That’s one side of Gates. Since retiring from public service in 1993, the career intelligence officer has shown a capacity to speak truth to Republican (and Democratic) power. His 1996 memoir, “From the Shadows,” takes his former boss at the CIA, William Casey, to task for shutting out Congress and scorning oversight. A 2004 study he coauthored with Democrat Zbigniew Brzezinski criticized the Bush administration’s policy of not speaking to Iran. But his record as a CIA analyst, as deputy national-security adviser to the first President Bush and as CIA chief in the early ’ 90s shows another side as well. Melvin Goodman, who served under Gates in the CIA’s Soviet division, says the boss knew how to spin raw intelligence into the kind of briefs politicians wanted to read. Goodman cites a Gates-ordered CIA analysis that supported allegations of Soviet involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on the pope as a particularly glaring example of skewed intel. “He always serves his masters,” Goodman told NEWSWEEK after Gates’s appointment last week. (Gates could not be reached for comment).
So which side will he show President Bush? Gates owes a debt to Bush Senior. The former president helped erase the Iran-contra stain on Gates’s record from the 1980s (when he was alleged to have been less than candid about when he learned of the illegal transfer of funds to Nicaraguan rebels from profits on arms sales to Iran) by picking him to head the CIA in 1991. Last week, four days before his appointment as secretary of Defense, Gates dined with Bush and wife Barbara at a football dinner at Texas A&M University, where Gates has served as president since 2002. He did not bite as readily when the son came calling. Twice, Gates turned down job offers from the younger Bush, first to be the National Intelligence director and later to serve as deputy secretary of State. And then there’s Iraq. Though the panel Gates sat on until last week will probably stop short of calling for a troop withdrawal, it will certainly urge Bush to change course.
For Gates and others on the panel, the Iraq trip appears to have marked a turning point. After traveling in an airliner for 13 hours to Kuwait, the commission members boarded a military C-130 for the 90-minute flight to Baghdad. Most of the panelists sat in the hull, along with about 25 soldiers who were returning to the front. One commission member remarked how young they looked, according to a source who traveled with the group. “To see these young men really brought home the reality of the mess in Iraq and the price we’re paying to be there,” the source said. It’s a mess Gates now owns.
