[Peace-discuss] Sec. of Def. Robert Gates' role in politicizing CIA intelligence in 1980s, etc. -- Robert Parry article

[Stuart Levy]

Here's an article I mentioned at last week's AWARE meeting,
including a couple of excerpts.   It's worth reading the full article.

    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040908H.shtml

   Losing the War for Reality
    By Robert Parry
    Consortium News

    Tuesday 08 April 2008

When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in
the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly
omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion
policies to face the real world.

Like the legendary Greek warrior - whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in
protective waters except for his heel - the United States was blessed with
institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from
the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and
balances.

What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could
become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public
relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is
what would do the Republic in.

That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the
past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst
Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA's office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was
on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological
right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began
to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.

One of the target institutions was the national press corps, which came under
sustained assault from the Right - with reporters facing accusations of
disloyalty and "liberal bias" from both inside the Reagan administration and
from well-financed right-wing attack groups. [For details, see Robert Parry's
Lost History or Secrecy & Privilege.]

Another key institution on the Right's radar scope was the CIA's analytical
division, which was responsible for supplying objective information about the
world's dangers to senior government officials.

However, in the 1970s and early 1980s, CIA analysts were seeing evidence of an
accelerating decline in the Soviet Union, especially in its technological
capabilities and its economy. Thus, Moscow seemed genuinely interested in
détente with the West, especially a winding down of the dangerous and expensive
arms race, the analysts concluded.

"A CIA paper warning of the Soviet Union's impending descent into economic
stagnation, 'Soviet Economic Problems and Prospects,' was issued in 1977,
setting out the reasons why the Soviet economy was in trouble and why its
future was so grim," wrote Goodman in his book.

While many Americans might have thought the Soviet decline would be good news,
it wasn't welcomed by the U.S. right-wing or inside the military industry. They
preferred that the American people still perceive an ascendant and implacable
communist enemy, all the better to justify brush-fire wars and higher spending
on weapons systems.

So, when Reagan captured the White House in 1980, his followers set their
sights on purging the CIA's analytical division of its historical commitment to
objectivity, to be replaced by a submissive readiness to deliver politically
desirable data.

   Robert Gates's Role

As Goodman's book explains in impressive detail, the key action officer for
carrying out this reversal of the CIA's analytical role was a young bureaucrat
named Robert Gates, who is now George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.

  [...]

"Casey's first NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] as CIA director,
dealing with the Soviet Union and international terrorism, became an exercise
in politicization. Casey and Gates pushed this line in order to justify more
U.S. covert action in the Third World.

"In 1985, they ordered an intelligence assessment of a supposed Soviet plot
against the Pope, hoping to produce a document that would undermine Secretary
of State [George] Shultz's efforts to improve relations with Moscow. The CIA
also produced an NIE in 1985 that was designed to produce an intelligence
rationale for arms sales to Iran."

After years of overestimating growth of Soviet military spending, which had
been pegged at 4 to 5 percent a year, CIA analysts sought in 1983 to correct
the growth rate down to 1 percent, only to be blocked by Gates, according to
Goodman.

"Gates would not permit the paper with the revised growth rates to be
published, but warned [Defense Secretary Caspar] Weinberger, who 'went nuts,'
according to two former CIA analysts," Goodman wrote. "Two years later, Gates
finally permitted the paper to be circulated, but he refused to publish a
paper."

   The Triumph of Career

>From his front-row seat at CIA headquarters, Goodman watched in dismay as Gates
applied his bureaucratic skills to reverse the agency's analytical principles.

"While serving as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986, Gates
wrote the manual for manipulating and centralizing the intelligence process to
get the desired intelligence product," Goodman wrote.

Gates promoted pliable CIA careerists to top positions, while analysts with an
independent streak were sidelined or pushed out of the agency.

"In the mid-1980s, the three senior [Soviet division] office managers who
actually anticipated the decline of the Soviet Union and Moscow's interest in
closer relations with the United States were demoted," Goodman wrote, noting
that he was one of them.

  [...]


"In 1991, the White House checked with Boren to see if Gates could receive
confirmation this time around, and Boren angered many Democrats on the
intelligence committee when he guaranteed confirmation to White House aide
Boyden Gray."

But a firestorm over Gates's role in politicizing CIA intelligence threatened
his nomination in fall 1991. Rather than back off this time, however, President
George H.W. Bush told committee Republicans "that he was 'going to the mat' for
Gates and wanted his nomination confirmed at all cost," Goodman wrote.

Gates's future ultimately was saved by Boren and his top aide, George Tenet,
who shepherded the nomination through the committee and then the full Senate.

Once Gates got in as director, he went to work shielding Bush from political
scandal, including Bush's secret military support of Saddam Hussein's regime in
Iraq during the 1980s, according to Goodman.

Gates helped squelch the House Banking Committee's examination of a
multi-billion-dollar Iraqi-financing operation involving the Italian-owned
Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Goodman wrote, adding:

"The fact is that the Bush administration was engaged in an effort to subsidize
and arm Saddam Hussein right up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the CIA
was totally aware of these efforts."

The Casey-Gates approach of putting politics and ideology ahead of objective
analysis was still alive and well a decade later when then-CIA director George
Tenet offered President George W. Bush the "slam-dunk" intelligence on Iraq's
WMD.

Though Goodman suspects that Bush would have invaded Iraq whatever the CIA did,
"it is conceivable … that honest leadership from George Tenet and John
McLaughlin and a strong CIA stand could have created more opposition to the war
from the Congress, the media, and the public," Goodman wrote.

But that didn't happen. Instead, Goodman wrote: "The CIA's failure in the
run-up to the Iraq War was a total corporate breakdown."

Even in the wake of the Iraq WMD disaster, politicization has remained
dominant, according to Goodman.

Tenet's successor, former Republican congressman Porter Goss, issued a memo to
the CIA staff telling them to "support the administration and its policies in
our work. As Agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion
opposition to the administration or its policies."

In Goodman's view, other post-9/11 changes in the structure of the U.S.
intelligence community - such as topping it off with another presidential
appointee as Director of National Intelligence - have failed to address the
underlying problem of a lost ethos that was committed to telling the truth no
matter the political consequences.

Faced with mounting opposition to the Iraq War in 2006, President Bush also
dipped back into his father's old roster of pliable bureaucrats and brought
Robert Gates back into the government as Secretary of Defense. Gates helped put
a fresh face on the "surge." [For more on Gates, see Consortiumnews.com's
archive, "Who Is Bob Gates?"]