Gates was linked to secret arms sales in the early 1980s to both Iraq and Iran as the two countries fought an eight-year war. However, because Gates had influential friends among Democrats -- the likes of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren -- as well as Republican allies, investigations into Gates's roles in the Iran-Contra and Iraqgate scandals faltered. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Secret World of Robert Gates. ]
Purging the Analysts
Also, as an ambitious CIA bureaucrat in the early 1980s, Gates became CIA Director William Casey's action officer in breaking down the CIA analytical division's tradition of providing objective assessments to the President and other senior policymakers.
As Casey's choice to head that division, Gates purged analysts who wouldn't go along with the politicization and promoted those who would, a distortion of a core CIA function that has had devastating consequences through this current decade and the disastrous Iraq War.
A Cold War hardliner in the 1980s, Gates particularly punished analysts who resisted the direst assessments about Soviet power and intentions. Analysts who noted the Soviet Union's rapid decline and Moscow's desire for negotiations were shunted aside in favor of propagandists who were willing to issue alarmist reports.
Gates may have been singularly responsible for the CIA's failure to detect the collapse of the Soviet Empire from 1989 to 1991. For the prior decade, he was the most senior CIA analyst exaggerating threats that justified massive U.S. military build-ups as well as support for violent guerrilla groups.
For instance, Gates made wildly erroneous predictions about dangers posed by leftist-rule Nicaragua as he espoused policy prescriptions, including the bombing of Nicaragua, that were considered too extreme even by the hawkish Reagan administration.
In a secret Dec. 14, 1984, memorandum to then-CIA Director Casey, Gates ignored many relevant facts that got in the way of his thesis about the need to launch air strikes against Sandinista military targets and to overthrow the supposedly "Marxist-Leninist regime.
Gates made no mention of the fact that only a month earlier, the Sandinistas had won an election widely praised for its fairness by European and other international observers. But the Reagan administration had pressured pro-U.S. candidate Arturo Cruz into withdrawing when it became clear he would lose -- and then denounced the election as a "sham.
Without assessing whether the Sandinistas had any real commitment to democracy, Gates adopted the Reagan administration's favored position " that Nicaragua's elected president Daniel Ortega was, in effect, a Soviet-style dictator.
"The Nicaraguan regime is steadily moving toward consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist government and the establishment of a permanent and well armed ally of the Soviet Union and Cuba on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere, Gates wrote to Casey.
The Gates assessment, however, turned out to be wrong. Rather than building a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, the Sandinistas competed six years later in a robust presidential election -- even allowing the United States to pour in millions of dollars to help elect Washington's favored candidate, Violeta Chamorro.
The Sandinistas respected the election results, ceding power to Chamorro. The Sandinistas also have competed in subsequent elections with Ortega finally regaining the presidency in the latest election held in November 2006.
Aggressive Intent?
In the 1984 memo, Gates also promoted another right-wing canard of the era -- that Nicaragua's procurement of weapons was proof of its aggressive intentions, not an attempt at national self-defense.
Again, Gates ignored significant facts, including a history starting in 1980 of first the right-wing Argentine junta and then the United States financing and training a brutal counterrevolutionary movement, known as the contras.
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