Why would Russia even respond, one asks? It was 1992, the Communist state had fallen, Russia's new democracy was struggling and looked to the U.S. for help, and a lot of old Soviet intelligence files and capers were being exposed. What this particular report revealed was that, Yes, indeed, the rumors were true: Republicans had met secretly with Iranians in Europe during the Carter-Reagan campaign. Unfortunately, the report arrived late, as did other corroborating evidence. Representative Hamilton's Committee had completed its investigation and sent its report to the printer. Besides, Hamilton had already decided he wanted to exonerate the Republicans, possibly since doing otherwise would present the Clinton administration, which had other fish to fry, with unnecessary complications. Representative Hamilton, says Parry, "rebuffed advice from his chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella," that the investigation be extended in order to evaluate not only the Russian report but other incriminating evidence of Republican guilt, and issued a report debunking all those persistent rumors. Parry claims he discovered the actual report stored in an unused ladies' room off the Rayburn House Office Building's parking garage.
The U.S. Embassy had translated the Russian report, including this statement: "R(obert) Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George (H. W.) Bush also took part" in a meeting with Iranians in Paris in October 1980. When this report arrived in Hamilton's hands in early 1993, Gates was H.W. Bush's last CIA Director; when Clinton came in as 42d President, Gates left to become President of Texas A & M. He returned to Washington in January of 2006 as Secretary of Defense when George W. Bush dramatically fired Rumsfeld after the Republican defeat in the Congressional elections. Where had Mr. Gates been between his stint in the 1980's at the National Security Council and his term as CIA Director? Apparently, after the Reagan-Bush-Iranian negotiations, his career at CIA "took off" under Reagan's new CIA Director, William Casey (who, says Parry, was also implicated in the secret October negotiations). In any case, Gates was made Assistant Director for Intelligence Analysis, and then elevated to Deputy Director of CIA.
Robert Gates also appears to have been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal as well as the "clandestine military support" the United States gave to Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war (when we were secretly on Saddam's side, and sent military "observers" to watch how our help was used). Finally, in 1991 President H. W. Bush appointed Gates CIA Director; Gates was helped during his approval hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee by Senator Boren, Democrat, whose chief of staff was then George Tenet. Thus we arrive at the time of Representative Lee Hamilton's investigation, and Gates was protected when the Russian report and other evidence of Republican duplicity was swept under the rug.
Now, we have no hard evidence the Russian report was good, although Robert Parry claims his "well-informed" Russian sources assure him it was considered reliable, hard data. But notice that Gates was, in the 1980's, a supposedly non-political appointee embedded in the Carter administration as a civil servant, obviously a well-thought-of, ambitious, rising intelligence officer. Yet, if there is any validity to the reports, he was plucked out of his sensitive national security post by the opposition party and used to perform illegal foreign negotiations with a hostile power. If he was mixed up in Iran Contra, he did the same thing twice. True, this was some time ago, times have changed, he has performed honorable service since. Forgive me, but I still have to ask: just where are his real loyalties? Having gone behind the back of one President to serve the ends of another, opposition politician, and then supposedly secretly gone behind the back of that same politician when he became President in order to join Ollie North's illegal machinations in another foreign state---- can he be relied upon now, in his maturity?
And another question: as another Democratic President prepares to take office, there are reliable reports that a number of Bush's political appointees are "burrowing in," converting themselves to career civil servants in order to retain their positions of power in the bureaucracy after a change in Administrations. Will each of them be a subversive cell, someone whose primary loyalty will be not to the a-political job they are supposed to do, but to a political party which has been voted out of power---- doing just as Robert Gates did to Carter in the 1980's, subverting official policy of the country's elected leader in favor of advancing the political interests of the Republicans? One wonders.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/...
Gates has arguably served as a sensible SecDef. When Bob Woodward writes another book about the Bush Administration, or when Gates writes his own memoirs, it will be interesting to learn what really happened in March/April of 2007, when the Iranians seized 15 British sailors in disputed waters in the Strait of Hormuz. I tried to glean every scrap of news available during that crisis, for I suspected that VP Cheney would try to manipulate the event to justify launching military strikes on Iran. What was most striking to me during the crisis was the complete absence of Gates from the headlines. It was as though he completely disappeared for about a week--until the crisis was resolved by the Iranian handover of the British sailors back to Britain.
My speculation? Gates likely spent that week working 24/7 to deflect Cheney's demands for military action and to seek a non-military resolution to the crisis. Gates (unlike Cheney or Bush) is smart enough to see a few moves ahead, and he very likely understood that a shooting war with Iran would have had immediate, catastrophic consequences for U.S. forces in the region, as well as for the economies of the U.S. and Europe and for our medium-term strategic position vis-a-vis the Russians and Chinese.
If Gates did in fact single-handedly avert such a disastrous conflict with Iran in 2007 (and since), I would be more than happy to applaud his keeping his job for a while under Obama. Maybe the old ideologue Gates has been tamed by experience to become a reliable, even wise, technocrat and manager.
Following through, though, I think we have more than enough reason to believe tht Republicans, given their sense of entitlement to rule, have no hesitation in burying moles of their own in key agencies, and using them to their political ends whenever it suits them; the loyalty of these moles is to the political party, and not to the Constitution, whatver the moles may tell themselves to salve their conscience. It makes me uneasy for the future Obama Administration.
Time will tell as far as Gates goes, but at least at this stage, it's a pick that makes sense to me (e.g. he and Obama share a similar foreign policy approach -- pragmatists; Gates has demonstrated himself to be an effective manager at the DoD and he should move through confirmation hearings without any difficulty; he'll work on closing Gitmo; also he'll add some continuity).
In reference to Gates too if there were real serious problems about him I'm sure that someone like Jim Webb who was in the Reagan administration would have heard at least some rumors about the guy. The news would have gotten around to him eventually -- even if it was sometime after he'd left in 1987. I'm also sure that Webb would have raised these issues at the confirmation hearings in 2007. My recollection is that he seemed to be pretty satisfied with the Gates selection.
As far as those past events go, who knows. I haven't seen any compelling evidence suggesting that he was involved in Iran/Contra; as far as the Iran-Carter hostage negotiations goes, who knows.
The issue with the political turned/career civil service is an issue that probably runs more through Rove side -- unrelated to Gates (e.g. DOJ scandal -- some other areas too). The "burrowing" issue worries me in the sense that the Federal bureaucracy does important work, and it hurts depts to have low quality hires (pretty much the definition of a "loyal Bushie" -- e.g. a Republican who wouldn't get the jobs without the political connections). I probably won't lose too much sleep over it, but perhaps it's something to keep an eye out for.
Gates is a center-right person but definitely more of a classic Republican than conservative. Restraint is a word that I would use to describe his efforts. Has he been involved in sketchy stuff? Maybe... but it just doesn't sound like something his personality would allow. I trust him.
If he has an agenda it seems to be - and always has been - that he leaves the politics to someone else and instead navigates his way carefully around political obstructions in order to achieve his goals. His goals are always related to the job at hand, not to political hijinks. He may well have been present at certain meetings - hard to tell because the Soviets would have had strong motive to discredit Gates any way they could due to his hardline stance against them - but I would suspect he was more of a passive observer than an active participant. He just doesn't seem very political.
Further, as I recall, the Village Voice once went through the issue in great detail, and found a period in OCtober of 1980 when Bush was not publicly visible for something like 14-16 hours. That is sufficient time to fly roundtrip from the East Coast to Paris, have a meeting, and then return.
I am not saying it happened. I am merely saying that Bush's statement can be true and the meeting still have happened. There is nothing I have seen in the public record that would disprove it.
Gates was a protege of Bush, but that does not mean that he was necessarily purposely tied to the vision of Reagan and Bush 41. And he has demonstrated independence, including ending legacy admissions at Texas A&M while president there, in large part because he saw it as tilting the admissions too much in favor of whites at the expense of minorities.
peace