Gates’ CIA Past Could Haunt Him in Confirmation Hearings

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – INTELLIGENCENov. 8, 2006 – 6:06 p.m.

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
President Bush’s pick to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld with former CIA Director Robert Gates is an odd one, considering it’s almost certain to revive festering questions about the Bush administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

Gates is one of those longtime Washington insiders whose name is not likely to ring bells outside of the Beltway.

But he’s long been a major player in Republican national security circles, first as a Russian specialist on President Gerald Ford’s White House National Security Council in 1974, then eventually at the CIA, where he held a handful of senior positions before being tapped to be its chief by the first President Bush, in 1991.

And it wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated for the post — or his first dose of trouble in the spotlight.

In early 1987, his role in the so-called Iran-Contra affair, a secret White House operation to sell weapons to radical Islamic Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages — and cash for CIA-backed rebels in Nicaragua — came under scrutiny.

Gates withdrew his nomination in the face of sure rejection.

Then, in during his 1991 nomination hearings to run the CIA, Gates ran into a buzz saw of testimony from a former agency analyst who said that during the 1980s Gates had skewered intelligence to fit the convictions of senior Reagan administration officials that Soviet agents had concocted a plot to assassinate the pope and were arming and encouraging Marxist revolutionary groups to carry out terrorist attacks.

Both theories turned out to be wrong, according Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, who headed a team of CIA analysts assigned the task of investigating the theory.

While Moscow boasted of its backing for such revolutionary groups as Yassar Arafat’s PLO, which was fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, it privately urged them not to engage in terrorism, Ekedalh said.

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said during Gates 1991 confirmation hearings to head the CIA. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.” [Nomination of Robert M. Gates, Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, Volume III]

But Gates, then head of CIA analysis, was dissatisfied with her draft, Ekedahl said, and helped rewrite it with an angle “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism.”

In From the Shadows, a memoir published in 1996, Gates conceded that his boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was hostile to anything less than a finding of Soviet support for terrorism, including the attempt on the life of the pope, which turned out to be the act of a deranged Bulgarian.

“The first draft by the analysts proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig had exaggerated the Soviet role — that the Soviets did not organize or direct international terrorism,” Gates wrote, adding that Casey had refused to pass it along to the White House.

The careers of anyone who disagreed with the views of Casey, channeled by Gates, suffered, according to Ekedalh and another analyst who testified at Gates’s confirmation hearing. >>>cont

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