Photograph Source: Defense Dept. photo by Helene C. Stikkel – Public Domain
Former CIA director Robert M. Gates was on “Face the Nation” last month and demonstrated that there has never been a better truckler in the federal bureaucracy over the past four decades. “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan gave Gates ample opportunity to separate himself from the Trump administration, but he used these opportunities to legitimize the actions of Donald Trump.
The worst of these examples took place when Brennan asked Gates to comment on Trump’s purge of the National Security Council and his appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting director of the NSC. Gates defended the purge by glibly remarking “be loyal or be gone,” which was his credo over the years. Indeed, it was how he operated.
But the role of the national security adviser is probably the second most powerful position in any administration, since he or she must ensure that the president has received all policy options from the national security community and then to ensure that the chosen policy has been implemented. The issue of “loyalty” is secondary; expertise and experience are paramount. At this moment, the NSC lacks experience and has no leadership. It plays no role in policy making. As a result, there is no foreign policy process in the Trump administration. It’s unusually random.
Gates ignored the opportunity to assess the role of real estate oligarch, Steve Witkoff, who actually performs as secretary of state in dealing with Iran, the Middle East, Russia, and Ukraine. Witkoff is overmatched in dealing with the experienced counterparts that he is facing. Gates truckled once again by endorsing Witkoff and favoring the role of “new faces” and “fresh eyes” in conducting sensitive negotiations. When asked about the firings throughout the intelligence community, Gates punted and said he “didn’t know enough” to comment.
Gates, a former secretary of defense, made sure not to respond to any question regarding the current secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who is incompetent in terms of the skill set needed for the job. The same dance was conducted with respect to the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who is not hiding her role in politicizing intelligence prepared for the president on sensitive matters.
Gates even defended Trump’s style of negotiations as a tactical approach to ascertain what is possible from an ally or an adversary, and then switching tactics when faced with opposition. The lambasting of Ukraine’s President Zelensky and the praise for Russia’s President Putin pointed to the random nature of policy making. There was also the one-day policy for turning Gaza into the “riviera” of the Middle East; the following day the policy was dropped and Israeli President Netanyahu had his free hand for pursuing the genocidal policy against the Palestinians. He even praised Netanyahu’s military campaign for “changing the strategic equation” in the Middle East, and thanked Trump for getting the U.S. military back in the Middle East.
I’ve known Gate for more than 50 years so nothing in the interview surprised me. I also learned from my military sources at the National War College that no secretary of defense in recent history was more brutal in crushing alternative views than Gates. He did the same thing at the CIA in the 1980s as the deputy director for intelligence.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has praised the actions of Gates. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who conducted her own obsequious interview of Gates, described the former CIA director as a “public intellectual.” Gideon Rose, then editor of Foreign Affairs, enthused that Gates was “cut from the same cloth” as the soldier-statesman George C. Marshall, and argued that Gates was “involved in making history over the last 30 years.”
Maddow and Rose and so many others from the media may be unfamiliar with Gates’ central role in politicizing intelligence on behalf of President Ronald Reagan and then CIA director William Casey. Or they may simply be choosing to ignore one of the worst cases of politicization in CIA’s history. Gates was of course totally wrong in exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to advance Reagan’s record peacetime spending on defense. He made the entire CIA wrong in failing to report the Soviet decline in the 1980s that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fall of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Some of the agency’s worst analytical failures.
Reagan nominated Gates to be CIA director after Casey died in 1986, but the director of the Senate intelligence committee, Senator David Boren, told Gates that he couldn’t get his committee to advance Gates’ nomination to the entire Senate for confirmation. Gates withdrew his name from the process. President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates five years later; Gates was confirmed but with more than 30 senators opposing the confirmation. At the time, this was the most resistance to a confirmation of a CIA director since the creation of the agency in 1947.
Gates continued to defend Casey from the charges of politicization but, long after Casey’s death, he acknowledged watching Casey “on issue after issue, sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.” I sat in on some of these meetings, and flinched as Gates passed notes to Casey to support the entire politicization effort. Over the years, Gates’ recommendations to Casey included support for the use of force against Nicaragua and Libya in the 1980s, which is the very policy advocacy that CIA leaders must foreswear.
I can only suggest two possible explanations for CBS giving Gates a full hour interview that allowed for the one-sided assessment of the Trump presidency in national security matters. Both explanations involve truckling. First, CBS is truckling to the Trump administration so that its parent company, Paramount Global, can benefit from a merger between CBS and Skydance Media, which requires regulatory approval. Second, Gates may believe that there will eventually be an opening for him at the NSC because Rubio can’t be an absentee landlord forever. Gates, the windsock, is certainly always ready to serve…his master.
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