However, that ethos began to erode in 1973 – beginning with President Richard Nixon’s appointment of James Schlesinger as CIA director and Gerald Ford’s choice of George H.W. Bush for that job in 1976 – but the principle of objectivity wasn’t swept away until Ronald Reagan put in his campaign chief, William Casey, as CIA director. Casey then chose the ambitious Robert Gates to run the analytical division.
Rather than Kent’s mandate for “bark on” intelligence, Goodman observed, “Bob Gates turned that approach on its head in the 1980s and tried hard to anticipate the views of policymakers in order to pander to their needs.
“Unlike Kent, Gates consistently told his analysts to make sure never to ‘stick your finger in the eye of the policymaker.’”
It didn’t take long for the winds of politicization to start blowing through the halls at Langley.
“Bill Casey and Bob Gates guided the first institutionalized ‘cooking of the books’ at the CIA in the 1980s, with a particular emphasis on tailoring intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America, and Southwest Asia,” Goodman wrote.
“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.
“All understood the weakness of the Soviet Union, but were removed from their managerial responsibilities by the director of the Soviet office, Douglas MacEachin, under the orders of the deputy director of intelligence, Bob Gates.”
The reason, Goodman wrote, was: “The Reagan administration would not accept any sign of Soviet weakness or constraint, and CIA director Casey and deputy director Gates made sure intelligence analysis presented the Russian Bear as threatening and warlike.”
These institutional blinders remained in place for the rest of the 1980s.
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