But a firestorm over Gates’s role in politicizing CIA intelligence threatened his nomination in fall 1991. Rather than back off this time, however, President George H.W. Bush told committee Republicans “that he was ‘going to the mat’ for Gates and wanted his nomination confirmed at all cost,” Goodman wrote.
Gates’s future ultimately was saved by Boren and his top aide, George Tenet, who shepherded the nomination through the committee and then the full Senate.
Once Gates got in as director, he went to work shielding Bush from political scandal, including Bush’s secret military support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq during the 1980s, according to Goodman.
Gates helped squelch the House Banking Committee’s examination of a multi-billion-dollar Iraqi-financing operation involving the Italian-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Goodman wrote, adding:
“The fact is that the Bush administration was engaged in an effort to subsidize and arm Saddam Hussein right up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the CIA was totally aware of these efforts.”
The Casey-Gates approach of putting politics and ideology ahead of objective analysis was still alive and well a decade later when then-CIA director George Tenet offered President George W. Bush the “slam-dunk” intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
Though Goodman suspects that Bush would have invaded Iraq whatever the CIA did, “it is conceivable … that honest leadership from George Tenet and John McLaughlin and a strong CIA stand could have created more opposition to the war from the Congress, the media, and the public,” Goodman wrote.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Goodman wrote: “The CIA’s failure in the run-up to the Iraq War was a total corporate breakdown.”
Even in the wake of the Iraq WMD disaster, politicization has remained dominant, according to Goodman.
Tenet’s successor, former Republican congressman Porter Goss, issued a memo to the CIA staff telling them to “support the administration and its policies in our work. As Agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”
In Goodman’s view, other post-9/11 changes in the structure of the U.S. intelligence community – such as topping it off with another presidential appointee as Director of National Intelligence – have failed to address the underlying problem of a lost ethos that was committed to telling the truth no matter the political consequences.
Faced with mounting opposition to the Iraq War in 2006, President Bush also dipped back into his father’s old roster of pliable bureaucrats and brought Robert Gates back into the government as Secretary of Defense. Gates helped put a fresh face on the “surge.” [For more on Gates, see Consortiumnews.com's archive, "Who Is Bob Gates?"]
Lost Moral Compass
To Goodman, the erroneous intelligence analyses – that caused the United States to massively over-spend on military hardware to confront a declining Soviet threat in the 1980s and that led the nation into a bloody quagmire in Iraq this decade – were not simply mistakes.
“The intelligence provided in the Gorbachev era and the run-up to the Iraq War represented the failure of the CIA’s moral compass,” Goodman wrote. “There have been pluses and minuses over the sixty-year history of the CIA, but the past twenty-five years have provided an unending cycle of failure in telling truth to power. …
“The moral failure is the most worrisome aspect of all because, without the willingness to tell truth to power, reform and reorganization of CIA become irrelevant.”
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