From the Shadows

...But according to Gates, an incident almost as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1983, and for much the same reason...

...Perhaps the main lesson of From the Shadows is that in the CIA, as elsewhere, the techno-nerds performed brilliantly, the liberal-minded academics made their usual hash of things—and those like Gates, who did know better, decided in the end that being popular was more important than being right...

...It was certainly not due to inattention...

...Indeed, this is the only memoir I know of in which one senior government official—Robert Gates was deputy director for intelligence under President Reagan— accuses two other senior officials, former Reagan secretary of state George Shultz and former Reagan secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, of perjury...

...The issue The American Spectator • May 1996 69 was terribly important," writes Gates...

...Bill Casey's Discovery From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War Robert M. Gates Simon & Schuster / 6o8 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan The most unusual thing about this book is that, although it is overwhelmingly concerned with Soviet-American relations, its most illuminating section has to do with the Iran-contra affair...

...70 May 199 6 • The American Spectator...

...On the other hand, Gates is sharply critical of Casey's "zealotry" in trying to keep the contra cause alive in the teeth of congressional opposition: "Bill Casey ran a hell of an operation at CIA but, under his management, the overhead costs became very high...

...Eventually, a more sensible draft was produced by intelligence analysts but, as Gates notes, "For all the blood on the floor at the end, and for all the careful compromise drafting to get the damn estimate out, we would learn a decade later that it had been too cautious...

...But when Casey expressed his dismay with the quality of the draft, he was accused of trying to "politicize" the agency...

...Casey obviously agreed...

...The first draft by the analysts," writes Gates, "proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Haig had exaggerated the Soviet role —that the Soviets did not organize or direct international terrorism...

...While it would be unfair to apply Clemenceau's jibe to the agency, Gates's account makes it clear that despite all the information it had amassed, the CIA understood the Soviet mentality very poorly...

...The CIA's failure to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a good example of "mirror-imaging" — the tendency to assume that your adversary thinks just like you do...

...His nomination was later resubmitted—this time successfully—by President Bush...

...To have the brass ring come around a second time...was the sort of thing that just didn'thappen in Washington," he writes...

...The main focus of From the Shadows is on how the CIA influenced U.S...

...come close to a nuclear crisis the preceding fall and not even known it?...To what degree was our skepticism about the war scare prompted by the fact that...

...Gordievsky's disclosures provoked a major debate within the CIA...

...book...

...True, "in the economic arena, CIA...overstated the size of the Soviet economy...

...And no, "we never recruited a spy who gave us unique political information from inside the Kremlin...

...Only after Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer, defected to Britain in 1985 did we learn from British intelligence that Soviet leaders were far more paranoid than the CIA had realized, and that "the threat of a preemptive strike [by NATO] was taken very seriously in Moscow in mid-1983 and early 1984...

...But CIA analysts didn't take this warning very seriously...

...For if Haig's assertion were correct, it might be used to justify a more assertive American foreign policy...

...Why is the generally hawkish Gates suddenly dovish on Central America...

...Another impediment that prevented the CIA from responding effectively to the Soviet threat was the liberal bias of its analysts...

...our intelligence experts didn't want to admit that we had badly misread the state of mind of the Soviet leadership...

...In other words, thanks to the CIA's assumption that the Soviet approach to nuclear war basically mirrored our own, we barely avoided a Soviet-American nuclear showdown in 1983-84...

...shortly after he received Gates's memo, he reached down into agency ranks and appointed the 38year-old staffer head of the Intelligence Directorate, in charge of overseeing the CIA's all-important intelligence estimates...

...It was here, alas, that the agency fell down...

...The great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau, said of his successor, Raymond Poincare: "He knows everything and understands nothing...

...Nonetheless: The great continuing strength and success of the analysts of CIA and the intelligence community was in describing with amazing accuracy from the late 1960's until the Soviet collapse the actual military strength and capabilities of the Soviet Union...

...With the huge outcry after the exposure of the arms sale to Iran and later charges that the administration not only had subverted our policies toward terrorism but also had tried to subvert the Constitution, no one was willing to admit in late 1986 and 1987 that this whole business had been seen inside the government as a wacko, likely-to-fail NSC operation that the President wanted to pursue—and no one was willing to put his job on the line to stop it...

...These were the tools of Soviet subversion, their efforts to destabilize Third World countries, and we hardly paid attention...

...In the course of a NATO exercise called Able Archer, designed "to practice nuclear release procedures," the CIA learned that Soviet military intelligence seemed especially alarmed, and then-Director William Casey duly informed President Reagan "of a Soviet perception of an increased threat of war...

...In light of this "shocking" state of affairs, Gates wrote Casey a memo in 1981 arguing that the CIA had "a case of advanced bureaucratic arteriosclerosis: the arteries are clogging up with careerist bureaucrats who have lost the spark...

...Consider the agency's failure to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979...

...Determining the enemy's capabilities is undoubtedly a crucial intelligence task—but it is largely a technical one, a job for scientists, engineers, and computer whizzes...

...So when CIA analysts were tasked to examine the Soviet Union's policy toward terrorism, they deliberately set out to discredit Haig...

...They saw all the reasons why it would be foolish for the Soviets to do so...and simply couldn't accept that Brezhnev or the others might see the equation differently...

...Gone are all the barbed references to clogged arteries and loss of spark...

...On the one hand, he calls Casey, the man most responsible for Gates's meteoric rise, "one of the smartest people I have ever known and certainly the most intellectually lively," who came to the CIA "with a single purpose in mind—to challenge the Soviet empire everywhere...

...That it happened to him testifies to Gates's extraordinary knack for making influential friends in high places—and betraying the man who made all of it possible...

...For policymakers, though, knowing the other side's capabilities is not nearly enough...

...As in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the director of central intelligence had shown far more intelligence than the intelligence professionals.yet another problem bedeviling the CIA was the lack of cooperation between its two main departments—or "Directorates" — Intelligence and Operations...

...Thus, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig, early in the Reagan administration, declared that the Soviets were behind much of international terrorism, CIA analysts were horrified...

...Gates, an Indiana University graduate who joined the CIA as a lowly Soviet analyst in 1968 and climbed the greasy pole all the way to the top, becoming the director of central intelligence in 1991, tries to show that "the CIA made an important contribution to victory in the Cold War...

...Gates's attitude to Casey is surprisingly ambivalent...

...But what he actually ends up demonstrating is that when it came to offering American presidents essential insights into Soviet policies, the CIA's contribution was minimal...

...Writes Gates: Surprising as it may seem—shocking, in fact—while the Directorate of Operations collected information on Soviet covert actions around the world...these reports were regarded as "operational" — not substantive—and were rarely shared with the analysts...

...After all, being rational—just like us—the Soviets could surely distinguish between a nuclear exercise and a nuclear attack...

...Perhaps the classic example of mirror-imaging occurred on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the consensus within the intelligence community, shared by everyone except its then-director, John McCone, was that Khrushchev, being rational, would never provoke the United States by placing missiles in Cuba...

...And these numbers and capabilities would be relied upon, with confidence, by the Executive Branch (including the Defense Department), the Congress, and our allies both in arms control negotiations and in military planning...

...Instead, Gates contends that the CIA's "record in retrospect is far better than its critics of all political hues will admit...

...Initial claims by both Shultz and Weinberger not to have known much of what was happening," Gates writes, "were later apparently belied by notes they or their assistants took at the time...

...I believe the real answer is the last dirty little secret of the Iran affair: no one thought it was that big a deal...

...Evidently he blames Casey's determined efforts to topple Nicaragua's Communist regime for nearly wrecking his career: When President Reagan nominated Gates to replace Casey as head of the CIA after the latter's death in 1987, Congress's anger over what Gates agrees was Casey's duplicity forced Gates to withdraw his nomination...

...All this, of course, was total nonsense: The Soviets did support international terrorism, and what the CIA had produced read more like a lawyer's brief for the KGB than a serious analysis...

...So why, despite the fact that the Reagan administration's two most powerful cabinet officers knew about, and disapproved of, the attempt to trade arms for hostages, did the dealings with Iran continue...

...So it's not surprising that by the end Gates becomes a standard issue Washington apologist...

...Although this debate was never fully resolved, Gates agrees with the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which in 1990 concluded that "the intelligence community's confidence that [the Soviets] had been posturing for political effect was misplaced...

...On the contrary, writes Gates, the "CIA had tracked the growing Soviet involvement with great precision and conveyed to policymakers in a timely way Moscow's growing presence and combat role in Afghanistan...

...The problem was that "CIA's Soviet analysts just couldn't believe that the Soviets actually would invade in order to play a major part in ground combat operations...

...the urgent task is to understand the enemy's intentions, and that requires political insight...

...policy toward the Soviet Union during the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations...

...Gates's discussion of Iran-contra, however, is just a very small part of a very big JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...

...Had the U.S...