Judge William Webster, William Casey's successor as DCI in 1987, resigned to return to private law practice in August 1991. He had come into the job in the wake of Iran-Contra, and was the first Director also to have been Director of the FBI (he moved directly from there). He was respected as a safe pair of hands, and as a manager: his appointment was uncontroversial and received widespread support in Congress. His tasks had been to reassure Congress that the Agency had not been responsible for the arms-for-hostages deals, and that it had not broken US law.
Webster succeeded in both these undertakings, but in the process implicitly made clear that DCI was not synonomous with CIA (William Casey personally, rather than the CIA, was shown to be intimately involved in Iran-Contra), and that the Agency was no longer close to the Presidency: Casey's deputy, Robert Gates, observed that the CIA was now mid-way between the White House and Congress when it came to taking orders. Laws, the appointment of a Congressional Inspector General, and regular Congressional scrutiny of Agency activity had made this the case. In consequence, when a President wanted a covert operation such as Iran-Contra or to teach a lesson to the Libyan leader, Muhamar Ghaddaffi, because he was implicated in terrorism, he no longer could look to the Agency to undertake it. Even twenty years earlier, a President could look to the CIA (and did in the case of attempting to overthrow the government of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s) to carry out such undertakings. But it would be a mistake to think that the abilities of the Agency had necessarily changed because it no longer operated as easily as it once did: what had changed was the world within which it operated.
Recognition of the changing world gave Robert Gates, President Bush's nominee as Webster's replacement, severe problems. Gates had been Reagan's first choice to replace Casey in 1987, but had withdrawn his nomination because of the Senate's doubts about his role in Iran-Contra. Four years later, once it was plain that Casey had operated largely outside Agency channels, and that Gates had not been instrumental in any of the arms-for-hostages deals, Bush considered that the way was open for Gates' nomination a second time.
Surprise was in store. Bob Gates had got ahead by going along. He was young - aged 48 in 1991 - and had an impressive career: National Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union, 1981-82; Deputy Director of Intelligence, 1982-1986; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, 1986-1989; Deputy National Security Adviser, 1989-1991. He had impressed Bill Casey with his hard cold war view of the Soviet threat, and his willingness to pursue topics of interest to President Reagan, such as counterterrorism, in ways that also appealed to reigning political sensibilities. He had also impressed George Bush. Bush - a man who had the politician's desire to advance younger men who are dependent on his patronage - found in Gates not only political sensitivity and bureaucratic mastery, but also a matching willingness to have a patron.
The backdrop to the 1991 Senate hearings on Gates' nomination was the collapse of communism in the USSR and the disintegration of the Soviet empire following the failed August 1991 coup attempt by hard-liners in Moscow. These elements combined to make the hearings in September and October 1991 the most fraught and revealing ever for a DCI nomination. The world on which Gates had commented had passed away far more completely than had been apparent just weeks previously.
The hearings turned into a battle over old sores in the CIA's analytical side, and the issues that were raised were those of an earlier time. Casey and Gates had been self-avowed protagonists of a stronger voice for the CIA in US policymaking circles, and had also shared classic cold war views. But many analysts in the DDI, and especially in its Soviet division, took the CIA's traditionally unexcited attitude toward the USSR. As the A Team/B Team debate in the mid-1970s had shown, they tended to suspect the strength of the Soviet economy and its military capabilities. They also tended to be more positive about the wind of change that Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to usher in during the mid-1980s. Under Casey and Gates during the 1980s, however, their views had often been rejected and ridiculed, and many thought their careers had suffered because of honest disagreement. After the failed coup attempt in Moscow, with its signal that the Soviet system had really collapsed, a settling of scores took place in Washington.
Several serving and retired CIA analysts gave evidence that as DDI and then DDCI in the 1980s, Gates had trimmed estimates to serve prevailing political wishes. In particular, he was accused of presenting harsher estimates of the Soviet threat than CIA analysts in order to please President Reagan and William Casey. Cited in particular was the analysis of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, when both the CIA and the Reagan administration depicted Moscow as being dangerously expansionist, and Mikhail Gorbachev as being a flash in the pan, unlikely to have a long-term effect on Soviet society or policy.
Melvin A. Goodman, a former division chief in the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis with twenty-four years' service in the Agency, considered that the review process, whereby divergent views could be accommodated in an estimate, had been subverted, and he testified that:
There were two primary targets for politicization. First, nearly all intelligence issues connected to covert action. That is, the operational commitments that Casey had made regarding Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. All those issues were politicized. The second area concerned Casey's other major concern, his world view of the Soviet Union. That is, the Soviet Union as the source of all US problems in the international arena. Casey seized on every opportunity to exaggerate the Soviet threat... Gates' role in this activity was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence on all these issues. He was Casey's filter in the Directorate of Intelligence... He pandered to Casey's agenda... Gates' other contribution was to ignore and suppress signs of the Soviet strategic retreat, including the collapse of the Soviet empire, even the Soviet Union itself.0
Harold Ford, a respected thirty-year veteran of Agency analysis, concurred, saying that Gates lacked `integrity of judgment' and that he `ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own'.1 Jennifer L. Glaudemans, a young analyst who in 1989 resigned from the CIA in disgust at what she saw as slanted analysis, went further:
There was, and apparently still is, an atmosphere of intimidation within the Office of Soviet Analysis. Many, including myself, hold the view that Mr. Gates had certain people removed because of their consistent unwillingness to comply with his analytical line... The only answer I have heard to this perception problem was from Mr. Gates himself a few days ago to this committee. He said that when he was a junior analyst, and his views were not accepted, that he too thought this was politicization. Senators, I think that answer is the most smug, condescending, and callous answer to such a sensitive question I could possibly imagine.2
Gates successfully fought back, providing chapter and verse to refute specific charges, demonstrating an impressive ability to recall events and to marshal evidence. `There were a number of unhappy analysts early in my tenure,' he stated, acknowledging the testimony of those opposing his nomination, `unhappy about too much change from a comfortable, familiar past.'3 He admitted mistakes:
I think we overestimated statistically how big the Soviet GNP was, giving a false impression of the economic strength they had and their ability to sustain this military competition as far into the future as anybody could see. It was not by trying to underplay Soviet strength but by overstating it that we erred.4
