The new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is an accomplished conspiracy-monger, says alexander cockburn |
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Robert Gates' journey from Texas A&M University, of which he is President, to the confirmation hearings that will mark his ascent to Secretary of State for Defense will be a testament to his patron of thirty years, George Bush Snr. He will head off to College Station's airport down George Bush Drive, past the George Bush Library in the sealed portion of whose archives he surely figures - unless the records have been purged - as one of the 41st President's slimier henchmen.
Now 63, Gates was a CIA wunderkind, the only career employee who ever made it from entry-level officer to the Director's office. He wasn't a cloak and dagger man, but he shinned up the ladder thanks to a keen nose for political opportunity and an even keener eye for bureaucratic cover.
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| As an analyst of Soviet affairs, Gates was expert in the art of threat inflation |
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As a CIA and top National Security Council analyst of Soviet affairs, Gates was an expert confectioner in the art of threat inflation. He helped transmute the Soviet Union of the times, for instance, from comatose senility and impending collapse into an Evil Empire whose hideous - albeit entirely imaginary - vitality was invoked with increasing frenzy in Washington throughout the late Seventies. And he played a major role in putting Ronald Reagan in the White House.
Like Donald Rumsfeld, the man he is now scheduled to replace at the Pentagon, Gates was a highly accomplished imagineer of the Soviet threat. He helped manufacture entirely bogus force estimates and leaked baroque fictions about Soviet sponsorship of the plot to kill Pope John Paul II to complicit journalists. His dexterity as scriptwriter for these vivid conspiracies caught the eye of George Bush Sr, who ran the Agency in the mid-1970s, and when Bush became Reagan's VP Gates's elevation was assured.
Reagan’s pick as CIA director was that man of darkness William Casey. Gates was 
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