Page 2 of 5 THE GATES
INHERITANCE, Part 1 The
tortured world of US intelligence By Roger Morris
sense owned
none of it, preferring to identify himself first
and foremost with the rank he won in 1950s
Wichita. "That's how he started," said a
colleague, "and no matter what he's done or how
things turned out, that's how he wants to be
seen." In the nation's future spymaster and
bureaucrat of the covert as oath-bound Eagle
Scout, there was, of course, Hardy Boys irony.
Beyond his merit badges, media profiles
over the years offered
remarkably little of the
flesh-and-blood man who served as a senior
official for three presidents. It was as if
rigorous CIA checks had already ruled out any of
the unwieldy personal details. Gates' own 600-page
memoir typically told almost nothing of his
background. "Friends remember him," Time recounted
in 1991, "as a child who demonstrated a need and a
knack for pleasing his elders."
His
Midwestern provenance left him self-conscious, yet
defiant, among the CIA's vestigial Eastern elite
and in a State Department he ridiculed as "guys
with last names for first names". He was, as he
proudly pointed out, of "plain tastes and
middlebrow origins", so prairie practical and
provincial that whenever he saw someone carrying
flowers, he asked in utter seriousness, "Where's
the funeral?"
In Washington as in Wichita,
he was a familiar genus, reassuringly,
unthreateningly American. An interviewer in 1990
noticed an aphorism on the wall of his White House
office: "The easiest way to achieve complete
strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes
no sense or is even self-destructive." It was a
reminder, Gates explained, of the enemy's sinister
ways. "A useful admonition when trying to
understand the Saddam Husseins of the world," the
reporter noted brightly. It was accepted, after
all, that the US faced alien forces of evil intent
and inherent duplicity in the sometimes menacing,
unsavory business of foreign policy. Men of
homegrown virtue like Bob Gates had to fathom the
challenge and, whatever the transgression of
traditional American values, of the code of the
Eagle Scout, more than match the methods.
In 1961, he went off to William and Mary,
the venerable college in Williamsburg, Virginia,
where presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe
had been educated two centuries before, but which
had since slipped into parochial obscurity.
Shuttered for the Civil War when faculty and
students left en masse to fight for the
Confederacy, state-supported William and Mary
admitted its first African-American only in 1963,
nearly a decade after the University of Virginia
and other regional white redoubts. "Oh my
goodness, very traditional, very conservative, and
very, very southern," remembered a woman who
studied there in the 1960s and still works at the
school. "During Vietnam I think we had some of the
only campus demonstrations in the country that
were pro-war."
It was not a usual Wichita
college choice, but Dan Landis, an Eagle Scout at
Wichita East who had gone there two years earlier,
ardently recruited Gates, and he was given a
generous scholarship. On arrival, he was ushered
into the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, while
Landis set him up driving a school bus part-time
for pocket money. He also enlisted Gates as an
adviser to a local scout troop and got him to join
his church. The two Kansans settled into what
other students saw as a "straight-arrow,
no-nonsense" routine.
Asked recently what
the future CIA director and defense secretary did
for extracurricular activities in the eventful
1960s, Landis, a retired educator, replied simply,
"We did scouts and we went to church." Actually,
Gates was also a dorm advisor and business manager
for a campus literary and arts magazine and, while
already-discreet Bob never revealed his politics
to Landis, he was also active in the Young
Republicans.
The "scholar scout", as a
college newspaper called him in 2007, began in
pre-med but soon switched to European history.
Timothy Sullivan, who sat in courses with him and
went on to be president of the college, thought
Gates "immensely disciplined, really smart and
obviously very ambitious". Like most witnesses
along the way, Sullivan could remember no
"sparkling anecdotes" about the famous man, but
assumed the qualities behind his later success
must have been "in some form or other evident" at
the time. They were all, he did remember,
"undergraduates who didn't know much about the
world and certainly nothing about the world in
which we were going to wind up".
At
commencement in 1965, the service fraternity,
scout troop, school bus, church and campus work
all won him the college's award as the senior
making "the greatest contribution to his fellow
man" (another accolade faithfully retained in his
resume). He was interested now in Eastern Europe,
the Soviet bloc, perhaps in teaching, though later
he would say that the assassination of John F
Kennedy in his junior year moved him to think as
well of public service.
He would take a
fellowship for a master's in history at Indiana
University, a well-funded Soviet and East European
affairs center known for training future
government officials and academics in the Cold
War's most valued specialization. "A real patriot
in the very best sense of the word," was the way
Landis summed up his Kansas friend. It was one
thing the vortex and Wichita Group might have
agreed on.
The Baltic syndrome
Our story's other train was more exotic, a
muscular new Red Putilov engine emblazoned with
the hammer and sickle and pulling an ornate, plush
wagon-lit with scars still raw where the imperial
double-headed eagle of the Romanoff Tsars had been
chiseled off. The year was 1933. Rolling eastward
across the Russian plain, the swaying car carried
the first US diplomats dispatched to Moscow as
president Franklin Roosevelt recognized the Soviet
Union after some 15 years of severed relations
following the Bolshevik Revolution.
Aboard
was a 29-year-old foreign service officer, later
to become famous as a diplomat and scholar, George
Kennan. Though he was already deemed a government
expert on Russia, the train provided Kennan's
first actual exposure to the Soviet Union. As he
listened to their escort, foreign minister Maxim
Litvinov, reminisce in London-fluent English about
growing up in a village by the rail line, about
books he read as a boy and his dreams of becoming
a librarian, the Princeton-educated diplomat from
Milwaukee was astonished. "We suddenly realized,
or at least I did, that these people we were
dealing with were human beings like ourselves."
Kennan noted, as if making a scientific discovery,
"that they had been born somewhere, that they had
their childhood ambitions as we had". It would
prove but a fleeting moment of respite in an
endless ordeal of mutual ignorance, dogmatism and
dread.
In his surprise, Kennan symbolized
generations of US officials who would continue to
see the Soviet Union through the prism not only of
native provincialism and ideological hostility,
but also the pervasive bias of their training.
Pre-world-power America, in its isolation, knew
little of the old Russia and even less of the
tumultuous, often savage new politics of class and
revolutionary party power that followed the
Bolsheviks' coup of November 1917. "A fearsome set
of internationalists and logicians," Winston
Churchill had called the new Soviet leaders with
Tory wrath, "a sub-human structure upon the ruins
of Christian civilization." While a million
Americans now voted socialist and there was some
early sympathy for the "Reds", most of the US from
Wall Street to Main Street shared Churchill's
reflexive fear and loathing, if not the florid
elocution of the British statesman.
Anti-capitalist Soviet Russia was not
merely a disagreeable state on some far horizon,
but an immediate threat to domestic tranquility.
Alarm gripped even the most respectable of
newspapers, in which the Bolsheviks, like early
Christians in Rome or Jews in Medieval Europe,
were reliably reported to be eating babies and
committing other unspeakable outrages.
"Brutalities of the Bolsheviki," announced a
typical 1919 headline in the usually sedate New
York Times, "Strip women in streets - people of
every class except the scum subjected to violence
by mobs."
In the late summer of 1918, US
troops landed in north Russia and in Siberia, part
of a joint military intervention with the French,
British and Japanese to aid the monarchists and
turn the tide against the Bolsheviks in the
Russian civil war; meanwhile, across America, an
accompanying Great Red Scare loosed mass arrests,
persecutions and deportations of foreign radicals
of every stripe. It was "a moment of political
repression", wrote noted historian Howard Zinn,
"unparalleled in United States history". In a
sweeping onslaught of reaction, all-American
Wichita would, by 1919, imprison and try hundreds
of its citizens, assumed seditious, if not
terrorist, simply for having joined, or worked
for, a union.
Over the next two decades of
mortgaged peace, Washington and other Western
powers would abide tyrannies around the world -
Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain, as
well as despots from China to Argentina. Yet the
Soviet Union was in another category, "Untenable,
unacceptable, unimaginable," as one writer put it.
In geopolitics and language, the new revolutionary
state was to be treated as an infected patient,
held in isolation behind a cordon sanitaire (as
Kennan would himself so famously urge after World
War II in his celebrated, if unoriginal, policy of
"containment").
With Washington refusing
even to recognize the Soviet regime throughout the
1920s, no posting or direct exposure to Russia was
possible for the officials charged with keeping
watch on the scourge. The fall-back position was
academic training in the nature of the new regime;
and, since expertise was lacking in American
colleges, Washington sent its Kennans to study
Soviet affairs at European universities. The
"experts" they found there, however, were almost
exclusively exiles from Tsarist Russia,
expatriates by class, outlook and personal
history, loathing - but also largely ignorant of -
Soviet rule, and often financially as well as
sentimentally nostalgic for the fallen autocracy.
Few of history's losers owed defeat more
to political blindness or were more blinded by
defeat; and no victims remained more staunchly
oblivious to what had befallen them than the
Russian
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