Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council Senior Staff under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons, offers a three part study of Robert Gates and the cultural and institutional history of the CIA.
“The Specialist: Robert Gates and the Tortured World of American Intelligence” (
Part 1), 19 June 2007.
Morris comments on "the Baltic Syndrome":
"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."
"From that corrupted tutelage, freshly minted U.S. specialists were commonly assigned to Latvia or Estonia, small Baltic states conquered by Russia in the eighteenth century but now (briefly) independent. These became Meccas for the anti-Soviet Diaspora, in many respects small replicas of the caste system and reactionary politics of Imperial Russia itself. So it was that America's diplomats, expected to understand and interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were shaped not only by an insular and fearful American culture, but also by the pervasive lost-world bias of their trainers."
On the CIA and Orientalism:
"The CIA was not to be confused with -- or disposed to confuse the President and his top officials with -- genuine intelligence about countries of the world in and for themselves. The Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa -- a region mattered, for the most part, only as it related to the struggle with the Soviet Union. From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and Iraq -- with scores of lesser-known disasters in between -- that willful negligence was, and remains, immensely damaging."
On the CIA in the Origins of Ba'thist rule Iraq:
"In Iraq, a CIA-supported corrupt monarchy, inherited from the British, stifled democratic stirrings in the 1950s; then, CIA-instigated Ba'ath Party coups in 1963, and again in 1968, killed reformers and reforms (along with any hopes of sectarian equity), and led to Saddam Hussein's tribal-clan despotism."
On the doctrine of plausible deniability:
"Deniability-minded postwar presidents were surely prone to Henry II's demure order -- "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" -- to his zealous knights to hack to death Archbishop Thomas Beckett in the sanctity of the cathedral."
“The CIA and the Politics of Counterrevolution: Robert Gates, The Specialist” (
Part 2), 21 June 2007.
On Orientalism:
"Yet there was something more insidious than crude Eurocentric racism at work. Imbibed by a new generation of bureaucrats and analysts with winning-hearts-and-minds, career-making fervor was another kind of bigotry dressed in the clothes of scholarly authority and of knowledge in service to power. It took an eminent literary critic and expatriate from one of the most abused "areas" of the world to expose it."
"A revolutionary book when it appeared in the late 1970s, Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said revealed the intellectual hollowness of the predominant Western view of the Arab world (and, by implication, of much of the rest of the globe as well). Professor Said's naked emperor proved to be the views of two centuries of Western academics and novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists, diplomats and dilettantes that created a collective, stereotypical, paradoxical Muslim Orient -- stagnant yet ever-roiling; childlike yet cunning; femininely weak yet no less macho-menacing for that; indolent but agitated; always prone to feudal despotism, though available for capitalist liberation; congenitally terrorist and genocidal by nature; presumptively inferior; endlessly devious; and, above all, relentlessly alien. Said's Orient of Western mythology was what one author aptly called "the quintessential ‘Other.'"
"They're our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted," said Archie Roosevelt, Kermit's cousin and a CIA deputy for the Middle East in the later 1960s. His weary exasperation with the supposedly innate Arab traits of treachery and corruptibility -- he was speaking of Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 Baghdad coups -- caught an American official mood extending from the 1940s to 2007, from Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. It was part of the territory, diplomats and spies understood, a cost of doing business beyond the English Channel with what many called, in the privacy of inter-agency meetings, the "rug merchants."
The colonial sociology of knowledge of the specialists, when placed alongside the cultural illiteracy of senior bureaucrats, policy-makers, and politicians -- to say nothing of a blanketing pro-Israeli bias -- produced a half-century of American patronage of repressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East.
Stations in Cairo, Beirut, and Amman spent years plotting the February 1963 Ba'athist coup in Iraq that led to the murder of reformist Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, who was deemed too sympathetic to the left. ("The target suffered a terminal illness," a CIA officer quipped to a Senate committee, "before a firing squad in Baghdad.") That bloody succession led to the murder of thousands of Iraq's educated elite, communist and non-communist alike, from lists the CIA gave Ba'ath Party death squads. When that coup faltered, the Agency staged a further one in 1968, almost a month to the day before Gates began his job, installing a Ba'athist dictator -- along with his kinsman and protégé, security chief Saddam Hussein.
All in all, CIA intelligence on Vietnam was so shallow that, by 1969-1970, President Richard Nixon's White House policy-makers had essentially stopped paying attention.
CIA estimates elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, were no less suspect in the White House and the Pentagon -- except for reports passed on from CIA client regimes or kindred spy agencies. This was especially true of Israel's Mossad, widely (and mistakenly) believed in Washington to be omniscient, if not omnipotent, and invariably imagined to be synonymous with American interests.
"The Rise and Rise of Robert Gates: The Specialist" (
Part 3), 25 June 2007.
