License to Spill

It was an investigative reporter’s ultimate fantasy come true. There he was, the former head spook of the CIA, sitting at the Beverly Hilton lobby bar, knocking back some hard liquor and eager to talk.

“From the Shadows” is how he had titled his tell-not-quite-all book, and the secrets were about to flow. They had subtitled it right: “The Ultimate Insider’s Story.”

Robert M. Gates, who spent three decades with the CIA from Vietnam through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even served with Zbigniew Brzezinski working out nuclear war scenarios on the National Security Council staff, was now out in the cold. And wide open for interrogation.

Gates had been captured by book publicists and there is no distance they won’t make an author crawl. Simon & Schuster was marketing Gates, and the man had spent weeks on the road spilling the mostly known secrets of the Cold War on radio talk shows, at bookstores and at elite foreign policy councils all over the country.

Now it was my turn to make a buck. Sure, the newspaper had asked for a nice little feature profile, but I was thinking TV treatment. “Tales From the Shadows,” a long-running series. But classy--not creepy like “Tales From the Crypt,” more like “The X-Files” or, dare one hope, “Mission: Impossible.” Maybe even a movie.

He’s got the short, wiry body and good hair, but forget “Mission: Impossible” unless you can imagine Tom Cruise 25 years older, very tired and without the smile.

But one look at Gates and you know he is the genuine article. Not a flashy, cocky spy doing car bombings and stuff, more the clerk type, really earnest and good looking in a middle-aged sort of way.

Harrison Ford could play him. But unlike Ford, this guy never ends up being in the middle of the action with bullets flying. Always desk-bound, a fly on the wall at top meetings even in the White House. Gates is nondescript to a fault. His M.O. is no M.O.

The book doesn’t even mention his teenage children, and his wife appears only once. After tough questioning, he finally confessed that he decided to omit his personal side from the book because “I guess I felt that I wasn’t very interesting.”

Right, and boring is your cover. Gates is the butler who did it. He could spy on you all day and you’d never know it. And he has no fingerprints. Nada. Any evidence you might want to pick up, from Stingers in Afghanistan to mines in the harbor of Nicaragua, in all those years of evaluating evidence, this guy never got caught with his prints on a piece of it.

Those mines--it was all William Casey’s fault. “[Then-Director] Casey loved the idea. No one bothered to tell me or consult with our analysts about the operation.”

Not even when Iran-Contra was bubbling and the special prosecutor was all over him and Gates was about to be confirmed as CIA director by the Senate could they lay a glove on him. It was, he writes, “the lowest point of my life,” but he was confirmed nonetheless.

*

“The Ultimate Insider’s Story” turns out to be the ultimate survivor’s story. It is very important, to hear him tell it, to know that nothing ugly ever occurred on his watch.

Gates never left the building at Langley to play outside. No wonder he’s so white. While other spooks were blowing up things and rifling safes, Gates was reading satellite reports. A desk job may sound easy, but it takes its toll.

“I came in when it was dark to prepare the morning reports,” he confesses, “and I left when it was dark. I could only see my kids on weekends.”

But saving the Free World wasn’t all drudgery.

“We in CIA worked terrible hours, but we had a lot of fun too.” Among other things, they maintained a list of grammatical screw ups in the cable traffic they were forever reading. Real spies read a lot, and they’re damn proud of it.

As an analyst specializing in Russia, Gates was analyzing a country he had never seen. He could barely get permission to travel anywhere lest he be kidnapped and pumped for secret codes.

Nor could he rely on the agents the CIA had developed in the Soviet Union because they were all presumed to be double agents. That was the word, early in Gates’ career, from the legendary CIA head of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, whom Gates describes in his book as “mysterious, even weird--sitting in a darkened office with a single desk light, chain-smoking, a figure from another world.”

You can’t make this stuff up. According to Gates, Angleton was so loony that he became convinced that James Schlesinger, then CIA director, “was one of them,” meaning he was part of the Soviet conspiracy.

Angleton made the mistake of telling this to one Sam Hoskinson, a friend of Gates but--more important--one of Schlesinger’s top assistants. When Hoskinson told Angleton that he would have to report the conversation to his boss, Angleton replied, “Well, then, you must be one of them too.”

Not an easy place to work. Particularly when you’re a guy with your head screwed on right, like Gates, and your main job is figuring out what’s going on in the Soviet Union almost exclusively from satellite photos.

“We had virtually no Soviet sources by the end of the 1960s or the early 1970s in the Soviet Union,” Gates all but whispered to me while sucking on an ice cube, “because there was no benefit to recruiting a Soviet agent, because Angleton thought they were all doubles. There was no benefit in persuading someone to defect, because all defectors were automatically assumed to be doubles. And so it was a lean time.”

After the Aldrich Ames affair, some might think Angleton was right and the CIA was indeed riddled with moles. But who was the top mole? It couldn’t have been Gates, because, as his book describes it, he was kept in the dark on the things the Soviets wanted to know about, which is what CIA spies in the field were up to.

“You have to appreciate . . . how strong the separation was between the clandestine service and the analytical side of the agency. I think what we felt at the time was, what the hell are those guys doing? And why are they doing things that discredit the agency, that don’t seem right?”

For most of his tenure at the CIA, Gates was barely allowed to have lunch with the guys working the covert side of the street: “There was a south cafeteria, where visitors and others could come in, in the old days, and then there was the north cafeteria, where no outsiders could eat, to protect the cover of agency officers who were in headquarters . . . and the analysts tended to gravitate toward the south cafeteria.”

Now he tells me. If I had known at the beginning of our interview that he was just a south cafeteria kind of guy, an analyst and not a spy, I might have stayed home and watched some action flick on cable. If I want to talk to analysts, I go over to the UCLA faculty club.

*

But wait, there’s more. The great moments in his career occurred when he was assigned to work directly for various presidents where, according to his book, he witnessed, “Intrigue. Back-stabbing. Ruthless ambition. Constant conflict. Informers. Leakers. Spies. Egos as big as the surrounding mountains. Battles between Titans. Cabinet officers behaving like children. High level temper tantrums. I would ultimately work in the White House for four presidents and I saw it all.”

I guess you had to be there.

The best story that Gates has to tell from his White House follies is the one about the day the world almost blew up.

It occurred when Gates was working for Brzezinski, who in 1980 was Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor. At 3 in the morning Brzezinski was awakened by a call from his military assistant, Bill Odom, telling him that 220 Soviet missiles had been launched in an attack against the United States. That meant the president had three to seven minutes to decide whether to launch a counterstrike.

According to Gates, “Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back,” and told Odom to make sure the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back a few minutes later, he not only confirmed an attack but reported that 2,200 Soviet missiles had been launched: “It was an all-out attack.”

But in the nick of time came a third call. Oops, never mind. No missiles had been launched after all.

“Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system. When it was over Zbig just went back to bed. I doubt he slept much, though. Such were the terrors and nightmares of the Cold War, now faded so far from memory.”

It’s a good thing the rest of us didn’t know about such terrors at the time, or we might have asked Gates, Zbig and the rest of those geniuses to resign.

But maybe I’m not getting the whole picture. After all, I was the only one at the premiere of “Mission: Impossible” who admitted that he couldn’t follow the plot. Maybe, as in that movie, the Gates I interviewed was not the real Gates. Could be that the face I studied so intently across that cocktail table in the Beverly Hilton bar was just another rubber mask.

But let’s assume it was Gates. PR people don’t lie, and they had set the meeting up. But haunting thoughts remained: Did I know him in the end? Had all the masks been ripped off? And what secrets was he still concealing?

Is it possible someone could have spent so many years inside CIA headquarters and yet know so little about the agency’s covert operations?

Is it conceivable that he didn’t know about all the spying on American citizens and the other dirty secrets until he read about it in Sy Hersh’s 1974 story in the New York Times?

Had he not read the 693-page internal compilation of CIA dirty tricks requested by then-Director Schlesinger and subsequently referred to as the CIA’s “family jewels” in Former Director William Colby’s memoirs?

“According to Colby,” wrote Gates, “the ‘family jewels’ included Operation Chaos, directed against the anti-Vietnam War movement; surveillance of U.S. journalists to determine the source of leaks, all connections to the Watergate conspirators; Agency experimentation with mind-control drugs; and involvement in assassination attempts against Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo and more.”

Could Gates really have been so out of it? The answer is, amazing as it sounds, yes.

I didn’t realize it till I was back in my deserted office, late at night, sipping a frozen mocha, the caffeine jostling my brain cells. Suddenly, it hit me. There had been a clue all along. Where was it . . . yes, Page 35 of the Gates book, where he wrote about his days as a young man in the CIA:

“The CIA in 1969 had not yet been traumatized by a multitude of investigations that exposed ill-fated or ill-conceived operations, nearly all undertaken at presidential direction. Most of us then had only a glimpse--mainly through Ramparts magazine--of Agency involvement in U.S. institutions and activities, or in collecting information on Americans. That was yet to come. We were at the end of an era, and we didn’t even know it.”

Ramparts magazine! That scurrilous muckraking subversive rag of the infamous ‘60s knew what “insiders” like Gates didn’t know about their own covert operations?

Stunned at this revelation, I let the Gates book drop from my hand and quietly resolved to bring my investigative journalist career to a close. In 1969, the editor of Ramparts magazine was . . . me.

I was Gates’ source. Talk about disappointment.