BEHIND THE BUSHES

GATES AND ZBIGGY GET THE TALIBAN GOING

[Interview with former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
by Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998]

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his
memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began
to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet
intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to
President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that
correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid
to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet
army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded
until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that
President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote
a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion
this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But
perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to
provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they
intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in
Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of
truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the
effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I
wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the
USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry
on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about
the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic
fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or
the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the
liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic
fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to
Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a
rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading
religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in
common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan
militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing
more than what unites the Christian countries.
Translated from the French by Bill Blum

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

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GREAT MOMENTS IN THE LIFE OF ROBERT GATES

JAMES RIDGWAY, MOTHER JONES - While Donald Rumsfeld was Ronald Reagan's
errand boy to Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s, Robert Gates, the man
named to succeed him as Secretary of Defense, was at the very heart of
the American intelligence apparatus, actively planning and carrying out
covert operations in Central America and the Middle East.

Gates, a 26-year CIA veteran and the agency's director between 1991 and
1993, has long been accused of undermining competent, unbiased
intelligence analysis at the agency during his tenure, opening the way
for its role in partisan politics, a reality brought to the fore again
as the Bush administration made its flawed and phony case for war with
Iraq. Gates was a high official at the CIA at a time when the U.S.
intelligence community experienced one of its most humiliating debacles:
the failure to predict the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Instead,
under CIA director William Casey the U.S. concocted evidence showing the
expansion of Reagan's "evil empire."

On December 14, 1984, in a five page memorandum for then Director of
Intelligence Casey, Gates, then serving as deputy director of
intelligence, set forth his views: "It is time to talk absolutely
straight about Nicaragua," the memo begins. "The Nicaraguan regime is
steadily moving toward consolidation of a Marxist-Leninist government,
and the establishment of a permanent and well-armed ally of the Soviet
Union and Cuba on the mainland of the western hemisphere. Its avowed aim
is to spread further revolution in the Americas." Gates goes on to say
this is an "unacceptable" course, arguing that the U.S. should do
everything "in its power short of invasion to put that regime out.". . .


Nicaragua wasn't the only place Gates wanted to take action. In 1985,
sounding very much like one of today's neoconservative hawks, the then
head of intelligence analysis at the CIA drafted a plan for a joint
U.S.-Egyptian military operation to invade Libya, overthrow Col. Muamar
Ghaddafi, and "redraw the map of North Africa." . . .

According to Robert Parry, a reporter who has closely tracked this
period in the CIA's history, during this time the Reagan administration
was "pressing the CIA to adopt an analysis that accepted right-wing
media reports pinning European terrorism on the Soviets. . . "In 1985,
Gates closeted a special team to push through another pre-cooked paper
arguing that the KGB was behind the 1981 wounding of Pope John Paul II.
CIA analysts again knew that the charge was bogus, but could not block
the paper from leaving CIA.". . .

In his book, "Firewall: The Iran/Contra conspiracy and Cover-Up,"
Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-Contra
investigation, wrote that he was skeptical of Gates' repeated denials of
having been aware or involved with the details of the Iran-Contra
operations with Oliver North. . . In blunt terms, Walsh thought Gates
was a liar. It was only for a lack of evidence that he eventually gave
up trying to indict him.

http://www.motherjones.com//washington_dispatch/2006/11/Gates%20Files.html



NY TIMES, 1991 - David Boren, the [Senate Intelligence] committee
chairman, commends Mr. Gates for forthrightness. Yet he overlooks
occasions when Mr. Gates helped skew intelligence assessments and was
demonstrably blind to illegality. The illegality concerns the
Iran-contra scandal. Mr. Gates contends he was 'out of the loop' on
decisions about what to tell Congress. And he defends his professed
ignorance on grounds of deniability--that he was shielding the C.I.A.
from involvement. These contentions defy belief.

The testimony of other puts Mr. Gates, on at least two occasions, very
much in the loop. He supervised preparation of Director William Casey's
deceitful testimony to Congress about the scandal. And one C.I.A.
analyst, Charles Allen, says he informed Mr. Gates, before it came to
light, of three unforgettable details: Oliver North's involvement, the
markup of prices of arms sold surreptitiously to Iran, and diversion of
the proceeds into a fund for covert operations. In a telling lapse of
his reputedly formidable memory, Mr. Gates could not recall the details
when Congress asked two months later.

The second criterion concerns intelligence estimates. Incorrect
forecasting should not be disqualifying; estimates can be wrong for the
right reasons of political expediency, that's `cooking the books.'

The hearings have documented at least three cases of such slanting: a
May 1985 estimate on Iran, estimates of Soviet influence in the third
world, and assessments of Soviet complicity in the assassination attempt
on Pope John Paul II. . .

It is more reasonable to think the agency would be better off with a
director unbound by William Casey's dark legacy--the conviction that the
agency knows best, a barely concealed contempt for Congress and a belief
that anything goes including evading the law. Reshaping the agency
wisely depends on casting off the legacy.

Thomas Polgar, a C.I.A. veteran, urged the committee to consider the
message that confirmation would send. Would officials wonder whether it
was wise for outspoken witnesses to risk their careers by testifying?
Would they say to themselves, `Serve faithfully the boss of the moment;
never mind integrity? Feel free to mislead the Senate--senators forget
easily?

By voting no, senators will vote to remember.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1991_cr/s911031-gates.htm

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