Washington – Robert Gates, Eagle Scout, longtime American spy, head of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1993, and President George W. Bush’s nominee Wednesday as secretary of defense, now faces the challenge of his career: finding a new strategy for the American war in Iraq.
Those who know him well said Gates, described as intellectually brilliant, recognizes that the Democrats’ dramatic success in the midterm elections and the soon-to-be-released report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group have given him a mandate to chart a new course.
Gates, who will be leaving his position as president of Texas A&M University to prepare for Senate confirmation hearings, is a member of the Iraq Study Group and traveled to Iraq earlier this year to assess the situation firsthand.
“Even though people may see him as a strong leader, he also has feelings, and to be in a war zone would move anybody. And it moved Bob Gates,” Rodney P. McClendon, chief of staff to Gates during his 4 1/2 years as university president, said Wednesday.
McClendon, who said Gates kept his opinions on Iraq private, said the trip to Iraq “just brought home the seriousness of the war for him. He was very introspective about it.”
The silver-haired Gates, 63, was born in Wichita and received a bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary and a master’s degree in history at Indiana University in 1966. While at Indiana, he was recruited by the CIA, but first he served two years in the Air Force.
Gates became a consummate Cold War spy, earning his doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University in 1974.
Over the next two decades, he held positions at the National Security Council and the CIA, eventually rising to become, at the time, just the third career officer in the intelligence agency to lead the organization.
In 1987, he was nominated as CIA director but withdrew because of controversy surrounding his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, in which proceeds from arms sales to Iran were used to fund the counterrevolutionary Contra forces in Nicaragua.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated him again. His Senate confirmation process took six months, ending with an independent counsel’s decision that Gates did not warrant indictment on whether he was telling the truth regarding when he first learned of the diversion of funds.
“I suspect I’m the only CIA officer to have had two secretaries of state, a secretary of defense and the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party all try at different times to get me fired,” Gates once said.
