TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052791/0527520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 199 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 46

Toughie, Smoothy, Striver, Spy


Bland-looking and hard-hitting, BOB GATES is the President's
pick to lead the CIA beyond its cold-war roots into an uncertain
future

By DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON -- Reported by Bruce van Voorst/
Washington


    Robert Gates was an eagle scout and an A- student, a
wholesome Kansas kid who met his wife-to-be on a hayride. He
yearned to become a doctor or a teacher, and volunteered to
tutor needy students. His college honored him as the graduate
"who has made the greatest contribution to his fellow man." So
how did a nice guy like Gates get into the spy business? And why
do some Democrats in the Senate say such nasty things about him?

    Nominated last week by President Bush to serve as director
of Central Intelligence, Gates began his CIA career "on a lark"
in 1965. He accepted a recruiter's invitation to an interview
just for "a free trip to Washington." Once he got there,
however, things got serious. The agency asked Gates to join, not
as a "spy" but as a deskbound analyst, and he accepted. Yet
when the agency offered to finance his part-time doctoral
studies, Gates declined. He "didn't want to feel obligated to
stay" if a good teaching job suddenly became open.

    Fast-forward a quarter-century and Gates, now 47, is
poised to become the youngest -- and yet the most experienced
-- CIA director since the agency was founded in 1947. But first
Gates must win the Senate confirmation that eluded him on his
last go-round, in 1987. Then the agency's deputy director, he
was criticized for not acting on indications that the
Iran-contra scandal was afoot. No wrongdoing by Gates was
proved, but he withdrew his name from nomination to spare
President Reagan further embarrassment.

    Since then, passions have cooled and the public has grown
weary of the Iran-contra investigation. The boyish-looking,
soft-spoken Gates, during two years as first lieutenant to
retiring CIA Director William Webster and two more as Deputy
National Security Adviser to Bush, has assiduously cultivated
key Senators. Though some Democrats vow to re-examine Gates'
Iran-contra role, most Senators predict that he will be
confirmed this time, barring some unexpected new evidence of
wrongdoing. "Bob Gates was an exceptional deputy to Webster, an
honest liaison to the congressional committees and an invaluable
aide to the President in the White House," says Senator David
Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat who chairs the intelligence
committee. "I think he could be an outstanding CIA director."

    The agency can afford nothing less if it is to outgrow its
cold war roots. Policymakers lament the CIA's failure to warn
earlier of Iraq's intention to invade Kuwait, and they demand
intelligence on new topics, from industrial counterespionage to
the AIDS epidemic's devastation of the political and managerial
elites in several African countries. Budget cutters hungrily eye
the estimated $30 billion in often redundant spending by the
CIA and other elements of the intelligence community. To
address these challenges, Bob Gates offers close ties with the
White House and Pentagon, broad CIA experience and a black belt
in bureaucratic politics.

    Friends remember him as a child who demonstrated a need
and a knack for pleasing his elders back in Wichita, where his
father sold wholesale auto parts. Young Bob was bright,
well-organized and punctual. He read voraciously and loved to
run and hike. When he went off to the College of William and
Mary in Virginia, he first enrolled in pre-medicine, then
gravitated toward history. "I started with American history,"
Gates says, "and moved east." He studied Western Europe as an
undergrad, Eastern Europe for his master's degree and Russian
history and language for his doctorate. Gates worked part time
in Williamsburg as a school-bus driver with the eccentric habit
of teaching his riders words and phrases in German and Russian.
At Indiana University, he worked as a dorm counselor, as did his
wife-to-be Becky, whom he met when they chaperoned a hayride.

    At the CIA, Gates scrambled rapidly up the career ladder,
starting as a junior analyst who struggled to write coherent
reports after poring over mountains of information from a wide
range of secret and public sources. He quickly drew praise for
cogent analysis and crisp writing -- traits still evident in his
scholarly articles and speeches.

    A big break for Gates came in 1974, when he was assigned
to work at the White House on the National Security Council.
His boss, then as now, was an Air Force general named Brent
Scowcroft. Over the next 17 years, Gates deftly hopscotched back
and forth from the White House to CIA, winning kudos from
Democrats and Republicans alike.

    Some detractors describe Gates as a "chameleon" who, like
Magnus Pym, the sociopathic protagonist of John le Carre's The
Perfect Spy, finds it easy to match his coloration to whomever
he needs to please. And while his friends disagree, they add
wryly that it's better to have Gates as an employee than as a
boss.

    He strives to deliver what his superiors want, and rides
his subordinates until he gets it. He first made his name as
head of the CIA's analysts, insisting that reports be made less
cautiously academic and more relevant to policymakers,
addressing their concerns bluntly, concisely and accurately. He
demanded each analyst's "best estimate" on difficult questions,
and tracked such judgments on scorecards that influenced
promotions. Some analysts considered Gates a little Napoleon.
But Congressman Dave McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, says he witnessed a "remarkable" improvement in the
quality of CIA reports prepared under Gates.

    Gates also takes pride in having helped to establish a
day-care center for employees' children, complete with jungle
gyms and little CIA T shirts. He delighted in imagining what KGB
analysts would conclude from their satellite photos of the
facility: perhaps that the CIA was training midgets for some
covert mission.

    He was working at the White House back when George Bush
was CIA director, and the two didn't meet then. But Gates
astutely courted Bush once he became Vice President, arranging
briefings for Bush before he attended funerals of foreign
leaders. When Gates was appointed deputy CIA director in 1986,
he asked Bush to swear him in. After Gates moved to the Bush
White House in 1989, he, unlike previous Deputy National
Security Advisers, was invited to attend almost all the meetings
Scowcroft holds with Bush, including each morning's round of
intelligence and national-security briefings.

    Gates has long expressed deep skepticism toward Soviet
reform efforts. "The reformers," Gates said in a speech this
month, "must overcome not just 70 years of Communist history,
but a thousand years of Russian history, a history that has
never known government other than autocracy." For such public
pessimism, Gates was slapped down first by Secretary of State
George Shultz, then by his successor, James Baker. And on Gates'
first trip to the Soviet Union, with Baker in 1989, Gorbachev
bluntly expressed the hope that Moscow-Washington detente would
"put Mr. Gates out of a job."

    Sometimes Gates seems pleasantly bumfuzzled by recent
turns in the relationship between the superpowers. Last August,
for example, his son Brad, then 10, was struggling to
comprehend what he was hearing from his cold-warrior father.
"Let me get this straight, Dad," Brad said. "The Russians are
on our side in this one?" Gates smiled and nodded. Brad replied
simply, "Wow!"

    Like Bush, Gates rises early: about 5 a.m. He runs three
miles, showers, shellacs his white-gray hair and hops into the
back of a black government sedan that waits outside his home in
suburban Virginia. The driver hands over a packet of
intelligence reports and diplomatic cables that moved overnight,
and Gates scans these and the newspapers on his way to the White
House. He usually eats lunch at his desk. He seldom gets home
before 9 p.m.

    He takes son Brad and teenage daughter Eleanor to Orioles
baseball games, and they indulge his attraction to carnival
rides. During a trip to Germany when he was deputy CIA director,
Gates detoured to a local fairground, security detail in tow,
and rode a roller coaster called the Triple Loop. A man of plain
tastes and middlebrow origins, Gates likes to torment elitists
at the CIA and the State Department, whom he derides as "guys
with last names for first names." He tells corny jokes and
Russian jokes. And he is relentlessly practical in a way that
sometimes amuses his friends. While driving down Constitution
Avenue in a convertible, for example, Gates was caught in a
rainstorm but couldn't get the top up. Unfazed, he unfurled his
umbrella and kept driving.

    His White House office, like Gates, is compact and
strategically located. Little larger than a broom closet, it
flanks the West Wing entrance just across the lobby from the
Oval Office. It is stuffed with color-coded folders marked
SECRET, photos of Gates' family on backpacking trips, a
Dictaphone, a big secure telephone and a regular White House
phone console that often erupts with a steady, insistent ring.
"Yes, sir," Gates answers. "Yes, Mr. President . . . I'll get
right on it, sir."

    On the wall only a few feet in front of his desk is an
aphorism, the source of which Gates has forgotten. "The easiest
way to achieve complete strategic surprise," it reads, "is to
commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive."
Gates says he finds this a useful admonition when trying to
understand the Saddam Husseins of the world. He hopes to take
it with him when he returns to the CIA.