Thread: GATES, Robert - SecDef

Council on Foreign Relations Membership List (F-K)

1328. GATES ROBERT MICHAEL,CFR '92

Did you have any doubts ??

UB

Originally Posted by UB

Council on Foreign Relations Membership List (F-K)

1328. GATES ROBERT MICHAEL,CFR '92

Did you have any doubts ??

UB

Nope!!!

http://www.yccbsa.org/news/pressrelease ... tesbio.htm



Robert M. Gates
President of the National Eagle Scout




Biographical Background

Robert M. Gates served as Director of Central Intelligence from 6 November 1991 until 20 January 1993. In this position, he headed all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States and directed the Central intelligence Agency. Dr. Gates is the only career officer in CIA’s history to rise from entry-level employee to Director and the only intelligence analyst to become Director.

Dr. Gates served as Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser at the White House from 20 January 1989 until 6 November 1991.

Dr. Gates joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1966 and spent nearly 27 years as an intelligence professional, serving six presidents. During that period, he spent nearly nine years at the National Security Council, The White House, serving four presidents of both political parties.

Dr. Gates has been awarded the National Security Medal, the Presidential citizens Medal, has twice received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and has three times received CIA’s highest award, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.

Dr. Gates is the author of an acclaimed memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How they Won the Cold War, published in 1996.

Dr. Gates is currently the President of Texas A & M University. Dr. Gates served at Dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University from 1999- 2001. He also is a member of the board of trustees of the Fidelity Funds, and a member of the board of directors of TRW, Inc., LucasVarity plc, NACCO Industries, and Parker Drilling Company. He also serves as senior adviser or consultant to several major international firms, and is a trustee of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Boston.

As a Boy Scout, Dr. Gates received his God and Country Award in 1957, his Eagle Scout Award in 1958, and became a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow in 1959. As a Scout, he attended Philmont twice, once as a hiker and in 1959 for the National Junior Leader Training Camp. Dr. Gates is a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout award, presented to him in 1993 in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole. Dr. Gates currently is a member of the national executive board of the Boy Scouts of America and president of the National Eagle Scout Association.

Dr. Gates received his BA degree from the College of William and Mary, his Master’s degree in history from Indiana ‘University, and his Doctorate in Russian and Soviet history from Georgetown University. Dr. Gates is 58, married and has two children.

Damn! Take a look at this!

November 8, 2006, 1:35 pm
A New Perspective on Iran?
[gates]
Gates

Whatever else he may bring to his new job at the Pentagon, Robert Gates apparently holds a view on the highly sensitive subject of relations with Iran that hasn’t been embraced by all his new colleagues in the Bush administration.

At a White House news conference, President Bush made the stunning announcement that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is departing, to be replaced by Gates. That announcement will immediately focus attention on the views held by Gates, a longtime Washington national security hand who was a leading adviser to President Bush’s father during the first war with Iraq.

On at least one Persian Gulf issue, Gates has been associated with a different approach than the one now being pursued. In the summer of 2004, Gates and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski co-chaired a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations that argued for opening a dialogue with Iran. The task force’s report contended that the lack of American engagement with Iran had harmed American interests, and advocated direct talks with the Iranians. “Just as the United States has a constructive relationship with China (and earlier did so with the Soviet Union) while strongly opposing certain aspects of its internal and international policies, Washington should approach Iran with a readiness to explore areas of common interests while continuing to contest objectionable policy,” said the report, entitled “Iran: Time for a New Approach.”

Bush’s announcement of the change at the Pentagon seemed to be a direct contradiction to his contention last week that Rumsfeld would be saying on the job. But the president’s description of how the change took place made clear that the decision to replace Rumsfeld was already in the works as he made those comments. The president described the change not by saying that defense secretary had decided to leave, but by saying that “after a series of thoughtful conversations, Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed” it was time for a change. –Gerald F. Seib

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2006/11/0 ... e-on-iran/

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World News
See other World News Articles

Title: The Man Who'll Replace Rummy
Source: Time Magaziner
URL Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article ... 51,00.html
Published: Nov 8, 2006
Author: Time Magazine
Post Date: 2006-11-08 16:57:54 by Document

The last time presumptive Pentagon boss Robert M. Gates faced Senate confirmation — for CIA director in 1991— he put a small good luck charm in his pocket. It was a smooth, white, oblong stone he'd picked up while hiking in Washington state's Olympic range. Gates put it in his pocket to remind him during the tough confirmation hearings that there was life after Washington if his nomination went down to defeat.

Gates is likely to be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense and he would bring to the job intimate knowledge of the White House, the Congress, the CIA and military intelligence. But he might want to dig the stone out of his belongings just in case.

Traditionally, the job of Defense Secretary goes to a person who sets a tone and policy atop the national defense structure while a deputy actually runs the building day to day. Rumsfeld tried to do both. Gates would fit the traditional pattern if he is confirmed.

The Kansas-born Gates is a Bush family hand from way back. He served Bush's father as deputy national security adviser and later as CIA director. He was a rare hardliner in the Bush 41 White House, famously suspicious of Mikhail Gorbachev and closer ideologically to then-Defense boss Dick Cheney than to Colin Powell and James Baker.

But Gates was chiefly a lifetime CIA officer, who rose quickly through the agency's Russia and Soviet ranks during the 1970s and 1980s. He was marked for higher office by Reagan CIA Director William Casey but was slowed in his rise by minor involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, when Gates was Casey's Deputy director at the agency. That misstep cost him the chance to replace Casey during the Reagan years; Bush's father named him CIA director a few years later after the Iran-contra smoke cleared.

During Gates' second CIA confirmation hearings he was charged with cooking intelligence by CIA insiders and making it more favorable to White House policy makers; Gates rebutted the charges sufficiently to get confirmed. Many Democrats voted against him nonetheless.

After leaving government, Gates wrote a book entitled From The Shadows and became president of Texas A & M University, the home of the George Herbert Walker Bush Presidential Library. Recently, he was named a member of the James Baker-Lee Hamilton commission on Iraq.

Gates is an affable, soft-spoken man who can tell a good story and has a generous sense of humor. He'll need all those skills and more to run a Pentagon amid a war that few believe the U.S. is winning.

Another Gates Endorsement [Michael Rubin]
Gary Sick, the discredited conspiracy theorist behind the October Surprise/Iran hostages hoax, endorses Gates and parrots the Lyndon LaRouche line about rogue Pentagon intelligence. What is going on at Columbia University?
http://corner.nationalreview.com/

DIRECTLY FROM THE CFR

Sick: Gates Will Bring ‘Realism and Pragmatism’ to Pentagon

Interviewee:
Gary G. Sick, executive director of the Gulf/2000 Project, Columbia University
Interviewer:
Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

November 9, 2006

Gary Sick Gary G. Sick, a prominent expert on Iran, worked with Robert M. Gates in the White House during the Ford and Carter administration. He says the nomination of Gates to replace Donald M. Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense marks a “moment of real change” for the administration of George W. Bush. Gates “represents a completely different brand of political action than the neoconservatives who have surrounded both Rumsfeld and Cheney up until now and who have been important in the policymaking process,” says Sick, who is the executive director of the Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University, a program devoted to studying the countries in the Persian Gulf region.

During the Ford and Carter administrations, you served on the National Security Council (NSC) staff in charge of Iranian affairs. Was Robert M. Gates working with you at the time?

He was at the NSC, and we worked together and I knew him and liked him very much. We’re both from Kansas. He’s from Wichita and I’m from Russell and so we had something in common.

And he went on in the senior Bush administration to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), right?

That is correct. Bush senior actually appointed him to be the Director of Central Intelligence in 1991. It was particularly significant in terms of a demonstration of real trust because the elder Bush had himself in fact been a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). By naming Bob Gates to that job it was clearly a signal that was someone that he trusted. Gates had been involved, but not really damaged too much, during the Iran-Contra Affair. He knew a lot of the people who were playing these games of sending arms to Iran and sending money off to support the Contras in Nicaragua. He was aware of that, and he made it clear that he was aware of it, though there was some dispute about when he learned about it. The bottom line was that although he had some kind of a role in Iran-Contra he was never indicted. That did keep him from being confirmed as President Reagan’s DCI at an earlier stage. But President [George H.W.] Bush later came along and nominated him again in 1991 and the confirmation went through.

I see. In private life he was the cochairman with Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on U.S. Policy toward Iran.

That’s correct. That came out in the summer of 2004. I think this was one of the landmark studies the Council did. The Council got a truly blue-ribbon group together, people who were both extremely knowledgeable about what was going on in Iran, plus some people who were very savvy about Washington politics. They all sat down and thought about what U.S. policy should be for the future and they came to a very firm conclusion that we needed to engage Iran directly if possible. The two chairs in particular, Brzezinski, who had been President Carter’s National Security Adviser, and Gates, gave it a certain amount of punch. But I must say the report fell on deaf ears in Washington, where there was just no interest whatsoever in any kind of an opening to Iran. This was a year after the beginning of the war in Iraq and Iran had been denounced as one of the three members of “the axis of evil.” There was just no interest whatsoever in Washington to pursue this further.

And this was after Iran had sent a diplomatic note to the United States asking for a sweeping review of relations, right?

That’s correct and as far as I know the study group was unaware of that. That was in 2003, just about the time of the invasion of Iraq. The Iranians sent a formal letter through the Swiss—who are representing American interests since we have no embassy in Tehran—and it basically suggested direct talks to look at all aspects of the relationship between Iran and the United States. The reception it got in Washington was not only chilly, it was absolutely frigid. They basically threw the thing away, it never got any mention whatsoever and the story is—and apparently it’s true—the Swiss ambassador who carried the message to Washington was actually chastised for exceeding his authority.

Well, now let’s play prognosticator a bit. Gates has obviously been hired to replace Rumsfeld with the idea being to work on Iraq primarily. Yet being in on the National Security Council meetings, he’ll be deeply involved one way or the other with Iran policy. Do you think he’ll have much input on that?

There are at least a couple of areas where I think his input could be extremely important. As you’re probably aware, there has been a lot of talk about the United States launching an attack against Iran. Seymour Hersh [of the New Yorker] has been writing on the subject and Scott Ritter [a former U.N. arms inspector in Iraq] has been saying that the war has already begun. There were rather hysterical reports in the last month or so [in TIME] about a U.S. naval task force that was arriving in the Persian Gulf, and that this was going to be the moment when a preemptive strike was launched. Of course, that didn’t happen but there is a kind of uneasiness about that possibility.

I would think that at a minimum the nomination of Gates as secretary of defense would push that even further back to the backburner than it is presently. I’ve never really thought this was going to happen, but actually I have been a minority in thinking that in some circles. But now with Gates coming in, it’s very difficult for me to imagine this guy, who is a consummate realist and pragmatist, launching a wild attack against Iran with the idea that somehow we’re going to solve all of our problems with Iran with a military strike. I just can’t see him doing that. The other side is that the Defense Department under Rumsfeld has been building up, just as it did before the Iraq war, its own intelligence service, which basically takes a jaundiced view of everything the CIA and other intelligence agencies do. That’s the organization that came to the conclusion Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction and they had close relationships with al-Qaeda and so forth.

That’s the shop it came out of. Someone named Adam Shulsky is heading it. The interesting thing is that shop is now being reconstituted in the Defense Department and I would be very surprised if Gates, with his really impeccable intelligence credentials, would go along with that kind of rogue intelligence operation. So I would suspect that if there were people who were trying to play the same game that was played before the Iraqi invasion, that is, cherry-pick the intelligence and decide what looks scariest and then get the highest authorities to use that as a justification for invading Iran, if that was what anybody had in mind I should think he would put a stop to that. I don’t think he’s going to be called up to decide whether we open diplomatic relations with Iran right away but at least he would have quite a bit to say about the military aspects of this.

Now what do you think his relationship with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be?

It’s hard to judge except they both have a similar background. Both of them are Russian speakers and really cut their teeth on the Cold War and were Soviet experts. And both of them really come out of the realist camp of U.S.politics. That, of course, has put Condoleezza Rice at somewhat of a disadvantage in the present set of circumstances, where she’s had to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney on one side and Don Rumsfeld on the other, both of whom did not share her views necessarily on many issues. I should think Bob Gates would be quite a bit more sympathetic to [Secretary of State] Condi Rice’s point of view than he would be for instance to Dick Cheney’s point of view.

Now, it’s interesting because Condi Rice, with the president’s approval, offered herself to talk to the Iranians if they agreed to suspend their uranium enrichment program. You get into this sort of back and forth of who should go first and I wonder if there might be a change in policy possible. That would have been what Gates’ task force had recommended.

Yes, it is. But you do have to remember that Vice President Cheney, before he became vice president, was the head of Halliburton and in that capacity he made speeches and wrote articles basically calling for an opening to Iran, doing away with the sanction against Iran and so forth and calling it a really foolish and pointless sanction.

This was in the 90s?

This was just before he became vice president, but when he was selected to be vice president for George W. Bush he never said another word about that whole idea. He has become one of the toughest hawks with regard to Iran sanctions and so forth. So the fact that somebody says one thing as a private citizen doesn’t necessarily mean that they will sustain that when they actually take public office.

What did Gates do after Bush senior left office? I guess he left the CIA then.

He left the CIA and he went to Texas A&M. He went there originally to head its international relations school and then went from there to become the president of the school. Apparently he was made a firm offer to become the director of national intelligence, the position that John Negroponte now holds. He was officially offered that position. He said that he thought about it very hard and originally thought he was going to say yes and then changed his mind and said no, but it was a very close call.

I think we’re in for an interesting time now.

I do too, and I honestly believe this is a moment of real change because Gates couldn’t be more different from Rumsfeld or Cheney. He represents a completely different brand of political action than the neoconservatives who have surrounded both Rumsfeld and Cheney up until now and who have been important in the policymaking process. That’s got to be a very clear signal that, if nothing else, the United States is moving closer to policy that I would consider to be more realist oriented rather than neoconservative or ideologically oriented. Because the one thing you can say about Gates for sure is that he is no ideologue. He worked for various presidents in various guises and he is a pragmatic, problem-solving, realistic guy. He is tough minded but he is not somebody who is given to flights of ideological fancy. I think it is a real change that we are going to see in the coming two years.
http://www.cfr.org/publication/11963/

November 09, 2006
Gates Lacks Defense Experience, Views on Iraq Unknown
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON -- A leading arms industry lobbyist and former senior Pentagon official was told Wednesday that Donald Rumsfeld was resigning as secretary of defense, to be replaced by Robert Gates, president of Texas A&M University.

"You have to be kidding!" exclaimed the lobbyist.

It was not Rumsfeld leaving that caused the surprise. Rumsfeld was at odds with Congress, the State Department and the uniformed military. It had been expected that he would be gone sooner or later -- probably soon after the midterm elections, no matter how they turned out.

The surprise was over Rumsfeld's successor. "Not Bob Gates!" said the lobbyist. It had been widely expected that Rumsfeld would be replaced by a major industrial executive. Gates, a former career employee at the CIA who rose to the top of the agency, has no experience with the defense establishment.

Unusual choice

He has no known views on Iraq, and consequently there is no way of knowing how he might depart from current policies in Iraq under Rumsfeld. He was a deputy in the first President Bush's administration (at the National Security Council) of Gen. Brent Scowcroft. While Gates remains close to Scowcroft (as he is to George H.W. Bush), that does not mean Gates shares Scowcroft's disapproval of the Iraqi intervention. Indeed, Gates is considered a cool, non-ideological analyst.

That makes Gates an unusual choice, considering that he is being proposed for a managerial post of great difficulty and great complexity. His intelligence career was as an analyst, not an operative. And a low-key, low-profile analyst he was.

Being unobtrusive in the nature of a CIA "spook" does not mean, however, that Gates is noncontroversial. On the contrary, his entire career has been marked with conflict.

Joining the CIA in 1966 out of Indiana University, Gates fit in with liberal careerists at the agency and even marched in protest of U.S. intervention in Cambodia under President Richard Nixon.

As he progressed up the line of promotions at the CIA, Gates became known as a purist attempting to keep the intelligence free of tampering executive branch officials. In particular, he bridled at efforts by two secretaries of state -- George Shultz and James Baker -- to sanitize intelligence in the interest of protecting Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Gates was publicly rebuked by Shultz and Baker.

President Ronald Reagan nominated Gates to head the CIA in 1987, but the nomination was withdrawn. It had become clear that the Democratic-controlled Congress would not confirm Gates because of alleged connections with the Iran-contra scandal.

Questions raised

The first President Bush named Gates to the CIA post in 1991, and this time he was confirmed after a fierce struggle with Democrats in the Senate. He did not surface with his own views during four years at the agency, and Gates was not a popular figure there.

It has been reported that the current President Bush secretly asked Gates to take the new director of national intelligence post in 2005 but that he declined on grounds that he did not want to leave Texas A&M to return to Washington.

Since then, Gates has joined the "Iraq Study Group," co-chaired by Baker, that may set the model for a new Iraq policy. That prompts speculation that Baker suggested Gates' selection for the Pentagon post.

But the selection raises questions:

Will Gates clean out Rumsfeld's civilian officials at the Pentagon? If so, where will the new officials come from?

What will Gates do to mend the broken fences between the secretary's office and the angry uniformed officers?

What will Gates do to restore relations between the Pentagon and Capitol Hill?

The biggest question remains what he will do about Iraq, and probing his views promises a potentially stormy fight over Senate confirmation.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... ience.html

James "F*** The Jews" Baker redux.

Jorge Bush never ceases to amaze me. A CFR globalist who wants to talk to the Iranian Muslim Nazis is who he nominates?

He really is worse than Jimmy Carter.