Translated material
He destroyed the USSR, and now he will destroy Iraq
The military likes the new head of the Pentagon more than the previous one
“Solving the Iraqi problem will be the most important area of my activity,” said Robert Gates, whose candidacy for the post of head of the Pentagon will be considered and, most likely, approved on December 5 in the US Senate. The American military also views his appointment favorably. One of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the New York Times: “Gates will at least listen to us. Donald Rumsfeld was listening to himself." Gates has another advantage. Unlike his predecessor, 74-year-old Rumsfeld, he did not start the unpopular war in Iraq and he did not feed the White House with false intelligence.Gates has a huge job ahead of him at the Pentagon. The conflict in Iraq, which has been dragging on since 2003, has played a negative role in the decline in the morale of the armed forces. Fewer and fewer volunteers are joining the US Army; huge amounts of money will be needed to replace the military equipment destroyed in Iraq.
“America is stuck in Iraq like a horse in a swamp. If the tail stretches out, the front hooves will get stuck... The United States has accumulated many problems within the country, in Afghanistan, but Iraq is tying the hands of the White House. The first thing Gates will have to deal with is the problem of Iraq. He will get out of the Iraqi crisis, but it’s hard to say how,” former USSR KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who personally knew Gates when he was head of the CIA, told Vremya Novostey.
Gates, 63, is a professional intelligence officer who served under six US presidents. During his 27 years at Langley, he worked his way up the career ladder, from expert analyst to the post of director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which he held from 1991 to 1993 at the instigation of George H. W. Bush.
Gates, who speaks Russian and German, began his career in the mid-1960s. Then a promising young Sovietologist, who defended his dissertation on Soviet-Chinese relations at Georgetown University, was invited to join the CIA. But not everything was rosy for him there. In 1989, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he came under investigation in Congress in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal, involving the CIA secretly selling weapons to Iran to circumvent sanctions and financing the Nicaraguan Contras with these funds. Gates managed to escape and was considered innocent.
In 1991, Gates again appeared before a Senate committee, this time in connection with charges of distorting information about the Soviet Union. Gates was accused of exaggerating the danger from the USSR during the “perestroika” of Mikhail Gorbachev. Despite complaints from his own subordinates, this did not prevent him from taking the post of CIA director.
General Kryuchkov told VN that he met with Robert Gates twice. “The first time was in 1987 during Gorbachev’s visit to the USA. We met at a Washington restaurant called the White House. Gates came with security. I arrived along with the USSR Ambassador Yuri Dubinin and security officers from the KGB. From the outside, the situation looked funny: employees of the CIA, KGB and FBI were the only visitors to the fashionable restaurant. Gates seemed to me more like a highly intelligent professor from Europe than an American and the chief of serious intelligence (Gates acted as the head of the CIA, William Casey, who was seriously ill. - Ed. ). He is a person of integrity, a professional, who showed a sincere interest in life in the USSR. During the conversation he did not ask a single empty question. Gates made it clear that he understood the reasons for the difficulties in the USSR, but spoke about them without a hint of irony.”
The second meeting of the two colleagues took place in Moscow in 1990. Kryuchkov recalls: “Gates admitted that he did not expect that he would like Moscow so much. He showed interest in developing relations, even proposed to establish an exchange of information between the intelligence services of Russia and the United States.” The general believes that Gates' appointment as head of the Pentagon “will not entail” a deterioration in relations with Russia.
Robert Gates, who considered himself the winner of the Cold War, became the only head of the CIA to parade across Red Square during his visit to Moscow in 1992. In front of BBC television cameras, he said: “Against the backdrop of the Kremlin and the Mausoleum, I make a solo victory parade. We understood perfectly well that the Soviet Union could only be taken by organizing an explosion from within.”
After US President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Robert Gates resigned and began his literary career. In 1997, he published his memoirs, Out of the Shadows, in which he argued for the US victory in the Cold War. Gates maintained close ties to the Bush family and, allegedly with the help of Bush Sr., was elected president of Texas A&M University in 2002.
In March of this year, Robert Gates joined a congressionally mandated group to study Iraq, known as the Baker Commission. The task of the commission, headed by former US Secretary of State James Baker, is to resolve problems arising around Iraq. In this country, which is actually falling apart, there is already a civil war going on.