Volume 38, Number 21 · December 19, 1991
The Betrayal of the Contras
By Michael Massing
Comandos: The CIA and Nicaragua's Contra Rebels
by Sam Dillon
Holt, 393 pp., $27.50
Executive Report 102–19 on the Nomination of Robert M. Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence
report by the Select Committee on Intelligence
The sixty-four senators who voted to confirm Robert Gates as the fifteenth director of the CIA had to dismiss a lengthy catalog of mistakes and misjudgments attributed to him. Among them were his belief that the Soviet Union was behind the attempted assassination of the Pope; his exaggerated sense of Soviet ambitions in the third world; his excessive estimate of the strength of the Soviet economy; his failure to perceive the strength of the Soviet reformers; his conviction that Moscow had designs on Iran; his willingness to share intelligence with Iraq; his meddling in an intelligence estimate on Mexico; his faulty memory on the diversion of funds to the contras; his abrasive personality and autocratic style of management; his contribution to the growing sense of malaise and tension within the agency; and more generally, his part in politicizing and slanting the intelligence reports that were circulated to policy makers in Washington.
Review, 4821 words
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