White House aided Moscow
in hiding germ war program
Robert M. Gates, defense secretary under the second President Bush and under President Obama, has admitted to having been a key player in an international operation to conceal from the world the Soviet Union's gigantic, treaty-breaking germ war program, according to a trio of reporters associated with the New York Times. Supposedly Gates was trying to prevent reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Gates adjudged as the West's best bet, from being weakened politically.
Yet, Gorbachev and his government were denying the existence of a monstrous threat to humanity. Maybe the military had the audacity to conceal the program from Gorbachev, was one theory.
It is true that Communist Gorbachev was threatened politically by nationalist Boris Yeltsin. And, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, an alleged coup d'etat occurred, that rapidly went awry. I say "alleged" because an obvious motive of the plotters was to arrest Yeltsin, after which Gorbachev could have been restored to power.
It is true that Communist Gorbachev was threatened politically by nationalist Boris Yeltsin. And, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, an alleged coup d'etat occurred, that rapidly went awry. I say "alleged" because an obvious motive of the plotters was to arrest Yeltsin, after which Gorbachev could have been restored to power.
At any rate, the point is that in 1991 the White House was meddling in press matters in order to keep a Communist from looking bad, supporting him against a nationalist known to be highly amenable to Western ideas and who publicly stated that Russia should renounce the world empire business and concentrate on homeland affairs.
On Page 126 of Germs -- Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, we read:
"The British were eager to expose the Soviet lies, perhaps by arranging for [high-level defector Vladimir] Pasechnik to make his charges public on a television documentary. Robert Gates, Bush's deputy national security adviser, was horrified by this idea, fearing it would humiliate Gorbachev and hamper his reform efforts."
Gates's argument prevailed, say authors Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, who quoted Gates as saying, "The information was tightly held. And the Bush administration had a pretty good reputation for keeping secrets."
Miller now appears on Fox News and writes a column for Pundicity. Engelberg is top editor at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news outfit that occasionally partners with the Times. Broad remains a science writer for the Times.
One might argue that helping this particular red was a rational policy. But, there are numerous other similar pointers that strongly suggest excessive communist influence at high levels in Washington.
Joining the CIA in 1966, Gates headed the agency from 1991 to 1993, having been the agency's deputy director from 1986 until 1989. He was a national security aide to President George H.W. Bush and from January 20, 1989, until November 6, 1991. The elder Bush, who was President Gerald Ford's CIA chief for one year, approved of Gates's policy of favoring the top Soviet communist over the pro-Western nationalist Yeltsin.
Bush is still smarting from criticism of his "Chicken Kiev" speech in which he took a hard line backing reform communism over liberty.
Here we see a CIA careerist who angled on behalf of communism over freedom, which some might interpret as lending credence to the long-held suspicion within the CIA that the agency was penetrated by moles.
The Soviet biowar program is discussed here:
Biotech or bioterror? A global dilemma
No comments:
Post a Comment