At the Directorate for Operations a similar attitude prevailed. Richard Stolz feared being taken in. Burton L. Gerber, a legendary case officer and street man in Eastern Europe and station chief in Moscow, now heading the Soviet and East European Division, had doubts too. Gerber questioned what CIA saw on the surface. One hint of change was that, miracle mirabilis, beginning in December 1987 the CIA began having its own sit-downs with Soviet intelligence, but the Russians certainly weren’t giving away the store. Worry about a mole within the agency simultaneously focused the spooks even more than usual on spy-versus-spy espionage rather than the positive intelligence mission. As then Deputy Director Gates puts it, “the American government, including CIA, had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us.”

  Gates soon left Langley—President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, asked him to the White House as deputy. President Bush also wanted his choice for director of central intelligence to signal confidence to the community and—no doubt recalling his own experience at Jimmy Carter’s hands—wished to break the cycle of every president bringing in a fresh CIA director. He decided to keep Judge Webster. Gates’s successor as DDCI would be Richard J. Kerr, again a professional drawn from the ranks of analysts. It would thus be Judge Webster and Richard Kerr who gazed in amazement as the tidal wave of history hit the beach. Meanwhile Bush engaged in a series of lengthy and sterile policy reviews. When the rubber hit the road at the end of the Cold War, American officials would be bystanders.

  It took President Bush several months to move off dead center in his approach to Gorbachev and Eastern Europe. In mid-April 1989 the president ended certain trade restrictions on Poland and gave the first of several speeches on Poland, Eastern Europe, and Russia. By then the Polish military-Communist government had acknowledged its labor and democratic opposition by opening “round-table” talks with them, agreeing to free elections under a formula designed to preserve Communist control. Bush scheduled a visit to Poland. Perhaps the Eastern European upheaval beginning in Poland betokened in some way the CIA’s propaganda there, though nothing it had done had the scope necessary to trigger a tidal wave. In any case, events in Poland were soon eclipsed by those in East Germany. By the time Bush reached Poland that July, East Germany had begun moving toward transformation, and Hungary had arrived, its Communist Party suddenly disavowing Leninism.

  Restive East Germans began escaping to the West through Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Efforts to seal East Germany’s borders brought mass public demonstrations that dwarfed the 1953 East Berlin riots. This time the Russians rejected intervention. Gorbachev gave no comfort to German Communists who wished to crush the mobs. Instead the East German government fell, and the cabinet that took over from them resigned in its turn. Their successors told East Germans they could leave the country without special permission. On the night of November 9–10 deliriously excited crowds in both East and West Berlin began tearing down the Wall piece by piece.

  These events electrified Washington and the CIA. President Bush sat in his Oval Office when Brent Scowcroft entered to tell him that reports indicated the East German government had opened its border. It was mid-afternoon. They went into the study to watch live on television.

  At Langley America’s secret warriors took to the hallways. Excited gossip filled the air, champagne materialized, the spooks told war stories. Even the barons. Burton Gerber had moved that summer to squire the European Division, his place at the Russia House taken by Milton Bearden, a promotion for work in the Afghan War. Bearden heard from Richard Rolph, his station chief in East Berlin, that the border guards were really standing down, and people were crossing with alacrity. Rolph went out to mix in the crowds at Checkpoint Charlie. Bearden, like Bush, turned on the television, surfing between Cable News Network and the CIA’s satellite access to German TV. Uncle Milty had made a point of going out onto the bridge over which the Russians had pulled out of Afghanistan; it would not be long until he made his own pilgrimage to Checkpoint Charlie.

  Over the next months the Communist governments of Eastern Europe were swept away. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, all went down. The Iron Curtain disappeared. These nations put in democratic governments, or at least as close to democratic as possible for societies raised on a diet of Marxism. Behind the questions of what the CIA knew and when, of whether Langley had “missed” the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, lay an anomaly: America’s premier Cold War agency had had only a bit part in the largest expansion of democracy to occur since the fall of the monarchies after World War I. Of course there had been agency operations in the East, but to claim great credit for the CIA in these events would be a significant distortion of reality. Instead, in 1989 as in 1953–1954, the agency created to fight the Russians continued to expend the vast majority of its money, talent, and effort in the Third World. As the Cold War ended, several of those Third World operations persisted, if not unabated, at least as a form of broken-backed secret war.

  As with every president during the time of the CIA, George Bush inherited secret wars begun by predecessors. But he had an advantage only Lyndon Johnson had previously enjoyed—as a member of the preceding administration he had had the opportunity to know the origins and status of the actions. In Bush’s case the primary theaters were Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, and Nicaragua. These secret wars entailed an assortment of headaches which left Ronald Reagan’s successor to cope as best he could.

  By 1989 Angola had begun implementation of a multilateral agreement that provided for South African and Cuban withdrawal and reconciliation among warring parties. Bush continued CIA funding for UNITA through at least two budget cycles. In 1990 the president vetoed the intelligence appropriation (retaining the preceding year’s funding level) over a dispute on findings, as will be seen later. The second time around he kicked up a ruckus with the oversight committees to obtain a new peak appropriation, $80 million. Beyond that, evidence is sparse. Elections for a government were held, and the MPLA agreed to a coalition. But Jonas Savimbi, not satisfied with the outcome, had himself smuggled out of Luanda in a coffin and took up arms anew. Savimbi had key subordinates, including relatives, murdered. Whatever the purpose of the CIA’s secret war in Angola, no one any longer could speak of democracy. The conflict had lost any claim to noble cause.

  The Angolan war sputtered on for another decade. The United Nations brokered a new cease-fire and sent a peacekeeping force to the war-torn land. UNITA shot down a United Nations aircraft, South Africans resumed their covert intervention, Angolans starved, and amnesty offers to UNITA were spurned. Only Savimbi’s death in battle in 2002 seems finally to have brought the conflict to a close. Had the Ford administration not begun this secret war, Angola might have been spared a quarter-century of misery. Had the Reagan administration not resumed the CIA covert operation, it is likely that Chester Crocker’s diplomatic solution would have crystallized sooner, though there is no telling whether it would have stuck.

  As for Afghanistan, Soviet withdrawal left the situation virtually unchanged. The mujahedeen remained pitted against Najibullah’s Democratic Republic. The Russians sent Najibullah arms and cash, the CIA continued to support the muj. New weapons appeared on the battlefields, to the point that frustrated government forces, unable to strike down the resistance, began bombarding them with long-range missiles. President Bush made Afghanistan a subject of bilateral conversations between Washington and Moscow, as well as several personal meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. Over time the superpowers agreed to stop their aid to the erstwhile proxies. The CIA handed over a final payment, a golden parachute, to the resistance.

  Najibullah’s control gradually weakened. His power was decisively compromised when a general and Uzbek warlord, Rashid Dostum, defected, shifting the balance of forces. By the time Kabul fell in 1992, Bush had disengaged the United States. Coup attempts began a new round of civil war between the Dostum-Masoud forces and the Peshawar-based resistance groups. Popular frustration with corruption and infighting among the warlords and fundamentalists led to the rise of new mullahs and an even more fundamentalist movement called the Taliban. Pakistani intelligence shifted their support to the Taliban, which introduced its own rocket attacks and went on to victory, conquering Kabul themselves in September 1996. They executed Najibullah, who had been sheltered by the United Nations. The Taliban admitted Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. These events led directly to the terror war that continues today.

  On Nicaragua President Bush steered a careful course. He believed in the necessity of a truce with Congress on the contras. The CIA’s project had ended in 1988. Langley’s division chief, Jerry Gruner, watched as diplomatic contacts led to partial agreements. Congress approved humanitarian aid to tide the rebels over into 1989, by which time Managua had scheduled elections for February 1990. Infighting among contra factions revealed fissures in the rebellion itself. Enrique Bermudez lost his commanding position, though he continued to function in that titular role. James Baker, secretary of state for Bush, refused to meet contra leaders, but he backed humanitarian aid through the Nicaraguan elections. Some leaders finally saw the president. Bush remained cool to their pleas.

  The president took up the matter of Soviet arms with Gorbachev in their initial meetings as well as at the December 1989 Malta summit, to be told that Russia had halted shipments to Nicaragua. Cuba filled the void. American officials disputed the Soviet aid halt. Gruner and the CIA played a political action role in the elections themselves, fueled by $9 million in Bush administration electoral assistance. The Sandinistas lost, an outcome most U.S. officials had believed Managua would not permit. That says something about the Sandinistas too. International observers, headed by McGeorge Bundy and Sol Linowitz, pronounced the voting fair. In March 1990 there were slightly more than 6,000 contra troops in Nicaragua, among a total claimed force of about 15,000. These soldiers began regrouping and disarming, ending the long secret war. Between 8,500 and 11,500 contra rebels died in the CIA’s secret war. Casualty figures for Nicaraguan civilians and the Sandinista military are not available.

  The last of the crossover covert operations concerned Libya. Reagan had never abandoned his enmity for Muammar Gadhafi, though after previous misadventures he needed a new formula. Gadhafi furnished the means with a fiasco of his own, a strike into Chad in 1988 that ended with the capture of hundreds of Libyan soldiers. The CIA recruited six hundred of these men for a new strike force. They volunteered in order to stay out of prisoner camps. A fresh anti-Gadhafi political front formed under Abdel Moneim al-Huni, who rejected CIA overtures. The project had to be tied to royalist interests. Gradually a new CIA initiative evolved, stimulated by the bombing of Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, attributed to Libya. But the moment never seemed right to commit this formation, even in 1990 when controversy surged over whether Gadhafi had produced chemical weapons. Late that year renewed fighting for control of the Chadian government exposed the unit, revealed to possess large stocks of U.S. weapons including Stinger missiles and dune buggies. This secret initiative turned into more of an embarrassment than anything else.

  When Gadhafi demanded repatriation, the leaders of Chad ejected the Libyans. The soldiers went to Nigeria, then Zaire, aboard U.S. military aircraft. Colonel Mobutu expelled them when Congress halted U.S. aid for Zaire. In March 1991 about four hundred of the refugees went on to Kenya while the rest agreed to go home. Through the Libyan government-in-exile in Rome, Prince Idris agreed to care for the soldiers. Kenya suddenly received $5 million from the Bush administration, though aid to that country had been denied on human rights grounds. In April 1992 the pretender to the Libyan throne died in London, mooting the entire exercise.

  Like the operations themselves, the effort to regularize control of covert activity remained a work in progress. Bush pledged cooperation with the oversight committees, which refrained from enacting a law requiring notification within forty-eight hours. Bush substituted written assurances of “timely” notification. In October 1989 Bush told the committees that he would usually give notice within a few days but in some cases would rely upon his authority as commander-in-chief.

  This did not sit well with congressmen, resulting in a 1990 effort to make the notification rules explicit. In an official account of its oversight efforts, the Senate reports that Bush officials assured them this measure would be acceptable. The 1991 intelligence budget bill contained the provision, which President Bush then trumped by pocket veto. The offending element was a part of the bill that defined covert operations so as to include “third party” activities. Bush asserted in a November 30, 1990, letter that “it is unclear exactly what sort of discussions with foreign governments would constitute reportable ‘requests’ under this provision,” arguing that it could have a “chilling effect” on the U.S. government. Side assurances to the White House from the chairmen of both oversight committees were not satisfactory to Bush. Revised legislation passed Congress on July 31, 1991, but without settling the “third party” issue. Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, would be hoist on this petard a few years later.

  Judge Webster may have been the most prominent casualty of the Gulf War. During the long interregnum between Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the beginning of the coalition military campaign came a period of diplomacy and economic sanctions. In Capitol Hill debates and the struggle for public opinion, Webster was called upon to render opinions on the effectiveness of sanctions, Iraqi intent, and the balance of forces. Others seized on Webster’s words as ammunition. This did not please Bush. Never that comfortable at Langley, Judge Webster decided he had had enough. He let a few weeks go by after the Gulf triumph, then stepped down. The DO shed few tears.

  The White House announced the resignation on May 8, 1991. Appearing briefly with Webster, President Bush said he had yet to think of a successor but praised Robert Gates. That same day Bush summoned Gates to his cabin aboard Air Force One and asked if the former spook would accept the CIA nomination. Gates immediately agreed. He expected a painful confirmation process, and he got one. Iran-Contra investigations continued, and Bob Gates would not be definitively cleared until the special prosecutor’s final report, still two years in the future. When Alan Fiers pleaded guilty in July 1991, Gates feared that Fiers would implicate him in some way. “The lowest point in my life came the day before the plea bargain was announced,” Gates recalls. Acutely conscious of the fact that civil servants rarely rise to head their departments, Gates realized it had been a generation since Bill Colby had been confirmed. Gates had been close to some quite controversial people, from Kissinger to Casey. Then the summer of 1991 brought the final collapse of the Soviet Union, kicking off the debate as to whether the CIA had failed to predict it. Of course Gates had had a dominant role in CIA analysis of Russia for years. But this time, unlike 1987, Gates resolved to proceed with the confirmation process no matter what.

  Charges that Robert Gates had politicized intelligence took center stage when confirmation hearings opened in September. At first an extended examination of the nominee was not planned. Marvin C. Ott, deputy director of the SSCI staff at the time, recalls that the predisposition to let Gates sail through created a staff presumption that there was nothing to look into. Committee staff and members were flummoxed by the appearance of a succession of analysts who gave chapter and verse on many Gates interventions in intelligence analysis. Reports on Afghanistan and Nicaragua were among those cited. Evidence emerged that current employees, reluctant to criticize openly, also saw Gates as an interventionist. Far from pro forma nomination hearings, those on Gates morphed into a major CIA inquiry.

  The nominee presented a preemptive defense, attempting to disarm critics with examples of how he had simply tried to push analysts to back up their assertions, picturing some alleged interventions as his effort to tease out better reporting. Then a number of former analysts went before the committee to dispute that rendering, most notably Mel Goodman, who had been a colleague for years; Jennifer L. Glaudemans, a former Soviet analyst; and Harold P. Ford, one of the CIA’s grand old men. Alan Fiers appeared as part of the committee’s fairly extensive coverage of Iran-Contra, but his testimony did Gates no harm. Others supported the nomination. Gates himself returned for “something fairly dramatic,” a round of follow-up testimony refuting critics. The hearings became the most extensive examination of U.S. intelligence since the Church and Pike investigations. Work at Langley ground to a halt as CIA officers watched every minute on television, much like Americans riveted by the O. J. Simpson murder trial.

  The intelligence committee wrestled with its quandary. President Bush intervened, invoking party discipline to ensure that members backed the nominee. Ott believes Gates appealed to the White House for this measure. Committee chairman David Boren staged his own covert operation, acting impartially in the camera’s eye while laboring in secret to build support for the nominee. Boren agreed to one of the most extensive committee reports on a nomination ever, in which his committee attempted to reconcile Gates’s testimony with the charges against him. In Ott’s view, this episode became the first time in a decade where partisanship reigned on the SSCI. Finally the committee approved Bush’s appointee. Gates was confirmed early in November.

  For all the drama of the hearings, the sequel did not live up to the fears of opponents. Director Gates strove to preserve flexibility as Langley marched into the post–Cold War era. He showed a healthy appreciation for the need to change, forming a whole range of task forces, fourteen in all, each to recommend changes in some aspect of CIA activity. A group on openness figured among them, advising that a swath of records be made public. In 1992 Gates spoke before a conference of diplomatic historians and promised that the agency would open up, even in regard to covert operations. As an earnest of its intentions, the CIA declassified large portions of the body of NIEs on the Soviet Union and that December sponsored a conference reflecting on the period. Stansfield Turner gave the keynote address.