Gates aided fight to save Soviet

Interesting that war controller Dr. Robert M. Gates, a career CIA professional, was a top national security aide to George H.W. Bush, himself a former CIA chief, at the time the Bush White House and Jim Baker's State Department were scrambling in a vain effort to forestall the collapse of the Soviet Union. Interesting that Gates wasn't repulsed and didn't feel a need to step down.

In that period, Gates, who had been nominated to head the CIA in May 1991, was confirmed by the Senate in November 1991, about the time that Boris Yeltsin banned the Communist Party in Russia. Bush administration efforts may have helped in the premature restoration of that party, supposedly in the name of democracy.

Gates headed the CIA into the first Clinton administration at a time the CIA was obstructing implementation of a law passed during the late days of the presidential campaign requiring the CIA to release JFK assassination records.

As CIA chief, Gates apparently was unaware of top-level communist penetration of the agency until a mole-hunting task force eventually bagged Aldrich Ames and his wife. However, the warnings of Soviet moles went back to the days of President Reagan's first CIA head, William Casey (who once worked for a Marxist socialist think tank).