Robert Gates to Bashar al-Assad: Don’t Tempt Obama

I spent most of my career in the CIA trying to forecast what people would do, and how things would turn out. And when it comes to saying what is going to happen, we have every reason to be very modest about our abilities to do that. Because the truth is, we can monitor weapons, we can monitor movements of military forces, but the decision [by a foreign leader] to use them or how to use them is something that often is a mystery to us. And sometimes because the protagonist himself doesn’t know what he is going to do.

The whole interview is worth watching to hear Gates talk about the limits of intelligence gathering and analysis, and of trying to intuit the moves of an adversary. Gates cut his teeth in the Cold War, and like many intelligence officers of his generation worried back then that America’s spies would become too dependent on surveillance technology to take the place of human agents on the ground. He still worries about that today, in the era of drones and global electronic eavesdropping. 

“This is an era in which human intelligence is every bit as important as it ever was during the Cold War,” Gates said. The successful operation against bin Laden, which hinged on human sources, would seem to bear that out. (As an aside, we were bummed to learn that a DC preview screening of the new movie about the bin Laden raid, Zero Dark Thirty, which was scheduled for last night, has been postponed until January.) 

Another timely comment: Gates said he didn’t have a problem with the CIA evolving into a paramilitary organization, one that has become very good at hunting and killing its enemies the world over. “But I do have a problem if that is all the [CIA] director is paying attention to,” he said. There’s been a provocative debate this week over at the New York Times about that very subject. It seems the unexpected departure of David Petraeus, who was closely involved in counterterrorism operations with the CIA as a military commander, has occasioned some soul searching at Langley. 

Gates left the Pentagon in July 2011, and since then, he said, he’s been “doing some speaking, but staying as far from Washington, DC, as I can.” He’s also writing a memoir, which he said he’ll send to his publisher in February. 

Shane Harris