Pro-Soviet intrigue

in the White House

The strange case of Robert M. Gates

A top-level U.S. security official intervened to prevent the British and American press from embarrassing Russia's top communist with exposes of the Soviet Union's vast germ warfare program, it has been disclosed.

Eager to spotlight Soviet duplicity, British Prime Minister John Major's government was considering having a highly credible defector, Vladimir Pasechnik, make his charges public, perhaps in a television documentary, according to a published report. But, a top presidential aide, Robert M. Gates, was "horrified" and vetoed the plan, the report says.

Confronted years later by a reporter, Gates conceded: "The information was tightly held. And the Bush administration had a pretty good reputation for keeping secrets."

Gates defended his conduct by saying that his aim was to shield the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, from being destabilized by public awareness that the Soviets were busily ignoring the treaty banning biowar weapons and were piling up huge stockpiles of weaponized germs capable of wiping out the human race several times over. 

Gates said he was worried that someone worse than Gorbachev might take over and derail Gorbachev's reforms. Had the public become aware of the staggeringly large germ war program, Gorbachev's much touted reforms would have been taken by many as a Soviet deception operation.

Gates's quoted remarks said nothing about the pro-democracy politician, Boris N. Yeltsin, who went on to liberate Russia from communism, although Gates's boss, George H.W. Bush, delivered a speech in Kiev backing Gorbachev's communist regime over the Yeltsin forces.

At the time of his intervention to shield the world from knowledge of communist perfidy, Gates was deputy national security director. He continued in Washington as chief of the CIA. More recently he served as secretary of defense for President George W. Bush and President Obama.

The remarkable, but little noticed disclosure, is found in a book by three New York Times reporters, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. Their book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War was published by Simon and Schuster in 2001.