Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  In early 2009, SALT, START, and SORT—acronym hell—gave way to “New Start,” an Obama administration effort to negotiate the next strategic arms limitations treaty. Medvedev signed on that spring. All the presidents I worked for except Carter found the details of arms control negotiations mind-numbing and excruciatingly boring. Most of the hard work was done by the negotiators and the sub–cabinet level experts in Washington, with only major issues or obstacles put before the principals. The broad outlines of an agreement emerged within a matter of weeks, limiting the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 and the number of strategic missile launchers and bombers to 800. Included were very important provisions for satellite and remote monitoring—for the first time, monitoring tags would be on each bomber and missile—and for eighteen on-site inspections each year. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of Strategic Command were supportive of the provisions, as was I. General Cartwright and Jim Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, were expert in the strategic nuclear world and played a prominent role in shaping the views of senior leaders in the Pentagon, including mine.

  Agreement was reached on the terms of the treaty on March 26, 2010, and Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed it in Prague on April 8. I informed the president a few days later that at the exact moment of the signing ceremony, the Russian military had been conducting a nuclear attack exercise against the United States. A nice Putin touch, I thought.

  Critics of the treaty in the United States wasted no time in describing its purported shortcomings. It was said the treaty would inhibit our ability to deploy missile defenses, to modernize our strategic systems, and to develop capabilities for conventional global strike (using ICBMs with conventional warheads for long-range precision targeting).

  Because the treaty limited the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, the viability of our aging nuclear warheads and production facilities became a growing concern during the ratification process. (A number of our nuclear weapons production facilities had been built for the Manhattan Project during World War II.) Principals had met on several occasions to discuss modernization, not new capabilities. The cost of replacement and upgraded facilities would be significant—$80 billion over ten years. Given Obama’s ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, the idea of modernization met with stiff resistance at the subcabinet level and in the White House and NSS.

  Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent. If we were going to have nuclear weapons, we’d damn well better ensure they would work and were safe from both terrorists and accidents—and that meant incorporating new designs and technologies.

  I spent most of my professional life dealing with the role of nuclear weapons in national defense—beginning with my assignment as an Air Force second lieutenant to the Strategic Air Command. Over the decades, the arguments over the circumstances in which they might be used and how many weapons were needed became highly charged and highly esoteric. The debates sometimes reminded me of medieval theologians arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I never believed that nuclear weapons could be used on a limited basis in a war between the United States and the USSR, as a number of others did. I was a strong advocate of dramatically reducing the massive number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal on the basis of reciprocal agreements with the Soviets and subsequently the Russians. But I do not believe we should unilaterally reduce our nuclear forces. I also believe reducing to very low levels of nuclear weapons—below 1,000 to 1,500—offers the temptation to other powers to exceed those numbers and place us at a disadvantage, at a minimum in terms of perceptions. It is a matter of both global politics and military deterrence.

  Led by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a number of senators made clear they wouldn’t consider voting for ratification of the New Start Treaty unless the administration put enough money in the budget to pay for upgrading our nuclear facilities and modernizing our weapons. The administration promised the funding, most of which I agreed to provide from the defense budget. (Kyl voted against the treaty anyway.)

  During the ratification process and hearings, I (along with Mike Mullen) was placed front and center by the administration to defend the treaty. Clinton, Mullen, and I gave a briefing for all senators on May 6, and then we testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 18. Once again the Republican hawk—me—was rolled out to provide political cover for the Democratic president. But as with missile defense, I had no problem with it because I believed the treaty was in our national interest. The key question about the new treaty, I said, was the same one posed during over forty years of strategic arms control: is the country better off with the treaty or without it? During that period, I pointed out, every president felt we were better off with a treaty. Under the treaty, we could maintain a strong ICBM, ballistic missile submarine, and bomber deterrent, and the provisions of the treaty were verifiable. The treaty did not constrain our missile defense programs; it had been buttressed by a credible modernization plan for our nuclear weapons stockpile, for the infrastructure that supports it, and for the necessary funding to carry out these plans; and it did not limit our ability to make essential investments to modernize our strategic forces, including delivery systems, nuclear weapons themselves, and the supporting infrastructure.

  Hillary spoke to the political aspects of the treaty and the consequences of not ratifying it, and Mullen talked about its effect on our military, adding the strong endorsement of the Joint Chiefs. The questioning was reasonably civil, the criticism perfunctory—except that Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina wanted to bring back Reagan’s missile shield. The three of us testified again on the treaty before the Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-June. Before the hearings, I wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal defending the treaty, and then Hillary and I wrote another in mid-November in The Washington Post. The two of us, together and separately, had a lot of “quality” time with individual senators through the summer and fall. The treaty was ratified by the Senate in the lame-duck session of Congress just before Christmas 2010. It passed by four votes.

  A potentially serious crisis in the U.S.-Russian relationship, unrelated to nuclear arms or Iran, cropped up just when the treaty was under consideration. On June 16, John Brennan grabbed me after a meeting and confided that the FBI had penetrated a Russian “illegals” program in the United States. (Illegals, also known as sleepers, are trained spies sent to another country, where they spend years building a life and well-placed careers so that eventually they can be activated as agents with good access to gather information or influence decisions.) Over a period of years, the FBI had identified four couples of illegals in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Seven or eight of the adults were Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers. The immediate problem, according to Brennan, was that the source in Moscow who had identified the illegals to the FBI now needed to get out of Russia immediately. Brennan told me that the current plan was to arrest the illegals, who would be interrogated, tried, and held for a potential swap. The concern was that this would be playing out while the president was meeting with Medvedev—at the White House on the twenty-fourth and at the G-8 meeting in Canada on June 25–26. The potential for a major flap was self-evident. Brennan said there would be a meeting with the president on all of this on Friday afternoon, June 18, and I should be there.

  CIA director Leon Panetta filled me in on the details regarding the illegals. Leon was passionate about getting the source out of Russia safely. As a former CIA director, I needed no persuading; we have an obligation to try
our best to protect, and save, our sources.

  As we took our accustomed places in the Situation Room the next afternoon, there was tension in the air. As happened so often during the Cold War, a spy case threatened to derail a political step forward in the U.S.-Russian relationship. The political and diplomatic players came into the room frustrated and angry about the spy case potentially wrecking their goals with Moscow; the CIA and FBI officials came determined to save the source and prosecute the foreign agents. Panetta and FBI director Bob Mueller informed the president of the planned exfiltration and arrests. The illegals were in the United States under false identities, though none of them had done any spying yet that we knew of. The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians: “Just as we’re getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?” Biden was adamant that U.S. national security interests would be best served by not acting at all. He strongly believed “our national security interest balance tips heavily to not creating a flap,” which “would blow up the relationship with the Russians.” Jones agreed and asked if we could hold off on the exfiltration until September. The president, betraying a cynicism (and realism) that had to be deeply offensive to both Mueller and Panetta, said he knew that if we let the illegals go back to Russia, folks in the FBI and at CIA would be mad and probably leak it. “The Republicans would beat me up, but I need to keep a broader perspective on the national interest. Isn’t there a more elegant solution?”

  Medvedev probably didn’t even know about this program, I said, but Putin probably did. If we took down the illegals while Medvedev was here or immediately thereafter, he would be embarrassed and weakened at home: “Maybe there is a way to flip this on Putin.” Meanwhile “you must exfiltrate the source on schedule,” I said to the president. I suggested Obama meet privately with Medvedev in Canada, give him the list of Russian illegals in the United States with their true Russian names and GRU rank, ask if this kind of thing is part of “reset,” and demand that they all be recalled to Russia within forty-eight hours or they would be expelled noisily. This would allow the illegals’ children to go back to Russia too. I said this might give Medvedev a trump card with Putin: Why was he doing this? Why did he not tell him? I said we would likely get nothing from interrogations; the illegals had been kept isolated from one another, and we already knew a great deal about the program from the source. Based on past experience, a swap would take a year to negotiate.

  The president said he would approve my approach. After he left the meeting, though, the principals talked further and concluded that my recommendation would put Medvedev too much on the spot and agreed—with my concurrence—to suggest that the president proceed with exfiltration of our agent from Russia and then just expel the illegals. This would show decisive action but would not put Medvedev in a potentially embarrassing position. Panetta and Mueller agreed. Panetta added, “The vice president got it all wrong—if the president looked like he didn’t take the Russian illegals program seriously, that would have jeopardized START and more.” The spy story would inevitably leak, he said, and there was no way the Republicans in the Senate would have ratified the New Start Treaty had Obama ignored the Russian illegals. I agreed with Leon.

  The illegals were arrested on June 27. Much to my surprise, a swap was swiftly arranged—the illegals for four Russians in prison for spying for the West. The episode, I thought, had ended with no political damage to the president and no damage to the bilateral relationship with Russia—but only because the first instincts of the president and vice president, to sweep the whole thing under the rug, had yielded to a wiser path, and because Obama’s other advisers had rejected my initial proposal. I admired the president for moving past his anger and frustration to make a good decision.

  While I did not go to Russia for the first twenty-six months of the Obama administration, I did meet regularly with my counterpart, Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov, at NATO. Putin and Medvedev had directed him to reform—and shrink—the Russian military, especially the army; to turn a lumbering, top-heavy Cold War leviathan into a nimble, modern force. He was charged with cutting 200,000 officers and some 200 generals and reducing headquarters personnel by 60 percent. Since retired Russian officers were promised housing, he also had to find or build apartments for all those officers.

  Serdyukov had no experience in the security arena. He came to his new post by way of the furniture business and the Russian federal tax service. But his father-in-law, Viktor Zubkov, was a first deputy prime minister and confidant of Putin’s, and the longer Serdyukov stayed in his job and the more controversial his reforms, the clearer it became just how strongly he was being protected by both Putin and Medvedev. (Serdyukov later was embroiled in a corruption scandal that resulted in his sacking in November 2012.)

  As I went forward with my internal reforms and budget reallocations within the Pentagon, I became increasingly curious about what Serdyukov was doing. And so I invited him to Washington, the first visit by a Russian defense minister in six years. He arrived at the Defense Department on September 15, 2010, and I pulled out all the stops to make him feel welcome, with bands and marching troops. (I probably did that for only a half-dozen visitors over four and a half years.) I set aside the entire day to meet with him, spending the morning on our respective internal defense reforms and the challenges we faced. In my Cold War days, I could never have imagined such a remarkably candid conversation on internal issues and problems taking place between our two countries. Although, as I wrote earlier, Serdyukov did not seem to be a significant player in Russia on foreign policy issues, that September day I came to admire his courage, skill, and ambition in trying to reform his military. One analyst in Moscow was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “That which Serdyukov is doing is a challenge to the Russian military culture as a whole, the culture that is based upon the idea of a mass-mobilization army starting with Peter the Great.” There was no doubt he had become a hated man among Russia’s senior military officers.

  Our cordiality changed nothing on the big issue that most divided us—missile defense. And I would continue to annoy Putin. Soon after the Serdyukov visit, I had told my French counterpart, Alain Juppé, that democracy did not exist under Putin, that the government was little more than an oligarchy under the control of the Russian security services, and that although Medvedev was president, Putin still called the shots. That conversation leaked, and of course, Putin took offense. In an interview with CNN’s Larry King on December 1, he said I was trying to “defame” either him or Medvedev, and he described me as “deeply confused.” I never did get around to polishing my diplomatic skills.

  All through 2010, at the bottom of the huge funnel pouring problems from Pandora’s global trove into Washington, sat just eight of us who, even though served by vast bureaucracies, had to deal with every one of the problems. The challenge for historians and journalists—and memoirists—is how to convey the crushing effect of dealing daily with multiple problems, pivoting on a dime every few minutes from one issue to another, having to quickly absorb reporting from many sources on each problem, and then making decisions, always with too little time and too much ambiguous information. Ideally, I suppose there should be a way to structure our national security apparatus so that day-to-day matters can be delegated to lower levels of responsibility while the president and his senior advisers focus on the big picture and thoughtfully make grand strategy. But that’s not how it works in the real world of politics and policy. And as the world becomes more complex and more turbulent, that is a problem in its own right: exhausted people do not make the best decisions.

  ASIA

  During each of my first three years in office, I had traveled to the Far East twice, including a visit to China in the fall of 2007. In 2010,
I would make the long trip from Washington on five separate occasions.

  On any trip to Asia, even if China isn’t on the itinerary, it is on the agenda. Improving the military-to-military relationship with Beijing was a high priority. I had first traveled to China at the end of 1980, with then CIA director Stansfield Turner, to implement the 1979 agreement between Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping to begin technical intelligence cooperation against the Soviet Union (to replace the radar sites in northern Iran that CIA lost after the 1979 revolution). That extraordinary relationship had continued uninterrupted over the decades through the ups and downs in the two nations’ political relationship. As secretary of defense, I wanted to build a similar relationship—that is, one largely immune to political differences—in the military arena. Above all, I wanted to open a dialogue on sensitive subjects like nuclear strategy as well as contingency planning on North Korea. I was convinced that the prolonged dialogue between Washington and Moscow during our many years of arms control negotiations had led to a greater understanding of each other’s intentions and thinking about nuclear matters; I believed that dialogue had helped prevent misunderstandings and miscalculations that might have led to confrontation. In my 2007 visit to China, I tried to lay the groundwork for such a relationship. My Chinese hosts and I decided at that time to build on previous cooperative exchanges with a fairly ambitious list of initiatives, from exchanging officers among our military educational institutions to opening a direct telephone link between ministers and beginning to expand a strategic dialogue. It was clear, though, that Chinese military leaders were leery of a real dialogue.