COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : ‘Hello. My Name Is Robert G.’ : It seems that Robert Gates need only confess, like a recovering alcoholic, to be forgiven.

My hope all along has been that the Senate, in a moment of confusion, would do the right thing and confirm Clarence Thomas as Director of Central Intelligence, putting Robert Gates on the Supreme Court. The CIA would be an ideal harbor for a man of eccentric ideology such as Thomas; Gates would blend in on the highest bench somewhere between Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, with his clerks instructing him in elementary principles of law.

Thomas drives a late-model Corvette. Gates arrived in Washington in 1966 driving a 1965 Mustang that he promptly got rid of, presumably on the grounds that it might offend one of the superiors whom it has been his life’s mission to flatter. The cars tell the story.

These confirmation hearings have become an extension of Alcoholics Anonymous. Apologize and all is forgiven:

“My name is Robert G. and I’m a liar. I apologize for all the bad things I’ve done. I acknowledge the existence of a power higher than myself and I promise to clean up. Thank you.�

Select Committee chairman David Boren: “Thank you, Robert G. The committee is mighty impressed with your forthright testimony. Confirmed!�

Robert Gates was brought into the CIA in the mid-1960s by Ray Cline, who later founded “CIA Agents for Bush.� In 1974 he was seconded from the Agency to the National Security Council. His job under Henry Kissinger was to control National Security Agency intercepts and thus protect his back-channel operations. In other words, Gates was a trustworthy hireling, a masker of foul deeds.

Gates lasted at the NSC through Jimmy Carter. In 1979 he was brought back to the CIA under Stansfield Turner and was first an assistant to and later the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union. He became a dutiful accomplice in the late Carter and Reagan efforts to portray the Soviet Union as an economic and military giant, thus justifying the hike in U.S. military spending. Gates generated inflated estimates of Soviet strength and crushed all internal CIA protests.

When Gates figured out what policy his bosses were set on, he provided the analysis to back it. It was a sure way to get ahead. He swung the CIA behind the ridiculous “the-KGB-shot-the-Pope plot,� and again suppressed all internal dissent. To him, policy and analysis were one and the same. He cut the facts to fit the frame.

By 1985 Gates had sufficiently ingratiated himself with CIA Director William Casey and with former NSA and CIA executive Bobby Ray Inman to be on track for deputy director of intelligence, though he was only in his early 40s. A year later, when the Boland Amendment was dead, he got memos from National Security Council Director John Poindexter telling him that the CIA should take over the illegal Contra assets (meaning the Iran arms money). He has dissembled repeatedly about his knowledge of these memos in two sets of confirmation hearings, even though other Poindexter memos to Oliver North attest to their existence and even though Poindexter testified before Congress in 1987 about these conversations with Gates.

In August, 1986, CIA intelligence officer Charles Allen spoke both to Richard Kerr, now deputy director of intelligence, and to Gates about the anger of the Iranians at being overcharged for their arms shipments. Kerr has testified that he also talked to Gates about this. About these conversations too, Gates dissembled. In fact he played an important role, providing analysis about the Soviets’ aggressive intentions designed to persuade Iran that arms shipments were necessary.

Throughout 1985 and 1986 Gates was one of 16 people in the intelligence apparat who were sent 168 reports from the NSA, totaling 417 pages, detailing intercepts concerning all of the secret arms negotiations with the Iranians. He subsequently claimed that his desk was crowded and that the reports were hard to understand.

From the end of 1986 through his aborted CIA confirmation hearings in April, 1987, Gates was at the center of the cover-up of Contra-gate crimes. It was the Senate committee’s unease at his role that caused Gates’ 1987 nomination to be withdrawn.

In the Bush Administration, Gates went to the NSC as chairman of the Deputies Committee, arbitrating disputes between government agencies. In this role he provided bureaucratic muscle to ease the trade in dual-use items to Iraq.

In these hearings, Gates has sometimes tried to claim that he’s just an analyst, offering factual data to assist a government in its policy decisions. In fact, his career has been made by twisting facts to serve his masters. All intelligence executives do this to a certain extent, but for the Senate committee to accept Gates’ pretenses is to acknowledge that the hearing process is a meaningless farce.