Reagan’s disengaged style and lack of foreign policy experience left the door open to palace intrigue among his subordinates, who were eager to fill the void. Vice President Bush displayed firm, if nefarious, establishment credentials, with long-standing family ties to Rockefeller, Morgan, and Harriman interests. After graduating from Yale, he had moved to Texas, become an oilman, and run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970. Richard Nixon had engineered his appointment as Republican Party chairman.
Jeane Kirkpatrick would also play a prominent role in shaping foreign policy. A conservative Democrat and Georgetown political scientist who supported Reagan because of his staunch anticommunism, she was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick supplied the Reaganites with a justification for supporting right-wing dictatorships, calling them “authoritarian” regimes instead of “totalitarian” ones. Along with her colleague Ernest Lefever, who directed Georgetown’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, she contemptuously dismissed Jimmy Carter’s concern for human rights and reform programs. Lefever, a defender of repressive regimes from El Salvador to South Africa, became assistant secretary of state for human rights. The New York Times described him as “an ultraconservative who sneers at existing policy as sentimental nonsense and believes it is profound error to embarrass allies, however repressive, with talk about habeas corpus.” He dismissed concerns about torture in Argentina and Chile because it was “a residual practice of the Iberian tradition.” His center had recently been assailed for accepting a large contribution from Nestlé after conducting a study supportive of its campaign to convince mothers to replace breast-feeding with infant formula despite evidence that the switch had contributed to a tripling of infant malnutrition in underdeveloped nations.13 In June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected Lefever as unqualified for the position. Five of the committee’s nine Republicans joined with all eight Democrats in the vote. He was replaced by the equally objectionable Elliott Abrams.
Not everyone welcomed the opportunity for freelancing that resulted from Reagan’s inattention. General Colin Powell, the deputy to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci, recalled, “The President’s passive management style placed a tremendous burden on us. Until we got used to it, we felt uneasy implementing recommendations without a clear decision…. One morning… Frank moaned…, ‘My God, we didn’t sign on to run this country!’” James Baker, who served Reagan as campaign manager, White House chief of staff, and Treasury secretary, described the resulting foreign policy structure as “a witches’ brew of intrigue… and separate agendas.”14 Though often at one another’s throats over control of policy, Reagan’s top advisors shared an enthusiasm for covert operations. Together with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Bush, they initiated operations in Central America and Africa through the National Security Planning Group, while supporting Soviet-bloc dissidents and expanding Carter’s programs in Afghanistan.
Global economic travails made their job easier. The rapid economic growth experienced by resource-rich third-world countries in the 1960s and early 1970s ground to a halt by the mid-1970s as the worldwide economic decline undercut income earned through raw-material exports. Third-world debt ballooned, crippling the prospects for continued development and devastating already impoverished populations. Revolutionary states that had overthrown colonialist regimes and experimented with socialism were among the hardest hit, leading many to question the viability of leftist development models. Reagan saw the resulting unrest as an opportunity to topple unfriendly governments and prove the superiority of capitalism.
The Soviet economy also hit the skids in the late 1970s, beginning a sustained period of stagnation and decline that only worsened when oil prices collapsed in 1982. Military expenditures, which absorbed almost a quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP), were further weakening the economy. Reagan was determined to exploit the situation. At his first press conference, on January 29, 1981, he unleashed an anti-Communist diatribe that reversed almost two decades of progress in easing Cold War tensions:
Well, so far détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims… the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use… they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.15
The CIA, which had largely been kept in check by Carter, played a major role in Reagan’s new anti-Communist crusade. CIA analysts had long prided themselves on professionalism and distance from the operations side of the Agency. That would not fly with the Reagan team. The assault that began via Bush’s Team B reached fruition under Casey. Administration hard-liners wanted intelligence that supported their view of a dangerous, hostile, and expansion-minded Soviet Union regardless of how far such a perception departed from reality. Casey, a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, “to wage war against the Soviet Union.” According to Gates, “the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover.”16 Casey had read Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network and was convinced that the Soviet Union was the fount of all international terrorism. According to Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA’s office for Soviet analysis, “Several of us met with Casey to try to tell the director that much of Sterling’s so-called evidence was in fact CIA ‘black propaganda,’ anticommunist allegations planted in the European press.” But, he added, “Casey contemptuously noted… that he ‘learned more from Sterling than from’” all of them. Others who touted the Sterling line included Haig, Wolfowitz, State Department consultant Michael Ledeen, and State Department official Robert “Bud” McFarlane.17 CIA experts, however, knew that the Soviets, for all their faults, actually discouraged terrorism.
Casey and Gates began a purge of analysts who refused to knuckle under. If their reports failed to support the administration line, Casey just wrote his own conclusions. Goodman, who served as a senior CIA Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1986, observed, “The CIA caricature of a Soviet military octopus whose tentacles reached the world over supported the administration’s view of the ‘Evil Empire.’” Goodman blamed “the fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history—the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself”—largely on “the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”18