Gates, Robert Michael (1943– )

US intelligence officer and administrator, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 1991–93 and defence secretary from 2006. An intelligence expert, he served for 26 years at the CIA and at the National Security Council 1967–93, and then as dean and later president of Texas A&M University. He became US defence secretary in December 2006 after the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and devised and implemented, in 2007, a controversial new strategy of a further ‘surge’ in the US military presence in Iraq in an attempt to improve order and stability there.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Gates studied history at Indiana University and Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where he received a PhD in Russian and Soviet history in 1974. During the Vietnam War he was an air force officer in Strategic Air Command, 1967–69. He served in the CIA 1969–74, after being recruited when at university. After working in the National Security Council 1974–79, he returned to the CIA, and became its deputy director in 1986. Gates was proposed by the Republican president Ronald Reagan to become director (head) of the CIA in 1987, but his name was withdrawn because controversy about his role in the Iran–Contra affair meant that the US Senate was likely to reject his nomination.