Trump not to involve the military in determining the outcome of the 2020 elections. Three days later the Capitol was attacked. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates participated as a member of the National Advisory Council for the COVID Collaborative. Memoirs In his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates alternately criticized and praised Obama's military leadership, writing, "I never doubted [his] support for the troops, only his support for their mission [in Afghanistan]", and "I was very proud to work for a president who had made one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House" by authorizing the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Criticism As deputy director and director of America's leading intelligence agency for many years, Gates and his CIA staff have been faulted for failing to accurately gauge the decline and disintegration of the Soviet Union. More particularly, Gates has been criticized for allegedly concocting evidence to show that the Soviet Union was stronger than it actually was. George Shultz said that, while Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, he felt the CIA under Gates was trying to "manipulate" him, that the agency was "a big powerful machine not under good control. I distrust what comes out of it." Shultz personally convinced Reagan that the U.S. should soften her stance towards the USSR after Gorbachev came to power in 1985; Shultz told Gates at the time that his CIA was "usually wrong" about the Soviet Union, having dismissed Gorbachev's policies as "just another Soviet attempt to deceive us." In 1991, Stansfield Turner, former Director of Central Intelligence, described the "enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis. ... I never heard a suggestion from the CIA ... that numerous Soviets recognized a growing systemic economic problem." Turner said this failure was a consequence of deliberate distortion by those in the upper echelon of the CIA who were helping to sell the Reagan administration's defense buildup, a view backed by former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman at Gates' 1991 confirmation hearings: "[William] Casey seized on every opportunity to exaggerate the Soviet threat ... [while] Gates' role in this activity was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence." Reviewing the third installment of Gates' memoirs in 2016, Goodman said, "In my 24 years at the CIA, there was never the kind of toxic atmosphere that