Did Bob Gates Serve His Masters Too Well?

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

There is something very Kansas about Robert Gates, the man President Bush has nominated to succeed William Webster as the new director of the CIA. His open face, wide-set eyes and ready grin, even his prematurely gray corn-silk hair, somehow evoke the state where he was born 47 years ago. At the same time, there is something very Washington about Gates -- the slightly self-satisfied air of the successful bureaucrat who has managed to survive in a city where survival is sometimes all it takes to succeed.

Gates may soon discover that the same techniques that helped him survive before have left him open to attack now. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which this week began hearings on the Gates nomination, has been looking into his performance both as CIA deputy director for intelligence under William Casey between 1982 and 1986 and as chairman of the interagency National Intelligence Council during much of the same period. In those twin jobs Gates was responsible for the integrity of the analytical reports that the CIA and NIC produced. Yet a number of current and former U.S. intelligence officers have accused him of trying to "cook the books," of using his position in an attempt to assure that CIA and NIC reporting conformed to certain key policies dear to the Reagan White House. An assessment of how well or poorly he fulfilled that responsibility may tell more about what kind of CIA director Gates would be than would any number of Iran-contra revelations.

When Gates was promoted to deputy director for intelligence in January 1982, he imposed a series of reforms that made the CIA's reports shorter, better written, more timely and more definitive. Moreover, his defenders argue, on several occasions he actually protected analysts from White House pressure on key matters related to the Soviet Union, Nicaragua and Lebanon. Says a senior intelligence officer: "I thought Bob was one of the most creative and stimulating, and at the same time easiest, guys I worked with. The charge that he politicized intelligence is a bum rap."

But those who oppose the Gates nomination say much of the evidence of book cooking is in the reports themselves -- and Gates read and approved all reports issued during his tenure as deputy director. Indeed, the Gates period produced a rash of complaints that, on controversial issues like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Iran, the agency tailored its reports to fit White House policy rather than providing objective conclusions. In the world of intelligence analysis, that is the ultimate sin.

In the past, much of the blame for "politicizing" intelligence was pinned on Casey. But the Senate intelligence committee is examining the extent to which Gates himself was responsible and failed to stand between Casey and intelligence analysts. Observes Thomas Polgar, a retired senior CIA officer who was a consultant to the agency in this period: "You never heard about a Gates position that differed from Casey's. Either he sincerely believed in Casey's ideology or he catered to it."

Among the cases about which the Senate committee intends to question Gates:

The "Opening" to Iran. In May 1985 the White House was considering a secret reversal of U.S. policy toward Iran -- a change that would quickly lead to arms sales aimed at gaining the release of American hostages in Lebanon. In hopes of finding a rationale for this politically explosive notion, a classified "estimate" was requested from the NIC, of which Gates was chairman. When the estimate was issued, it found that Iran faced serious instability, warned of the Soviet's ability to exploit it and recommended arms sales to Iran by U.S. allies. Conveniently, the NIC estimate contained no "footnotes" -- indicating that it expressed the unanimous view of the U.S. intelligence community.

The opinion was anything but unanimous. According to numerous sources directly involved, key analysts at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department's intelligence bureau disagreed with the estimate. They attempted to insert footnotes of dissent but were repeatedly prevented from doing so. "This false unanimity was not an accident," charges a former official. "It was the personal creation of Mr. Gates." One agency that persisted in its dissent was the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, headed by Morton Abramowitz. Only when Gates called directly to say that Casey wanted no footnotes did Abramowitz finally yield. In their defense, those who gave in may not have understood that a radical change in U.S. policy was at stake. Gates has testified that even he was in the dark. The Senate intelligence committee has obtained documentary evidence, however, suggesting that Gates knew arms sales to Iran were under consideration.

U.S. Policy in Central America. The public relations aspect of intelligence on Central America grew distinctly more noticeable after Gates became deputy director of the CIA, according to a September 1982 House intelligence committee report. The study cited a briefing on outside military aid to the Salvadoran guerrillas and a misleading CIA study on repression of Nicaraguan Indians as products whose main purpose seemed to be to "mobilize support for policy" rather than to inform.

Defenders of Gates insist that the report was signed by only the Democrats on the committee, and it is true that at least some Republican members declined to sign it, and that committee consultant and former CIA officer Bobby Inman resigned in protest against it. But there was criticism from inside the CIA as well. According to a former senior estimates officer for Latin America, David MacMichael, the CIA in late 1982 issued a classified report concluding that Marxist rebels in El Salvador depended largely on Sandinista arms. One of the few pieces of hard evidence cited was the fact that a Nicaraguan customs officer had allowed an arms-carrying Volkswagen to cross into Honduras. The report, says MacMichael, whose CIA contract was not renewed in 1983, was "a laughable document."

Senior State Department officials complained repeatedly in the mid-1980s that CIA analysis with implications for ongoing covert operations consistently downplayed or eliminated dissenting views. Former Senate intelligence staff director Robert Simmons agrees. "There's no question that in countries where the agency had operational interests," he says, "the pressure was on the analysts."

Indeed, says a former national intelligence officer, there is fear at the CIA that "Gates' return would mean a new party line." Senator William Cohen, a Republican former member of the intelligence committee, once described Gates as "an ambitious young man, Type A personality, climbing a ladder of professional success." This week Gates is on the brink of reaching the top of that ladder, thanks in part to his willingness to tell his superiors what they wanted to hear. The question is whether he resorted to that old survival technique too often for his -- and the nation's -- good.

With reporting by Jay Peterzell/Washington