TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092391/0923101.000

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                                                                                NATION, Page 18

INTELLIGENCE

Did Bob Gates Serve His Masters Too Well?


By STANLEY W. CLOUD -- Reported by Jay Peterzell/Washington


    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.