TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 132 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 25

AMERICA ABROAD

The Case Against Gates


By Strobe Talbott


    When he nominated Robert Gates to be director of Central
Intelligence five months ago, President Bush said he was
counting on the CIA to help America "maintain its role as the
leader of the free world."

    The phrase had an anachronistic ring, as though the very
subject of the nation's spy agency caused Bush to slip back into
the vocabulary of the cold war. That would be natural enough.
After all, no American institution is more closely identified
with the 40-year struggle to stop the spread of communism and
Soviet influence around the world. Whether American agents were
restoring the Shah of Iran to the Peacock Throne in the '50s,
organizing an invasion of Cuba in the '60s, or applying the
Reagan Doctrine in Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the
'80s, their real target was the Soviet Union.

    Now the U.S.S.R. is itself a Third World country,
appealing for American largesse. The new chief of the foreign
branch of the KGB, Yevgeni Primakov, even offered last week to
engage in joint ventures with the CIA.

    To justify its continued existence, the agency must both
reduce and redirect its clandestine activities. Before retiring
as director at the end of the summer, William Webster began
shifting resources toward fighting terrorism, the narcotics
trade, nuclear proliferation and other threats that loom large
in the post-cold war era.

    In the past, it was the agency's directorate of operations
that tended to draw public scrutiny and occasional dismay. For
example, the last time television audiences were treated to a
lengthy official probe of the CIA was in the mid-1970s, when
committees on Capitol Hill exposed a variety of bizarre plots
to "destabilize" pro-Moscow regimes and "terminate with extreme
prejudice" leftists and revolutionaries. But even when American
citizens objected to specific capers or methods, few challenged
the need for covert action.

    The Gates nomination has triggered a controversy that has
little to do with the sometimes ugly, even bloody, but necessary
business that case officers transact in the back alleys of the
world. At issue is the way bureaucrats behave toward one another
at the home office in Langley, Va.

    The agency's middle name is Intelligence, which Webster
(Noah, not William) defines as "the faculty of understanding."
A crucial task of a CIA analyst is to figure out what is
happening in some corner of the globe so that if the President
decides to dispatch American diplomats, aid officials, Marines
or spooks, he will know what he, and they, are getting into, and
what the consequences are likely to be.

    Not even the estimated $30 billion a year that the U.S.
spends on intelligence can buy a crystal ball. Good analysts are
purveyors not of predictions but of reality checks, of
correctives to their superiors' prejudices, misperceptions or
wishful thinking. That means working in an atmosphere of
freewheeling discourse.

    To an admirable and largely unappreciated degree, the CIA
has managed to preserve a tradition of intellectual freedom.
During the McCarthy period in the '50s, when red-baiting
Congressmen were able to drum out of the State Department
Foreign Service officers who were insufficiently passionate in
their anticommunism, the agency used its special claim to
secrecy to make itself a sanctuary for independent-minded
experts.

    It has always been an important part of the director's job
to protect the agency, whether from congressional pressures to
tailor the intelligence "product" to conform with political
fashion or from leading questions intended to elicit answers
that confirm the policy preferences of the White House.

    Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, a number of Gates' former colleagues have charged
that as a senior official of the agency during the Reagan
Administration, he corrupted the very essence of intelligence.
They cited numerous instances in which they believed Gates
leaned on analysts to stretch available evidence in support of
several suspicions: that the Soviets were behind the 1981
assassination attempt on the Pope, that the Gorbachev reforms
were merely a tactical retreat, and that the Kremlin had a
master plan to deny the U.S. access to critical natural
resources in Africa and elsewhere.

    The witnesses made a generally persuasive case that during
the most ideological Administration in modern times, Gates was
part of an agency leadership that enforced a kind of political
correctness on the way information was assessed and presented.

    Gates' supporters on the committee -- all Republicans --
tried with more ingenuity than success to discredit the most
damaging testimony. Gates then put up a spirited, gutsy defense
of his own, earning respect from several Senators -- all
Democrats -- who will still probably vote against his
confirmation. At a press conference Friday, Bush joined the
fray, denouncing the critics for having "accused this good man
of the worst kind of sin" an analyst can commit. Bush then
remarked pointedly that he should know, since he is not only
"the ultimate consumer" of intelligence but was once the
principal producer as well.

    Bush's reminder of his own tenure at the agency hardly
clinches the debate over Gates. In 1976, when Bush was director,
conservatives in Congress and in the Republican Party were
savaging the CIA for supposedly underestimating the Soviet
military menace. As a sop to the right and a demoralizing slap
at the professionals on his own staff, Bush allowed a panel of
outsiders, deliberately stacked with hard-liners, to
second-guess the agency's findings. Not surprisingly, the result
was a depiction of Soviet intentions and capabilities that
seemed extreme at the time and looks ludicrous in retrospect.

    If not a sin, that episode was certainly a lapse in Bush's
stewardship of the intelligence process -- and a precedent for
the trouble that now afflicts his own nominee for the post.