Did Bob Gates Serve His Masters Too Well?

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: