Toughie, Smoothy, Striver, Spy

By Dan Goodgame/Washington

Robert Gates was an eagle scout and an A- student, a wholesome Kansas kid who met his wife-to-be on a hayride. He yearned to become a doctor or a teacher, and volunteered to tutor needy students. His college honored him as the graduate "who has made the greatest contribution to his fellow man." So how did a nice guy like Gates get into the spy business? And why do some Democrats in the Senate say such nasty things about him?

Nominated last week by President Bush to serve as director of Central Intelligence, Gates began his CIA career "on a lark" in 1965. He accepted a + recruiter's invitation to an interview just for "a free trip to Washington." Once he got there, however, things got serious. The agency asked Gates to join, not as a "spy" but as a deskbound analyst, and he accepted. Yet when the agency offered to finance his part-time doctoral studies, Gates declined. He "didn't want to feel obligated to stay" if a good teaching job suddenly became open.

Fast-forward a quarter-century and Gates, now 47, is poised to become the youngest -- and yet the most experienced -- CIA director since the agency was founded in 1947. But first Gates must win the Senate confirmation that eluded him on his last go-round, in 1987. Then the agency's deputy director, he was criticized for not acting on indications that the Iran-contra scandal was afoot. No wrongdoing by Gates was proved, but he withdrew his name from nomination to spare President Reagan further embarrassment.

Since then, passions have cooled and the public has grown weary of the Iran- contra investigation. The boyish-looking, soft-spoken Gates, during two years as first lieutenant to retiring CIA Director William Webster and two more as Deputy National Security Adviser to Bush, has assiduously cultivated key Senators. Though some Democrats vow to re-examine Gates' Iran-contra role, most Senators predict that he will be confirmed this time, barring some unexpected new evidence of wrongdoing. "Bob Gates was an exceptional deputy to Webster, an honest liaison to the congressional committees and an invaluable aide to the President in the White House," says Senator David Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee. "I think he could be an outstanding CIA director."

The agency can afford nothing less if it is to outgrow its cold war roots. Policymakers lament the CIA's failure to warn earlier of Iraq's intention to invade Kuwait, and they demand intelligence on new topics, from industrial counterespionage to the AIDS epidemic's devastation of the political and managerial elites in several African countries. Budget cutters hungrily eye the estimated $30 billion in often redundant spending by the CIA and other elements of the intelligence community. To address these challenges, Bob Gates offers close ties with the White House and Pentagon, broad CIA experience and a black belt in bureaucratic politics.

Friends remember him as a child who demonstrated a need and a knack for pleasing his elders back in Wichita, where his father sold wholesale auto parts. Young Bob was bright, well-organized and punctual. He read voraciously and loved to run and hike. When he went off to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, he first enrolled in pre-medicine, then gravitated toward history. "I started with American history," Gates says, "and moved east." He studied Western Europe as an undergrad, Eastern Europe for his master's degree and Russian history and language for his doctorate. Gates worked part time in Williamsburg as a school-bus driver with the eccentric habit of teaching his riders words and phrases in German and Russian. At Indiana University, he worked as a dorm counselor, as did his wife-to-be Becky, whom he met when they chaperoned a hayride.

At the CIA, Gates scrambled rapidly up the career ladder, starting as a junior analyst who struggled to write coherent reports after poring over mountains of information from a wide range of secret and public sources. He quickly drew praise for cogent analysis and crisp writing -- traits still evident in his scholarly articles and speeches.

A big break for Gates came in 1974, when he was assigned to work at the White House on the National Security Council. His boss, then as now, was an Air Force general named Brent Scowcroft. Over the next 17 years, Gates deftly hopscotched back and forth from the White House to CIA, winning kudos from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Some detractors describe Gates as a "chameleon" who, like Magnus Pym, the sociopathic protagonist of John le Carre's The Perfect Spy, finds it easy to match his coloration to whomever he needs to please. And while his friends disagree, they add wryly that it's better to have Gates as an employee than as a boss.

He strives to deliver what his superiors want, and rides his subordinates until he gets it. He first made his name as head of the CIA's analysts, insisting that reports be made less cautiously academic and more relevant to policymakers, addressing their concerns bluntly, concisely and accurately. He demanded each analyst's "best estimate" on difficult questions, and tracked such judgments on scorecards that influenced promotions. Some analysts considered Gates a little Napoleon. But Congressman Dave McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says he witnessed a "remarkable" improvement in the quality of CIA reports prepared under Gates.

Gates also takes pride in having helped to establish a day-care center for employees' children, complete with jungle gyms and little CIA T shirts. He delighted in imagining what KGB analysts would conclude from their satellite photos of the facility: perhaps that the CIA was training midgets for some covert mission.

He was working at the White House back when George Bush was CIA director, and the two didn't meet then. But Gates astutely courted Bush once he became Vice President, arranging briefings for Bush before he attended funerals of foreign leaders. When Gates was appointed deputy CIA director in 1986, he asked Bush to swear him in. After Gates moved to the Bush White House in 1989, he, unlike previous Deputy National Security Advisers, was invited to attend almost all the meetings Scowcroft holds with Bush, including each morning's round of intelligence and national-security briefings.

Gates has long expressed deep skepticism toward Soviet reform efforts. "The reformers," Gates said in a speech this month, "must overcome not just 70 years of Communist history, but a thousand years of Russian history, a history that has never known government other than autocracy." For such public pessimism, Gates was slapped down first by Secretary of State George Shultz, then by his successor, James Baker. And on Gates' first trip to the Soviet Union, with Baker in 1989, Gorbachev bluntly expressed the hope that Moscow- Washington detente would "put Mr. Gates out of a job."

Sometimes Gates seems pleasantly bumfuzzled by recent turns in the relationship between the superpowers. Last August, for example, his son Brad, then 10, was struggling to comprehend what he was hearing from his cold- warrior father. "Let me get this straight, Dad," Brad said. "The Russians are on our side in this one?" Gates smiled and nodded. Brad replied simply, "Wow!"

Like Bush, Gates rises early: about 5 a.m. He runs three miles, showers, shellacs his white-gray hair and hops into the back of a black government sedan that waits outside his home in suburban Virginia. The driver hands over a packet of intelligence reports and diplomatic cables that moved overnight, and Gates scans these and the newspapers on his way to the White House. He usually eats lunch at his desk. He seldom gets home before 9 p.m.

He takes son Brad and teenage daughter Eleanor to Orioles baseball games, and they indulge his attraction to carnival rides. During a trip to Germany when he was deputy CIA director, Gates detoured to a local fairground, security detail in tow, and rode a roller coaster called the Triple Loop. A man of plain tastes and middlebrow origins, Gates likes to torment elitists at the CIA and the State Department, whom he derides as "guys with last names for first names." He tells corny jokes and Russian jokes. And he is relentlessly practical in a way that sometimes amuses his friends. While driving down Constitution Avenue in a convertible, for example, Gates was caught in a rainstorm but couldn't get the top up. Unfazed, he unfurled his umbrella and kept driving.

His White House office, like Gates, is compact and strategically located. Little larger than a broom closet, it flanks the West Wing entrance just across the lobby from the Oval Office. It is stuffed with color-coded folders marked SECRET, photos of Gates' family on backpacking trips, a Dictaphone, a big secure telephone and a regular White House phone console that often erupts with a steady, insistent ring. "Yes, sir," Gates answers. "Yes, Mr. President . . . I'll get right on it, sir."

On the wall only a few feet in front of his desk is an aphorism, the source of which Gates has forgotten. "The easiest way to achieve complete strategic surprise," it reads, "is to commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive." Gates says he finds this a useful admonition when trying to understand the Saddam Husseins of the world. He hopes to take it with him when he returns to the CIA.

With reporting by Bruce van Voorst/Washington