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.