But when the intelligence committee finally gets around to deciding his fate, perhaps this week or next, the betting is that Gates will survive. In the end, the delay may have helped him. Angry intelligence committee members have cooled off. Gates has had more time to hone his responses to the likely hostile questions. The panel telegraphed its punches by having Gates provide written answers ahead of time to more than 80 detailed interrogatories. Some committee members are now eager to get a CIA director in place at a time when the very role and purpose of the agency are in question. Indeed, Gates’s confirmation hearings may end up as less a trial of Bob Gates than of the agency he seeks to run.
Gates still faces difficult questions from the committee. How could he have remained in the dark about the Iran-contra scandal if the people directly above and below him were deeply involved? Did Gates know of illegal arms shipments to South Africa and Iraq when he was deputy director? Did he slant agency analyses on Soviet Union to justify the Reagan military buildup? Bush last week dismissed “these kind of feathery charges that are floating out there” as “nonsense.” Alan Fiers, the CIA official who agreed to finger top agency officials as part of his own Iran-contra plea bargain last July, is not expected to directly implicate Gates when he testifies before the committee on the diversion. Former CIA covert-operations chief Clair George, who served directly under Gates and last week was arraigned on federal charges of perjury and obstructing government inquiries into the scandal, has so far refused to testify before the committee. “I haven’t heard of a real smoking gun anywhere,” says Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, a committee member.
Tougher questions remain about the future of the intelligence community’s $30 billion-a-year budget. With the Soviet empire disintegrating and the KGB building down, “we can’t give the intelligence budget the blank check it’s received in the past,” says House intelligence-committee member Bill Richardson. Critics accuse the CIA of being top-heavy; 850 of some 20,000 employees are in senior-executive paygrades, the highest percentage for any department save the State Department. Spending on big-ticket items, like the $1 billion KH-11 spy satellite used mainly to photograph the Soviet military, will likely be scaled back. The CIA’s counterintelligence operation can be trimmed if the KGB no longer represents a serious penetration threat. “A lot of the intelligence missions the CIA took part in are keyed to a world that no longer exists,” says Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official. He believes the agency should be disbanded, with its functions parceled out to the Pentagon and State Department.
Even when there was a communist threat, some old missions bore little fruit. Intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK of one shocking example. After interviewing recent Cuban defectors and reviewing Stasi (East German secret police) files uncovered after the fall of communism, CIA officials discovered a nasty surprise about almost all the people they had recruited in those countries: they were double agents.
The CIA has already begun reorganizing its covert-operations division. More emphasis has been placed on recruiting Third World agents and targeting drug trafficking, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. More money is also being spent on gathering economic and political intelligence, with agents having to build deeper covers in friendly countries. Agency officials point out that the CIA already plans to reduce its budget by 15 percent over the next five years. “It is a much more complicated world, and intelligence has a very real role to play,” says Acting CIA Director Richard Kerr. Can Gates, who rose through the ranks of the agency as a hard-line Soviet analyst, lead the CIA in this more complicated world? Critics say no; admirers argue that he’s a politically shrewd and tough manager whose 18 years in the agency’s byzantine bureaucracy make him the ideal candidate to reorganize it. If Gates can overcome his past, his bigger test will be in shaping the CIA’s future.
PHOTO: ‘No real smoking gun’: The nominee testifies before a Senate committee in 1987 (Wally McNammee–NEWSWEEK)
