20-Year Career Man : Cautious Gates Called Contrast to Casey Style

To succeed his close friend William J. Casey in the nation’s top intelligence post, President Reagan on Monday nominated a man who is Casey’s top deputy and in many ways his opposite.

The contrast between Casey and Robert M. Gates likely will please many critics of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence bureaucracy, now under fire for missteps in both the Iran arms affair and the quasi-private support network for rebels in Nicaragua.

But whether the cautious, even-tempered Gates will have the same sway over the intelligence community as the irascible, adventurous Casey is an open question.

Gates is a 20-year veteran of the CIA and the National Security Council and the holder of a doctorate in Soviet history. He is a cautious sort who reportedly frowns on “black” operations such as the Iran arms affair, favoring the sort of dispassionate analysis on which he has built his own career. Friends and observers say that he has a quick wit and acceptable political skills.

At 43, Gates is the youngest man ever proposed to become director of central intelligence, a job that includes not only management of the CIA but also coordination of the entire U.S. intelligence community, from the Pentagon to the National Security Agency.

He appears little like the 73-year-old Casey, the oldest director of central intelligence in the post’s 30-year history. Casey is a former World War II intelligence officer, a Reagan political guru, an anti-Soviet hardliner and cantankerous defender of the kinds of risky intelligence missions--such as the Iran arms sales--that had fallen into disfavor in the 1970s.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report last week suggested that the CIA under Casey became more deeply involved in the Iran and contra scandals than has been admitted. Although Gates served as deputy director for intelligence during the period, he so far has not been tainted by the affairs.

‘Careful Analyst’

“He’s a very competent, straightforward person, a person of integrity. He’s a careful analyst. He’s fair-minded,” said Michael Oksenberg, a University of Michigan professor and former co-worker at the National Security Council. “He represents to me the best of the profession, and it’s a demanding profession.”

“I think he’s clean,” one former top CIA official said Monday. “I think he’ll be questioned closely” during confirmation hearings by wary senators, “but many of them will be relieved to have somebody who’s clearly not political.”

For someone reportedly so apolitical, Gates’ ascent through the espionage bureaucracy has been unusually rapid.

Started as Analyst

Casey already had been retired from the CIA’s predecessor, the wartime Office of Strategic Services, for 20 years when Gates joined the CIA in 1966 as an intelligence analyst. In 1974, the year he acquired his doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington, Gates moved from the CIA to the National Security Council, where he remained through the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.

By the time he left the NSC in 1979, he was executive assistant to then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, controlling the paper flow within the White House national security bureaucracy and acting as an informal adviser on Soviet affairs.

Back in the CIA under Reagan, he served first as the agency’s top Soviet analyst and then, in 1982, as deputy director for intelligence. A year later he added the post of director of the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the assembly of intelligence “estimates” of worldwide political and military situations.

Thoughtful Forecasting

It is in the world of number-crunching and thoughtful forecasting--and not dark-alley spying missions--that Gates has excelled.

“Gates has demonstrated repeatedly a very tough mind and he sees the role of intelligence agencies as making judgments, not just writing history,” said Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy director for intelligence under Casey. “When you do that, you’re never 100% right. But your value is greater.”

The covert operations that Casey so admired “will be a new business to him,” Inman said of Gates.

Other associates say that Gates brings the professionalism and breadth of view to the job that Casey, the World War II “cowboy,” visibly lacked. But the dispassionate Gates lacks the White House clout and, perhaps, the internal loyalty that made Casey a powerful and often popular CIA director.

‘Rough on People’

“He’s quick to form judgments and not easy to turn around. Sometimes he forms judgments by the quickness of arrogance rather than analysis,” one critical observer said. “He is a crackerjack analyst who’s rough on people. His management style is to deal with substance and he doesn’t give enough time to trying to win the allegiance of those who have to carry out his instructions.”

Several former associates said that Gates may be hindered in the job by his relative youth. He is fully three decades younger than Reagan, and years the junior of other intelligence heavyweights such as National Security Adviser Frank C. Carlucci. The odds that he will be replaced by the next President, in about two years, also limit his power to change the intelligence community’s course, they said.

But he has other assets to draw on, including close ties to Carlucci and to National Security Agency Director William Odom. His years at the National Security Council also may help make up for his lack of a close relationship with Reagan.

“He has a broader background than most people in the CIA, being in and out of the national security staff for six years,” a former CIA director said. “That may help him understand what he’s supposed to do better than most.”

Staff writers Robert C. Toth and Karen Tumulty contributed to this story.