The Second Time May Be the Charm : CIA pick faces tough but not insuperable queries

President Bush, himself a former Director of Central Intelligence, has turned to the ranks of intelligence professionals to fill the vacancy left by William Webster’s retirement.

Robert M. Gates, who has served as deputy national security adviser in the White House since the beginning of the Bush Administraton, first joined the CIA in 1966. His nomination this week to the nation’s highest intelligence post puts him back on familiar if not wholly comfortable ground. President Reagan nominated Gates for the job in 1987, after the death of William J. Casey. But Gates soon asked to have his name withdrawn, and he resumed his post as deputy CIA director, when a number of senators made clear their concerns over what Gates may have known--but not revealed--about the Iran-Contra scandal. Some of that unease could resurface during Gates’ nomination hearings.

No one in the Senate, however, is likely to raise a whisper of doubt about Gates’ high professional competence. He rose through the ranks of the CIA on merit, earning a Ph.D. in Russian history even as he was establishing a reputation as a solid analyst of Soviet affairs. He is widely respected by his peers. Gates earlier showed his administrative skills when, for the better part of a year, he virtually ran the CIA while Casey was dying of a brain tumor.

In two areas in particular, though, Gates is likely to be--and should be--asked some tough questions.

The first, and most consequential, is what he intends to do to reorient intelligence gathering to pay closer attention to events and potential threats in Third World countries--like Iraq. Allied closely to this is how he plans to bolster human intelligence capabilities around the world, and so get away from what some have come to see as an excessive reliance on technical intelligence gathering means. With the strategic threat from the Soviet Union largely erased, these refocusing efforts are seen in Congress and elsewhere as increasing in priority.

A second hard line of questioning will likely recall earlier concerns that Gates should have aggressively spoken out about what he learned of the illicit diversion to Nicaraguan Contras of profits from secret arms sales to Iran. Some senators who four years ago indicated doubts about Gates now say they have changed their minds and will have no trouble supporting him. Others, though, remain to be persuaded, and the nomination hearings could be rigorous--maybe even messy.

If Gates is approved, as seems probable, he will be returning to an agency that has had its respectability restored after suffering a period of shady misuse during the Casey years. Credit for that goes to William Webster, with his cautious approach to decision-making and his firm insistence on due diligence in the exercise of the CIA’s responsibilities. Webster, a confidant of neither Reagan or Bush, reinsulated the CIA from White House politics. That is a model that Gates, or whoever else might be chosen to head the nation’s intelligence establishment, could not go wrong in emulating.