Nominee’s Rise, Fall, Rise Traced to His Total Loyalty

Months ago, over a casual dinner, Robert M. Gates began to talk about the job of director of Central Intelligence.

“You know the great thing about the DCI,” Gates told his dinner companions, “it’s the only job in government where you’re free to promote anyone you want.”

He spoke from experience.

At 23, a former Eagle Scout with a master’s degree in Soviet history, Gates joined the CIA as an analyst. Eight years later, the man President Bush nominated Tuesday to be the nation’s intelligence chief had risen quickly through the ranks and achieved a coveted assignment at the White House as a staff member at the National Security Council.

On his return to the CIA, in 1979, Gates’ career moved even more rapidly: chief Soviet analyst, head of the intelligence directorate, deputy director. And then, in 1987, the ultimate triumph--nomination to the top job--and the ultimate failure, a forced withdrawal under fire, his name associated with the Iran-Contra mess, the gravest Washington scandal of the decade.

Gates’ rise, fall and rise again, according to those who know him, can be traced to the same cause. By all accounts supremely intelligent, meticulous and well-organized, Gates “works for whomever he works for with total loyalty and is a super bureaucrat,” said one longtime associate. “The guy who loves Bob Gates the most is the guy he works for,” said another, “he is very attentive to the boss’ needs.”

Under such bosses as Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Bush, traits of loyalty and bureaucratic circumspection opened Gates’ way to the top levels of his profession.

Under Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director William J. Casey, the same traits led him into the perilous morass of Iran-Contra.

His superiors have returned Gates’ loyalty. In April, 1986, recalled one Reagan Administration official, Gates was sworn into office as the CIA’s deputy director by then-Vice President Bush, with whom Gates had worked when Bush was CIA director in the Gerald R. Ford Administration.

As the two walked into the ornate Indian Treaty Room on the second floor of the Old Executive Office Building, Bush put his arm around Gates’ shoulder. His admiration for Gates, Bush told the small crowd of family, friends and co-workers present, was like that he felt for his own sons.

Five years later, Bush barely considered anyone else when the time came to pick a CIA chief of his own, pausing only long enough to make sure that key senators felt they had been consulted before the decision was announced.

As a result, Gates will get what few people in high-level Washington positions achieve--a second chance.

Born in September, 1943, the son of an auto parts salesman, Robert Michael Gates grew up in a quiet, nearly all-white neighborhood of Wichita, Kan. An avid Boy Scout and straight-A student in high school, he traveled East to college at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., where he earned high honors in history, an award for service and a reputation as a grind.

From there, Gates moved to the University of Indiana’s Institute on Soviet and East European Studies where he earned a master’s degree and met his wife, Becky--the couple now have two children--before moving to Washington to begin work at the CIA in the fall of 1966.

A quarter-century later, Gates, if confirmed, will take office at a critical time as the agency seeks a new role in a world no longer divided by the Cold War. As the first career analyst to head the CIA, “his appointment means that we are seeing the analysts come into their own” in an agency that long has been dominated by its far-smaller but more glamorous covert operations side, former CIA boss William E. Colby said.

And as a convinced skeptic about the chances for successful long-term reform in the Soviet Union, Gates’ nomination ensures that the government’s eyes and ears will remain carefully tuned for hints of trouble from Moscow. He is likely to fend off those on Capitol Hill and in the Administration who argue for a new intelligence focus on such issues as international economic competition.

Gates’ views about the Soviets have been a consistent counterpoint to official opinion during much of the last decade. During the early days of the Reagan Administration, many White House officials viewed Gates as too soft. “He was not an ‘evil empire’ believer,” recalled one official. In 1983, for example, Gates ordered a study of Soviet military spending, which concluded that Moscow’s military budget had stagnated since 1976 at a level far lower than the Pentagon had been saying.

Subsequently, however, as Reagan became more and more enamored of his relationship with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Gates began sounding warnings. In the first 18 months of the Bush Administration, he was widely seen as a hard liner, particularly after Secretary of State James A. Baker III forced him to cancel plans to deliver a skeptical public speech about Gorbachev.

Opponents argue that Gates’ conservatism led him to miss the significance of Gorbachev, and that his policies, if followed, would have caused the United States to miss key opportunities to change the political shape of the world. “He was just short of flying in the face of reality,” one former colleague said.

Friends, by contrast, argue that Gates has been correct in arguing that whatever Gorbachev’s intentions or motives, any reform effort must deal not only with the weight of seven decades of Communist rule but with centuries of history in which Russia has never known either a free market or a free political system. Reforming that system may be possible over a period of generations, he has argued, but reform efforts are unlikely to accomplish permanent changes in the short term.

One point on which both sides agree is that Gates’ forcefulness in stating an opinion and sticking with it are typical of a style of pointed analysis that he is likely to try to foster within the CIA as its director.

Having been both an analyst and a policy-maker, Gates has argued publicly that intelligence officials need to work harder to make their analyses relevant to officials making decisions--a view that has been resisted by some analysts who would prefer to see a clear wall separating analysis from policy.

Gates would also come to the CIA with more direct experience in the making of foreign policy than most of his predecessors. As deputy national security adviser, he has headed the Deputies Committee, a panel of representatives from leading agencies that serves as a sort of executive committee for the Administration’s foreign policy.

In that post, he has participated in such major events as the Gulf War, but has also been the White House manager for many lower-level crises that did not require direct presidential involvement and received correspondingly little public attention.

“Most of the past DCIs were American government people, and they learned foreign affairs after being appointed,” said Kenneth de Graffenreid, the National Security Council’s intelligence expert in the Reagan era. Gates, by contrast, “is actually a person who likes foreign policy.”

Before he can assume the job he has long coveted, however, Gates will first have to undergo a peculiarly Washingtonian ritual of mortification, a public airing of the allegations that he failed to alert Congress to the involvement of Casey, and the CIA, in the efforts to sell arms to Iran and provide forbidden aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Three key questions have been raised: Should Gates have notified Congress when he first learned that money from the sale of arms to Iran had been diverted to aid the Nicaraguan Contras? Did he act improperly in not disclosing CIA involvement in a 1985 shipment of arms to Tehran? And did he testify accurately when he appeared before Congress to explain what he had done?

At the time of his first round of confirmation hearings, neither the Senate Intelligence Committee, which questioned him, nor the public knew the full details of the Iran-Contra affair. Since then, these matters have been thoroughly investigated by a congressional committee and an independent counsel. As a result of the CIA’s role, two senior officials were subsequently fired and four others were reprimanded.

The diversion of arms-sale money to the Contras first became public on Nov. 25, 1986. Gates testified that he learned about the operation eight weeks earlier at an Oct. 1 meeting with Charles Allen, a counterterrorism official who gave Gates evidence of the diversion. Allen was subsequently disciplined for his role in the affair.

But according to testimony by others, including former NSC head John M. Poindexter, Gates learned about the diversion even earlier, in August.

In either case, several senators, led by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), have questioned why Gates did nothing with his knowledge. Gates testified that he failed to act because he regarded his information as “extraordinarily flimsy” and, therefore, not proper to bring to Congress. Others, however, say he failed to act out of loyalty to Casey.

Committee members last time also grilled Gates about his participation in a White House meeting on Nov. 20, 1986, in which top Administration officials drafted false congressional testimony that Casey was to deliver the following day. Gates argued that he and others had quashed attempts to insert untrue statements into the testimony and that Casey’s eventual statements were “a fair statement of what we knew at the time.”

Senators have also questioned whether Gates’ testimony at his confirmation hearings contradicted earlier statements he made at a closed-door hearing of the Intelligence Committee shortly after the scandal broke into public view.

At least some members of the Senate say they still have serious doubts about Gates’ willingness to be fully candid with them. But White House officials have canvassed the current membership of the Intelligence Committee and are convinced that this time, after some tough questioning, Gates will get his promotion.

Staff writer Sara Fritz contributed to this story.