CIA Hearings Must Get All the Facts

The U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee made the right decision in postponing its confirmation hearings for Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s nominee to be director of central intelligence. Now it must make an even tougher call--it must decide whether to insist on the testimony of witnesses who might directly link Gates to the Iran-Contra scandal, at the risk of letting wrong-doers go unpunished.

The Gates confirmation hearings were supposed to begin Monday, but committee members delayed them when a special prosecutor’s investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal took an unexpected turn.

Last Tuesday a former CIA official pleaded guilty in federal court to misleading Congress about the Reagan Administration’s sale of arms to Iran in order to raise money for Nicaragua’s Contra rebels. That raises the possibility that Gates did not tell Congress everything he knew about the illegal operation. Gates was deputy CIA director at the time and is currently a deputy national security adviser in the White House.

In pleading guilty, Alan D. Fiers, the former chief of the CIA’s task force on Central America, admitted he knew of the illegal arms dealings well before they were made public in November, 1986. Fiers said that he told unidentified CIA superiors that profits from arms sales to Tehran were being used to try to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. Gates was one of Fiers’ three superiors, along with then-CIA director William J. Casey and Clair George, then the agency’s director of operations.

It is already known that Casey was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal--indeed, he was among its principals. Fiers could provide the proverbial “smoking gun” that links Gates directly to the Iran-Contra scandal. Of course, similar allegations were made about Gates in early 1987, when he was first nominated to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Gates denied any prior knowledge of the matter at that time, but the issue was not fully explored because he withdrew his name from consideration after the allegations undermined his support in the Senate.

Some members of Congress have since said they think Gates got a bum rap and should have been confirmed in 1987. That may be so--and it’s still possible Gates will be confirmed this time around. But given Fiers’ guilty plea, some tough questions now have to be asked, even if that means Fiers gets off lightly in exchange for testifying before Congress.

That must be done not because we need to rehash an illegal covert operation whose spectacular failure has already been an embarrassment for the former officials involved--including former President Ronald Reagan. It must be done to reassure the public that the man Bush would put in charge of the nation’s intelligence gathering is also a man of integrity and sound judgment.