Bush Assails Challenges to CIA Nominee : Iran-Contra: President shows his anger at the Senate’s delay in the confirmation process. He also calls on the special counsel to end his probe.

For nearly 15 minutes Friday, President Bush angrily denounced challenges to his nomination of Robert M. Gates to be director of central intelligence, dismissively cutting off questioners as he delivered a bitter monologue in Gates’ defense and calling on the Iran-Contra independent counsel to wrap up his investigation.

In an extraordinary session with reporters that reflected the depth of his anger over the Senate’s delay in considering the nomination as new avenues for investigation have presented themselves, Bush said that Gates should not be left “twisting out there” and that the Senate “ought not to panic and run like a covey of quail because somebody has made an allegation against a man whose word I trust and who, as I understand it, hasn’t been fingered by what’s coming out of this process.”

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee postponed its hearings on Gates, seeking answers to new questions arising from the latest disclosures about CIA complicity in the diversion of Iran arms sales profits to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua during the Ronald Reagan Administration, when Gates was the agency’s deputy director.

The committee wants to question Alan D. Fiers, a former CIA official who admitted in federal court this week that he had told his superiors about the illegal diversion months before it became public on Nov. 25, 1986.

Gates is facing a difficult road toward the top job at the CIA for a second time. Four years ago, his nomination to the post was derailed by the Iran-Contra scandal, and he asked that the nomination be withdrawn. For the last 2 1/2 years, he has been Bush’s deputy national security adviser, a post that does not require Senate confirmation.

As Bush was walking away Friday morning from a brief conversation with reporters after saying farewell to Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, an overnight guest at the President’s vacation home, he turned on his heels to respond to a question about Gates.

“Isn’t the people that might be accusing him of something--shouldn’t it be their responsibility under American sense of fair play?” Bush said.

“What is it when we hear something leaked to a newspaper we all run for cover because we’re--not me, because I know Bob Gates and I have total confidence in the man’s integrity and honor,” Bush added.

“What we’re entitled to in this country is fair play--innocence ‘til guilty,” Bush said. “Yes, the Senate has an obligation. But let’s call these witnesses that are supposed to know something bad. Isn’t Bob Gates entitled to that? I mean, why let them run for cover and say, ‘Let’s hang it out all over next summer?’ ”

Three times as reporters attempted to ask further questions, he cut them off to continue his lecture, at times wagging his finger in irritation, and saying, “may I finish?”

The debate over the nomination has yet to produce signs of deep concern within the White House staff--even as it brings out public displays of presidential anger.

“We’ve had a team working this nomination, but there are no changes we need from an organizational standpoint,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. “We think we’re doing it the right way, working with the committee.”

Gates and Brent Scowcroft, the President’s national security adviser, have spoken with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is considering the nomination, Fitzwater said, adding, “we don’t have any concern about our ability to respond” to whatever allegations are raised.

“We think he’ll be confirmed,” Fitzwater said.

Among those close to Bush, it is clear that the President’s anger over the trouble the nomination has run into is directed not so much at the Senate as at independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh and his office--raising questions about whether the timing of the Fiers case was tied to the scheduled beginning of the Senate committee’s formal consideration of the Gates nomination.

At the same time, Bush has become extremely irritated that the hearings’ delay is giving Gates no formal opportunity to immediately confront any accusers and respond to specific allegations.

“This idea that it will be served by leaving it out all summer; you know and I know there’ll be questions every single day: What about this allegation? What about that? Let’s get to the bottom of it,” Bush said, urging the Senate committee to hear under oath any specific accusations.

“We can’t respond to the President,” said a spokeswoman for Walsh.

Mary Belcher, the spokeswoman, did note that Walsh on Thursday said his office would do its work quickly but thoroughly, and said that the five-year statute of limitations begins to run out next October on some of the possible crimes in any CIA cover-up.

Bush said that if Gates wants the nomination delayed, “fine.”

“But why wait?” Bush asked, adding that some of the testimony “has been going on for four years.”

Meanwhile, the President said he saw no political motivations behind the Senate delay.

But, calling on the Senate to demonstrate greater courage, he said: “What I do worry about is that there is some pusillanimity--faint heartedness. You hear a rumor and then you run for cover; you get under the bush like a quail and hope that you don’t get flushed out for a while.”

To a suggestion that “obviously, everything came across (Gates’) desk” when he was the CIA’s deputy director, Bush, a former director of the agency, responded: “No, obviously it might not have. That’s sometimes the way it works in a compartmented system.”

When asked whether Walsh should “get on with his investigation,” Bush cut off the question and said: “He’s been on with it for four years. He ought to get on with it and off with it, in my view.”

He said that Walsh should make public any information he has that relates to Gates, but “it’s my understanding that he doesn’t have any.”

Repeatedly, Bush recalled the questions that have been asked about him in connection with rumors that the Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 sought to delay the release of the 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran until after the election that year, lest their release before Election Day tip the campaign in Jimmy Carter’s favor.

Bush, who was Reagan’s successful vice presidential candidate, has denied any involvement in such a scheme, which, according to the rumors, involved the late William J. Casey, the campaign’s chairman who eventually became director of the CIA.

“How long can you keep denying your knowledge or involvement on something that didn’t happen as far as I know. . . . It just seems a little weird that it keeps going,” he said.