White House Maps Gates Hearings Strategy

President Bush on Wednesday called Republican leaders to the White House to go over the battle plan for hearings next week on the nomination of Robert M. Gates to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, as the Administration braces for another tough confirmation fight.

According to participants in the session, the strategy will focus on ways to dispel Senate doubts about Gates’ insistence that--while holding a high-ranking CIA position in the mid-1980s--he was aware only of the barest outlines of the Iran-Contra affair, in which both his former boss and subordinates have since been implicated.

With the late CIA Director William J. Casey now believed to have played a central role in the scandal, Gates and his allies on the Senate Intelligence Committee intend to make a case that he was cut out of key decisions about agency operations and that his job as the second-ranking CIA official was “like being vice president,” one informed source said.

The planning session was convened as the White House adopted a more public tack on what has been a largely invisible bid to muster support for Gates, now Bush’s deputy national security adviser. The low-key strategy has contrasted sharply with a vigorous campaign on behalf of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, whose confirmation hearings began Tuesday.

Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater disclosed that senior White House officials have begun to gather daily in working “quite aggressively” on behalf of Gates. And President Bush vowed to speak out with “strong supportive words on that one again, too” when Gates faces the Intelligence Committee next Monday.

Some of Gates’ allies have criticized the White House for remaining so mute, warning that its passivity has allowed accusations to go undeflected.

The spokesman conceded that “sensitive national security interests” involved in the Gates nomination have forced the White House to adopt a “somewhat different response.”

Administration officials have said in the past that a principal obstacle to the Gates nomination is that it confronts them with questions that cannot be conclusively answered. The Gates paper trail appears to provide no definitive proof about what he did and did not know.

In seeking to blunt criticism in advance, Sen. Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska, the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee, told reporters that the panel’s investigators had uncovered no conclusive evidence that Gates knew more about the Iran-Contra affair than he has previously admitted.

The senator was among five key Republican lawmakers who met in the Oval Office on Wednesday with Bush and other top White House officials to plot a strategy for the hearing that participants characterized as a “compartmentalization” defense.

They said that Gates’ supporters would seek to demonstrate that Casey kept his deputy in the dark about Iran-Contra by working clandestinely with operatives like Clair E. George, the agency’s former deputy director for operations, who was indicted last week for involvement in the scandal.

But a senior Democratic aide on the committee said: “Some people are not going to be reassured by his knowing nothing.”