COLUMN LEFT/ GEORGE BLACK : Why Bring Dirty Old Ways to New World? : Robert Gates represents the worst of an obsolete spy cult.

“Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky has been dragged from his pedestal in the Moscow square that once bore his name. The KBG is under new command. And in a final symbolic act of surrender in the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev now proposes to cut Cuba adrift and dismantle the electronic listening post at Lourdes, just outside Havana.

Yet the CIA continues to behave as if nothing had happened, and George Bush still expects Congress to ratify his choice of Robert Gates, a man who epitomizes all that is worst about the obsolete cult of intelligence, as its director.

The U.S. and Soviet intelligence services have been joined at the hip since the Cold War began. There was symmetry, too, in the character of the men who spent 40 years spying on each other. Novelist John Le Carre described them best, with their odd mix of ideologues and cowboys and flawed idealists. Most of all, they were--and still are--chameleon-like bureaucrats who will follow each shift in the party line, or fight any newly designated enemy, in order to secure their own survival and privileges.

Even after the failed August coup, KGB operatives were told by their new chief to “work in the usual way.” Gates, meanwhile, will surely argue to Congress that the collapse of the Soviet Union means more work, not less.

The indictments of CIA officials Alan Fiers and Clair George for their part in the Iran-Contra affair, and the evidence that Gates was fully aware three years ago of the activities of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, show the extent of the agency’s degeneration. The defense of our “national security,” like the defense of their “socialism,” became a code word for doing whatever the intelligence community and the executive branch felt like doing in secret.

It was in the Vietnam era that covert operations became a way of life, a convenient way of insulating the President from the democratic process. Lying to Congress became as natural as brushing one’s teeth in the morning. When Gates (then No. 2 in the agency) was asked how William Casey (No. 1) and Clair George (No. 3) felt about Congress, he replied succinctly, “Their attitude toward the Hill was, ‘Screw ‘em.’ ” The sorriest part of the story is how willingly Capitol Hill submitted.

“Reform” proposals have begun to circulate. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) suggests that the State Department take over the functions of the CIA. Vincent Cannistraro, the agency’s former chief of counter-terrorism, calls the CIA a “dinosaur,” but only to argue for an expansion of its intelligence-gathering under the command of the Pentagon. None of these proposals confronts the way in which men like Robert Gates have corrupted the workings of American democracy.

While the KGB concentrated on rooting out the enemy within, the CIA’s mandate took it further afield. And in the name of fighting communism, it paid, trained and consorted with men who would feel right at home in a cell with Jeffrey Dahmer, the confessed Milwaukee serial killer.

Spare a thought for their victims. There’s a Chilean woman, now middle-aged, who lives in Washington D.C., enduring the memory of being repeatedly raped by Chilean secret policemen. On one occasion they used a live rat. Another woman, a Nicaraguan, was disemboweled by the Contras (do we still remember that U.S.-surrogate force?) and then had the head of her murdered husband stuffed in the open wound. Then there were the Filipino villagers of the 1950s, believers in vampires, who were terrorized by the sight of a dead nationalist guerrilla with two puncture wounds in his neck, strung upside down to drain the blood. That one was dreamed up by Col. Edward Lansdale, one of the CIA’s most revered heroes.

But few care now to remember those distant events in Asia and Latin America, just as few choose to recall Frank Church, Dick Clark and Otis Pike, honorable legislators who tried in the 1970s to rein in the Cold War cult of intelligence.

The end of the Cold War is a bad time for historians, who must contend with a tide of amnesia and revisionism on both sides. Citizens of the Soviet Union are now, perhaps understandably, repudiating the entire course of their history since 1917, even the initial impulse to escape from serfdom and the Czars. And in the West--well, the war is won, and what victors ever stopped to scrutinize the methods of their victory?

The easy verdict on the Cold War is that the bad guys lost. But in a less visible sense the bad guys also won. If Roberts Gates should be confirmed as director of the CIA, it would show that Congress is content for them to control our future just as they have controlled our past.