Inquiry Is Likely to Tarnish CIA’s Image : Hearings: Senators express alarm at agency’s ‘poor performance’ in anticipating vast changes in recent global politics.

The first day of confirmation hearings for prospective Central Intelligence Agency chief Robert M. Gates reflected Congress’ profound disappointment and frustration over the recent performance of the agency as a whole.

In expressing bipartisan alarm and even amazement at the CIA’s failure to anticipate the Soviet upheaval and Iraq’s attack on Kuwait, senators set a tone for an inquiry likely to tarnish the reputation of the agency if not the chances of Gates’ nomination.

“An institutional renewal is not easy, and it has to begin with an acknowledgement of problems,” declared Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.).

And Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) bluntly charged that the CIA’s “poor performance” has left the government “behind the curve” in responding to changes around the globe.

In language that seemed at times almost despairing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee suggested that only a wholesale overhaul might serve as a remedy. And with one senator charging that Gates reflected a CIA penchant for “denying reality,” some wondered aloud whether an official linked so closely to the agency’s past ought now to lead it into the future.

Gates, currently serving as deputy national security adviser in the White House, is President Bush’s choice to replace retiring CIA Director William H. Webster.

Indeed, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) suggested that it was Gates’ own preoccupation with the Soviet Union that caused the nation’s intelligence community to overlook danger signs that should have alerted it to Saddam Hussein’s designs on Kuwait, and might have averted a war.

And because Gates’ voice proved so influential in portraying the Soviet Union as resistant to change, Moynihan told the panel it would be a mistake “to gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis.”

“On this one,” Moynihan said, quoting Adm. Stansfield Turner, a former CIA chief, “the corporate view missed by a mile.”

The bitter assessments of the series of agency failures, voiced in many senators’ opening statements, presented Gates with an obstacle he was not forced to confront four years ago, when he was first nominated to take over the CIA post.

At that time, questions from the Intelligence Committee focused almost exclusively on Gates’ role in the Iran-Contra affair, and ultimately caused him to ask that his nomination be withdrawn after he concluded that the process was not going well.

The renewed interrogation on that subject Monday afternoon made clear that the issue had not gone away. But while the Congress of 1987 was most alarmed by what had gone wrong on the covert side of the CIA, senators made clear Monday that the recent mistakes have made them most troubled by the agency’s record in analyzing intelligence--a function in which Gates has played a principal role.

The nominee seemed to acknowledge the force of that criticism as he conceded with some candor in his opening statement that his “long track record” as an expert on Soviet affairs included a fundamental miscalculation.

“Who would have thought just five years ago we would stand where we are today?” asked Gates, who had predicted repeatedly that Soviet hard-liners would ultimately triumph. “Certainly not the intelligence analyst sitting before you. Talk about humbling experiences.”

Gates also acknowledged the need for reform as he called for the agency to change “dramatically” some of the ways in which it gathers information around the world and then shares its conclusions with other government agencies.

Without such reform, he warned, U.S. intelligence agencies may be doomed to “confront irrelevance and growing sentiment for their dismantlement.”

But as a man fiercely loyal to an agency he has served for nearly all of his 25-year career, Gates seemed to take offense at allegations that it had failed in its task. He quoted former President John F. Kennedy as he contended that “CIA successes remain a secret, while its failures are trumpeted.”

That defense nevertheless appeared unlikely to allay the powerful concerns of influential committee members who argued that the agency’s failure to foresee crucial recent events has shown that it remains fixated on outdated views of the world.

The sharp attacks reflect a wider concern voiced earlier this year when Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf complained publicly that the intelligence community had proven of scant use in providing assistance in the war against Iraq.

Bradley, who has emerged as the leading Senate critic of the nominee, at once broadened that line of criticism and made it more personal as he blamed Gates for the agency’s earlier neglect in choosing not to “refocus significant sufficient intelligence resources on the emerging Iraqi threat.”

Only “enemy stupidity,” the senator suggested, prevented “this failure of intelligence” from becoming “catastrophic.” He charged that Gates’ apparent fixation on the Soviet specter reflected an “entrenched” CIA culture apt to “deny reality.”

At the same time, even some senators supportive of Gates, while exempting the nominee from their criticism, voiced concern about what D’Amato called the “many cases” in which “we don’t have the people in place to give us the kinds of insights we need.”

And Moynihan, a former vice chairman of the intelligence committee who has suggested that the CIA could simply be abolished, assumed a curmudgeonly role in laying out a long list of cases in which he said the agency had proven “incredibly wrong.”

Noting that the CIA in 1986 published a document mistakenly reporting that the East German economy was wealthier on a per capita basis than that of West Germany, Moynihan said it was indicative of a deeper flaw that no agency official saw that conclusion as “something incongruous.”

“Any taxi driver in Berlin could have told you that wasn’t so,” he said.