Gates Criticizes Covert CIA Paramilitary Acts : Intelligence: Nominee says secret operations bring trouble. He is pressed on past failures and Iran-Contra.

CIA Director-designate Robert M. Gates, pressed to explain a series of past failures in intelligence-gathering and covert operations, acknowledged Tuesday that he had not foreseen the “unthinkable” changes sweeping the Soviet Union and expressed strong reservations about involving the agency in future paramilitary actions around the globe.

On his second day of confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee, President Bush’s nominee came under intense questioning from senators seeking more information about the CIA’s past activities and its likely future course if Gates is chosen to lead it.

Questions about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair continued to dog Gates, who was deputy director of the CIA when the scandal unfolded in the mid-1980s. Gates later joined the White House staff as deputy national security adviser.

Critics of the agency’s past performance also sought to broaden the focus of the confirmation hearings by probing Gates about intelligence mistakes in other parts of the world--from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Angola.

Under questioning, Gates revealed that the CIA’s intelligence-gathering abilities in the Soviet Union remain “somewhat limited,” because the United States has only two consulates outside of Moscow and must rely for information “on what we hear from travelers.”

Asked about covert operations, Gates said that despite successes in Angola and Afghanistan, he was “profoundly skeptical about the value of covert paramilitary action” as an activity in which the CIA should engage in the future.

“I am not aware of a single one since the founding of the CIA that has ever remained a secret, and they have repeatedly embroiled the agency and the government in controversy and difficulty,” he said.

“Unless there were fairly broad support for one of these programs, it would be unwise to use that kind of (activity) as an instrument of American foreign policy.”

One of Gates’ toughest critics, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), raised an issue that supporters conceded could pose the biggest challenge to his confirmation. Bradley suggested that Gates was involved in, or at least had knowledge of, what the senator asserted were illegal covert activities undertaken by the CIA to help Iraq win its eight-year war with Iran in 1988.

Bradley, who has alluded to highly classified intelligence information concerning U.S.-Iraqi relations, asked Gates if he had been aware of any unauthorized covert activities on behalf of Iraq during his tenure as CIA deputy director from 1986 to 1989.

“No, sir, I don’t believe so,” Gates replied after a brief pause.

Pressed on the subject, Gates acknowledged that he was involved in the then-secret U.S. effort to assist Iraq by passing along intelligence information about Iranian military capabilities in the final stages of the war. He said he believed that all of the CIA’s activities were legal, but he noted that the law was “fairly vague” on “liaison relationships” like the one with Iraq.

Committee Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.) interrupted Gates’ next answer, urging that questions about Iraq be saved for a closed hearing to be held next week. “We are verging on classified information . . . we cannot discuss in open session,” Boren said.

Bradley later told reporters that he would attempt during next week’s session to establish that, under the Ronald Reagan and Bush administrations, the CIA may have provided information to Iraq without proper authorization or notification to Congress.

On the issue of Iran-Contra, persistent questioning failed to scratch the composure that Gates has maintained as some senators have sought to disprove his assertion that he knew nothing at the time of the agency’s complicity in covering up the biggest scandal of the Reagan presidency.

During the first day of confirmation hearings, it became clear that Gates’ strategy for dealing with questions about Iran-Contra would be to disarm his critics by acknowledging that he should have known more about the illegal diversion of Iran arms sales profits to Nicaragua’s rebels. By the end of the second day of questioning, it became clear that the strategy was working.

Although Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) accused Gates of being a “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil” deputy who deliberately closed his eyes to the scandal so he could continue his rapid rise in the CIA, most senators praised Gates’ “candor” and predicted that he would be confirmed.

Even Metzenbaum, in a televised interview Tuesday, said it appeared that Gates would win confirmation. He cited the apparent support of Republican lawmakers, in contrast with GOP opposition four years ago when Gates was first nominated to become CIA director. Gates withdrew from consideration in 1987 when it became clear that his confirmation was doubtful.

Even more remarkable than Gates’ acknowledgment of misjudgments concerning Iran-Contra, however, was his ready acknowledgement of other CIA failures over the past decade--shortcomings he promised to remedy if confirmed as CIA director. “Sometimes it (the CIA) has been wrong,” he said, “and I think we should admit it when we’re wrong.”

Although denying allegations that he slanted intelligence reporting on the Soviet Union to conform agency analyses to his own conservative views, Gates made a key concession: He said he “may have erred” in giving too much weight to the Soviet military threat and in disagreeing with other agency analysts who predicted that the Soviets would actually cut back on their defense spending. “I was wrong,” he told the committee.

Reminded by Bradley that he had continually dismissed the possibility of democratic change in the Soviet Union, Gates conceded that “we have all learned some important lessons . . . in terms of thinking the unthinkable.”

Gates also conceded errors on the part of the CIA in a number of key areas over the past decade:

* In Iran, CIA assessments overstated the extent of internal turmoil under the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The inaccurate estimates were responsible, in part, for persuading the Reagan Administration to sell arms to so-called Iranian moderates in exchange for the return of American hostages. Gates said he had played a personal role in the preparation of the erroneous estimates and had persuaded State Department officials not to protest the CIA’s assessment.

* In Iraq, not only did the CIA underestimate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s army in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, but also it failed to foresee efforts by the Iraqi government to develop nuclear weapons. Gates attributed the mistake to “technological arrogance.” He said the agency’s analysts assumed that Iraq could not develop nuclear weapons because it lacked the sophisticated technology available in the West.

* In Angola, agency analysts predicted that the Communist-backed regime of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos would not be interested in negotiations with the rebels supported by the United States. A settlement has since been negotiated, he noted, and Dos Santos visited the White House on Monday.

* In November, 1986, Gates made a speech in which he erroneously predicted that the Soviet Union would test a ground-based laser defense against ballistic missiles by the end of the decade. Gates denied that he made the prediction to support the Administration’s request for funding of the “Star Wars” missile defense system. “I was not intentionally trying to support the Administration’s policy,” he said, adding that his information had come from reliable sources. “I didn’t make that stuff up,” he said. “I wouldn’t know a ground-based laser from a shoeshine box.”

* In the war against drugs, Gates said, the agency was slow to realize that drug trafficking posed a national security threat to the United States. He acknowledged that the CIA’s 1984 Latin American intelligence estimate failed to mention the involvement of the Colombian drug cartel in Mexico.

* In its involvement with the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit & Commerce International, the CIA failed to inform the Justice Department of information it had obtained about money laundering and other illegal activity by the bank. In the mid-1980s, Gates said, the CIA informed the Treasury and the comptroller of the currency about BCCI’s unlawful activity. He said CIA officials had no way of knowing that the Treasury would fail to act on the information.

* In the Persian Gulf War, allied commander H. Norman Schwarzkopf complained that CIA intelligence was of little use to the military. Gates said that, whereas the CIA is primarily “a peacetime agency,” it had made preparations for providing military intelligence in the event of global thermonuclear war. He said the agency had not made similar preparations for a massive conventional war. “We didn’t have very good procedures for CIA support,” he conceded.

Tuesday’s hearings concluded Gates’ public testimony before the Intelligence Committee, which will reconvene Thursday to begin taking testimony from present and former CIA officials.