Gates Panel Told Details of ‘80s Aid to Iraq : Intelligence: Charges that the nominee slanted reports on the Soviets are heard. Senators say they have no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing.

The Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior CIA officials Wednesday about the role that CIA director-designate Robert M. Gates played in providing sensitive intelligence data to Iraq but found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, key Democrats on the committee said.

As Gates’ confirmation hearings moved toward next week’s expected conclusion, the committee went behind closed doors to question Thomas A. Twetten, the CIA’s chief of covert operations, about still highly classified aspects of the secret support the Ronald Reagan Administration gave to Iraq in the mid-1980s. It also heard from several former agency officers who alleged that Gates suppressed dissenting opinions and tailored intelligence assessments about the Soviet Union to suit the Reagan Administration’s ideological biases.

Although details remained classified, it was clear from the comments by emerging senators that neither the allegations of intelligence slanting nor the CIA’s role in supplying Iraq with intelligence on Iran would prevent the committee from voting to recommend Gates’ confirmation.

“Nothing I heard about the allegations (about Iraq) looks like it will damage the nomination,” Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) said, adding that he was now “inclined” to vote for Gates.

Gates’ supporters confidently predicted that his nomination will be overwhelmingly approved, and even his sharpest critic, Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), conceded that Gates appears to have cleared his final hurdles to his confirmation as director of central intelligence. “The nomination is not a fait accompli yet. Some members still have misgivings (about Gates) . . . but it does appear he will be confirmed,” Metzenbaum said.

However, the ease with which Gates has deflected probing about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal and other questions arising from his 25-year-long intelligence career has embittered some members and provoked charges of partisanship in the only committee in Congress that, like the agency it oversees, is supposed to be free of political bias.

“The Republicans have closed ranks and made up their minds to support him no matter what” comes out of the hearings, Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) complained.

Backed by a few key Democrats including Committee Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.), the seven Republicans on the 15-member committee have “drawn their wagons around Gates” and made it more difficult for his critics to “develop a momentum” that might sway still undecided members their way, DeConcini said.

Boren and other supporters strenuously dispute suggestions that the scrutiny has not been rigorous.

Declaring he wanted to keep the hearings as open as necessary, Boren announced Wednesday that the committee was extending its session so that some of the intelligence slanting allegations can be aired in public next week. After hearing some of it in secret, “we determined there was less information of a classified nature than we had expected . . . and that we could open the process up,” he said.

But while defending the process as thorough, some supporters conceded there is “a general inclination to put Iran-Contra to rest” by accepting Gates’ explanation of discrepancies in the testimony as problems of recollection. Because Gates has been “extraordinarily open and frank” in briefing the committee on intelligence issues over the past several years, there is “a general feeling that he has earned this nomination, his memory lapses over Iran-Contra notwithstanding,” one senior committee source said.

“Do I think we are incessantly pursuing Iran-Contra to our graves? Yes I do! Do I believe we should continue to let Iran-Contra dominate what we do and say? No I don’t!” added Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), expressing what appears to be the committee’s consensus sentiment.

With the Iran-Contra hurdle cleared, Gates faced only one more set of obstacles to his confirmation in the form of questions about intelligence slanting and his role in supplying Iraq with intelligence during that country’s war with Iran in the mid-1980s.

In the closed hearings on Wednesday, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) questioned Twetten and two other CIA officials, Inspector General Fred Hitz and general counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf, about the extent of that assistance and the failure to disclose it to Congress at the time.

Sources who attended the meeting said Bradley contended that the intelligence the agency provided Iraq between 1984 and 1987, when Gates was director of intelligence and later deputy director of the CIA, exceeded what was permissible both under existing law and the guidelines of a secret National Security Council directive that was used to establish the framework for the Reagan Administration’s controversial tilt toward Iraq in the mid-1980s.

That tilt included giving the Iraqis advice on how to organize its best military units and how to use them to retake the Faw peninsula, breaking the Iranian siege of Basra in the closing months of the war. The CIA participated by giving the Iraqis satellite information on Iranian troop deployments and other strategic targets.

The panel heard from six witnesses--two former analysts and four current CIA officials--called to testify on allegations that Gates sought to keep dissenting views out of a 1985 memorandum that exaggerated Iran’s vulnerability to Soviet influence. That assessment was later used to justify the secret sale of arms to Iran. at the beginning of what became the Iran-Contra affair.