Impassioned Testimony Against Gates Surprises Bush Strategists : Intelligence: Administration officials maintain the fate of CIA nomination hinges on nominee’s credibility when he retakes witness stand.

Strategists for the Bush Administration conceded Wednesday that they were caught unawares by the vehemence of the testimony against Robert M. Gates, and said that the fate of his nomination to head the CIA hinges on his credibility when he retakes the witness stand as early as today.

Administration officials and outsiders with experience in the confirmation arena said that Gates is unlikely to repeat the apology strategy that he employed successfully earlier in the hearings to defuse charges about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair.

To offer a similar mea culpa in response to accusations that he slanted intelligence findings would severely damage Gates’ credibility, the attribute that a CIA director needs most, these sources suggested.

On the other hand, Gates is likely to try to avoid a direct assault on his accusers, who have portrayed him as an intolerant boss who twisted the analysis of key intelligence issues to match the views of senior policy-makers. A direct attack would simply cement Gates’ image as a heavy, noted one former Administration official with extensive congressional expertise.

As a result, the former official said, “you don’t attack their motivations, you let someone else do that”--presumably supporters on the Senate Intelligence Committee who already have questioned the credibility of Gates’ opponents.

The nominee’s likely role, one Administration official suggested, will be simply to argue that the disagreements between Gates and his accusers represent honest differences of opinion and that as a manager, it was his job to make the difficult decisions about which analysts were right.

The hope, Gates supporters said, is that the senators, most of whom have had their own experiences resolving disagreements among strong-willed staff members, will sympathize with Gates the manager, rather than with his unhappy subordinates. The problem, however, is that the hearings could simply dissolve into a swearing contest--Gates against his accusers--perhaps leaving the senators unwilling to risk putting Gates in charge of the nation’s intelligence community.

The current dilemma is a far cry from the plans of Administration strategists, who spent months concentrating on how to handle the accusations about Gates’ Iran-Contra background and who thought only a week ago that the confirmation was in the bag.

The problem is not the substance of the charges against Gates. The specific accusations relating to slanting of intelligence reports on Iran, on Soviet actions in the Third World and on the possibility of Soviet involvement in the attempt to kill Pope John Paul II have been circulating for several weeks.

But Gates’ partisans in the Administration and on the committee had not anticipated the vehemence of the testimony or the emotional impact of a parade of CIA analysts appearing in public to discuss the often bitter internal disagreements that normally lie hidden behind the agency’s intense secrecy.