Robert Gates Is Not Suited to Head the CIA, Beilenson Says

Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles), a former chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he opposes the confirmation of Robert M. Gates, President Bush’s nominee to head the CIA.

Beilenson, who chaired the oversight committee until January, said in an interview that he was deeply troubled by allegations that Gates improperly slanted intelligence assessments regarding the Soviet Union and Iran when he was deputy CIA director.

Moreover, with the Soviet threat vastly diminished, Beilenson said Gates’ background as a Soviet analyst makes him ill-suited to lead an agency that must redirect its priorities away from this focus.

As a House member, Beilenson does not have a vote in the Senate confirmation process. But he gained considerable familiarity with the CIA during his tenure as chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1989 and 1990 and as a panel member for seven years. He has dealt with Gates as well, primarily during Gates’ tenure as a National Security Council official in recent years.

“He’s clearly someone who knows his way around the intelligence bureaucracy and has a great amount of experience, both there and close to the President and, in that case, is competent to handle the job,” Beilenson said. But “the CIA needs a different kind of leadership, in my opinion.”

Beilenson said Gates’ apparent inability to divorce his hard-line views toward the Soviet Union--which he shared with then-CIA Director William J. Casey--from the intelligence that he provided casts doubt on his fitness. As examples, the lawmaker cited Gates’ assertion that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan reflected increased Soviet influence in the Third World--when the U.S.S.R.’s influence was actually waning--and Gates’ order to subordinates to prepare a report that made “the case for Soviet involvement” in the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

Finally, Beilenson cited the charge that Gates pressed the State Department to drop its opposition to selling arms to so-called Iranian moderates in 1985. The arms sale led to the Iran-Contra scandal--seriously damaging the Reagan Administration.

“He’s both been wrong in some major areas and he’s been, as others suggested, too willing, apparently, to be supportive of his political superiors”--particularly Casey, Beilenson said. “It leads one to have doubts about him.”

Moreover, Beilenson said Gates, who has spent much of his career as a Soviet analyst, is being considered to run the agency at a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union means that the CIA will redirect many of its resources from countering the Soviet threat to a range of new activities.

Beilenson said this should include preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as sophisticated conventional weapons; contributing to anti-terrorism and anti-narcotics efforts, and monitoring international compliance with environmental treaties and other agreements.

“Intelligence obviously faces new challenges and a new time, and you need someone who has a wide-ranging, roving mind, someone who has a lot of imagination,” Beilenson said.

“I would have preferred that the President found someone who might be more suited to the new, as yet mostly undefined, needs and uses of intelligence in the decade ahead and not someone who had spent most of his life assessing Soviet capabilities and intentions that will no longer be our major concern.”