Boren, Cranston Support CIA Nominee : Intelligence: Chairman of committee says an insider is needed at the agency. With 2 Democrats backing Gates, panel’s approval is now assured.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday declared his support for Robert M. Gates as the next director of the CIA, saying that doubts about his role in the Iran-Contra affair are outweighed by the need for an insider who can “hit the ground running” and deal with the revolutionary changes occurring in the world.

“Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.) said in announcing his “enthusiastic” support for the career intelligence officer on the eve of a committee vote to recommend Gates’ confirmation to the full Senate.

“The next director of the Central Intelligence Agency will preside over the most sweeping changes in the intelligence community since the CIA was created. We simply do not have the time for someone from the outside . . . to learn all the ropes,” Boren said.

Within hours of Boren’s announcement, one of the committee’s undecided Democrats, Sen. Alan Cranston of California, announced that he, too, will vote for Gates.

“I don’t believe the charges leveled against him have stood up under scrutiny,” Cranston said. “His record isn’t perfect. But whose is? Reforms are needed at the CIA and I believe that what Bob Gates has learned will make him a fine reformer.”

With the seven Republicans on the 15-member panel solidly behind Gates, the two Democratic votes mean that Gates is assured of winning the committee’s favorable recommendation on his nomination to succeed retired CIA Director William H. Webster with at least nine votes.

But a more crucial committee vote will be that of Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who carries more influence on the Senate floor and who, on the eve of the vote, was described by his aides as still “very concerned” about allegations that Gates slanted intelligence assessments to please policy-makers while serving as a top CIA official in the 1980s.

If Nunn and two other Democrats who are also undecided vote against Gates, the nomination could still face an uphill fight on the Senate floor, Republican strategists conceded. Committee members who have indicated that they will vote against Gates include Democrats Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina and Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who formally announced his opposition to the nominee Thursday.

Even though he insisted that he had only recently come to a decision to support Gates, Boren’s announcement came as no surprise. Republicans on the committee have counted the chairman as among Gates’ supporters since he was nominated by President Bush this summer. Some committee staff members privately have complained that he did too much to help the controversial nomination.

Boren strongly defended the exhaustive and often bitter confirmation hearings as “thorough and fair” and said that he had thought “long and hard” about the negative evidence emerging on Gates before deciding that, “on balance . . . (he) is well-equipped and well-qualified to be the next director of central intelligence.”

Boren said that, in weighing thousands of pages of testimony and other evidence, he had personally been most troubled by Gates’ claim to have been ignorant of the CIA’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. “While not guilty of malfeasance, I think (Gates) might be . . . guilty of nonfeasance. He did not aggressively pursue . . . information that came his way” that should have alerted him to the affair, Boren said.

Boren said that he gave the allegations of intelligence slanting less weight because they came largely from former CIA officials who for the most part had only secondhand knowledge of the charges that Gates tailored CIA assessments of the Soviet Union to support the conservative bias of the late CIA director William J. Casey.

On balance, he said, Gates’ 25 years of experience, first at the CIA and since 1988 as deputy national security adviser at the White House, make him the best person to restructure the agency at a time when it must quickly shift its resources away from the receding Soviet military threat to problems in the Middle East and the Third World.

“There are times when you need an outsider, such as when Judge Webster was made director in 1987. . . . Now if we’re going to bring about changes without unnecessary delay, without on-the-job-training, we need someone from the inside,” Boren said.

Arguing the opposite view as he formally declared his opposition to Gates, Bradley said that only “a new leader who has no association in any way with the abuses of power” that took place during the Casey years can restore the CIA’s credibility.

“We need someone who will look anew at the world, without the blinders of the past,” Bradley said. “To those who say the CIA needs an insider who knows the game, I say we need to realize there is a new game. The Cold War is over.”