Senate Panel Votes 11-4 for Gates Confirmation : The CIA: Democrats are sharply divided over the nominee. Backers predict swift victory on floor vote.

The Senate Intelligence Committee--its Democrats sharply divided over testimony about intelligence slanting, low morale and political turmoil inside the CIA--voted 11 to 4 Friday to recommend the confirmation of Robert M. Gates as the next director of central intelligence.

Dismissing parallels to the bitter brawl over Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, supporters of Gates predicted that the comfortable margin of victory will translate into a swift confirmation when his nomination goes to the Senate floor later this month.

Gates’ backers based much of their optimism on the decision by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the most influential member of the intelligence panel, to join Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and two other previously undecided Democrats in siding with the seven Republicans who voted for confirmation.

“He (Nunn) certainly will influence votes on the floor. No question about it,” said Sen. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), one of Gates’ strongest supporters on the committee.

Nunn, however, said that he voted for Gates only with “serious reservations,” and that he still might oppose the nominee on the floor if the CIA is not forthcoming with responses to questions for which it has yet to give him “satisfactory answers.”

He did not elaborate and aides would say only that Nunn’s questions referred to still-classified material that was not disclosed during the three weeks of public confirmation hearings that ended Oct. 4.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said that the agency “will do our very best to address” his request for more information. But an Administration official added he thinks that Nunn was engaging “in a little chest-beating” and that his concerns will not cause him to oppose Gates.

Noting that current and former CIA officials are still approaching the committee with information about Gates, some members and staff aides suggested that more problems could crop up for President Bush’s controversial nominee before the full Senate casts its vote--probably not before the last week of October.

One committee member who opposed Gates, Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), said that he is troubled by new, so far undisclosed allegations concerning Gates and South African black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela. “This week it was new allegations regarding South Africa and Nelson Mandela,” DeConcini said. “Will next week bring something more?”

Boren expressed the consensus of the committee, which received sharply conflicting testimony both about Gates’ knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal and about whether he had slanted intelligence reports on the Soviet Union to suit his own ideological biases and those of his superiors.

As a career intelligence officer who served in top management positions at the CIA until moving to the White House as deputy national security adviser in 1988, Gates brought a lot of “baggage” to the confirmation hearings, Boren acknowledged.

But while troubled by the allegations of intelligence slanting and Gates’ lack of recall about events related to Iran-Contra, the committee found no “smoking gun” to disqualify the nominee, no undisputed evidence to support “second-hand” allegations that he “systematically attempted to politicize or slant” intelligence, Boren said.

Committee vice chairman Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the principal accusations against Gates were made by Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst who charged that the nominee suppressed or rewrote intelligence estimates to exaggerate Soviet influence in the Third World during the 1980s, when he served first as deputy director for intelligence and later as deputy CIA director under the late William J. Casey.

But Goodman’s often emotional criticism of Gates was based largely on hearsay evidence and was flawed by “factual inaccuracies” that “vastly overstated” the case against Gates, Murkowski said.

While conceding that Gates’ abrasive personality, his rapid rise in the CIA and his often caustic criticism of other analysts’ work had “engendered more hard feelings than was necessary,” Murkowski said it was clear that the nominee, now 49, had matured and improved his management style in the years he has been outside the CIA.

The question now, his supporters said, is whether Gates is the right person to lead the agency into the post-Cold War era. The new director must preside over the inevitable budget cuts and reallocation of resources needed to shift the CIA’s focus away from the receding Soviet military threat and toward such problems as economic intelligence gathering and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the Third World, they said.

“The next director will immediately have to plunge into the process of radically changing the intelligence community to coincide with all the changes in the world,” Boren said. “This is no time to bring in a new director from the outside lacking in experience.”

Critics such as Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) countered that--for just those reasons--Gates is “the wrong man for the job.” The CIA, said Metzenbaum, “is in disarray,” and Gates, who as Casey’s deputy helped to engender many of the bad feelings that persist at the agency, “is not a leader who can galvanize a cohesive team out of the angry and demoralized agency he will inherit.”

Although not nearly as bitter as the Thomas confirmation hearings, the Intelligence Committee’s often heated deliberations bore similarities: the hard feelings created among members, the questions posed about the integrity of the confirmation process and the doubts raised about the motivation of people who leak confidential information.

The issue of leaks was of particular concern to the security-conscious Intelligence Committee, which was shocked to find Goodman’s originally classified testimony summarized in newspaper accounts. Rudman suggested that he knew who had leaked the documents and said that he was preparing an affidavit against the person responsible.

Rudman also denounced what he said was a “covert attempt” by CIA officials to influence the outcome of the hearings through “artful disinformation.”

While early skeptics such as Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) said they were won over by Gates’ forceful rebuttal of Goodman’s charges, the hearings failed to resolve a number of inconsistencies and allegations in the testimony of other witnesses who accused Gates of slanting intelligence.

DeConcini heatedly ticked off several examples, including an allegation by former CIA analyst Jennifer Glaudemans that Gates killed a 1983 memorandum about Libya and angrily berated its author, in front of witnesses, for reaching conclusions “inconsistent with Administration policy.” Gates never addressed the charge during the hearings.

In the aftermath of the Thomas debacle, the degree to which these and other allegations will be revisited on the Senate floor was not clear.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.