Testimony Supports Claim That Gates Politicized Data : CIA: Senate panel releases new information. Ex-analyst says nominee rejected report on Soviets because it ran counter to policy objectives.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released additional testimony Friday that supports allegations that CIA director-designate Robert M. Gates politicized intelligence assessments to support the policy biases of the Ronald Reagan Administration.

In a sworn statement received by the committee after the Gates confirmation hearings ended a week ago, former CIA analyst Wayne P. Limberg said that in 1986, Gates rejected a report that he had requested on Soviet aid to the Third World after it concluded that Soviet assistance was in fact declining.

“Mr. Gates only glanced at the project’s key judgments and threw the paper aside, warning us he never wanted to see this happen again. The paper was never published,” Limberg told the committee.

Limberg’s sworn statement was one of several previously unreleased affidavits contained in a lengthy staff report released Friday by the intelligence panel. The report both reinforces and amplifies allegations that Gates tailored intelligence estimates to suit policy objectives while serving as a senior CIA official in the late 1980s.

Although the report concluded that Gates had failed to answer “all of the allegations of politicization which were produced at the hearings,” committee sources said there were “no major surprises” that would be likely to derail Gates’ confirmation, which the committee voted, 11 to 4, last week to recommend to the full Senate.

No date for the floor debate on the nomination has been set, but an aide to Intelligence Committee Chairman David L. Boren (D-Okla.) said he expected the Senate to take up the nomination Tuesday or Wednesday.

Barring further surprises, Gates is expected to be confirmed by a comfortable majority of senators--many of whom have expressed a reluctance to engage in another divisive confirmation struggle so soon after the bruising fight over Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. But that equation could still change if the committee’s most influential member, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), changes his mind and decides to oppose Gates.

Nunn said last week that he was supporting Gates only with “serious reservations” and might vote against him on the floor if he does not receive “satisfactory answers” to several questions he sent the CIA concerning classified matters. A spokeswoman for Nunn said Friday that the Georgia senator, whose influence could sway between 10 and 20 votes on the floor, had not resolved his doubts and “still stands by his statement” of last week.

The 293-page staff report released late Friday to help senators decide how they will vote contained an exhaustive review of the conflicting testimony and documentary evidence available concerning the charges that Gates slanted intelligence estimates or knew more about the then-unfolding Iran-Contra affair than he has acknowledged.

Although there were no surprises, it contained new assertions that Gates suppressed intelligence assessments contradicting the anti-Soviet bias of his boss, the late CIA Director William J. Casey.

The most damaging was an account by Limberg, who was then a branch chief at the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, of Gates’ rejection of a report on Soviet Third World aid.

Limberg said that Gates summoned him and other analysts to a meeting in March, 1986, to criticize the Soviet department for believing that Soviet aid to the Third World was declining when Casey “sensed” it was increasing. “Knowing that we had precise, up-to-date figures at hand, I protested but was brushed aside,” Limberg said.

The meeting ended with Gates ordering a new report on Soviet aid to Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nicaragua and Mozambique, Limberg added.

The following week, the analysts gave Gates an inch-thick report that “unfortunately did not support Mr. Casey’s intuitions” but instead pointed “in the direction of at least a slowing in Soviet investment in the Third World,” Limberg continued.

Gates “only glanced at the project’s key judgments and threw the paper aside, warning us he never wanted to see this happen again.” he said.

Responding to the allegations in a letter to the committee this week, Gates said he did “not recall” the meetings with Limberg but that he doubts the analyst’s account of them was “balanced and accurate.”

However, one committee member who voted against Gates, Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S. C.), said in a dissenting view appended to the committee report that Limberg’s account strongly reinforced allegations from several other CIA analysts that the “cancer of politicization” spread throughout the CIA in the 1980s because of Casey and Gates.