The CIA’s Rocky Balboa Faces Even More Beatings : Intelligence: Gates wants more human spies, but until the agency speaks the languages of tomorrow’s trouble spots, he’s whistling in the dark.

Eager to get started as America’s top spymaster, Robert M. Gates arrived at CIA headquarters on his first day at work even before the sun. Newly confirmed as director of Central Intelligence, Gates appeared more like Rocky Balboa than James Bond after his bruising three-year struggle for the post. Behind him are the accusations of slanting reports to conform to the views of the White House and charges that he either knew or should have known about the CIA’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Ahead of him lie questions concerning the role of U.S. intelligence in a world now devoid of its age-old arch-enemy, world communism.

During his confirmation hearing, Gates indicated that he would beef up the agency’s traditional human intelligence-collection effort, getting more live spies out into the field. But the chances of that happening, at least in the near future, is almost nil. To recruit spies, you need people who at least speak the local language, and this has long been an Achilles’ heel for the CIA. For decades, the agency had one target, the Soviet Union, and in-depth training in Third World languages was virtually nonexistent. When a Farsi linguist was needed during the arms-for-hostages negotiations with Iran, it was necessary to pull former agency employees out of retirement.

Today, a world crisis can break out anywhere. This year it was the Persian Gulf, next year it may be the Horn of Africa. Even recruiting spies in the Soviet Union has completely changed. To really find out what is going on, it is necessary to have people who speak the local tongues of the breakaway republics. Once an adequate supply of language-qualified intelligence officers becomes available, it still will take years for them to develop networks of sources and informants.

For now and into the foreseeable future, intelligence collection will be left to the steel-skinned electronic spies. This means that Gates, sometimes accused of being difficult to get along with, will have to share much of his power as spymaster with Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who is charged with running the numerous agencies responsible for high-tech espionage. This includes the enormous National Security Agency, which breaks codes and eavesdrops on foreign communications, and the national Reconnaissance Office, located in the Pentagon, which directs the spy-satellite program.

As the Soviet Union and the East Bloc move down on the CIA’s Most Wanted List, Gates is elevating economic intelligence and information on drug trafficking. Both are areas of enormous potential abuse by the intelligence community and areas, given questions about Gates’ behavior during Iran-Contra, where the new director should be watched closely.

The issue of which foreign economic targets are acceptable and what should be done with the intelligence collected are among the thorniest questions in the spy world today. Some see nothing wrong with targeting foreign businesses and then passing the information on to corporate America. But the potential for harm to our foreign relations with friends and allies, as well as the question of just which companies should benefit from the intelligence, has frightened many others.

Equally troublesome to many is the talk of using the nation’s highly secret and powerful intelligence collection capabilities for domestic law-enforcement purposes, including drug trafficking and money laundering. In the early 1970s, for example, the federal drug agency was turned down when it sought authority to bug all the pay phones in New York’s Grand Central Station to catch drug dealers. As a result, the agency turned to the NSA, which secretly agreed to perform the task.

Even as many in the intelligence community worry about getting involved in helping enforce domestic laws, they fear that once a case gets to open court, there is a good chance they may be forced to reveal the sources and methods of their intelligence collection and thus jeopardize them.

For years throughout the Reagan Administration, the intelligence community, like the Pentagon, received enormous increases in funding. Now with the ending of the Cold War and the pressures of recession, it will be up to Gates to do some cutting. One likely target will be covert-action specialists in the Operations Directorate. Gates, who came from the analytical side of the agency and is the first director promoted from within with no experience on the operations side, is said to have little love for the agency’s dirty-tricks specialists, especially in light of his Iran-Contra troubles. But, as former director Stansfield Turner discovered, cutting the covert-action officers can be very hazardous to morale, and with many in the agency already complaining about Gates’ sometimes abrasive personality, this could be another trouble area.

But the biggest challenge to is to overcome both the image and the reality that the CIA is behind the curve when it comes to predicting major events, as it was with the invasion of Kuwait and the attempted coup in the Soviet Union. Until then, Gates, like Rocky, had better be prepared to take a beating.