Helms Fires GOP Staffers on Foreign Relations Panel : Senate: In a dramatic shake-up, the committee’s senior Republican aims to re-establish his dominance and mollify party members.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the conservative gadfly on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has dismissed most of the panel’s minority staff members in a dramatic shake-up aimed at reasserting his influence and at mollifying other Republican members upset by the staff’s failure to consult with them.

Committee sources said Tuesday that Helms, the committee’s senior Republican, on Monday fired his staff director and eight other aides. While the dismissals apparently had been planned for several weeks, they came as a shock to Senate aides, one of whom likened the mood at the committee Tuesday to “the morning after the night of the long knives.”

A Republican source said Helms had come to the conclusion that his staff had become too independent and “was not serving him well.” The source denied that the move reflected frictions with the Bush Administration over foreign affairs but said that other Republican senators had complained about the minority staff and its failure to consult with them on key foreign policy issues.

Helms could not be reached for comment.

But the sources who confirmed the dismissals said that, after receiving numerous complaints from other members, Helms decided that there was too much dissension among the Republican staffers. The staff was said to have been deeply divided between those who favored taking a strongly conservative, ideological approach to most foreign policy issues and those who wanted to adopt a more moderate, consensus-oriented position that would reflect the views of other Republicans on the committee.

In the end, the sources said, Helms decided to make a clean sweep, with both conservative and moderate staff members receiving their notices from retired Adm. Bud Nance, a longtime Helms friend whom the senator brought in two months ago to reorganize the committee’s minority staff.

Nance, who briefly served on the National Security Council during the Ronald Reagan Administration, will take over as minority staff director from James P. Lucier, a longtime Helms aide described by other sources as the leader of the hard-line conservative camp within the committee staff. Committee sources said that Nance has called a meeting of other committee aides Thursday to explain the changes and announce replacements for the dismissed staffers.

Nance was described by one source as “a childhood friend of Helms whom Jesse trusts completely.” He apparently was instrumental in convincing the senator that a major shake-up was needed, other sources said.

Although mostly kept from public view, the internal bickering occasionally broke into the open, such as when other Republicans expressed anger over a report that Helms’ staff issued last year on American POWs. Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), a member who had not been consulted beforehand, later took public issue with the report, which suggested that POWs from Vietnam and earlier conflicts--including World War II--may have been secretly imprisoned in the former Soviet Union and never returned.

“The staff was always off doing its own thing. . . . There was a lot of free-lancing and frequently Jesse found himself being backed by the staff into positions that he may or may not have supported,” one committee source said.

Another impetus for the change was the less dramatic but equally significant shake-up that occurred last year on the Democratic side of the 18-member committee, when Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R. I.) was persuaded to cede much of his authority to his subcommittee chairmen, who have proved more effective and politically combative than the aging chairman.

That move further undercut the position of the eight Republicans on the committee because it strengthened the role of the Democratic subcommittee chairmen, often at the expense of the senior minority members.

Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this story.