Gates Unveils Moderate CIA Reorganization : Intelligence: The director opposes more sweeping changes urged by Congress and says funding should not be reduced.

CIA Director Robert M. Gates on Wednesday wound up a months-long review of U.S. intelligence operations by unveiling a moderate internal reorganization of the CIA and warning against more sweeping changes proposed by Congress.

He cautioned against any congressional move to slash spending for intelligence.

“The Administration believes legislation is unnecessary,” Gates told a joint hearing of the Senate and House intelligence committees. Despite the end of the Cold War, he said, there remain threats to the United States that are “a reality, not a phantom conjured up to justify the existence of our intelligence community or our budget.”

Gates’ proposal amounted to an effort to prevent Congress from enacting far-reaching new legislation to restructure the American intelligence community.

In February, Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.) introduced proposals that would centralize and streamline the many existing intelligence agencies--including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and a series of other units--under a new director of national intelligence.

Gates on Wednesday urged the lawmakers to make sure that any changes in the U.S. intelligence community would be evolutionary, rather than dramatic or radical. In fact, the only legislative change that Gates sought was one which would increase his own power as CIA director to shift funds.

He said the CIA is asking Congress to approve a change that will authorize the President to move resources from agency to agency within the U.S. intelligence community. “In practice, this authority would be delegated to me and would be carried out in concert with the heads of other agencies,” he said.

The reorganization Gates announced Wednesday is the result of a series of internal studies of CIA policy ordered after he took office last fall.

Gates’ plan seeks to ensure that U.S. policy-makers will get different points of view from CIA analysts and that American scholars will be used more often in helping to provide CIA studies.

His reorganization also tries to make sure that the CIA will work more closely with American military leaders, thus avoiding some of the problems that cropped up during the Persian Gulf War, when American military commanders complained about the inadequacy of satellite and reconnaissance information they were getting from the CIA.

Boren and McCurdy, the chairmen of the two congressional intelligence committees, sat through the CIA’s presentation Wednesday without directly challenging it. It is not clear whether they will press forward with their own more sweeping proposals or accept Gates’ blueprint.

Boren said he thinks that the legislation he is sponsoring has led to “a great deal of creative tension” that may have created the climate in which Gates could win acceptance inside the U.S. intelligence community for administrative changes.

Nevertheless, Boren said that “it seems to me that there may be an opportunity here, an opportunity to legislate in ways that might strengthen the intelligence community without limiting its flexibility or effectiveness.”

The only legislator to voice skepticism about Gates’ testimony was Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who said that with the breakup of the Soviet Union “the nature of the threat (to the United States) has changed in a very dramatic fashion . . . . I simply don’t see a comparable threat out there.”

But the CIA director contended that “our way of life is threatened in different ways.” For example, he said, the United States remains dependent on imported oil from the Middle East. As a result, he said, what happens in Iraq and Iran remains extremely important.

Gates’ plan also seeks to defuse a looming turf battle with the Pentagon over control of budgets for the nation’s spy satellites.

The proposals by Boren and McCurdy would create a new position of director of national intelligence, with authority over all civilian and military intelligence agencies. He would be empowered to make all these agencies work together in a cost-effective way.