MYSTERIES & SECRETS : DIRECTOR GATES KNOWS THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY MUST CHANGE. BUT HOW--AND HOW MUCH?

LATE IN FEBRUARY, THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY’S 80 MOST SENIOR OFFICIALS gathered at the Farm, a training facility in eastern Virginia whose very existence is classified. Robert M. Gates, the newly confirmed director of central intelligence, had summoned his top managers to the secret two-day conclave to force them to come to grips with the post-Cold-War era at the CIA.

The agenda was the work of a group of impatient Young Turks from the agency’s Directorate of Operations, the unit responsible for overseas spying and covert action. They were determined to unsettle their elders from the start. Each official arrived at the Farm bearing a card with his table and seat assignment. But in the conference room where the meeting was to take place, there were neither tables nor chairs. With much creaking of inflexible joints and grumbling from unlimber minds, America’s top spooks--an overwhelmingly white, male, middle-aged clique--lowered themselves to the floor.

After introductory remarks spelling out the meeting’s theme of change, the officials were asked to stand and find places along a line of one-inch-wide masking tape that ringed the room with markings from 0 to 5. Those who felt that no change was necessary at the CIA were to place themselves near the zero; those who felt the agency should essentially be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up should stand on the 5.

The grumbling began again. Wasn’t this a gimmick more worthy of a haberdashers’ convention than a meeting of the world’s premier espionage organization? But the results were revealing. Half the people in the room stood at 4 or above; only a handful of what one participant called “troglodytes” were below 2. Director Gates planted himself at about 4.4. When the voting was over, the high priesthood of spookery had sanctified the need to change.

Or had they? Even Gates, who had placed himself just a few feet away from supporting total revolution, later admitted to deep misgivings about altering the agency where he has worked for 25 years. “I wanted to be at two places at once,” Gates confessed in an interview at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. “There are some areas in which I think we ought to preserve some of the things of the past--integrity and dedication and work ethic and sense of sacrifice, a willingness to try not to get bogged down in bureaucracy in accomplishing the mission. But I also think there are some areas where some fairly significant changes are needed. So I sort of found myself wandering around the tape,” he said.

Such ambivalence is the stuff of spying these days in Washington. The new world order may demand a changed intelligence machine, but how different should it be? And in what ways exactly? For two days at the Farm, the CIA’s most powerful insiders debated the issue--and came to no agreement. George Kolt, the agency’s chief Russia watcher and a former Air Force intelligence officer of Russian descent, stood firmly on the 5: “It’s a new world,” he said. “An institution created 50 years ago must fundamentally re-examine itself.” But others, more suspicious of change, argued against embracing too heartily even so much as a basic redefinition of who the enemy is.

“Intelligence looks at the world through a unique and gloomy prism,” Gates once said. “When an intelligence officer smells flowers, he looks around for a coffin.” Most recently, the flowers represented the historic opportunity to reshape the world after four decades of East-West confrontation; the coffin was the specter of communism seeking world domination in some perverse new form.

And while CIA insiders argue among themselves over fine points of how much change, how soon, there are others, on the outside, clamoring to end the indecision abruptly. The Cold War is over, they say, communism has collapsed, and the CIA is obsolete and should simply be dismantled.

Gates’ face, pink and smooth as a baby’s, rarely betrays emotion. In his high, thin, Midwestern voice, at ease in an upholstered chair in his office, he acknowledges that controversy continues to swirl around the CIA. He concedes that the debate over the conduct and character of U.S. intelligence is far from over. And he patiently points out the “evolutionary” changes that are already in the pipeline--a decline, albeit at a pace of only 2% a year, in the agency’s multibillion-dollar budget; a workforce that will shrink by 15% over the next five years; a shift from a single-minded focus on the Soviet Union to global issues of weapons proliferation, terrorism, the environment, migration patterns, the spread of AIDS.

Eventually, Gates finds his way back to what he considers the bottom line. He has addressed the problem of change at the CIA over and over again--at his confirmation hearings last year, at the Farm in February, at budget meetings that ended this spring. And every time he wanders around the questions of what to change, and how deeply to change it, he comes to the same basic conclusion, to that paradoxical and delicate spot on the scale from 0 to 5: The CIA must change radically, but it must also be preserved.

VIRTUALLY ALL INTELLIGENCE WORK CAN be reduced to two categories--secrets and mysteries. The United States has expended hundreds of billions of dollars over the past four decades to purloin the secrets of its enemies and to protect its own. A relatively minuscule effort has been expended in the more ambiguous job of understanding the world’s mysteries. With its sophisticated spy satellites, its electronic eavesdropping aircraft and its cable-tapping submarines, America became more adept than any other nation in history at reading the other guy’s mail. But it has repeatedly failed to read his mind--in Moscow’s Politburo, in Hanoi’s war councils, in Tehran’s ruling circle of mullahs, in Baghdad’s Baath Socialist Party headquarters.

An increased emphasis on the mysterious, as opposed to the merely hidden, is now the first order of change at the CIA. According to Gates and his senior advisers, unraveling the mysteries of the mind of a Saddam Hussein, for instance, is far more critical to American security than counting the number of tanks assigned to a Czech mechanized division.

“It is really important to make the distinction between the knowable--which in our business is the stealable, like the design of an aircraft carrier or the specifications of a missile--and that to which there is no known or knowable answer, such as ‘What is the future of Iran?’ ” says Fritz W. Ermarth, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the office that brings together the highest-ranking intelligence analysts from the CIA, the military and other departments. “A secret, you can ask your colleagues in collection to go get for you. But no amount of collection can tell you what the future holds for Iran or Russia.”

Plumbing mysteries rather than simply stealing secrets is mostly a matter of asking different questions. Last November, President Bush directed 20 government agencies to weigh in on exactly what those questions should be. The goal of the directive, National Security Review 29, is “a top-to-bottom examination of the mission, role and priorities of the intelligence community.” The replies included a desire for greater attention to environmental problems, health issues, ethnic strife, migration and economic trends. Military capabilities and intentions, while still a high priority, were appreciably less important in the mix.

Gates’ first official act as director of central intelligence last November was very much in keeping with such priorities. He ordered 10 short-deadline national intelligence estimates on the likely course of events in the former Soviet Union. He wanted his analysts to gauge the probability of starvation in Russia and divine whether that would lead the people to revolt against Boris N. Yeltsin. He wanted their best guess on whether the long-suppressed ethnic and religious bonds between the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the neighboring states of Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan would lead to militarily powerful alliances hostile to the West--with nuclear weapons stirred into the stew.

The answers to such mysteries cannot be found in satellite photographs or missile plans or the transcripts of intercepted communications--the hard data traditionally sought by the spies and technical surveillance systems of the CIA’s “collection” arm, the Directorate of Operations. Nor can the legions of photo interpreters and military-hardware bean counters employed by the analytic arm of the agency--the Directorate of Intelligence--solve the puzzle of human motivation. What is needed in both directorates are people who can read the obscure languages of the local press in Tatarstan or Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, who understand their culture and history and who aren’t afraid to predict the behavior of their peoples and leaders. The Operations Directorate, responding to the intelligence-estimate request, has produced a two-year review of “humint” (human intelligence) requirements, supervised by the head of the unit, Thomas A. Twetten, a former CIA station chief in the Middle East. Although spymaster Twetten declined to be interviewed for this story, sources say that the review indicated concern that agents trained to steal missile secrets or train rebels in sabotage are not well adapted to understanding the subtleties of ethnic tensions between, say, Russian Cossacks and the Kazakh nationalists in neighboring Central Asia. The demand now is for experts in tracking complex financial transactions, specialists in the newly free Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, agents able to penetrate international drug- and arms-dealing cartels, and experienced Middle East hands to watch not only the warring nations of the region but also stateless peoples with territorial ambitions such as the Kurds and the Palestinians.

In the Intelligence Directorate, the emphasis on mysteries rather than secrets shows up in semantics as well as in the deployment and qualifications of personnel. For example, the Soviet affairs office was recently renamed the Office of Slavic and Eurasian Analysis. Today only about a third of the analysts in the department study military developments in the former Soviet republics. As recently as 1988, nearly two-thirds of its officers worked on some aspect of the Soviet military.

“Before, we were looking at hard data--forces arrayed and questions like that,” says Kolt, the Russia specialist who until last month ran the Slavic analysis office and who now is the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. “Today, we’re talking a lot more about ideas, about social and political movements.”

John L. Helgerson, head of the Intelligence Directorate, said that he will be adding 50 new analysts this year, virtually all of them trained in economics or engineering. But the biggest growth areas in his department are the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the global spread of arms technology.

Gates warns that policy-makers and the public will have to learn to live with more surmise and less certainty if they want the CIA to address global mysteries. He says that intelligence reports now will reflect the ambiguity inherent in assessing “that which has no known or knowable answer,” in Ermarth’s phrase.

Too often in the past, the CIA assumed a guise of infallibility in its analysis. No more, says Gates. “How do you break away from the conventional wisdom and acknowledge to the policy-maker that you might be wrong?” Gates asks. “In those circumstances where nobody knows what the answer is, being honest about not knowing and telling the policy-maker that in this case we’re here to help you think through the problem rather than give you some kind of a crystal ball prediction, I think is a more helpful way to go about our business.”

ROBERT GATES WON HIS POST--ONE THAT presidents have traditionally tried to portray as apolitical--after the longest, bitterest Senate confirmation battle ever endured by a CIA chief. The fight laid bare a deep schism in the soul of the agency over whether Gates had sold out the CIA’s highest value--its intellectual independence and objectivity. Gates was a career CIA man, who joined as a Soviet analyst in the Intelligence Directorate in 1966 and rose quickly into the ranks of senior management. During the hearings, he was accused of bending CIA analysis to fit the Evil Empire biases of his bosses at the White House and at Langley. He was also accused of petty and vindictive treatment of his underlings and, as head of the Intelligence Directorate from 1982 to 1986, of being responsible for blowing the central analytic question of the 1980s, the future of the Soviet Union. He was portrayed as the ultimate bureaucratic chameleon, adopting the coloration of whatever master he served. Beyond that, it was charged, he was too inflexible, too rooted in the moral certitude of the Cold War, too tied to the past practices and prejudices of the old CIA to lead it into the new world.

To his critics, Gates embodied a suppleness born of ambition and a rigidity born of ideology, a fatal combination in a profession whose credo is “To seek the truth.” Sen. Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Democrat, captured this view in a passionate floor statement opposing Gates’ confirmation last November.

“How should we expect him to be able to deal with the much more diverse challenges that face American intelligence now?” Bradley said in the Senate. “How can we be sure he’s up to radically altering the way the agency understands the emerging world? How do we know he has the strength and creativity to redirect and refocus an agency full of bright people, many of whom are locked into old ways? How can he, a Cold Warrior himself, get an agency to focus around the world less on the Soviet military and more on the interactions of ethnic nationalism, proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons, power of religious and secular grass-roots movements, and terrorism? How?”

Gates’ small blue eyes grow frosty when he is reminded of Bradley’s challenge to his nomination. In his large, blond-wood-paneled office above the treetops of the Virginia countryside, three large telephone consoles sit on a table alongside his desk; busts of Churchill and F.D.R. and photographs of Gates with world leaders and with his family adorn the walls. Gates is wearing a variation on the Ivy League uniform that has prevailed at the CIA since its inception--gray chalk-stripe suit, a white button-down shirt, drab maroon tie and well-shined penny loafers. Like a good spook, he blends in. On his desk are neatly stacked striped folders with coded legends indicating highly sensitive intelligence reports from American satellites and spies around the globe.

Is he the right man to remake the CIA? He answers deliberately.

“The first response that I would make is that two presidents of the United States”--Reagan and Bush--”thought so, including one who held the job himself. This is not something I went out and solicited.”

He finishes his answer with a series of questions, guiding the interviewer methodically through the problem much as he would when briefing the President or the national security adviser on an intelligence matter. His cool facade does not crack, although this is obviously a sensitive issue for him.

“Whom do you turn to in order to make dramatic change in the intelligence community, where there is not going to be a consensus and where the (director) is going to have to make decisions on resources, priorities and assets of the United States, which in some cases are irreplaceable, and where lives are involved and the careers of many thousands of people?

“Do you want somebody who, whatever other aspects of his reputation, has a reputation as someone who not only understands how the community works and how it interacts with the policy community and has a positive attitude toward congressional oversight? Who also is knowledgeable and steeped in the intelligence world, but also has a reputation as someone prepared to change--prepared to accept responsibility for making bold decisions and who understands the impact of those decisions?

“Or do you want a neophyte who has never been inside the intelligence community and knows nothing about it to make those decisions?”

Robert Michael Gates is the 15th director of central intelligence (DCI), the third-youngest at age 48 and the first agency veteran to be named director in nearly 20 years. He rose in government service in the time-honored Washington way--by loyalty, tireless work, discretion and a canny choice of mentors, among whom he lists former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Bobby Ray Inman, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former DCI William J. Casey, current National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and past and current congressional intelligence committee chairmen Rep. Lee H. Hamilton of Indiana and Sen. David L. Boren of Oklahoma.

Gates is uncomfortable talking about his past and his private life, and his official biography consists essentially of a list of the senior government posts he has held.

But interviews with friends, sponsors and rivals depict a driven man, impatient and at times imperious with subordinates. The Eagle Scout from Wichita, Kan., son of a comfortably middle-class auto-parts salesman, studied history in college, earning a BA from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1965 and a master’s degree from Indiana University in 1966. He joined the CIA as an analyst in the Soviet studies branch immediately after finishing graduate school.

He admits to few interests outside of work. He rises before dawn to run on the streets near his home in the Virginia suburbs, he backpacks with his 11-year-old son, he reads history for edification and spy novels for entertainment. His taste in fiction is decidedly middlebrow; he favors the thrillers of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy and television journalist Jim Lehrer. Gates and his wife of 25 years, Becky, a school administrator, at a also have a 16-year-old daughter.

Gates first emerged from the pack at the CIA in 1974, the same year he earned his doctorate in Soviet and Russian history from Georgetown University. He was detailed to the White House National Security Council, where he did Soviet analysis and arms-control monitoring for Henry Kissinger and Scowcroft. He stayed on as special assistant to Brzezinski in the Jimmy Carter Administration.

Upon returning to Langley in late 1979, he was named executive assistant to DCI Adm. Stansfield Turner, perhaps the most unpopular leader in the agency’s history because he drummed hundreds of experienced officers out of the spy corps in the wake of Church Committee congressional hearings into illegal agency involvement in domestic spying and overseas assassination plots. He remained in the post when Casey took over the CIA in 1981 at the beginning of the Reagan Administration.

In 1982, Casey promoted Gates, then only 38, over hundreds of more senior analysts to the post of Deputy Director for Intelligence, in charge of the entire analytic division of the CIA. It was there that his hard-charging style, his demanding intellect and his hard-line views on the Soviet Union earned him lasting enmity from lesser analysts, several of whom came forward last year to publicly oppose his nomination as Director of Central Intelligence.

Shortly after assuming the Deputy Director of Intelligence post, he gathered a group of analysts together and delivered a blistering attack on their qualifications and their work. His arrogant and acid remarks emerged during the confirmation hearings and explained much of the antipathy toward him felt by his former colleagues in the Intelligence Directorate. He chastised “analysts pretending to be experts who did not read the language of the country they covered . . . who were unfamiliar with its history or culture . . . and who argued that none of that mattered; flabby, complacent thinking and questionable assumptions combined with an intolerance of others’ views . . . verbose writing . . . and analysis that too often proved inaccurate or too fuzzy to judge whether it was ever right or wrong.” He told them that they would change--or leave.

In April, 1986, Casey promoted Gates to deputy DCI, the agency’s No. 2 post; when Casey was incapacitated by a brain tumor later that year, Gates became acting director of central intelligence. Upon Casey’s resignation in early 1987, Reagan nominated Gates to the top CIA job. Exactly a month later, however, his name was withdrawn because of unanswered questions about his role in the then-unfolding Iran-Contra scandal. Gates returned to his job as deputy; when Bush became President, he brought Gates back to the White House as deputy national security adviser. Gates says he never expected another shot at the DCI job.

Many of Gates’ friends believe that his coming so close to the position he had long coveted and then having it snatched away was a decisive moment for the young official. After so many successes, the profound disappointment, they say, taught him a measure of humility and caused him to reflect on his goals and his relations with his peers. Then, last year, despite lingering questions about Iran-Contra, President Bush gave Gates a second chance.

“He’s much better as DCI now than he would have been four years ago,” said Walter Pforzheimer, a retired senior intelligence official and a walking encyclopedia of CIA lore. “He’s a lot better for not having been confirmed four years ago. This is a new Bob Gates, a Gates who has learned some lessons, in part from the crybabies (Pforzheimer’s disdainful term for the critical CIA analysts who testified against Gates last fall), that they are sensitive to his sharp pencil.”

Gates handled the ordeal of the hearings in characteristic fashion. With barely concealed anger, he applied his formidable mind and his disciplined analytic approach to the charges against him.

After days of accusations that he had slanted intelligence, Gates responded with a detailed, 20-point rebuttal to colleagues’ charges that he had appeared to reinforce, in spite of contradictory evidence, the Reagan-Casey position that the Soviet Union was behind most international terrorism, including the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. He persuaded a majority of the committee that he had been right more often than wrong.

And yet the charges continued to eat at him. He addressed them again in a recent talk to 500 analysts in a CIA auditorium known as the Bubble.

He described the public airing of internal agency feuds as “wrenching, embarrassing and even humiliating at times.” He said that while he still believed the charges were unfair and untrue, he was taking a number of steps to ensure that CIA analysis would be untainted by political bias.

He spoke for nearly an hour about the problem of politicization. But there was a more important subtext to his remarks, the result of months of soul searching on the part of this imperturbable bureaucrat. He confessed--not directly, but in his customarily oblique way--to having contributed to a “fearful, oppressive climate” in the Intelligence Directorate. He said he hoped to restore the civility and collegiality that had once been the hallmark of the tightly knit community.

It was a rare glimpse of the new Gates his friends had described. He implied--but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say--that he had changed.

ONE FLOOR DOWN FROM GATES’ ELEGANT suite at CIA headquarters sits a square office full of half-empty bookcases and unpacked boxes. Gary E. Foster, who with his salt-and-pepper beard and his leather suspenders looks more like a prosperous college professor than a career intelligence officer, is settling in to the newly created post of Director of Public and Agency Information.

His job is to effect the other sea change at the CIA--Gates’ stated intention to bring the agency into the overt world. Gates has promised fewer covert actions and black-bag break-ins and has shifted funds from such operations to the hiring of more overseas “case officers” to provide better on-the-ground reporting. He has opened tentative discussions with his former archenemies in the KGB to share data on terrorism, arms dealing and the spread of nuclear weapons, and he has created a historical review unit to begin the painful process of declassifying hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents from the agency’s dark past.

Coming in from the cold is a daunting job in an organization steeped in the craft of deception and denial--but it is one already being embraced by CIA counterparts in other countries. Recently Britain, for the first time in the history of its MI-5 spy agency, released the identity of its director of counterespionage--a woman, Stella Rimington. And the KGB is handing over some of its files to Stanford University.

Gates concedes, though, that the CIA faces a “yawning chasm of credibility” in its pledge of a new era of openness with American citizens.

No matter what steps it takes toward increased access, he says, they will be dismissed as yet another propaganda operation, a smiling mask behind which all the old spookery will continue in blackest secrecy. There have been grudging efforts in the past to answer public inquiries, to allow an occasional shaft of light to pierce the guarded and gated CIA compound. But, Gates told a Tulsa newspaper association in February, “all of this took place against a backdrop of undifferentiated secrecy, a reluctance to talk at all--much less on the record--about intelligence issues and process. This is going to change,” he announced.

Foster, who previously served as deputy director for planning and coordination, says that the results of the agency openness initiative won’t be seen immediately, except perhaps in the number of Gates’ public appearances, which have been more frequent than any previous CIA director’s.

Over time, Foster asserts, more and more CIA documents will be declassified. The agency’s new historical-review unit, staffed with 15 full-time professional archivists, will review files for declassification and release. Gates has decreed that all CIA files more than 30 years old will be submitted for review, as will all estimates on the Soviet Union more than a decade old.

Foster says files will be opened on the attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, on the ham-handed subversion of unfriendly regimes from Guatemala to Chile, on clandestine operations against friendly governments and American citizens, on the debacle of the Bay of Pigs and even on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Only material deemed sensitive because it exposes intelligence sources and methods will be deleted, Foster says--but that’s a huge “only.” The “sources and methods” excuse has been used in the past to block virtually all release of CIA documents.

In addition, some of the agency’s senior managers will be made available for interviews and profiles, exchanges with outside technical and academic experts will be expanded, and articles from the agency’s classified internal publication, Studies in Intelligence, will be released to the public.

To demonstrate the sincerity of the openness campaign, Gates permitted six senior CIA officials to be interviewed on the record for this article. A public-affairs officer sat in on each of the discussions, however.

Says Foster: “We’re not trying to go out and get everybody to cuddle up to the CIA. We want people to be able to discriminate between what’s right and what’s not right about the agency. If you bring a few facts to the table, it gives people the capacity to make their own judgments; it allows people to think more clearly about what we do.

“We’ve lived too long in that other world, where it’s all legend and myth,” he adds.

Despite his rhetoric, Gates remains as ambivalent about openness as he does about the other changes sweeping through the intelligence world. He will open a number of windows at the CIA; he will not tear down the thick walls of secrecy.

At one point in his Tulsa speech, he talked of the need to change the agency’s “attitude and approach” and bring an end to its “overarching attitude toward secrecy.”

But a few moments later, he reminded his audience that “CIA openness” remained an oxymoron: “CIA is an intelligence organization, many of whose activities are and must be conducted in secrecy.” Sources and methods of intelligence gathering will be zealously guarded. The names of the roughly 5,000 officers in the Directorate of Operations will be kept secret, as will the very titles and duties of the divisions within the directorate.

“There will be no press room at CIA,” Gates concluded in Tulsa, “and our employees will be expected to maintain discipline and refer all press inquires to our public-affairs office. In short, we still must be able to keep secrets in order to do our work.”

The report of the CIA Task Force on Openness, the blueprint for Gates’ sunshine campaign, officially stamped “SECRET,” was kept in a locked safe at agency headquarters. Gates decided to release it to the public this month in response to a Freedom of Information Act demand.

SO WHAT WILL THE NEW CIA BE? AN organization shorn of its rabid anti-communism, open to public view, taking a provocative and fresh look at a new world under the guidance of a visionary leader? Or the same old spy shop wearing a mask of smart PR, run by an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, wrapped in a new-world-order cloak with its old dagger well concealed?

Bob Gates knows better than anyone that his overriding task is to convince Congress and the public that he and the CIA have radically evolved to deal with a world seemingly bereft of clear enemies. Otherwise, he acknowledges, the intelligence community’s $30-billion annual budget and the very future of the CIA are in jeopardy.

“CIA and U.S. intelligence must change--and be seen to change--or confront irrelevance and growing sentiment for their dismantlement,” Gates told the Senate Intelligence Committee during his confirmation hearings.

The most ardent proponent of the view that the CIA is already obsolete is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who proposes that the CIA and many of the other intelligence organs of the United States simply be abandoned. The State Department could assume the analytic functions of the CIA and the Pentagon could handle the nation’s military and paramilitary operations, he argues. Much of the rest of the national security bureaucracy, with its lie-detector mentality, its obsession with internal security, its tradition of distrust and deceit, should be given a decent burial, the New York Democrat says.

Even Moynihan admits this isn’t the likely fate of the country’s Cold War institutions. “We can and probably will leave them in place, much as we left the U.S. Army forts in place at the end of the Indian Wars,” Moynihan told the Intelligence Committee during its debate on the Gates nomination. “This is what will probably happen to the Central Intelligence Agency. It will drift off into inconsequence, busying itself with narco-terrorism and economic espionage.”

Hold it, replies Gates. History--and its awful enmities--has not yet come to an end.

“In many places, history simply has been frozen, and now it is thawing with a vengeance that Americans would ignore at their peril,” the CIA chief reminds audiences in a passage repeated in speech after speech. “The nationalist, ethnic, border and resource conflicts of a long-ago world have survived the ravages of 80 years of revolution and war to confront us again, often in new and more virulent forms. We in intelligence thus owe the government reminders of the past, understanding of the present and a forecast of the future.

“In such a revolutionary, turbulent world as I’ve suggested, our national security institutions must change. And they are changing dramatically to meet new and different challenges. But our changes should be evolutionary, conforming to the reality of an unstable, unpredictable and dangerously over-armed world, a world that is still transforming and that is not yet the world of our hopes and our wishes. . . .”

Gates, like his mythical intelligence officer, smells flowers and looks for a coffin. “The world I describe is a reality, not a phantom I have conjured up to defend CIA or its budget,” Gates says. “All historical experience suggests to us that while revolutionary upheavals that we have seen and experienced have succeeded in breaking us loose from the past, the shape of the future is far from established.”

Gates vehemently denies that the agency is shopping around for new missions to justify its existence as it reassigns spies, analysts and surveillance assets to monitor arms proliferation, narcotics traffic, ethnic conflict, terrorism and industrial espionage. He asserts that the CIA, far from being congealed in the mind-set of the twilight struggle between communism and capitalism, is a young and dynamic agency. Gates notes that about two-thirds of its employees have been hired since 1980, 70% since 1976. And while there is no shortage of new applicants, the agency’s diminished budget keeps its ranks from swelling. And he says the agency’s work is as important today as it was in the depth of the Cold War, and in many ways more difficult, because of the variety of threats the United States and its allies face.

Gates’ fictional counterpart, the worldly-wise spymaster George Smiley, captured this outlook in a speech to new British intelligence-service recruits in John le Carre’s recent spy novel, “The Secret Pilgrim,” a series of cautionary tales about the uses and abuses of espionage during the Cold War.

In a world transformed and at peace, Smiley is asked, why spy?

“Spying is eternal,” Smiley responds to the eager class of would-be secret agents. “If governments could do without it, they never would. They adore it. If the day ever comes when there are no enemies left in the world, governments will invent them for us, so don’t worry. Besides--who says we only spy on enemies? All history teaches us that today’s allies are tomorrow’s rivals. Fashion may dictate priorities, but foresight doesn’t. For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars and madmen in the world, we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.”