Ex-CIA Chief Gates Hits Claims of Security Gaps

Former CIA Director Robert M. Gates on Monday dismissed as “nonsense” claims that internal security procedures had been a mess under his stewardship of the spy agency.

Blasting what he described as a rush to judgment, Gates said it was too early to draw conclusions about the case of Aldrich H. Ames, the Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of spying for Moscow.

“I think it’s nonsense that there’s a systemic problem in security,” he said in an interview. “And frankly I think it would be better for everybody to withhold judgment in broad terms until we figure out exactly what happened.”

Gates, CIA director from November, 1991, to January, 1993, was the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence in May, 1985, when Ames was allegedly recruited by the KGB.

Gates denied he felt stung by criticism of “systemic” internal security problems from his successor, R. James Woolsey, who said last week the Ames case was “not an episode or a single incident, but a serious problem that we need to fix.”

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said lapses exposed by the case show internal security was “clearly broken.”

On Friday, DeConcini introduced legislation, welcomed by Gates, to require all CIA employees to consent to government checks on their financial and travel records.

Gates cited failure to adopt such legislation when it was first proposed in 1990 as one reason the CIA may have been slow to uncover Ames. In the absence of that authority or a court order, the government could not check confidential records without alerting the suspect that a probe was under way.

Gates said he had been involved in setting up a task force in late 1986 to investigate mysterious problems with CIA operations in the Soviet Union, where Russian double agents in the CIA’s pay had been inexplicably disappearing.

“As it turned out, not very much came of that,” he said, citing suspicions that fell on Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who defected to Moscow in 1985, or Clayton J. Lonetree, a Marine guard convicted of spying at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. “It was a very complicated, very open-ended kind of investigation.

“I can tell you there is no agency in government that takes security more seriously than CIA.”