Senate Panel Endorses Deutch as CIA Chief

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday unanimously endorsed President Clinton’s nomination of Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch to be the next director of central intelligence, giving him a strong bipartisan mandate to enact what he has promised will be top-to-bottom reforms at the demoralized spy agency.

Meeting behind closed doors, the committee voted, 17 to 0, to recommend Deutch’s nomination to the full Senate. He is expected to win confirmation easily, possibly as early as today.

But one controversy continued to follow the nomination: Clinton’s plan to elevate the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost to Cabinet rank, a plan that many lawmakers fear could embroil Deutch in the kind of policy-making debates that in the past have sometimes colored the objective intelligence that the CIA is supposed to provide.

“My preference is that he (Clinton) doesn’t do it,” Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said after the vote.

Several senators have said Clinton should reconsider the decision, citing the role that former CIA Director William J. Casey played in the Iran-Contra scandal as evidence that policy-making and intelligence gathering do not mix well.

But Deutch, who sought the Cabinet-level elevation as a condition for accepting the nomination, assured the senators at his confirmation hearing last week that he would not allow the distinctions between objective intelligence reporting and policy advocacy to become blurred.

The additional status that Cabinet rank would confer on the director’s job is only meant to signal Clinton’s support for the badly demoralized intelligence agency, he said.

Deutch appears about to assume control of the agency at a time when a growing number of lawmakers are raising serious questions about it in the aftermath of the Cold War. The Aldrich H. Ames espionage scandal and allegations that a Guatemalan army officer implicated in political killings was on the CIA payroll have added to the furor.

Deutch told the senators last week that he plans a series of high-level personnel changes to forcibly shake the CIA out of its Cold War mind-set and redesign the agency “all the way down to the bare bones.”

The CIA, he said, needs to be led by a younger generation of officers untainted by past scandals and more attuned to the new types of threats that the nation faces in the post-Cold War period.

Senators declined to comment after the vote, citing an agreement to let Specter alone speak for the committee. But they made it clear at the confirmation hearings that they welcome the personnel and other changes that Deutch has proposed.

Barely a day before the committee vote, one of the senior officials believed to be on Deutch’s list of targets, covert operations director Hugh E. Price, announced his retirement.

Price had received a reprimand last year for failing to uncover the spying of Ames, a CIA officer who betrayed numerous U.S. agents in the nine years he spied for the Russians.

Several other top officials, including Douglas MacEachin, head of the intelligence directorate, are also planning to retire soon.

Adm. William O. Studeman, the agency’s deputy director, has been serving as acting director in the wake of the resignation of R. James Woolsey in January.