WASHINGTON — Shortly after Ronald Reagan was reelected president, the CIA forwarded a controversial intelligence report on the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II to the White House. It suggested the Soviets were involved in the plot.
Inside the agency, many analysts considered the intelligence estimate flawed. In the words of one CIA branch chief, the assertion lacked "common sense" and was, at best, conjecture.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday December 13, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 118 words Type of Material: Correction
Defense secretary nominee: A Dec. 4 article in Section A profiling Defense Secretary-designate Robert M. Gates said that as CIA director in the early 1990s, Gates gave important responsibilities to Harold P. Ford -- a longtime agency employee and a critic of Gates -- in an indication of a new openness at the agency. Ford, who at the time worked as a consultant for the CIA researching and writing on the agency's history, says he was given no new responsibilities or position by Gates and had no contact with him after Gates' 1991 confirmation hearing. Gates has been credited with placing new emphasis on studying the agency's history so that the intelligence community could learn from its past.
The contention later was proved false. But there was one person who did see a Soviet hand at play in the plot, and that was the man who mattered at the time: CIA Deputy Director Robert M. Gates, who personally handed the report up to the White House.
On Tuesday, the Senate begins its hearings on replacing Donald H. Rumsfeld, a Defense secretary criticized for failing to hear dissenting views, allowing his department to peddle flawed intelligence, and leading the military into a war in which victory has proved elusive. And it is Gates whom President Bush has selected to lead the Pentagon, offering the onetime CIA director up as "an agent of change."
But Gates appears to some an odd choice, given the Pentagon's rocky and occasionally divisive atmosphere under Rumsfeld. For much of Gates' career, critics and even some admirers have likened him to the imperious Rumsfeld and his close administration ally, Vice President Dick Cheney.
"Gates was making it clear to analysts what intelligence they were to produce," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit institute that gathers and analyzes declassified documents. "It's a chilling record, because you have two main themes of the Iraq war present in Robert Gates' career at CIA: the arrogance and bullying of a Rumsfeld and the intelligence cherry-picking of a Cheney."
Hearings were key
But critics and friends also suggest that Gates, 63, has evolved. The charges that he was a bully who was wrong on the important foreign policy issues of the day were sifted during his 1991 confirmation hearings to become CIA director. Those hearings, along with his failed nomination in 1987, were a public flogging that, those close to him say, forced him to reexamine his style.
"Bob Gates has learned over the years," said former Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee during the 1991 hearings. "He realized in retrospect he had been misunderstood by some people who became his critics. After that, he became more patient."
