The Spy Who May Be Allowed In From the Cold : CIA: Four years ago, Robert Gates was nominated to head the agency, but Iran-Contra foiled his ambitions. This time, the past may not haunt him.

WASHINGTON —  On a stage in the White House press room, Robert M. Gates, the long-time intelligence official selected to head the Central Intelligence Agency, stood next to President Bush, himself a former CIA director. Ironically, the principal topic of conversation among the journalists was not what the CIA knows about the Middle East or the Soviet Union but what the two men knew about their previous Administration.

For years, George Bush insisted that, as vice president, he knew next to nothing of his own Administration’s infamous arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And Gates, the No. 2 man at the CIA under William J. Casey, has claimed that he was equally ignorant of his own agency’s role in illegally diverting money from the Iranian arms deals and funneling it to the Contras in Nicaragua.

For Gates, the honor of being nominated to replace William H. Webster must have been tempered with a certain uneasy deja vu . A little more than four years earlier, he was picked for the same job by President Ronald Reagan but withdrew after two days of rough-and-tumble nomination hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The issue was what he knew about the Iran-Contra affair and when he knew it. Banished to a small office in the White House as deputy to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Gates spent the next four years quietly doing penance as the trauma of the scandal slowly receded from memory.

It seems to have worked. Now senators who earlier led the way to send Gates into the cold are ready to welcome him back. All is forgiven. But while it is one thing to forgive, it is entirely another thing to forget. Many of the questions that drove Gates into bureaucratic exile are still on the table, and still unanswered. And new questions have emerged. The answers are important to gaining an understanding of how an Administration slid into lawlessness and sent the nation into near shock.

Among the key questions is exactly when Gates discovered that profits from the arms sales were going to the Contras. He has long claimed that he first learned of the transfer on Oct. 1, 1986, during a conversation with CIA official Charles Allen and that, although the information appeared “worrisome,” it seemed “extraordinarily flimsy.” This was nearly two months before Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III announced the diversion to the world. But documents released during the trial of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North show that Gates was one of 17 government officials who were sent copies of highly secret intelligence intercepts between 1985 and 1986. These indicated that excess profits were being generated from the arms sales and suggested that some of the money might be flowing elsewhere.

Also in August, 1986, Allen, according to congressional documents, took his suspicions of money diversions to Richard Kerr, then deputy director of intelligence. “I wouldn’t be surprised but what perhaps we are overcharging at least the middleman on these matters in order to send money to the Contras,” Allen told the committee he informed Kerr. Kerr, in turn, told committee investigators that he then “recounted Allen’s diversion speculation to Gates, who told Kerr that he also wanted to be kept informed about the matter.” Finally, Kerr testified to the committee that Gates “told the CIA inspector general that he could not recall the meeting in which Kerr apprised him of Allen’s suspicions.”

Additional questions are now being raised because of a memorandum that seems to show that Gates had knowledge of covert aid to the Contras months earlier than he had previously acknowledged. Gates testified under oath before Congress that, as of July, 1986, he knew of no government involvement in Contra assistance. But in a memorandum that month from Adm. John M. Poindexter, the national-security adviser, to North, referring the proposed sale to the CIA of assets belonging to the secret Contra resupply operation, Poindexter included the phrase: “I did tell Gates that I thought the private effort should be phased out.”

Gates will also face problems over his role in overseeing the drafting of the testimony given by Casey in November, 1985. That testimony made no mention of the diversions of money to the Contras and left other false impressions.

The grilling Gates will receive before the Senate may not be the end of his questioning. As must all employees going to work for the CIA, he will be required to take a polygraph exam. And because serious questions have been raised about his testimony regarding some of his actions, he should logically be required to submit to questions on these topics. If he refuses or fails, he should be treated as any other employee, even if that means looking elsewhere for a job.

If Gates is able to make it over all the hurdles, he may soon find a very different intelligence community. No longer can he afford to spend billions of dollars and 70% of his resources targeting the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, as has been done in the past. Much more emphasis will have to be placed on Third World linguistic studies, so that when a crisis breaks out in an unexpected part of the world, the United States will have enough people to translate the mountains of intercepted communications received. This was a particular problem during the recent Gulf War.

Another intelligence failure during the war that Gates will have to address, along with the Air Force, is the reactivation of several SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. The aircraft, the fastest and highest flying in the world, were desperately needed during the war because of their capability to overfly any area with near impunity and photograph multiple targets in various parts of Iraq. Satellites are very limited in both time and area covered.

But for Gates, over the next few weeks, the secrets locked in foreign lands may be far less important than the secrets locked in his CIA past.