Involuntarily yours

ROBERT GATES'S appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee has all the earmarks of the medieval witchcraft test as outlined by Monty Python: if you float, you're a witch; if you drown, you're innocent. To cleanse himself of the charge of Reaganism, Gates tried to drown. He resorted to what the Washington Post contemptuously called a "strategy of contrition"--promising as CIA Director to tell the senators whatever they wanted to know, to report all covert operations to them as quickly as possible, to resign rather than collude in nefarious presidential shenanigans, and so forth. The Post expressed skepticism of Gate's sincerity. Our concern--for we hope Gates will be confirmed--is the opposite.

Four years ago, a young CIA Deputy Director gave a speech at Princeton commenting on the Agency's relations with Congress after more than a decade of

expanded congressional oversight. He stressed the extraordinary degree to which the CIA shared intelligence with the legislators: "Virtually all CIA assessments go to the two Congressional Intelligence Committees. Most go also to the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Appropriations Committees. In 1986, CIA sent some five thousand intelligence reports to Congress and gave many hundreds of briefings." The speech concluded: "CIA today is in a remarkable position, poised nearly equidistant between the executive and legislative branches . . ."

The speaker was Bob Gates. The theory of "equidistance" prompted a small outcry, so the word "involuntarily" was inserted in the last sentence when the speech appeared a few months later as a Foreign Affairs article. Quite so. When last we checked, the National Security Act of 1947 was still on the books, creating the Agency as part of the executive branch and its Director as a statutory advisor to the National Security Council, chaired by the President. George Bush, quite jealous of his constitutional prerogatives, is not likely to forget this. Gates, who has been a loyal servant of the President, is not likely to forget it either. Contrition cannot override the law and the Constitution. Whatever may apply to Clarence Thomas, no such theory of natural (or unnatural) law applies here.