doc_text: And President Bush, who initially expected his nominee to be approved with a minimum of fuss, may have to use a lot of political capital in the battle over the nomination, even allies seem to acknowledge.
  "We have an obligation to get as much information as possible," Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski, a Gates backer and the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview yesterday.
  "It's doubtful we can finish till October," when the special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra scandal is likely to conclude his inquiry.
  Even Oklahoma Democrat David Boren, the committee chairman, who is a big Gates backer and supporter of the CIA, has been privately unnerved by the new situation.
  "Another page of Iran-Contra is turning, and with every page you have a chance to solve another piece of the puzzle," says New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley, a leading Gates critic on the committee.
  The rapid change in prognosis is almost entirely the result of last week's guilty plea by former CIA official Alan Fiers, who conceded that he knew about the central feature of Iran-Contra: the diversion of funds from Iranian arms sales to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
  Mr. Gates has said he didn't know about the diversion, and Mr. Fiers hasn't directly contradicted him.
  But he has said he told Clair George, who headed covert operations at the CIA and was just one step below Mr. Gates, then deputy director of the agency.
  Before it votes on Mr. Gates, the panel is trying to arrange to question Messrs. Fiers and George under oath to find out what they know about Mr. Gates's knowledge of Iran-Contra.
  But Mr. Fiers is refusing to appear unless he is granted immunity from further prosecution.
  Congressional sources say Mr. George, who appears to be under investigation by the prosecutor, is also refusing to talk unless he gets immunity.
  Sen. Murkowski said yesterday he doubts either man can be heard from until the prosecutor is finished with them in the fall.
  When Mr. Bush chose Mr. Gates for the post, he was betting that the controversy over the Iran-Contra scandal, which forced Mr. Gates to withdraw his 1987 nomination for the same job, had died down.
  And the White House hoped that Mr. Gates's performance since 1989 as deputy national security adviser had won enough friends in Congress to bolster confidence in his integrity.
  Mr. Gates still has strong supporters on the committee.
  "I don't think opinion has shifted on the committee because of the new developments," Sen. Boren says.
  Among many committee members, Mr. Gates benefits from a widespread sense that he is a good bureaucratic operator who won't be afraid to order significant changes in the way the U.S. intelligence committee does business in the changed world of the 1990s.
  While Sen. Bradley and a fellow Democrat, Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, have been vociferous critics of Mr. Gates, some other committee Democrats, such as Arizona Sen. Dennis DeConcini and South Carolina Sen. Ernest Hollings, might be more willing to side with President Bush and his choice.
  And there are few obvious defectors among the 15-member committee's seven Republicans.
  There are also some influential outside voices defending Mr. Gates's integrity.
  Retired Adm. Bobby Inman, who like Mr. Gates served for a time as deputy CIA chief to William Casey, says Mr. Casey enforced a system where the covert-operations staff reported directly to the director, and around the deputy.
  "That's why I accept Bob Gates's direct assurances to me that he wasn't involved," he says.
  Mr. Gates isn't returning reporters' phone calls, but Sen. Murkowski, who spoke to him yesterday, says the nominee "is ready to go" with the hearings, and isn't considering withdrawing his name from consideration.
  Ideally, the White House would like the committee to vote before Congress starts its summer recess Aug. 5.
  But that isn't in the cards.
  Instead, the committee is weighing two options, neither of them pleasant for the White House: either waiting until fall to begin the hearings, or starting them soon to allow Mr. Gates to testify -- then recessing until the fall when it may know more about what the prosecutor is turning up.
  The committee is planning to meet today to discuss which of those options it will choose.
  "It's pretty much up to the White House," says Sen. Murkowski, who says he thinks the White House favors an early start no matter when the hearings would end.
  Either way, Mr. Gates would be left hanging for weeks, while rumors swirl of his involvement in various covert operations.
  The process could be speeded if the panel votes to grant Messrs. Fiers and George immunity from prosecution.
  Committee sources say that's a possibility in the case of Mr. Fiers, who has already pleaded guilty to misleading Congress.
  But the committee would probably be reluctant to vote immunity for Mr. George, who hasn't been charged with any crimes.
  And Mr. George, a bureaucratic foe of Mr. Gates's, might be a more important witness.
  Sens. Boren and Murkowski insist that the panel's role isn't to broadly investigate either Iran-Contra or the CIA, just to focus narrowly on Mr. Gates's personal activities.
  But a number of other issues seem likely to slow and complicate the Gates hearings, committee officials say.
  One is the recently disclosed existence of a CIA taping system for recording calls between agency officials and their field officers.
  The system wasn't illegal, but its scope wasn't fully appreciated in Congress, even during the Iran-Contra probe.
  The committee may want to know if Mr. Gates was involved in hiding the existence of such tapes, or if the tapes contain new information on his activities during the Iran-Contra operations.
  A second issue concerns reports that the CIA played some role in the unfolding financial scandal involving BCCI Holdings (Luxembourg) S.A.
  And a third matter involves allegations, including some aired by ABC News and published in the Financial Times, that the CIA tolerated or even assisted Iraqi efforts to smuggle out U.S. weapons technology during the Iran-Iraq War through Chile and South Africa.
  ABC asserts, and the White House denies, that Mr. Gates met with a Chilean arms dealer to discuss the effort.
  The CIA yesterday denied it ever provided military aid to Iraq.
  Like the taping system, the alleged Iraqi weapons-supply operation wouldn't necessarily have been illegal; unlike Iran, Iraq wasn't then banned as a weapons recipient, and U.S. policy at the time favored helping Iraq to win the war.
  But Congress might want to know why it wasn't informed of a major effort to arm Iraq.
  To further complicate the hearings, Mr. Gates has made enemies at the CIA in his years in the government, and some of them have secretly gone to the intelligence committee with their complaints.
  There always has been a cultural divide and antagonism at the agency between analysts -- Mr. Gates's background -- and covert operators.
  Operations officers "don't have anything specific against" Mr. Gates but are leery because he comes from the other side of the CIA house, says Kenneth deGraffenreid, who oversaw intelligence programs as a National Security Council officer in the Reagan administration.
  In particular, Mr. Gates pushed for bureaucratic changes that compelled operations officers to work together with analysts on new task forces looking at such issues as terrorism and drugs.
  Supporters say Mr. Gates also has ruffled some bureaucratic feathers over the years among his analyst colleagues by pushing them to make their work less academic and more closely attuned to questions posed by policy makers.
  Views of him are "split along the lines of people who think that he's innovative vs. people who are more comfortable with the traditional ways of doing business," says Roy Godson, head of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence.
  --- David Rogers contributed to this article.
summary_text: President Bush anticipated little opposition to his Gates' nomination as Director CIA but approval is now uncertain.
  Last week's admission by CIA's Alan Fiers to knowledge of Iran-Contra will likely cause Senate confirmation to drag on and include review of CIA activities during Gates' tenure as Deputy Chief.
  Gates denies Iran-Contra knowledge, supported by former CIA deputy director Bobby Inman who says Director Casey encouraged covert staff to bypass his deputy.
  Other issues likely to be investigated are recording of CIA telephone calls, CIA's role in BCCI, and CIA's technological assistance to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
  Gates's enemies at CIA have gone to the intelligence committee secretly with their complaints.