WASHINGTON: The nomination of Robert M. Gates as secretary of defence has begun to ease concerns in the intelligence community about the rapid growth of Pentagon intelligence activities since the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, said experts inside and outside the government and on Capitol Hill.

Mr Gates, a former CIA director, has a long history of opposing expansive Pentagon intelligence activities. He has voiced unease about roles being taken over by Pentagon personnel, in part because over 80 per cent of all intelligence spending is now done by Defence Department agencies.

On Wednesday, Nov 8, President Bush announced that former CIA director Robert M. Gates is his pick to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence. Mr Gates currently serves as president of Texas A&M University in College Station. Rumsfeld issued his resignation on Wednesday.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, the outgoing defence secretary, has vastly expanded Pentagon intelligence activities, increasing operations overseas and creating a new position and a new agency to handle military intelligence.

In 1991, after being confirmed for the dual role of director of central intelligence and CIA director, Mr Gates tried to rein in Pentagon activities by getting a White House directive from then-President George H.W. Bush that created the Community Management Staff to help oversee all intelligence activities. A CIA history of that period says Mr Gates, whose background was as an analyst, saw the Defence Intelligence Agency "as 'feeling [its] oats' and 'moving to expand in every direction,' including pushing some 'crazy ideas' " on the collection of human intelligence.

Gates's 1991 initiative "caused some heartburn in DOD, partly because he used the word 'management,' " requiring him to send out an explanatory joint statement signed by himself and then-Defence Secretary Richard B. Cheney.

More recently, Mr Gates watched Rumsfeld create the position of undersecretary of defence for intelligence, whose role is to coordinate and expand worldwide military intelligence activities in the post-Sept 11 world. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in May, Mr Gates wrote that he and other CIA veterans were "unhappy about the dominance of the Defence Department in the intelligence arena" at a time when "close cooperation between the military and the CIA in both clandestine and intelligence collection is essential".

The article supported Gen Michael V. Hayden becoming CIA director in part because Hayden, while director of the National Security Agency, opposed Rumsfeld keeping control of the NSA instead of having it move to the new director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte. Gates went on to say that the combination of Negroponte and Hayden would establish "a strong civilian institutional counterbalance and alternative strategic intelligence perspective to the historically strong Defence Department intelligence arm".

One quick indication of how Gates will deal with interagency tensions will be whether Rumsfeld's undersecretary of defence for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, and his top deputy, Army Lt-Gen William G. Boykin, remain in their current positions. They have backed the growth of the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the controversial new agency that in three years has spent nearly $1 billion to gather data to be used in the protection of defence facilities.

Both have supported the increased roles for the military in sending Pentagon intelligence collectors abroad to gather information that could be needed if military operations against terrorists were initiated in various countries. Some conflicts arose in past years when Defence agents turned up in countries without notice to US ambassadors and CIA chiefs of station.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service