NEWS ANALYSIS : Deutch May Help CIA Come In From the Cold : Intelligence: In recent years, the agency’s clout has been marginalized. But nominee is seen as one of Administration’s most influential defense figures.

WASHINGTON —  With the nomination of John M. Deutch, the CIA is about to get, by accident, just what it has wanted for the past two years--a forceful and well-connected director who can represent its interests at high levels of the Clinton Administration just when the long-term future of the intelligence community is being decided.

Since President Clinton took office, the CIA has become increasingly marginalized at the top levels of decision-making. Clinton’s first CIA director, R. James Woolsey, couldn’t get along with key leaders in Congress or the White House. The President’s original nominee to replace Woolsey, retired Air Force Gen. Michael P.C. Carns, had little experience in top-level policy-making and had few ties to the Clinton Administration.

By contrast, Deutch, now the deputy defense secretary, has emerged as one of the Administration’s most influential figures on defense and foreign policy. And if he is confirmed as CIA director, he would be in a position to wield still greater authority.

“He has obviously got the confidence of the President and the secretary of defense,” former CIA Director Robert M. Gates said Saturday. “Over the past two years, he’s learned a lot about the intelligence community and the budget process.”

As director of central intelligence, Deutch would also officially be in charge of other intelligence agencies in addition to the CIA. The U.S. intelligence community includes not only the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, but the National Security Agency, which handles global eavesdropping by the United States, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which collects satellite photographs.

“The silver lining in this unfortunate episode (Carns’ decision to withdraw after acknowledging errors in helping a Philippine worker obtain a visa) is that John Deutch is coming up to bat,” said Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Kerrey added that Deutch is “deeply versed in the intelligence business and national security matters.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Deutch would bring his expertise to the CIA just as a 17-member commission, set up by Clinton under a new law, is trying to address far-reaching questions about the role of the intelligence community after the Cold War.

Among the questions: Should the intelligence community’s budget and personnel be scaled back beyond the modest reductions it has faced so far? Should it be reorganized? How much of its resources should go to satellites or other high-tech equipment, and how much toward human sources--that is, spies? Should it devote more resources to gathering economic intelligence?

The bipartisan commission, headed by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin, is supposed to report to the White House and Congress a year from now. It will be up to Deutch to try to work with the commission and to help shape a consensus on what U.S. intelligence should be doing.

The CIA conceivably could benefit from another aspect of the switch to the Deutch nomination.

Deutch’s confirmation would mean that Adm. William O. Studeman, the CIA’s deputy director, would be legally entitled to stay on the job. The law that set up the CIA prohibits two career military officials from holding the agency’s top two jobs, and the confirmation of Carns would have required Studeman to step aside.

Studeman is a symbol of day-to-day continuity at the CIA. He served as Gates’ deputy in the George Bush Administration and in the Clinton Administration under Woolsey. Since Woolsey’s resignation in January, Studeman has been the CIA’s acting director.

Ironically, Deutch is an old friend of Woolsey’s. The two men worked on national security issues in the Jimmy Carter Administration, and both are friends and proteges of Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush’s national security adviser.

In 1983, when President Ronald Reagan appointed Scowcroft to head an 11-member commission on U.S. strategic forces, its Democratic members included Woolsey, Deutch and William J. Perry, who is now Deutch’s boss as secretary of defense.

But in the past two years, Deutch has been far more adept at working with Congress than was Woolsey.

Last summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the secretive way in which the National Reconnaissance Office had won congressional approval for a $310-million headquarters complex.

Deutch, as deputy defense secretary, was soothing and accommodating, promising Congress a “forthright and constructive review.” But Woolsey, as CIA director, was testy and defensive, suggesting repeatedly that Congress should have known about the new headquarters and that lawmakers had no right to be asking belated questions about it.

Now-retired Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), who chaired that hearing, later recommended to Clinton that he appoint Deutch to replace Woolsey. The President reportedly sounded out Deutch about the CIA job in late December, but Deutch was reluctant to leave his job at the Pentagon.

Before serving in the Clinton Administration, Deutch, 56, spent most of his life at the intersection of science, academia and government. He has a doctorate in chemistry and has taught at Princeton University and MIT.

In 1990, while serving as MIT’s provost, Deutch wanted to become the university president. But he lost out after faculty critics complained that he was a symbol of a too-cozy relationship between MIT and the federal government.

Since the 1960s, Deutch has served as a consultant to every Administration except Richard Nixon’s. In 1990, Bush appointed him to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

“He’s always been a safe member of the traditional Cold War foreign policy Establishment,” said Robert Borosage of the Campaign for New Priorities, an organization that is seeking to cut defense spending.