IF television can come up with an adorable gangster, why not a lovable CIA too?

For years, the intelligence agency has had a serious image problem. TV writers searching for an unscrupulous, high-handed and faceless bumbler could always make him a CIA agent.

It made life so easy.

But starting this fall, no less than three different new series are set within the CIA – including one that is being made with the full and unprecedented cooperation of The Company.

Suddenly, the CIA is cool again.

Gil Bellows (“Ally McBeal”) stars as a high-level American agent in CBS’ “The Agency, which at least one agent describes as a CIA-version of “The West Wing.”

The show is so tight with the agency the network is having its debut party later inside the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va.

“It has long bothered – viscerally – most people who work in this agency that the image of us as depicted in novels and screenplays and movies and certain TV programs was generally and universally negative,” Chase Brandon, a 30-year CIA vet told The Post.

“I watched during the ’70s and ’80s as the movies and the references to us just became progressively uglier and uglier,” said Brandon, who for the last five years has served as the agency’s film industry liaison, an office he helped create in order to help boost the CIA’s image.

All that ugliness, he hopes, is about to change.

“Unfortunately for image purposes, whereas [James] Bond was always in a tuxedo and going to the glitzy resort areas, we do real work. This is not the world of 007 and we aren’t 007s – there are no James Bonds here,” Brandon said.

“There are hard-working people, many of whom toil away at great risk in very troubled, war-torn, politically tumultuous, snake-infested jungle parts of the world,” he said.

The rehabilitation of the agency’s image doesn’t stop there.

Fox’s “24” – perhaps the most-talked about new series of the season – stars Kiefer Sutherland as a beleaguered intelligence operative assigned to stop a political assassination.

ABC’s “Alias,” on the other hand, stars Jennifer Garner as a fists-of-fury CIA recruit who is not sure she is working for the agency – or a rogue faction of the agency bent on taking power into its hands.

Until recently, while other government agencies like the FBI and the Department of Defense devoted time and energy to guiding the entertainment industry’s portrayal of them, the CIA maintained a wall of silence.

“So even though we did not like the imagery, we never did anything institutionally to try to counter it,” Brandon said.

The Vietnam war, the inexplicable deaths of a few foreign leaders and agency’s link to the Watergate burglars added up to a load of bad press that – 25 years later – the CIA is only now trying to overcome.

During the Cold War, “we did carry out kind of a surrogate warfare around the world,” Brandon said.

“The pawns on the chess board did the hard work while the kings and queens and leaders of the chess game never really had to duke it out. We helped keep the Cold War cold. We never did have that hot, thermonuclear war because the intelligence mission was being carried out in a way that insured that we didn’t have that horrible, nuclear global war,” he said.

In terms of “official” contact, the producers for “The Agency” leaned heavily on the CIA for advice on how to make the show as realistic as possible. “Alias” producers ran a few questions by CIA officials, Brandon said, but the creators of “24” had little or no contact at all.

“People who make films and make TV series have come to realize that there’s far more involved with this business of espionage, and far more complexity in consequence with the American way of life than can or should be represented by some stupid Clouseau-cop characterization,” he said.