U.S. Counter-intelligence Failures Suggest The Nation Urgently Needs Someone Other Than Tony Lake As D.C.I.

(Washington, D.C.): The revelation
that Soviet/Russian intelligence may have
succeeded for many years in exploiting
yet another mole — this time, veteran
FBI agent Earl Pitts — who was in a
position to compromise American
operations of interest to Moscow is
certainly shocking. Unfortunately, it is
not entirely surprising — coming as it
does on the heels of several other
serious spy scandals that are indicative
of the sorry state to which the U.S.
intelligence community has been reduced
in recent years.

What is shocking and
surprising, however, is that the
Clinton Administration was aware that
both the CIA and FBI had been penetrated
by alleged Russian spies and the
President still wanted to make Anthony
Lake his next Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI)!

Bad Attitude Toward
Counter-intelligence

After all, Mr. Lake has shown a
certain insouciance, to put it
mildly, about the Kremlin’s long-standing
efforts to infiltrate and suborn American
intelligence agencies. For
example, as noted in a recent Center Transition
Brief⁽¹⁾,
during an appearance on NBC’s
“Meet the Press” on 24 November
1996 — prior to his nomination as DCI —
Mr. Clinton’s National Security Advisor
seemed to downplay the significance of
Russia’s intensive efforts to conduct
espionage against the United States at
or above Cold War levels. As far as
he could bring himself to go was to say:
“They apparently are spying
on us to a degree that we don’t
like.”

Then, in response to a question about
whether Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, Mr.
Lake responded, “I’ve read a couple
of books that certainly offered a lot of
evidence that he may have been. I
don’t think it’s conclusive.“
Such statements bespeak a judgment that
can at best be characterized as
indefensible naivete, at worst as what
George Will recently called
“insufferable agnosticism.”
Either way, this sort of judgment — or
lack of it — about the abiding
counter-intelligence threat from Moscow
is clearly not what is needed in the next
Director of Central Intelligence.

Lack of Leadership on
Counter-intelligence

Moreover, as National Security
Advisor, Tony Lake has evinced little
appreciation of the necessity of an
aggressive, proactive U.S.
counter-intelligence program.
Without the sort of leadership that was
provided under President Reagan’s NSC
Advisor, Judge William Clark, even an
accomplished intelligence professional
like William J. Casey found it difficult
to overcome bureaucratic blind spots and
institutional rivalries in order to
ensure that the entire U.S. government
actively worked to defeat hostile
intelligence operatives before
they made inroads in this country. By
contrast, the best that can be
said about Tony Lake’s tenure is that he
has presided over improvements in our
capabilities to shut the proverbial barn
door after the horse has
delivered saddlebags full of vital
information to potential enemies.

In fact, the job of thwarting KGB
penetrations before they occur has been
made significantly more difficult by an
initiative promoted by Mr. Lake in his
capacity as the President’s top political
appointee responsible for formulating and
executing security policy. To the
extent that the Clinton Administration
has seen U.S. intelligence-sharing and
liaison arrangements as talismans of
post-Cold War rapprochement with Moscow,
it has simultaneously given Moscow
unprecedented access to America’s most
sensitive agencies and fostered a climate
that is antithetical to rigorous
counter-intelligence and security
practices.

A History of Indifference
to Counter-intelligence

Mr. Lake’s past associations may also
help explain why he has not done more to
strengthen the FBI’s abilities to perform
effective counter-intelligence functions
in this country or seen to it that the
CIA created a professional
counter-intelligence service to operate
overseas. As indicated in the
aforementioned Center Transition
Brief, Tony Lake was associated
with radical Left organizations like the
Institute for Policy Studies and Center
for National Security Studies during the
1970s and early 1980s.

It is relevant to the present topic
that this association was quite possibly
a by-product of unauthorized wiretaps
ordered by Henry Kissinger on Mr. Lake’s
phones — among others — in an effort to
ferret out whether he was responsible for
a series of leaks unhelpful to the
Vietnam war effort. In any event, it
put him in league with people who sought
assiduously to curb the tools available
to the FBI for domestic
counter-intelligence and to stymie or
disrupt the CIA’s clandestine operations.
The insidious long-term effects of those
efforts are still being felt in today’s
intelligence community.

Missing the Incipient
Counter-intelligence Crisis?

Unfortunately, there is a shoe that
has yet to drop amid the post-mortems on the
Pitts, Nicholson and Ames spy cases: They
are all instances of successful Soviet/Russian
intelligence operations. As
such, they are a helpful reminder that
whatever else may have changed (or
appeared to) following the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the Kremlin’s acute interest
in collecting intelligence against the
United States has not.

There has, as yet, been no
revelation that China has
successfully penetrated U.S.
intelligence, however. It simply
defies credulity that the Chinese, who
are no less keen on American secrets than
their born-again-allies in Russia, have
not taken advantage of the same
opportunities that Moscow has so
skillfully exploited over the past decade
or so. And the fact that China
has thus far avoided the sort of
breakdown of important power centers that
has increasingly afflicted Russia means
simultaneously that the damage being done
by China may be that much greater and the
chances of detecting Chinese penetrations
(for example, via defectors) is that much
less.

On this score, too, Tony Lake is
clearly the wrong man for the CIA job. He
has overseen the Clinton Administration’s
relentless campaign to improve relations
with Beijing on Chinese terms. He has
presided over presidential decisions that
have had the effect of making American
military installations, laboratories,
technology, universities and government
entities more accessible to China. In
particular, he had to have been
aware of the “strategic access”
to the Clinton White House enjoyed by
China through its friends like John Huang
and Charles Trie. Such a man is
grossly ill-equipped to lead the effort
required to contend with a
counter-intelligence problem that may
ultimately make that posed by Moscow pale
by comparison.

The Bottom Line

Unless President Clinton has the good
sense pre-emptively to withdraw the Lake
nomination to be Director of Central
Intelligence, chances are that members of
the Senate Select Intelligence Committee
will be obliged to explore the baggage
Mr. Lake brings to this appointment from
a counter-intelligence perspective. When
combined with other serious problems —
notably, the danger of further
politicization of the CIA arising from
the apparent sloughing off to the Agency
of this long-time Democratic operative
and his record of less-than-candid
interactions with (among others) Members
of Congress — Tony Lake is
clearly unworthy of Senate confirmation.

– 30 –

1. See Why
Tony Lake is Unfit — And Unlikely
— To Be the Next Director of Central
Intelligence ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_129″>No. 96-D 129, 16
December 1996).