Why Tony Lake Is In Trouble In The Senate

(Washington, D.C.): As President
Clinton and his allies on Capitol Hill
turn up the heat on behalf of his
controversial choice to become the next
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI),
it is useful to review why Anthony Lake’s
nomination is in such trouble in the
Senate.

Poster Child for the
Clinton Follies

On one level, Mr. Lake’s
problem is that he personifies — indeed,
he could be the poster child for — much
of what is seen to be ailing the Clinton
Administration at the moment.
For example, there is the question of a lack
of personal accountability.
“Mistakes were made” is the
President’s refrain about campaign
financing “irregularities”;
Tony Lake declares “it was a
mistake” not to tell Congress that
the United States was facilitating
radical Islamic Iran’s penetration of
Europe via secret arms shipments to
Bosnia.

Then there is the business of sharp
practices when it comes to the law.
The Clinton team evidently will contend
that the law permits renting the Lincoln
Bedroom, seats on Air Force One, tables
at the White House Mess, etc. to campaign
contributors as long as the settling of
accounts does not occur on government
property. Tony Lake’s defenders claim
that his National Security Council did
not “mislead” Congress about
the Iran-Bosnia scandal; it simply
refused to inform Members until two years
after the fact, which amounts — as Sen.
Jesse Helms correctly wrote in opposing
the Lake nomination on 25 February⁽¹⁾
— to the same thing.

Insult is added to injury that such
behavior is brought to us by an
administration whose leader sees fit
publicly to denounce cynicism.
Certainly, such behavior does not inspire
confidence that a candidate for Director
of Central Intelligence will be fully
transparent and forthcoming toward the
legislative branch — for whom he also
works.

The Clinton team also appears to
believe that improper, if not
illegal, financial activities
can be absolved as long as the money is
given back when one gets caught.
Interestingly though, in the case of the
Democratic National Committee, the rule
is to give it all back (at least
eventually). In Mr. Lake’s case, he only
had to pay out $5,000 in fines for the
roughly $250,000 he made by holding onto
energy stocks — despite being formally
directed not once, but twice, to dispose
of them.

Can He Tell A Failure When
He Sees It?

Even those who may be inclined to
overlook these problems with the Lake
candidacy — there is, after all, the
Clinton Administration’s favored
exculpatory line “everybody does
it” — cannot ignore two other,
troubling aspects of this nomination:

First, as Jim Hoagland observed in a
scathing Washington Post column
last month, Anthony Lake seems
ill-suited to the task of conducting
“intelligence assessments and
operations with absolute integrity, even
if they cost Bill Clinton politically and
the CIA bureaucratically.”
After noting the credit the President has
given Lake as “the architect of U.S.
Bosnia policy” and “relaxing
opposition to China” — among other
dubious policies — Hoagland declares:
“I doubt King Solomon would have the
detachment and perspective needed to
disentangle such past advocacy from the
demands of an unbiased analysis.”

In this regard, it is particularly
ominous that Tony Lake has been party to
the sacking of the first two Clinton DCIs
on the grounds, at least in part, that
they dared to speak truth to power.
Hoagland mulls the implications of the
anger Lake reportedly felt toward the
second of these Directors, John Deutch,
for acknowledging that Saddam’s incursion
last fall into northern Iraq was not the
“U.S. success” Clinton had
declared it to be:

“Iraq is the scene of the CIA’s
greatest covert fiasco of this decade.
The agency’s failures in northern Iraq
and its continuing inability to organize
an effective program against Saddam
should be the focus of the questions that
matter in judging whether Lake will have
the detachment and perspective needed to
rebuild a wounded organization….If
Lake cannot get Iraq right, he is not the
man for the job of rescuing an
organization that has not only lost its
mission but, in Iraq, lost its way.”

Will He Know Foreign Agents
When He Sees Them?

Second, since an important part of the
DCI’s job is overseeing U.S.
counterintelligence operations, it is
alarming that Tony Lake presided
as National Security Advisor over what
appears to be the most successful
penetration of the White House by an
unfriendly foreign government since the
British took the place in the War of
1812. As Michael Kelly, the
editor of the New Republic,
recently observed, various documents
supplied in response to congressional
questions about China’s influence
operations in the Executive Office of the
President point up a “profoundly
troubling fact”: “In Bill
Clinton’s White House, the idea that
agents of the People’s Republic of China
were Democratic National Committee donors
who should be granted face-time with the
president was treated [by Lake’s NSC] as
very nearly business as usual.”
Face-time with the President is, of
course, the least of the problems that
have been discovered in the
still-unfolding drama of what the
Communist Chinese got through their
“strategic access” to the
senior-most reaches of the Clinton
Administration.⁽²⁾

The Bottom Line

Anthony Lake’s FBI file may or may not
shed light on the questions of policy
judgment, contempt for Congress,
independence and integrity that are at
the core of the controversy over his
nomination. As long as the raw data in
that file might do so, however, it seems
only prudent for the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence to insist that
its chairman and ranking member be
afforded an opportunity and sufficient
time to review that data, not just the
highly abbreviated — and reportedly
uninformative — summary produced in
support of the Lake nomination. Once such
a review is accomplished, the Committee
and the full Senate will be in a position
to weigh all the evidence supporting the
conclusion that Tony Lake is the wrong
man at the wrong time for the CIA.

– 30 –

1. See the href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_36at”> attached excerpts
of Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Helms’ letter about the Lake nomination
which was sent last week to his
Intelligence Committee counterpart,
Senator Richard Shelby.

2. For more on the
security implications of the China
Connection, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled The
China Card: Evidence of Beijing’s
Involvement in Democratic Fund-Raising
Raises Anew Security Concerns
(No. 97-D 26,
13 February 1997).