Why Tony Lake Is Unfit — And Unlikely — To Be The Next Director of Central Intelligence

(Washington, D.C.): For some time, there has been
reason to believe that President Clinton regarded the
intelligence community with roughly the same disdain, if
not contempt, that he has long felt toward the U.S.
military. This attitude has been manifested in numerous
ways. For example, during much of his first term, the
President often declined personally to receive the daily
intelligence briefing prepared specifically for
him. He has presided over the politicization of
the intelligence community — a phenomenon that
has resulted in the dumbing-down of key estimates and
that leaves out of official biographies the fact that a
state visitor has mass murder in his background. href=”96-T129.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

What is more, on Mr. Clinton’s watch — as former
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Peter
Schweizer recently noted in National Review — CIA
resources have been massively diverted from monitoring
military threats to addressing such “global
issues” as the extent of ecological degradation
taking place in Lake Victoria. And this President has
appointed to senior positions in the intelligence
community individuals with no background in the
business but a demonstrated commitment to routinely
sharing sensitive intelligence with foreign nationals —
a practice that inevitably compromises valuable sources
and methods.⁽²⁾

Enter Tony Lake

Now comes the most damning indictment of all.
President Clinton has nominated his National Security
Advisor, Anthony Lake, to lead that
community as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Even
if the CIA were in top form — with no problems with
moles, morale, quality control or the recruitment and
retention of qualified people — Tony Lake would be an
undesirable choice to serve as DCI. Under the Agency’s
present dire circumstances, however, his nomination is
a formula for disaster. Consider the
following partial bill of particulars:

A Criminal Referral on Iran-Bosnia

Last month, a House select subcommittee chaired by
Rep. Henry Hyde named Tony Lake, among other senior
Administration officials involved in the Iran-Bosnia
scandal, in a criminal referral letter to Attorney
General. After a lengthy investigation, Rep. Hyde’s
subcommittee believed that there was sufficient evidence
of illegal activity by the named individuals to warrant
the appointment of an independent counsel.

At a minimum, this affair — which facilitated the
creation of a radical Islamic foothold in Central Europe
and entailed a deliberate effort to conceal questionable
activities from the appropriate congressional committees
— suggests a lack of judgment and candor. Concerns
expressed about Mr. Lake’s behavior over the weekend by
the outgoing and incoming chairmen of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Sens. Arlen Specter and Richard
Shelby respectively, make it inconceivable that
the Lake nomination could proceed in the Senate in
the absence of an official Justice Department response to
Rep. Hyde’s criminal referral.

Violating the Law on Missile Defense

Last week, three key House committee chairmen —
Appropriations’ Bob Livingston, International Relations’
Benjamin Gilman, and National Security’s Floyd Spence —
felt compelled to take an extraordinary step. They wrote
President Clinton advising him that, due to his
Administration’s failure to comply with the law href=”96-T129.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾ concerning
amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty, all funding was being cut-off for the negotiating
forum (the Standing Consultative Commission) in which
those amendments have largely been drafted.

At issue, fundamentally, are the Clinton
Administration’s efforts to expand the signatories and
scope of the ABM Treaty — and, thereby, to
create still further impediments to the deployment of
effective U.S. missile defenses — without
obtaining congressional approval for such substantial
changes. As National Security Advisor, Tony Lake
has been personally involved in the effort to finesse
Congress and, despite the legislative branch’s strong and
repeatedly expressed opposition, to subject an expanded
list of American defensive programs to vetoes by not only
Russia but by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, as well.
Is such an individual really the man to run an
organization that has had a checkered record when it
comes to remaining accountable to legislative overseers?

Indifferent to Russian Espionage, Unconvinced
about Alger Hiss

No less unsettling is the signal conveyed by Mr. Lake
prior to his appointment as DCI during an appearance on
NBC’s “Meet the Press” on 24 November 1996. href=”96-T129.html#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾ First, the
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 — is
clearly deficient for a job as sensitive as that of the
Director of Central Intelligence.

Lake’s Leftist Leanings

Finally, there is the matter of Tony Lake’s past ties
to the extreme Left and its campaign against the U.S.
intelligence community. After he departed the Nixon
National Security Council in April 1970 over his
opposition to the Vietnam war, Mr. Lake became involved
with the Institute for Policy Studies —
the mother of all radical left-wing activist
organizations.

In 1974, Lake helped found an IPS spin-off
organization, the Center for National Security Studies,
that played a leading role in the counterculture’s bid to
hamstring, disrupt and/or dismantle the covert activities
of American intelligence. For example, the Center’s
organizational conference offered a platform for
diatribes against the U.S. intelligence agencies
including presentations by Counter-Spy Magazine,
a publication that specialized in blowing the covers of
American covert operatives.

Tony Lake’s association with the Institute for Policy
Studies continued into the 1980s when he taught at six
seminar sessions on the “Executive Branch”
conducted by the IPS’s Washington School. Mr. Lake’s
dubious credentials as a candidate to lead the CIA also
include stints as a foreign policy advisor to the likes
of George McGovern, Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

The Bottom Line

The Central Intelligence Agency, and the larger
intelligence community its director must lead, are vital
national resources. Today, they are in extremis.
It will take a person of impeccable national security
credentials, someone who has demonstrated extraordinary
competence as a manager and an individual who has earned
the full confidence and trust of both the Congress and
the Nation’s intelligence professionals to restore these
assets to the required, robust condition. Tony Lake is
clearly not such a person.

– 30 –

1. See It Walks Like a
Duck…: Questions Persist That Clinton C.I.A.’s Missile
Threat Estimate Was Politically Motivated ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_122″>No. 96-D 122, 4 December 1996)
and Clinton’s Acquiescence to Chinese
Thuggery in Washington, Hong Kong Encourages Bloodshed in
July (No. 96-D 128,
12 December 1996).

2. One such individual is
Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and
Research Tobi Gati. Some inferred from a recent Transition
Brief concerning an ongoing investigation by the
State Department’s Inspector General into Ms. Gati’s
conduct — and that of her husband, Charles — with
respect to intelligence-sharing that such conduct was
comparable to acts of espionage of which CIA agent Harold
Nicholson stands accused. The Center is not at present in
a position to evaluate what damage, if any, the Gatis may
have caused and intended no such inference. It regrets
any misimpression on this score that may inadvertently
have arisen.

3. This is, regrettably, not the
first instance in which the Clinton Administration’s
national security team under Tony Lake’s leadership has
violated the law in order to impede vital U.S. missile
defense programs. Last October, Federal District Court
Judge Stanley Sporkin validated the substantive arguments
made by forty-one Members of Congress, led by Rep. Spence
and Senator Jon Kyl, who sued President Clinton and
Defense Secretary William Perry over their breach of the
1996 Defense Authorization Act. See the Coalition to
Defend America’s News Release of 10
October 1996 entitled Legislators’ Lawsuit
Scores a ‘T.K.O.’ on Clinton/Perry Bid to Violate the
Law, Stall Key Missile Defense Deployments.

4. See the Center’s Transition
Brief entitled No Go: Tony Lake’s
Position on Russian Spying, Alger Hiss Should Disqualify
Him for Director of the C.I.A. ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_118″>No. 96-D 118, 25 November 1996).