Lake Spooks the Senate
REES, MATTHEW
Lake Spooks the Senate by Matthew Rees In 1989, when Anthony Lake was toiling as a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he published a well-received book about U.S. policy toward...
...Sharp elbows, not to mention a stiff backbone, will come in handy for the next CIA director...
...Lake is far from forceful...
...Does that make him the right man to lead an agency said to be demoralized by a spate of spy scandals and the absence of a clearly defined enemy...
...and extract a pound of administration flesh...
...Lake possess unquestioned integrity...
...Indeed, Lake's hearing, originally scheduled to begin February 11, was delayed to allow the committee and the Justice Department to complete their inquiries...
...He's comfortable with the classroom-style give and take he knew as a professor, while the intelligence world is more akin to the military environment he's never known...
...Does Mr...
...Privately he was said to be furious with Deutch...
...As more information dribbles out about Lake, Senate Republicans will find it easier to end the confirmation lovefest (Albright, Cuomo, Daley, et al...
...It is essential," wrote Lake, "that the director of Central Intelligence be an official who is prepared to present a president with unpleasant information...
...Is this the right man for the job...
...Did Lake have a role in these meetings...
...Matthew Rees is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...Consider: In September 1996, when John Deutch, then director of central intelligence, shocked washington by testifying that Saddam Hussein was in a stronger position after the U.S...
...But it is one in a long list of concerns Lake must contend with as he prepares to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 25...
...Can he be an independent purveyor of intelligence to the president...
...bombing raids in southern Iraq that month, Lake dissented sharply in a White House session with reporters...
...I have not made up my mind," says the courtly Alabamian...
...Then it emerged that the Justice Department was conducting two investigations of him: one into whether he lied about his role in the administration's controversial policy not to block Iranian arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims, the other into his failure to sell some energy stocks upon becoming national security adviser...
...While loyalty to the president befits a national security adviser, Lake's break with Deutch has caused some to wonder how readily he would pass on to the White House information contradicting his own analyses of the past four years...
...Lake has been embroiled in controversy almost from the moment President Clinton tapped him on December 5. First he foolishly declared he wasn't convinced of Alger Hiss's guilt...
...And Deutch, though liked by the president, never gained the trust of career CIA officials, who resented his autocratic ways and his obvious desire to become defense secretary...
...Whether he carries a big stick is an unanswered question, though one colleague notes that when it comes to "bureaucratic gamesmanship," Lake is in a league with Richard Darman, the Bush administration's famously cunning budget director...
...Fast-forward eight years, and those two sentences take on new meaning...
...At least two of the committee's Republicans, Richard Lugar and John Chafee, are expected to support Lake, and another, Orrin Hatch, is a strong believer in executive privilege...
...policy toward Nicaragua entitled Somoza Falling...
...Still, unless Lake stumbles in his testimony or is directly implicated in shady fund-raising or shameless hucksterism, he'll probably get through the committee and the full Senate...
...Shelby, a former Democrat whose clashes with the White House prompted him to switch parties after the '94 election, has no intention of giving Lake a free ride...
...And Lake has another small advantage: He's extremely well versed on the CIA, having been the chief White House contact for both Woolsey and Deutch...
...Of course not...
...Lake should be able to avoid these pitfalls: His relations with Clinton are firm, and he doesn't see the CIA job as a stepping stone to another administration position...
...Among the explanations he offered for the Carter administration's slow response to the Sandinistas' rise was a weak CIA...
...White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles has said the president is "willing to go to the mat for Tony," which should limit Democratic defections...
...Still, there's a certain irony in having the CIA led by someone who in 1970 resigned from Richard Nixon's National Security Council over the secret bombing of Cambodia...
...Grounds for denying him the top CIA job...
...It doesn't hurt Lake that he's supported by two other influential Republicans: Senator John McCain, who calls him "straightforward and forthcoming," and Robert Gates, the head of George Bush's CIA...
...Some mischievous Republican might even want Lake to explain the story he once told a New York Times reporter about how in 1962 he deliberately misled his draft board so as to avoid Army service and instead go to Vietnam as a Foreign Service officer...
...Today, the strait-laced Lake would presumably chalk up that move as a youthful indiscretion and point to the Clinton record as proof that he's no shrinking violet when it comes to clandestine operations...
...companies in South America...
...His low-key approach will go over swimmingly until he encounters resistance to some request...
...when the director is a loyalist more than an analyst, an enforcer of the president's ideology rather than a skeptical and independent figure, the result can be disastrous...
...McCain speaks for many Republicans when he says, "I wouldn't have selected Lake" for the job, but "it all comes down to: The president has the right to appoint who he wants...
...All the reservations about him notwithstanding, Lake's confirmation hearings are unlikely to produce fireworks...
...And one of the many questions swirling around him is whether, after four years as the president's national security adviser, he can make the transition from ideological loyalist to skeptical analyst...
...Should Lake be confirmed, he'll have a few advantages over the administration's two previous CIA directors...
...Similarly, in litigation involving the subpoena of Commerce Department documents, a district court has ruled that the administration improperly withheld a draft memorandum from Lake to Clinton regarding advocacy on behalf of U.S...
...Shelby told me, "All of these themes need to be investigated, and they will be...
...There are a number of other sensitive subjects the senators could ask Lake to discuss: White House records show that a senior Lake aide was scheduled to meet on three occasions with one of the Asian donors who have caused so much trouble for the administration...
...Richard Shelby, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, says his reservations about Lake have only grown...
...James Woolsey resigned because he thought the director of central intelligence ought to have a close working relationship with the president—something he never had...
...Far from the ivory tower now, Lake is Bill Clinton's nominee to be director of central intelligence...
...Don't be surprised if the reservations keep on growing...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
