American Politics Journal

Now Who'll Direct the CIA?
Tony Lake pulls his name from consideration
by Jeff Koopersmith

Tuesday, March 18th, 1997 -- NEW YORK (APJP) -- These days, it seems almost anticlimactic to be concerned about who will run the CIA. After all, the Soviet Union has been dismantled and ex-KGB operatives are more interested in selling their life stories than in covert operations.

The withdrawal of Anthony Lake as a candidate for CIA director is telling. Lake came before the Senate amid charges that China has attempted to inject money into congressional campaigns. Lake was the first star in a generation of foreign policy soft-liners that were loathe to use American force to solve international problems. Lake was a wunderkind of the 1960s, steeped in a "look before you leap" philosophy. This cautious approach put him and the presidents he served in some difficulty several times over the last three decades, and some in Washington felt that his inability to acknowledge potential enemies boded ill for a the future of the CIA, still self-conscious over its failure to recognize the Soviet's imminent collapse.

Anthony Lake made no apologies for his stopping short of condemning Alger Hiss, his penchant for back-room deals by approving Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia without bothering to tell Congress, his cover-up of Haitian crimes against humanity, and his neglect to sell stock in several public companies after he had been named National Security Adviser to President Clinton -- an error for which he paid a fine of $5,000 assessed by the Justice Department.

Some Republicans wanted to deny him the post of "Top Spy". They succeeded. Lake, under fire, removed himself from consideration late Monday.

Leading the charge against his confirmation was Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby -- once a Democrat, now a Republican and eager to prove loyalty to his adopted party.

Lake entered the foreign service in 1962. In 1963 he went to Vietnam as Assistant Ambassador. Lake soon began to have personal reservations about the Vietnam War and American involvement in other nations' conduct in general. In 1969, after receiving a master's degree at Princeton, he was appointed as Henry Kissinger's special assistant. Kissinger was then-President Nixon's National Security Advisor, and Lake resigned over the bombing of Cambodia and returned to Princeton for a Ph.D. In 1972 he went to work for Ed Muskie's presidential campaign and Kissinger began wiretapping Lake. Lake later quietly sued Kissinger for the wiretap.

Lake's theory that the U.S. should not be involved in other country's civil wars received mixed reviews and, as one of the architects of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy, he found himself weakened and forced to retreat to Mount Holyoke College after the election of Ronald Reagan. Lake was also wrong when he attacked Reagan on deteriorating Soviet-American missile talks and had to nearly reverse himself as the Soviets came back to the table, retreated from Afghanistan, and finally came apart.

Lake was resurrected and seemed to do an about-face during Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign as he urged Clinton to take a hard stance against the Serbs in Bosnia. Clinton did so during the campaign, but later backed off his hard-line -- leaving Lake treading water.

Colin Powell remarked that National Security Council deliberations were like "graduate student bull sessions" under Lake. It finally took Richard Holbrooke's "force with diplomacy" to bring the Serbs to a jolting halt.

Lake also seemed slow to recognize that "Islamic" fundamentalism was a real threat to world stability until his flirtations with Algerian Islamist fanatics drove Middle East leaders into near hysteria.

Perhaps the most telling problem for Lake was his coddling the Chinese. He was most interested in preserving the huge and quickly-emerging Chinese market while at the same time suppressing or soft-pedaling White House criticism of Chinese human rights violations and China's penchant for exporting nuclear technology to the Third World. With revelations regarding Chinese attempts to influence American elections and policy, Lake was likely to stumble as he attempted to defend his protection of China while Congress investigated the not-so-sleepy giant.

It may be that this man of conflicted conscience was too much of a vacillator to be an effective director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Or is the problem that the United States finds itself without the well-defined enemy called "communism?" Jacob Helibrunn, writing for the New Republic, called Lake the "Great Equivocator." Mr. Lake thought he had finally found an era ripe for his uncemented views. Lake believed that use of American force should be a limited alternative. His history is laden with the struggle of weighing complex rights and wrongs. Perhaps his apparent indecision and reluctance to use the military was, in fact, an indication of wisdom, or at least a great respect for the brutality of armed conflict.

It may have been a refreshing change to have a CIA Director who opposed our intervention in Vietnam. The world of the 21st Century in unlikely to provide easily-spotted enemies. Perhaps Lake, who often wrestles with his own conscience, would have been able to lead the CIA into a new era where careful consideration of America's true interests would take precedence over nonessential saber rattling.

But now we'll never know.