Specter Raises Concerns About Choice for CIA Post

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that he may oppose Anthony Lake’s nomination as the nation’s new spy chief because of his role in the Clinton administration’s secret policy of allowing covert Iranian arms shipments into Bosnia.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said at a hearing that he has “grave reservations” about Lake, particularly because of his efforts, while serving as President Clinton’s national security advisor, to keep the administration’s Iranian arms initiative secret from Congress.

Specter’s admonition, coming during testimony by the current CIA chief, John M. Deutch, is one of the strongest signs of possible confirmation trouble for Clinton’s new foreign policy team. Earlier this week, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said that Lake faces “tough sailing” to win Senate confirmation.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, however, said Wednesday that he does not believe the Iranian policy will “pose any significant problem” to Lake’s confirmation. “I think the items of concern there have been addressed by the administration and addressed by Mr. Lake on other occasions,” McCurry said.

Lake is adhering to the traditional practice of not commenting to the press before his confirmation hearing, scheduled for early next year.

The administration gave a green light to Iranian arms shipments through Croatia and into Bosnia in April 1994. The United Nations had imposed an arms embargo on the warring factions in the Balkans. The initiative, largely crafted by Lake and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, conflicted with the longstanding U.S. policy of isolating Iran because of its support for international terrorism.

Specter said that, if Lake does not make it clear that he believes the administration made a mistake in not informing Congress of the Iranian arms policy, he will oppose Lake’s nomination.

“If somebody sits here in a confirmation proceeding and he says that’s not the sort of information which I as CIA director would tell the Intelligence Committee, and see to it that the Congress is informed, that would make it an easy question for me to vote no on his confirmation,” Specter said.

The CIA initially was kept out of the loop about the administration’s Iranian arms policy, leading then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey to wonder whether the White House was conducting a covert action that he did not know about.

When Woolsey learned of the plan, he confronted Lake at the National Security Council in the fall of 1994. At that point, the White House agreed to have the president’s Intelligence Oversight Board review the matter to determine whether any laws had been broken.

After the board determined in 1995 that the policy was not an unauthorized covert action, the administration decided that it could continue to hide the policy from Congress. The initiative was kept from Congress until The Times reported it last April, prompting a series of congressional investigations, including one by Specter’s Intelligence Committee.

The committee’s report, released just after the presidential election last month, was sharply critical of the administration’s handling of the matter. Although the report concluded that the administration’s actions had come “perilously close” to constituting an illegal covert action, the committee backed away from charging that any laws had been broken.

Sources said that Specter believed the arms initiative did constitute an illegal covert action but had agreed to soften the final report to win support for it from Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the committee’s ranking Democrat. Kerrey supported the report but other Democrats on the committee issued a dissenting minority report, saying that the administration had done nothing wrong.

The Justice Department is still reviewing a classified criminal referral filed by a select House panel formed to investigate the controversy. The panel has urged the Justice Department to appoint an independent counsel to investigate its allegations that several officials involved in the arms policy, most notably U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, may have lied to Congress.

Meanwhile, the White House issued a statement Wednesday night saying that Clinton is satisfied that Lake had made an innocent mistake when he failed to comply with an order to sell stocks he owned to avoid a conflict of interest.

The White House statement was in response to a story by CBS News, which reported that the national security advisor had been questioned last week by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section about his apparently inadvertent failure to sell off more than $200,000 of energy stocks.

McCurry said that some energy stocks reported on Lake’s 1993 financial disclosure statement were found by the White House legal counsel to pose a potential conflict of interest and he was advised to sell them. Lake agreed and “passed on information to instruct his accountant to sell those stocks but . . . apparently that wasn’t carried out.”

When Lake filed his financial disclosure statement for 1994, the legal counsel’s office discovered that he still owned the stocks. Last May, Lake was told of the problem and “he sold them immediately,” McCurry said, noting that “the law requires us to bring to the Justice Department’s attention anything related to a compliance issue.”

McCurry stressed that Clinton had been fully aware of the situation and that he felt it should not be a factor in Senate confirmation of Lake as CIA director.