Anthony Lake’s Baggage

The one certainty about Anthony Lake’s appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee early next year is that he is in for rough handling by the Republican majority. Lake, nominated by President Clinton as director of Central Intelligence, has already been accused by committee chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) of “duplicitous” behavior for his involvement in the administration’s tacit secret sanctioning of arms shipments from Iran to Bosnia in 1994. In recent days Lake has been calling key senators to plead his case and acknowledge that concealing the arms deal from Congress was a mistake. This effort does not seem so far to have put GOP senators in a more forgiving mood.

Concerns about Lake’s fitness extend beyond the Bosnia gaffe, which some see as having given radical Iran a worrying lodgment in a tumultuous area of Europe. A basic responsibility of the director of Central Intelligence is to provide objective, politically untainted intelligence and analysis to the president as a guide to policy making. As head of the CIA, Lake would be sending to the White House intelligence evaluations of some of the very policies he helped to shape as Clinton’s national security advisor. The committee will want persuasive assurances that Lake the intelligence boss would be ready when circumstances dictated to unhesitatingly take issue with policies that Lake the advisor recommended.

But the basic concern that some Republicans have raised is whether Lake is tough enough to successfully manage an agency that’s badly in need of reorientation in terms of its missions and redefining in terms of its institutional culture. Lake has been in and out of government for almost 35 years, and he is an experienced infighter. But in his four years at the White House he has been deeply involved in a foreign policy that can most charitably be described as uneven. None of this necessarily rules him out as a nominee to run the nation’s multifarious intelligence operations. But there are clearly grounds for probing questions to be asked.