Lake’s Bid to Head CIA Becomes Battle of Wills

One of Washington’s nastiest political dramas will break into the open Tuesday when hearings begin before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the nomination of former White House National Security Advisor Anthony Lake as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Lake will face off against his chief tormentor, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who chairs the committee. The two have little in common.

Lake is a Harvard graduate (magna cum laude) and has ties to Cambridge, Princeton (where he earned a PhD), the State Department, the Carnegie Endowment and Mount Holyoke. He is a member of the country’s Northeastern elite but never has been elected to anything more exalted than the Worthington, Mass., Planning Board.

Shelby, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., is a graduate of the University of Alabama and its law school and has served in the Senate more than 10 years. A Democrat who was punished for opposing the president’s 1993 budget plan, he changed his party affiliation and is now a Republican chairman who is in position for some payback.

The two sides in this political drama have been preparing for the collision for months, fighting over FBI files, trading accusations, whispering innuendoes, spinning facts for the media and dealing out leaks like poker cards. It has turned into that rare Washington set piece, a test of wills between two men backed by powerful partisan forces--the Democratic administration and the Republican Congress.

The latest twist in the ongoing confrontation between the White House and Shelby came Sunday, in response to a new report about alleged efforts by China to funnel illegal campaign contributions into U.S. politics last year. According to the report, staff members at the National Security Council, which Lake headed, were informed by the Justice Department of an FBI investigation into the allegations concerning China, but President Clinton and other senior White House officials were not briefed. Shelby said he will raise the issue during Lake’s confirmation hearings to find out whether a breakdown in the system kept the president in the dark.

All this has earned the Lake nomination comparisons to the ugly battle over Sen. John Tower’s failed 1989 nomination by President George Bush to become secretary of Defense.

To stave off a similar fate, Lake has aggressively and successfully courted the old boys’ network at the CIA, dining with retired spies, bringing others into the White House for private chats, promising anxious CIA alumni that he will stay at the agency for four years and take an active management role in its espionage operations. The CIA’s public affairs staff, meanwhile, has referred inquiring reporters to talkative retired officers, and Lake’s NSC staff has “inspired” friendly op-ed pieces in major newspapers while providing background sessions with reporters on Lake’s leadership role in the administration’s foreign policy successes.

Yet the baying from the anti-Lake camp has been even louder and more fulsome. His foes have been tearing into his reputation, circulating innuendoes about his supposed ties to anti-CIA organizations.

Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), the Intelligence Committee vice chairman, sees “pressure from the Republican caucus” behind the Shelby-Lake battle.

Firefights between Shelby and the White House have been breaking out almost daily: over Lake’s FBI file, over NSC contacts with controversial Democratic fund-raisers, over White House claims of executive privilege on documents related to U.S. policy in Haiti. The White House has resisted many of Shelby’s requests, prompting him twice to ratchet up the pressure by delaying Lake’s hearings. Exasperated White House officials said that, as soon as they meet Shelby’s conditions on one issue, he piles on new demands, raises new questions.

“This is torture by QFR,” admits one Capitol Hill Republican, using Congress-speak for “questions for the record.”

In the process, senators who normally pay little attention to intelligence matters are taking the time to read up on Lake, demanding complete access to Lake’s raw FBI files, choosing sides. Without the kind of broad access to Lake’s FBI files that was granted members of the Senate during the Tower nomination, “Lake is going to have a bloc of automatic ‘no’ votes, and that could place his nomination in jeopardy,” according to Sen. Wayne Allard of Colorado, a junior Republican on the intelligence panel.

“The opposition has reached critical mass,” said a gleeful Frank Gaffney, an ultraconservative defense analyst who is both widely credited--and blamed--for starting the drumbeat against Lake.

Now, with virtually the entire conservative wing of the Republican Party lined up behind Shelby, and Clinton demanding that the Senate consider the matter, the Lake nomination has evolved into a foreign policy surrogate for the clash of cultures between the White House and the GOP Congress.

Stuck in the middle is the CIA, an agency already numb from a bad case of the post-Cold War blues. Reeling from a rapid-fire succession of scandals--its highest-ranking officer ever to be charged with espionage just pleaded guilty to selling out to Moscow last Monday--the last thing the CIA needs is a partisan congressional battle over its leadership and direction.

“I think it is safe to say that the attitude among career employees is that they are dismayed by what is happening,” said one U.S. intelligence official.

“The longer this goes on,” declared Richard Stolz, a former chief of the CIA’s clandestine operations who has been consulted by Lake, “the more damage it does to the agency.”

Shelby has carefully avoided committing himself to voting against Lake, but that has not stopped him from making the nominee’s life miserable. He has ordered the committee staff to conduct a complete scrub of Lake’s life and his record as national security advisor. He also makes it clear that he does not believe Clinton thought very carefully about the likely Senate response to a nominee who was a central player in all of the most controversial foreign policy actions of the president’s first term, from Bosnia to Haiti and beyond.

“I think this nomination surprised a lot of people,” said Shelby. “It’s surprising that the president would nominate someone that would bring controversy with him to a post as important as the CIA. It’s troubling. I have a lot of unanswered questions, and I’m not alone.”

But bad blood between Shelby and the Clinton White House is nothing new. It dates back four years, to the administration’s first major legislative battle: the 1993 tax and budget bill.

Then-Democrat Shelby chose to announce his opposition to the president’s budget in the midst of a photo opportunity with Vice President Al Gore. “The tax man cometh,” he said memorably.

Furious, the White House yanked 900 National Aeronautics and Space Administration jobs out of Alabama and moved them to Texas. To make sure Shelby got the message, the White House then denied him tickets to a South Lawn ceremony honoring the University of Alabama’s championship football team.

Later, on the night Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide in July 1993, President Clinton tried to make amends. Shelby was Foster’s next-door neighbor in Washington, and--after comforting Foster’s wife and family--Clinton, always the politician, went next door to talk with Shelby.

But Shelby “never seemed interested in repairing the breach,” said one source. In November 1994, just days after the Republicans took over Congress, Shelby switched parties.

Shelby aides insisted that the fight over Lake is about policy substance, not a ploy to extract a pound of flesh from the nominee to settle old political scores with Clinton.

Just business, declared Shelby. “I don’t even know Mr. Lake,” he said.

In fact, even Democrats acknowledge that the Republicans have raised some serious questions--on Lake’s record as national security advisor, his commitment to keeping Congress informed of secret policies and whether he has provided objective information and analysis on administration policies that he helped craft.

Shelby and others remain troubled by Lake’s involvement in Clinton’s 1994 decision to give a green light to Iranian arms shipments into Bosnia-Herzegovina without telling the CIA, the Pentagon--or Congress. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chaired the Intelligence Committee at the time, has circulated a letter to every other senator stating that Iran-Bosnia should be the central issue of the Lake nomination. Lake’s failure to notify Congress of the secret policy, Specter has charged, calls into question whether he can be trusted to keep Congress informed of CIA operations.

“When Lake came to talk to me and Sen. Kerrey about this issue last year, he said he thought it was necessary” not to notify Congress, Specter fumed. “When he came to see me after he was nominated to be CIA director, he said it was a mistake not to tell Congress. That’s what I call a confirmation conversion.”

But Shelby has no intention of keeping the hearings so narrowly focused. In a floor statement Wednesday, he unveiled a smorgasbord of questions that the hearings will address, including the NSC’s contacts with controversial foreign fund-raisers; Lake’s stock dealings, which prompted a Justice Department ethics investigation, and allegations that Lake’s NSC played politics with the intelligence process on sensitive issues like human rights abuses in Haiti and Chinese missile shipments to Pakistan.

Signs that Lake is wounded have prompted liberals to close in on him as well. Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), a longtime critic of the CIA’s alleged ties to murderers and thugs in Central America, said his support for Lake depends on whether the nominee promises broad reform at the CIA, including further reforms of its past willingness to turn human rights violators into paid informants.

The shifting sentiments in the Senate have made it difficult to predict Lake’s fate. Two moderate Republicans--Sens. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.)--have said that they are likely to vote for Lake, which should give him at least a one-vote margin of victory in the committee. But Republicans warned that the real battle is likely to come on the floor of the Senate, where it is still unclear whether Lake can win enough GOP support to get a majority.

Even if he wins confirmation, Lake’s bloody battle with Shelby has raised serious questions about whether he will arrive at CIA headquarters so badly wounded that he is too weak to lead. Lake privately asked Kerrey whether Shelby will ever agree to work with him. Kerrey said that he will. Shelby has insisted that Lake “might satisfy all the questions raised” in the hearings and then go on to succeed at the CIA.

“Ha!” said Specter. “You can say that, when asked whether they will be able to work together, Arlen Specter laughed.”