CIA Officials Saw Lake as Providing a Sense of Stability

When Anthony Lake was nominated by President Clinton to be CIA director last December, CIA officials breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the badly shaken agency would be getting a director who could provide it with the stability, stature and White House access needed to help the CIA adapt to the post-Cold War world.

Instead, Lake’s sudden withdrawal from his bitter confirmation battle has sent yet another shudder through an agency that has been plagued by turmoil for half a decade.

Damaged by revolving-door leadership, a succession of high-profile internal spying cases and sagging morale, the CIA has now lost the nominee many had hoped would finally reverse its fortunes and provide it with the sense of mission it has lacked since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Lake’s failure has raised questions about whether the CIA--which has not had a permanent director since December--can maintain good congressional relations in the midst of a broad internal reorganization. It has prompted CIA observers to wonder whether the White House, embittered by the nomination fiasco, will treat the rudderless CIA as an unwanted stepchild within its national security apparatus.

“I think this whole thing is just very damaging for the agency,” complained Richard Stolz, former chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, its clandestine espionage division. “This whole thing is just awful.”

Indeed, turnover at the top and White House neglect have compounded the CIA’s difficulties in dealing with a seemingly endless string of scandals, from Russian spies Aldrich H. Ames and Harold A. Nicholson to allegations of links to human rights abuses in Central America.

With the Lake nomination, President Clinton seemed to be signaling that he was ready to take the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community more seriously. But Lake’s withdrawal could prompt the White House to revert to its initial habit of keeping the CIA at arm’s length. It may even compound those problems by suggesting to CIA personnel that the director’s post has become a perennial political tar baby.

“You have a president who is already in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most CIA nominees in a single term,” observed Jeffrey Richelson, author of several books on the U.S. intelligence community. “Leadership here is a problem.”

More broadly, many compare the CIA today to the U.S. Army at the end of the Vietnam War; it is suffering from a kind of institutional post-traumatic stress syndrome from its 50-year struggle with the KGB. The high turnover at the top has left CIA employees groping for a new institutional identity largely on their own.

To be sure, the CIA is not as mired in the Cold War as many in the public believe. The agency’s clandestine espionage service began in the early 1990s to reduce the number of spies targeted against Moscow, redirecting them to new “transnational” espionage targets such as terrorism, narcotics and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the Third World.

The agency’s payroll has shrunk dramatically since the Soviet collapse and the U.S. victory in the Gulf War in 1991. From a peak of about 22,000, buyouts and other forms of attrition have cut the CIA’s work force down to about 16,000.

Some overseas CIA stations have been closed. A major “scrub” of paid informants around the world has been conducted in an effort to sever the agency’s relationship with those who no longer provide useful information about the CIA’s new targets--and who may have committed human rights violations in the past. Such agent scrubs were initiated just as the Cold War ended and have been conducted more recently in the wake of allegations of CIA ties to Guatemalan Army officers implicated in acts of torture and murder.

Still, more dramatic reforms have not been implemented because of internal resistance as well as a lack of stable and consistent leadership. As a result, America’s allies have begun to grow restive because the CIA has not, for example, scaled back many of its secret operations in Europe that are holdovers from the Cold War.

“Certainly there had to be a major change in the intelligence community as a whole once the Cold War collapsed, and there hasn’t been as much as there might be,” observed Richelson.

Many at the CIA hoped Lake would be the answer to the CIA’s woes--a powerful insider with access to the president who could start the CIA on the long road to reform and recovery. After all, the CIA lives or dies based on the perception of policy-makers of whether it is providing useful and credible information not obtainable anywhere else. It can make a huge difference if the director who takes that information to the White House has the president’s ear.

Lake had mounted a concerted campaign to convince the CIA’s retired spies of the same thing, claiming he was excited by the challenge of leading the intelligence community. Just as important, he had also pledged to stay on the job for four years--far longer than any of his recent predecessors.

With that prospect now gone, CIA veterans are placing their hopes in acting director George J. Tenet, who seems likely to be nominated for the job by Clinton. Tenet’s possible selection is being applauded on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers expect both parties to agree to a quick confirmation to put the Lake affair behind them.

Still, Tenet, a former staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee and an NSC staffer in the Clinton White House, lacks the influence within the administration that made Lake so attractive.

Given recent history, what is remarkable to some observers is that the CIA has managed to function at all.

“After a prolonged period [without a director] the institutional drift does begin to percolate down,” noted former CIA Director Robert M. Gates. “New initiatives, new thrusts, major organizational changes tend to be put on hold.”

The CIA, argued Gates, has done better than most companies could if they had been led by “five CEOs over 5 1/2 years, each with his own ideas.”