Anthony Lake: Clinton Confidant Sent to Skeptical CIA

WASHINGTON — As a young National Security Council aide in the Richard Nixon administration, Anthony Lake was the subject of a wiretap investigation to determine whether he was leaking classified information. More than 20 years later, he is in line to head all U.S. efforts to bug, wiretap and spy on the rest of the world.

But the 57-year-old Lake, nominated as President Clinton’s third CIA director, will find himself thrown into an agency that is deeply skeptical of Clinton’s interest in or commitment to the U.S. intelligence community.

Lake’s great advantage over his predecessors may be that he has spent the last four years inside the West Wing of the White House as Clinton’s national security advisor, and so should know just what the president wants from the intelligence community. His great disadvantage may be that everyone at the CIA also knows that Lake knows what Clinton wants.

Lake may have to overcome initial suspicions from CIA staffers that he will try to tailor intelligence information to suit Clinton administration policy--just the sort of charge leveled against the agency when it was run by William J. Casey, a confidant of then-President Reagan.

Lake is a soft-spoken former college professor whose foreign policy views were forged during his years in the Foreign Service in Vietnam and later on Henry A. Kissinger’s National Security Council staff. It was during that time with the NSC that Lake was one of many people investigated by the administration, which feared information leaks.

He is a man noted for being willing to stand up for his principals; he resigned from the NSC in 1970 in protest of the Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia.

Unlike Clinton, Lake is said to have a strong interest in intelligence matters, and would clearly feel comfortable in the semi-academic atmosphere found in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, where desk-bound analysts write the reports that often end up on the president’s desk.

But CIA observers wonder whether he has the leadership and management skills needed to deal with the agency’s undercover spies in its espionage arm, the Directorate of Operations.

That is where the agency’s toughest problems are, and where most of the CIA’s biggest controversies originate. Helping the operations directorate get through its post-Cold War identity crisis consumed Clinton’s first two CIA directors: R. James Woolsey resigned from the CIA at the end of 1994, and John M. Deutch--who had hoped to use his CIA assignment as a springboard to becoming defense secretary--is returning to academia, having lost out in the Pentagon sweepstakes.

Lake has never run a large institution before, and the CIA is a devilish place to have to learn management skills.

He is likely to find a strong ally in the CIA’s current deputy director, George Tenet. Tenet worked for Lake at the NSC before becoming Deutch’s deputy in 1995, and the two are said to have a close working relationship.