Subterranean Lake

National Review, Jan 27, 1997 by Martin Sieff

Just call him "Dirty Tony." Like Detective Harry Callaghan in the "Dirty Harry" movies, Anthony Lake, national security advisor for the past four years and now President Clinton's nominee to be the next Director of Central Intelligence, rose high in his master's estimation by tackling any dirty, thankless job that came along, and doing surprisingly well at it. And that is the major source for his deceptive power.

This is not the popular perception of Mr. Lake. His critics prefer to characterize him as a "bleeding heart," and, superficially, they appear to have abundant reason to do so.

After all, Mr. Lake, 57, resigned in April 1970 as a special assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in protest at the Nixon Administration's Cambodia policy. In the Carter Administration he was director of policy planning for Cyrus Vance --perhaps the most inept Secretary of State since the Hoover Administration -- and he proudly presents himself as a neo-Wilsonian, committed to using America's power to do good works throughout the world. Nor is he a deep conceptual thinker on foreign-policy issues. Even the sympathetic New Republic, reviewing his 1984 book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy, co-written with Leslie Gelb and I. M. Destler, described it as "a book that drifts along amiably without seriously challenging a single entrenched assumption."

Yet after four years as national security advisor, this supposedly vague, amiable fellow remains eager for the fray, keen to take on one of the most thankless tasks in any Democratic Administration for the next four years. Is he really -- as Nancy Soderberg, his longtime loyal lieutenant as National Security Council staff director, described him -- "a reluctant warrior" and "such a non-egotist"?

Indeed not. Mr. Lake's record over the last four years reveals a positive genius for bureaucratic maneuver, a love of power and the action at the heart of decision-making, and a quite unexpected taste for derring-do. In fact, so great is his largely unrecognized taste for the cloak-and-dagger life that it is likely to prove one of his most serious drawbacks if he wins control of America's secret world.

When the Dayton peace talks to end the four-year war in Bosnia looked as if they were falling apart, despite all of the charm and bullying Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke could muster, it was Mr. Lake whom President Clinton dispatched to Wright - Patterson Air Force Base to dangle the necessary carrots and sticks before Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic to get them back in the deal.

When China's leaders were breathing fire at every American olive branch after President Clinton had thoughtlessly outraged them by allowing President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan to pay a private visit to this country, unintentionally fueling Peking's paranoia that he was about to recognize Taiwan diplomatically, reassurances from Secretary of State Warren Christopher could not heal the breach. The Chinese knew perfectly well that Mr. Clinton overrode him whenever he felt like it. But when Mr. Lake flew to Peking with the President's reassurances, they believed him.

And when Haiti's thuggish generals dragged their feet about turning over power to the Clinton Administration's darling, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, none of Washington's clumsy threats of gunboat diplomacy could budge them. Mr. Clinton looked as if he were locked into a possibly bloody and politically ruinous military invasion. Until, that is, Mr. Lake flew to Port-au-Prince and talked the generals into stepping down to ensure their own comfortable survival. Once again, he got the job done.

Bespectacled, scholarly, personally kind, the gentlemanly Mr. Lake seems an unlikely candidate to have pulled off such deeds, especially as, judged by more familiar and conventional yardsticks, his four years as national security advisor have been less than stellar. For all his academic background, he has failed to initiate a single significant doctrine or impose any sort of pattern on the nation's foreign and national-security policies. Instead, judged by the yardstick of sustained influence on major issues, his National Security Council has been the weakest since -- at least -- the Eisenhower Administration. Even the revolving-door security advisors of the Reagan era -- from the best (William Clark) to the most inept (Robert MacFarlane and John Poindexter) -- exerted more clout.

Yet in the inner circles of power, Mr. Lake's clout has been greater than that of anyone else around the President.

How has he achieved this? Low-key in public, he has steadfastly shunned television appearances and high-profile speeches whenever he could, while operating in a city where publicity is universally assumed to equal clout. He virtually had to be hauled kicking and screaming to any appearance on the Sunday talk-show circuit.

In the approved manner of the modern liberal Georgetownite, he has disdained detailed work on unfashionable bread-and-butter issues like bilateral relations with Russia or China to focus on the broad, effectively meaningless mantras of disarmament, ecology, women's rights, and other "global" issues -- which in practice always break down into being subsets of our unfashionable old bilateral direct dealings with all the individual countries that make up the messy real world.