March 26, 1997
On March 17, Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, explaining that he was tired of being "a dancing bear in a political circus." His confirmation hearings, originally scheduled to last for six days, had instead threatened to drag far into the spring as opponents to his nomination in the Senate caused delays and searched for damning evidence with which to undermine his candidacy. The new nominee to fill the post is current CIA deputy director George Tenet.
Directing the CIA is quite a job. In "Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks,"
(The Atlantic, August, 1979) Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Powers
tells the story of former CIA director Richard Helms, who ended up being
sanctioned by the Senate in 1977 for allowing the CIA to function under his
direction as though it had "a license to operate freely outside the dictates of
the law." Under Helms, Powers wrote, the CIA engaged in such schemes as "the
manufacture of poison dart guns, the stockpiling of lethal toxins, medical
experiments on unsuspecting victims, attempts to infect Castro and Lumumba with
disease, the funding and technical guidance of police organizations that
tortured and killed local opponents ... [and] the injection of corrupting sums of
money into the political systems of other nations."
"The business of intelligence has its ugly side," Powers noted. Perhaps that
was as much of a deterrent to Anthony Lake as the nomination process.
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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