Anthony Lake, the controversial adviser on foreign policy and national security for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, is scheduled to take over as executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on May 1, replacing Ann Veneman, who has held the post since 2005.
President Obama’s nomination of Lake in March to head the UN agency received almost no publicity, in sharp contrast to President Clinton’s stormy nomination of Lake in 1997 to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Lake was forced to withdraw from consideration for the CIA role when this magazine and other opponents of the nomination exposed his subversive record and it became clear that his Senate confirmation hearings would get very messy.
The New York Times and other organs of the establishment mainstream media were apoplectic over the failure of Clinton’s effort to place the CIA under Lake’s control. In a February 10, 1997 op-ed for the Times, “The Right Choice for the C.I.A.,” Douglas Brinkley, attacked an article by this writer, “Security Risk for CIA” as “error-ridden” and filled with “ludicrous charges” — though he failed to point out any specific error, and most Americans would find the documented, serious charges to be far from ludicrous.
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This is how Brinkley, in his piece for the Times, attempted to run interference for the troubled Clinton designee:
In an error-ridden article in The New American, a John Birch periodical, William F. Jasper dissected Mr. Lake’s resume and found a pattern of anti-Americanism: attending Harvard and Princeton, speaking at the Institute for Policy Studies when it was supposedly a beehive of militant Marxists, working at Alger Hiss’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The diatribe would not be worth mentioning except that its ludicrous charges have been picked up, in slightly milder fashion, by mainstream conservative publications like The Washington Times and National Review.
In a similar house editorial, “The Dossier on Anthony Lake” the Times launched its own ludicrous diatribe against those who were attempting to shed light on Lake’s dark past, a past the Times and Lake’s other champions obviously preferred to keep buried. The Times editorialized:
The John Birch Society and other opponents are busily assembling a Lake dossier — widely circulated on the Internet — that depicts him as a dangerous radical. Among other things, it breathlessly reports that in 1970 Mr. Lake resigned from the White House staff to protest the invasion of Cambodia, and recently said the evidence that Alger Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union was inconclusive.
My article, as Brinkley and the Times knew full well, dealt with matters far more alarming than they let on. The extensive dossier on Lake compiled by the Birch Society — and provided to members of the Senate and the media — contained more than enough damning evidence for the Clinton administration not to want a Senate confirmation hearing poking into it. Anthony Lake was — and is — no mere liberal. He was not being “persecuted” for his beliefs; he was being held accountable for his actions and policies — actions and policies that continually aided and abetted America’s enemies, while betraying our allies and undermining America’s security.
The Senate would have been criminally negligent if it had confirmed Anthony Lake as the gatekeeper of America’s most important secrets and its most powerful intelligence agency without thoroughly investigating his past. That past included Lake’s key role in the Carter administration in helping overthrow three of America’s most loyal and strategic allies: the Shah of Iran, President Somoza of Nicaragua, and President Ian Smith of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). They were replaced, respectively, by America’s sworn enemies: Ayatollah Khomeini (and his Moscow-and-Beijing-aligned terrorist successors); the Havana-Moscow-aligned Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega (now back in power again); and the murderous dictator Robert Mugabe.
Americans deserved to know what, precisely, Anthony Lake’s role was in those debacles that so critically impacted (and continue to haunt) our nation. Americans also deserved a thorough examination of Lake’s role in the many serious security breaches during the Clinton years that so severely compromised our national security.
In a glowing article in Time magazine, Lake was described by a Clinton aide as “the ‘heart and soul’ of Clinton’s foreign policy team.” One of the most outrageous decisions made by this “heart and soul” of the Clinton team was the 1994 decision to allow Iran to gain a strategic foothold in the Balkans. At a time when the Clinton administration was publicly denouncing Iran as a rogue terror state and proclaiming its support for United Nations sanctions against the Tehran regime, President Clinton, under the advisement of Lake and Strobe Talbott, gave the infamous “green light” order to allow Iran to secretly ship vast amounts of arms — along with troops, advisers, and trainers — to Bosnia, thus endangering not only the U.S. troops stationed there, but also further destabilizing the entire Balkan region, and planting Iran’s radical influence in the area.
An investigation by a House Select Subcommittee in 1996 concluded: “The Administration’s Iranian green light policy gave Iran an unprecedented foothold in Europe and has recklessly endangered American lives and U.S. strategic interests.”
Then there were the 1995 White House meetings between Anthony Lake and Abdulrahman Alamoudi, founder and director of the American Muslim Council (AMC) and a director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). While posing as a moderate, Alamoudi was supporting, and raising money for, Hamas and Hezbollah, and serving as a paid agent for Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. Alamoudi was arrested in 2004 and is now serving a 23-year prison sentence for his activities. Lake, then serving as National Security Adviser, arranged a 1995 White House meeting for Alamoudi with President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
The Alamoudi-Clinton meeting was not the only strange White House liaison during the Clinton years. Under Lake’s watch as National Security Adviser; a steady stream of foreign agents from Beijing, Moscow, Havana traipsed through the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and most of our top-secret laboratories.
My article in The New American surveyed some of these “high points” of Mr. Lake’s record and asked a series of general questions, each of which easily could have led to dozens of more specific questions pertaining to Lake’s actions that had undermined America’s national security. Those questions were:
• What was Anthony Lake’s role in the infamous Pentagon Papers heist which so seriously damaged America’s security?
• What was, and is, the extent of Lake’s involvement with militant Marxist activists of the subversive nexus at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Fund For Peace (FFP)?
• What was, and is, the full story on Lake’s activities with the radical one-worlders and Establishment Marxists at Alger Hiss’ old haunt, the Carnegie Endowment?
• What is Lake’s relationship with IPS extremist Morton Halperin, and why did they cochair a radical conference panel for the anti-American, pro-Soviet Center for National Security Studies (CNSS)?
• What was Lake’s connection to Orlando Letelier, the notorious Chilean agent of the Soviet KGB and Cuban DGI in Washington?
• Why would Lake, who has spent his entire career associating with those who are attacking and undermining America’s security, want to head our nation’s premier intelligence agency, and why would any U.S. senator who takes his oath of office seriously even contemplate for a moment confirming such a nominee to head the CIA?
Of course, those questions and my brief survey of his subversive record barely scratched the surface. However, as this information became more widely known, and as it became clear that several Senators had decided to grill Lake on these and other weighty matters, the Clinton White House became alarmed and decided retreat was the better option.
United Nations World Citizen
Lake’s nomination to head UNICEF faced no opposition and no daunting confirmation process. On March 16, the United Nations press office issued the following statement announcing Lake’s appointment:
Following consultations with the Executive Board of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today announced the appointment of Anthony Lake (United States) as the agency’s new Executive Director….
Mr. Lake will bring substantial experience and passion to the critical work of UNICEF, coupled with strong leadership, proven managerial skills and the ability to mobilize political will and material resources in support of the Fund.
He has demonstrated a strong interest and commitment to supporting the agency, having served for nine years on the Board of the United States Fund for UNICEF, including a term as Chair from 2004 to 2007. As Chairman, he oversaw a significant increase in funding and a transition in its personnel and mission.
As head of UNICEF, Lake may be less likely to jeopardize America’s national security than as head of CIA or Secretary of State (a post he reportedly was being considered for in the Obama administration). However, as a dedicated “one-worlder,” he can be reliably depended on to use his new UNICEF platform to continue the accelerated push for expansion of funding, and increased power for, UNICEF and all UN programs. One of his early efforts will very likely be to push for ratification by the U.S. Senate of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is a dangerous UN assault on national sovereignty, the family, and parental rights. The United States remains the last holdout that has not signed on to the document — and that is intolerable for the internationalists at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the premier institution in the United States pushing for world government and an end to U.S. national sovereignty. Lake has served as a Senior Fellow at the CFR, co-chairman of several of its task forces, and author of several of its reports, articles, and op-eds.
Photo of Anthony Lake: AP Images
Related content:
Security Risk for CIA: Anthony Lake’s Dubious Past
