My life

When I got home from the hospital, I had less than a week to get ready to meet Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki, and a big issue to deal with before then. On the seventeenth, Tony Lake came to see me and asked me to withdraw his nomination for director of central intelligence. Senator Richard Shelby, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, had delayed Lake’s confirmation hearings largely on the grounds that the White House had not informed the committee of our decision to stop enforcing the arms embargo against Bosnia in 1994. I was not required by law to tell the committee and had decided that it was better not to do so in order to keep it from leaking. I knew a strong bipartisan majority of the Senate favored lifting the embargo; in fact, not long afterward, they voted for a resolution asking me to stop enforcing it. Though I got along with Shelby well enough, I thought he was far off base in holding up Lake’s confirmation and unnecessarily hampering the operations of the CIA. Tony had some strong Republican supporters, including Senator Lugar, and would have been voted out of committee and confirmed had it not been for Shelby, but he was worn down after working seventy-and eighty-hour weeks for four years. And he didn’t want to risk hurting the CIA with further delays. If it had been up to me, I would have carried on the fight for a year if that’s what it took to get a vote. But I could see Tony had had enough. Two days later I nominated George Tenet, the acting CIA director who had been John Deutch’s deputy and before that had served as my senior aide for intelligence on the NSC, and staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was confirmed easily, but I still regret the raw deal handed to Lake, who had given thirty years to advancing America’s security interests and had played a major role in so many of our foreign policy successes in my first term.

My doctors didn’t want me to go to Helsinki, but staying home wasn’t an option. Yeltsin had been reelected and NATO was about to vote to admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic; we had to have an agreement on how to proceed.

The flight was long and uncomfortable, but the time passed quickly as I discussed with Strobe Talbott and the rest of the team what we could do to help Yeltsin live with NATO expansion, including getting Russia into the G-7 and the World Trade Organization. At a dinner that night hosted by President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, I was glad to see Yeltsin in good spirits and apparently recovering from open-heart surgery. He had lost a lot of weight and was still pale, but he was back to his old buoyant and aggressive self.

The next morning we got down to business. When I told Boris I wanted NATO both to expand and to sign an agreement with Russia, he asked me to commit secretly—in his words, “in a closet”—to limiting future NATO expansion to the Warsaw Pact nations, thus excluding the states of the former Soviet Union, like the Baltics and Ukraine. I said I couldn’t do that because, first of all, it wouldn’t remain secret, and doing so would undermine the credibility of the Partnership for Peace. Nor would it be in America’s or Russia’s interest. NATO’s governing mission was no longer directed against Russia but against the new threats to peace and stability in Europe. I pointed out that a declaration that NATO

would stop its expansion with the Warsaw Pact nations would be tantamount to announcing a new dividing line in Europe, with a smaller Russian empire. That would make Russia look weaker, not stronger, whereas a NATO-Russia agreement would boost Russia’s standing. I also urged Yeltsin not to foreclose the possibility of future Russian membership.

Yeltsin was still afraid of the domestic reaction to expansion. At one point when we were alone, I asked,

“Boris, do you really think I would allow NATO to attack Russia from bases in Poland?” “No,” he replied, “I don’t, but a lot of older people who live in the western part of Russia and listen to Zyuganov do.” He reminded me that, unlike the United States, Russia had been invaded twice—by Napoleon and by Hitler—and the trauma of those events still colored the country’s collective psychology and shaped its politics. I told Yeltsin that if he would agree to NATO expansion and the NATO-Russia partnership, I would make a commitment not to station troops or missiles in the new member countries prematurely, and to support Russian membership in the new G-8, the World Trade Organization, and other international organizations. We had a deal.