PRESIDENT Clinton is having to seek a successor to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); following the surprise withdrawal of his first choice, Mr Tony Lake. The president is said to have pleaded with Mr Lake not to withdraw in the face of Republican opposition but to no avail.
The decision by his former National Security Adviser to stepdown is a setback for the president but not too serious. So far all of Mr Clinton's other nominations have been accepted or are in the process of being approved.
Mr Lake, in his former post as National Security Council adviser, played a key role in the US involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process and would be well known to most of the key players on both sides of the Atlantic. He helped to persuade Mr Clinton to grant a US visa for the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, in 1994, before the IRA ceasefire, against advice from the State Department and London.
The Senate committee on intelligence had been giving Mr Lake a tough grilling at his hearings but he was believed to have enough favourable votes to win eventual approval. However in his letter to the Mr Clinton, Mr Lake showed that he had lost patience with the long-drawn out committee investigation of his career and personal affairs and could take no more.
Mr Lake said that the "endless delays" in his nomination hearings was "hurting the CIA and NSC staff in ways I can no longer tolerate
He had learned over the weekend that "the process is once again faced by endless delay. It is a political football in a game with constantly moving goalposts".
In an impassioned letter to Mr Clinton, Mr Lake said that while he still believed in public service "Washington has gone haywire". He said that "The whole confirmation process has become more and more outrageous. It is nasty and brutish without being short."
However the chairman of the Committee on Intelligence, Senator Richard Shelby, who has been Mr Lake's chief critic, was unrepentant. He said in a statement that this nomination has been "fraught with controversy" from the beginning. "Although I found Mr Lake to be intelligent and amicable, I continued to have strong reservations about his fitness" to head the CIA.
A Democratic senator on the committee, Mr Bob Kerrey, blamed the "unfair treatment" of Mr Lake by the committee but also his failure as head of the NSC to establish an effective procedure to be informed of contacts between his staff and political fund-raisers and donors.
While Mr Lake's personal integrity was not in question, he was coming under increasing scrutiny for his administration of the NSC. Mr Clinton himself was angry when he recently learned that the FBI had warned NSC staff of possible Chinese involvement in political fund-raising but this information was never passed on to higher levels.