PIML 96062610 / Forwarded to Patriot Information Mailing List: ["Partners in Power" is available from Unlimited Thought Bookstore in San Antonio, Texas, 210 525-0693. Highly recommended reading.] PIML =================================================================== Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 07:23:30 GMT To: uwsa@shell.portal.com From: reply@remail.ecafe.org (ECafe Anonymous Remailer) Subject: *** Best Book on Clinton Yet *** Date: Mon, 24 Jun 1996 13:58 Subject: "Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America" Biography by Roger Morris http://www.washtimes.com/ [The Washington Times] [Front Page] [Image] Published in Washington, D.C. June 24, 1996 "America's Newspaper" Book says Clinton had CIA ties By George Archibald THE WASHINGTON TIMES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Was Bill Clinton, as a graduate student at Oxford, a boy spy for the CIA? One of the intriguing mysteries of Mr. Clinton's life at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar during the Vietnam War, is how a young man of relatively modest means from a small town in Arkansas managed a luxury tour of Moscow at Christmas 1969. The president himself has never offered a full explanation. A new biography of the president and the first lady, by Roger Morris, who resigned from Richard Nixon's National Security Council to protest the Vietnam War, offers a startling solution to the mystery: The young Bill Clinton was an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency, paid to spy on his friends and classmates, reporting anti-war activities in London. By Mr. Morris' telling in "Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America," Mr. Clinton's connection to the CIA continued through his tenure as governor of Arkansas. Mr. Clinton, he writes, once encouraged his favorite security officer to work for the CIA in support of a program of flying aid to the Nicaraguan Contras out of the airport at Mena, a small town nestled in the dense forests in the Ouachita Mountains of remote western Arkansas. -- Continued from Front Page -- The White House declined to respond to specific allegations in the book. Mark Fabiani, the president's special associate counsel, said in a terse statement released through a spokeswoman that the allegations are "bizarre and they speak for themselves." CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said: "It's our long-standing policy not to comment on allegations of affiliation with the agency." Mr. Morris writes that several CIA officers he knows do not believe that Mr. Clinton became an agency "asset" during the Vietnam era. But others, whom he believes to be "more plausible," say he was. His chief source had made a record of Mr. Clinton's listing within the CIA as an informant for "Operation Chaos" in the late 1960s. The CIA purged the files during the 1970s, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the late Sen. Frank Church, Idaho Democrat, investigated CIA spying activities. Mr. Morris describes the source as "a retired [CIA] officer who had been in many foreign postings as well as in the agency in Washington." "This was a man who was on the operations side, I gather would have been under some degree of cover when he was working abroad, [and] had been in several different stations in Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe," he continues. This agent was with the CIA for 20 or 25 years "and had not been purged or, I gathered, was not let go" when he left the agency during the 1980s. "He had served out a normal tenure, but had come to be one of those people who later became very critical of the intelligence operation in a very discreet way." Among the book's other explosive revelations and conclusions: * The Mena operation was a major conduit for cocaine shipments from Colombia's Medellin drug cartel, and its distributors in Arkansas included Roger Clinton, the governor's half-brother, whose drug trafficking helped support a decade-long "four-gram-a-day" cocaine addiction. Mr. Morris describes the Mena operation as "a multibillion gun-running, drug-smuggling and money-laundering operation, an enormous criminal traffic carried on for at least five years with what the U.S. government's own documents secretly recorded as the collusion of organized crime, the CIA, and other Washington institutions." * Mr. Clinton, fully aware of his brother's addiction and drug peddling, received cocaine from Roger Clinton, who described the governor on a police surveillance videotape as having "a nose like a vacuum cleaner." Roger Clinton also supplied cocaine to Dan Lasater, an investment broker with operations in Arkansas and Florida who was among the most generous contributors to Mr. Clinton's campaigns. * In early 1984, undercover police filmed Roger Clinton telling a drug contact he needed $10,000 "for my brother to take care of EPA regs and other environmental oversight problems" involving a land development project owned by Mr. Lasater. Arkansas police forwarded the surveillance evidence to the Justice Department's criminal division to investigate Mr. Clinton for corruption, but no action was taken. * Mr. Clinton persuaded Mr. Lasater to hire his brother and send him to Florida to get him out of Arkansas. But Roger Clinton was indicted in August 1984, was convicted the following January and served a reduced two-year prison sentence after agreeing to testify against Mr. Lasater, who in December 1986 also received a 30-month prison sentence for cocaine distribution and conspiracy. Though once the governor's favorite security agent and bodyguard, state Trooper L.D. Brown fell from favor after he told Mr. Clinton that Barry Seal, a CIA contract pilot, was running arms for the Contras from Arkansas to Honduras and returning to Arkansas with cocaine. Barry Seal was later shot dead on a street near his home in Baton Rouge, La., in a hit believed to have been ordered by the Colombian cartel. Mr. Morris, who is now a history professor at the University of New Mexico, says his 526-page book is the result of a three-year investigation, based on almost 300 separate interviews of law enforcement, political, business and media sources in Arkansas, and friends and colleagues of the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Much of it had first been reported in The Washington Times. "It's very much like a jigsaw puzzle, it's very much a matter of fitting pieces together from different angles," he says in an interview. "It wasn't meant to be a collection of muck or of smut. It was intended to be what I hope it is -- a serious dual biography of these two people and a serious look at the American political system." Mr. Morris, who holds a doctorate in government from Harvard, served as a Foreign Service officer and as an aide to President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Vice President Walter F. Mondale. Most of his key sources asked anonymity for fear of political retaliation, he says in an interview. "Presidents Johnson and Nixon had a reputation for being tough and ruthless and smearing their opponents," he says, "but I don't think either one of them hold a candle to the Clinton campaign. ... The Clintons have this reputation of being young and congenial and much more modern. They're very old-fashioned in their retaliation." In a 28-page chapter detailing sources, he writes that he "followed the historian's rule of requiring documentary support for every major assertion of fact or state of mind and at least two and usually three verifying sources for any quoted statement." Mr. Morris, who is the author of an acclaimed biography of the 37th president, "Richard Milhous Nixon, The Rise of an American Politician," says that he believes Mr. Clinton has a "deeply flawed" character like Richard Nixon's, and, like him, may also be forced to resign the presidency in disgrace. "I think that probably he'll be re-elected and probably Kenneth Starr's investigation will be a slow-drip undoing of this administration which, I think, is going to be a crisis for the country. It's a sad prospect." Mr. Starr, the independent counsel, he says, is "a very methodical and cautious, careful man. I don't think he's driven by any election calendar. I don't know him personally, but if you look at his track record, it's a very careful and conservative record. He doesn't take risks and he's not very political at all in his approach. I think he'll be very documentary and very methodical. I think the heart of his case will be financial." Mr. Clinton's bodyguards in Arkansas, who say they overheard many conversations involving Whitewater and other disputed financial matters, will provide important supportive evidence as they did in the writing of his book, he says. "The state troopers, who have been vilified so much and attacked on all sides for their credibility, I think proved to be accurate 99 percent of the time ... about the Clintons and the events, the incidents, on sworn statements and depositions. ... Since they deal often with criminal matters, they were liable to have been called up to a grand jury on perjury issues." He credits the troopers' revelations, first reported in the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator magazine, as "the expose that led indirectly to the media and legal inquiries into Whitewater." QUOTES FROM the BOOK: "Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America." By: Roger Morris Espionage, drugs among the topics Roger Morris, National Secu- rity Council aide for Presidents Johnson and Nixon and author of an acclaimed critical biogra- phy of Richard Nixon, writes in his dual biography of Bill and Hillary Clinton that not since Watergate "has a White House been so under suspicion for acts of wrongdoing both before and during the presidency." The fol- lowing are excerpts from "Part- ners in Power: The Clintons and Their America." >>>>>>>> Bill Clinton, CIA informant?: " 'Bill Clinton's ties to the intelli- gence community go back all the way to Oxford and come for- ward from there,' says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since de- stroyed.... [T]he Central Intel- ligence Agency's infamous Op- eration Chaos of the 1960s had been directed at uncovering some discredited foreign hand in antiwar activities at home and abroad, to the point of recruiting American student informants and placing provocateurs among the demonstrators.... "One more CIA retiree would recall going through archives of Operation Chaos at the Langley headquarters -- part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s--and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant.... 'He was there in the records ' the for- mer agent said 'with a special designation.' Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton's arrangement as an in- former had been further insur- ance against the draft." >>>>>>>> Bill Clinton and drugs: "Roger Clinton had begun using cocaine in the late 1970s and . . . eventually was slave to a four- gram-a-day habit. He supported the addiction and a rakish life- style by dealing drugs himself with contacts in New York wind- ing all the way to the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia.... On one of the 1983-84 videotapes filmed by lo Gal narcotics offi- cers, Roger Clinton was said to tell a supplier jauntily, 'Got to get some for my brother. He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner.' ;; >>>>>>>> Cash payoffs to the governor: "According to the local narcotics officers who made the tapes video surveillance footage showed Roger discussing var- ious payoffs of $30,000 to ar- range government approval of sewer lines for a large develop- ment that was an interest of a close Clinton friend and major contributor, multimillionaire bond broker and later convicted drug dealer Dan Lasater. "'I need $10,000 for my brother to take care of EPA regs and other environmental over- sight problems,' the officer quoted Roger as saying on the tapes, which were turned over to the state police, never to be pre- sented at trial. City police offi- cers who shot the tapes were told the portions dealing with imputed involvement of the gov- ernor had been forwarded to the Public Integrity office of the Justice Department in Washing- ton early in 1984, but then they heard no more." Roger Clinton's drug-traffick- ing conviction: "[Dissident state police] managed to get details of the case to Hillary Rodham Clin- ton as well, counting on her to force the governor to keep his hands off as a political precau- tion. By the dissidents' account, the first lady reacted exactly as they hoped, rushing to Clinton with her own report on Roger and ordering that he do nothing to warn his half-brother or stave off the arrest, actions that might be exposed and used against them in the 1984 re-election campaign or later. " 'I don't think she ever knew how much coke Bill had snorted with Roger or how many girls they'd done together, said one state policeman, 'but we knew she'd tell him to feed ole Roger to the feds for the sake of his career, and that's what he ended up doing.' " >>>>>>>> Mrs. Clinton and Vincent W. Foster Jr.: "There would be sev- eral sources--including a for- mer U.S. attorney, sometime aides, a number of lawyers, so- cial friends, and many of the same troopers who testified about the governor's illicit acts --who described the first lady's affair, dating to the mid-1980s, with Rose partner Vince Foster. "A relationship evident in the semi-private kisses and furtive squeezes at parties and dinners described by the security guards, it was also an intimate professional bond between two attorneys who worked together on some of their firm's most sen- sitive cases.... "Foster was known to treat her with the dignity, respect, and abiding love she was miss- ing in her marriage. 'He adored her,' said a fellow lawyer. Under other circumstances, it might have been one of those relation- ships that remained private and without any relevance to the Clinton presidency. What set it apart was that, once in the White House, the Clintons would in- stall the first lady's confidant in one of the nation's most Sensi- tive positions as deputy counsel to the president, where he would handle controversial matters stemming from their Arkansas past as well as highly classified presidential affairs." =================================================================== * Patriot Information Mailing List * http://constitution.org/piml/piml.htm * A service to help inform those who have an active interest in * returning our federal and state governments to limited, * constitutional government * Send messages for consideration and possible posting to * butterb@sagenet.net (Bill Utterback). * To subscribe or unsubscribe, send message with subject line * "subscribe patriot" or "unsubscribe patriot" * Forwarded messages sent on this mailing list are NOT verified. * See World's Smallest Political Quiz: www.self-gov.org/quiz.html * Libertarian is to LIBERTY as librarian is to library (DePena) * PIML grants permission to copy and repost this message * in its entirety with headers and trailers left intact.