The Electronic Telegraph   Sunday 23 January 1994   World News

The threats that followed my fling with Bill Clinton
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Former Arkansas beauty queen Sally Perdue tells Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of an alleged attempt to buy her silence

SALLY PERDUE sits back in her chair and tells in her slow, soft, Southern accent of the night Bill Clinton dropped by in his jogging gear: "He saw my Steinway grand piano and went straight over to it and asked me to play."

She was a former Miss Arkansas, the host of a local radio talk show. He was the State Governor. It was 1983. Soon Bill Clinton was bringing his saxophone over and they would play Fifties rock numbers together. It was a lot of fun.

Then, claims Miss Perdue, they became lovers. "He had this little boy quality that I found very attractive."

Miss Perdue's testimony is important, for when two Arkansas state troopers went public a month ago, accusing Bill Clinton of misusing his staff at the Governor's Mansion to facilitate extra-marital affairs, a crucial ingredient was missing from the scandal. No woman could be found to corroborate the allegations or to support the general claim that state resources and personnel had been used in such a way.

But Miss Perdue's account not only backs the troopers; it goes further. Her story of what happened to her when her name surfaced during Mr Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 raises questions about the methods used by Democratic operatives to prevent the story of Mr Clinton's past from coming out in the press.

In a series of interviews with The Sunday Telegraph, Miss Perdue, who now works in St Louis, Missouri, in a home for adults with Down's syndrome and cerebral palsy, described her alleged sexual liaison with Mr Clinton in 1983 as a mistake that brought her nothing but grief. "I was going through a second divorce at the time; I was vulnerable," she said.

She claimed the affair lasted from August to December 1983 and that state troopers brought Mr Clinton to her condominium at Andover Square about 12 times, usually in nondescript police vehicles. "They'd pull up in a wooded area about 30ft from the house and wait there," she claimed. "When Bill was ready to come out, he would signal using my patio light, flicking it on and off."

On one occasion, she claims, Mr Clinton was dropped at her front door in his official Lincoln, a move she considered astonishingly reckless for the Governor. It also threatened to expose her to public opprobrium. At the time, she presented a radio talk show in Little Rock for three hours every morning. "I had just as much reason to hide the whole thing as he had."

The alleged involvement of the state troopers is a key issue. A Republican senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, is currently under criminal indictment for allegedly using her staff to carry out personal errands and could face up to 10 years in prison. Nothing she is accused of compares in scope and gravity with the recent allegations against President Clinton.

But more serious, and much more sinister, are Miss Perdue's alleged experiences during the 1992 presidential campaign after she tried to air details of her alleged affair. She tells how she sat through a three-and-a-half-hour meeting at the Cheshire Inn in Clayton, Missouri, on August 19, 1992, with a man claiming to represent the Democratic Party. His name was Ron Tucker. She described him as a short, squat "good-ole-boy" in his fifties.

"He said that there were people in high places who were anxious about me and they wanted me to know that keeping my mouth shut would be worthwhile . . . If I was a good little girl, and didn't kill the messenger, I'd be set for life: a federal job, nothing fancy but a regular paycheck, level 11 or 12 (about $60,000 a year). I'd never have to worry again.

"But if I didn't take the offer, then they knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn't guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs. Things just wouldn't be so much fun for me any more. Life would get hard."

A WORK colleague of hers, Denison Diel, had positioned himself at the bar nearby and heard all the alleged conversation. He wrote a report which was submitted to the FBI. A copy has been furnished to The Sunday Telegraph. An FBI official in St Louis refused to comment on what he described as an "ongoing investigation".

Ron Tucker lives in a dilapidated wooden house in Marion, Illinois, two hours' drive east of St Louis. Before he had a stroke last summer he worked as a salesman for Marion Mining Bolt Corporation and was known in the area as a small-time operative for the Democratic Party.

He is not eager to discuss the subject of Miss Perdue. "That woman is childish. You people are foolish. I don't know a thing about the Clinton thing," he shouted, and slammed down the telephone.

But his former employer at Marion Mining, John Newcomb, says he overheard him talking about the subject in September 1992 on the telephone at work and confronted him about the matter.

"Ron Tucker told me that somebody from the Democratic Party in St Louis had asked him through a friend to get to this woman and get her to shut up," claims Newcomb.

Miss Perdue did not take up the offer of a job. Then the warnings appeared to come true. She lost her job at the admissions office of Lindenwood College, Missouri, where she was also studying for a degree in communications.

A Missouri lawyer, Paul Ground, told The Sunday Telegraph a college official had admitted to him that she had been fired because of outside pressure. The president, Dennis Spellman, refused to answer queries on the matter.

Then, she says, the threatening mail and telephone calls started. She produced one of the letters, written in a strangely twisted hand. "I'll pray you have a head-on collision and end up in a coma . . . Marilyn Monroe got snuffed. It could happen."

She found an unspent shotgun cartridge on the driver's seat of her Jeep. Later the back window of the vehicle was shattered, possibly by gunfire. Both incidents were reported to the police.

Scared, she went to ground, having all contact with the outside world screened by her daughter, Myra, who lives in Atlanta.

These apparent attempts to silence Miss Perdue fit a pattern of alleged dirty tricks that appear to have been undertaken by somebody to cover up for Mr Clinton.

There is the strange case of Gary Johnson, an Arkansas lawyer, who blurted out at the Flaming Arrow club in Little Rock that he had a videotape of then Governor Clinton going into the apartment of his neighbour, cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers. Shortly afterwards, on June 26, 1992, three men appeared at his door, beat him unconscious and stole the tapes. He was left with a shattered arm, severe head injuries, a perforated bladder and had to have his spleen removed.

Then there is the case of the American Spectator magazine, which first broke the story of the Arkansas state troopers. It suffered three mysterious burglaries of its offices just at the time the article was nearing completion. During its previous 26 years the magazine had never had a single break-in.

It is possible, of course, that Miss Perdue is motivated by political animus in coming forward with her charges. She once had links to the Republican Party and in 1984 ran as a Republican candidate for mayor of her home town, Pine Bluff, the second city of Arkansas.

Indeed, she says it was this dabbling in politics that brought her affair with Mr Clinton to an abrupt end. "He ridiculed me and said I hadn't got a chance against the big boys. Then he warned me that we'd be enemies if I became a Republican. That was the last time he ever came to my house."

But in several hours of interview she revealed no inconsistencies in her account of the alleged affair. There was a set pattern. After drinking a few Budweiser beers, she claims, Mr Clinton would start playing the clown.

"When I see him now, President of the United States, meeting world leaders, I can't believe it . . . I still have this picture of him wearing my black nightgown, playing the sax badly; this guy, tiptoeing across the park and getting caught on the fence. How do you expect me to take him seriously?"

She described him as a "showman" and a "brilliant actor", who craved approval and needed the constant affection of women. Occasionally, the subject of Hillary Clinton would come up. "As far as I could tell, the marriage was a business partnership."

It is true that Miss Perdue had a reputation in Pine Bluff for mild eccentricity. But John Henry, managing editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial, said: "I never heard of anything dishonest that she ever did."

During his presidential campaign, an aide said Mr Clinton denied knowing Miss Perdue. Last week the White House failed to respond to requests for a comment on her claims. But they are supported by her close friend Anna Lisenbey, her campaign manager in the 1984 Pine Bluff election. Miss Lisenbey says she never saw the pair together but was told about the alleged affair from the start.

"Some days I'd call her up and she'd say: 'I can't talk. It's him.' The chauffeur would drop him off in her area and he'd jog over to her place and come in the back door."

MISS PERDUE did not tell her daugh ter, Myra, about the alleged liaison until early in 1992, after a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette telephoned to ask whether she was the former Miss Arkansas mentioned in rumours linked to Mr Clinton.

Afraid that the story would come out in an unfavourable way - she had seen the devastating assault on the credibility of Gennifer Flowers - she agreed to do an interview with a family friend at an ABC television affiliate in Atlanta. It was taped but never aired. Three months later, just before the Democratic Convention, word of the interview was leaked by the campaign staff of Jerry Brown, a Clinton rival. For a few days her name was in the news, but she claims that she was never given a fair chance to make her case.

Rumours were put about, false stories planted, and she soon found herself described as a bimbo, another Gennifer Flowers, who had sold her story for money. It is an accusation she vehemently denies. After that she withdrew into a shell.

On July 26, 1992, the Washington Post made a perfunctory reference to her in an article about the tactics of the Clinton machine in suppressing "bimbo eruptions".

"I've had it with the American press," she said. "I think it's going to take a foreign paper to bring this whole thing out, because the powers here are so strong. You know, they've protected Bill Clinton in a way they've never protected anybody in the history of America."

All she wants, she says, is to set the record straight and to find out who was behind the apparent attempts to intimidate her. "I want it wrapped up with ribbons, once and for all, and dropped in the garbage can."

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