The Electronic Telegraph   Friday 2 February 1995   World News

Suicide is hard to sell
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

As the Whitewater investigation gains momentum, much may hinge on the suspicious death of a Clinton aide. In Washington, AMBROSE EVANS- PRITCHARD finds growing belief in a cover-up theory

MORE THAN a year and a half has passed since the body of Vincent Foster was found in a secluded Virginia park near the headquarters of the CIA. Controversy about the highest ranking suicide in almost half a century should have subsided by now. Two investigations found no evidence of foul play, and the press has been almost unanimous in accepting that the Deputy White House Counsel shot himself in the mouth during a bout of depression.

But the mystery continues to fester. A growing number of people suspect that there may be a darker story behind the death of the handsome, soft-spoken man who accompanied the Clintons from Little Rock to Washington. He was no ordinary White House aide, after all. One of the Four Musketeers from the Rose law firm, he had been mentor, law partner, and intimate friend of Hillary Clinton.

At the White House he had been the keeper of the secrets, managing the personal financial affairs of the President and the First Lady. Within hours of his death a high-level raiding party ransacked his office, removing a number of files, including the Whitewater papers.

The doubts are not confined to anti-Clinton enthusiasts. A member of the Foster family has told The Sunday Telegraph that he no longer believes the official verdict of suicide. He suspects the death may have been a political murder with elements of government complicity. He says some other members of the family are increasingly willing to entertain that idea.

There are also murmurs at the Federal Bureau of Investigations. In a recent interview with the Telegraph, a high-level FBI source spoke about a cover-up by the US Park Police and voiced suspicions that the abrupt firing of FBI Director William Sessions on July 19, 1993 - the day before Foster's death - was in some sinister way linked. The man who took over as acting Director did not assert FBI jurisdiction over the case, leaving the investigation in the hands of a Park Police officer with no homicide experience.

Now it appears that the Whitewater special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, is beginning to view the Foster mystery as the Rosetta Stone that can open up the Whitewater complex of scandals. Last month his lawyers grilled Webb Hubbell - the confessed felon who once ran the Clinton Justice Department - questioning him about Vince Foster, according to sources in Little Rock. Starr also called a number of Park Police officers before a grand jury, read them the perjury statutes in a pointed manner, then interrogated them at length about discrepancies in testimony.

If we are really watching the unravelling of a colossal cover-up involving police officers, rescue workers, FBI agents, and the inner circle of the White House - a very big "if" - then much of the credit must go to a young Irish-American reporter called Christopher Ruddy who has been keeping the story alive in a lone crusade.

RUDDY has the right background for a sleuth. His father was a veteran of a New York police force. "My dad would never have looked the other way. That's part of what motivates me," he said. Before starting his career as a journalist he took a masters degree at the London School of Economics and then taught history in one of the toughest schools of the South Bronx.

It was Ruddy who broke the key stories in the New York Post last year that revealed that the rescue workers had doubts about the suicide theory. He reported that the paramedics were surprised by the lack of blood on the ground. There was no soil on Foster's shoes. The body was laid out "as if in a coffin".

The suicide weapon, a Colt of pre-First World War vintage that his family could not identify, was in his hand - always a red flag for experienced homicide investigators. The crucial crime scene photos were ruined by under-exposure.

"What we found out was that the Park Police never did a proper investigation," said Ruddy. The case was treated as a suicide from the beginning. The police did not bother to speak to nearby residents and failed to interview an old man who spends all day in the park and is a goldmine of information on everything that goes on there.

For a few weeks Ruddy, 30, was a star. But America's establishment press was not willing to pursue the mystery too deeply - nor was the New York Post, a gutsy, well-written tabloid. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch. As the first wave of interest in the Foster case subsided, Ruddy was pulled off the story.

The editor of the New York Post, Ken Chandler, praised Ruddy but said that there was a limit as to how far the Post could go in covering the story. He told one magazine: "The truth is, Chris Ruddy trod where others fear to tread. When you do that, you get criticism and scorn heaped upon you. When you're writing about something you can't get answers to, you have to keep pushing, and he did."

Ruddy persisted. With the backing of the Western Journalism Centre, a California group that funds investigative reporting, he launched a guerilla campaign to get the story out. He published a document known as the "Ruddy Memorandum" attacking the report of former Whitewater prosecutor Robert Fiske, and chipped away at public apathy with a barrage of newspaper advertisements paid for by wealthy donors and grass roots fund-raising. In November he was employed full-time on the story by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

He says the facts of the case simply do not point to suicide. Why were Foster's fingerprints not found on the gun? Why were no skull fragments found? Why was the gun in Foster's right hand when he was left-handed? Why was no attempt made to investigate carpet fibres and blonde hairs found on his clothes? Why did the chief medical examiner claim there were no X-rays when he is quoted in the Park Police report talking about the results of X-rays? The list goes on.

But the big question is over the true location of the body. The police say that Foster was at the foot of a civil war cannon deep inside the park. This is the so-called "second cannon". But Ruddy says that two of the paramedics he interviewed last year located the body in a different spot, in an area of dense undergrowth 20 yards from the "first cannon". In a more recent interview, a medical examiner drew a map placing the body in the same spot. (The first cannon, interestingly, was recently removed from the park.)

CRITICS say his theory is preposterous. Twenty to thirty people saw the body that night. How could the Park Police get so many public servants to change their story? Why would they do so? What difference does it make whether the body was at the first or the second cannon?

Ruddy's answer is that the witnesses were not questioned under oath by the Fiske investigation, which is unusual, and most of them were never asked about the location of the body. As for the scale of the alleged cover-up, he argues that it shows the enormity of whatever it is they are trying to hide.

And what might that be? Ruddy prefers not to speculate, except to say it must be something more breathtaking than a 15-year-old property deal called Whitewater. As for Vince Foster, Ruddy is working from the assumption - until shown otherwise - that the man lost his life because of a refusal to compromise his honour and integrity.

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