Copyright © 1997 The Telegraph plc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.
International News Electronic Telegraph
Sunday 12 January 1997
Issue 597

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Why is Clinton persecuting me?


External Links

Politics Now


The Death of Vincent Foster


Was Vince Foster murdered?


Corruption in America


The White House



The anatomy of a President

THE Telegraph's Washington correspondent has been accused by President Clinton of peddling 'Right-wing inventions'. But, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, it is the White House that is lying.

In a 331-page report, released last week by the Legal Counsel's Office, it described a conspiracy "food chain" in which a putative right-wing cabal led by the reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, Richard Mellon Scaife, skilfully feeds material to London newspapers.

"The stories get picked up overseas, typically in London, typically by one particular reporter," explained the White House Press Secretary, Michael McCurry, without naming the scoundrel responsible. They are, of course, referring to me.

From London, according to "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce", as this astonishing report is called, these wild inventions then make their way back across the Atlantic through a network of Right-wing conduits, ultimately reaching the mainstream US media. This is known as the "blow-back" strategy.

What seems to cause intense frustration at the White House is the emergence of a new mass media that does not respond to the usual levers of control. A foreign newspaper such as The Sunday Telegraph can run stories that are picked up by the Internet and transmitted instantly across America.

The radio talk shows - predominantly Right-wing - then provide broader amplification, ensuring that the stories reach 10, 20, 30 million people. The White House is clearly alert to the dangers posed by this samizdat network, but has not figured out a way to jam the transmissions.

So it has resorted instead to shameless propaganda. The report refers to The Sunday Telegraph throughout as a "Right-wing tabloid", even though it is sold in hotels and news-stands all over Washington. Most of what it says about my work for The Telegraph is either untrue or misrepresented to the point of defamation. It accuses me of promoting the allegation that the late Vincent Foster, a White House aide, was a spy, lumping me in with those who claim that he was caught selling nuclear secrets to Israel. In fact, as the White House knows well, I have explicitly rejected the espionage story as far-fetched.

What is true is that I asked whether Foster might have done some sensitive work for the US government before joining the White House staff, but that is an entirely different matter. That such a shoddy document could be issued by the legal counsel's office, at taxpayers' expense, offers an insight into the intellectual and moral calibre of the people who surround this President.

Of course, it was never intended that the "food-chain" report would fall into the hands of the wrong people. The documents were prepared in the autumn of 1995 for use by friendly journalists, who were encouraged to use the material as a crib sheet for hostile articles on the tiny group of journalists investigating Foster's death.

A few reporters have allowed themselves to be used for this purpose. It was not until the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of the report last Monday that the White House released it to the rest of the press. There is no precedent for the White House drawing up a written list of enemy journalists and their supposed sponsors. After combing through the report, I can only conclude that the Clintons were in panic in July 1995, when Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced that he was going to open his own investigation into Foster's death.

It appears that the "food-chain" report was drafted - in part, at least - in order to discredit two revelations about the Foster case that were acquiring dangerous momentum in the United States. Or as the White House Press Secretary put it on Thursday: "We're trying to protect people from getting a bunch of bad stories in their papers . . . We'd say, 'Wait a minute, you guys are chasing a story that had very, very suspicious roots'."

One of the targets was a story published in The Sunday Telegraph on April 9, 1995. It explored evidence suggesting that the White House had been given an early tip-off about the death of Foster and had then falsified the official record to cover this up. The White House's frenzied reaction to this article suggests that The Sunday Telegraph may have stumbled on to something of acute significance.

The story was based on my interviews with medical personnel at the crime scene, FBI witness statements, and the notes of police investigators. It also reported that three men in Arkansas - two state troopers and the former commander of the state police - had signed affidavits claiming that they heard about Foster's death suspiciously early.

They said that a young White House aide, Helen Dickey, called the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock to relay the tragic news at least an hour and a half before the White House was supposedly notified. The "food-chain" report does not attempt to rebut the allegations, except to say that Dickey remembers making the telephone call much later in the evening. Instead it dismisses the article as the "rantings of the fringe" and seeks to impugn the motives of the two state troopers.

It then goes on to describe how the story was picked up by the "conspiracy-theory fanatics" on the Internet and was ultimately given "unwarranted legitimacy" by Congressional investigators. Another target of the report is Strategic Investment, an Anglo-American newsletter co-published by Lord Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times, which commissioned three handwriting experts to examine the Foster "suicide note". Each of the three, working independently, came to the conclusion that the note was a forgery.

One expert was Reginald Alton, an Oxford professor, but the report does not mention him. Instead it implies that the finding was based on the work of a single man, Ronald Rice of Boston, who is labelled a "fraud".

Once again, it seems that the White House is willing deliberately to propagate outright lies. It must know from culling the press accounts on this story - if nothing else - that Rice has worked on a number of famous cases as a hand-writing expert, including the Boston Strangler case and most recently as a consultant for CNN on the O. J. Simpson case.

The White House does not try to argue with the analysis of the experts. It simply states that the report of the independent counsel, Robert Fiske, based on the work of the FBI, had authenticated the note, as if that were argument enough.

But the whole point of the Strategic Investment allegation is that the FBI did not conduct a proper analysis of the Foster note. The FBI relied on a single sample of Foster's writing, even though it is standard procedure to use a wide mix of samples. (The FBI also examined Foster's signature on 17 cheques - which is no substitute).

The report has now blown up in their faces. In their zeal to discredit critics, they have given a fresh lease of life to the very articles on Vincent Foster that caused them so much angst to begin with. They have been caught using the office of the presidency to run a smear campaign against journalists and political opponents, turning the White House into an adjunct of the Democratic National Committee. Even Richard Nixon, at the height of Watergate, was cautious not to venture so far out into these perilous waters.

15 December 1996: Foster dead . . .and so Clinton goes to bed
17 November 1996: Newspaper the super-spooks dare not miss

Selected archive of Electronic Telegraph articles regarding the death of Vince Foster

  • 20 March 1995: Doubts linger over Clinton aide's 'suicide'
  • 10 April 1995: When did White House learn of aide's death?
  • 22 May 1995: Secret Swiss link to White House death
  • 12 June 1995: White House death: murder theory comes under scrutiny
  • 10 July 1995: America's top newspaper has pointed the finger at our man in Washington. Now it's his turn
  • 1 August 1995: Lawyer speaks for Mrs Clinton
  • 7 August 1995: Secret service link in death of Clinton aide
  • 25 September 1995: Fight over phone log rings alarm bells for Clinton
  • 23 October 1995: Death in the park: is this the killer?
  • 26 October 1995: Vince Foster suicide note forged, say experts
  • 15 January 1996: The eerie similarities between Whitewater and Watergate
  • 24 January 1996: Clinton speech shadowed by scandal
  • 15 July 1996: Foster 'hired detective to spy on Clinton'
  • 6 October 1996: Phone call rings Clinton alarm bells
  • 10 November 1996: Clinton aide case witness sues FBI



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