THE US National Security Agency has been collecting my articles from The Telegraph about the death of the White House aide Vincent Foster, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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The Death of Vincent Foster - Evidence of a Cover-up Who killed Vincent Foster? Was Vince Foster Murdered? National Security Website

I had no idea that the most secretive branch of the US intelligence network would be interested. Staff at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, say that there is nothing to get excited about. "We get things faxed to us all the time," said Judith Emmel, the press officer. "It'll get put in a file somewhere . . . your articles were in the conspiracy theory file, I think."

Thank you, Judith. Perhaps that is an appropriate place to store my articles about Vincent Foster. But I cannot help wondering why a Defence Department agency that handles signals intelligence and electronic eaves-dropping overseas is collecting cuttings by deranged journalists about a lawyer who - according to the US government - shot himself in a fit of depression.

Why would they think of filing newspaper clips on a domestic suicide? Is something bothering them? My articles are among 77 declassified documents released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. Also included: an article from Strategic Investment, a newsletter co-edited by Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times; an editorial from the Wall Street Journal about the Mena airport; a piece from the French Intelligence Newsletter, and a long article by Jim Norman, a former editor at Forbes Magazine, which the NSA appears to have downloaded from the computer Internet. There is some in-house e-mail by NSA officers, but all the juicy bits are crossed out. Such a disappointment.

The request was filed last year by the Washington Weekly, a cyberspace newsletter published on the Internet. The editor, Marvin Lee, decided to ask for all NSA material relating to Vincent Foster after The Telegraph reported that Foster had been handling classified NSA material before his death in July 1993.

To be more precise, Foster's secretary told the Senate Banking Committee that Foster had given her "two one-inch ring binders that were from the National Security Agency" to place in the encrypted safe at the White House counsel's office.

The new documents do not shed much light on this particular mystery. What we learn instead is that Foster attended a "Law Day" at the NSA headquarters on May 4, 1993. He was briefed by the deputy director of the NSA, Robert Prestel, then attended a round-table discussion on SIGINT - signals intelligence.

There is nothing sinister about this. But it does show that Vincent Foster, the Deputy Counsel to the President, was the White House official who liaised with the NSA on the legal questions arising from computer espionage. Yet the White House has been adamant in denying that Foster had dealings with the NSA. Why?

Beyond that there is an intriguing admission in one of the NSA's internal e-mail messages. It reveals that an affiliate of a Little Rock company tied to the Clintons - Hillary Rodham Clinton was the firm's lawyer in 1978 and 1986 - has been a sub-contractor for the Defence Department's intelligence arm, a fact vehemently denied until now.

It mentions a $166,000 contract issued by the NSA in September 1990 to build a "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility" (SCIF) in Fort Gillem, Georgia, to handle the highest secrets of the US government. This document is bound to cause further speculation thatthe Clintons were on friendly terms with US intelligence long before they came to Washington.

The 77 documents are just the first to be released. Another 600 or so have been sent to other agencies for further review. I hope the NSA does not cross out too much of its own internal commentary. It would be interesting to know what the spooks are really saying about the nuts.

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

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