Copyright © 1996 The Telegraph plc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduced with permission.
International News Electronic Telegraph
Sunday 6 October 1996
Issue 501

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Phone call rings Clinton alarm bells
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard


External Links

The Death of Vincent Foster: Evidence of a Cover-up


Vincent Foster: The Beyer Autopsy


Christopher Ruddy Stories on Vince Foster's Death


Who Killed Vincent Foster?


The Death of Vince Foster


The Vince Foster Page


White Water Web



A MYSTERIOUS and hitherto undisclosed telephone call could hold vital clues for the investigation into the fate of Vincent Foster, the White House aide whose body was found in a Virginia park in July 1993.

Foster made the call the night before his death. It provoked a heated telephone conversation in which he allegedly spoke of a plan to meet Hillary Clinton at a location referred to only as "the apartment" in order to turn over confidential files.

The call was to Jerry Parks, a private investigator in Little Rock who had been chief of security at the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign headquarters. Parks was watching television at home when Foster, then deputy counsel to the President, called from a public pay-phone in Washington.

"It was an angry exchange," said Parks's widow, Jane, who says she was in the room at the time. "Jerry told him: 'You can't give Hillary those files, they've got my name all over them.' "

The account of the phone call on July 19, 1993, comes from Mrs Parks alone. But two official investigators have told The Telegraph that they consider Mrs Parks, a Pentecostal Christian now suffering from multiple sclerosis, to be a credible witness.

Both Foster and Parks were dead within two months. Foster's body turned up the next day. An unidentified Colt .38 revolver without his fingerprints was lodged in his hand. The death was deemed a suicide at first, but the case has been re-opened by Kenneth Starr, the Independent Counsel investigating the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater Arkansas land deal.

'It was all in $100 bills wrapped in string, layer after layer. It was so full I had to sit on the trunk to get it shut again'

Parks died two months later, in a gangland-style murder - a case that has never been solved by the Little Rock police.

It is not clear what files Foster was referring to. But at least some of them may have concerned philandering by Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas. Mrs Parks said that her husband had conducted covert surveillance of Bill Clinton for Foster, allegedly at Hillary Clinton's behest.

Mrs Parks believes that the files covered other shadowy matters too. In 1991, Mrs Parks discovered what must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in the boot of her husband's Lincoln car after he had made a trip to Mena airport in western Arkansas with Foster.

"It was all in $100 bills wrapped in string, layer after layer," she said. "It was so full I had to sit on the trunk [boot] to get it shut again. I took the money and threw it in his lap, and said 'Are you running drugs?' Jerry said that Vince had paid him $1,000 cash for each trip; he didn't know what they were doing, and he didn't care to know; he told me to forget what I'd seen."

She also said that Parks and Foster bugged the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock. "Vince knew that somebody was stealing money from the campaign, and he wanted to know who was doing it," she said. If her allegations are correct, Foster played a far more important role as a campaign fixer than is generally known.

When Parks learned of Foster's death, he blurted out: 'I'm a dead man'

Official documents show that Foster left his White House office shortly after 1pm on July 20, 1993, saying that he would be back. He was found dead at Fort Marcy Park opposite the Saudi ambassador's residence at 6.03pm. It has never been established what happened in the intervening five hours.

He could not have met Hillary Clinton because she was concluding a private trip to Santa Barbara in California - although Foster could mistakenly have believed he had a rendezvous with the First Lady.

Instead of returning to Washington, Mrs Clinton flew from California to Arkansas to visit her sick father, touching down in Little Rock at 7.40pm local time.

On the evening of July 19, Foster was at home with his family, according to the statement by his widow, Lisa, to the FBI. The statement does not say, however, whether he left the house that evening for any reason. Documents reveal that he received a telephone call from President Clinton at around 8pm inviting him to return to the White House to watch a film - it happened to be In the Line of Fire, in which a dutiful Secret Service officer takes a bullet to protect the president - but Foster refused.

'I decided that if you tell the whole truth it'll set you free'

The call to Parks must have been made within the next hour or two. The call, Mrs Parks said, set in train a fearful set of events. When, later, Parks learned of Foster's death, he blurted out: "I'm a dead man." She then saw a change in her husband. "That's when Jerry got paranoid," she said. "He took some of my valium that night, something he'd never done before."

After her husband was murdered two months later, a team of police officers - including federal agents from the FBI, the Secret Service, the IRS and, she believes, the CIA - searched her house, taking everything they could find. Parks's computer was purged by an expert, and 130 tapes of telephone conversations were confiscated.

Over the past two and a half years, Mrs Parks has given a series of interviews to The Telegraph, each time revealing a little more. She held back before, she explained, because she was afraid of violent reprisals against her two sons and herself if she revealed the full extent of her knowledge.

"I've been praying about it," she said. "I decided that if you tell the whole truth it'll set you free."

Last week she received three death threats. With mixed feelings, she has asked the US federal government for protection.

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'



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