Clinton and the CIA: Roger Morris's important new book, Partners in Power, describes how Clinton was recruited by the CIA to keep tabs on other overseas students while at Oxford. A CIA operative who worked in the Stockholm station confirmed that Clinton had submitted a report on American peace activists who had taken refuge in Scandinavia to avoid the draft. Whether anyone else reported on Clinton taking refuge at Oxford to avoid the draft is not known.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph of London reported recently that:

"Rhodes scholars such as Mr. Clinton were favorite targets for recruitment. This caused serious friction with Britain's MI5 because it violated a US-UK agreement that neither country would conduct covert operations or recruit on each other's home territory. Because of the sensitivity of the UK, these kids were treated in some ways like high-level agents.' "

Assets like Clinton were part of a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft known as Operation Chaos. The files of Operation Chaos were shredded by the agency in the mid-1970s but one official told Morris that Clinton "was there in the records, with a special designation."

The Morris book confirms something we have long suspected -- that the story of Bill Clinton is the story a politician nurtured by the CIA, just as George Bush was. The 1992 election was an extraordinary one: the first contest between two men in no small part the creatures of the CIA. In other words, since 1988 this country has been run by politicians deeply beholden to the agency.