Part of a television series 'Strangers Abroad', shown on television in the 1990s. Details of the programme, including producer, director and other credits are at the end of the film.
The film centres on the work of E.E.Evans-Pritchard, particularly his work on Azande Witchcraft.
This information first appeared in the May 14, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The `MI6 factor' in the murder of Princess Diana
by Our Special Correspondent
Recently, EIR was one of several news organizations that received an unsolicited e-mail transmission, identifying senior officials of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, including individuals who are accused of having been involved in the Aug. 31, 1997 deaths of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul. The three were killed in a car crash in Paris, that, to this day, remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century.
More than 21 months after the crash, the official French investigation, headed by Judge Hervé Stephan, is still under way, and some of the most disturbing questions about the fatal crash remain unanswered, including the most basic question: Was it an assassination?
EIR has been well-known for our exhaustive coverage of the death of Princess Diana, identifying otherwise unpublished leads, and pointing to the involvement of British and other intelligence agencies, in the run-up to the crash, and in the effort to cover up the evidence that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed were the targets of a murder plot.
Some of the information provided in the e-mail posting has been independently verified by EIR. Indeed, three MI6 officials, identified as having been intimately involved in the events leading up to the fatal crash, and the ensuing cover-up, have been previously identified by EIR as suspected culprits, acting on behalf of the House of Windsor, under the personal orders of Prince Philip.
In late 1997, EIR published exclusive photographs showing that a team of at least seven men were surveilling the Ritz Hotel on the evening of Aug. 30, 1997--during the final hours before the crash in the Place d'Alma tunnel.
As this issue of EIR goes to press, a French court is in the process of deciding whether Judge Stephan will be ordered to pursue further leads on the crash provided by Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of Dodi Fayed, who has made numerous public statements to the effect that he believes that the crash was not an accident. Al Fayed is a civil party to the case, and, as such, is entitled, under French law, to present new leads and evidence for consideration by the chief investigator before the final report is released.
In the interest of furthering the investigation into the Paris crash, we publish the text of the anonymous document below. We cannot, at this time, independently authenticate many of the details provided. However, we pass the document along as "raw" material. As we pursue the leads contained in the document, we will keep our readers informed. Here is the e-mail text (the names section contains the year and city to which the alleged agents were posted):
Professor Pritchard of Gonville and Cauis College Cambridge is the leading recruiter for MI6 agents. He identifies and recruits the most intellectual geniuses for MI6.
Gonville and Cauis College, Cambridge
"...little did Patrick Knowlton know that his episode in Fort Marcy Park was only the beginning for him. Some 18 months after the fact, British reporter Ambrose Evans Pritchard interviewed Knowlton and informed him that Special Agent Larry Monroe had falsified Knowlton's story by misreporting to the OIC that he had identified the brown car he saw at the scene as a "1988 to 1990" year model. This fabrication would have coincided with Foster's 1989 (silver-gray) Honda, except that they could not coerce this witness into agreeing to the lie."
"Perhaps the most important and the most exciting one to listen to yet is with the Washington bureau chief for the respected Sunday Telegraph of London, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. It took place less than a week after Evans-Pritchard had published his article based upon his interview of the elusive witness, Patrick Knowlton, who had stopped to relieve himself at the secluded Fort Marcy Park on the afternoon of July 20, 1993, when Foster already lay dead near the back of the park. His name had appeared in the police report on the case misspelled as “Nolton” and the address given for him was also wrong. Ambrose-Pritchard had tracked him down by asking around the small mountain community of Etlan, Virginia, where Knowlton had been headed to a vacation home on that fateful day in July. Knowlton learned from Evans-Pritchard that the FBI had falsified his testimony in a couple of crucial ways. What seemed most significant at the time was what was featured in his October 22, 1995 article. That is, that he had a very clear recollection of the “menacing-looking” man who stared at him from one of the two cars he saw parked in the Fort Marcy lot, and a drawing based upon Knowlton’s description accompanied Evans-Pritchard’s article. Even more importantly we would learn later, the empty Honda with Arkansas license plates that Knowlton saw there was quite different from Foster’s Honda, according to his clear recollection, and the FBI reported that he had seen Foster’s car.
The article hit U.S. newsstands on Tuesday, October 24. I was working at the time only a block from a very good news and magazine store on K Street next to a Farragut North subway entrance in Washington, DC, which carried many foreign newspapers, including the Telegraph. How exciting it was to read this extraordinary report that never made it into the mainstream U.S. press in those days before the widespread use of the Internet!
Two days later, on the morning of Thursday, October 26, Knowlton received a subpoena to testify before Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater grand jury. What happened that evening as Knowlton walked with his girlfriend in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the next night Evans-Pritchard characterizes in his 1997 book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, as “bizarre beyond belief.” No written description that I could give here can compare to the phone conversation between Evans-Pritchard and Irvine immediately after the event (The “Chris” referred to is Christopher Ruddy.) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE3-TxJajSA.
The Book to Read
If you are going to read only one book on the corruption of the Clintons and our enabling government and opinion-molding institutions, it should be the one by Evans-Pritchard, not Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists, by Richard Poe. Poe does have a very good account of the harassment suffered by Knowlton as recounted below, but Evans-Prichard actually witnessed some of it, and he has a whole chapter in his book on it, which he entitles “Street Fascism.”
Most tellingly, even though he had finished his book just before Starr released his final report on the Foster death and Poe had much more time to reach a firm conclusion as to what Starr was all about, Evans-Pritchard’s assessment is much more accurate and honest:
…there is [an] important point to understand about Kenneth Starr. He is by character a servant of power, not a prosecutor. One thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: He will never confront the U.S. Justice department, the FBI, and the institutions of the permanent government in Washington. His whole career has been built on networking, by ingratiating himself. His natural loyalties lie with the politico-legal fraternity that covered up the Foster case in the first place. (p. 112)
Evans-Pritchard and his book have their shortcomings. He may not trust or even glorify the Clintons’ conservative critics as much as Poe, but he trusts them too much. In his “Street Fascism” chapter he writes of the determined Knowlton, “He gave a sworn deposition to Congressman Dan Burton, one of the few stalwarts on Capitol Hill who refused to allow his independent judgment in the Foster case to be swayed by mocking editorials.”
But that’s exactly what he did do when push came to shove after he became a committee chairman. And, ironically enough, after encountering difficulties in locating Patrick Knowlton because his name had been misspelled by the Park Police, Evans-Pritchard spells Brett Kavanaugh’s name with a “C” instead of a “K” and, like Poe, he leaves him out of his index, by whatever spelling. In Evans-Pritchard’s or his publisher’s case, it’s probably caused by mere inadvertence because John Bates and Miguel Rodriguez are there. Why that is significant is explained in my original review of Poe’s book, published on my web site September 9, 2007 and expanded on February 23, 2009.
The Original Review of Hillary’s Secret War
Thumbing through this 2004 book, with a foreword by Jim Robinson, founder of FreeRepublic.com, one gets the impression that this is a much harder hitting and genuine effort than Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President.
Harder hitting? Yes. More genuine? No.
The tip-off as to who is expected to read this book is at the top of the dust jacket: "This book is required reading," it says in bold italics. And right under the quote in bigger, bolder, all capital letters is the name of the professional polarizer being quoted, none other than Ann Coulter. With such a recommendation, the publisher is assured that the only people likely to spend more than five minutes with the book are hard core Fox News junkies. And Poe gives them a lot more raw meat than Klein or even Coulter, herself, ever did.
Recall that I faulted Klein for pulling his punches on Hillary Clinton's likely lesbianism and the various Clinton scandals, particularly the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster. Hillary's domestic life is not a topic of his book, so her sexual orientation is, appropriately, not addressed.* As for the scandals, Poe can hardly be said to have gone easy on Hillary. Though both Klein's and Poe's books are aimed principally at conservatives, Poe's is obviously meant for only a small subset of that audience. The giveaway is that Klein's book got tons of publicity and Poe's book got absolutely none. I didn't even know of the existence of Poe's book until I stumbled across it at a used book store a couple of months ago, even though it actually mentions me and references my "America's Dreyfus Affair, the Case of the Death of Vincent Foster." It is safe for Poe to tell his readers about some of the worst of the Clinton scandals, because only a very select group of people who already hate the Clintons with a passion are likely ever to read it.
That is not to say that Poe tells the whole truth. Far from it. His job is clearly to play right-wing shepherd and to herd his assigned flock away from the corruption that envelopes both the Democrats and the Republicans as well as our ruling media elite.
Poe describes a shocking manifestation of the corruption in his apparent gloves-off treatment of the murder and cover-up in the Foster case. Revealing more than journalist Christopher Ruddy, whom he praises to the skies and ridiculously likens to Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case, he describes here the reaction of Kenneth Starr's "investigative" team to the terrifying harassment** that the inconvenient witness, Patrick Knowlton, whom British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had ferreted out, received after being subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury:
No one knows who ordered the harassment team to begin its operation against Patrick Knowlton on October 26, 1995. However, someone close to the Starr investigation must have tipped them off that Knowlton had received a subpoena.
Throughout Knowlton's ordeal, Starr's team treated the beleaguered witness with extraordinary contempt.
When the street harassment began, Knowlton called the FBI and requested witness protection. Nothing happened for two days. Finally, Agent Russell Bransford--the same FBI agent who had delivered Starr's subpoena--showed up. "He had this smirk on his face, as if he thought the whole thing was amusing," says Knowlton. "I told him to get the hell out of my house."
At the same time Knowlton was calling the FBI, Ruddy and Evans-Pritchard called Deputy Independent Counsel John Bates to report the intimidation of a grand jury witness. Bates's secretary jotted down some notes. "An hour later I called again," says Evans-Pritchard. "She let out an audible laugh and said that her boss had received the message...Bates never called back.
What did Starr's people find so funny about the situation?
As a last resort, Knowlton prepared a "Report of Witness Tampering" and took it personally to the Office of the Independent Counsel. "It was their responsibility, at the very least, to find out who leaked word of his subpoena," notes Evans-Pritchard. According to Evans-Pritchard, John Bates responded by calling security and having Knowlton removed from the building.
Perhaps the most telling indication of Starr's attitude toward Knowlton is the humiliating cross-examination to which this brave man was subjected before the grand jury. Knowlton says that he was "treated like a suspect." Prosecutor Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be trying to imply that Knowlton was a homosexual who was cruising Fort Marcy Park for sex. Regarding the suspicious Hispanic-looking man he had seen guarding the park entrance, Kavanaugh asked, Did he "pass you a note?" Did he "touch your genitals?"
Knowlton flew into a rage at Kavanaugh's insinuations. Evans-Pritchard writes that several African American jurors burst into laughter at the spectacle, rocking "back and forth as if they were at a Baptist revival meeting. Kavanaugh was unable to reassert his authority. The grand jury was laughing at him. The proceedings were out of control."
It was at that point, reports Evans-Pritchard, that Patrick Knowlton was finally compelled to confront the obvious: "the Office of the Independent Counsel was itself corrupt." (pp. 106-107) "
Ambrose Evans Pritchard:
J'Accuse!
by Carol A. Valentine
Curator, Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum
Copyright, March, 1997
May be reproduced for non-commercial purposes
"Your Majesty, the people are crying out for truth.""Let them have half-truths . . ."Ambrose claims to have a long-standing interest in exposing the truth about what happened at Waco. I have worked with him for a number of years, furnishing him from time to time with information. He is a charming fellow. On one occasion, Ambrose relied on me for leads concerning Kiri Jewel's testimony during the 1995 House Waco hearings. The result was his piece Sloppy Right lets Clinton off the hook, London Sunday Telegraph July 23, 1995, in which Ambrose challenged the veracity of Kiri's testimony. I live in the Washington, D.C. area, home of the CIA, FBI, the Pentagon, NSA, foreign embassies, and the international press corps. This area is loaded with spooks and poseurs of every size and shape. Here the question is not "Is Joe Blow an agent?" but "Who does he work for?" (which agency). And a number of savvy people in this town have been telling me for years that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is British military intelligence. The evaluations I heard were made without rancor (some even with benign amusement) just as a Southerner might describe a neighbor as an employee of Southern Bell. My policy on Ambrose was this: As long as Ambrose helped expose the lies surrounding Waco, I would help him, and regard him as an ally. Now I see Ambrose as part of the Waco cover up, and I come forward. "J'Accuse!" I say, to borrow a headline from one of Ambrose's own London Sunday Telegraph articles. Let's look at the history: In November, 1996, I had a lengthy conversation with Ambrose concerning the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum. I gave Ambrose the Museum's website address: http://www.Public-Action.com/SkyWriter/Waco/Museum and summarized the contents of the site for his convenience. On the subject of the deaths of the mothers and children, I gave him this information:
To my surprise, Ambrose became argumentative. He said the notion that some of the April 19 victims were dead before April 19 was at variance with what the Branch Davidian survivors said--was I calling them liars? I explained a few simple truths:
The former Mrs. Doyle, who had lived in Waco for years, said that the Doyle grandchildren were in the Mt. Carmel Center during the siege. Ultimately no Doyle grandchildren were listed among the dead after April 19. Provided the former Mrs. Doyle was not lying or mistaken about having grandchildren, the ramifications might be obvious to an independent observer: The lives of the youngsters are perhaps being used as bargaining chips by the FBI. "Liar" would not describe a person who succumbed to such intimidation. An investigator would at least entertain the possibility that the Tribune report might be factual and worth follow-up investigation. But Ambrose instantly dismissed it--out of hand--as erroneous. "Why would you believe the Chicago Tribune and not Clive Doyle?" he asked me. On the other hand, why would Ambrose leap to the conclusion that another newspaper had necessarily done a shoddy reporting job, or that Mrs. Doyle was lying or mistaken about having grandchildren? The Chicago Tribune report of grandchildren certainly did not discredit the Davidians or hold them up to ridicule; if the Chicago Tribune report had been accurate, and the children used as bargaining chips, obviously Clive Doyle could not admit to having grandchildren. With the incurious and brusque dismissal of that report, it seemed to me Ambrose had clearly stepped out of his role as a reporter and revealed himself as a partisan. During this conversation, Ambrose asked several times if I knew who had perpetrated the crimes of April 19, 1993. He seemed concerned. No, I did not say "the 'butcher-and-bolt' British commandos helped kill them," even though we are aware that the British were accessories to the torture of the Branch Davidians. Recall the SAS spy plane over the Mt. Carmel Center, reported by the London Times on March 21, 1993? http://www.Public-Action.com/SkyWriter/WacoMuseum/war/fig/w_fig01.jpg AMBROSE THEN TOLD ME THAT HE COULD NOT USE THE MUSEUM'S INFORMATION BECAUSE HIS EDITORS THOUGHT HE HAD DONE ENOUGH ON WACO ALREADY. At a later date Ambrose called me, this time to ask questions concerning Livingstone Fagan. His editors wanted Fagan's treatment in prison covered because Fagan was British, he said. [Note: Ambrose later told me he found out Livingstone Fagan was Jamaican.] On that occasion, I again suggested Ambrose cover the evidence contained in the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum for his paper. AGAIN AMBROSE DECLINED, SAYING HIS EDITOR ONLY AGREED TO COVER LIVINGSTONE BECAUSE LIVINGSTONE WAS BRITISH. Otherwise, the London readers would have no interest in Waco. When I got off the phone, I wondered why the London Telegraph editors were not interested in the other British citizens who died in the Holocaust. Surely the scandalous cover-up and body laundering documented in the Museum would be of interest to British readership--after all, the Death Certificates issued the British victims were arguably false! Honestly reported, the US cover-up and murder of British citizens could cause international repercussions. Surely this was news worthy. On March 4, 1997, before Ambrose traveled to the West Coast to see "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," he called me to ask if I had seen the flick. I said no, but I had visited the film's webpage, and read the synopsis of the film. I pointed out to Ambrose:
THIS TIME AMBROSE SAID THE IDEA THAT THE BRANCH DAVIDIANS WERE DELIBERATELY MURDERED WAS TOO MUCH FOR MOST PEOPLE TO ACCEPT, INCLUDING HIS EDITORS. Most people still believed that the Davidians set themselves on fire, and people had to be brought up to the truth slowly, he said. Let's apply Ambrose's logic to another atrocity: First you tell the world that 100 Jews were killed in the German Holocaust. When that is accepted, you change the number to 200. On and on, up until you hit the six million mark. Does the logic make sense? If not, why apply it to the Davidians? I told Ambrose that people should be directed to the evidence, including his editors. Ambrose intimated his editors were too delicate psychologically to deal with the news directly, and had to be brought up to the truth over a matter of time. I told Ambrose his editors sounded like cot cases, and Ambrose defended them, saying all editors were cot cases. "They are newspeople. They deal in news," he explained. Ambrose said that he was going to write a story about "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," to illustrate the "changing perceptions" about Waco. "Changing perceptions?" Since when do newspapers chronicle "changing perceptions?" Perceptions are based on information. Newspapers used to be the source of INFORMATION. If perceptions are based on newspaper reports, and newspaper reports cover only "perceptions," what kind of an information system do we have? Exactly. Not an information system at all. It is a PsyOps operation, and Ambrose is right in the middle of it. Consider: Ambrose's employers were willing to fly him across the continent, pay for airfare, lodgings, meals--all to have an article about "perceptions." Meanwhile, Ambrose's employers are uninterested in an article about cold factual evidence which would have cost them virtually nothing, evidence which had been available to them for months. Consider: Ambrose is UNwilling to report evidence of murder as documented in the Museum, but is willing to report "changing perceptions" about the murder which the film portrays. Why is "murder" verboten in one case, but not in the other? I asked Ambrose if he had read the Museum yet, and he allowed he'd popped in quickly, but had not really read it closely because he had not written anything about Waco since. Yet here he was getting ready to go on a plane to do . . . an article on Waco. Ambrose has developed the non sequitur to high art form. Since the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum was posted on the World Wide Web, many thousands of people around the world have read it and downloaded the material to their own computers. Surely this is evidence of changing perceptions? No matter. Apparently the London Sunday Telegraph wants London readers to hear about movie-generated changing perceptions but not Internet-generated changing perceptions. In this March 4 conversation Ambrose called the new flick "damning." Considering that Ambrose had not seen the movie yet, it sounded like he had the story already drafted before he got on the plane. Folks, I think what is going on is this: * The powers-that-be don't want to publicize the fact that the February 28, 1993 raid was a set-up, a phoney, a domestic Gulf of Tonkin incident, courtesy of the US military looking to secure a broadened role for itself in civilian US life. * The powers-that-be don't want to publicize the fact that some of the mothers and children were long dead by the April 19, 1993 gas attack. They don't want us to know the real time, cause, and circumstances of death of the victims. * If public attention is diverted to the murder of adult Davidians, people will forget about the murders of the mothers and children. The adults, remember, are accused of shooting at the agents, and as active combatants, do not hold the same victim status as three-dozen-odd mothers and children and babies. * The British are in it up to their ears, much like The LondonTimes reported, and much like Linda Thompson and George Zimmerlee have been reporting. Kiri Jewel's statements did not impact on the interests of the British government. Ambrose's article on her testimony made him an opinion leader on Waco, at no expense to the British. But the nature of the military involvement in the initial attack and the dates of the mothers and children's deaths are British sensitivities. That's why they can't be reported and attention must be taken off that information and placed elsewhere. And that's where Ambrose comes in. Next time you speak to Ambrose, he may tell you I have mischaracterized our conversations. In response, just challenge him to tell his British readers about the Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum and give them its website address. See what he says. If he agrees to do the story and actually does one, I will eat these words. Until then: "J'Accuse!"  |
On the off chance that you haven't followed every twist and turn of the case, there are two ways to reassure yourself that former Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster killed himself in Fort Marcy Park. One is to read Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's just-released report on the subject--a briskly efficient 114-page document that makes an already overwhelming case for suicide about as close to airtight as you can get. The other is to read Christopher Ruddy's new book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. Ruddy, of course, is the Inspector Clouseau of the Foster case--a determined, if bumbling, former New York Post reporter who has virtually single-handedly spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy buffs dedicated to the proposition that a foul and monstrous cover-up surrounds the circumstances of Foster's death.
Financed by a cranky right-wing philanthropist, Richard Mellon Scaife, Ruddy's repeated bromides about the Foster case have been republished in newspaper ads across the country; his sheer persistence has led some casual observers to conclude he might be on to something. The Strange Death, published by The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, is endorsed as "serious and compelling" by former FBI Director William Sessions. In the New York Times Book Review, National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser chides political journalists for failing to pursue Ruddy's many "unanswered questions" about the case.
Don't worry, when it comes to how Foster died, there aren't any--or none that matter. Ruddy's book--and the entire movement he has helped create--is utterly preposterous. Turgidly written and dense with 534 footnotes and seven appendixes, Ruddy's plodding book repeatedly confuses the evidence and chases after scores of imaginary holes in the official verdict--without ever positing an alternative scenario that makes the least bit of sense.
To fully understand why the "debate" over Foster's death is so phony, it helps to review a few of the raw, incontrovertible (you would think) facts. Foster left his White House office for the last time at around 1 p.m. on July 20, 1993. About five hours later, his supine body was discovered by a secluded Civil War cannon near the Potomac River, a bullet wound through his mouth, his right thumb trapped in the trigger of an antique .38-caliber revolver, gun-shot residue on his hand, and blood oozing from the back of his head. There were no signs of a struggle; his sports jacket was later found folded over the front seat of his Honda Accord in a nearby parking lot. In the days that followed, friends and family members described Foster as distraught over the demands of his job and suffering from clear signs of depression. Starr adds new details: Just four days before his death, he reports, Foster broke down in tears over dinner with his wife and talked of resigning. On the day before he died he phoned his family doctor in Little Rock, Ark. According to the doctor's typewritten notes, published in Starr's report for the first time, Foster complained of stress, anorexia, and insomnia, and received a prescription for Desyrel, an antidepressant.
It is Ruddy's contention that none of this should necessarily be believed; the doctor, the widow, the friends, the Park Police officers that found the body, the coroner who performed the autopsy--all may well be "complicit" in a cover-up. But why? As far as the Park Police goes, Ruddy argues, they mistakenly rushed to the judgment that Foster's death was a suicide and are concealing the fact that they failed to follow proper police procedures by considering alternatives, such as murder and/or the possibility that Foster died somewhere else and his body was "moved" to Fort Marcy by an unidentified group of secret conspirators. The argument begs certain questions, such as: Who were these conspirators? What possible motive would they have had? Why deposit Foster's body in a public park? (At least the Mafia drops its victims in rivers.) And most curious of all, how exactly could this dastardly crime have been carried off? Consider: There were at least a half-dozen people known to have visited the park that afternoon. It was broad daylight. Foster was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 200 pounds. To have transported the deputy White House counsel's lumpy dead body 200 yards from the parking lot to the cannon and have nobody notice would have been quite an achievement. Wouldn't they have at least waited until nightfall?
Ruddy makes no stab at guessing who the criminals are. But as he plows his way through hundreds of pages of witness statements, he thinks he has discovered what they were wearing: orange vests! This is actually not a joke. Ruddy dwells ominously on the equivocal testimony of a Fairfax County rescue worker, Todd Hall, who initially told the police he thought he might have seen someone in an orange or red vest in the woods. Hall later conceded it may have been nothing more than a car or truck in the distance. Still, Ruddy smells a rat. He speculates darkly that Hall's possible sighting was evidence of a suspicious group of orange-vest-clad body-movers in the park that day masquerading as Park Police "volunteers."
There is, of course, much more about Ruddy's book that is equally absurd--or simply wrong. Like his fellow conspiracy nuts, Ruddy argues that there was too little blood in Fort Marcy for Foster to have been killed there. In fact, as Starr makes clear, when Foster's body was turned over, three Park Police officers reported a pool of blood underneath his head and new, wet blood pouring out of his nose. The first independent counsel, Robert Fiske, is chastised for failing to identify supposedly mysterious white carpet fibers found on Foster's clothing. Starr has: The carpet fibers are the same as those found in Foster's home. Ruddy and other critics have questioned where the .38-caliber revolver found in Foster's hand came from. According to Starr's report, Foster's widow, sister, and two of his children recall that Foster inherited a similar handgun from his late father in 1991 and that he took it to Washington two years later, keeping it in a bedroom closet. When Lisa Foster ran upstairs to look for it on the night of her husband's death, the weapon was missing. Are they all lying?
In the days before his death, Foster was obsessing about the White House travel-office affair, and apparently feared continued investigations would focus attention on Hillary Clinton's role in the firings. That almost certainly helps to account for White House stonewalling over the documents left behind in his office--an action that did much to fuel suspicions about what secrets Foster might have known. But that the man killed himself is beyond dispute. It would be comforting to think that Starr's report--reaching precisely the same conclusion as four previous government investigations--will finally end the matter. Of course, it won't. On his continually updated Web site, the indomitable Ruddy charges on, picking away at Starr's report and darkly suggesting that the Whitewater prosecutor, with his impeccable Republican credentials, has joined the cover-up. It must be heady stuff taking on such giant conspiracies--and frightening too. Can Ruddy be sure the men with orange vests won't soon be coming for him?
In response to:
Anything Goes from the August 8, 1996 issue
To the Editors:
The London Sunday Telegraph has never reported that Vincent Foster shot himself in the White House parking lot.
In his “Clinton-Bashing” critique of August 8, Gene Lyons traduces an article I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph on April 9, 1995. The purpose of the piece was to explore evidence that the White House got an early tip-off about the death of Foster, at least an hour and a half before the official notification at 8:30 PM on July 20, 1993. The article did not examine the question of WHERE Foster died.
I reported that a White House aide, Helen Dickey, telephoned the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock very early on the night of Foster’s death at around 7 PM Eastern Time and allegedly said to an Arkansas state trooper: “Vince got off work, went out to his car in the parking lot and shot himself in the head.”
As it happens, this was similar to the wording of the Secret Service memorandum on the night of Foster’s death, which stated that the “US Park Police discovered the body of Vincent Foster in his car”—with the gun also in the car. In other words this was the first version circulating in the White House that evening—(later, of course, it emerged that Foster had been found in a Virginia park)—and Ms. Dickey had picked up a slightly garbled account and had repeated it.
The point I was trying to make was that the existence of the Secret Service memo lends credence to the Dickey story. But it should have been clear to anybody reading theTelegraph that the focus of our investigation was the timeline. Most of the text dealt with testimony from rescue workers at the crime scene who said that the Park Police found Foster’s White House ID before 6:37 PM—almost two hours before the White House was supposedly notified.
Lyons is also incorrect in stating that two state troopers, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, refused to testify about the Dickey call in hearings before the Whitewater Committee of Senator Alfonse D’Amato. In fact they were eager to testify, though their lawyer had suggested that D’Amato obtain the telephone records first. It was D’Amato who decided not to call them to testify.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The Daily Telegraph (London)
Washington, D. C.
The Daily Telegraph (London)
Washington, D. C.
Gene Lyons replies:
I fear that Mr. Evans-Pritchard is indulging in a bit of intellectual foppery. Here’s what he wrote in his original April 9, 1995, story: “In an interview, he [Trooper Roger Perry] estimated the call at 5:15 PM—or 6:15 PM in Washington, D.C., very shortly after the Park Police first discovered the body…. “‘She was kind of hysterical, crying, real upset,’ said Perry. ‘She told me that Vince got off work, went out to his car in the parking lot, and shot himself in the head.’
“The wording is significant. It is very similar to the Secret Service memorandum on the night of the death which reported that the ‘US Park Police discovered the body of Vincent Foster in his car.’ The memorandum was wrong, of course. Or was it? When rescue workers and Park Police found the body after a telephone tip-off at 6:03 PM Foster’s corpse was deep inside a Virginia park. But the body-in-the-car version was the first one circulating in the White House that night…. [my italics]
“If the White House received an early warning about Foster’s death, why would it have been covered up?”
Evans-Pritchard’s insinuation could hardly be clearer. Unaware of the latest trends among Vince Foster conspiracy theorists, I can’t think why he now chooses to deny it. Republicans, it should be added, chose not to bring troopers Perry and Patterson before the Senate Whitewater committee after their attorney canceled two scheduled depositions. The senators no doubt recognized that the troopers’ twenty-month delay in “remembering” Helen Dickey’s call gave them a bit of a credibility problem. Danny Wattenberg, one of the American Spectator reporters on the original “Troopergate” story written five months after Foster’s suicide, has told me that Perry and Patterson never mentioned it to him.
There’s also a problem about Perry’s original time estimate. At 5:15 PM Park Police had been on the scene in Fort Marcy Park for only six minutes and hadn’t yet discovered Foster’s identity. Ms. Dickey has since testified that her call to the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion was made after 10:00 PM, and she was backed in this statement by other witnesses.
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