The Consortium

'Silver Bullet' (Part 3):
Czech-ing on Bill



WASHINGTON -- Like a fireworks display nearing the end, the Bush-Quayle campaign opened October 1992 by blasting off its remaining supply of explosive revelations about Bill Clinton. All were designed to inspire public doubts about the little-known challenger and rally voters to the time-tested incumbent, George Bush.

But some of the GOP fireworks backfired. The worst self-inflicted injury came from the Bush administration's leaking of a baseless criminal referral which suggested that a Clinton friend at the State Department had purged Clinton's passport file of a rumored letter in which Clinton renounced his citizenship. Congressional Democrats exposed the dirty trick and the FBI promptly rejected the referral. (See The Consortium, March 28 in Archives)

Other planned explosions were total duds, such as a hasty Whitewater criminal referral slapped together by pro-Bush investigators at the Resolution Trust Corp. It was soon slapped down by the Republican U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Charles Banks, who judged that the referral lacked merit. (See The Consortium, April 12 in Archives)

Still, as the days to the election counted down, President Bush's gang frantically searched for that special "silver bullet" scandal that would stop Clinton dead in his tracks. Some Republicans saw their chance with suspicions about Clinton's visit to Marxist-ruled Eastern Europe while Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in 1969-70. Rep. Bob Dornan, the loose-tongued Republican from California, alleged that the KGB had given Clinton a ride into Prague, Czechoslovakia, from the airport. on blew back to the United States. The Reuters news agency distributed a version of the Czech stories to U.S. newspapers. The right-wing Washington Times ran articles on three consecutive days mentioning Clinton's trip to Prague.

"This is a typical tactic of the CIA or the communist intelligence services," one foreign policy expert told The Consortium. "They plant a story in a foreign newspaper. Then they refer other newspapers to that source," so the allegation has more credibility. The average reader knows little about either the reputation of the foreign newspaper or the origin of the story.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail in late October, Bush cut into Clinton's once double-digit lead. Still, in the wake of the passport fiasco, the Czech stories received little notice in the U.S. media. Reporters recalled, too, Bush's 1988 campaign in which whispering campaigns disparaged Michael Dukakis's mental health and Willie Horton TV commercials whipped up racial fears.

Bush's final hopes of a 1992 comeback were dashed on Oct. 30, the Friday before the election, when a new Iran-contra indictment (of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger) was released. It contained documentary evidence disproving Bush's long-stated claim that he had been "out of the loop" on that scandal. Ironically, the Bush-Quayle campaign denounced the indictment as a political dirty trick. But Bush spent the final weekend on the defensive and lost to Clinton byon blew back to the United States. The Reuters news agency distributed a version of the Czech stories to U.S. newspapers. The right-wing Washington Times ran articles on three consecutive days mentioning Clinton's trip to Prague.

"This is a typical tactic of the CIA or the communist intelligence services," one foreign policy expert told The Consortium. "They plant a story in a foreign newspaper. Then they refer other newspapers to that source," so the allegation has more credibility. The average reader knows little about either the reputation of the foreign newspaper or the origin of the story.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail in late October, Bush cut into Clinton's once double-digit lead. Still, in the wake of the passport fiasco, the Czech stories received little notice in the U.S. media. Reporters recalled, too, Bush's 1988 campaign in which whispering campaigns disparaged Michael Dukakis's mental health and Willie Horton TV commercials whipped up racial fears.

Bush's final hopes of a 1992 comeback were dashed on Oct. 30, the Friday before the election, when a new Iran-contra indictment (of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger) was released. It contained documentary evidence disproving Bush's long-stated claim that he had been "out of the loop" on that scandal. Ironically, the Bush-Quayle campaign denounced the indictment as a political dirty trick. But Bush spent the final weekend on the defensive and lost to Clinton by five percentage points.

New Revelations

Though largely forgotten as a footnote to the 1992 campaign, the Czech story took another turn in January 1994, a year after Clinton took office. The Czech news media disclosed that former Czech intelligence officials were saying that in 1992, the Czech secret police, called the Federal Security and Information Service (FBIS), had collaborated with the Bush-Quayle campaign to dig up dirt on Clinton.

The centrist newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes reported that during the American presidential campaign, the FBIS gave the Republicans internal data about Clinton's Moscow-Prague trips and supplied background material about Clinton's "connections" inside Czechoslovakia. Other news stories in early 1994 asserted that the derogatory information was funnelled through officials at the U.S. Embassy while also being leaked to cooperative journalists.

If true, these allegations meant that the Bush administration had enlisted a foreign secret police force to help influence the outcome of an American presidential election, a decidedly questionable act.

When the Czech stories appeared in 1994, an independent counsel, Republican Joseph diGenova, was already investigating possible crimes committed by the Bush administration in its ham-handed search of Clinton's passport files. DiGenova's team of investigators, however, was stacked with former Reagan-Bush officials, who, by 1994, were telling reporters that the investigation would clear the Bush administration.

But given the similarity of the cases -- and evidence of another dirty trick -- diGenova added the Czech allegations to his investigation. His inquiry also stumbled onto documents which showed a suspicious link between the Bush-Quayle campaign and Czechoslovakia in fall 1992.

Calling Czechoslovakia

The investigators had obtained phone records from the Bush-Quayle campaign which revealed an unusual calls to Prague in fall 1992, when normally campaigns are busy contacting only cities in the United States. Between Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, seven calls were placed from the Bush-Quayle headquarters to the U.S. Embassy in Czechoslovakia. There were also three fax transmissions, on Oct. 4, 14 and 15.

Also, on Oct. 16, 1992, the U.S. Embassy in Prague placed two phone calls from the ambassador's executive offices to Washington. One was to Bush's National Security Council and the other was to an office at the Bush-Quayle campaign headquarters. That office was headed by public relations specialist, Sig Rogich, who was responsible for developing anti-Clinton media "themes."

(In an interview, Rogich told The Consortium that six to eight people worked in his office, but that he knew nothing about Clinton's trip to Prague or about any 1992 phone call from the U.S. Embassy in Prague. Rogich also said he was never interviewed by diGenova's investigators.)

The Washington-to-Prague calls matched the time frame when Czech authorities reportedly were rooting out information about Clinton's 1970 trip. But in the independent counsel's final report, issued late last year, diGenova said he could not figure out who made the calls, so the phone records were tossed aside. Then, diGenova's report proceeded to attack the Czech sources who were quoted in the 1994 news articles and some of the journalists who wrote those stories.

A Clean Bill of Health

Despite the phone records and the public declarations by Czech intelligence veterans, diGenova said he "found no evidence linking the publication of the [1992] Czech press stories to either Czechoslovak intelligence or the Bush-Quayle campaign." Similarly, diGenova announced that he found nothing wrong with the Bush administration's search of Clinton's personal passport files or its leaking of the confidential criminal referral about those files a month before the 1992 election.

The report aimed its harshest criticism at State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk for suspecting that a crime had been committed in the first place. DiGenova's report mocked the IG for "a woefully inadequate understanding of the facts."

Stung by the criticism, John Duncan, a senior lawyer in the IG's office, expressed disbelief at diGenova's findings. Duncan protested in writing that he could not understand how diGenova "reached the conclusion that none of the parties involved in the Clinton passport search violated any federal criminal statute. Astoundingly, [diGenova] has also concluded that no senior-level party to the search did anything improper whatever. This conclusion is so ludicrous that simply stating it demonstrates its frailty."

Duncan saw, too, a dangerous precedent that diGenova's see-no-evil report was accepting. "The Independent Counsel has provided his personal absolution to individuals who we found had attempted to use their U.S. Government positions to manipulate the election of a President of the United States," Duncan wrote.

(c) Copyright 1996 -- Please Do Not Re-Post

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