The Clinton Team and Blackmail

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 19, 2000 | by J. Michael Waller

Intelligence and security experts are outraged at the Clinton administration's probable use of blackmail and susceptibility to it as the Congress fails to investigate.

Catching people with their pants down was a prime way of compromising and recruiting them," recalls former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who was decorated for, among other things, recruiting Americans to spy for Moscow. The Russians call it gathering "compromising material," or kompromat. In the West, it's known as blackmail.

After the 1994 elections, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, the Clinton administration ran an alleged dirt-digging operation out of the Office of the White House Chief of Staff, says Gary Aldrich, a former senior FBI special agent on White House duty at the time. "They hired upwards of 36 lawyers to staff the operation to handle 40 different cases," Aldrich tells Insight. "Once it became known that they had such an operation, then the blackmail itself took place." It all came in handy when the House impeached President Clinton. "People like [James] Carville and [George] Stephanopoulos said in the media that there would be a `scorched-earth policy' and that everyone who had skeletons in their closet would be exposed if they didn't back off the impeachment policy" Aldrich says.

These threats allegedly were carried out during the 1998 impeachment trial of Clinton, when White House operatives and allies such as pornographer Larry Flynt not only dug up dirt on their Republican opponents but openly threatened them with releasing it if they persisted.

House leaders who didn't submit found themselves swamped by embarrassing revelations about their past or present personal lives. Some, such as House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois, went public to preempt the revelations. Others, such as House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston of Louisiana, otherwise an able and honorable man, saw their political careers destroyed.

They wouldn't be blackmailed, but their fates would be an example to others. According to Capitol Hill insiders, some Senate Republicans caved under the implicit threat. "One of the things that always bothered me was why senators we thought might be willing to do the right thing [and vote to convict Clinton] backed off," David Schippers, the Democratic Chicago lawyer who led the impeachment investigation, tells Insight. "I still have in the back of my mind some thought that Filegate had something to do with it."

Filegate is, of course, the still-unresolved scandal of the FBI's illegal transfer to Clinton political operatives in the White House of the secret, personal background files of at least 900 Republican former officials. Those files, security experts say, are filled with raw, unverified information of the most personal and often lurid kind. Schippers says he believes the White House or its designees used leads from some of those files to blackmail law-makers on Capitol Hill. Congress, despite his urging, has failed to probe the matter.

Blackmail, whether by political hacks or foreign spies, can be crude or sophisticated. Some consists merely of confronting the targeted victim with compromising documents, photos or videotapes. But it's usually done more subtly. Dan Moldea, who was one of pornographer Flynt's lead investigators, denies blackmail in a rambling self-defense: "No member of our team ever approached any of our targets and posed any threats and/or ultimatums -- or participated in any other activity that could even remotely be viewed as blackmail or extortion" That would be illegal. But Aldrich says "blackmail is implied," and the recipient gets the message.

Kompromat-type blackmail might work to hold a politician at bay or extort policy decisions. But in the intelligence world it usually isn't enough to recruit someone as an effective agent under operational control. A 1989 KGB training manual on recruitment of foreigners titled Political Intelligence From the Territory of the USSR, obtained by Insight, says that recruitment based purely "on the basis of kompromat" is "especially risky" because it often produces a resentful or unreliable spy. Kompromat can be a good starting point from which to begin recruitment, but often it takes place after the intelligence service carefully has studied the target's personality and background to detect vulnerabilities.

"Intelligence subunits working in cooperation with counterintelligence organs take timely measures to ensure that the agent recruited on the basis of kompromat is `converted' into an ideological or moral-psychological basis," according to the KGB manual, which was obtained from a former Soviet republic.

This "moral-psychological basis" the manual states, "represents a broad spectrum of moral, psychological and emotional factors. Separate elements partly include: careerist ambitions, considerations of prestige, feelings of revenge, hate and love, nostalgia, personal sympathy for the operational worker or agent, and fear of the consequences of illegal actions which have been committed." In other words, in the last case, blackmail involves fear of exposure as a spy.