The Clinton Team and Blackmail

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

Even though Hammer has been dead for eight years, the vice president and would-be successor to Clinton still is in the pocket. He recently told reporters that he does not own any stock, except for a chunk of Occidental shares in his late father's trust that he administers for his mother and the rest of the family.

"Are you unwilling to ask the public if they want a president who owes his personal family wealth to a known Soviet agent?" challenges a retired senior CIA official. "That's not in the past. That's the future. One of the first [Soviet] goals is to perpetuate the value of the operation. They fill up files with information the subject knows is there." Gore has stated that there was nothing improper about his relations with Hammer, but he is notoriously sensitive about the questions.

Blackmail has a variety of targets in Washington. Secret personnel information has been misused, often illegally, to blackmail career officials within the federal bureaucracy to toe the administration line on a range of defense, foreign-policy, national-security and law-enforcement issues, sources say. "They will pull such things as your financial-disclosure forms and find a variety of ways of putting pressure on you" a longtime intelligence officer at a large security agency tells Insight. "They have a number of leverage points that they can use against people in the structure that constitutes blackmail.

"People get the message on that, and they behave accordingly," the security-agency source says. "You're dealing with human nature. People have jobs and families, and when they get into a position of GS-15 or SES [senior civil service and senior executive service pay grades] and colonel or general or admiral, their kids are in college, right? They're vulnerable. There are a lot of leverage points on people. From my experience in the bureaucracy, I have never seen, never ever seen, it this bad"

"When you have the abuse of power and authority at senior levels, it has a very corrosive effect on the bureaucracy" a military-intelligence veteran tells Insight. "The bureaucracy refuses to stand up to that kind of pressure. You never get a senior official in the DIA or anywhere else going to bat for their people. They don't protect their people any more"

Those who don't submit to blackmail, under the Clinton-Gore rules, simply are destroyed. "Look at what happened to Linda Tripp," says a former Pentagon colleague. Tripp is the career civil servant stationed at the White House in whom Monica Lewinsky confided her liaisons with Clinton and who recorded the conversations and passed them to the special prosecutor when Lewinsky allegedly asked her to commit a felony. "There was a youthful indiscretion in her personnel file, and look at what they did with that," says her former colleague.

"Once you get the politicians abusing power, the protection of the bureaucracy itself is only as good as the integrity of the senior civil servants. If they're intimidated by power, they lose their protection. That is accessed by them, the same way [Assistant Defense Secretary Kenneth] Bacon betrayed Linda Tripp's file, which should have been protected. Once the pattern of abuse from on high for violating confidentiality starts, it's very hard to protect down in the bureaucracy."