Clinton’s File Sent to Home of Passport Chief

Former Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth M. Tamposi had Bill Clinton’s passport records delivered to her home on the night of Sept. 30 after the documents were found during an unusual evening search by three Tamposi deputies at a National Archives warehouse in Suitland, Md., according to knowledgeable sources.

Tamposi’s decision to have the Democratic presidential candidate’s records brought to her house in suburban Virginia and to keep them there overnight is expected to be cited by the State Department’s inspector general next week as one of several irregularities and violations of department regulations uncovered in a wide-ranging investigation into the pre-election search for the passport files of Clinton, his mother and Ross Perot.

Tamposi has told State Department officials that she took personal possession of the Clinton file in order to keep the records secure after having been told they appeared to have been tampered with, according to sources.

In today’s editions, the New York Times quotes a source as saying that Tamposi, who was dismissed earlier this week by President Bush, has told federal investigators that the search of the files was approved by John F. W. Rogers, the undersecretary of state for management, one of the highest ranking political appointees in the State Department. The source quoted Tamposi as saying that one of her assistants, Carmen DiPlacido, acting director of the passport office, initiated the search without consulting her.

Rogers, 36, is a former businessman who worked in the Ronald Reagan White House under former Secretary of State James A. Baker III when he was chief of staff there and as assistant secretary of the Treasury under Baker when he was Treasury secretary in Reagan’s second term. The New York Times said it had sought comment from Rogers unsuccessfully for three days.

Defending Tamposi’s right to keep Clinton’s records in her home overnight, her Washington lawyer, Thomas C. Green, said Friday that as head of the consular bureau, Tamposi had, in his view, “the authority to possess and examine documents that were within the domain of her office. Where she did it is a red herring.”

Tamposi has maintained to investigators that she did not share the Clinton records with anyone outside the State Department, sources said.

But other sources familiar with the inspector general’s probe say investigators have already uncovered evidence that Tamposi, a former Republican fund-raiser and state legislator from New Hampshire, had discussed the political implications of the Clinton files with associates, including Steven K. Berry, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs.

Investigators have also interviewed senior White House aides and Republican campaign officials in an effort to determine whether Tamposi or any of her deputies involved in the search were acting on the instructions or suggestions of persons outside the State Department.

One Administration official familiar with the matter said that Tamposi had shown “appalling judgment” in having the Clinton records brought to her house and then keeping them overnight. Although the passport records are not classified, the contents are protected by the Privacy Act and access is restricted to individuals who need them for official government business.

This official said he believed that Tamposi’s actions in having the records at her house would have been one of several grounds for her removal from office had not President Bush ordered her dismissal earlier this week.

Bush’s decision on Tuesday to fire Tamposi came shortly after it was disclosed that Tamposi’s deputies had also searched the passport files of Perot during the campaign, prompting Perot to accuse the Administration of a “gross abuse of federal power.”

The renewed criticism from Perot irritated the President, sources said. “Perot was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said one Administration official. “The President had had enough.”

The extraordinary search at the National Records Center originally was explained as fulfilling expedited Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from three news organizations.

During the initial search on Sept. 30, three Tamposi deputies--then-acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State DiPlacido, chief of passport program support Richard P. McClevey and special assistant Steven Moheban--visited the Suit-land facility about 6:10 p.m. and spent four hours screening passport files. They looked for records on Clinton and his mother, Virginia Kelley, under his original surname of Blythe and his adopted name of Clinton.

The officials found three passport applications by him, all filed under Clinton--one in 1968 when he first went to England as a student, another in 1976 reporting his earlier passport as lost or stolen, and a third in 1978.

According to an account Tamposi has provided associates, DiPlacido called her at home at about 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 30 to tell her there were indications the Clinton papers had been tampered with at some earlier time. She expressed interest in seeing the documents herself and asked they be brought to her Northern Virginia townhouse.

After the documents were delivered, Tamposi has said she concluded there might have been tampering with the files and kept them for safekeeping at her home that night. “They were never out of her possession,” the source said.

The next day, Tamposi says she raised her concerns with Rogers, setting off a chain of events that led to a brief FBI investigation into the alleged tampering. Within a few days, the FBI determined there was no evidence to support the allegation.

Among the questions that remain unanswered is what documents the State Department officials hoped to find in the passport files and why political appointees at the State Department thought a search was worth the effort. The FOIA requests from the news organizations had been submitted in September during a period of widespread rumors--some of them fueled by Republican campaign officials--that Clinton had once inquired about renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

Under the Privacy Act, passport and other files on Clinton could not be released to news organizations without his approval or a court order. State Department officials insisted when the search first came to light that whatever they found would not be released, but their practice was to search the files anyway to see what existed.

At the same time, Republican congressmen and Bush-Quayle campaign officials were escalating their attacks on Clinton for having engaged in protests against the Vietnam War. They sought to tie his antiwar activities to a holiday trip he took to Moscow in the winter of 1969 while he was a student at Oxford University in England.

On Sept. 29, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland was told by a senior Republican campaign aide that the Bush-Quayle campaign was researching Clinton’s trip to Moscow and hoped to use it to raise questions about Clinton’s truthfulness in recounting his student activities.

One logical place to look for evidence on these questions was the Passport Office. According to sources familiar with its operations, the Passport Office had once retained tens of thousands of pages of “classified” passport files on individuals, including reports, photographs and other material about U.S. citizens submitted by the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

Such records had been compiled largely under the direction of Frances G. Knight, a staunch anti-Communist who during her tenure as chief of the Passport Office in 1955 to 1977 had worked closely with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover during his tenure. The ostensible purpose for the file, also known as the “alpha file,” was to determine if a passport applicant had engaged in activities that would make the person ineligible to receive one.

During the late 1960s, sources said, the Passport Office routinely received copies of voluminous FBI reports on prominent dissidents, antiwar protesters and student activists--the product of Hoover’s extensive surreptitious monitoring of the antiwar movement.

“If you demonstrated before the U.S. Embassy in London (as Clinton had done), the chances are you would be watched by people and reports would be compiled with photographs and names,” said one knowledgeable source. Those reports, the source added, would then have been forwarded to the alpha file.

Sources said that many of the classified alpha files were destroyed by the Passport Office in the late 1980s after officials became concerned retention of such records might violate the Privacy Act. But sources said that for a variety of reasons some “highly sensitive” material, including files on politically prominent individuals, was left intact among State Department documents in the warehouse facility where the officials searched Clinton’s files.

Ironically, the passport officer who supervised the partial destruction of the alpha file was McClevey--one of the Tamposi deputies who conducted the search at Suitland.