FBI Files Create Trail of Mystery, Political Fodder

Early in June, a congressional committee investigating the disputed 1993 firings of seven former White House travel office employees made an extraordinary discovery. Amid a stack of subpoenaed White House documents was proof that Clinton administration officials had sought and obtained the FBI files of the travel office’s longtime head, Billy R. Dale, seven months after he was fired.

Why, the committee demanded, did the White House need Dale’s file so long after he no longer worked there? White House officials initially condemned the question as a political attack--but acknowledged two days later that it had FBI files on at least 330 other people who no longer had reason to seek access to the White House. Later it corrected the number to 406.

The committee bored in with more questions, and the story of the FBI files became front-page news--and a major political headache for President Clinton in his reelection campaign year.

A great deal remains unknown about the White House personnel security office’s improper acquisition of sensitive FBI background reports on top Republicans and other former White House employees. There are starkly contradictory versions of events, gaps in information and signs that the conflicts may only sharpen in the weeks ahead.

But while definitive proof of wrongdoing is so far absent, there is ample room for Republicans to argue that this was far more than what Clinton has described as a “bureaucratic snafu.”

Unhappily for the White House, the FBI file drama seems to have a cinematic quality that the murky Whitewater script has lacked. Much of it played out in the musty grandeur of the Old Executive Office Building, the cavernous edifice next to the White House where President Lincoln once puzzled over maps of Confederate battle lines.

It was there that D. Craig Livingstone, a longtime Democratic political operative and former restaurant bouncer, had come to run the White House Office of Personnel Security. He kept FBI background reports on hundreds of people who no longer had any reason to seek White House access, along with hundreds of others who did.

Still unclear is how Livingstone, who has no known experience in personnel, came to head that office.

One former boss, Vice President Al Gore, politely but hastily hung up the phone when he was asked that question.

The fact is, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry conceded, “we don’t have the answer. . . . We don’t know.”

With a core staff of five, the Office of Personnel Security had the task of helping arrange security clearances for White House employees, job seekers and people who needed intermittent access to the complex, from Cabinet secretaries to gardeners. Almost nobody except the president’s immediate family can get through the White House gates without a pass.

The office didn’t actually do any investigating. Rather, it acted as an intermediary for the White House counsel’s office, which set the rules governing White House security; the FBI, which conducted background checks; and the Secret Service, which issued passes and guarded the premises.

In late 1993, the personnel security office, part of the way through the job of obtaining clearances for new Clinton administration hires, decided to start updating security files on the dozens of White House employees still on hand from the earlier administrations--mail handlers, switchboard operators and other semi-permanent staff members.

The Bush administration, following the practice of previous administrations in their closing days, had sent its own White House security files to secure storage. So the Clinton personnel office needed to create a batch of new files.

One important component of the recreated files was to be material from summaries of old FBI background investigations.

The summaries, two or three pages long, contain what the FBI learns in checking on the subjects’ criminal, financial, medical and motor-vehicle histories, as well as in checking out information that all job seekers must provide.

The White House and its congressional defenders have argued that the summaries are so brief that anyone with ill intent would have wanted the full file. But FBI general counsel Howard Shapiro has pointed out that the summaries are supposed to “reflect in them any significant derogatory information.”

The files may contain references to unproved allegations from neighbors, ex-spouses, in-laws or business rivals about such things as drinking, drug use and extramarital affairs. The FBI also told Congress last week that many of the summaries were accompanied by full texts of agents’ interviews.

The summary reports also contain the answers to the final, grab-bag question on the job application form: whether the applicants wish to disclose anything else that might be embarrassing about themselves or their families.

The job of updating files on the holdovers was primarily handled by Anthony Marceca, 53, an Army procurement investigator and longtime Democratic Party operative who had been detailed for six months from his Pentagon post at the White House’s request.

Between December 1993 and February 1994, Marceca obtained many FBI background files of individuals who still had reason to seek White House access. But he also obtained 407 FBI background files of former employees and others who had no reason to seek clearance into the White House.

Most of the 407 were staffers of little prominence, including a number of Carter administration aides. But sprinkled in were such GOP luminaries as former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Reagan White House Chief of Staff Kenneth M. Duberstein and Tony Blankley, spokesman for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

At the core of the dispute is the accuracy of the Secret Service’s records on who has access to the executive mansion. White House officials and personnel office staffers insist that Secret Service lists are filled with errors--and that the 407 improper names reflect nothing more than years of accumulated mistakes.

But Nancy Gemmell, who had worked in the personnel security office until August 1993; her longtime White House boss, Jane Dannenhauer; Secret Service officials; and former Republican White House officials all say that the Secret Service maintains highly accurate lists that are updated within a few days of any change.

Lisa Wetzl, the former White House personnel security office employee who took over the security clearance project more than six months after Marceca had left, said: “The first thing that struck me was how many files there were.” White House officials later said Marceca’s work began with names that start with “A” and that he only got through files of names beginning with “Go.”

Wetzl, 25, said that as she went through the files over a period of months to update those held over from the Bush administration, she sent back to the White House records management office those of people who were no longer in the government. She said the one name she could remember in that category was that of Marlin Fitzwater, Bush’s press secretary.

As the White House is at pains to point out, no one has provided any evidence that any of the background information has been used for nefarious purposes or been seen by unauthorized people. Marceca says he passed on information from background files to Livingstone in only three cases: when he saw seeming inconsistencies in the data on a phone company worker and two low-level employees.

However, the White House has not contradicted assertions that Livingstone’s office, which was then under pressure to deal with a growing backlog of incomplete clearances, had begun using a large number of young interns and volunteers for such tasks as filling out applications to get background summaries from the FBI.

In sworn statements, Livingstone and Marceca have said they never misused the information nor did they know of any abuse. William Kennedy, the former White House associate counsel to whom Livingstone reported, has declared that he himself did nothing improper.

One mystery concerns evidence that some of the 407 files may have been borrowed by others at the White House while they were held in the personnel security office vault. FBI officials discovered this when they came to retrieve the files and saw colored slips of papers indicating that portions of the summaries, or whole summaries, had been “charged out.”

The FBI has not interviewed anyone at the White House about the borrowing.

The matter of the FBI files is a boon for the GOP in this election year. Some of the president’s erstwhile Democratic allies are even lining up with Republicans.

Polls show that the issue is making an impression on voters who have shrugged off much of the complex Whitewater case. Voters realize clearly, in contrast, that presidents and their staffs are not to make political use of the FBI.

Nor is the issue likely to go away soon, now that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has handed the investigation over to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. One administration official said, sighing: “Here we are, performing water torture on ourselves again.”

How did the White House get into this mess? One leading Republican theory is that it may have been trying to compile material on earlier employees to defend itself against GOP allegations that the Clinton White House had an unusually large number of people who could not get security clearance because of prior drug use.

“They might have been trying to compare apples to apples,” said Alixe R. Glen, a White House spokeswoman during the Bush years and the subject of one of the files.

This theory, Republicans say, would explain why somebody sought files of so many anonymous lower-level employees.

An alternative theory holds that somebody in the White House may have wanted to know about Republican big shots and padded out their requests for FBI files with the names of smaller fry to disguise their true purpose.

The White House has argued that the fact that the misappropriation ended at names beginning with “Go” shows this was not a systematic attempt to dig dirt. Republicans counter that perhaps this was a fishing expedition that was aborted after Wetzl, or maybe a higher-up, noticed what was going on and sent the improper files to the records management office.

Several administration officials and loyalists who believe that this was probably simple bungling are nonetheless disconcerted by the fact that Livingstone and Marceca are ardent partisans who reveled in their top-security work.

Marceca worked for the presidential campaigns of Edmund S. Muskie, Gary Hart and Walter F. Mondale, as well as for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992. Livingstone worked for the 1984 Hart campaign and handled security at Clinton’s inaugural.

One former White House staff member said he remembered a casual conversation in which Livingstone mentioned that he had seen that aide’s files. Said a senior administration official: “Craig was always trying to impress you with how important he was--trying to demonstrate his power.”

The White House must also deal with the fact that some of its most controversial staffers were apparently close to the FBI files mystery.

Livingstone reported directly to Kennedy, who was reprimanded in 1993 for improperly arranging to have the FBI issue a news release saying it was investigating the White House travel office firings. White House administration director David Watkins, later forced out for unauthorized use of White House helicopters, also had some responsibility for the office.

And the requests for the FBI summaries were stamped with the name of Bernard Nussbaum, the former White House counsel who remains at the center of unproved allegations about the removal of records from former aide Vincent Foster’s office after his apparent suicide.

Even if all such theorizing is proved groundless, the White House is taking heat for its shifting explanations of events.

“Here we have an abuse of power,” one loyal ally, Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), said recently. “We should treat it very, very seriously.”

* GOP REACTION: Bob Dole assails White House’s acquisition of 407 FBI files. A21