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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DD™ who wrote (382)	9/20/1998 10:45:00 PM
From: SOROS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1151

MONICA LEWINSKY had the highest level of security clearance when she was working at the White House and Pentagon while having an affair with President Clinton. The clearance was granted after extensive checks into her backround by the FBI when she was promoted from an unpaid trainee to a White House staff job in the Office of Legislative Affairs. Ms Lewinsky kept the clearance after she was transferred from the White House to become a confidential assistant to Kenneth Bacon, the chief Pentagon press officer. She had been moved by White House officials, who realised she was spending too much time around the Oval Office and was too persistent in her efforts to be near Mr Clinton. However, her security clearance was not reviewed after her transfer. If new checks had been made, they might have uncovered her sexual liaisons with Mr Clinton. She eventually told 11 people about them, and Secret Service guards were aware of her frequent visits to the President. Her indiscretions with him, and her talking about them, could have been reasons enough to withdraw her clearance, according to independent security experts. Ms Lewinsky had clearance for "Sensitive Compartmented Information", giving her access to secret intelligence of sweeping scope and importance. According to a regulation quoted in a footnote to the Starr report: "This is information that is not only classified for national security reasons as Top Secret, Secret or Confidential, but also is subject to special access and handling requirements because it involves, or derives from, particularly sensitive intelligence sources and methods." Her job status at the Pentagon was known as a "Schedule C" position, giving her access to "highly confidential, sensitive and frequently politically controversial information". She was required to be a person in whom Mr Bacon had "complete trust and confidence". A senior Pentagon official said that Ms Lewinsky's clearance was the highest available. She needed it just to walk into Mr Bacon's office and to carry documents to his desk. It also meant that she could stay in meetings when classified information was discussed. Her access to highly sensitive information affecting national security, however, was limited to a "need to know basis", the official said. In other words, top secret clearance does not give someone access to all the Government's secrets, only to those that they need to see in order to do their job. Would she have seen raw material from foreign intelligence agencies such as MI6? The short answer is no. Specific sources of such intelligence are not identified in Pentagon documents, the official said. For clarification, he explained: "A document would not say, 'This came from an MI6 agent who rifled the papers on the Russian Prime Minister's desk.' " Probably not, but Beijing is buzzing with a story, taken as a fact by many residents, that Ms Lewinsky is a latter-day Mata Hari. It appears in Guandong Writer, a popular magazine, under the screaming headline: "Is Lewinsky with the KGB?" By this implausible account, Ms Lewinsky was sent to Washington as a child in the 1970s as a Soviet agent on a Cold War mission to sexually ensnare the President and destabilise American politics. The story was attributed to a retired KGB official who now runs a karaoke bar in Moscow. Western tabloid editors are said to be green with envy.