Table Of ContentThe Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Copyright © 1997 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
• INSIDE & BACK COVERS
• INTRODUCTION: Blackwater
• The Oklahoma Bombing -- "Our Common Ground"
o ONE: The Resurrection of President Clinton
o TWO: Glenn and Kathy Wilburn
o THREE: John Doe Two
o FOUR: Elohim City and Dennis the Menace
o FIVE: Carol Howe
o SIX: Lt. Andreas Strassmeir PzGren (SPz)
o SEVEN: The Aryan Republican Army
• Vince Foster and "The Most Ethical Administration in the History of the Republic"
o EIGHT: The Taboo Investigation
o NINE: The Peripatetic Gun
o TEN: The Neck Wound
o ELEVEN: The Car
o TWELVE: Street Fascism
o THIRTEEN: The Tip-Off
o FOURTEEN: "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce"
o FIFTEEN: The Verdict of Depression
o SIXTEEN: The Parks Murder
• "Come to Arkansas .... You Might Even Learn a Thing or Two"
o SEVENTEEN: Death Squad
o EIGHTEEN: The Dixie Mafia
o NINETEEN: The Dan Lasater Drug Trafficking Organization
o TWENTY: Barry Seal, Air Contra, and Mena Airport
o TWENTY-ONE: The Mena Twins
o TWENTY-TWO: Paula Jones: Perverse Justice
o EPILOGUE: America's Hope
• Notes
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Index
"I'M A DEAD MAN," whispered Jerry Parks, pale with shock, as he looked up
at the television screen. It was a news bulletin on the local station in Little
Rock. Vincent Foster, a childhood friend of the President, had been found dead
in a park outside Washington. Apparent suicide. [1]
He never explained to his son Gary what he meant by that remark, but for the
next two months the beefy 6' 3" security executive was in a state of permanent
fear. He would pack a pistol to fetch the mail. On the way to his offices at
American Contract Services in Little Rock he would double back or take
strange routes to "dry-clean" the cars that he thought were following him. At
night he kept tearing anxiously at his eyebrows, and raiding the valium pills of
his wife, Jane, who was battling multiple sclerosis. Once he muttered darkly
that Bill Clinton's people were "cleaning house," and he was "next on the list."
[2]
Two months later, in September 1993, Jerry and Jane went on a Caribbean
cruise. He seemed calmer. At one of the islands he went to take care of some
business at a bank. She believed it was Grand Cayman. They returned to their
home in the rural suburbs of Little Rock on September 25. The next day Jane
was in one of her "down" periods, so Jerry went off on his own for the regular
Sunday afternoon supper at El Chico Mexican Restaurant.
On the way back, at about 6:30 PM, a white Chevrolet Caprice pulled up beside
him on the Chenal Parkway. Before Parks had time to reach for his .38 caliber
"detective special" that he kept tucked between the seats, an assassin let off a
volley of semi-automatic fire into his hulking 320 pound frame.
Parks skidded to a halt in the intersection of Highway 10. The stocky middle-
aged killer jumped out and finished him off with a 9 mm handgun -- two more
shots into the chest at point blank range. Several witnesses watched with
astonishment as the nonchalant gunman joined his accomplice in the waiting
car and sped away. [3]
***
It was another two years before Jane Parks began to tell me the rest of the story.
She had remarried and moved to Batesville, two hours' drive from Little Rock.
Her new husband was an attorney named Harvey Bell, the former Arkansas
Securities Commissioner. His life, too, had intersected with that of Vincent
Foster. A colonel in the Arkansas National Guard, Bell told me that he had been
the commander of Foster's reserve unit and had later crossed swords with him
in court. "Vince liked to think of himself as a master chess player, moving all
the pieces, controlling the game," he said. "He was always scheming in the
shadows." [15]
Jane felt safer in Batesville. The threatening telephone calls that she had been
receiving had stopped. Her illness was in remission. She had held back before,
she explained, for fear of violent reprisals against her two sons and herself. But
she was weary of bottling up her secrets, and she no longer felt the emotional
compulsion to cover for her first husband. "I've been praying about it. I decided
that if you tell the whole truth it'll set you free."
She revealed that Jerry Parks had carried out sensitive assignments for the
Clinton circle for almost a decade, and the person who gave him his
instructions was Vince Foster. It did not come as a total shock. I already knew
that there was some kind of tie between the two men. Foster's brother-in-law,
Lee Bowman, told me long ago that Vince had recommended Jerry Parks for
security work in the mid-1980s. "I was struck by how insistent he was that
Parks was a 'man who could be trusted,'" said Bowman, a wealthy Little Rock
stockbroker. [16]
Jane thought that Jerry and Vince Foster had gotten to know each other when
the Rose Law Firm represented Guardsmark in litigation. Vince had fed him
little tasks during the 1980s, she believed, rewarding him along the way. In late
1989 he helped to secure Jerry a $47,959 loan from the Arkansas Teachers
Retirement Fund, a huge piggy bank used by the Clinton Machine for political
payoffs. As reported by James Ring Adams in The American Spectator, the loan
went through the Twin City Bank of North Little Rock, a bank that had played a
role in the Whitewater saga.
Jerry, in turn, "respected Vince Foster more than anybody else in the world."
[17] It was a strange, clandestine relationship. Foster called the Parks home
more than a hundred times, identifying himself with the code name, "The
Congressman." Jane met him only once in person. It was at a "Roast and Toast"
of the Governor. He walked over, graceful as always, and said: "Hello, you
must be Jerry's wife. I'd heard he'd robbed the cradle."
By the late 1980s Vince trusted Parks enough to ask him to perform discreet
surveillance on the Governor. "Jerry asked him why he needed this stuff on
Clinton. He said he needed it for Hillary," recalled Jane. It appears that Hillary
wanted to gauge exactly how vulnerable her husband would be to charges of
philandering if he decided to launch a bid for the presidency.
Had he learned to be more cautious? How easily could he be caught? Was it bad
enough to destroy a candidacy? These were things she needed to know before
subjecting herself and her daughter to the media glare of a national campaign.
This moral check-up was a very understandable precaution. [18]
Later, during the early stages of the presidential campaign, Parks made at least
two trips to the town of Mena, in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas.
Mena had come up in conversations before. Jane told me that Parks had been a
friend of Barry Seal, a legendary cocaine smuggler and undercover U.S.
operative who had established a base of operations at Mena airport. Parks had
even attended Seal's funeral in Baton Rouge after Seal was assassinated by
Colombian pistoleros in February 1986.
One of the trips was in 1991, she thought, although it could have been 1992.
The morning after Jerry got back from Mena she borrowed his Lincoln to go to
the grocery store and discovered what must have been hundreds of thousands of
dollars in the trunk. "It was all in $100 bills, wrapped in string, layer after layer.
It was so full I had to sit on the trunk to get it shut again," she said.
"I took a handful of money and threw it in his lap and said, 'Are you running
drugs?' Jerry said Vince had paid him $1,000 cash for each trip. He didn't know
what they were doing, and he didn't want to know either, and nor should I. He
told me to forget what I'd seen."
They had a bitter quarrel and barely spoke to each other for two weeks. They
made up on Jerry's birthday on July 3. "The whole thing was becoming scary,"
she said of that time. "He was in over his head."
He told her that he would leave his Lincoln at a hangar at the Mena airport, go
off for a coke, and by the time he came back they would have loaded the money
into the trunk with a forklift truck. He never touched it. When he got back to
Little Rock he would deliver the money to Vince Foster in the K-Mart parking
lot on Rodney Parham boulevard, a little at a time. They used a routine of
switching briefcases, a "flip-flop mail carrier" made of leather.
Foster and Parks had other operations running. The two of them had bugged the
Clinton-Gore headquarters in Little Rock. "Vince knew that somebody was
stealing money from the campaign, and he wanted to find out who was doing
it," she said. If her memory is correct, it suggests that Foster was far more
deeply involved in the 1992 campaign than previously thought. It raises extra
questions about the bundles of cash coming through Mena. Was it campaign
money? If so, how was it laundered? How could so much cash have been
spread around without flagging the Federal Election Commission?
Contact with Foster was rare after he moved to the White House. But he
telephoned in mid-July 1993, about a week before his death. He explained that
Hillary had worked herself into a state about "the files," worried that there
might be something in them that could cause real damage to Bill or herself. The
conversation was brief and inconclusive. Jerry told Vince Foster that there was
indeed "plenty to hurt both of them. But you can't give her those files, that was
the agreement." Jerry did not seem too perturbed at the time.
A few days later Foster called again. Jane is sure that it was either Sunday, July
18, or Monday, July 19, the night before Foster's death. Jerry was in the living
room with his feet up, watching the History Channel on TV. Jane was puttering
in and out of the kitchen. It was around 8:30 PM, central time.
"Vince was calling from a pay phone," said Jane, who overheard one side of the
conversation and then learned the rest from Jerry afterward. "He kept feeding
coins into the box, and then he told Jerry to hold on. He must have been near a
mini-mart or something because he said he had to get more coins. [19] Then he
called a second time, and they spoke for 30 minutes or more."
This time it was a heated exchange. Vince said that he had made up his mind.
He was going to hand over the files and wanted to be sure that he had the
complete set.
"You're not going to use those files!" said Jerry, angrily.
Foster tried to soothe him. He said he was going to meet Hillary at "the flat"
and he was going to give her the files.
"You can't do that," said Parks. "My name's all over this stuff. You can't give
Hillary those files. You can't! Remember what she did, what you told me she
did. She's capable of doing anything!"
"We can trust Hil. Don't worry," said Foster.
Jane does not know exactly what files Foster wanted, but assumes he meant
everything that Parks had done for him over more than a decade. Nor did she
know what Foster meant by "the flat."
-- The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by Ambrose Evans-
Pritchard
Inside Cover:
The reporter the White House most fears ... with good reason
"Evans-Pritchard has made contacts ... that are the envy of other reporters." -- The New York Times
Magazine
Cited by White House press secretary Mike McCurry as the origin of every major Clinton scandal
story, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has done more than any other journalist to expose the truth about the
Clintons.
Now Evans-Pritchard is braking the biggest scoop of all; an assiduously documented expose of "the
blackwater scandals" -- the scandals that have gone unreported in the American media, but that
characterize the Clinton presidency as the most corrupt in history.
Among the secrets Evans-Pritchard exposes:
Did the Federal Government have advance warning about the Oklahoma City bombing? Evans-
Pritchard tells the story that the FBI and the Justice Department don't want you to know.
Eyewitnesses to corruption in Clinton's Arkansas -- many have met with brutal harassment, physical
intimidation, and, in some cases, even suspicious death. Those who survived tell Evans-Pritchard their
story.
Bill Clinton's involvement in the drug underworld of Arkansas. Evans-Pritchard talks to the smugglers,
the Arkansas state troopers, the federal agents and prosecutors, and the young girls who were the
victims of "the good times."
The true story of Vince Foster's death -- what the official report won't tell you, but what eyewitnesses
saw, and why the government is being sued for falsifying sworn testimony.
In the aftermath of Vince Foster, the shocking story of the murder of Jerry Parks, head of Clinton
security in Little Rock. Why Parks predicted his own death.
Why the Left was right about Mena Airport: Evans-Pritchard discovers the missing evidence.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been in the trenches for more than four years investigating the stories
that few other reporters have the gumption to touch. No other reporter has as strong a record of
credibility and as devastating a portrait of our political life as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. And with The
Secret Life of Bill Clinton, he has written the Clinton book of the year.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has built a stellar career as a journalist. He covered Central America for The
Economist and The Daily Telegraph and has reported from the United States for both The Spectator and
The Sunday Telegraph, for which he was Washington bureau chief. Cambridge-educated and
internationally renowned, Evans-Pritchard has recently returned to England, where he will serve as The
Daily Telegraph's roving European correspondent.
Jacket photo courtesy of AFP
Jacket design by Marja Walker
Back Cover
"He is the Woodward and Bernstein of the current era." -- Michael Reagan
"Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's reporting for The Sunday Telegraph made Washington a lively place, and
he was a source of scoops and disclosures that were a source of heartburn and misery for certain
occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." -- Wes Pruden, Editor-In-Chief, The Washington Times
"Evans-Pritchard is a straight shooter." -- Christopher Hitchens
"For the past decade one of the greatest journalists covering America has been Ambrose Evans-
Pritchard. No one has developed wider contacts regarding the botches and scandals of American
government. No one has written more elegantly and intelligently." -- R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Editor-In
Chief, The American Spectator
"Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is one of the few British journalists in Washington who did not rehash the
front pages of The Washington Post or The New York Times in his dispatches. He made his own
investigations, reached his own judgments, and reported his findings in luminously readable and
entertaining prose." -- John O'Sullivan, Editor, National Review
DEDICATION
To the people of Arkansas who deserve better,
to the people of Oklahoma who deserve the truth,
and to the people of the United States who have treated me with such generosity
INTRODUCTION: BLACKWATER
I WRITE THIS BOOK with sadness. By elective affinity I am an American, even if I remain a subject
of the Queen. I did not come here with an attitude of haughty disdain, intent on running down the
country. It has always been my unquestioned assumption that the United States is a force for good in
the world, the final guarantor of liberal civilization.
Nor did I harbor animosity toward Bill and Hillary Clinton when I was sent to Washington as Bureau
Chief for The Sunday Telegraph at the end of 1992. Although a Tory of Burkean philosophy, I had
succumbed to the charm of Bill Clinton years before at a conference of the Democratic Leadership
Council in Williamsburg. As for Hillary, I was rather taken by her image of flinty altruism. When I
wrote the lead editorial for The Daily Telegraph the day after the presidential election in November
1992, I was guardedly optimistic. Little did I know.
The Clintons are attractive on the surface. As Yale Law School graduates they have mastered the
language and style of the mandarin class. It is only when you walk through the mirrors into the
Arkansas underworld whence they came that you begin to realize that something is horribly wrong.
You learn that Bill Clinton grew up in the Dixie Mafia stronghold of Hot Springs, and that his
brother was a drug dealer with ties to the Medellin Cartel. You learn that a cocaine distributor
named Dan Lasater was an intimate friend, and that Lasater's top aide would later be given a
post in charge of administration (and drug testing) at the White House. You learn that Arkansas
was a mini-Colombia within the United States, infested by narco-corruption.
And you start to wonder.
In Washington, Clinton moved with ruthless efficiency to take control of the federal machinery of
coercion. While the U.S. watchdog press barked and howled with pitiful irrelevance about Clinton's
$200 hair cut, he quietly fired every U.S. Attorney in the country and then made his move on the FBI,
which would be transformed gradually, one appointment at a time, into a replica of the Arkansas State
Police. When he sacked William Sessions in July 1993, it was the first time in American history that a
president had summarily dismissed an FBI director. The putsch passed without protest. This is how a
country starts to lose a democracy.
I have not lost my faith in the American people. In the end, I believe, it is the ordinary citizens who will
cleanse the institutions of the country before they become irretrievably corrupt. They are the heroes of
this book. Ultimately, this is an optimistic essay, a paean to the American spirit. But let me tell you, I
am astounded by the bullying and deceitful conduct of the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and other
law enforcement agencies under this administration. No doubt there have been abuses in the past, but I
believe that malfeasance has become systemic over the last five years. It is spreading down, by
example, lodging itself in the institutional apparatus of government. Whether it is the Internal Revenue
Service targeting foes of the president, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service expediting
citizenship for "Democratic" voters in time for the 1996 elections, or the prostitution of the Lincoln
Bedroom, the Clinton reflex is in evidence everywhere. To put it with brutal honesty, you can sniff the
pungent odors of decay in the American body politic. I expect that this is what it smelt like in
continental Europe in the 1920s, even as the boom rolled on.
When you are living through events day-by-day it is hard to know whether you are witnessing an
historic turning point in the life of a country, or just mistaking the usual noise of politics for something
meaningful. But there can be no doubt that the undercurrents in the era of William Jefferson Clinton are
unprecedented. It was driven home to me by a symposium in November 1996 held by Father Richard
Neuhaus, a respected Catholic intellectual and editor of First Things. Neuhaus warned that the
experiment of the founding fathers was in danger of failing, and he pointedly spoke of the "the trail of
abuses and usurpations" that set off the first American Revolution. Has it reached the point, he asked,
"where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime?"
Yes, he said "regime."
Something about Bill Clinton -- his ineffable caddishness, perhaps -- is changing the political discourse
of the country. Every year that he continues in power, he eats a little deeper into the eroded legitimacy
of the political order. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated. Three-quarters of the American
people now tell pollsters that they do not trust the government to do the right thing. If ever there was a
time when a leader of stoic virtue was needed to restore the authority of the national institutions, it is
surely now.
It is under this president that domestic terrorism has become a feature of daily life in America. For
decades the country was largely free of the political violence that has afflicted much of western Europe.
Indeed, Europeans looked across the Atlantic with envy, marveling at the way this huge bustling nation
managed to order its affairs with such cohesive goodwill. Not any longer. The actions and character of
President Clinton have engendered the most deadly terrorist movement in the industrialized world. I
choose the word "movement" advisedly because I do not accept the Justice Department claim that
Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh were acting alone when they killed 168 people in the
Oklahoma federal building in April 1995. There has been a steady campaign of bombing since then:
three in Atlanta alone, including the deadly pipe bomb that eclipsed the 1996 Olympics. The attacks are
so ubiquitous that they do not make the national news unless somebody is killed. To a foreign eye,
America looks like a country that is flying out of control.
Again, it is under Clinton that an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people has
mushroomed out of the plain, an expression of dissent that is unparalleled since the southern gun clubs
before the Civil War. People do not spend their weekends with an SKS rifle, drilling for guerrilla
warfare against federal forces, in a country that is at ease with itself. It takes very bad behavior to
