the following is an excerpt from
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
by Ambrose Evans Pritchard
"Thank you for ruining my life," said Patrick Knowlton, calling to announce that he had received a subpoena from the Whitewater grand jury.
It was delivered by FBI Agent Russell Bransford at 10:30 AM on October 26. What happened over the next two days is bizarre beyond belief, but I tell the story because it has had major consequences two years later. The tomfoolery outlined in the following pages is laughable in a way, but it has resulted in a lawsuit that could compel fresh witness testimony through the power of legal discovery. If we ever learn the full truth about Vincent Foster, it may well be because of a childish prank by the political police.
It was Patrick's girlfriend, Kathryn, who noticed it first. They were walking through the avant-garde neighborhood of Dupont Circle that evening when a middle-aged man in a brown suit stopped and stared at Patrick. At first Kathryn did not think much of it. A practical woman, with a Ph.D. in management, she is not the kind to see shadows on the wall. But then it happened again. The next man was of similar vintage, with a navy blue jacket. His stare lasted about fifteen seconds. It was the same distinctive stare--one designed to provoke fear, confusion, and paranoia. And then it happened again, and again: men cutting in front of them, following them, glowering into Patrick's eyes, fixing him with the look of death wherever he turned.
The harassment was a boiler-plate operation, just the sort of trick played on Communist sympathizers in the 1950s, and Civil Rights activists in the 1960s. Old habits die hard, it seems.
After seven or eight episodes--which are all described in detail in court documents--Patrick and Kathryn were seriously alarmed. The men were becoming more brazen now. They were actually brushing into Patrick, circling like hyenas. Some Middle Eastern types had joined in. Well-groomed. Athletic.
"At this point I was a nervous wreck, I was sweating. It was totally out of control," said Patrick.
He called me up in great distress that night and relayed the details, but was trying hard not to overreact. The next day it began again. My colleague Chris Ruddy, from The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, happened to be visiting Washington. He was extremely skeptical, but agreed to accompany Patrick for a stroll around lunchtime. Half an hour later he called me on his mobile telephone.
"You're not going to believe what's going on here. There's a surveillance net of at least thirty people harassing Patrick, I've never seen anything like it in my life."
It was now obvious that they were trying to destabilize Patrick Knowlton before his grand jury appearance, and they did not seem to care whether this was observed by witnesses. It was street fascism in broad daylight, five blocks from the White House.
Patrick had called the FBI, requesting witness protection. Meanwhile Chris Ruddy and I put in a conference call to Deputy Independent Counsel John Bates to inform him that his grand jury witness was being intimidated. His secretary took down a few details. An hour later I called again. She let out an audible laugh and said that her boss had received the message. I can hardly blame her treating it as a joke. The office is no doubt deluged with calls that range from the cranky to the deranged. Bates never called back.
Sometime after midnight, Patrick telephoned me at my home in Bethesda. By now he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Somebody had got inside his apartment building and was banging on the door. When he answered, there was nobody there. Outside his window there was a man in a green trenchcoat, staring up at him. The telephone kept ringing. Hang-up calls.
"I can't take it any more. I want out of this," he said.
"Stay calm, don't let these criminals get to you," I said. "I'm going to come down and get you out of there. You're going to stay at my house until this nonsense is over."
On the way down I used my car phone to round up a posse. We met outside Patrick's apartment block, all three of us--a professional clown, accountant Hugh Sprunt (who was visiting from Texas), and myself, trudging through the drizzle, armed with umbrellas.
By then, the harassment had stopped. Patrick had regained his nerve. He decided it was better to tough it out. I told him to disconnect the telephone for the rest of the night. The truth militia would mount a guard outside his apartment building, patrolling the streets of Foggy Bottom with their umbrellas.
Our little foray was just what the FBI wanted. On Monday they told Patrick that "Pritchard and Ruddy" were orchestrating the harassment--to sell newspapers. FBI Agent Russell Bransford finally dropped by the apartment, more than 48 hours after Patrick had requested witness protection. Patrick tried to call his lawyer, but the telephone had gone dead. Agent Bransford was cavalier, ironic, and mocking.
"He had this smirk on his face, as if he thought the whole thing was amusing," said Patrick. "I told him to get the hell out of my house."
"A toast to Kenneth Starr and the cause of justice," I said, acidly. "To Kenneth Starr," replied Patrick Knowlton, lifting his glass. "The bastard."
We were a foursome--Patrick, his girlfriend Kathryn, Christopher Ruddy, and myself--sitting in one of those mahogany booths at the Occidental Grill, drinking a bottle of very expensive Cakebread Chardonnay. It was strangely jovial. There is always a sense of camaraderie when you find yourselves thrown together, fighting on every front at once: against the White House, against the Republicans, against the FBI, against the Justice Department, against the whole power structure of the United States.
None of us could quite believe that it had reached this point. But it had. The ruling class was going to crush
Patrick Knowlton. They were going to trample on the civil rights of an American citizen, rather than let him disturb the settled resolution of Vincent Foster's death. There was nowhere for Patrick to turn. The rule of law was derelict, the press craven.
Patrick was still fuming from his treatment at the Whitewater grand jury that afternoon. It had been another hazing, this time by a young prosecutor named Brett Kavanaugh who attempted to ridicule the witness. Did the menacing man at the park "pass you a note," Mr. Knowlton? Did he "touch your genitals," Mr. Knowlton?
So it went on, surely one of the lowest moments in the life of the Whitewater grand jury. Patrick flew off the handle at the imputation that he was a homosexual. He erupted in fury against the polished yuppy prosecutors, much to the delight of a group of African American jurors who rocked back and forth as if they were at a Baptist revival meeting. Kavanaugh was unable to reassert his authority. The grand jury was laughing at him. The proceedings were out of control. It had started as a charade; it had ended in farce.
At least Patrick now knew that he could expect nothing from the Starr investigation. He was forced to conclude that the Office of the Independent Counsel was itself corrupt.
We ordered a second bottle of Cakebread, and plotted. Chris Ruddy and Patrick had snapped a few pictures of the street fascists, but identifying these people would take a long time.
We also had the license plate number of one of the cars that had been curb-crawling behind Patrick in a maneuver of overt intimidation. The tags tracked to an Arab living in Vienna, Virginia, close to the headquarters of the CIA. His name was Ayman. Not much to go on, but it was a start. Robustly drunk by now, I suggested that we all pile into a car and drive to the man's house for a surprise visit.
It was after midnight when we arrived at a cluster of mid-market townhouses. The lights were still on.
"Ayman, it's us. Answer the door, Ayman," I called out from the steps. He appeared in the doorway, an affable man of about thirty who spoke educated English. Patrick Knowlton recognized him at once as the driver of the surveillance car.
He explained that he was from Jordan. Not Palestinian. Jordanian. He had studied for a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford University, he said, and was now completing his studies in the United States. What could he do to help us? he asked.
We explained that somebody using his license tags had been conducting a harassment operation related to the death of Vincent Foster.
"Vincent Foster? It has to do with the Foster case?" he spluttered, turning ash white.
"It certainly does, Ayman, old chap. You'd better be more careful with those tags of yours," I advised.
As we spoke, a younger man appeared in the hall. He never said a word, but watched with fierce concentration. "That was him," said Patrick, afterward, "the other guy who was in the car."
Clearly they were stringers of some kind, people who could be called up at short notice to do street jobs for a little extra money. The security forces of every country employ such types for operations that require a degree of deniability. The stringers usually come cheap. If foreign, they tend to have residency problems so they can be induced to work for free.
But who were they working for? Who was Ayman? Oxford University said that they had no record of anybody by his name. But he has an interesting past. During the buildup to the Gulf War in 1990 he worked as the U.S. coordinator for a group called Solidarity International for Kuwait. The group ostensibly represented the civic opposition to the Al-Sabah family. It was making the statement that democracy activists had rallied to support the Kuwaiti monarchy in the face of Iraqi aggression.
In short, Ayman's task was to provide a patina of democratic respectability to the Kuwaiti cause. It was to reassure Americans that young, enlightened, pro-western students were behind the Sheikh. It had intelligence fingerprints all over it. But which intelligence service? Surely not the Jordanians. It could only have been the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, or the CIA.
Most people would have given up at this point. It seemed hopeless for a lone citizen to cut his way through this impenetrable thicket. But Patrick Knowlton was not going to surrender his rights as an American citizen without giving them--whoever they were--a taste of Celtic wrath.
He commissioned a lie detector test from Paul Minor, former chief polygrapher for the FBI, and passed with "no deception indicated" on every question about the events in Fort Marcy Park and the harassment in Dupont Circle. He submitted to a psychiatric examination by Dr. Thomas Goldman who concluded that he was not suffering from mental disorder or paranoia. He underwent a Wechsler Memory Scale test by Dr. Lanning Moldauer, who found that he was in the 90th percentile for his visual memory.
He gave a sworn deposition to Congressman Dan Burton, one of the few stalwarts on Capitol Hill who refused to allow his independent judgment in the Foster case to be swayed by mocking editorials.
Finally he prepared a "Report of Witness Tampering" in the hope that the Starr investigation would be shamed into doing something. It was their responsibility, at the very least, to find out who leaked word of his subpoena. But when Patrick took the report to the Office of the Independent Counsel at 1001 Pennsylvania Avenue, John Bates called security and had him thrown out of the building. That was the last straw.
In October 1996 Patrick Knowlton filed a federal tort claim in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, case number 96-2467, alleging a conspiracy to violate his civil rights, to inflict emotional distress, and to dissuade him from testifying truthfully before the federal grand jury. In the amended complaint he named the United States of America, FBI Agents Lawrence Monroe and Russell T. Bransford, and the two mysterious Jordanians, Ayman and Abdel.
"This case arises from a conspiracy to obstruct justice into investigations of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster," began the suit. "Plaintiff avers that overt acts alleged in furtherance of the
conspiracy were committed at the direction or with the knowledge or consent of Defendant United States by and through the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
It was a quixotic endeavor. Patrick was in debt. His lawyer and friend, John H. Clarke, had already sold his car to help defray the costs of pursuing the case. They had no money, no well-heeled patrons. Just the little contributions that came in dribs and drabs from around the country for the Knowlton defense fund.
"It's just so reprehensible what they've done--using government agents illegally like that. It's the epitome of
everything wrong in this country," said Clarke, explaining why he had sacrificed his law practice to work doggedly on this case. "But I also know in my own mind, as a lawyer, that I can prevail. It's one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of the country, and if they ever give me a day in court I can prove it."
Big if.