Stupidity-and maybe worse. Tamposi, NEWSWEEK has learned, has decided to shoot back. On Saturday, she added a new and sensational twist to the story. She told NEWSWEEK that she had come under pressure from a department colleague, who said he was acting at the behest of a top White House official, to dig up dirt on Clinton. Tamposi could be lying, of course, to save herself. The administration officials fingered by her flatly deny the allegations. But the charges raise serious questions about whether a campaign of dirty tricks against Bill Clinton was ordered at the highest levels of government.
As Tamposi tells it, she was initially pressured by Steven Berry, the State Department’s liaison man to Congress. Some conservative congressmen were beginning to fulminate about Clinton’s Vietnam-era record, hinting that the young Rhodes scholar had even considered switching his citizenship to avoid the draft. The rumor was nothing more than that. But several right-wing lawmakers, including Bob Dornan of California and Gerry Solomon of New York, wanted to know if there was anything in Clinton’s passport file that would lend credence to the charge.
Berry asked Tamposi to find out. But he did more than invoke the congressmen. According to Tamposi, he said the White House wanted the information. Who? asked Tamposi. Janet Mullins, Berry answered. Mullins had held Berry’s congressional liaison job at State before going over to the White House with James A. Baker to help run the Bush-Quayle campaign the month before.
Tamposi says she flatly refused to help. But two days later, she got a call from Carmen DiPlacido, a veteran consular affairs official, telling her that three Freedom of Information requests had come in from media organizations looking for Clinton’s passport record, and a search was already underway. Normally, FOIA requests take months, but in this case the FOIA office had sent a hurry-up order. It was at this point that Tamposi called Baker’s chief aide, Margaret Tutwiler, to find out what was going on, to ask whether Berry had really been speaking for the White House, and to get some advice on how to handle the press inquiries. Tutwiler refused to take her call. But a couple of days later, after the search had been completed, Berry told Tamposi, “Margaret appreciates everything you’re trying to do, but she says you simply cannot call them at the White House.” Tamposi later told NEWSWEEK, “That really sent a chill up my spine. How did he know that I had called Margaret?” Tamposi figured that White House officials wanted the job done-but without their fingerprints.
Both Mullins and Tutwiler hotly deny that they asked Berry to get Tamposi to do anything improper. Mullins says that when Tamposi’s call came in to Tutwiler’s office late on the afternoon of Sept. 30, “We both had the same reaction: Eeeek, you cant talk to her [about such rumors].” In a later conversation with Berry, about routine State Department dealings with Capitol Hill, Mullins said she told him, “If you ever see Betty, tell her she shouldn’t be calling the White House.” Berry acknowledges that he asked Tamposi to answer the congressional inquiries, mostly to get the lawmakers off his back. But Berry insists that Mullins never asked him to pressure Tamposi and that he never invoked the White House in his conversations with her.
On the question of Perot’s file, Tamposi says that she had been advised by a department lawyer that in the past, longtime State Department passport chief Frances Knight routinely removed the files of presidential candidates for safeguarding. Tamposi decided to do the same. (Bush’s file, it turned out, had already been pulled when he became president.) In the old days, passport files had the potential to be a rich vein of damaging information. Knight, a staunch anti-communist and an ally of J. Edgar Hoover, routinely received FBI reports of “subversive activities.” Most of these so-called Alpha Files were destroyed in the late 1980s, but department lore has it that some reports on prominent people were retained. If Betty Tamposi’s story is true, it appears that for a few days at least this fall, the bad old days came back.
