- ISRAEL blackmailed President Clinton with phone-tapped tapes of his steamy
sex talks with Monica Lewinsky, a blockbuster new book charges.
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- The price Clinton paid for the silence
of the Mossad spy agency was calling off an FBI hunt for a top-level Israeli
mole allegedly installed at the White House.
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- The allegation appears in "Gideon's
Spies - The Secret History of the Mossad," written by respected author
Gordon Thomas and due out next week.
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- Asked for comment, White House spokesman
P.J. Crowley replied, "The only thing I can possibly say is we'll
skip the book and wait for the movie."
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- Israel has denied conducting spying operations
in the United States.
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- But hints about the Mossad connection
to Sexgate surfaced in evidence given to independent counsel Kenneth Starr
last year.
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- Lewinsky testified under oath that after
a session of heavy petting and oral sex in the White House, Clinton told
her that a foreign embassy was tapping the two phone lines in her D.C.
apartment.
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- She said Clinton advised her that if
she was questioned about their phone-sex sessions she should claim that
they knew their calls were being bugged - and were joking to make the phone-tappers
look silly.
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- Starr did not pursue the matter, as far
as the public record shows, and Lewinsky apparently accepted Clinton's
story without asking for details.
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- But author Thomas says Danny Yatom, Mossad
inspector general, succeeded in tapping Lewinsky's phone and amassed some
30 hours of sexually explicit conversations between the president and Lewinsky.
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- Thomas says Tel Aviv used the tapes to
stop the probe of an operative code-named "MEGA," who was, and
could still be, deep within the White House.
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- "So far as anyone knows, the Israeli
agent MEGA - a much more important spy than the imprisoned CIA traitor
Jonathan Pollard, and probably his controller - is still in place at the
White House," Thomas said last night from London.
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- "There was a flurry of high-profile
counterintelligence activity which lasted as long as the bioleverage"
- that is, blackmail - "took to work."
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- His book - which coincidentally is published
by St. Martin's Press, like Andrew Morton's "Monica's Story"
- claims the decision to use the Lewinsky tapes reaches high levels in
Israel.
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- Israel's Committee for Central Intelligence,
meeting in emergency session, decided to play dirty by exploiting Monica's
steamy chats as a way of protecting their White House "asset,"
Thomas said.
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- "FBI counterintelligence, which
had also been taping Monica's calls, got the message and decided to go
back off," the Welsh-born author claims.
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- Verifying Thomas' account is difficult
because spy agencies almost never comment on their activities or anything
anyone writes about them.
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- It's been reported that the Justice Department
and FBI launched an investigation last year for a suspected mole, code-named
"MEGA," based on undisclosed evidence that an Israeli spy had
penetrated the White House.
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- Israel heatedly denied a mole existed,
saying it had ended such spying with the arrest of Pollard more than a
decade ago.
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- Officials in Jerusalem said MEGA was
the code name for a U.S.-Israeli intelligence sharing arrangement to fight
terrorism.
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- In any event, nothing has been heard
of the U.S. pursuit of MEGA in a year.
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- The alleged Mossad connection adds a
new dimension to Sexgate - and could even support Hillary Clinton's charge
that a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" was out to destroy her husband's
presidency.
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- Asked about that, Thomas replied: "That's
not for me to say.
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- "I can only report the facts as
I found them. What you make of the facts is up to you. What Monica makes
of them is up to her."
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