"Aggressive, Outspoken Member of the Clinton Inner Circle" is Longtime AIPAC Employee

By Ella Bancroft

Susan Thomases, an independent lawyer in New York who the Washington Post says "functions as an informal White House adviser" and the New York Times says is "one of Mrs. Clinton's closest friends," spent a grueling Aug. 8 sparring with members of the Senate Whitewater Committee. In recounting some of her testimony the following day the Times described her as "an aggressive and outspoken member of the Clinton inner circle," but neither the Times nor any other daily newspaper in the United States thought to add that at the same time she was becoming Hillary Rodham Clinton's confidante some years ago in Washington, DC, she also was a full-time employee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Ms. Thomases held a key AIPAC position at the time she and Hillary Rodham were housemates, when she drove the future first lady to the Midwest for her marriage to a rising young Arkansas political star named Bill Clinton, and for some years afterward.

What senators wanted to know, said the Times, was why "she had made a flurry of calls to senior White House staff members" after the July 20, 1993 apparent gunshot suicide of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster. Ms. Thomases said that Mrs. Clinton called her on the night Foster's body was discovered in a nearby park, and that her subsequent conversations with White House aides were to console each other and to share grief. Former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, Foster's boss at the White House, who lost his job over his handling of the investigation and other White House business, remembered the many conversations differently. He said in a disposition that Ms. Thomases called him to inquire about procedures for restricting access by investigators to the files in the deputy counsel's office. He said Ms. Thomases told him "some people were concerned" that investigators not be given complete access to the files. Ms. Thomases told the Senate committee under oath that it was the other way around, with Mr. Nussbaum bringing up the subject of protecting the papers in Foster's office and assuring her "that he had a plan. That he was going to take care of them."

If a White House guard's sworn testimony to the Senate Whitewater Committee is correct, however, by then the discussions may have been academic. The guard said that after he unlocked the door of Foster's office to allow White House aide Patsy Thomasson, who had no security clearance, to search the desk for a suicide note the night of Foster's death, he saw Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff, Margaret Williams, leave Foster's office with files which she put into her own office—well before investigators from the Park Police and Justice Department arrived the next day to be stonewalled by Nussbaum. Williams denied under oath that she had removed files from Foster's office that night, but admitted to the committee that later she put a box of Clinton personal files from Foster's office into a closet in the Clintons' private living quarters within the White House, where she "forgot" them until some time later.

The fact that the files were removed from Foster's office might explain why Williams and Thomases both assured the investigators that despite Nussbaum's secretive actions on the following and subsequent days, "there was no big conspiracy." Nussbaum had been so obstructionist with investigators that Philip B. Heymann, the number-two officer in the Justice Department at the time, had asked, "Bernie, are you hiding something?"

If he was hiding something, the American people may never know what. Nor is it clear whether Thomases knew what it was, or whether her long-time employer, AIPAC, knows now. Wouldn't it be astonishing if historians learned a century from now that a secret too hot for Foster or the Clintons to handle had ended up in the possession of the lobby for a foreign power, which could use it to blackmail a president or his wife for so long as they might be useful? It would, of course, explain a lot. Which again raises the question—why did no U.S. daily newspaper mention that the key witness at the Senate hearings, who was called upon to explain the strange goings on with the late Vincent Foster's papers, was a long-time employee of a lobby for a foreign government—and a notoriously dangerous government at that? Must just have slipped their minds.

Both Heymann and Nussbaum, who found themselves testifying at cross purposes at the Senate Whitewater hearings in August, are familiar names to capital Israel watchers. Heymann, a Harvard law professor, was a Justice Department official during the 1976 to 1980 administration of President Jimmy Carter. During that period the FBI received a complaint from former National Association of Arab Americans President Michael Saba that he personally had overheard, in the coffeeshop of the Madison Hotel in downtown Washington, DC, Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide Steven Bryen offering to obtain a classified Pentagon document for a military attach? from the Embassy of Israel and a visiting Israeli defense official. After a lengthy investigation in which, among other things, the FBI reported finding that Bryen's committee had requested the document, and that Bryen's fingerprints were on it, the FBI recommended that Bryen be indicted for espionage. The recommendation went to Heymann's desk where, according to Saba, whose book The Armaggedon Network lays out the charges in detail, the recommendation stayed until the time limit for filing charges had passed. (With charges dropped, Bryen went on to become a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He was charged with protecting classified U.S. military technology against "export" to countries receiving or purchasing U.S. military or civilian equipment. Between government stints he has been associated with the Jewish Institute of National Security, JINSA, of which both he and his wife, Shoshanna Bryen, have been executive directors. JINSA is a Washington lobbying group closely associated with the Israeli arms industry.

By 1993 Heymann again was serving in the Justice Department, this time as deputy to Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno, when a request for clemency for convicted spy for Israel Jonathan J. Pollard reached Heymann's desk. It stayed there for some time and aides speculated that Heymann was waiting for the right time to get Reno's approval and then forward it to Nussbaum, who in turn would present it to Clinton for signature. Whatever the reason for holding up the Pollard request, the plan was aborted by Reno's dismissal of Heymann for a clash in "management style" and Reno's recommendation against clemency for Pollard.

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank's sister, Ann Lewis, who was appointed in August as Clinton-Gore deputy campaign manager for communications, also is well known to Israel watchers. It was she who refused to allow state delegates to the Democratic national convention to discuss from the floor adding a reference to Palestinian human rights to the Democratic platform's Middle East policy plank. Between campaigns, Lewis has been serving as vice president for public policy at Planned Parenthood and has worked on behalf of various Democratic candidates.

Richard Marius took a leave of absence as director of Harvard University's expository writing program to accept a $70,000 salary as a full-time speech writer to Vice President Al Gore beginning July 24. Marius, who previously had written speeches for Gore, was all set to depart when another sometime Gore speech writer, multimillionaire New Republic (and former Ramparts magazine) publisher Martin Peretz, got wind of the appointment and reportedly told Gore Marius was "an anti-Semite." Peretz cited Marius' comparison of the Israeli domestic security service, Shin Bet, with its Nazi equivalent, the Gestapo, in a book review Marius had written for the Harvard alumni magazine. Without further explanation, Marius was told by Gore communications director Lorraine Voles on July 9 that he had been "unhired." The turnaround time was so quick that Marius had time to be reinstated in the fall teaching schedule at Harvard. Peretz, noted for extreme pro-Israel views, was Gore's tutor at Harvard and, when Gore spoke at 1994 Harvard commencement exercises, Peretz gave a reception in his Cambridge, MA home in the vice president's honor. (See "Other Voices," p. 117.)

Helen Thomas, White House correspondent for United Press International since 1961, was feted by President Bill Clinton on her 75th birthday with beer and cake for the White House press staff and her journalistic colleagues. After giving an impromptu imitation of Thomas—a Lebanese American who frequently asks hard questions about presidential Middle East policies—shouting questions at him on his early morning jogs, Clinton left the press room when she started asking him real questions.

British authorities dropped charges against a Palestinian man and woman in connection with the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994. They were Mohammed Derbas , 31, and Reem Abdelhadi, 34, a graduate student and former executive member of the National Union of Students. Abdelhadi said she had been quizzed by police during a visit to Israel in January and upon her return to Britain she had reported voluntarily to British authorities.

In Denmark two Egyptian men were indicted on charges of planning terrorist activities against Israeli or Jewish targets in Copenhagen. Mohammed Fahim and Abdul Hakim Suliman reportedly were carrying U.S. telephone numbers that have been linked with the Egyptian Islamist extremist group Gama'a Al-Islamia. Danish embassy spokesman Jorgen Grunet in Washington said that fingerprints of the suspects match some of those found on equipment used in the World Trade Center bombing.

A memorable moment occurred at a Washington luncheon of the Organization of American States hosted by Jewish chairman of the House International Affairs Committee Benjamin Gilman and the state of Uruguay commemorating the first anniversary of the June 12, 1994 death of the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Attending the luncheon were ambassadors of the countries from which Jewish leaders had traveled to Washington to honor the rebbe. When Moroccan Chief Rabbi Shimon Sunissa rose to deliver his remarks, Moroccan Ambassador to the U.S. Mohamed Benaissa stood at his side to translate them from Arabic into English for the assembled audience.

Anat Ben-Tov, a 35-year-old Israeli secretary and mother of a 10-year-old son, told Associated Press from a hospital bed, "I have no luck, or I have all the luck. I'm not sure which." The reason for her puzzlement was the fact that she was hurled into a storefront window on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv last October by a bus bomb that exploded in front of her, killing 22 people. Then, in July, she was sitting on another Tel Aviv bus when another bomb went off under one of the seats in front of her. She climbed out of the bus window and escaped with only minor cuts, but the bomb killed five other Israelis on the bus along with the suicide bomber.

Director Stuart Polack of Britain's Conservative Friends of Israel said his organization was "absolutely delighted" with the appointment of former British defense secretary Malcolm Rifkind as Britain's new foreign secretary. Rifkind, who describes his Judaism as "supremely irrelevant" to his political duties, told a Britain-Israel Chamber of Commerce luncheon just before his appointment was announced that he approved last year's lifting of Britain's arms embargo against Israel. A spokesman for the all-party Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group said Rifkind and conservative party chairman Jeremy Hanley, who as minister of state will assume responsibility for the Middle East, both have a "long record of solid support for Israel."

Newly elected President Jacques Chirac became the first French chief of state to recognize publicly the responsibility of the French state for the deportation of France's Jews to Nazi Germany during World War II. Speaking on the 53rd anniversary of the first mass arrest of 13,000 Jews on July 16-17, 1942, Chirac said: "There are moments in the life of a nation that hurt the memory and the idea one has of his country. It is difficult to evoke them because those dark hours tarnish forever our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions...France, homeland of the Enlightenment and of human rights, land of welcome and asylum, France, on that very day, accomplished the irreparable. Failing her promise, she delivered those she was to protect to their murderers." Of that first group of 13,000 French Jews rounded up, 4,000 without families were sent to the Drancy internment camp near Paris and later were deported to Auschwitz. The remaining 9,000, including 4,000 children, were kept at the Veledrome d'Hiver cycling stadium for a week and then sent directly to Auschwitz. Chirac's predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who was a member of the Vichy regime in 1942 and later worked with the French resistance, had always said that France was not responsible for World War II crimes and attributed them to "an active minority who exploited" France's 1940 defeat by the Germans.

The Jewish Week of New York noted in its July 21 edition that "an administration that already seems to be setting records for the number of Jews in high-level positions has added several more." The weekly newspaper cited the appointment by the Clinton administration of Lee Fisher, former attorney general of Ohio, to head the National Commission on Crime Control and Prevention; and Cheryl Halpern, former president of the National Jewish Coalition, the organization of Jewish Republican activists, to the broadcasting board of governors of the International Bureau of Broadcasting. Halpern also has served on the executive board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the "think tank" funded by board members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's principal Washington lobby, and founded by AIPAC official Martin Indyk, who subsequently became Clinton White House Middle East adviser and who now is U.S. ambassador to Israel.

A committee of former U.S. diplomats and statesmen has urged President Clinton to "stop hoping that something will turn up" and take a stand in support of the Bosnians. Their letter called upon Clinton to lift the arms embargo, call for a withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers, and launch a "strategic and sustained" NATO air campaign against Serb military targets. Among those signing the letter were former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, former State Department spokesman Hodding Carter , and former Ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and Max Kampelman.

Ella Bancroft covers U.S. and Canadian affairs for overseas newspapers.