Linda R. Tripp (Reuters)

Page Two

Friends Sharing Secrets

As Lewinsky allegedly told Tripp, the relationship included late afternoon or early evening encounters at the White House. The president, she claimed, sent her gifts, which subsequent reports say included a dress, a pin and a book of Walt Whitman's poems, "Leaves of Grass." She sent him a number of notes or messages from her office at the Pentagon, including what several accounts have described as a sexually provocative audiotape. She reportedly sent them to Clinton's secretary, Betty Currie, who also was listed as the official who often cleared Lewinsky for entry into the White House when she was no longer on the staff. The messenger service slips from Lewinsky's packages to the White House have been subpoenaed by Starr.

Lewinsky offers lurid descriptions of her relationship with Clinton, according to those familiar with the tapes. She suggests that she and the president have engaged only in oral sex, not intercourse, and relates how they engaged in telephone sex on a number of occasions late at night. She complains that Clinton is more interested in other women than in her.

Lewinsky and Tripp were drawn together as well by their mutual jeopardy in the Paula Jones case. Tripp was an obvious witness for Jones's lawyers, given her chatty description of Kathleen Willey and the president. How Jones's lawyers first got Lewinsky on their radar is not as clear. But in mid-December, both women received subpoenas to testify in the Jones case.

Well before then, Tripp had secretly begun to tape her telephone conversations with Lewinsky. Eventually there would be 17 tapes covering 20 hours of conversation that Tripp initially would give to Starr's investigators. Recent tapes captured Lewinsky's agonizing as her day of reckoning with Jones's lawyers neared.

Tripp told some people that she started taping conversations primarily to protect herself against retaliation by Clinton's lawyers and to preserve her federal job. On Saturday, The Post revealed that Tripp's literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, an opponent of the president, had recommended making the tapes to prove to Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who had written the story about Kathleen Willey, that Clinton and Lewinsky were having an affair.

The first detailed account of their contents appeared in an article published by Newsweek on its Web site last week, and the magazine's editors and reporters have elaborated on the tapes in numerous television interviews since, including descriptions of one 90-minute tape they listened to a week ago.

On that tape, Lewinsky can be heard weeping and suggesting clearly that she and the president had had a sexual relationship. She tells Tripp that she plans to deny the affair to Jones's lawyers and despairs that the president has refused to settle the lawsuit. Clinton, she said, "is in denial. He'll never settle." She tells Tripp, "Look, I will deny it so he will not get screwed in the case, but I'm going to get screwed personally." Tripp tells her she plans to tell Jones's lawyers about the affair.

"You can tell from listening to the tape that Lewinsky is a scared, angst-ridden young woman," Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas said on CNN's "Larry King Live." "She makes it clear that she, at least in her own mind, is having an affair with the president." Tripp, he said, comes across as "a tough, formidable, somewhat manipulative woman."

"They sound like very upset women talking on the telephone to each other," said Ann McDaniel, Newsweek assistant managing editor on ABC's "PrimeTime Live."

On one of the tapes, Lewinsky reveals to Tripp that, on Currie's recommendation, she has sought the advice of attorney Vernon Jordan, Clinton's golfing buddy and close friend, because she feared she would be subpoenaed in the Jones case.

Jordan, as he later confirmed to reporters, met with Lewinsky, arranged for her to be represented by Washington attorney Frank Carter, and escorted her to Carter's office. "I want to say absolutely and unequivocally that Ms. Lewinsky told me in no uncertain terms that she did not have a sexual relationship with the president," Jordan said at a Thursday afternoon appearance before reporters. "At no time did I ever say, suggest or intimate to her that she should lie."

But Jordan said that in addition to finding legal assistance for Lewinsky, he had recommended her for employment at American Express and Revlon, two companies on whose boards he sits, and at the New York advertising firm of Young & Rubicam.

It was, he added, nothing out of the ordinary for a man who has helped many others in his life – "from paralegals to mail-room clerks, from corporate directors to CEOs," as he put it.

Currie, according to reports, also interceded on Lewinsky's behalf by helping to arrange for United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson to interview her for a job. Richardson and Lewinsky met at a Washington hotel in October for breakfast. He offered her a low-level job, which she declined, saying she preferred to work in the private sector.

It was a remarkable amount of high-level attention for a mere intern – especially one who hadn't worked in the White House for more than a year.

On the tapes, Lewinsky apparently refers to the president not by name but as "the big he" and "the creep." At one point Lewinsky muses aloud about confessing to Clinton that she had told others of the affair. "That's what I would do," Tripp replies. "But I don't know if you're comfortable with that." At another point, Lewinsky reportedly says she can't tell the president that she has told others they had a relationship. "If I do that, I'm just going to ... kill myself."

At still another point, she sighs, "I have lied my entire life."

Lewinsky's Affidavit

Five days later, on Monday, Jan. 12, Tripp met with her lawyers to prepare her statement for the Jones case. The previous Friday she had given copies of the tapes to her lawyers, who spent the weekend reviewing them. They were startled at what they heard. Their recommendation, according to one source, was to turn them over to Clinton's attorney Bennett, on the theory that the contents would force Clinton to settle the case.

Tripp was appalled at their suggestion, according to the source, and left her attorneys' office in anger. Instead of taking the tapes to Bennett, she called Starr's investigators. Before the end of the day, she was telling them everything she knew, and her story set in motion a series of extraordinary events over the next week.

The next day, by prior arrangement, Tripp met Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City for a drink around noon. Before arriving, FBI agents had outfitted Tripp with a tiny listening device – "a wire" in the parlance of the investigators – and as the two women talked, agents nearby monitored the conversation and snapped photos.

On Wednesday, Jan. 14, the two women drove home from the Pentagon together. During the ride, Lewinsky offers Tripp a three-page, typewritten document of "talking points" suggesting how she might handle her upcoming deposition with Jones's lawyers. The document suggests that Tripp alter her story about Kathleen Willey in ways that would protect Clinton. Tell the lawyers, Tripp is urged, that "you do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc."

It is not clear who drafted the talking points, which appear too sophisticated for a 24-year-old non-lawyer, but the document represents potentially damaging evidence of an attempt to tamper with a witness in a legal proceeding.

On Friday, Jan. 16, investigators again asked Tripp to lure Lewinsky to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for another conversation. That same day, Starr had decided to ask the Justice Department to seek expanded authority for his Whitewater investigation, claiming that Jordan is a target. The Justice Department agreed and submitted the request to a three-judge panel, which also granted the approval. Starr's hope was to "flip" Lewinsky quickly and get her to help, before reporters already on the trail of the story started calling around town and exposing the operation.

As Tripp and Lewinsky sat down to talk at the hotel, agents interceded and escorted Lewinsky to a room upstairs. The agents confronted Lewinsky with the tapes and photos of her earlier meeting with Tripp. The young woman was shattered by the agents' assertion that she could be prosecuted for perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering – unless she cooperates with the independent counsel's investigation. They offered her immunity in exchange for her cooperation. "My life is ruined," she said.

Frightened and overwhelmed, she asked if she could call her mother, Marcia Lewis, in New York, who agreed to come to Washington – by train, not plane. A long wait ensued. Lewinsky and the agents killed time with a shopping expedition at the Crate & Barrel store in the Pentagon City mall. They watched Ethel Merman in the old movie, "There's No Business Like Show Business." They ate dinner together at a restaurant in the shopping mall. Finally, around 10 p.m., Lewinsky's mother arrived. "What's the big deal?" Lewis reportedly asked. "So she lied and tried to convince others to lie?"

Starr's team had warned Lewinsky that its offer expired at the end of the day, and the clock was ticking. Lewinsky's mother called her former husband, Bernard Lewinsky, in California, and he in turn sought advice from longtime family attorney William Ginsburg, a civil lawyer. Ginsburg refused to accept the immunity deal without knowing more details, saying he had not heard the tapes and had not fully debriefed his new client. He offered to fly to Washington the next day, but by the time he arrived the immunity offer had been taken off the table.

As the deadline for Starr's immunity offer to Lewinsky was passing, another deadline was looming at the editorial offices of Newsweek magazine. Newsweek reporter Isikoff had heard about the Lewinsky-Tripp tapes days earlier and had warned Starr's office the magazine was preparing a story for its upcoming edition. Starr's office, magazine editors said later, begged the magazine to hold off, claiming publication would jeopardize the investigation.

Rumors of a big story out of Newsweek swirled through Washington all day Saturday. Fearful of being scooped, Time magazine reporters pestered the White House "every 10 minutes" about the rumors, one official said, but as Kendall's call that afternoon indicated, those around Clinton remained mostly in the dark. At Newsweek, a debate raged throughout the day over whether to run the Isikoff story. At the last minute, top editors pulled the article from the magazine. Despite Isikoff's strong advocacy for the story, editors at the magazine feared they did not know enough about Lewinsky to publish such an explosive charge against the president.

"On the basis of what we knew Saturday, I am comfortable that we didn't go ahead with the story," Newsweek president Richard Smith said later. He added, "When the clock ran out, I wasn't prepared to air an allegation that a young White House intern had an affair with the president without more independent reporting on her."

The story of the Newsweek story soon found an outlet, however. By the next day, Internet gossipmeister Matt Drudge, who earlier had scooped Newsweek on its own story about Kathleen Willey, had posted an item on his Web site, and on ABC's "This Week with Sam and Cokie," William Kristol, editor and publisher of the conservative journal Weekly Standard, made reference to it before being dismissed by former White House official George Stephanopoulos. "We've all seen how discredited that's been," Stephanopoulos said of the Drudge Report site, whose tone would turn more serious later in the week once the allegations surfaced fully.

Other reporters who had long worked the Starr beat were in hot pursuit of the same material that Newsweek had held up. Late Tuesday night, Post reporters Sue Schmidt and Peter Baker got there first. The article was posted on the Post's Internet site shortly after midnight and appeared in the edition of the paper hitting the street at the same time. It was closely followed by reports on ABC News and in the Los Angeles Times. "Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie," the four-column headline in The Post said on Wednesday morning. Washington had not seen a story as explosive since Watergate, and the feeding frenzy began.