THE SECRET LIFE OF AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD

In a recent Washington Post column, Robert Novak assured his readers that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a reporter of noteworthy “accuracy” and ” industry” who is “no conspiracy theory lunatic.” Well, let’s see. On page 349 of his new book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Evans-Pritchard recycles the following story: In the mid-1980s, Bill Clinton and Oliver North held a secret meeting at an “ammunition storage bunker” where a CIA handler chewed them out for letting the drug running at Mena, Arkansas get out of hand. This was shortly after, according to Evans-Pritchard, Medellin cartel drug pilot Barry Seal showed up in Little Rock and arranged for another secret meeting at Charlie Trie’s Chinese restaurant where he plotted a ” deniable” airlift of weapons to the Nicaraguan contras. Chapters Eighteen and Nineteen of Evans-Pritchard’s book are devoted to Clinton’s ties to the ” Dixie Mafia” — a purportedly murderous and all-powerful criminal enterprise that has a “deep reach into the U.S. federal government.” Chapters Eight through Fifteen make the case for the murder of Vince Foster — a crime so monstrous and devious that it “throws into doubt the durability of the republic.”

Does Novak actually believe this stuff?. How about Washington Times editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden, who is quoted on the book jacket as praising Evans-Pritchard for his “scoops and disclosures”? The willingness of some conservatives to believe the most ridiculous things about President Clinton is one of the more curious political pathologies of the past few years. Whatever the explanation for it — blind hatred, boredom, the perverse influence of Oliver Stone — there is little doubt that Evans-Pritchard has been the pied piper of the Clinton-obsessed. A Cambridge-educated journalist assigned in late 1992 to cover Washington for London’s Sunday Telegraph, Evans-Pritchard quickly made a name for himself in right-wing circles by publishing a series of increasingly far-fetched dispatches suggesting all sorts of horrible crimes and misdemeanors by the First Family.

Never simply echoing what American investigative reporters were already writing about the Clintons, Evans-Pritchard aimed to trump them with disclosures far more stunning and consequential — and then bask in the glory bestowed upon him by radio talk-show hosts and Internet crazies. Evans- Pritchard’s work, such as it is, consists of little more than wild flights of conspiratorial fancy coupled with outrageous and wholly uncorroborated allegations offered up by his “sources” — largely a collection of oddballs, drug dealers, prostitutes, and borderline psychotics.

Subtitling his book “The Unreported Stories,” Evans-Pritchard depicts the mainstream media as spineless lapdogs for failing to follow up on his revelations. He ignores, of course, another possible reason that these stories have gone unreported: There is little reason to imagine that any of them are actually true.

I suspect, however, that Evans-Pritchard isn’t really out to prove anything about Clinton, but to spin a colorful yarn. His book tells the saga of a courageous and dedicated journalist — himself — who risks his life and the ridicule of his colleagues to expose the truth about a corrupt and tyrannical government. To accomplish this mission, he taps into an underground network of whistleblowers and dissidents who wage guerrilla warfare by means of underground postings on the World Wide Web.

Some of Evans-Pritchard’s scenes are priceless — which is another way of saying that they are beyond parody. Here he is in Little Rock for an interview with Gary Parks, a young man convinced that his father, a private detective who was supposed to have had a file on Clinton’s bimbos, was the victim of a mob-style execution ordered by the president. When they meet for dinner at the Little Rock Hilton, Parks brings along an escort who “arrives first, ‘sweeping’ the lobby, the bar and even the bathrooms, before giving the all clear,” writes Evans-Pritchard. “It was like being back in El Salvador or Guatemala, where I had worked as a correspondent during la violencia of the early 1980s.”

Of course, the aura of menace and intrigue does more than swirl around the author in Little Rock. Back in Washington, Evans-Pritchard breaks one of his big stories: Patrick Knowlton, a construction worker who stopped to urinate at Fort Marcy Park on the afternoon of Vince Foster’s death and — here’s the key part — recalls seeing a mysterious “Hispanic-looking” man lingering around the parking lot. No sooner has Evans-Pritchard popped this bombshell in the Telegraph than, Knowlton reports, menacing-looking men in business suits begin following him and staring really hard at him: Brushing into him and circling “like hyenas,” they fix him “with the look of death.”

Evans-Pritchard and Knowlton conclude this is surely the work of goons from the “political police” who are trying to “destabilize” Knowlton before he can tell his story to the federal grand jury. And only one person has the motive, means, and opportunity to dispatch these goons in business suits — that master intimidator and establishment enforcer Kenneth Starr, incensed that Knowlton is going to interfere with his plans to whitewash Vincent Foster’s death. That night, reporter and source — joined by their comrade-in-arms, that intrepid Foster death investigator Christopher Ruddy — huddle over dinner, breaking out a bottle of “very expensive” wine. “It was strangely jovial,” writes Evans-Pritchard. “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.”

All this could probably be chalked up as harmless nonsense were it not that some respectable people treat Evans-Pritchard seriously. His reporting is so scurrilous and irresponsible that he would have been thrown out of any newsroom in this country in a flash. Consider what he writes about Clinton’s days in Arkansas. There are plenty of legitimate questions about Clinton’s past, but what is one to make of Evans-Pritchard’s breathless account of the allegations of Sharlene Wilson, a former Little Rock bar girl, who, we are told, used to attend “toga parties” and “Babylonian orgies” where Clinton would cavort with teenage girls and “avidly” snort cocaine? Wilson is a convicted drug dealer, currently in an Arkansas prison, who makes all sorts of fantastic claims, including having transported planeloads of cocaine from Mena airport to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. (Where? The fifty-yard line?) There isn’t a single corroborating witness for any of the events involving Clinton she describes.

Elsewhere, Evans-Pritchard recounts in great detail the story of Gary Parks’s father, Jerry — the aforementioned presidentially murdered private detective with the bimbo file. As it happens there is no evidence Parks’s file ever existed, and Little Rock police long ago concluded that his real enough murder was most likely related to a business dispute that had nothing to do with Bill Clinton.

Still, Evans-Pritchard offers up the claims of Parks’s widow who “with time and new drugs” (not to mention a Clinton-hating second husband) is now telling stories she never mentioned to the police when her husband died in 1993 — among them, that her late husband carried out “sensitive assignments” under the direction of Vince Foster. (You see how it all fits together?) Just a night or two before Foster’s death, it seems, the deputy White House counsel called her husband from a pay phone and demanded a “complete set” of ” the files” so he could take them to Hillary. Her husband, we are assured, then shouted, “You’re not going to use those files! . . . My name is all over this stuff. You can’t give Hillary those files. You can’t! Remember what she did, what you told me she did. She’s capable of doing anything.” To which Foster, in this conversation between two dead men Evans-Pritchard recreates verbatim, offered the reassurance, “We can trust Hil. Don’t worry.”

Oddly, the part of Evans-Pritchard’s book that is getting the most attention actually has little to do with Clinton and his friends. It involves the Oklahoma City bombing and, in the seven chapters that make up the book’s first 108 pages, Evans-Pritchard wallows in the waters of an entirely different conspiracy school — a group of victims’ family members and freelance investigators convinced the government is covering up the truth behind the destruction of the Murrah building. As it happens, there are grounds to wonder if convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh may have had accomplices besides Terry Nichols. There was, after all, the elusive “John Doe #2.” And some two weeks before the bombing, McVeigh — a man of singularly nasty and racist views — did indeed place a phone call to Elohim City, Arkansas, site of a loony sect training for battle with America’s ” Zionist Occupied Government.”

Beyond that, hard evidence is hard to come by. But that does not stop Evans- Pritchard: He is convinced that McVeigh was manipulated by secret government informants posing as neo-Nazi fanatics and that the bombing itself was a Clinton administration “sting” of the far Right that ran amok. He identifies as the linch-pin of this botched government operation one Andreas Strassmeir, a former German army officer who apparently spent time at Elohim City. Evans- Pritchard quotes the recollections of some cocktail waitresses at a Tulsa strip club called Lady Godiva’s who thought they saw McVeigh sitting in a booth with a man who looked like Strassmeir on April 8, 1995. A possible lead — only, as Evans-Pritchard is forced to concede, hotel records indicate that McVeigh was in Kingman, Arizona, on that day. The hotel records are probably fishy, he concludes. In the end, whatever Strassmeir’s ties to McVeigh (if any), there is absolutely nothing to suggest either one of them was in the government’s employ at the time of the bombing, much less that federal agents put them up to it or that the Clinton administration is covering it all up.

It is probably professionally hazardous to be too dismissive of the conspiracy theories offered up by the likes of Evans-Pritchard. Who knows what tornado might yet blow through Arkansas, turning up records proving that Bill Clinton is indeed a CIA-controlled cokehead mobster who executes his political enemies? But for the moment I prefer my own conspiracy theory: Evans-Pritchard doesn’t believe a word he has written in The Secret Life of Bill Clinton. According to my new theory, Evans-Pritchard’s book is all devious disinformation — part of a far more elaborate government sting, run no doubt by that master control agent James Carville, designed to discredit critics of the Clinton White House by making them look like a bunch of blithering idiots.

By Michael Isikoff; Michael Isikoff is a correspondent in Newsweek’s Washington bureau A British Reporter’s Conspiracy Compendium