HILLARY'S SECRET WAR
The assassin
Posted: July 18, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
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If that sounds too fantastic to be true, read on.
By Richard Poe
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
On the afternoon of Feb. 8, 1999, a man named Steven R. Kangas entered One Oxford Center in downtown Pittsburgh. He carried a Kel Tek 9-mm semiautomatic pistol, 47 rounds of ammunition and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Kangas took the elevator to the 39th floor. He reportedly paused at the door of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, pressed his face against the glass and tried the door. It was locked. Kangas moved on. For nine hours, he holed up in a men's room down the hall, getting drunk. A building engineer discovered him at about 11:30 p.m., lying on the floor, mumbling incoherently. When the man left to call police, Kangas evidently sat up on a toilet and shot himself in the head. The building engineer returned a few minutes later with a coworker, only to find Kangas slumped over dead.
Police wrote off Kangas's death as a simple suicide. However, further investigation revealed that the 37-year-old Kangas may have been an assassin.
He had arrived in Pittsburgh only that morning on a Greyhound bus, with $14.63 in his pocket. It turned out that Kangas ran a popular leftwing website called "Liberalism Resurgent: A Response to the Right." Several of Kangas' writings attacked Richard Mellon Scaife – oil and banking heir, philanthropist, newspaper publisher and funder of political causes. Scaife's office was right down the hall from the men's room where Kangas killed himself. Some investigators speculate that Kangas – unable to enter the locked office – had retreated to the men's room to wait in ambush for Scaife while steeling his nerves with whiskey.
Kangas was a former Army intelligence specialist from a conservative, Michigan family. The bio and resumé he published online state that he learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., in 1983 and later shipped out to Berlin, where he intercepted and translated Soviet military communications for NATO. Kangas claimed in his online bio that he was stationed for a time in Central America, "doing things I am not at liberty to discuss."
After leaving the Army in 1986, Kangas earned a bachelor's degree in Russian Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. "I visited Russia in 1989," he writes, "and the trip was one of the most incredible experiences of my life."
By this time, for reasons he does not clearly explain, Kangas had rejected both his conservative upbringing and his military indoctrination, to become a leftist. His writings hint that he may have felt some regret about this choice. On his website, he summarized his life in these tongue-in-cheek, yet oddly self-punishing words: "I left religion at age 12, and conservatism at 26, to become a godless pinko commie lying socialist weasel."
A few months before he died, Kangas quit his job with a Las Vegas company that made gambling software for betting on horse races. Kangas tried to launch his own Web pornography business, shooting sadomasochistic sex scenes in his apartment and selling them online. The venture failed, mainly because Kangas blew his money on booze and prostitutes.
In real life, Kangas had become a loser. But on the Web, he had achieved something akin to celebrity. An entity calling itself the Robert F. Kennedy Democrats honored Kangas' "Liberalism Resurgent" page with its 1997 "Excelsior Award" for websites that "communicate the highest progressive ideals."
"Help Fight the Right!" Kangas exhorted readers. He recommended Al Gore's "Earth in the Balance" as one of his favorite books. He railed against Rush Limbaugh. "The CIA and its allies turned American AM radio into a haven for conservative talk-show hosts," Kangas ranted. More ominously, Kangas portrayed Scaife as a leader of what he called the "New Overclass," a cabal of rightwing forces that "undemocratically control our government."
On his website, Kangas warned leftwing activists that their efforts would be wasted, "if they are not directed at the heart of the problem. It is absolutely critical to identify what the true core problem is, because all other problems in society stem from it." Evidently, Kangas had decided that Scaife was the "core problem." But why Scaife?
One answer may lie in an article from Kangas's website entitled, "Myth: There's no 'vast rightwing conspiracy' to get Clinton." He opened his essay with a famous quote from Hillary Clinton, excerpted from her Jan. 27, 1998, interview on NBC's "Today Show." Readers will recall that interview from Part 3 of this series, in which Hillary said, among other things, "[B]ill and I have been accused of everything, including murder … drug running … [I]t's part of an effort … to undo the results of two elections. … I do believe that this is a battle." Kangas highlighted the following quote from Hillary:
"The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast rightwing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this [the Lewinsky scandal] may do it."
It would seem that Kangas took up Hillary's challenge to "find it, write about it and explain it." In his essay, he set out to prove that Hillary was right, that there was indeed a vast and sinister conspiracy bent on toppling the Clintons. Like Hillary, Kangas painted the various Clinton scandals as frame-ups, funded by shadowy, rightwing moneymen. In his view – as in the view of many mainstream media commentators – the most prominent of the anti-Clinton moneymen was Richard Mellon Scaife. "Scaife is undoubtedly the most important figure behind the Clinton scandals," he writes. Nearly 60 percent of Kangas' 2,059-word text focuses on Scaife.
Significantly, Kangas charges that "Scaife is obsessed with proving that Vince Foster's suicide was actually a murder. He goes so far as to call his death 'the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton administration.'" Kangas also notes that Scaife had assigned a full-time reporter named Christopher Ruddy to investigate Foster's death.
We may never know for sure why Kangas took a gun to Scaife's office, nor why he decided, at the last minute, to shoot himself instead. We do know one thing, however. In the tortured recesses of Kangas' mind, the figure of Hillary loomed large. Kangas studied Hillary's words with care. He believed her story. He felt her pain. Kangas made Hillary's enemies his. In the final analysis, he may have died for her – shedding his blood to guard the secret of the Rosetta Stone.
The Rosetta Stone
Would-be assassin Steven Kangas was correct about one thing: Richard Mellon Scaife had indeed described the Vincent Foster case as a "Rosetta Stone" – an unreadable tablet whose decipherment might one day illuminate every mystery of the Clintons.
"It is the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton administration," Scaife told the late John F. Kennedy Jr. in an exclusive interview in the January 1999 issue of George magazine. "Once you solve that one mystery, you'll know everything that's going on or went on." Pressed to explain further, Scaife responded:
"Listen, [Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He's got the entire federal government behind him. … God, there must be 60 people … who have died mysteriously – including eight of Clinton's former bodyguards. … There have been very mysterious deaths."
The Vincent Foster "Rosetta Stone" remains undeciphered to this day. But the struggle to decode it, in large measure, gave birth to the Web Underground.
Richard Poe is the investigative editor of David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, as well as managing editor of Horowitz's group blog Moonbat Central. The views expressed in Poe's book, "Hillary's Secret War," are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.