Posted on 09/29/2003 6:14:51 PM PDT by ranair34
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Billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, a close personal friend of President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hilary, was one of the most important high-level contacts Mossad had in the United States. The revelations published here for the first time, could be a serious blow for Hilary Clinton’s plans to run for the Presidency. Today Rich, a Belgium-born Jew who has taken Spanish nationality, lives in Switzerland under heavy armed guard protection. There is no extradition treaty with the United States to enable him to be questioned by the FBI about his until now secret connection to Mossad. In January, 2000, his last day in office, President Clinton pardoned Rich, a secretive commodities trader indicted in 1983 on charges of evading almost $50 million tax and illegally buying oil from Iran during the Tehran hostage crisis in 1979. The question that will inevitably dog Hilary Clinton, if she runs for the Presidency, will be how much did she and her husband even suspect about Rich’s Israeli intelligence links. An MI6 file covering the Clinton years in the White House reveals that Rich is also suspected of knowing the real identity of a top Mossad informer in the Clinton Administration. The informer is still only known as “Mega”. The name was first discovered on February, 1997, by the National Security Agency, NSA. It provided the FBI with an intercept of a late-night telephone conversation from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. It was between a Mossad intelligence officer, still identified only as “Dov” and his superior in Tel Aviv. He was later named as Mossad director-general, Danny Yatom. “Dov” had asked for guidance as to whether he “should go to Mega” for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then Secretary of State, to PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat. Yatom instructed Dov, according to a transcript of the intercept, “this is not something we use Mega for”. The MI6 file indicates that Mega had been in place towards the end of the first Bush Administration. It also describes how Rich had acted as a “conduit” for the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States to counter FBI demands that the hunt for Mega should be pursued as vigorously as the FBI dealt with spies from other countries. The then MI6 head of station at the British Embassy sent a memo to London stating that “dinner guests at the White House dining table – who include Hollywood stars, attorneys, editors and senior members of the Anti-Defamation League – lose no opportunity to remind Clinton of the damage he could face in this matter. They argue the hunt is not properly grounded and that Israel has already explained to DOS (Department of State) the use of Mega”. Mossad sayanim – the Hebrew name for “helpers” – in the US media had already planted stories that Mega was an incorrect hearing of the Mossad slang for the CIA, Elga. “Further, Mega is supposedly a well known word in USIC (US intelligence community). It is said to be a joint code for shared intelligence with Mossad”, the MI6 memo stated. President Clinton’s only comment on pardoning Marc Rich came after he left office. “It was terrible politics. It wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation”, he told Newsweek magazine. There has been widespread speculation among opponents of the Clintons that Marc Rich “bought” the pardon with political donations and gifts that his former wife, Denise Rich, gave the president and other democrats. But in a hint of Rich’s important connections to Mossad, Clinton has admitted that he granted the pardon “partly because the Justice Department did not oppose a pardon and because I had received a request from the government of Israel”. That request came in a personal handwritten note from another old friend of Bill Clinton, Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak. The MI6 file reveals that the pardon was stitched into the Camp David peace agreement by another plea-bargainer, Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton was convinced there were “strong mitigating circumstances for a pardon”. Rich and his first wife, Denise, fled to Switzerland in 1983 – just before US prosecutors brought charges against him of tax evasion and trading with the outlawed regime in Iran. The couple divorced a decade later and Denise, 59, now lives in a magnificent Fifth Avenue duplex overlooking Central Park. Rich, 69, has remarried and lives in similar splendor in the exclusive town of Zug in Switzerland. He still deals in commodities. His company, Marc Rich & Co Investment, has recently been taken over by the Russian Alfa Group for a reported $3 billion. Rich’s secret work for Israel included organizing Israeli passports for members of the Russian Mafia. So far thirty known members of various Mafia groups are currently traveling on Israeli passports. The FBI were also investigating Rich’s connections to various money-laundering operations involving mid-European banks and those in Canada and the United States. Rich’s prime use for Mossad was as someone who moved in the highest financial circles in Europe, the Middle East and South America. It is those links the FBI and other teams of US investigators were examining to see if they link to the large sums of money Rich paid to the Clintons and other Democrats before the pardon was granted. At the time, US Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White launched a criminal investigation into Rich’s financial links with Clinton and his wife. White obtained copies of Clinton’s White House phone logs and those of Air Force One, the Presidential aircraft. The logs covered all calls the President and Mrs Clinton made to Rich. There was also a complete record of all his calls to them. All official calls are monitored by the US communications team that accompany the President and his wife on all visits. The calls were described at the time as “a key element in our investigation” by one of White’s aides. Clinton himself received from Rich, just before leaving office, a check for $450,000 to help him set up his Presidential Library Fund. Rich also sent $1.1 million last year to the Democratic Party to help Al Gore fight for the Presidency. Until now, all the financial links to Rich’s past have not been pursued. But it is the Mossad connection which could prove to be a “smoking gun” for Hilary Clinton, should she enter the Presidential race – either next year or in 2008. Shortly before he was kidnapped by Hezbollah in October, 2000, Mossad agent Hanan Tannenbaum visited Rich in his Swiss home. Tannenbaum had been sent by former Mossad director, Danny Yatom, to discuss what Tel Aviv sources later admitted were “intelligence matters of the highest order”. At the time, Yatom was personal security adviser to prime minister Ehud Barak. Hezbollah somehow spirited Tannenbaum out of Europe to their base in the Beka’a Valley. His fate remains unknown. In January, 2000, shortly before the Rich pardon was granted, the Senate Judiciary Committee received documents that showed Marc Rich played a crucial role in helping the Bank of Credit and Commercial International (BCCI) arrange for Abu Nidal to receive “hundreds of millions of US dollars for illegal arms transactions in an effort to persuade its wealthy Middle East backers that the bank was staunchly pro-Arab”. A sworn affidavit by Ghassan Quassem, for 17 years a senior officer with BCCI, states: “British weapons secretly destined for Abu Nidal were financed through BCCI offices and shipped under export documents that Marc Rich knew to be phony. My role at the bank was to handle the Nidal account. I later became a spy for the CIA and MI6”. With the coming election years promising to be a knuckle-duster fight, there is a real possibility that the closest Jewish friend the Clintons had may once more step back into a spotlight he has never welcomed. Nor them. Rich was one of 140 pardons Clinton granted for what was a rogues gallery. The clutch of shady characters included a heroin dealer. But it was the odious figure of Marc Rich who has left a permanent stain on Clinton’s presidency – and raised questions now. March Rich played a key part in supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the economic rape of post-Soviet Russia. His former wife, the Manhattan socialite, pleaded his cause by throwing money at the Clintons – even giving Bill a saxophone. A hint of Clinton’s feelings for Rich is contained in a book proposal he has entered into with Knoph, the New York publisher, for $10 million. In an outline for a chapter headed “How A Man Gets What He Really Wants”, Clinton writes: “Sometimes people who seem to have very little in common can discover what they have in common”. Was he referring to Rich? Certainly the billionaire is not quite as rich as he was two years ago. In March, 2001, British Customs officers at Gatwick airport seized $1.9 million of Rich’s money. The money was seized under UK laws designed to “prevent the movement of money from suspected drug trafficking”. Last week in Zug, Rich refused to answer questions about his intelligence links – or his connections to Saddam Hussein and the remaining members of the “axis of evil”, North Korea and Iran. Having renounced his American citizenship, he now travels on Spanish and Israeli passports. He has dual nationality with both countries. Until recently, he also held a Bolivian passport. The power for a President to grant a pardon stems from the Constitution. This states that the President “may grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States. A President can issue a pardon for “any Federal crime for any reason and no reason – before or after conviction”. The Clinton pardon stopped the prosecution in their tracks. Post-pardon Rich is free to return to the United States without fear of prosecution – except possibly in the case of compromised national security. There is no precedent for that – and Rich is unlikely to provide one. But his links to Mossad remain a ticking time bomb for Hillary Clinton. Gordon Thomas |
Oh, please... just go away clintons... go away.... far away and stay there.
" Everyone was outraged about that pardon, so what to do, what to do?"
"Ah, yes...we will say Marc Rich worked for Mossad! Then I will look like a hero and Hillary's kissing up to the Muslims won't look so bad! Podesta, get some spinmeisters shopping this story!"
Yeh, right! Barbra Streisand and other Hollywood types allegedly know about "Mega" and dissuade Clinton --- not even one-on-one but collectively --- not to do anything about it.
Garbage.
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This is wishful thinking. Nobody is going to dog her about anything. At the worst, she will declare it old business while saying she is concerned about the future, not about the past, then move on. Her campaign will be about making history in the position of women in America, about for the children, about social justice, and so on.
Excerpt:
His books of best-selling David Morton novels are being filmed by IAC International as a 22-hour television series to be screened worldwide in 2003. His Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors became a major documentary for Channel Four which he wrote and narrated. It followed three years of research during which he was given unprecedented access to Mossad’s key personnel. The book has so far been published in 16 languages.
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