Was Bill Clinton a CIA Asset?

Last night I listened to the radio interview of Jack Wheeler, who made all those nasty allegations of treason against John Mccain (see my post of yesterday).The interview on the Radio Patriot can be found here .

The accusations against McCain are based entirely on the word of the alleged translator "T". Wheeler says he knows T's name and has spoken to him, as well as to "more than one" Republican member of Congress who have been briefed by T. Neither Wheeler or the Republican Congress members have seen any documentation of any of this. I don't doubt Wheeler at this point but I do wonder who is behind T, and why did he come forward. And, of course, is he telling the truth?

As to the allegation that Bill Clinton was a CIA asset as a student abroad, however, Wheeler may be on firmer ground. Note that if this allegation is true it really does not reflect discredit on the former President. Nor does it mean that Clinton's opposition to the Vietnam War was not genuine. Wheeler said that the allegation that the CIA recruited young Bill Clinton was confirmed to him personally by the late Cord Meyer.

To recap from yesterday, this is what Cord Meyer said about Bill Clinton.

"They all darkly point to Bill's participation in anti-war peace conferences in Stockholm and Oslo, and his trip to Leningrad, Moscow, and Prague while he was at Oxford. ‘Who could have paid for this?', they ask. ‘It had to be the KGB!' they claim." Cord would shake his head. "What rot - we paid for it. We recruited Bill the first week he was at Oxford. Bill's been an asset of The Three Bad Words ever since."

Wheeler is not the first to make this allegation regarding Clinton. Stew Webb reported the following back in 1993, originally in the Spotlight Newspaper.

According to sources within the CIA, Clinton was used by the agency to infiltrate protest groups and report on their activities. In addition, Clinton used his cover as a Rhodes scholar to view the Khrushchev memoirs, then he stole documents for "the Company", Webb said.

According to sources, Clinton was answering to London bureau chief Cord Meyer when he took the Khrushchev documents. Contacted in Washington recently, Meyer denied Clinton was working for the agency (CIA).

Webb said his sources indicate former Time editor and Council on Foreign Relations mouthpiece Strobe Talbott, international business tycoon Ira Magaziner and a third Ivy League grad. at Oxford all started careers with the CIA as they were schooled in England. The one unidentified agent died shortly after returning to this country. The other three engaged in brilliant careers that placed them in influential positions the media, business and politics.

Now maybe Wheeler is simply repeating allegations he found on the internet, and neither Stew Webb or the Spotlight are the most reliable sources. Nonetheless, Wheeler does claim to have heard this first-hand from Cord Meyer, although Meyer is beyond questioning at this point, and denied the allegation when he was alive.

The allegation is plausible which does not make it true. Cord Meyer was involved in the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird", and has been reported as having recruited other liberals, including feminist Gloria Steinem.

"'I came home in 1958,' Steinem later explained, 'full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done. ... Private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival.' Convinced that a contingent of liberal but anticommunist American students should go to Vienna, she heard through her contacts at the National Student Association that there might be funding available to finance American participation in the fes- tival. Working through C.D. Jackson and Cord Meyer, Steinem then set up an organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival. She obtained tax-exempt status, and Jackson helped her raise contributions from various American corporations, including the American Express Company. But most of the money came from the CIA, to be managed by Jackson in a 'special account.'

Cord Meyer, as regular readers will recall, was also implicated in the JFK assassination by E. Howard Hunt. He was also the ex-husband of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a former lover of John F. Kennedy who may have turned him on to LSD. She was later murdered.

Asked to comment on the case, by the current author (C. David Heymann), Cord Meyer held court at the beginning of February 2001 - six weeks before his death - in the barren dining room of a Washington nursing home. Propped up in a chair, his glass eye bulging, he struggled to hold his head aloft. Although he was no longer able to read, the nurses supplied him with a daily copy of The Washington Post, which he carried with him wherever he went. "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed , " he whispered. "It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."

One suspects that Cord Meyer knew just who those "sons of bitches" were.