Exclusive to American Free Press
By Gordon Thomas
President Clinton’s close friend, a billionaire and fugitive from justice, was a top Mossad source—and could wreck plans by Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for the presidency.
Billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, a close personal friend of President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, 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 Hillary Clinton’s plans to run for the presidency.
Today Rich, a Belgian-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, Clinton pardoned Rich, a secretive commodities trader indicted in 1983 on charges of evading almost $50 million in taxes and illegally buying oil from Iran during the Tehran hostage crisis in 1979.
The question that will inevitably dog Hillary, 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 in 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. The intelligence officer was later named as the 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 toward the end of the first Bush administration.
It also describes how Rich had acted as a “conduit” for the powerful Israeli 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 U.S. 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 [the U.S. 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 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 Rich “bought” the pardon with political donations and gifts that his former wife, Denise, 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 Clinton, Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Barak.
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