Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (51 page)

This harsh and amusing judgment is borne out in Evans-Pritchard’s book, where time and again he is struck by the inner nobility and true bravery of anyone, however problematic his background and improbable his story, who implicates the Clintons in crime and sordid behavior. Evans-Pritchard’s credulity, naturally enough, was followed by paranoia. Brock writes:

“One night . . . I visited Ambrose at his home in the Maryland suburbs to hear about his latest scoop. This one involved Clinton’s alleged abuse of the penal system in Arkansas, where Ambrose said that he compelled prison warders to make inmates available to him for his sexual gratification. . . . When [I] arrived at the house, a sparsely furnished suburban rambler, Ambrose drew the shades and asked if [I] had been followed. The CIA, he was sure, had tapped his phones, and he believed his house was under surveillance by the Clintons’ ‘death squads.’ A few minutes into the conversation, it was apparent to me that poor Ambrose had lost his grip on reality.”
¹⁶

Lies, Spies, and Stings Gone Wrong

The Secret Life
begins in Waco, Texas, in April 1993. To most of the watching world, uninitiated in the Clinton felonies, the mishandled storming of the compound of the Branch Davidian sect of David Koresh seemed the outcome of a regrettable mix of cultism, propensity for groups to carry firearms and to use them against the authorities (four Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents had been killed during a raid in February—a rather high number for a peacetime operation), and pressure on the authorities to bring the consequent fifty-one-day siege to an end. Not quite fifteen years earlier in Guyana, supporters of the cult leader Jim Jones had killed an investigating U.S. congressman on a local airstrip, and Jones then organized the mass suicide and murder by poisoning in which more than nine hundred perished. That the government should want to terminate the siege in Waco was understandable. The bloody ending, however, was fraught with contradictory claims about how necessary a final assault really was, and about the circumstances in which seventy-five Davidians met their deaths.

Evans-Pritchard was in little doubt that a crime had been committed by the federal authorities, and that this had been subsequently covered up in their attempts at self-exculpation. To him the events at Waco could be seen as having provoked further armed extremism among other parts of the millenarian American underground. “Every salient fact put forward by the Clinton administration about Waco is a lie,” he wrote, adding, in almost religious tones, “There has to be a ritual expurgation of some kind if the open wound of Waco is ever to heal.”
¹⁷

Of course, that “ritual expurgation” had in some people’s minds already happened, two years before the publication of Evans-Pritchard’s book and two years to the day after the end of the Waco siege. Accordingly, the first seven chapters of the book are devoted to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, and to the propositions that those convicted for the crime, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, had not acted alone, and that the bombing had been either part of a government sting operation that had gone wrong and then had to be covered up, or a deliberate false-flag atrocity, conducted with the objective of justifying draconian antiterrorist legislation. Readers may now recognize this trope from elsewhere in this book.

Readers may also recognize a familiar tone in the claim made by another writer that “many an ‘expert’ and many an expert believe that McVeigh neither built nor detonated the bomb that blew up a large part of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. . . . Evidence, however, is overwhelming that there was a plot involving militia types and government infiltrators—who knows?—as prime movers to create panic in order to get Clinton to sign that infamous Anti-Terrorism Act.”
¹⁸

Writing in the September 2001 edition of
Vanity Fair
—copies of which one may imagine being incinerated in offices and waiting rooms in the Twin Towers—Gore Vidal nodded toward the “Opus Dei conspiracy” in the Justice Department and the “FBI conspiracy” over Waco. He pointed out that “no less than a retired Air Force general has promoted the theory that in addition to Mr. McVeigh’s truck bomb, there were bombs inside the building.” Vidal also referred to the anger of the mother of two children lost in Oklahoma City when she was told that no Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents had been killed in the explosion. The woman, Edye Smith, was said to have asked: “Did the A.T.F. have a warning sign? I mean, did they think it might be a bad day to go into the office? They had an option not to go to work that day, and my kids didn’t get that option.” The ATF, noted Vidal, “has a number of explanations. The latest: five employees were in the offices, unhurt.” There was also the fact, not mentioned by Vidal, that the ATF offices were in the part of the building least affected by the blast.

The unsatisfactory dearth of ATF fatalities was only one component of Vidal’s insinuated argument that Timothy McVeigh was a patsy. Books by men who (long after the article was published) turned out to be mad, newsletters quoting unnamed and untraceable “Pentagon analysts,” and anonymous sources “close to” unpublished and unseen reports made up the bulk of the evidence. The rest was Vidal’s instinct that McVeigh (whom, Capote style, he saw to his death) had been a rather noble figure—practically Kiplingesque—taking the full rap for an event that should be best and most positively seen as “a wake-up call to a federal government deeply hated, it would seem, by millions.” Vidal ended with what might be termed a cry for a better narrative: “Finally, the fact that the McVeigh-Nichols scenario makes no sense at all suggests that yet again, we are confronted with a ‘perfect’ crime—thus far.” The perfect crime being, of course, the work of the successfully hidden hand.

Vidal, like Philip J. Berg, was an equal-opportunity conspiracist, and was comfortable whether accusing FDR, Harry Truman, LBJ, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush of complex and dastardly secret acts for various nefarious purposes—usually as pretexts for war or domestic crackdowns. Evans-Pritchard, writing four or five years earlier, had no such history, but when it came to Oklahoma he essentially shared Vidal’s view. Having spoken to and, almost inevitably, come to admire a number of those dissatisfied with the “official” explanation for the bombing, Evans-Pritchard had immersed himself in militia culture and its strange attendant world of latter-day Nazis, cultists, racists, weaponry, and drugs, to attempt to explain why the trial of McVeigh had been “skillfully managed [by unspecified persons] to ensure that collateral revelations were kept to a minimum.”
¹⁹
After ninety pages Evans-Pritchard reached the conclusions that a German named Andreas Strassmeir was the key to the affair, and that Strassmeir had been a spy for the German government whose job was to infiltrate a militia community called Elohim City “to find out whether the US neo-Nazi movement had the capability or intent to graduate to weapons of mass destruction.” According to Evans-Pritchard, “A high-level counterintelligence operation of this kind would explain why Elohim City was being protected, even though it was engaged in every weapons violation in the US code, not to mention manifest sedition.”
²⁰
As a result of this toleration, a group called the Aryan Republican Army—presumably with the knowledge of the cowardly ATF (whose members seem peculiarly dispensable in modern American culture)—had carried out the bombing. Official persons unknown had organized for these truths to be covered up, to the intense distress of those brave interviewees who had worked with Evans-Pritchard.

The Killing Fields

None of this, however, compared with the obscenity of Clintonian Arkansas as revealed by some of her doughtier citizens to the horrified Englishman. In six chapters these admirable and brave characters dish the dirt on orgies, drug-smuggling, drug-taking, and murders indulged in, covered up, or possibly initiated by Clinton and the Dixie Mafia. Chapter 17 of Evans-Pritchard’s book, “Death Squad,” concerns the case of the boys on the tracks, two teenagers from Alexander, Arkansas, who were found dead on railway lines in 1987; their deaths, originally ascribed to marijuana-induced misadventure, were later diagnosed as murders. Evans-Pritchard found people to testify that the two had stumbled across a drug shipment organized by a Clinton associate, and had therefore been eliminated. The FBI, he was informed by a “charming, educated” woman with a “strong sense of duty,” knew who had done it, but couldn’t take it to trial. This was a shame, because “already people associated with the case were beginning to die in what amounted to a reign of terror among young people in Alexander. . . . Keith Coney, who told his mother he knew too much about the railway deaths . . . died in a motor-cycle accident after a high-speed chase. . . . Bonnie Bearden, a friend of the boys, disappeared. His body was never found. Jeff Rhode, another friend, was killed with a gunshot to the head in April 1989. And on it went. The killing fields.”
²¹
As it happens, a successful libel case brought by two police officers accused by various right-wing sources of involvement in the tracks murders became the occasion of Joseph Farah’s perilous visit to the South in 1999.

Perhaps the best illustration of the Evans-Pritchard approach to investigative journalism concerned the September 1993 murder of Jerry Parks, a “security executive” from suburban Little Rock, who was shot and killed in his Chevrolet Caprice while returning from a Mexican restaurant he regularly patronized with his wife, Jane. She was not with him at the time, and it wasn’t until a little later that she spoke to Evans-Pritchard about her husband’s murder.

The reason the
Sunday Telegraph
man was interested was that back in 1992, Parks had had the contract for managing security at Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock. Evans-Pritchard had already met one of Parks’s sons, Gary, in a Little Rock hotel, accompanied by the twenty-three-year-old’s security detail. Gary informed Evans-Pritchard that his father had maintained a file detailing Clinton’s infidelities, based on his own surveillance operations. In 1988, Jerry had taken the teenage Gary with him on “nocturnal missions” to stake out Clinton’s trysts. One day Gary had come across some of these files, and sure enough, there were photographs of the priapic governor with various women.

The files had evidently survived for nearly half a decade and a whole presidential campaign when, just two months before Jerry’s murder, there had been a “sophisticated” burglary at the Parks residence, and the whole lot had been stolen, never to be seen again.

It is hard, when describing Evan-Pritchard’s willingness to believe such a transparent, almost schoolboyish tale, not to be rude. Absolutely none of this story makes sense, and it couldn’t—by its very nature—be substantiated.

Or could it? Sometime later Mrs. Parks opened her heart to the “outsider” journalist. The process took no less than three years, during which she elaborated on a story that was far more than sensational, and incrementally recalled “details that had been repressed and buried.” Her account, Evans-Pritchard admitted, “confronted me with a journalistic dilemma of the first order. Certain episodes could be corroborated, which established a pattern of veracity, but the most shocking allegations were based on her word alone. I made an intuitive decision to publish. At times the moral imperatives of reportage require one to violate the Columbia School codex.”
²²
Clearly his bosses shared his intuitions, and agreed on the moral imperative of running truly head-turning, banner-headline stories on the uncorroborated say-so of a woman apparently uncovering repressed memories.

But what a woman. His Jane Parks is “a slender, elegant brunette, with high cheekbones and a Scots-Irish look about her. . . . Tanned and carefully made up, with a soft southern voice, she is undoubtedly an attractive woman.” A woman who, it transpired, also turned out to have firsthand knowledge of just what a debauched Lothario Bill Clinton really was. Back in the summer of 1984, she had been the manager of an apartment complex called Vantage Point. While there she was told to take care of Roger Clinton, the ne’er-do-well drug-taking brother of the governor. She put him in a corporate suite, room B107, which had been part of a still larger space, now divided “by a thin partition.” The utility of this arrangement became clear when the governor himself came to call on Roger, as he did many times, usually in the middle of the afternoon. Jane, whose office seems to have been housed in the other part of the divided room, “soon learned to distinguish between the voices of the two brothers behind the thin partition.” She could, for example, hear them discussing the quality of the marijuana available, with Bill commenting, “This is really good shit.” Then this:

“It was just not marijuana either. Two or three times a week the Governor was buoying his spirits with a snort of Kid Brother’s Colombian rock. The repartee was coming through the vents. She was as certain as if she had been in the suite herself. Sometimes the two brothers were alone. Sometimes young women were invited to join, and the little party was consummated with raucous orgasms. The bed was pressed up against the partition wall, just a few feet from the desk of Mrs. Parks. On two occasions she heard the Governor copulating on the bed. Who the visitors were, exactly, she did not know. But some of them appeared surprisingly young.”
²³

Mrs. Parks’s hearing—allowing for the thinness of the partition—seems to have been as good as her capacity to work quietly at her desk and to muffle incoming phone calls. Somehow—perhaps because of the drugs and orgasms—no one ever seemed to suspect that she had her office barely inches away. And her perspicacity wasn’t bad, either. She told Evans-Pritchard that she had alerted her husband to the “goings-on at B107” and that Jerry had written it all down, complete with dates, license plates, and photos, which were then consigned to the same files so irrevocably lost nearly nine years later.