Was Hillary Clinton's Husband a CIA Student Informant in the 1960s?

In the 1960s, most U.S. anti-war activists worked for the defeat of the 1964 Republican Party presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet in 1964 (according to a 1996 book written by a former senior aide to 1984 Democratic Party presidential nominee Walter Mondale named Roger Morris, titled Partners In Power), Hillary Clinton “to the delight of her parents, joined the campaign as an official Goldwater Girl, wearing her straw boater and sash to rallies, briskly canvassing the already solid Republican neighborhood” in which she lived in Park Ridge, Illinois. Four years later, she also worked for the 1968 presidential campaign of New York Republican Goverrnor Nelson Rockefeller, which most U.S. anti-war activists opposed.

In the 1960s, most U.S. anti-war activists also felt that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] should be abolished and that the CIA should not be allowed to recruit student informants on U.S. or foreign campuses. Yet the husband of 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, apparently may have worked during the 1960s as a CIA informant. According to Roger Morris’ Partners In Power book:

“`Bill Clinton’s ties to the intelligence community go back all the way to Oxford and come forward from there,' says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since destroyed…

“…The Central Intelligence Agency’s infamous Operation Chaos of the 1960s had been directed at uncovering some discrediting foreign hand in antiwar activities at home and abroad, to the point of recruiting American student informants…

“According to at least two former agency station chiefs and two more deputies who received the instructions and directed such covert operations, the inducements for the young informers ranged from cash payments to help with local draft boards and even promised deferments to more general and sweeping proffers of future help and influence with careers. `I could get them some money and accommodations if they needed it and see that selective service stayed off their backs,’ said one former CIA officer. `And most case officers were telling these young men…the agency’s in a position to help at some point in their careers, there’d be an institutional memory. The Rhodes and Fulbrights and others…knew the advantages of helping out.’…

“…There was a standing agreement between the CIA and their London counterparts not to conduct covert operations on one another’s home territory…According to several accounts of CIA officers on the scene in 1967-70, Operation Chaos evaded the secret intelligence agreement through an elaborate ruse in which the station at the US embassy in London arranged to contact certain American students at Oxford, Cambridge, and elsewhere and to be `turned down,’ with word of the attempted recruitment then leaking to the British…`In fact,’ remembered a ranking CIA case officer, `we went back and got the boys for real…’

“It would all befog still more the later allegations of CIA collusion by and around Bill Clinton at Oxford. One former agency official would claim later that the future president was a full-fledged `asset,’ that he was regularly `debriefed,’ and thus that he informed on his American friends in the peace movement in Britain. Similarly, he was said to have informed on draft resisters in Sweden during his brief trip there with Father McSorley…

“One more CIA retiree would recall going through archives of Operation Chaos at the Langley headquarters—part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s—and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant who had gone on to run for or be elected to a political office of some import, in Clinton’s case attorney general of Arkansas. `He was there in the records,’ the former agent said, `with special designation.’ Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft.”…

Book II of the U.S. Senate’s Final Repot of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, titled Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans and released in 1976, contained the following reference to the CIA’s Operation Chaos program:

“Under White House pressure, the CIA developed its own program—Operation CHAOS—as an adjunct to the CIA’s foreign counterintelligence activities…The first CHAOS instructions to CIA station chiefs in August 1967 described the need for `keeping tabs on radical students and U.S. Negro expatriates as well as travelers passing through certain select areas abroad.’…”

In a footnote to his book, the author of Partners In Power, Roger Morris, noted that “interviews on the issue of Clinton and the CIA were arranged in part through organizations of retired intelligence officers and other national security officials and included former ranking members of the CIA stations in London, Stockholm, Paris and Moscow, as well as some who served at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, during the late 1960s and who were familiar with the Operation Chaos files.”

Next: SNCC Freedom Singer Matt Jones: A 1994 Downtown Interview—Part 1