Above The Fray

CHIEF OF STAFF James Baker may not have "orchestrated" the fishing trip made by State Department officials through Bill Clinton's confidential passport records four weeks before the election. But he knew about it, as did his political aide Janet Mullins, says a report by Sherman Funk, the department's inspector general. And neither did anything to stop it.

The dirty tricks began in September, when Bush partisans, including White House aides, began circulating unsubstantiated rumors that Clinton had contemplated renouncing his citizenship to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Funk found no "conspiracy" to damage Clinton. But he said Steven Berry, the department's Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, coached Republican Congressman Gerald B. Solomon on how to word a Sept. 29 letter that would provide State with a fig leaf of official justification for a search of Clinton's files. The next day Elizabeth Tamposi, Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, seized on Solomon's "request" and a handful of press inquiries to justify a rushed two-day hunt through 10 sets of confidential records in Washington, London and Oslo. Funk's report makes clear that Mullins informed Baker of the searches on or around Oct. 1. When the searches proved futile, Tamposi and her colleagues suggested Clinton's files had been "tampered with" -- a claim that took the FBI seven days to dismiss. But those were seven days in which Clinton had to endure a new round of stories speculating on his character and his patriotism -- just what the White House wanted in the first place.

Tamposi lost her job, and is back home in New Hampshire. As he released the 100-page report on the affair, a visibly agitated Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger anguished, "Our reputation has been tarnished," and $ disclosed that Bush had rejected his offer to resign. Baker, ever the master of fingerprint-free hardball tactics, stayed out of sight.