Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky's "friend," stated on her resume that she had been an "operations assistant" to Delta Force at Fort Bragg and an "administrative assistant" at U.S. Army Intelligence headquarters at Fort Meade.  Linda Tripp described her Army intelligence work as being an "assistant to the director, handling correspondence, tracking of classified case files ... assisted in the coordination of a far reaching political, international mission."  In her testimony before the Senate Whitewater Committee in 1995, Tripp said:  "I've worked on the covert side of the Department of Defense..."  Beyond that she wouldn't elaborate, saying "the nature of this position is classified."  Tripp also speaks German fluently, suggesting intelligence training.

The CIA and the Pentagon have a history of placing intelligence operatives in low-level staff positions at the White House.*  Tripp was originally hired by the Bush administration and, under Clinton, was one of the few holdovers, serving as an assistant to the White House Counsel, the office of Vince Foster.  Given what is now known about Tripp's exploits, it is likely that she was a mole in the Counsel office, passing information to the Pentagon and/or the CIA.

With Vince Foster's "suicide" in 1993, right-wing pundits -- notably Christopher Ruddy and his employer, CIA-connected billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife -- began to circulate stories that Foster's death was not a suicide, but rather a murder and that President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary were behind it.  However, others have intimated that, instead of the Clintons, it is suspected intelligence operative Linda Tripp who should be scrutinized, having been the last person in the White House to see Vince Foster alive.  Indeed, it was Linda Tripp who served Vince Foster his last meal, a cheeseburger and some M&M's, which she brought to him on a cafeteria tray.

The fact that Linda Tripp's resume included a stint as an operations assistant to Delta Force has raised eyebrows.  According to NBC investigative reporter, Robert Windrem, Delta Force personnel have, over the years, been recruited by the CIA’s Special Activities Staff (SAS) for use in assassinations.

If foul play was involved in Foster's death, a possible motive would be Foster's role in the White House travel office firings.  In early 1993, as the president's wife, Hillary Clinton was putting together her Health Task Force, details of the plan began to leak to the press.  The First Lady regarded such leaks as an attempt by conservative forces to derail health care reform.  Hillary Clinton suspected that the source of the leaks was the White House travel office and, in response, summoned her former law office partner, Vince Foster to investigate.

As Vince Foster began examining the affairs of the travel office and its director Billy Dale, Foster discovered that Dale had secured a no-bid contract from the charter company, Airline of the Americas (UltrAir).  Dale told aviation broker Harry Thomason that "no combination of price or service" could convince him to accept bids from any other charter firm, even though the GAO suggested that as many as fourteen airlines would have been interested in bidding for the travel office business.

UltrAir -- which allegedly shipped weapons to the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s -- was financed by Geneva-based Potomac Capital, a front company created by George H. W. Bush when he was CIA Director in 1976.  After UltrAir fell into financial difficulties, President Bush leased the planes for White House use in a highly questionable deal.

Given Billy Dale's special relationship with UltrAir, and UltrAir's CIA dealings, Hillary Clinton's suspicions about moles in the travel office appeared to be on firm ground.  In May 1993, Billy Dale and the travel office's six other employees were discharged.

Right-wing pundits reacted with outrage to the travel office firings, including columnists at the Wall Street Journal, who attacked Vince Foster in a series of editorials.

Some time later, Clinton loyalists began to suspect that Linda Tripp was also a mole.  In March 1994, the new White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler removed Linda Tripp from the Counsel office, replacing her with another assistant.  Tripp was described by one White House co-worker as a "dangerous commodity" and a "loose cannon."

In August 1994, Linda Tripp left the White House and immediately landed a job at the Pentagon as a "public affairs specialist," a position that curiously had no job description.  The Pentagon paid Tripp an annual salary of $69,427, an increase of $20,000 a year over her old White House salary.  Two years later, the Pentagon increased Tripp's salary to $88,000.

Meanwhile in June 1995, twenty-one-year-old Monica Lewinsky was hired as an intern at the White House.  Ten months later, Lewinsky transferred out of the White House and "coincidentally" got job at the Pentagon in the same public affairs office where suspected intelligence operative Linda Tripp was working.

Linda Tripp befriended Lewinsky who soon confided to Tripp that she was having an affair with President Clinton.  As their "friendship" developed, Lewinsky shared details of the affair with Tripp in numerous telephone conversations.  Tripp secretly tape recorded these conversations and later turned over the recordings to Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation.

Ken Starr decided to make public the explicit details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.  With the character assassination of President Clinton at full throttle, right-wing forces in the media and society attempted to turn public opinion against Clinton and pressure him into resigning.  However, a majority of Americans continued to support the President.  When Clinton refused to resign, he faced impeachment by a Republican led Congress.  President Clinton survived impeachment and went on to complete his second term.

*Another documented case of Pentagon spying on the White House occurred during the Nixon administration.  It "...involved a young enlisted Navy man named Charles Radford, who shuttled between offices in the Pentagon and the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) as an admiral's assistant.  Unbeknownst to White House staff, he had been collecting countless documents from White House wastebaskets, burn bags, and mailroom sources and passing them on to his superior [Admiral Rembrandt Robinson] at the Pentagon....   A little more than a year later, thousands of pages of material -- photocopied and returned to the desks or burn bags from whence they came -- lay in Pentagon safes.  They ranged from NSC policy papers and minutes of confidential meetings to information about White House plans for troop withdrawals from Vietnam.  [Admiral] Robinson felt the spying was warranted.  It is one of the ironies of the Nixon administration that the president -- whose intemperate anti-communist rhetoric had been part of the political lexicon since the McCarthy era -- became a skillful proponent of a whole litany of efforts that the Pentagon viewed with apprehension.  They included nuclear arms control, Vietnam troop reductions, and the improvement of diplomatic ties with communist China and the Soviet Union."
Richard Lamb, George magazine, "Tale of the Shadow Chaser," October 1998

"The in-house coalition of conservatives who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger moves toward detente in 1972 was similar to the one which opposed the Kennedy-Harriman detente initiatives in 1963.  It still included [counterintelligence chief] James Angleton in the CIA, who in the 1960s had suspected Harriman of being a Soviet spy, and who in the 1970s reportedly 'objectively' believed Kissinger to be a Soviet spy.'"
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK