Consider The Source

By Jay Peterzell/Washington

In citing Scott Barnes as a key source for his bizarre dirty-tricks charges, Ross Perot described him as a former "contract employee for the CIA." That's an exaggeration. But if Perot is confused about Barnes' real identity, so is Barnes.

The 38-year-old Arizona dress-shop owner first came to the attention of the national press in 1982, when he claimed to have taken part in a covert mission into Laos the previous year. Barnes' story: his team found two American soldiers in a Laotian prison camp but were unable to rescue them. The team radioed the CIA's headquarters, and the agency ordered them to kill the men. ABC's Nightline planned a three-part series on the story but later dropped the project, as did the Los Angeles Times, which sent two reporters to Thailand in a vain effort to verify the tale.

Barnes claimed to have worked at various times for the CIA, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration. In April 1982, he said U.S. advisers in El Salvador were poisoning streams and experimenting with chemical warfare. Two years later, he surfaced in the case of Ronald Rewald, a Hawaiian banker who was in jail at the time facing fraud charges in connection with the collapse of his investment firm. Rewald had also provided cover for the CIA, and said the agency had engineered his troubles. In September 1984, ABC News reported Barnes' claim that the CIA helped him get a job as a Honolulu prison guard so that he could spy on Rewald. Barnes said the agency had then ordered him to kill the banker. ABC later admitted it could not substantiate the story. In 1988, after Barnes published a book about his adventures in Laos, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a rare public statement calling the work "rife with total fabrications" and denying that Barnes had ever worked for any federal intelligence agency.

Barnes now claims that he taped conversations with a former top defense official seeking damaging information on Perot. The only sign that there may be something to Barnes' charge is Bush campaign counsel Bobby Burchfield's refusal to say whether the ex-official is associated with the election effort.

Barnes' links with Perot are equally murky. On July 1, Perot told a Senate committee in a secret deposition that the two men had never met, but said Barnes called him once or twice a year. Then, on Aug. 5, Perot's security guards caught Barnes in the billionaire's Dallas headquarters after hours. According to Perot, Barnes said the Republicans had hired him to wiretap the Texan's computers and ruin Perot financially so he could not run again. "Maybe it doesn't make sense," Perot said when asked why he had not made these charges public until now. "But that's me."