Flying Blind

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Whether or not it involves cronyism and cover-up, the affair of the White House travel office is a tale of ineptitude by officials who blindly followed bureaucratic rules. It begins with a phone call on Wednesday, May 12, from associate White House counsel William Kennedy to James Bourke, head of the FBI unit that conducts investigations of presidential nominees. Kennedy, a former law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton, spoke vaguely about problems at the travel office, which charters flights for reporters accompanying the President and makes airline and hotel reservations for Executive Office aides. Would the FBI take a look?

Bourke and his colleagues decided they should at least find out what Kennedy was talking about. Over the next two days, four FBI agents visited the White House. They were shown a pile of checks -- totaling $18,200 according to a subsequent audit -- made out to "cash" but not recorded on the travel office's books. Also, a source familiar with the investigation told TIME, Catherine Cornelius, a distant cousin of President Clinton's who was working there, informed the agents she had heard that a travel-office employee had solicited a kickback from Miami Air International, which flew eight White House press charters in 1992.

The $18,200 could have gone unrecorded because of slipshod accounting, and the kickback allegation was hearsay. In fact, Ross Fischer, head of Miami Air, has told TIME neither he nor his staff was ever asked for a kickback. There were grounds, however, for a closer look. By Friday afternoon, May 14, the agents were reporting to Joseph Gangloff, head of the Justice Department section concerned with the integrity of public officials. He authorized what the FBI regarded as a "preliminary" inquiry to continue.

Up to this point, everyone's actions had been perfectly appropriate. No one realized the probers might poke into a political hornet's nest. But as the world shortly learned, Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, a pal of the President's, had been trying to get friends of his cut in on the charter action, and Clinton's cousin Cornelius had proposed a reorganization of the travel office, with herself at its head.

White House aides did not even notify Attorney General Janet Reno of the case's sensitivity. Their reason: while written guidelines specify that the head of the Justice Department must be told about any "pending" FBI investigation requested by the White House, they considered the travel-office inquiry to be merely a "potential" investigation. Gangloff did write a memo to his boss, John Keeney, who sent a short "alert" message to Reno, but she apparently never read it. Aides say the Attorney General gets five or six "alerts" a day, many about routine matters, and that there was nothing to single out the Keeney memo for special attention.

FBI officials insist they were as shocked as anyone else when the White House on May 19 fired the entire seven-person travel-office staff without any proof or even formal accusation of wrongdoing. The White House got the FBI to confirm that it was investigating the travel office, as official guidelines permit if another agency or "credible person" first breaks the news. But on Friday, May 21, as reporters' questions became far more persistent, John Collingwood, head of the FBI press office, was summoned from lunch to an impromptu meeting at the White House. With communications director George Stephanopoulos, press secretary Dee Dee Myers and White House aide David Levy, Collingwood worked out a statement the FBI insists was intended only to guide officials responding to journalists' questions. To the FBI's dismay, the White House trumpeted it to the world.

By Monday morning, May 24, calls were flooding into Reno's office, and the Attorney General asked press aide Carl Stern to find out how the FBI had become involved. On getting his report, says an associate, Reno "wheeled in her chair and called Bernie Nussbaum" in the White House counsel's office. Calmly but firmly, she insisted that "potential" as well as "pending" investigations be cleared through her. Nussbaum's reply: "We didn't do anything wrong, but it won't happen again."

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington