MAN BEHIND THE MESS

By ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

Every political event has a Craig Livingstone standing somewhere near the stage. He's the overweight advance man who's trying to look like a Secret Service agent--the one conspiring into his cell phone and swaggering through the crowd with beepers and walkie-talkies bristling from his belt. Every campaign needs people like Livingstone; they book the hotels, hire the copy shops, polish off the buffet-table spreads and try to make others at the hotel bar think they were in the room for the big strategy session. If the candidate wins, some land staff jobs with impressive-sounding titles. In 1993, after helping prepare campaign stops for Al Gore and working on the Inauguration for Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, Livingstone got his: director of the White House Office of Personnel Security.

The title came with a basement office and little clout. Livingstone, in his mid-30s, has no law-enforcement background, and the Secret Service handles all the real security work, but it lets him stroll the corridors of power, exuding an air of mystery and importance. "Basically, my job is to be invisible," Livingstone told a reporter two years ago. "If I'm around, something's wrong."

Bill and Hillary Clinton would no doubt agree. Last week the White House was hit by disclosures that Livingstone's office had improperly gathered confidential FBI files that contained private information about 408 people, most of them Republicans who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Stored for two years in the vault behind Livingstone's desk, the reports were collected in 1993 and 1994 by Livingstone's friend Anthony Marceca, a civilian gumshoe with the Army's criminal-investigation command whom Livingstone handpicked to help process a mountain of security-clearance forms.

The White House says Marceca obtained the confidential files by mistake because the Secret Service had supplied him with an inaccurate list of holdovers from the previous administration. "The Update Project," as the effort was known, has been described as a routine attempt to create new security files for people from earlier administrations who might still need access to the complex. But the vast majority of people on the list were low- and mid-level staff members who hadn't been inside the place in years. Raising further suspicion was the presence of former staff members from Clinton's travel office who had been fired seven months before, replaced by Clinton loyalists, and investigated by the FBI on charges of misappropriation leveled by the White House. (The charges proved baseless.) Bob Dole went so far as to draw comparisons with Nixon's "enemies list" after hearing that this one was sprinkled with influential Republicans. Could the White House be digging up dirt on old foes like Bush Secretary of State James Baker?

If the charge is frivolous--the list is almost entirely made up of faceless bureaucrats--the principles at stake are not. What makes this more than just another inside-the-Beltway imbroglio is the fear that the Clinton White House may have misused the FBI just months after the Administration, in the wake of the travel-office scandal, swore such a thing would never happen again. When a President harnesses the power of America's premier law-enforcement agency to political ends, he rides roughshod over the Constitution and revisits the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. Is this what Clinton or his people were up to? There are three ways to see the story, depending on who is telling it:

The Bureaucratic Snafu. Clinton and his team are insisting it was all just an "inexcusable mistake," as chief of staff Leon Panetta called it last week. It began, in this version, with a rogue computer program that produced the erroneous Secret Service list of people whom Marceca investigated, beginning in August 1993. For each name, he sent an unsigned request form to the FBI, which responded with a confidential report. Both Marceca and his FBI contacts apparently failed to question the accuracy of the list he was working from, and his supervisor, Livingstone, failed to supervise the exercise. Marceca says he plowed down the alphabetical list from A to G and passed on to Livingstone three FBI files containing "derogatory information." It was only after Marceca left in early 1994 that his replacement discovered what had been going on. According to the White House, the requests were quickly halted and the files put into the vault behind Livingstone's desk. The White House says Livingstone looked at none of the files except the three brought to his attention.

The Freelance Operation. It is also possible, according to some of the two dozen people interviewed by TIME who know Livingstone, that the security director's love of intrigue and need for acceptance may have led him into waters too deep for his skills. (Fellow advance men used to call him Craig Flintstone.) A former restaurant bouncer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Livingstone apparently inflated his work history. He said he was the public-relations man for an Atlantic City casino, but that job requires a license, which, according to the Casino Control Commission, he never obtained. Working as a gofer and advance man for Democratic campaigns in the 1980s--it was on the 1984 Hart campaign that he met ex-cop Marceca--he became known as a teller of tall tales, often turning his bit parts into leading roles. In 1986, after working on Colorado Representative Tim Wirth's successful Senate bid, Livingstone landed a job he was happy to call "director of transition." The job consisted of moving furniture and boxes from Wirth's old office to the new one.

Once inside the White House, Livingstone continued to play the big shot. Most disturbing of his grandiose tendencies, three former Clinton staff members told TIME, was Livingstone's habit of insinuating that he had read their security files. The message, they contend, was that Livingstone knew all about their peccadilloes but their secrets were safe with him.

Several former colleagues believe that Livingstone must have noticed the list was somehow faulty--he had been in politics for a decade, after all--but that he continued to let the files come in because he enjoyed the covert thrill of it all. "I think he made a stupid mistake that mushroomed far beyond what he could have imagined," says a friend. Livingstone's lawyers deny that he was running any kind of freelance operation. He was so busy trying to process background checks on Clinton staff members, they say, that he never had time to pay attention to, or even initiate, Project Update. At the White House Friday, Livingstone signed a sworn statement saying he had not asked anyone to obtain the FBI files and that he had not disclosed the information to anyone "for any improper purpose whatsoever." But Livingstone's know-nothing defense does not seem to be winning him any points inside the White House. That Livingstone "doesn't appear to have closely overseen this operation," says associate White House counsel Mark Fabiani, "is one of the troubling things about this."

The Nefarious Plot. Whitewater conspiracy buffs will find in Livingstone a Zelig-like character who was on hand for most of the Administration's darkest moments. On the day of the travel office purge, in May 1993, he wrote the memo barring the workers from the White House. When Vincent Foster committed suicide, in July 1993, he accompanied associate counsel William Kennedy III to identify the body. The next morning, two Secret Service agents said, they saw Livingstone leaving the elevator that connected to Foster's office suite with a briefcase and box of loose-leaf binders (Livingstone denied removing documents from Foster's office). Because of these provocative appearances, Livingstone was deposed by various investigatory panels, including the Senate Whitewater Committee, and ran up enormous legal bills. (He has started a defense fund.) The investigators focused on better-connected figures after concluding, in the words of a committee source, that Livingstone was "more or less clueless."

But that picture does not match the one offered last week by Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who spent five years assigned to the White House. He describes Livingstone as someone who seemed to be executing orders from higher-ups--his bosses during the Administration's first year were Kennedy and White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, both staunch Hillary Clinton allies--in a White House that repeatedly violated the rules surrounding background investigations of White House employees. In an account that appeared on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Aldrich charged that staff members considered trustworthy by the Clintons could avoid background checks while permanent White House employees "whose loyalty to the Clintons was in question" were subjected to security investigations years before their periodic re-investigations were due. When Aldrich tried to stop the practice, he says, Livingstone "effectively told me to mind my own business."

Last Friday the FBI released its own report admitting that it and the White House had committed "egregious violations of privacy." But while the report spread the blame equally between the two sides of the copy flow, director Louis Freeh seemed to pin it mostly on the Clinton camp. "The prior system of providing files to the White House relied on good faith and honor,'' he said. "Unfortunately, the FBI and I were victimized." Agent Aldrich has refused to provide details about his own allegations, but that may happen as early as next week when William Clinger, chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, will hold hearings on the matter.

It was Clinger who uncovered Filegate as he sought to get to the bottom of Travelgate. His committee had been seeking 3,000 pages of White House documents related to the travel office. The committee managed last month to reel in 1,000 of those pages, which contained the first evidence of the latest escapade. Clinger is threatening to hold the White House in contempt if it does not release the next 2,000 pages. The Clintons may be wondering whether another Livingstone is lurking among those dusty documents. Or they may already know.

--With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister, Mark Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington

With reporting by J.F.O. MCALLISTER, MARK THOMPSON AND ADAM ZAGORIN/WASHINGTON