Unmasking the Biggest Clinton Scandal of All
Unmasking the Biggest Clinton Scandal of All
Clinton cover-ups have been a feature of American political life for over three decades, but this Top Secret one mattered the most
Bill Clinton has been a national political figure since the summer of 1988 when, as Arkansas governor, he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. That speech was long and boring, but it made Bill someone to watch in politics, a fresh centrist face among Boomer Democrats, which eventually resulted in his election as president in 1992.
Since then, the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, have been surrounded by myriad scandals and related cover-ups, of varying degrees of seriousness and veracity. Bill’s scandals alone could fill volumes: Troopergate. Whitewater. “Bimbo eruptions.” Accusations of serious sexual impropriety. Chinagate. White House intern shenanigans resulting in his impeachment. Since leaving the presidency over two decades ago, Bill’s efforts to clean up his stained reputation have been marred by more infractions, most infamously his gaining gold member status on the late Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”
For her part, Hillary has added her own indiscretions and misrepresentations. The Benghazi affair. Questionable foreign fundraising. That bathroom classified email server. Her calling much of the country “deplorables.” Hillary’s a less successful politician than her husband, but she’s absorbed scandals in her own right.
Democrats have always insisted that Republican witch-hunting against the Clintons was purely partisan, transforming misunderstanding molehills into scandalous mountains. There’s undeniable truth to that accusation. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Team Clinton insisted was out to get them wasn’t merely a figment of the liberal imagination. In hindsight, many of the Clintonian indiscretions that got so much attention during Bill’s presidency seem minor compared to the raucous scandals plaguing American politics today.
That said, nobody has ever ranked the Clintons among the more ethical people in politics. Moreover, Bill and Hillary possess the well-honed habit of acting in shady ways which make people want to investigate them. Take the 1993 death of Vince Foster, the White House deputy counsel and a longtime friend of the Clintons, who was found dead in a park outside Washington, DC, with a gunshot to the head, just a few months after Bill Clinton entered the Oval Office. There was never any evidence that Foster’s death was anything other than suicide, but Team Clinton’s obfuscations and secretiveness about the affair led to doubts. Three decades ago, right-wing media was awash with wild claims of a White House murder plot against Foster.
In 1996, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was killed, along with 34 others, when his U.S. Air Force jetliner collided with a mountainside in Croatia in bad weather, and his perfectly explainable, if sad, death likewise became fodder for conspiracy theorists. In time, this mania grew into the supposed “Clinton death list” which has percolated on the kook fringe of the Internet for decades. There’s a direct line from such tinfoil-hattery to the Russian intelligence fabrication in 2016 that DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary’s death squad to hide “the truth” about DNC emails being put online by WikiLeaks after they were hacked by Russian intelligence.
It's therefore tempting to dismiss all claims of Clintonian scandals and cover-ups as overblown when not simply invented by their many political enemies. That would be incorrect. Some of those scandals and cover-ups were quite real. Moreover, the biggest one of all has been hidden from the public for decades. I’ll explain it to you in one sentence (then in detail):
In 1996, President Bill Clinton was nearly assassinated by Al-Qa’ida.
That’s a shocking statement, particularly because it’s very likely that you, dear reader, have never heard this. That’s because very few people know about it, by design.
Assassinations are a tragic fact of American politics. Four presidents have been murdered by assassins: Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Several presidents narrowly dodged death. Ronald Reagan was gravely wounded by a madman’s bullet in 1981. In 1950, Harry Truman was nearly gunned down by Puerto Rican radicals. Gerald Ford was attacked by two thankfully incompetent deranged young women less than three weeks apart in 1975.
The common denominator is that all these assassins and would-be assassins were Americans. No president has been felled by foreign actors. All these unfortunate events can be classified as domestic terrorism. The Al-Qa’ida attempt to murder Bill Clinton in 1996 remains the sole effort by foreign assassins that came close to killing a sitting American president.* For that reason alone, this incident should be well known. Why it isn’t will become clearer as I explain this long-hidden event and the resulting cover-up.
On Nov. 23, 1996, just three weeks after winning reelection, President Bill Clinton landed in Manila. He traveled to the Philippines to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a major diplomatic event with emphasis on boosting trade with China. Press accounts at the time noted that security surrounding the summit was tight, with 26,000 police and soldiers deployed to protect the event and its attendees. The State Department warned Americans in Manila for APEC to be on guard against possible terrorist attacks. The Philippines had more than one terrorist group operating on its territory.
However, nothing nefarious happened during Clinton’s visit, at least as far as the media was concerned. The truth was less pleasant. The president had narrowly dodged a terrorist attack, thanks to timely intelligence and quick action by the Secret Service. It’s not widely publicized that whenever an American president travels abroad, he takes not just a robust Secret Service team with him, but also spooks from Intelligence Community agencies to provide an extra layer of protection from assassins.
The media was mum about what happened in Manila but in the late 1990s it was common knowledge in certain highly secretive corners of the Intelligence Community that something most unpleasant was thwarted in the Philippines on Nov. 23, 1996. I heard the story, in fact a colleague of mine had been involved in what transpired in Manila that day, so I got the full version of events. It was a remarkable tale of spies and cops working effectively to save President Clinton’s life. However, the account was classified Top Secret, so the public didn’t hear about it.
Over the years, fragments of this astonishing event appeared in the media, but they never got much attention. In 1998, a mainstream media outlet ran a story that President Clinton was targeted by Al-Qa’ida during his visit to Manila in November 1996 (the piece erroneously said 1994). Ramzi Yousef, the jihadist who was convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing in New York, was said to be behind the plot to blow up the president, probably on the orders of Osama bin Laden himself. Tight security prevented the attack, however. The Clinton administration had kept mum about what happened in Manila. That initial press account had inaccuracies but was partly true.
Then, in 2009, a fuller account of the Manila incident appeared as a sidebar in Ken Gormley’s book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Lewis Merletti, who headed the Secret Service from 1997 to 1999 and was in Manila with Clinton as the head of the presidential protective detail when the terrorist plot was thwarted, spilled the Top Secret beans to Gormley. Per Merletti, the presidential motorcade was headed to a late-afternoon meeting with a senior Philippine government official. Clinton was running late, as was standard, and he ordered the driver to get him moving, fast. At that point, Merletti received an alarming message: U.S. intelligence operatives in Manila had intercepted communications from suspected terrorists which included the ominous terms “bridge” and “wedding” – latter being jihadist lingo for an attack. Clinton’s motorcade route that afternoon included a bridge.
Unnerved, Merletti asked the spies if they had any more information. They did not. Merletti made the snap decision that the motorcade had to proceed via an alternate route to avoid that bridge. The president was upset by this, since it meant a longer drive and an even later start to his next meeting. However, Merletti stood his ground even when his discussion with Clinton included “strong language.” It’s the Secret Service’s job to protect the president even when the president doesn’t like it. The motorcade took the alternate route.
Intelligence personnel were immediately dispatched to the bridge in question, located in downtown Manila. Explosives experts discovered a bomb placed on the bridge’s underside that was big enough to take out the entire presidential motorcade. Merletti added that the thwarted assassination attempt was hidden from the public, classified Top Secret, with only some Intelligence Community personnel being aware of what happened. The IC’s assessment was that the bomb plot was indeed the handiwork of Al-Qa’ida, and it was masterminded by Osama bin Laden himself.
This sensational story got remarkably little press coverage, even with Merletti divulging the essential events. No major American journalists bothered to pursue the Manila incident, the day that SIGINT and the Secret Service together saved President Clinton’s life. It would take more than a decade for a significant reporter to dig into this saga. Finally, Reuters national security journalist Jonathan Landay, an award-winning correspondent, executed the overdue deep dive into the Manila incident. It was published in late March, lifting the curtain on what happened on Nov. 23, 1996, while raising troubling questions about the cover-up.
Landay’s account amplifies and corrects previous reports. He got eight retired Secret Service agents, seven of whom were in Manila that day, to reveal their versions of the incident. These accounts largely align with Merletti’s recollection. A quick SIGINT tip mentioning a “wedding across a bridge” from suspected jihadists led Merletti to alter the president’s route, narrowly dodging a terrorist attack. In addition to the bomb, investigators discovered a red Mitsubishi Pajero SUV abandoned at the far end of the bridge. They found AK-47 assault rifles inside the vehicle, suggesting that the jihadists planned to block the bridge with the SUV and open fire on the motorcade, in coordination with the bomb explosion. Landay uncovered that the bomb itself wasn’t under the bridge, rather it was found atop an electrical box on one of the three bridges along Clinton’s original motorcade route. The improvised explosive device consisted of armor-piercing rifle-propelled grenades atop a box containing TNT wired to a Nokia phone rigged as a detonator. Landay’s report includes the Intelligence Community assessment that Al-Qa’ida and Osama bin Laden were behind the assassination plot, which may have involved Ramzi Yousef in the early planning stages.
The big reveal in Landay’s analysis is how little the Clinton administration did about the near-death of the president at the hands of foreign terrorists. The incident was covered up completely outside highly classified channels. Neither was there any investigation of the plot. As Landay put it, “Reuters found no evidence of a U.S. government investigation into the attempt on Clinton's life.” Even those involved in the incident remain puzzled, nearly three decades later, about the cover-up:
“I always wondered why I wasn't kept back to stay in Manila to monitor any investigation,” said Gregory Glod, the lead Secret Service intelligence agent in Manila and one of seven agents who spoke out for the first time. “Instead, they flew me out the day after Clinton left.”
“There was an incident,” said Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “It remains classified.”
Four former U.S. officials, including the ambassador in Manila at the time, Thomas Hubbard, confirmed the foiled attack to Reuters but said they were also unaware of any U.S. investigation or follow-up actions.
Nobody in Washington had much to say to Reuters. The FBI and several other agencies declined any comment on the incident, while Bill Clinton did not respond to multiple attempts by Landay to reach him through his spokesperson and the Clinton Foundation. Although it’s been a crime since 1986 for a foreign extremist organization to attempt to kill any U.S. national overseas, there is no evidence that the FBI, the Justice Department, or any entity, conducted any investigation into the Manila incident. It was simply swept under the rug.
Presumably the cover-up was authorized by President Clinton himself. It’s not difficult to ascertain why Bill might not want his near-death experience in the Philippines at the hands of Al-Qa’ida publicly discussed. In the first place, the Clinton administration considered the threat of foreign terrorism, especially Islamist, to be an unhelpful issue for them, politically. Domestic terrorism was another matter. The Apr. 19, 1995, destruction of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City by a massive truck bomb, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, was the handiwork of a pair of American far-right extremists. That fact was employed by the Clinton White House to criticize Republicans, who had just taken both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, for their alleged encouragement of violent extremism. Convincing evidence that the OKBOMB plot included actors beyond Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, plus intriguing foreign dimensions (which involved the Philippines and perhaps Ramzi Yousef) was never seriously pursued by the FBI.
Just a few months before the Manila incident, on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 headed to Paris, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, killing all 230 aboard. The FBI initially suspected the disaster was a terrorist attack. After an extended investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the loss of TWA 800 was caused by a spark in a near-empty fuel tank which blew apart the jetliner. However, the FBI’s unusual conduct during the investigation left lingering questions about what really happened. What is certain is that the Clinton administration didn’t want a major foreign terrorist attack on their plate in an election year.
The jihadist threat was an issue that Team Clinton low-balled and denied, including U.S. support for Islamist extremists in Bosnia in league with Iran, for as long as possible. Al-Qa’ida finally forced the Clinton White House to start taking them seriously with their East African embassy bombings on Aug. 7, 1998. Al-Qa’ida terrorists employed truck bombs against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 and wounding thousands. After that, the Clinton administration started pushing back against the jihadists, but their successes were limited. While the White House ordered desultory cruise missile strikes on Al-Qa’ida bases in Afghanistan, their impact was minimal. Clinton demurred from more serious action against the jihadists.
On Oct. 17, 2000, not long before Bill Clinton left the White House, the destroyer U.S.S. Cole was attacked by Al-Qa’ida while she was refueling in Yemen’s Aden harbor. A suicide boat bomber blasted a hole in the ship and killed 17 sailors. The only major Clinton success registered against Al-Qa’ida was the thwarting of the so-called Millennium Plot, the jihadist effort to blow up Los Angeles International Airport at the very end of 1999. However, that was unraveled thanks to the savvy of U.S. Customs agents which had nothing to do with the Intelligence Community or the White House.
The unpleasant truth is that Bill Clinton never gave Al-Qa’ida sufficient attention during his presidency – even though they nearly killed him. When he passed the Resolute Desk to George W. Bush on Jan. 20, 2001, American counterterrorism was unprepared for the threat posed by the global jihadist movement. The terrible 9/11 attacks eight months later were the result.
There is an alternate history, however. If Bill Clinton had decided to seriously go after Al-Qa’ida following his near-death in Manila, we might be living in a very different world. Had the president unleashed the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon against the jihadists in late 1996, when Al-Qa’ida was still coming together in Taliban-run Afghanistan, the terrorists would have been relatively easy to crush with bombs and commandos (certainly much easier than they were five years later). There would have been no East African embassy bombings, no attack on the U.S.S. Cole, no 9/11. Thousands of Americans would have had their lives saved and the whole Global War on Terrorism could have been averted.
Alas, that was not what Bill Clinton chose. Why he did not we can infer, but only Bill knows for certain. He’s dodging press inquiries and it’s doubtful he will ever come clean about why the Manila incident has been covered up for almost three decades. Ignoring Al-Qa’ida’s assassination attempt was the most significant Clintonian scandal and cover-up, considering its far-reaching global implications. Jonathan Landay’s impressive account offers an excellent jump-off point for further investigation of exactly what happened in Manila, breaking through the cover-up. But will anyone bother? The lack of interest by America’s mainstream media in this important story is perhaps the greatest scandal of all.
*In April 1993, there was a bomb plot to kill George H.W. Bush, who had left the White House three months before, during a visit to Kuwait that was stopped “left of boom” with the arrest of 14 conspirators before Bush’s arrival. The plot is generally believed to be the work of Iraqi intelligence, but that assessment isn’t universally shared.