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By Root 2157 0

in the morning. Steve Irons, a senior FBI official, contacted headquarters and arranged for a handful of the agency’s best undercover people to be in place by noon. Bennett had told Irons to do whatever was necessary to get this task accomplished: “I knew we had the capacity to do this and to do it very quickly. This is what the FBI does. If it had been a bank robbery that they had gotten a tip on at this meeting, they would have had the bank surrounded with videocams and that kind of thing. It’s just what you do. And so I knew it was within our ability to get it done within that very short time frame.” Bennett told Irons that he should call FBI Director Louis Freeh and wake him up, if that step was needed to execute the plan. That phone call, however, was not necessary. By the time the sun came up over the Capitol, the equipment, manpower, and action plan were all in place.

One of the principal worries of the FBI was the potential for equipment failure. For these types of “wire” operations, the FBI typically used Nagra subminiature recorders, tiny devices no bigger than Walkmans that utilized small reel-to-reel mechanisms that could record hours of conversation. Occasionally, the Nagras malfunctioned and popped open during the middle of a recording, creating a mess of “spaghetti.” Bennett fretted that a malfunction, as Tripp was sitting in a booth with their target, could wreck the entire covert operation.

To be safe, the FBI switched to a different, top-secret, state-of-the-art recording device that utilized digital technology. The undercover FBI agents arranged to meet with Linda Tripp the next day, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the Pentagon City Mall, just after 1:00 P.M. Her lunch date with Monica Lewinsky was scheduled for 2:30 at a restaurant downstairs. It was a tight deadline. After years of waiting for a big break, however, they had only one shot at getting it right.

Bennett, groggy from lack of sleep but alert from the combined sense of excitement and danger, arrived in the office at dawn. He briefed Ken Starr on the conversation at Tripp’s home and informed his boss, “We’re going to surreptitiously record this arranged lunch.” There was no extensive discussion about whether to go forward. The options seemed clear-cut. As Bennett later summarized his conversation, there was no exclamation of “Gosh, I think we might get challenged by Congress someday on whether this is within our jurisdiction.” Rather, once Starr heard from his lawyers concerning the visit to Linda Tripp’s home, he concurred that wiring Tripp was “the next logical investigative step.” All of his prosecutors and agents “were of like mind that this needed to be done.” And so Starr “agreed with that.”

Nor was the issue of the legality of Tripp’s tape recordings, or the question of “where might this wire of Tripp lead?” one that Ken Starr labored over. Starr would later put it in perspective: “That was Jackie’s issue, not my issue. You have to remember that I was consumed with other serious issues—I was focused on the trial of Jim Guy Tucker. Plus the issue ‘What do we do with Susan McDougal?’ We had just concluded a careful evaluation of a hundred-page draft referral to the House of Representatives, referring possible impeachable offenses by the president regarding Whitewater. This had taken up my time. The decision was made in September of 1997 that we needed more information—from Susan McDougal, Jim Guy Tucker [and others].” When it came to this unexpected tip from a woman named Linda Tripp, Starr was counting on his trained professionals to take charge.

Back at the Ritz-Carlton, Tripp was being tucked back in and prepared for her lunch with Monica Lewinsky. Jackie Bennett would remember the scene: “Linda … is being high maintenance at this point. She’s a bit of a diva. And she’s the center of attention. She’s gotten the FBI’s attention; she’s gotten the OIC’s attention.” Tripp seemed nervous but eager to get the job done.

In a dimly lit room on the ninth floor of the hotel, a female agent secured the recording device to Tripp’s “inner thigh