Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [246]
Evidence now reveals that the FBI did take steps to prepare to wire Monica if that option presented itself. Back at the office, Jackie Bennett received a call from Agent Irons, directing him to locate a gray briefcase under a table. The case contained recording equipment. Bennett recalled thinking to himself, “Oh, we’ve made some headway.… Maybe she [Monica] is going to call Betty [Currie].” He asked Irons, “Is she going to come around?” The agent replied, “We want to have that on hand.” The signs appeared hopeful.
Yet Bennett had new problems, as he dug around looking for the recording equipment. Michael Isikoff was calling repeatedly and asking, “What’s going on?” Bennett had held the reporter off by giving him little driblets of information without spilling the whole pot of soup. He told Isikoff that Monica “hasn’t ruled out cooperating, but she needs to consult with somebody.” The reporter parried, “Who is that person?” When Bennett refused to answer, Isikoff pressed, “It’s her mother, right?” Starr’s deputy thundered, “Mike, I can’t say. But it’s going to take some time and we know now to a certainty that she’s going to talk to somebody. And that conversation cannot take place really until late this evening. And so you have got to pledge you’re not going to [leak] this. Okay?”
Bennett knew that he was allowing himself to become engaged in a “very unholy alliance.” Yet at this late stage there was no turning back. Isikoff grudgingly agreed to leave the prosecutor alone. But he wanted details soon. “First thing in the morning,” the Newsweek reporter warned Bennett.
The weary group in the hotel room passed the time by watching television reruns. Monica tried to ease her own tension by telling “some kind of [mildly] dirty joke.” Emmick screwed up his face and said, “You know, maybe under the circumstances we shouldn’t be getting into areas like that.”
Finally, Monica said that she was feeling claustrophobic. She gulped down air and asked, “Can’t we just go out and take a walk somewhere?” She would later say that she was overcome by a “suffocating feeling,” knowing that her mother was on a train and “knowing I had three more hours with these people.” Her sense of panic also flowed from “knowing I had screwed up. I had caused all this trouble.” So she convinced Emmick and Fallon to take her down to the Pentagon City Mall, to get some fresh mall air.
At the Crate and Barrel store, Monica tried to act friendly and to “humanize” herself so that her captors would like her. She began examining house hold goods as Emmick shuffled his feet because he was “not much of a shopper.” The young woman then veered in the direction of Macy’s, saying that she needed to use the bathroom. Agent Fallon whispered to Emmick that they needed to follow her. The prosecutor shook his head: “No, no, no. It’s unnecessary. We told her she can leave any time she wants, anyway.” Emmick worried about treating the former intern as if she were in custody—that would trigger additional messy legal issues. So the two men hovered near the entrance while Monica hustled up to Macy’s and disappeared. Twenty minutes later, she returned.
In that time, it turned out that Monica had made a frantic call to Betty Currie, but had been unable to reach the president’s secretary. Jackie Bennett later chastised Monica for this breach of trust. Monica, on the other hand, pointed out that she owned up to this from the start and expressed no remorse for trying to thwart OIC’s plans to nail the president. She admitted, without compunction, that she called Currie knowing full well what she was doing. “Betty was the only one that I knew that I could call for two seconds,” she explained, “and say something cryptically that I knew would get to him [President Clinton].” Her only regret was that Currie did not answer the phone so that OIC’s plan would be foiled.
The threesome