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Jones' legal team said a woman called one of their attorneys in January 1997 and, refusing to give her name, said "I had a similar thing happen" to Jones' allegation that Clinton exposed himself in a Little Rock, Ark., hotel suite in 1991.
But Willey, in a September 1997 affidavit, denied making the phone call or describing Clinton groping her in a small room just off the Oval Office in 1993.
Starr's office of the independent counsel is investigating whether the Clinton White House used a wealthy campaign fund-raiser to persuade Willey not to provide damaging evidence against the president. His ongoing investigation could yet produce criminal indictments.
In addition, if Willey's story about an unwanted sexual episode with Clinton is true, she could provide key supporting testimony should an appellate court reinstate Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against the president.
The 725 pages of Jones case documents, released for the first time, also show that attorneys for Clinton and Jones fought ferociously over whether the president's medical records should be turned over. Jones' lawyers were seeking verification of her recollection that the president had a "crooked" penis.
Exactly how Willey's name first came to the Jones team has been a matter of heated debate for nearly two years.
Joseph Cammarata, one of Jones' former lawyers, said in a sworn affidavit that he received an unsolicited telephone call from a woman whom "I now believe is Kathleen E. Willey" and who said Clinton had groped her in the White House.
Cammarata said the woman also advised him that she had told a White House employee about the incident - an apparent reference to Linda Tripp, who later came forward with descriptions of seeing Willey disheveled, as well as similar allegations about former intern Monica Lewinsky and Clinton.
And Cammarata said the woman on the phone told him that her husband "was found dead that night, apparently a suicide," which also tracks with the truth.
Willey's husband was found dead the night of her alleged encounter with Clinton, and details of the encounter described to Cammarata match the account Willey gave earlier this year in a "60 Minutes" interview.
But in her own affidavit, Willey categorically denied making such a phone call.
"I did not call Mr. Cammarata," she said. "In fact, I have never spoken with Mr. Cammarata."
Cammarata, in an interview yesterday, held his ground. "I believe it was her, despite her denial," he said. "As of today my belief is unchanged."
An attorney close to both parties speculated that a woman who knew the details of Willey's experience may have been the one who phoned Cammarata and posed as Willey "in order to get Cammarata's interest."
"It makes no sense that Willey - if indeed it was her - would give such specific information to Cammarata that it could only be Willey and still would decline to give her name," this source said, who asked not to be identified.
When the Jones team in the fall of 1997 began seeking her cooperation, Willey vigorously fought a subpoena. But she ultimately was deposed, and later also testified before Starr's grand jury in the Lewinsky matter.
Willey's story is considered crucial because, if truthful, it would tend to support Jones' claim of a pattern of Clinton preying sexually on women who worked for him. In 1991, when Jones alleges Clinton harassed her, she was an Arkansas state employee and he was governor.
Furthermore, Willey's credibility is a key factor in whether Starr will prevail in seeking criminal charges of influence-peddling by the White House.
According to sources, Starr has been investigating whether Nathan Landow, a wealthy Maryland developer who has made campaign contributions to Vice President Al Gore and has had White House access to Clinton, attempted to intercede and offer Willey incentives to keep silent about the alleged encounter with Clinton in 1993.
The records show that Willey, who denied in her deposition that anyone had spoken to her about her testimony, later amended her answer.
"Nate Landow discussed my upcoming deposition testimony with me," she said in correcting her earlier testimony. "The reason for the change is a misunderstanding of the original question."
Landow has denied any improprieties.
Last month, prosecutors took the extraordinary step of bringing manslaughter charges against Phi Gamma Delta - the organization, not its members - in the case of Scott Krueger, who drank himself into a coma at a party and died.
Since no individual members were named in the indictment, the case quickly unraveled when the fraternity disbanded.
Yesterday, the Superior Court magistrate who had issued a warrant against Phi Gamma Delta filed it away in case the fraternity tries to reorganize at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pamela Wechsler, assistant district attorney, conceded the case is over for now but said it wasn't all for naught: The charges drove the fraternity off campus and prompted MIT to change its alcohol and disciplinary policies.
"A lot of things have happened as a result of the investigation and indictment," she said.
Boston defense attorney J. Albert Johnson, who was not involved in the case, called the charges silly, saying a fraternity is simply an association of people with no legal standing in criminal law.
The quake struck at 5:08 p.m. and was felt as mild rolling in downtown Los Angeles and stronger rolling in San Bernardino. The quake was followed by a magnitude-3.2 aftershock at 5:42 p.m.
The epicenter in San Bernardino County was about four miles north of Big Bear City, said seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The quake was relatively shallow.
at a depth of about 3 miles.
"We don't think it's an aftershock" to the Landers-Big Bear quakes of 1993, said Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the USGS office in Pasadena.
The magnitude-7.3 Landers quake on June 28, 1992, was followed a few hours later by a magnitude-6.5 quake in Big Bear Mountain area. The two San Bernardino County quakes left one person dead, injured more than 400 and caused nearly $100 million in damage. There have been thousands of aftershocks.
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Four U.S. diplomatic observers were among those present Sunday in the village of Krajkova, 18 miles west of Pristina, where the boy's family lives. But they declined a request from his relatives to use the observers' armored car as a shield during the funeral. The observers, who were unarmed, said they could not ensure the family's safety and drove off after urging the family to bury him elsewhere.
The incident, which came two days before a NATO-imposed deadline for the Yugoslav government to withdraw its security forces from Kosovo province, underscores the difficulties Washington and its allies face as they try to get Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to comply with an Oct. 12 agreement or face possible airstrikes. It demonstrates the difficulties the observers may face as they monitor troop withdrawals.
One Western official here called Sunday's incident "appalling" but said that if U.S. observers or a team of Finnish forensic experts, who visited the site earlier, had helped protect the family, their action would have risked leaving an impression that the observers were "on one side"of the bitter ethnic conflict that has engulfed Kosovo since March.
Intensive talks between NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Wesley Clark and Yugoslav military officials about the troop withdrawal ended in Belgrade Sunday morning, and Clark returned to Brussels to brief diplomatic officials.
"They said a lot of things, but we're waiting to see what they'll do," a senior U.S. official said.
Other Western officials said no additional forces were pulled out of Kosovo Sunday. Instead, some forces were shifted to new locations, including three armored units in the southern Renica region, roughly surrounding an area where members of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla movement known as the Kosovo Liberation Army have been active in recent weeks.
The Central Drenica region, where the shootings took place, has also been tense, despite a cease-fire pledge several weeks ago from government security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. The group is fighting for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia, on behalf of ethnic Albanians who make up more than 90 percent of Kosovo's population but have no political or police powers.
During a late-summer offensive, government forces smashed dozens of villages in the region that had supported the rebels, and since then they have erected bunkers along most of the major roads and taken up positions in strategically located, abandoned houses.
Witnesses said that they did not see the shooters Sunday but that the shots appeared to come from an enclave of Serbian security forces that had moved into homes at the edge of town three weeks ago.
Relatives of the slain boy, Shemsi Elshani, told those at the scene that Saturday's gunshots appeared to come from the same direction.
Government spokesmen in the provincial capital of Pristina said they had no comment on either shooting incident, but according to ethnic Albanian sources and a journalist who arrived at the scene Saturday, it occurred while Shemsi, his father Rashit, and cousin, Zymer, were chopping wood on a hillside overlooking Krajkova at midday.
The sources said the weather was clear enough for a sharpshooter to know he was firing at the blond-haired boy, who was found dead with bullet wounds in his head, chest and neck. To retrieve the boy's body, a relative enlisted the assistance of journalists in an armored car rented by a Spanish television network.
Zymer was also shot but was not seriously wounded.
Witnesses said seven villagers were digging the boy's grave in light fog Sunday morning when the shots rang out. The family pleaded unsuccessfully with the U.S. diplomatic observers, who had come to see the body and attend the funeral, to use their car as a shield.
A spokesperson for the observers declined to allow team leader Norman Olsen to answer questions about the incident Sunday evening. But U.S. officials and witnesses said Olsen told the family that government troops had shot at U.S. observers in the past and that he did not want mourners to conclude his presence meant they would not be attacked.
After consulting by radio with superiors in suburban Pristina, Olsen said that as an observer, he had no authority to protect them, the officials and witnesses said.
Shemsi's father spurned suggestions that the boy be buried elsewhere because the family had buried the boy's uncle at the same site after he was killed by troops a month ago. The father said he wanted his son to be with the uncle.
The last-minute decision to cancel the one-day visit to Vienna for a summit with European Union leaders today came as yet another political blow to a country still reeling from economic distress.
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who would become acting president if Yeltsin is incapacitated, is ready to take Yeltsin's place, and political commentators said Primakov was already acting as a de facto vice president to the ailing Russian leader. Primakov insisted that Yeltsin remains in "good working condition."
Yeltsin, who underwent a quintuple coronary artery bypass operation nearly two years ago, is also suffering from high blood pressure, his press secretary, Dmitri Yakushkin announced. No medical details were given.
Yakushkin said there were no indications that Yeltsin needs hospital treatment. The doctors monitoring Yeltsin's health urged him to scrap the trip after a meeting on his condition. They did not say how long Yeltsin would be on vacation or where, but others said it probably would be two weeks. Yeltsin officially has been on vacation for 47 days this year.
Yeltsin's prolonged absences have contributed to Russia's drift after the Aug. 17 devaluation of the ruble. Primakov, who took office Sept. 11, has yet to come up with a long-term economic program.
A top Kremlin aide, Oleg Sysoyev, said today that Yeltsin now would leave details of the economic situation up to Primakov.
Only last Wednesday, Yeltsin visited a clinic for what the Kremlin then described as "planned medical checks" following a bout of respiratory illness that caused him to cut short an earlier visit to Kazakhstan.
Under the 1993 Russian Constitution, Yeltsin's powers as president "shall be terminated in the event of his resignation or sustained inability due to health" or in case of impeachment.
However, the Constitution does not specify how a determination that the president is incapacitated should be reached. If Yeltsin is incapacitated or leaves office, Primakov would become acting president and new elections would be held within three months.
Ever since Yeltsin stumbled during a welcoming ceremony in Uzbekistan and had to be physically propped up there and in Kazakhstan, Russia's political elite has been on edge, anticipating more bad news about Yeltsin's health and possible new elections.
Already, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who had been a strong Yeltsin ally in the 1996 reelection campaign and earlier, has set in motion a campaign machine and suggested Yeltsin is too ill to remain in office. Luzhkov's comments were an important clue for many others in Russian politics that a presidential campaign may be looming sooner than the expiration of Yeltsin's term in the year 2000.
Andrei Nikolayev, a former chief of the border guards service, who is emerging as a key political operative for Luzhkov, announced yesterday a union of several small parties expected to work for Luzhkov's election.
Two other potential successors, Krasnoyarsk Gov. Alexander Lebed, the former military commander, and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, both of whom Yeltsin defeated in 1996, have called on him to step down early. Zyuganov repeated the demand yesterday. Yeltsin "is tormenting himself, the country, his relatives. He must resign, but he does not have the will or the scruples," Zyuganov told reporters.
Yeltsin is reported by those who have seen him to stubbornly resist such demands. Last week, he insisted anew he would not seek reelection in 2000.
More immediately, Yeltsin faces the question of whether he can continue to function. Recently, the Russian weekly news magazine Itogi had a cover showing Yeltsin pickled in a bell jar with the headline "How Can He Be Preserved?" and the accompanying article reported that Kremlin aides were looking at creating a ceremonial job description for the ailing leader.
"The president is not so sick as to be considered incapable, in terms of the powers defined for him by the Constitution," Sysoyev told a television interviewer, but hinted that Kremlin aides were trying to work out a new role for the aging Russian leader.
10-27-98
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