True Spies Episode 45 - The Profiler NARRATOR Welcome ... to True Spies. ​ ​ Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would YOU do in their position? This is True Spies. ​ ​ NARRATOR CLEMENTE: With any equivocal death investigation, you have no idea where the investigation is going to take you, but in this particular investigation, it starts at the White House. That makes it incredibly difficult to conduct an investigation, when you know that two of the people that are intimately involved in it are the First Lady and the President of the United States. NARRATOR This is True Spies, Episode 45, The Profiler. ​ ​ This story begins with an ending. CLEMENTE: On the evening of January 20th, 1993, Vince Foster was found dead of by gunshot wound at the top of an earthen berm in Fort Marcy Park. NARRATOR A life cut short in a picturesque, wooded park 10 minutes outside of the US capital. He was found by someone walking through the park who then called the US park police. The park police and EMTs responded to the scene and the coroner then arrived and pronounced Foster dead. And his body was removed. NARRATOR A body, anonymous – housed in an expensive woolen suit, a crisp white dress shirt. A vivid bloodstain on the right shoulder. When they then searched his car that was in the parking lot they found a pass to the White House. NARRATOR The first clue of the life that had been. The first rattle of the storm about to take hold. CLEMENTE: They went to Foster’s home to notify his wife, and while they were there the President of the United States shows up. NARRATOR President Bill Clinton, just six months into his first term in office. CLEMENTE: And that’s when they realise that not only did Vince Foster work at the White House, but he was a close personal friend of the President of the United States. NARRATOR A man consoles the shell-shocked widow of his childhood friend. For now, this is a tragedy of intimate proportions. But tomorrow morning, a striking story will make the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. CLEMENTE: I remember on July 21st 1993, I was working in the US Attorney’s office in New York City and I noticed on the desk there was a copy of the New York Post, and the entire front ​ ​ cover was a picture and a bold headline about White House counsel Vince Foster being found dead. I remember picking up the paper and walking into the assistant of the United State Attorney's office and saying to him, ‘Wow, I’d love to figure out what happened here. This sounds like there’s more to this story.’ NARRATOR This episode of True Spies is about the shockwaves of ​ ​ controversy and scandal that tore the White House open in the early 1990s, and left one of the President’s closest confidantes dead. It’s about the grubby game of politics, the noble intentions of an honest man, and a conspiracy that took hold of a nation’s imagination. It is the story of one burning question. CLEMENTE: How does the White House counsel end up dead by a gunshot wound just outside of Washington DC? NARRATOR And the True Spy who would finally answer it. CLEMENTE: I’m Jim Clemente. I’m a retired FBI supervisory special agent and profiler. I spent 22 years working for the FBI. NARRATOR Two years will lapse before Jim gets a chance to disappear into the story that has demanded the whole of Washington’s attention, on a hot, sticky morning in July of 1993. But he can wait. In a way, he has been preparing for this case his entire life. CLEMENTE: In college I was a chemistry major, but I took a criminal law course in undergrad at Fordham University. I loved it. For me, every single case was like reading a whole new book about somebody’s life and circumstances, and I just found it fascinating. NARRATOR That spark of fascination led Jim Clemente to what he thought would be his lifelong career. CLEMENTE: I was a prosecutor for the city of New York in the Bronx and I worked child sex crimes prosecutions, violent crime prosecutions and so forth. NARRATOR It was riveting, demanding work. Work that fulfilled him, in many ways – except for one. CLEMENTE: When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a detective, but I went to college and I decided to go to law school, and I thought:‘Well, detective is sort of not in the cards anymore.’ NARRATOR But every life contains twists and turns. The one that would define Jim Clemente came from close to home. CLEMENTE: I actually got a call from my brother, my older brother, and he said: ‘Now that you’re a prosecutor, we should go after the director of the camp.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when I was there I snuck into his office and I found three paperbacks filled with Polaroid pictures of him molesting boys.’ And I said: ‘I thought I was the only one.’ NARRATOR The very next day, Jim went to the FBI’s task force for child sexual exploitation. He told them what had happened to him as a teenager, at the hands of the director of a Catholic youth camp. They opened an investigation, but with so much time having lapsed since the crimes were committed – the trail had grown cold. The investigator handling the case needed something more from Jim. CLEMENTE: When the FBI agents first asked me to wear a wire and meet with the guy who had molested me as a kid, I flatly refused. There was no way I was going to sit down and have a civil conversation with this guy. Everything that I had ever experienced about that was negative and I just didn’t see how I could possibly sit down with this guy. NARRATOR But Jim knew this was his one opportunity to serve justice to a man he despised. And so he found that he could push his fear, his disgust, aside. CLEMENTE: They literally coached me, and hey trained me how to do it properly and how to use his psychology against him. Eventually I would actually go undercover in that investigation, wear a wire, and lock up the guy that had molested me as a teen. NARRATOR A cathartic end to the story that had haunted Jim since childhood. A thrilling digression from the path. But all that was over now – or so he thought. Until one of the agent’s from the case invited him for breakfast CLEMENTE: And while we were sitting there he slid this big document to me and said ‘You should fill this out.’ And I looked at it and it was an application to become a special agent of the FBI. I literally said to him, ‘Would they still take me even though I was a victim?’ He said, ‘Sure, you’re a prosecuting attorney, you did great undercover work for us. We’d love to have you.’ NARRATOR It was a moment he never could have predicted. But opportunities like this one are hard to come by, and Jim knew he had to pounce. CLEMENTE: I thought maybe I’d do it for about five years and then go back to prosecuting, become an assistant United States attorney, but I had so much rich and exciting and interesting and compelling experience, being an FBI agent, that I stayed for the entire 22 years. NARRATOR In his first years on the job, Jim would put the skills he had learned on the camp director case to good use, time and time again. CLEMENTE: I went undercover as a street person on the Bowery, as a Hasidic Jew on the diamond district, and I eventually did a deep cover, long-term investigation on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, on Wall Street, as a commodities broker. I actually became a broker and traded crude oils futures for the better part of three years. NARRATOR I don’t need to tell you that undercover work, at the best of times, is a stressful prospect. But this was something else entirely. CLEMENTE: At the time, they ranked the most stressful jobs in the country. Number One was air traffic controller. Number two was commodities trader. Number three was police officer. I was number two and three at the same time, which trumped number one. I had to wear a wire every day, get through metal detectors and deal with the fact that I was trading what amounted to millions of dollars every day, and if I did something really bad, if I made some kind of huge error, I could have lost the entire budget of the FBI. NARRATOR The undercover work scratched a certain itch. But at the same time, he was developing a different, very specific skill-set – one that had blossomed out of his first case with the FBI. CLEMENTE: So when I got out of the FBI academy they actually assigned me to the very squad that had just finished investigating my case, and it became a turning point in my life. Before this, the fact that I was sexually molested as a kid was something dark and secret, something I hid from everyone and I didn’t want any of my colleagues to know about.