During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton’s travels abroad became a campaign issue. Then-President Bush criticized Clinton’s participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations while in England. He said that “to be in a foreign country and demonstrate against your own country when it’s at war — that’s wrong.” Clinton demonstrated against a war that he avoided by lying about his desire to go into an ROTC program back in the U.S.

Bush also raised questions about Clinton’s student trip to the Soviet Union. The liberal media didn’t like that. Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen wrote, “Bush hints that when Bill Clinton visited the Soviet Union on a student tour, Clinton may have met with KGB officers. Bush implies that something sinister was arranged. What was it?? The KGB sent a brainwashed Bill Clinton back to become governor of Arkansas.” Quillen said that was “preposterous.”

It may not be so outlandish. Speaking at an Accuracy in Media luncheon in Washington, D.C., Ivian C. Smith, the former FBI special Agent-in-Charge in Arkansas, voluntarily brought up the issue of Bill Clinton’s tour of the old Soviet Union. “That’s never been satisfactorily explained,” he said. Smith said that while Clinton was never formally branded a security risk by top officials in the bureau, many believed that he had never fully explained his travel to the Soviet Union. As President, Clinton expressed concern during his affair with Monica Lewinsky that a foreign government was tapping his phones.

Smith said books about Clinton, such as “First in His Class” by David Maraniss, never explained it either. Smith added, “I can tell you back in those days, though, that there would have been close scrutiny by someone because students didn’t just wander in and out of there. I suspect there’s a reference to Bill Clinton somewhere in some kind of archive back in Moscow?” >From the perspective of an FBI counterintelligence agent, Smith said, “We would have liked to have a more complete answer to what happened during those weeks there.”

The implication is that the “someone” was the Soviet KGB. However, in retrospect, it appears that President Clinton became an ally of both Russia and Communist China. China pumped untold millions of dollars into his 1996 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Attorney General Janet Reno refused to authorize an independent counsel investigation of that scandal.

Smith noted that questions have also been raised about Al Gore’s ties to Russia. Gore had family connections to the late Soviet agent Armand Hammer, whose father Julius laundered money to establish the first Soviet espionage networks in the United States. Armand Hammer helped make the Gore family rich. J. Michael Waller, a writer for Insight magazine, reported that some U.S. intelligence professionals have viewed with deepening concern the two generations of relations between the Hammers and the Gores. A retired CIA official told him, “Are you unwilling to ask the public if they want a president who owes his personal family wealth to a known Soviet agent?” We may get a chance to answer that question again.