How Jeffords Got Away

The defection of Jim Jeffords may be remembered as one of the most successful covert operations in American political history, with Democratic leader Tom Daschle as the mastermind and Jeffords as the spy who came in from the cold. But when Jeffords helped blow his own cover, the scene was like something out of Ally McBeal. By last Tuesday morning, rumors had been swirling for days that the Vermont Senator was thinking about leaving the Republican Party. That morning Jeffords stood in a rest room off the Senate floor staring at his haggard face in the mirror. Republican Senator Pat Roberts sidled up to him at the next sink. "Jim, how you doing?" Roberts asked. Jeffords just shook his head.

"Well, I hope some of the stories I've been hearing are not accurate," said Roberts, trying to get Jeffords to open up.

"I've got to do what's in my heart and mind," Jeffords replied, and that's all he would say. He walked out. But Roberts knew what it meant. He found majority leader Trent Lott and warned him that "it's pretty doggone serious." Lott had been getting similar reports and sounded the alarm to the White House and the Senate's G.O.P. leadership. But he was too late. The defector had already slipped past the gate.

White House aides were dumbfounded. "The horizon was clear; there were no clouds," says one. "No one saw it, and then it poured." As Republicans from Bush to Dick Cheney to party hacks in Vermont tried everything they could think of to lure Jeffords back, Daschle and his top lieutenant, minority whip Harry Reid, sat in their offices hiding broad grins from the rest of the world. They knew something else that Lott was in the dark about. The Jeffords deal had been practically sealed a full week before. In fact, for almost a month, Daschle and Reid had conducted their secret negotiations under Lott's nose, with the Republican leader clueless that he was the victim of a silent, slow-motion fleecing.

The recruitment of Jim Jeffords had no code names, no dead drops, no encrypted communications, but it followed all the rules of a classic CIA operation. Democrats had targeted Jeffords as a possible party switcher practically from the day he came to Congress 26 years ago. Daschle, a former Air Force intelligence officer, knew that spymasters don't have a chance of bagging a high-value defector unless he is eager to defect. Even then, he has to be slowly and carefully cultivated. By last month, Jeffords seemed ready to come over. His disenchantment with the Republican Party had been building for months.