MAN BEHIND THE MESS

Every political event has a Craig Livingstone standing somewhere near the stage. He's the overweight advance man who's trying to look like a Secret Service agent--the one conspiring into his cell phone and swaggering through the crowd with beepers and walkie-talkies bristling from his belt. Every campaign needs people like Livingstone; they book the hotels, hire the copy shops, polish off the buffet-table spreads and try to make others at the hotel bar think they were in the room for the big strategy session. If the candidate wins, some land staff jobs with impressive-sounding titles. In 1993, after helping prepare campaign stops for Al Gore and working on the Inauguration for Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, Livingstone got his: director of the White House Office of Personnel Security.

The title came with a basement office and little clout. Livingstone, in his mid-30s, has no law-enforcement background, and the Secret Service handles all the real security work, but it lets him stroll the corridors of power, exuding an air of mystery and importance. "Basically, my job is to be invisible," Livingstone told a reporter two years ago. "If I'm around, something's wrong."

Bill and Hillary Clinton would no doubt agree. Last week the White House was hit by disclosures that Livingstone's office had improperly gathered confidential FBI files that contained private information about 408 people, most of them Republicans who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations. Stored for two years in the vault behind Livingstone's desk, the reports were collected in 1993 and 1994 by Livingstone's friend Anthony Marceca, a civilian gumshoe with the Army's criminal-investigation command whom Livingstone handpicked to help process a mountain of security-clearance forms.

The White House says Marceca obtained the confidential files by mistake because the Secret Service had supplied him with an inaccurate list of holdovers from the previous administration. "The Update Project," as the effort was known, has been described as a routine attempt to create new security files for people from earlier administrations who might still need access to the complex. But the vast majority of people on the list were low- and mid-level staff members who hadn't been inside the place in years. Raising further suspicion was the presence of former staff members from Clinton's travel office who had been fired seven months before, replaced by Clinton loyalists, and investigated by the FBI on charges of misappropriation leveled by the White House. (The charges proved baseless.) Bob Dole went so far as to draw comparisons with Nixon's "enemies list" after hearing that this one was sprinkled with influential Republicans. Could the White House be digging up dirt on old foes like Bush Secretary of State James Baker?