MAN BEHIND THE MESS

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If the charge is frivolous--the list is almost entirely made up of faceless bureaucrats--the principles at stake are not. What makes this more than just another inside-the-Beltway imbroglio is the fear that the Clinton White House may have misused the FBI just months after the Administration, in the wake of the travel-office scandal, swore such a thing would never happen again. When a President harnesses the power of America's premier law-enforcement agency to political ends, he rides roughshod over the Constitution and revisits the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover. Is this what Clinton or his people were up to? There are three ways to see the story, depending on who is telling it:

The Bureaucratic Snafu. Clinton and his team are insisting it was all just an "inexcusable mistake," as chief of staff Leon Panetta called it last week. It began, in this version, with a rogue computer program that produced the erroneous Secret Service list of people whom Marceca investigated, beginning in August 1993. For each name, he sent an unsigned request form to the FBI, which responded with a confidential report. Both Marceca and his FBI contacts apparently failed to question the accuracy of the list he was working from, and his supervisor, Livingstone, failed to supervise the exercise. Marceca says he plowed down the alphabetical list from A to G and passed on to Livingstone three FBI files containing "derogatory information." It was only after Marceca left in early 1994 that his replacement discovered what had been going on. According to the White House, the requests were quickly halted and the files put into the vault behind Livingstone's desk. The White House says Livingstone looked at none of the files except the three brought to his attention.

The Freelance Operation. It is also possible, according to some of the two dozen people interviewed by TIME who know Livingstone, that the security director's love of intrigue and need for acceptance may have led him into waters too deep for his skills. (Fellow advance men used to call him Craig Flintstone.) A former restaurant bouncer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Livingstone apparently inflated his work history. He said he was the public-relations man for an Atlantic City casino, but that job requires a license, which, according to the Casino Control Commission, he never obtained. Working as a gofer and advance man for Democratic campaigns in the 1980s--it was on the 1984 Hart campaign that he met ex-cop Marceca--he became known as a teller of tall tales, often turning his bit parts into leading roles. In 1986, after working on Colorado Representative Tim Wirth's successful Senate bid, Livingstone landed a job he was happy to call "director of transition." The job consisted of moving furniture and boxes from Wirth's old office to the new one.

Once inside the White House, Livingstone continued to play the big shot. Most disturbing of his grandiose tendencies, three former Clinton staff members told TIME, was Livingstone's habit of insinuating that he had read their security files. The message, they contend, was that Livingstone knew all about their peccadilloes but their secrets were safe with him.