WASHINGTON -- Linda R. Tripp entered the Ritz-Carlton hotel near the Pentagon last Jan. 13 and wondered to herself: "Is everyone looking? Does anyone know?"

In handwritten diary-like notes to herself, she recalled the day she arranged to meet Monica Lewinsky at the hotel, nervous about the body wire attached to her inner thigh that would secretly record their conversations. "Maybe this will work," she scribbled. "Feeling low -- guilt -- fear -- overriding emotion -- fear, 00 however.

"I am wired."

So began the final chapter of the strange odyssey of the nearly two-year friendship between Lewinsky and Tripp, one that began with shared confidences about everything from diets and hair to perjury and subpoenas and ended with explosive fights, desperate attempts at self-preservation and a final act of betrayal.

Through testimony, notes, e-mails and transcripts of taped phone conversations released Friday, Tripp, 48, who is nearly twice Lewinsky's age, emerges as a woman with complicated motives who was propelled by a palpable disgust for Clinton's behavior.

Tripp, a Columbia resident who retains a $90,000-a-year Pentagon job, nearly lived the affair alongside the former White House intern while scheming to bring President Clinton's sexual misdeeds to public light.

At times, she encouraged Lewinsky in the liaison -- even fueling Lewinsky's fantasy of a future life with Clinton -- and forged a bond of trust.

"You're so good at it. No wonder he likes phone sex with you," Tripp told Lewinsky, encouraging her to send Clinton a personalized taped message. "You're just like a little Marilyn Monroe vixen."

Other times, Tripp berated and mocked Lewinsky, told her she was a "hysterical baboon" whose obsession with the president "nauseated" her.

Though Lewinsky implored Tripp to guard her confidences -- and even to lie if necessary -- Tripp, increasingly irate over an affair she deemed an "unconscionable" abuse of presidential power, became determined to expose the secrets.

Eventually, Tripp decided it was her duty to inform both independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr and lawyers for Paula Corbin Jones, who was pursuing a sexual misconduct case against the president, of everything she knew about her friend's entanglement at the White House.

She gave investigators more than her word. She gave them 29 tapes of intimate phone conversations with Lewinsky that she had begun secretly recording last October as an "insurance policy."

"There was no way Monica was going to remove herself from what I considered to be an extremely unhealthy relationship," Tripp told the grand jury, explaining her aim to expose the affair. "Nothing good was going to come of this for Monica."

Two days after the "wired lunch" in which federal investigators first heard Lewinsky's words and worries live, Tripp reflected on her shattered relationship with her former colleague, seeming to justify to herself the extraordinary actions she had just taken.

"She sounds strange," Tripp wrote in notes to herself after a call from Lewinsky. "This is no longer a friend but a manipulator. I feel the same way. We are on opposite sides. Guilt is still there, but lessening. Her decision to lie is hers alone."

The tape is running

In the recorded phone conversations from October 1997 to January 1998, Tripp revealed little of substance about herself. Instead, Lewinsky expressed her insecurities and despair over her love for Clinton, while Tripp alternated the occasional withering remark ("He's never been attracted to you because you use big words") with comfort and assurance.

"You're a very unusual person," Tripp told Lewinsky. "Most people going through what you've gone through would have said, 'Hey, [expletive] you and the horse you rode in on and let me call the National Enquirer.' "

At one point, with considerable sangfroid, Tripp kept calm as Lewinsky noticed noise on the phone line. "You know what's really weird? I keep hearing these double clicks," Lewinsky said. "That's my gum," Tripp responded.

Tripp, as counselor to Lewinsky, edited her love letters to the president and urged her to press Clinton for a high-paying job through his friend Vernon Jordan. The more Tripp heard of the affair, the more she appeared to boil with moral indignation.

"I hate what he's done to you," Tripp told Lewinsky. "I hate what I've had to watch."

The blue dress

Transcripts and documents show that Tripp also tried to collect evidence to delineate the full scope of the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship. In her first interview with the FBI, on Jan. 12, Tripp disclosed that Lewinsky had a blue dress stained with Clinton's semen and that Lewinsky "won't have the dress dry-cleaned to this day."

But in their calls, it is clear that Tripp persuaded Lewinsky not to have the dress dry-cleaned. "I would rather you had that in your possession if you need it years from now," Tripp says.

Tripp said Lewinsky pestered her with so many calls that she eventually bought a caller-ID box for her home phone. She seemed to grow so exasperated with Lewinsky that, in e-mails, she told Lewinsky to leave her alone.

"Don't bother me with all your ranting and raving and analyzing the situation," she wrote to her in late October 1997. "I really am finished, Monica. Share this sick situation with one of your other friends, because, frankly, I'm past nauseated about the whole thing."

Lewinsky sent her a message back, saying she would respect her wishes. "I would only like to ask that I have your assurance everything I have shared with you remains between us. You have given me your word before but that was when we were on good terms."

In contrast to her public remarks in July that she "never, ever" asked to be involved in the scandal, Tripp assumed a central role in ensuring that the Lewinsky-Clinton relationship was made public, documents show.

As early as March 1997, a year after Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon, where she befriended Tripp, Tripp tipped off Michael Isikoff of Newsweek magazine about "an intern at the White House."

Her outrage over what she said was an "egregious" situation seemed to grow out of disillusionment with the Clinton administration that Tripp, who had worked at the White House since the Bush administration, felt from the start.

Literary ambitions

In 1996, she considered writing a book about the White House because her observations jibed with those of Gary Aldrich, a former Secret Service agent who wrote a book accusing the Clinton administration of drug use, sex, corruption and presidential affairs. Tripp testified that Aldrich was "a decent human being" who had been "smeared" in the media.

By the summer of 1997, Tripp's name had surfaced publicly when she corroborated a report that a woman named Kathleen Willey, who had accused Clinton of forcibly kissing and fondling her, had emerged from the Oval Office looking disheveled. Clinton's lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, was quoted as saying Tripp was "not to be believed."

Tripp was now enraged. Hoping she would be called by lawyers for Jones to testify about Willey and any other women she knew who'd been involved with the president, she was determined to expose Clinton's affair with Lewinsky and to arm herself with proof.

For advice, she said she called Lucianne Goldberg, the New York agent with whom she had earlier worked on a book proposal. "I told her that I had finally had it, that I finally wanted this to come out," Tripp told the grand jury.

Goldberg, she said, told her, "You have to tape."

"And I said 'why?' " Tripp testified. "And she said, 'They will never believe you. You are going to walk into a perjury trap.' So I didn't want to intentionally hurt Monica, but I had to have an insurance policy to do it."

Fearing for her life

Tripp testified that she felt she needed the "insurance policy" of the tapes because she feared for her life, an assertion questioned by dubious grand jurors.

JUROR: "You actually felt that telling the truth would result in your life being threatened?"

TRIPP: "Not only did I feel it, I was told it."

JUROR: "By whom?"

TRIPP: "By Monica. Who also feared for her life."

JUROR: "It didn't sound as if she was frightened."

Tripp and Goldberg discussed the Lewinsky affair -- and the existence of the tapes -- with lawyers for Paula Jones.

Tripp said Goldberg made the initial contact with the Jones legal team in November. But Goldberg said she called one of Jones' lawyers, David M. Pyke, only after Pyke had phoned Tripp.

Either way, documents show that Tripp indicated to Pyke that she would be happy to testify in the Jones case. The two agreed that the subpoena would not request any tapes; they did not want Bennett, Clinton's lawyer, to find out about the tapes.

Tripp eventually told her lawyer, Kirby Behre, about the existence of her tapes, and he told her she may have broken the law in making them. Indeed, Tripp is under investigation in Maryland for possible wiretap violations. State law requires that both parties be informed that a conversation is being recorded.

Worried about possible prosecution and concerned that word of the tapes would get to the White House, Tripp testified that she panicked. Goldberg told her: "You need to call Jackie Bennett at the Office of the Independent Counsel and bring your entire story and evidence to them."

Goldberg, it turned out, had already contacted Jackie Bennett and told him the Lewinsky story, according to an FBI report of an interview with Goldberg.

Tripp called Starr's office on Jan. 12 and received immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for her information.

Late lunch at the Ritz

By 3 p.m. the next day, Tripp was splitting a cheeseburger and fries with Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton -- with a body wire recording their conversation.

Tripp indicated she would not lie, painting herself as "a working stiff" in the suburbs of Howard County with a mortgage and two children. She said she lacked the protection of a Vernon Jordan to help her.

After the lunch, Lewinsky insisted on giving Tripp a lift back to the Pentagon, saying, in her last recorded words of that day, "I'd drive you to the moon, my dear."

In her notes, Tripp documented the experience and those of the ensuing days, which culminated in another rendezvous with Lewinsky at the Ritz four days later, when the former intern was confronted by investigators.

The day before that sting, Tripp wrote about a call from Lewinsky in which Lewinsky discussed Clinton's plan to deny his affair with her when questioned in the Jones case.

"She is more relaxed, happy talks more about his denial, his lying in sworn (written) testimony, the fact that he will lie under oath Sat. (deposition)," Tripp wrote.

Tripp's one-time friend was a day away from learning that her darkest secret had been revealed. It is clear that Tripp -- seemingly as consumed by contempt for Clinton as Lewinsky was by infatuation for him -- believed the president was the only one who had truly betrayed Lewinsky.

"I feel beyond terrible on one hand because she is more a victim than Paula Jones ever was," Tripp continued in her notes. "The emotional scarring will be permanent. The man is so self-absorbed that her plight is irrelevant to him. She's a troubled kid."

Pub Date: 10/04/98