Three days earlier, Mr Clinton had given the first public acknowledgement that yes, he had had an affair with the young intern. The hacks idly watched the film Wag the Dog, a tale of presidential advisers seeking to deflect attention from White House indiscretions with a small war.
Suddenly, everything shifted gears. A briefing was rapidly assembled. The President told the nation that he had just activated a massive missile strike at a "chemical weapons" plant in Sudan and a "terrorist training camp" in Afghanistan, in retaliation for the bombing of US embassies in Africa. This was Operation Infinite Reach, a staggering demonstration of the power of the United States of America to deliver several dozen high-precision weapons to their targets across the globe in a matter of hours. The strikes were intended to hit at Osama bin Laden, the former Saudi financier who was the Global Threat before last, overtaken by Saddam Hussein and then Slobodan Milosevic.
A dozen cruise missiles struck the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, killing one man and leaving all but three sections totally demolished. Dozens were killed, many of them Pakistanis, at six facilities in Afghanistan, though Mr bin Laden - apparently the target - was not there.
Salah Idris went to bed on 20 August a Saudi banker and owner of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum. Courtesy of Mr Clinton, he woke up on 21 August labelled a terrorist, and his factory a chemical weapons plant. Mr Idris did not take kindly to this, and he decided to fight back, publicly and actively, to defend his reputation. The US used its network of spies to prosecute him; he hired his own to defend himself. What has emerged from his struggle is a bizarre picture of the United States struggling to explain its actions, of Strangelovian characters with their fingers itching to pull the trigger, internecine feuds, background briefings, of lies, damned lies and classified information.
The US claimed within hours of the attack that it had cast-iron proof that it had hit the right target. It had a sample of something nasty scooped up outside the Al-Shifa plant, something which the US said was the key precursor to VX nerve gas. A CIA agent had been infiltrated into the plant, bagged the dirt and brought it back to the US. There was no other reason for it to be there other than chemical weapons production.
And this was not a usual pharmaceutical plant, the Americans said in a welter of background briefings that alluded to its massive intelligence apparatus. It had massive security around it, including military guards and strong fences. It had never produced any medicines. It was part of the Military-Industrial Complex, a shady arm of the Sudanese government devoted to producing the worst kinds of weapons, and linked to the man himself, Osama bin Laden. Case closed.
Except, of course, that nearly all of this was wrong. The factory did indeed produce pharmaceuticals, large amounts of them, for sale at home and abroad. It did not have massive fences, and there were no military guards. Plenty of people, including engineers, visitors and European ambassadors in Sudan, emerged to say rapidly that this was just an aspirin factory: not even that, but a place where pills got put in bottles, no more able to make chemical weapons than your local branch of Boots.
And the shady Military-Industrial Complex did not own the factory. That privilege belonged to Mr Idris, a wealthy banker born in Sudan who was a Saudi citizen. Mr Idris was gobsmacked to discover that his factory had been destroyed by the US and identified as a terrorist facility. But worse, far worse, was to come. Once the US discovered that it had made some mistakes, it backtracked and created a new version of events. In Congressional briefings and unsourced comments to the newspapers, officials started to blacken Mr Idris's name. He was not only an associate of Mr bin Laden, he was close to other Middle Eastern groups, they said. Once again, they used the massive might of the United States, but financial power instead of military. Mr Idris's bank accounts were in London but in an American bank. The US Treasury ordered the Bank of America to freeze those accounts, and it complied.
Mr Idris, unlike most of the people against whom the US launches salvos of cruise missiles, decided to hit back. He is a sophisticated and civilised man, with friends in high places, and they found for him the ideal lawyers in Washington DC: Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a most distinguished group of ladies and gentlemen which includes Vernon Jordan, the President's friend and adviser. Akin Gump in turn decided to pack some heat: and that heat came courtesy of Kroll Associates.
Kroll, a New York-based firm of private investigators, is very largely staffed by people who have been in public service. They are policemen, lawyers and, in many cases, former spies. Many are former station chiefs for the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Mr Idris and Akin Gump decided to see if their spies were better than those of the US government. They turned to Kroll's London office, a bland and innocuous suite of offices near Savile Row with little to distinguish it from the many chartered accountants and consultancies in the same building.
Kroll dispatched a young former British government official with years of experience in the region to Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to follow Mr Idris's trail, and see what they could dig up, literally and metaphorically. A private firm of chemists scooped up its own dirt from the plant, which it tested in its own laboratories. Kroll's man in the trenchcoat toured the Middle East and investigated Mr Idris's background. He scrutinised him and all of his associates for links to Mr bin Laden, using contacts in the Middle East and in London and Washington. When the spookery was over, the results on Mr Idris and the Khartoum dirt were clear: no deal. There was no evidence of a precursor chemical in the soil. There was no evidence of a link between Mr Idris and Mr bin Laden, or anybody else in the same line of work. Akin Gump, after long efforts to get the US government to discuss the problem, sued.
In theory, they won. On the very day when the US government was due to reply to the legal case, it folded its hand. The bank accounts were unfrozen, and Mr Idris was given back his metaphorical cashpoint card.
But this was not the end of the affair. Amazingly, after it had failed to prove a single one of its points, after it had conceded that it could not make its case stand up in court, the Administration continued to attack Mr Idris.
"We made a judgement that we had concerns regarding Mr Idris based on sensitive information, but we're not prepared to compromise those sources for the sake of this case," the Associated Press reported, quoting "an Administration official who spoke on condition of not being identified by name". In other words: we do have evidence, but it's so secret that we aren't going to tell you about it.
Trust us. "We have concerns about Mr Idris and his business dealings," the senior official said. "There are things that Mr Idris has associated himself with that I think every American would find reprehensible... And we will continue to monitor his network for any potential threat to US interests."
The same story, roughly speaking, appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Times. What, precisely, are these concerns? The US government left them undetailed. What had Mr Idris associated himself with that Americans might find "reprehensible"? Had he failed to put the toilet seat down? Smoked a cigarette indoors? Made disparaging comments about Charlton Heston? We were not to be told. Nor was Mr Idris, because it was all "secret". His next step will be to sue the US government for compensation.
Perhaps the story of Mr Idris is the story of Wag the Dog, of zealous officials providing a distraction for a President in trouble. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, it is a much older story: of power too concentrated, of mistakes made at a very high level and concealed, of justice denied to save reputations, and the abuse of power. That is a film which Washington has seen many, many times before. Because the real global power that Washington possesses is power to define the truth exactly as it wants, the ability to create information and use it as a weapon against others through intelligence agencies, newspapers, background briefings and unsourced allegations. The only difference this time is that someone had the money and the will to fight back.
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