President, Senior Officials Briefed on Possible 'Penetration' of White House Phones

6:57 p.m. ET (2257 GMT) May 5, 2000

By Carl Cameron

WASHINGTON — The White House telephone system may have been penetrated by an employee of an Israeli-owned telecommunications billing company that helped install new telephone lines there three years ago, Fox News has learned.

FOX News

Sources say a senior-level employee of Amdocs had a separate T1 data phone line installed from his base outside St. Louis connected directly to Israel

The FBI, which has briefed President Clinton, CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, is investigating what sources told Fox News was a "penetration of the U.S. government telephone system."

The breach may have involved the "real time" interception of telephone conversations inside the White House and other government offices. It does not involve the secure lines that the president uses for calls to foreign leaders or the military, the sources said.

For the past 18 months, the FBI has been investigating Bell Atlantic and Amdocs, a Chesterfield, Mo., telecommunications billing company, Fox News has learned. Amdocs helped Bell Atlantic install new telephone lines in the White House in 1997.

Amdocs, once a small Israeli software company, is the world's leader in the $20 billion telecommunications billing software industry, with expected revenues this year of $1.1 billion,

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