Discussing Mr. Cafasso's claims that he participated in the rescue attempt, Mr. Buckholz said he talked to several individuals involved. "That was a very closed mission," he said. "And nobody knew a Cafasso. We told Fox that."

Fox said a researcher in New York who had clashed with Mr. Cafasso had asked the Spartan Group to look into his record, independently. Only after his departure did executives learn of the inquiry and its results, which did not conclusively disprove his story.
 

The Washington bureau chief for Fox News, Kim Hume, finally decided to let him go, people at Fox said, and he decided he was ready to leave. In an e-mail message to the staff, Ms. Hume wrote that Fox's "military and counterterrorism consultant," Mr. Cafasso, "made crucial contributions to our coverage of the war on terror" and helped take "Fox's war coverage to the next level."

Mr. Cafasso, reached on his cellphone, said in a brief interview, "I left because I had enough; I don't like the press." Yet he sent the staff a gracious note. "I opted to depart without fanfare because this is the way I am," he wrote. "One day there, the next not."

That, too, is how former associates describe Mr. Cafasso. Before his arrival at Fox, Mr. Cafasso spent years flitting in and out of military and political circles, impressing people with his stories and disappearing when people began to doubt him.

Born in 1956, he graduated from Carteret High School in Carteret, N.J., military records show. He is described by people who know him as an imposing figure with graying hair, tobacco-stained teeth and a gruff voice. He is considered a gifted storyteller whose tales can keep people riveted for hours.

It appears Mr. Cafasso was introduced to many of the retired generals with whom he built relationships by Rear Adm. Clarence A. Hill Jr., former commanding officer of the the aircraft carrier Independence and once a colleague of Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser.

Mr. Cafasso first met Mr. Hill at a conference in 1997 held by the conservative media group Accuracy in Media, where Admiral Hill spoke about his theory that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a missile when it crashed off Long Island in July 1996.

"He made enough of an acquaintanceship with me at the time to arrange a later meeting, and he had information about TWA 800," Mr. Hill said.

Mr. Cafasso was so enthusiastic about the missile theory that Mr. Hill introduced him to like-minded military men, like Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and William S. Donaldson 3rd, a retired commander in the Navy.

Mr. Cafasso's collaboration with Mr. Donaldson on TWA the crash ended abruptly when Mr. Donaldson asked to see his partner's service records and Mr. Cafasso told him they were sealed, Mr. Hill said. When the records were not provided, Mr. Hill said, Mr. Donaldson, who died last August, ended the collaboration.

Mr. Hill said he regretted introducing Mr. Cafasso to a group of veterans and American and Serbian activists concerned about the humanitarian conditions in Yugoslavia after the NATO military campaign there. Mr. Cafasso helped the group lobby for aid to the wartorn region, people involved said.

"He's overwhelmingly convincing," said David Vuich, a member of the Serbian group. "He walks sometimes with a cane and made reference to it being something that he had experienced in Vietnam."

Mr. Cafasso finally had a falling out with some in the advocacy group in late 1999 when they thought he was trying to take over its leadership, several members said.

Not long afterward Mr. Cafasso began to work with the presidential campaign of Patrick J. Buchanan, helping it collect petitions in Texas and then in Oklahoma and Georgia.

By last summer, he was working, for free, for the crisis-obsessed, politically wired program of Paul Alexander and John Batchelor at WABC Radio in New York. Phil Boyce, the programming director there, said Mr. Cafasso approached the program claiming to have leads on stories but quickly began to overstep his bounds. He was dismissed within a few weeks. "He began to introduce himself as an executive producer and began to tell my employees what to do," Mr. Boyce said. "Once I found out, I put a stop to it."

Mr. Vuich of the advocacy group said he was surprised when Mr. Cafasso appeared at a reception at the Yugoslavian embassy in Washington as a representative for Fox News in early November. "How he had managed to wiggle his way into Fox was beyond me," Mr. Vuich said.

At that point Mr. Vuich and two others from the advocacy group, John Saylor and Ben Works, decided to check Mr. Cafasso's military record, the men said in interviews. Mr. Works received Mr. Cafasso's record from the national personnel records bureau in St. Louis and gave it to people at Fox and other Cafasso associates. But Mr. Cafasso had just left the network.

Mr. Cafasso has recently been seen on Capitol Hill, representing himself as a consultant for Midwest security company.

On Friday he said he was doing crucial secret work, adding that he could not cooperate because of "national security." On Saturday, he offered an explanation of his work but would not do so for publication.

On Sunday, he sent an e-mail message: "This is nothing more than political assassination by a group of self-centered individuals with their own political agendas, who enjoy half-truths, gossip and hiding behind the press for their own self-worth. I will not be tried by the press and small-minded individuals such as these that have no clue to what is real or not."

About the Author:
Jim Rutenberg  an award winning and highly respected journalist along with a prestigious author who had just written a book about her experiences in Bosnia.  Neuffer traveled extensively throughout Afghanistan during the war and then covered the Iraq war where she was killed in May 2003.  It was a great loss to the industry because Neuffer was known to be one of the rare journalists with impeccable credentials, and unquestionable ethics.

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