LEWINSKY GETS CALL TO TESTIFY : GINSBURG TO FIGHT STARR SUBPOENA.

Byline: John M. Broder The New York Times

Government prosecutors have summoned Monica Lewinsky to appear before a federal grand jury Thursday, a significant escalation of the battle over Lewinsky's testimony now that immunity talks have broken down.

The vise is tightening on Lewinsky, a 24-year-old former White House intern caught in a swirl of charges of White House sex and cover-up. With the option of her testifying voluntarily about her relationship with President Clinton now apparently a dead letter, she faces a choice between testifying under a limited grant of immunity or facing possible prosecution for perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating accusations that Clinton engaged in an extended sexual relationship with Lewinsky and then urged her to lie about it, had hoped that Lewinsky voluntarily would agree to cooperate in exchange for a full grant of immunity from prosecution.

But because of bitter past experience and ingrained prosecutorial skepticism about witnesses in criminal cases, Starr has been unwilling to immunize Lewinsky until he has had a chance to look her in the eye and check her story against other evidence. He has also raised the possibility of subjecting her to a polygraph examination as a further means of testing her truthfulness.

Starr's office declined to comment on its dealings with Lewinsky.

Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, has stated repeatedly that his client would agree to be debriefed by Starr's investigators for ``days, weeks, months, whatever'' - but only after she had been given immunity, not before. He said Monday that he would try to quash the grand jury subpoena and would challenge what he called Starr's failure to deliver on a binding grant of immunity.

Discussions between Ginsburg and Starr's office over the timing of the grant of immunity and the completeness of her account have become increasingly contentious in recent days and appear to have collapsed.

After nearly three weeks of conditional offers to cooperate with Starr, Ginsburg adopted a hostile tone toward the independent counsel over the weekend.

Lewinsky faces legal jeopardy because she swore in an affidavit prepared for the Paula Jones sexual misconduct case against Clinton that she had never had sexual relations with the president. But Lewinsky confided in friends - one of whom taped their conversations and gave the tapes to Starr - that she had indeed been involved sexually with Clinton.

Ginsburg also angrily charged that Starr's office had carried out a calculated campaign of leaks designed to discredit his client.

Ginsburg said Monday that the alleged release of information from Starr's office ``makes it impossible to achieve fairness in any sense of the word.''

``The leaks must be stopped,'' Ginsburg said in brief remarks to reporters in Los Angeles, where he and Lewinsky are visiting with her father and preparing for the next stage in the high-stakes legal contest.

The tale of how a star-struck young woman from Beverly Hills came to be a pawn in this game is one of missed opportunities and miscommunication and a case study in the difficulty of carrying on sensitive negotiations in the blinding glare of a full-scale media blitz.

Prosecutors first offered Lewinsky immunity Jan. 16, the day that Lewinsky was confronted at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in suburban Virginia by lawyers and agents working for the independent counsel. Starr's team made a simple offer: If Lewinsky was willing to work undercover, and secretly record conversations with people close to the president, she would be granted full and complete immunity. The offer would expire that night if she left without agreeing to assist investigators.

Late that evening, Ginsburg, a longtime family friend and lawyer, advised Lewinsky to reject the prosecutors' offer, which she did.

The next day, word of her alleged affair with the president began seeping out on an Internet gossip site, killing the possibility that she could surreptitiously capture incriminating conversations on tape. Prosecutors said the immunity deal was off.

Ginsburg and Starr's legal team then embarked on a confounding - and at times, bizarre - series of negotiations over the terms of Lewinsky's immunity and her testimony. On some days, far more was said by both sides publicly to television cameras than was said behind closed doors to each other. The negotiations were marked by suspicion on both sides that the other side was being disingenuous and breaking agreements.