One of President Clinton's long-time friends and investment partners, Susan McDougal, was sentenced Tuesday to serve two years in prison and repay about $600,000 to the government after her conviction on fraud charges stemming from the Whitewater investigation. Even though McDougal played a relatively small part in the Whitewater saga, she received one of the toughest sentences meted out in the case so far _ only four months less than the central figure in the conspiracy, David Hale. Her attorney, Bobby McDaniel, said Tuesday that McDougal received a harsh sentence because, unlike many other defendants, McDougal, 42, has refused all entreaties to cooperate with Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. "She is being used as a political pawn," McDaniel said. "The entire objective of prosecuting Susan McDougal was not to go after Susan McDougal but to try to get someone to say something against Bill and Hillary Clinton." Prosecutors have said that they hoped fears of harsh sentences would encourage Mrs. McDougal and her two co-defendants _ her ex-husband James McDougal and former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker _ to give them more information. U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. has delayed sentencing James McDougal amid speculation that he has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency. Howard sentenced Tucker to four years' probation Monday, saying it would be cruel to imprison him because he is on a waiting list for a liver transplant. McDaniel said Starr's staff recently offered to get Mrs. McDougal's sentence reduced to probation if she would "provide information that she might have against Bill and Hillary Clinton." He said she refused to cooperate because she has no information of wrongdoing by the Clintons. As a result of Mrs. McDougal's refusal to cooperate with what she believes is a politically motivated investigation of the Clintons, McDaniel said, "she feels like what she is, is a political prisoner in the United States." Although Mrs. McDougal intends to appeal, Howard ordered her to begin serving her sentence Sept. 30. In addition to a fine of $5,000, she was instructed to reimburse the government for the $300,000 loan she failed to repay to a federally backed institution and about the same amount in interest. After prison, she will be on three years' probation. Mrs. McDougal, who has no source of income, was convicted on three counts of fraud in connection with a $300,000 loan she received in the '80s from a small business investment owned by Hale and funded by the government. Wiping tears from her eyes, she pleaded with Howard for probation. She said she was a naive, 21-year-old when she married McDougal, her college professor who was 15 years her senior. She said she did everything he told her, including signing for the loan. The Whitewater scandal, she said, has destroyed her life, preventing her from holding a job or marrying Eugene Harris, the man she fell in love with after leaving her husband in 1985. "If not for Whitewater," she sobbed, "I would have been married and have children." The prosecution, however, characterized her as a woman who has lived a life of deception. The $300,000 loan at issue in the trial was one of a number of transactions that were reputedly part of a larger financial conspiracy by the McDougals, Hale and Tucker to defraud Hale's investment firm and Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which was owned by the McDougals. Hale maintains he made the loan, which was never repaid, to Mrs. McDougal under pressure from her husband and Gov. Clinton. He said Clinton later told him Mrs. McDougal had squandered the money. Although her loan application concealed the real purpose of her loan, Mrs. McDougal says she borrowed $300,000 from Hale to develop Lorrance Heights, a real estate venture. About $25,000 went toward acquiring the property from International Paper Co., she said, and another $105,000 for roads and drainage. At one point shortly after Lorrance Heights was acquired, the property was held briefly by the Whitewater venture. James McDougal has said he put the property under Whitewater ownership briefly because he thought the Clintons were going to sign their portion of the investment over to him and he hoped that Lorrance Heights could then reap the tax benefits of a $145,000 loss that had been sustained by the Whitewater partnership. He said he removed the property from Whitewater ownership shortly thereafter when the Clintons failed to give him their stock in the partnership. As a result, he insists, the Clintons enjoyed no benefit from the $300,000 in question. When Susan McDougal realized she could not repay the loan, she tried to compensate Hale by giving him 5,744 shares of stock in Madison Guaranty, which soon was closed by the government. She later consented to a $396,000 judgment that Hale filed against her, but she never paid the money. _ Information from New York Times was used in this report.