Was Watergate Really About Sex?

As time rolls on, new evidence about the Watergate case seeps from the bowels of archives and witnesses revealing previously unreported information. One of these revelations is that Watergate was really about a call girl operation run by the Democratic National Committee. Although it is part of the puzzle, we don’t think it tells the whole story.

 

Although Phil Stanford has recently written a book, White House Call Girl, laying out the details of the prostitution ring serving Washington's high and mighty, the story has been around since as early as 1976, and gained stature with G Gordon Liddy’s legal encounter with Maxie Wells, one of the prominent figures in the ring. However, Standford’s book is dedicated to the details of the subject, and is more accessible to casual students of Watergate than some other treatments of the topic.

 

The call girl ring is certainly a verifiable aspect to Watergate about which Stanford reveals important details, some of which we admit are necessary inferences for which we would like meatier substantiation. He identifies 3 important characters who were the motivation for the break-in, namely John Dean, White House Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, Carl Shoffler, the arresting officer of the Watergate burglars, and Heidi Rikan, the madame running the escort service.

 

Rikan ( c. 1940 – 1990 ), also known as Cathy Deiter, was a German immigrant who became involved with the underworld as a stripper. Mob boss Joe Nesline thought that her talents would be better used as a whore to spy on his pimps’ big name clients in football and politics. She had developed an exclusive clientele in the Johnson and Nixon administrations when she came to the attention of John Dean.

 

John Dean’s girl friend and future wife Mo Biner and Rikan were roommates at the Columbia Plaza Apartments before Biner moved in with Dean. Dean and Rikan knew each other well as attested by Rikan’s black book which contained Dean’s direct White House number. Stanford believes that the ambitious Dean wanted the information Rikan had on politicians in order to blackmail them for personal political advantage. Consequently he ordered the Watergate break where Rikan’s business originated at the DNC headquarters.

 

The target of the break in was Ida “Maxie”  Wells’ desk, the secretary to Spencer Oliver, Jr. Wells was the front woman for Rikan’s prostitution service for which Wells arranged hook-ups for out of town visitors. The operation is confirmed by attorney Phillip Bailey whose credibility was so high that he was sent to St Elizabeth’s Hospital for psychiatric tests where after some considerable time he was certified sane. When he was released from the hospital he was forced to plead guilty to a felony and sent to federal prison. The purpose for railroading Bailey into the hospital and prison was to discredit him. Clearly he touched a nerve.

 

The Washington Post’s version – ie the CIA’s – of Watergate is that the burglars broke into DNC chairman Larry O’Brien’s office to tap his telephone to gather political information. They burglarized the Watergate on May 28 and June 17, with the former deemed to be a failure requiring the second break in. No bugs were ever found in the offices but the CIA story claims that Alfred Baldwin was eavesdropping across the street in the Howard Johnson motel. The most likely story is that he was listening to conversations at the Columbia apartments down the street since O’Brien had been out of town for about a month prior to the last break in.

 

At some point, perhaps as early as June 1, Carl Shoffler of the Washington DC police department, and concurrently a military intelligence agent, got a tip about the second break in. On the night of the burglary, he volunteered to work without pay, waiting in an unmarked car for a call to come in reporting the burglary. This version of events is supported by testimony of the Senate Watergate committee from a certain Army LTC whose name we don’t recall.

 

This version of the story contradicts the CIA story which alleges that an alert diligent police officer just happened to stumble upon the burglars as he was making his rounds. This story is a complete lie.

 

Two interesting points stand out about the arrest. The 5 burglars were wearing surgical gloves and had mounted photography equipment on Wells’ desk, and one of them, Eugenio Martinez had a key which Shoffler took, but which the FBI later determined fit Wells’ desk. So the evidence points strongly to the burglars breaking into Wells’ desk to photograph her black book with its rich data.

 

As Stanford puts it, the arrest looks like one intelligence operation stepping on the toes of another. But we don’t see it quite that way. The absolute most important fact of the entire Watergate saga is that the 5 burglars were not ordinary street hoods. They were hardened top level CIA agents and operatives who were involved with Bay of Pigs and the murder of John Kennedy, something which Nixon immediately recognized when he found  out about the break in. Without understanding who they were, it is utterly impossible to understand Watergate. Even if proper cognition is made of this salient fact, it is no guarantee that one will understand the purpose of the break-in, but clearly the CIA was behind it and was the reason Nixon wanted Haldeman to contact Richard Helms, CIA DCI, to thwart the investigation. After all, it was their operation.

 

Unfortunately for Nixon, the CIA was the sponsor of the break-in and they were not about to call off the investigation, especially when Nixon threatened them with the unraveling of the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.”

 

Our view is that Dean instigated the cover-up into which he drew Nixon who thought he could twist the whole affair to his political advantage. Unfortunately he was going up against the entire intelligence establishment which included the press – a fact which he never understood.

 

He also did not realize that Dean started the cover-up, knowing full well that it would end badly, thus accomplishing the agency’s goal of removing a president.

 

While we agree that Stanford has uncovered a significant dimension to the Watergate story, we don’t think that it was the true ultimate aim of the CIA operation. Certainly Dean threatened to expose an explosive sex scandal, but the Democrats fought mightily by turning it into a story about abuses of the imperial presidency in order to keep the salacious aspects under wraps, and for which the FBI obliged by suppressing the evidence of the key which Shoffler obtained during the arrests.

 

We could be mistaken about the grand purpose of Watergate, so will hedge our bets with continued research into the 20^th century’s great American political scandal. But for now, it was not all about sex.

Reference

Jim Hougan, Hougan, Liddy, the Post and Watergate, jimhougan.com, June 22, 2011, accessed 3/26/2014

Phil Stanford, interview on Oppenheimer Report, no date, accessed 3/26/2014, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MedT1FkaR0

Copyright 2014 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Who Is John Dean?

For most Americans of a certain age, John Dean needs little introduction as the Watergate whistle blower who helped bring down the Nixon White House. Unfortunately the characterization of him in the press is deceitful at best and a lie at worst. John Dean is, in the words of a New York Times reviewer J. Anthony Luca, ‘”one of the sleaziest White House operatives.”’ We present his sleazy story below.

Dean, a son of an affluent Ohio family, attended Staunton Military Academy in Virginia where he roomed with Barry Goldwater, Jr, a relationship which blossomed into a friendship with the Goldwater family, who were also very friendly with the Bushes.

Following graduation from the academy, Dean attended college in the Midwest, after which he graduated from Georgetown law school. He was dismissed from his first job at a Washington law firm for violating company policy against conflict of interest pursuant to negotiating a private broadcast deal while doing so for a client.

Dean then managed to get a job as chief minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee working for Ohio representative William McCulloch. After a couple of other stints, he got a job working for Richard Kleindienst, a Goldwater protégé and Nixon Deputy Attorney General. In time, in July 1970, he managed to take John Ehrlichman’s position, through the agency of Egil Krogh, as chief White House counsel when Ehrlichman became Nixon's chief domestic adviser.

Egil Krogh is the man who ordered the break-in to Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and who had been trying months before July 1970 to get Dean into the White House. Krogh was also the money man liaison for the CIA who paid off the Southeast Asian drug lords. Krogh also worked with Kennedy murder co-conspirator E Howard Hunt during the Nixon years. And to round out his villainy, Krogh also had associations with University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman whose Vietnamese pacification program had close associations with the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, a program designed to murder Vietnamese civilians of which 20,000 – 60,000 were murdered in cold blood.

Dean was soon heading up his own intelligence operations in the White House, ostensibly to help re-elect the president. However, his true goal was to implicate the president in a crime resulting in his removal from power. In November 1971, Dean ordered two private investigators to do a walk-through of the Watergate Hotel where the Democratic National Convention maintained its headquarters.

In January 1972, Dean instructed G Gordon Liddy, another Krogh appointment, to set up an intelligence operation, on an unprecedented scale, which spawned Operation Gemstone, a clandestine operation to infiltrate Democrat campaigns. This operation morphed into the Watergate break-in which Dean, in April 1972, ordered Jeb Magruder to order Liddy to initiate.

When the FBI became involved in the purposefully botched break-in and its subsequent trace of the money found on the burglars, Dean attempted to coerce director Patrick Gray to drop or curtail his investigations. When he refused to do so, Dean sat in all of the witness interviews in order to control the way the story developed and to stanch any information which might tie him to the break-in and its cover-up.

Dean was quite active in the cover-up, one action of which was ordering Hunt out of the country, obviously in an effort to silence potentially loose lips, which precaution he sweetened with an offer of hush money. Dean also covered-up the fact that Gordon Strachan, a mid-level White House staffer, had pre break-in knowledge and direct ties with Dean.

Dean was finally convicted of Watergate crimes but plea bargained for a 4 month prison sentence. He wrote his autobiography and Watergate tale, Blind Ambition, to turn his intelligence espionage in the White House into big money. Bigger money awaited him when he moved to California to work as an investment banker, proving once again that crime pays.

Unfortunately, and quite curiously, though not in the least bit surprising, John Dean disavowed his book as a bit of fantasy in a 1989 interview with author Len Colodny, in which he admitted that he could not rely upon Blind Ambition, deferring instead to his sworn testimony. He also accused his publisher, Simon & Schuster of introducing fictional material into the book to make it more interesting. Alice Mayhew, an editor of the firm, completely denied that the publisher was responsible for any of the book’s content.

In addition to investment banking, Dean has an avocational interest in suing people who publish unflattering material about him. Examples include his lawsuits against Len Colodny, author of Silent Coup, and G Gordon Liddy who suggested that Dean authorized Watergate to obtain information about his call girl wife Maureen. We dismiss that allegation as a distraction from the larger story about US intelligence engaged in another executive action operation.

Dean, far from being the earnest but ambitious legal counsel for the corrupt president as he and the press portray, was one of the prime movers behind the Watergate debacle. However, we must acknowledge that higher powers than Dean were plotting the political assassination of a president.

Reference

Family of Secrets, Russ Baker

http://www.watergate.com/, Len Colodny

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Watergate 40 Years Later

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