The Arrogance of Power (72 page)

The prosecutor in the Watergate break-in case, Earl Silbert, concluded on the basis of Baldwin's description while under interrogation that the conversations had been “extremely personal, intimate, and potentially embarrassing.” Who made the calls? “I don't know if you had one very active secretary or you had ten,” Baldwin said recently. “I don't know if you had one very active male or if you had ten . . . there were a lot of calls of a sexual nature.”

The phone on which the conversations took place was in the office of thirty-five-year-old Democratic official Spencer Oliver. CREEP's Jeb Magruder, who saw Baldwin's logs, brought up Oliver's name when John Ehrlichman questioned him during the Watergate crisis. Ehrlichman's handwritten notes of the meeting include the name “Oliver” followed closely by “sex.”

“What they were getting,” Ehrlichman told Nixon the same afternoon, “was mostly this fellow Oliver phoning his girlfriends all over the country lining up assignations.”
¹¹
Oliver, today a top official with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was a prime mover in ensuring that the content of the bugs was not revealed in court.

The woman at the DNC who in recent years has drawn the most attention is Maxie Wells, at the time Oliver's twenty-three-year-old secretary. By her account, she was “completely naïve and innocent,” a music major from a small town in Mississippi. Months after Watergate, when she had left the DNC and the Democrats brought a civil suit against the burglars for invasion of privacy, she would write to a girlfriend:

Testifying in 1997, in a more recent lawsuit, Wells said that while working at the DNC, she thought her life “pretty wild by the standards of where I grew up. Living in a house with five men, dating several different people, working for a man who was rumored to have numerous affairs, and gossiping on the phone about it with my friend.”

Wells said she was “kind of appalled by a lot of the romantic and sexual behavior I saw going on at the DNC. . . . People were just sleeping with each other kind of indiscriminately, I thought, not real relationships, but one-night
stands and things like that. That was pretty wild stuff to me.” So she gossiped, she said, especially on the internal phone with her friend Marty Sampson, who worked in an office a few floors below. “I bet,” she said, “we gossiped about every single person we knew at the DNC . . . it was kind of crude sometimes. . . . Marty and I gossiped about adultery.”

Her own chatter aside, Wells said, other secretaries took advantage of the fact that the phone in question was in a room that was often unoccupied to “[talk] to their sweeties on the phone.”

Was that all that took place, then, on the infamous bugged phone at the Democratic headquarters? Conversation about personal relationships and secretaries' gossip? Some suspect not, noting that when arrested, one of the Watergate burglars would have with him a key to a drawer in Maxie Wells' desk. Reasonably enough, such researchers have concluded that her desk was a specific target for the burglars.
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Phillip Bailley, a former Washington lawyer convicted in 1972 of pimping, has claimed that a secretary at the DNC was used as a go-between with prostitutes based at the Columbia Plaza, the huge apartment complex nearby. This secretary, he said, would provide would-be customers with photographs of available whores. Then, unknown to Oliver, a phone in his office was used to set up specific assignations.
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As reported earlier, one element of Gordon Liddy's “intelligence” plan had envisaged the employment of prostitutes. Everyone privy to the plan admitted later that he hoped to put into action, as John Mitchell put it, “the call girl bit,” the houseboat at the Democratic convention, wired for sound, to which classy-looking women would lure leading Democrats and try to get information out of them.

A madam he had located in Baltimore, Liddy told colleagues, promised “girls who can be trained and programmed,” and there was later discussion—after the houseboat plan had been shelved—of using prostitutes in Washington. Howard Hunt later told one of his accomplices that he feared “accusations about prostitutes” would come out at his trial.

While one aide has said that Nixon's top men were too straitlaced ever to have approved such antics, another—one of Ehrlichman's assistants—stated in an interview that Nixon and Haldeman both had “perverted interests in their surveillance activities.”

Prostitutes did operate in the apartment complex near the Watergate, a fact confirmed by police arrest records, interviews with former policemen, and by former Assistant U.S. Attorney John Rudy, who investigated call girl operations in the spring of 1972.

The author, for his part, located Barbara Ralabate, a former madam once known in the trade as Lil Lori. Ralabate's criminal history reflects several prostitution-related arrests, one of them just before CREEP's burglars turned their attention to the Watergate. Now a middle-aged woman living far from
the capital, she readily acknowledged having managed call girls operating at different times out of apartments 204 and 901 at the Columbia Plaza.

Her professionalism would not allow Ralabate to divulge clients' names, and she would say only that they included both Republicans and Democrats. “I'd give them nicknames, and I knew them by voice,” she said. “If I knew their voice they could come . . . that's how secretive I was. It kept me out of trouble because so many people were political. It's a political town.

“That's the way business was done,” said Ralabate, when asked if it was plausible that a DNC phone had been used to make appointments. “That's the way politicians are, and every other business. Attorneys, they entertained their clients in those days too, especially in the Nixon days. . . . They were spending big money to entertain this politician or that politician to get things done. That's just the way it was.”

Pressed on whether she herself had a special arrangement with the DNC, Ralabate replied with a smile, “I wouldn't tell you if I did.” She did admit, however, that she had had “good friends . . . customers” among the Democratic staff. “There was a lot of business done at that place. . . . These people were good to me, trusted me.”

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy, who investigated links between the Columbia Plaza prostitution and the DNC, was told Democrats were involved. He was also informed that a woman at the DNC “arranged for liaisons.” Most startlingly, he revealed that some of the prostitutes' operations were filmed or tape-recorded.

A number of customers, Rudy learned, knowingly performed in front of a movie camera or with sound tapes turning because they wanted a record to keep for their own later pleasure. The police meanwhile had “phone taps . . . pursuant to a court order,” and “perhaps other agencies . . . involved in some type of intelligence operations. I mean, it was a ball of wax.” The ball of wax, Rudy added, included “people who were having illegal taps.”

One of Rudy's sources was Lou Russell, the former FBI agent who had once worked with Nixon on the Hiss case and was employed by CREEP at the time of Watergate. Russell was on close terms with several Washington whores and their madams—he said specifically that he knew Ralabate—and by his own account made covert recordings of conversations between the Columbia Plaza girls and the DNC. An associate who came to know him in the months after Watergate, Robert Smith, actually listened to one of the tapes.

“I had three or four meetings with Russell,” Smith told the author, “and among other things he claimed—and I have no reason to doubt it—that there was a tape recorder operating against a couple of prominent Democratic leaders. They were picking up these conversations in which they were making dates with women over the phone . . . for sexual liaison purposes.” Russell told Smith and other associates that one of the senior Democrats involved was
DNC Chairman Lawrence O'Brien. He also named a prostitute O'Brien allegedly frequented.

Ralabate, the former Columbia Plaza madam, admitted in 1997 that she knew people involved with the Watergate break-in. She declined to elaborate but told of a visit by a senior Democrat at the height of the Watergate crisis. “I remember him talking with me on the balcony,” she said. “He wanted to know what I was going to say when I was questioned, if I was questioned. I said: ‘What I'm going to say is I don't know what anyone is talking about.' . . .”

Whatever the truth about the occupants of the Democratic offices and their neighbors the whores, the sex angle came up in the Oval Office a few months after Watergate. As Nixon sat discussing the situation with Haldeman and colleagues, John Dean briefed him on the lawsuit the Democratic National Committee had brought against CREEP. The burglars' attorney, Dean told the president, was “getting into the sex lives of some of the members of the DNC . . . he's working on an entrapment theory that they were hiding something or they had secret information, affairs to hide.”

Three days earlier, in a memo to Haldeman headed “Counter Actions (Watergate),” Dean had written: “NOTE: Depositions are presently being taken of members of the DNC by the defense counsel in the O'Brien suit. These are wide ranging and will cover everything from Larry O'Brien's sources of income while Chairman of the DNC to
certain sexual activities of employees of the DNC. They should cause considerable problems for those deposed
[author's emphasis].”

The lawyer representing the burglars, Henry Rothblatt, has since died, but Liddy's attorney, Peter Maroulis, well remembered the nature of the sex activities Rothblatt hoped to use against the Democrats. “The Democrats,” his fellow attorney had told him, “were using call girls.”
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Potential embarrassment about prostitution, however, could cut both ways, as the Nixon White House well knew in the months before Watergate. In the fall of 1971 Charles Colson had received a tip from a
Life
magazine contact about a breaking story in New York. Bugs installed in a Manhattan brothel had led to exposure of a police protection scam. Now political scandal also loomed.

In a note to Colson, the
Life
reporter summarized what he had heard from the electronics man who had installed the bugs: “He said: ‘I know a lot about that operation. There were a lot of politicians mixed up in it, even the White House.' I said: ‘What are you talking about?' And then he brought up Mosbacher's name. . . .”

Emil Mosbacher was Nixon's chief of protocol, and the allegation was that he had taken prostitutes from the brothel by limousine to service clients elsewhere. The
Life
reporter believed his source was telling the truth.

Alerted by Colson, John Dean began making inquiries. Even before they were completed, however, the
New York Times
featured a story with an
ominous headline:
POSSIBLE BLACKMAIL OF NIXON OFFICIALS CHECKED HERE
. “At least two high-ranking officials in the Nixon administration,” ran the lead, “are among the people the Manhattan District Attorney's Office intends to question about the possibility that they were blackmailed because of their association with an East Side brothel.”

The woman who had run the brothel, Xaviera Hollander, surfaced soon afterward with her book
The Happy Hooker,
an instant worldwide best seller. It contained no revelations about the Nixon White House, but allegations got into the press again, this time about “one of the hierarchy of the White House.” In the spring of 1972, just weeks before the first Watergate break-in, Hollander was deported to Europe. The wiretapper who claimed his tapes proved a White House connection also left the country.

“Thank you, Tricky Dicky,” Hollander wrote in the next edition of her book, for the pressure to deport her had apparently come from the top levels of the government. “The White House got her kicked out to stop her making a noise,” said the author Robin Moore, who listened to the brothel tapes and worked with Hollander while ghosting her book. “The Nixon administration had been using the Hollander outfit to entertain foreign dignitaries, especially Arabs. It was organized by Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler. It was taped. . . .”

Sometime after Nixon's resignation, in a report suppressed officially but leaked to the press, the House Intelligence Committee would reveal that the CIA had provided foreign heads of state with “female companions.” Several leaders, including King Hussein of Jordan, had so benefited.

Watergate Special Prosecution Force attorney Carl Feldbaum, who had access to highly classified material, told the author in 1997 that documents he saw established that the Nixon administration “understood the CIA had a capability to provide hookers . . . when Emperor So-and-So, or a king or a president or premier comes to town and made known the creature comforts he was used to—whether he liked them tall and dark, blonde and petite or whatever his taste was. . . .”