The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  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.”14

  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. . . .”

  Ron Ziegler has insisted he had nothing to do with providing sex for foreign guests. The very suggestion, he said, is “absurd.” John Dean, however, recalled Ziegler going “white as a sheet” when asked if he had “anything to fear from Xaviera Hollander’s address book.” He replied, “I’ll deny it,” according to Dean, and over the weeks that followed frequently called the counsel’s office asking for further developments.15

  Protocol chief Mosbacher, whose primary responsibility was to look after foreign guests, resigned within days of the Watergate break-in, and has since died. So too has assistant protocol chief Nick Ruwe, the veteran aide Nixon placed in charge of all White House social events. Neither, obviously, could be interviewed for this book, but it seems Ruwe might have been a key source. “What do you do as deputy protocol chief?” Republican lawyer William Bagley once asked him during the presidency. “Well,” he replied, “we have ten Arabs coming to town, and they’ve ordered twenty prostitutes—none of them Jewish. . . .”

  “Nick Ruwe,” a longtime Nixon aide told the author on condition of anonymity, “was himself the biggest cocksman this town ever saw. He was a bachelor at the time. When our families were out at San Clemente, we’d go over to his place. And before the night was over, he’d have girls in there, and those of us that were frail and sissies would leave, and they’d party.”

  Comments by this source and by Nixon’s top advance man, Ron Walker, along with other leads, suggest the White House indeed had secrets of a sexual nature to hide in early 1972. These were secrets much more directly damaging than those involving the Xaviera Hollander prostitution outfit in New York.

  Walker was aware of the brothel next to the DNC at the time, he said in 1997. “I knew it from the Advance Office. I had colleagues that used call girl rings.” One such colleague, said the aide who requested anonymity, was deputy protocol chief Ruwe, who “was always using those call girls at the place next to the DNC.”

  How the whores were employed—whether to provide sex for government guests or for personal pleasure, or both—remains uncertain. Depositions in a recent libel case focused on Heidi Rikan, a flashy German-born blonde, who graduated from striptease dancing at Washington’s Blue Mirror Club to a social life that by 1972, when she was thirty-four, included friends ranging from gamblers to White House counsel John Dean and his girlfriend—later wife—Maureen.

  Before her death in 1990, Rikan said in a conversation with her maid that she had once been a call girl. Explaining that a call girl was “a lady that meets men, and men pay them”—the maid had grown up in the country and knew nothing of big-city sins—she added, tantalizingly: “I was a call girl at the White House.”16

  Exactly a week before the Watergate break-in, John Dean again had to follow up on a prostitution story. The June 9 banner headline in the Washington Evening Star was: CAPITOL HILL CALL GIRL RING UNCOVERED. “The FBI,” its opening paragraph read, “has uncovered a high-priced call girl ring allegedly headed by a Washington attorney and staffed by secretaries and office workers from Capitol Hill and involving at least one White House secretary, sources said.” Among the clients of the call girl operation, the Star’s sources also claimed, was a “lawyer at the White House.”

  The president’s aide and personal friend Peter Flanigan, the Star reported, had called the U.S. attorney’s office to “find out if there was a chance of embarrassment to the Nixon administration.”17 The following day, the Washington Post reported, courthouse sources said that “the White House had shown a special interest in the case and was exerting pressure on the prosecutors not to comment on it.”

  Now that the story was in print, there was an immediate reaction from the Oval Office. “There was a big folderol,” recalled Dean’s lawyer colleague Pete Kinsey. “I remember John having to question each one of us, on the instructions of Haldeman. They were looking for the identity of the ‘White House lawyer,’ for damage control.”

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy found himself in Dean’s office within hours, explaining the investigation and showing him materials seized from Phillip Bailley, the man indicted in the call girl case. Dean thumbed through one of Bailley’s address books, comparing it with a roster of White House personnel. He had his secretary copy the book and paid particular attention to one photograph of a naked woman.

  The woman, a young attorney in her twenties, was not exactly a White House lawyer. She did work in the Executive Office Building Annex, however, and was summarily fired.18 It is not known if internal inquiries identified others compromised by the probe, but the case clearly had too many links to the Nixon White House for comfort.

  Protocol chief Mosbacher’s alleged connection to the Xaviera Hollander ring, if revealed, would have triggered disastrous publicity.

  Nick Ruwe, said to have “used” the Columbia Plaza women—for whatever purpose—was also very close to the president. He had worked for Nixon since 1960, had been his personal aide in 1962, and was to serve as his senior assistant and traveling companion long after the resignation. Had Ruwe been associated at the time with the Columbia Plaza whores, as a colleague has alleged he was, the scandal would have come embarrassingly close to the president.

  In the late summer of 1972, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy has recalled, he was ordered to “ice” his investigation into linkage between the Columbia Plaza prostitutes and the Democratic headquarters, to close it down. “The directions that I received,” he said, “were that the DNC should not be pursued, that it was a political time bomb. It was very politically sensitive. . . . It was a time that was very highly politically charged about what Republicans might have done. I worked for a Republican administration, and I was told that was no longer a subject matter to be looked into.”

  CREEP’s Gordon Liddy, writing of Xaviera Hollander’s appointment books, observed that they “were useless to either Democrats or Republicans, because so many prominent members of both parties were represented in them they would cancel each other out in a political ‘balance of terror.’ . . .”

  _____

  However potentially damaging such evidence might be, the final fateful break-in of the Democratic headquarters was not driven solely by the prostitution angle. Had the target been only the desk of one secretary, it would have made no sense to commit eight men with varied criminal specialties to the task. One, at most two, burglars would have sufficed.

  There is indeed no need to try to explain Watergate by a single motive. “We were really after anything . . .” Magruder would tell Ehrlichman. That, in the end, was the burglars’ brief.

  “We were looking for everything,” Sturgis emphasized in his detailed account. “Our orders were to sweep the entire file system of the Democrats. Our assignment was to photograph two thousand documents. We had very efficient photo gear, and an efficient system. . . . we had done other assignments, successfully, and as we went along, we improved our techniques.”

  It is, however, apparent that two full years after the start of Operation O’Brien, the chairman of the Democratic party remained a primary target. His Washington apartment was also twice burglarized, and documents taken. There were two attempts to break into his home in New York City. He and his wife concluded that their private phones were tapped both in the capital and in New York. Spies, one of them a known member of the Watergate operation, trailed O’Brien around the restaurants of both cities, trying to find out with whom he was dining. Howard Hunt was in Miami before the final Watergate break-in, preparing “an alternate plan” for the bugging of O’Brien’s suite at the Democratic convention.

  The DNC leader himself concluded that on the evidence, the overall motive had been to get “information that CREEP, President Nixon and his associates, could use against me, in the hope of embarrassing me. . . . The political realities and the facts show conclusively that the objective of Wat
ergate was to secure all possible information that would help destroy the Democratic Party and its chairman. It is as simple as that.”

  That and, as Liddy and Sturgis were to say, to discover what the Democrats might have on Nixon and his colleagues. “We knew the Democrats had a shit file of damaging rumors about Republican leaders,” Sturgis said. “We dug for that everywhere.” Nixon had reason to fear what O’Brien knew or might know of an array of guilty secrets: the Castro plots; the Howard Hughes money; the illicit funding by the Greek colonels; the sabotage of the 1968 Vietnam peace initiative. If revealed, any of these issues would have been capable of sinking Nixon in the coming election.19

  One of the two attorneys most concerned with defending Nixon during Watergate, Leonard Garment, had no doubt who and what was behind the crime. “These people,” he said in the nineties of the CREEP operatives, “had an assignment: What the president wants is information about Larry O’Brien. O’Brien had him spooked for decades. He thought: ‘Why can’t you guys get the stuff for me that I know is there?’

  “It was Richard Nixon who said: ‘I’m not going to risk this campaign; it was too close last time. There are people who have information I want. . . .’ If anybody can believe that it wasn’t made clear what this was all about, then they really do believe in Santa Claus.”

  Early on Gordon Liddy had characterized his “intelligence” project against the Democrats as “war.” It had been, until then, a secret vendetta, but on Friday, June 16, 1972, it was about to be secret no longer.

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  Watergate has done for the politician what the Boston Strangler did for the door-to-door salesman.