Ep. 01b: What's Past is Prologue

What do a young widow from California, an alcoholic private detective, a civil rights leader, a CIA poisons doctor and a Washington, D.C. prostitution ring have to do with each other?  Seemingly disconnected story lines find themselves woven together in the bizarre 1970s political scandal we call Watergate. 
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The Mysteries of Watergate with John O'Connor
Ep. 01b: What’s Past is Prologue

I do not exaggerate when I tell you the story that will unfold in these episodes will be richer than any political story in our country's history.  It will detail academic but interesting historical fact going back to 1787 and the meaning of our Constitution, and some of its key parts.  Some of it will concern titillating tales of men seeking paid female escort services and out-of-control spooks listening to them.  Some will be about the most noble, ethical and skillful of modern law enforcement.  Some evidence we will present will concern that tawdry underbelly of an intelligence service gone to the dark side. 

These episodes will feature honest government witnesses and abject liars. The narrative will feature energetic reporting of young journalists seeking the truth without fear or favor.  It will feature a presidential administration with dark secrets to hide about its churlish behavior.  It will also detail the way an unattractive politician was unfairly smeared by a partisan press. 

Some parts of the story will be uniquely personal.  Others will reflect larger institutional prerogatives which transcend any individual motives.  Some characters will be true patriots loyal to their country, while other characters will deviously undermine the legitimate function of the government they swore under oath to serve.   I will here profile a few of these characters and their motives. 

It was July 1969 when young Maureen Kane Biner who just lost her husband of two years to a tragic boating accident was pondering what to do with her life.  A California girl, she decided to spend some time in South Lake Tahoe, where California meets Nevada, where there is beach and boating fun in the summer and skiing in the winter.  All year long, on the Nevada side of South Lake there was a lively casino night life.  Soon Mo befriended the glamorous German-born woman named Heidi Riken. Heidi had been only briefly in Tahoe and was about to return to her previous residence in Washington, DC and start a business. Heidi urged Mo to come with her as she drove across the country to DC.  At the time, Heidi urged, Washington, DC was an entertaining place full of interesting people, good jobs and eligible men who could make Mo forget about the tragic loss of her husband. 

So, after crossing the country with her friend, Mo did find a solid job in government.  But more significantly, she developed a relationship with the dashing young lawyer with great ambition.  His name was John Dean.  Dean had been an up-and-coming government counsel and protégé of Attorney General John Mitchell.  He then left the Department of Justice to take an exciting job as White House counsel to the Nixon Administration. 

Soon Dean and Mo Biner began living together.  When John was traveling on an extended trip, Mo would often stay with Heidi.  Heidi had a wealthy boyfriend and Mo sometimes would borrow one of Heidi's expensive furs. The two couples were friends and especially the two women stayed in touch. Heidi was a guest at the small wedding of John and Maureen in October of 1972.  This social friendship would ultimately prove to be one of the strands woven into the complex fabric which we today called Watergate. 

John was in a celebratory mood that October, not only because of the wedding but he had just put to rest, he believed, the nagging possible embarrassment to the Nixon Administration he served as White House counsel.  It seems that there had been a silly odd burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC that June.  The original seven suspects – five burglars and two supervisors – had just been indicted.  One had worked at the White House and one at the CRP, or Committee to Reelect the President, the campaign arm of the White House. 

Many had suspected that others in the White House or CRP would be charged.  But the Department of Justice had recently announced on September 15, 1972 that no more indictments were forthcoming.  As a troubleshooter for this potential scandal, Dean had deftly guided his White House clients through choppy waters.  He could now relax and go on a honeymoon with Mo. 

A high, No. 2 official in the FBI, one W. Mark Felt, was not pleased with this development. He was, that same October of 1972, devising a plan which he thought could possibly restart the same stalled Watergate investigation.  All Felt wanted was permission for the FBI to continue to investigate and present any further findings to a grand jury.  Felt and Dean had dueled earlier that year.  

A young reporter named Brit Hume had uncovered a hot smoking gun, a memo written by a lobbyist for the ITT Corporation dealing with what appeared to be an explicit bribe of the Nixon Administration.  ITT had agreed to pay $400,000 in cash and $400,000 in hotel rooms for the Republican National Convention in exchange for the Nixon Justice Department to drop its antitrust case objecting to ITT's purchase of the Hartford Insurance Company.  Dean wanted Felt’s FBI to agree with the White House that the memo was a forgery but Felt was not buying what Dean was selling ,and the FBI authenticated the memo. 

When legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died shortly after this, Felt, Hoover's No. 2 and his logical successor, was passed over, likely as a result of this stubborn rectitude as he refuses to politicize the Bureau.  Instead, Nixon named L. Patrick Gray, a malleable, Republican political hack.  This choice seemingly politically safe for Nixon ultimately became a significant factor in the President's eventual resignation. 

Years earlier, Hoover had alerted the Kennedy brothers, President John F. and Attorney General Robert, that young, emerging civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was working closely with known communists.  The Kennedys feared that exposure of this link would hurt them politically as King supporters, which they were.  King repeatedly denied it and Robert Kennedy reluctantly ordered Hoover to wiretap King to track any communications he might have with these communists.  The wiretaps, however, yielded some highly unexpected fruits, far removed from communism.  

The great, young preacher had a weakness for women of any color and the matching charisma to attract them.  The taps caught him frequently in the throes of sexual trysts, often with multiple partners featuring loud exultation from the minister.  The prudish Hoover's prime area reaction was simply shock, but his aggressive roguish intelligence Chief William Sullivan wanted to use them as a weapon to bully King, perhaps shame him into resigning his civil rights leadership, which Sullivan thought was communist inspired, or worse, to shame him into suicide.

Sullivan secretly made a recorded montage of many of King’s excited commentaries while in flagrante delicto and mailed a copy of the tape to King’s home with an anonymous letter chillingly suggesting King knew what he had to do.   Hoover always suspected Sullivan of this risky and stomach-turning act, notwithstanding Sullivan’s denials.  Sullivan was also becoming too close for Hoover's taste to the roguish black operations of the CIA which Hoover looked upon as a thuggish rival who might get the FBI in trouble as it helped the CIA with its domestic operations. 

So, Hoover promoted his most capable, clever, senior agent to deal will Sullivan, eventually leading to Sullivan’s firing.  The official’s name was W. Mark Felt, now in line to succeed Hoover and one who wanted to erase Sullivan’s wrongs and clean up Felt’s beloved Bureau.  Indeed, Sullivan’s churlish specter would later hover over the Watergate investigation led by Felt.  Sullivan, at the time, then out of the Bureau, would become an adviser to President Nixon on Watergate. 

Meanwhile, a young DC lawyer, Phillip Mackin Bailley, was making his small but lurid mark as a lawyer representing a clientele consisting largely of prostitutes.  A very lucrative profession in swinging Washington, DC of the early 1970s.  Bailley, the stocky, boyishly handsome, fun-loving Irishman with an insatiable sexual appetite, had been just a few years earlier voted by his Catholic University law school classmates, “most likely to be disbarred.” He would soon prove deserving of this dubious accolade.  It was not uncommon for Bailley to have close personal relationships with his prostitute clients, taking, it seemed, some fees in the form of services. 

In the fall of 1971, one beautiful young madame named Kathy asked Bailley if he could lure referrals from the nearby Democratic national offices.  Bailley dated a girl there and quickly arranged a pipeline. Her operation, Kathy assured Bailley, was protected by the CIA.  Not too long after this, Bailley was having drinks at a Georgetown bar with a large group of like-minded young men planning their continuing deviant exploits.  Bailley passed around the table a nude photo of a young college student with whom the group had had their way at a recent raucous party.  One of the group, a friend of a regular attendee, was a straight arrow and became understandably shocked.  His conscience told him he should report this scenario to the proper authorities.  Like the other events we have here described, this gathering would be one of the several interconnected events that would lead to the only forcible removal of a President in United States history. 

In May 1972, former Alabama Governor George Wallace, a conservative Democrat, had been causing great mischief as a potential third-party Presidential contender.  It was unclear whether Wallace's candidacy would draw more voters away from likely Democratic nominee George McGovern or from the more conservative Republican nominee, incumbent President Richard Nixon.  

On May 15, 1972, at a shopping center in the DC suburb of Laurel, Maryland, Wallace was shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin, effectively ending Wallace's viability as a candidate.  Every reporter in the country was seeking the motive of the shooter, Arthur Bremer.  Was he trying to help Nixon or McGovern?  Was he a Republican or Democrat?  Who put him up to that?  Everyone wanted to know. 

Out of all the country’s interested reporters, the inside story was landed by cub reporter, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, whose lowly assignment was covering local crime in Montgomery County, Maryland.  Scooping all others, Woodward reported convincingly that the gunman, Arthur Bremer, was a crazed loner without political motive.  It seems that Woodward had developed his story through a high official he had confidentially developed within the FBI.  Woodward's proven source led his editors to keep Woodward on the reporting of another local crime which also quickly became a national story: the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office building in Washington, DC just one month after Wallace’s shooting.

Months before the Watergate arrests, Washington, DC lawyer Bernard Fensterwald and his associate, Bob Smith, each had been hearing hilarious tales from a freewheeling friend and alcoholic private eye long working the shadow we demimonde of Washington, DC.  It seems that the investigator had been taping hookers and their johns and regaled his drinking buddies with an amusing recounting of the details. 

These are just a few of the odd tableaus which would eventually unite to cause the combustion of the explosive scandal today known as Watergate. 

Howard Hunt, an ostensibly “retired” CIA officer was working in the summer of 1971 fulltime for a PR agency, Mullen and Company, when he began working parttime for the White House, hired in July 1971 by fellow Brown University alum, White House aide Charles Colson.  Hunt had previously worked for the office of security, or “OS,” of the CIA.  He had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  Not long after his hire, the CRP, or the Committee to Reelect the President, hired James McCord, initially as a parttime Director of Security, later to work fulltime. 

McCord was recently “retired” from the CIA and also had recently worked for the Office of Security, as had Hunt. McCord also was a Bay of Pigs veteran.  Yet, his hire by the CRP was not helped or facilitated by Hunt, but by White House Secret Service chief Alfred Wong.  Was the simultaneous hiring of the two retired agents nothing more than an amazing coincidence?

McCord’s job had nothing to do with the White House or with Hunt. Was it a coincidence that they both were hired by the Nixon Administration at roughly the same time?  Later, when CRP council Gordon Liddy introduced the two, they acted as if they had not previously known each other, clearly not the truth.  Why would they deny having known one another? 

It was December 8, 1972.  Dorothy Hunt, wife of Howard Hunt, was flying to Midway Airport in Chicago from Washington, DC.  The plane, oddly, clipped some trees as it approached Midway, causing a crash and the deaths of many on board, including Dorothy.  Her body was found along with $10,000 in cash she was caring with her.   Her husband was scheduled to begin trial for the Watergate burglary just weeks later, in early January 1973.  Why was she carrying cash?  James McCord would later tell the Senate off-handedly that Dorothy was a “hush money” courier.   

Those who know a bit about Watergate know that the White House was paying money to the arrested suspects mainly, it was inferred, to keep them from fingering higher-ups in the Nixon Administration, thus the term “hush money.”  But no one in the White House has ever written or said that Dorothy Hunt was a hush money courier, nor is there evidence she interacted with Nixon aides.  In fact, her husband Howard was a hungry recipient of hush money, constantly demanding more for legal bills and financial support.  Why would he be giving money away? None of the serial numbers on the bills matched any known White House slush fund cash and there were no burglary defendants in Chicago.  To whom could she possibly be bringing money, and why? And was this hush money or something else? If McCord was giving a false explanation of Dorothy as a hush money courier, what would be his motive?  More detailed discussion of these and other issues we will cover in our podcast can be found in my book, Postgate. 

It was March 24, 1972.  White House consultant Howard Hunt asked his close friend and wannabe covert operator, CRP General Counsel Gordon Liddy to a meeting with “retired” CIA Dr. Edward Gunn, often called the “poisons doctor.”  The three discussed ways of killing or disabling by poison nettlesome columnist Jack Anderson.  One of the methods they discussed was called “aspirin roulette.”  The CIA would put one poison pill in a victim’s medicine container.  After he takes the poison pill, the remaining tablets would all appear normal.  This poisoning method, to be sure, was never employed against Anderson. 

Fast forward to a year later.  In May 1973, Deep Throat met reporter Bob Woodward for one of their late-night garage meetings.  Normally calm and cool,  Deep Throat was greatly agitated and fearful, warning Woodward,  “everyone's life is in danger.” Did this dire warning ever materialize in a death? And if so, was aspirin roulette, a signature of the CIA poisons program, involved? 

More detailed discussions of these and other issues we will cover in our podcast can be found in my book, Postgate.  Each of the vignettes we have just summarized, seemingly separate and isolated from one another, will eventually tie together as we solve the Mysteries of Watergate. 

Thank you for listening. If you like you've heard, please give me a five-star review on iTunes and share this podcast with your friends.  I truly enjoy being here and solving the Mysteries of Watergate with you.  If you have any questions about what we've discussed, please email me through the contact page of postgatebook.com or send me at tweet at @TheJohnDOConnor. We’ll meet back here during the next episode of The Mysteries of Watergate.