Nixon's Secret (66 page)

The telephone conversation is full of similar contradictions. Those with any doubts should go online at Colodny’s website
Watergate.com
to hear the entire tape of Dean confronted with the discrepancies. One can see why Dean has fought so hard to suppress this tape; it cuts directly to the core of his credibility.

Dean blamed his book publishing company Simon and Schuster and claimed he was pressured into the O’Brien angle and other details that conflicted with his testimony by editors looking for a more salacious, marketable angle.

“I’ll tell, let me tell what the st—, I can go through that process for you,” Dean explained to Colodny. “What happened is, the editors got real excited, interesting wanted to make it more intriguing. That’s why all that shit got in there. My testimony is what I’m going to stand on.”

When contacted, Simon and Schuster’s powerhouse editor Alice Mahew, a partisan Democrat who has worked with writers such as Stephen Ambrose and David Brooks, said Dean’s allegation was completely fabricated. “I never told John Dean what to put in his book, and, ah, that’s a lie, L-I-E—that is spelled, L-I-E,” Mahew emphatically asserted.
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Years later, in a civil suit against Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, Dean, on the stand and under oath, attempted to cover his trail of contradiction by admitting that large portions of
Blind Ambition
were not actually written by him, but instead by a ghostwriter, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch.
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Dean repeated the charge against Branch again during his early 1990’s lawsuit against author Len Colodny. In a deposition under oath, Dean said:

Q:
You state as follows: “I turned away from Liddy for a moment to absorb Strachan’s name. This was the worst blow since Magruder’s call. I felt queasy. I really didn’t want to know more because I had to assume that if Strachan knew, Haldeman knew, and if Haldeman knew, the President knew. It made sickening sense. Now I understand why Strachan had called earlier.” Do you see that?

A:
I do.

Q:
Is that an accurate description of your reaction upon absorbing Strachan’s name?

A:
No. Pure Taylor Branch.

Q:
He just made that up?

A:
Absolutely made it up out of whole cloth.

Mahew, intimately involved in the book’s production, vehemently denied that Branch invented facts. “And Taylor Branch who wrote the book . . . would never have been party to . . . such dishonest behavior,” said Mahew.
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Branch also denied concocting any facts in the book.
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Dean not only denied writing portions of the book, but also denied reading through the parts he
had not
written before it was published. Dean testified that he was bedridden with a fever at the time the proofs for the book arrived, and his wife did not want him to get ink on the sheets attempting to make corrections in his condition.
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The civil suit also forced Dean to once again confront his Watergate testimony, and some gems came out of the grilling:

“It could be that I misspoke myself.”

“It’s either a misstatement or an incorrect transcription.”

“Highly possible—I just misspoke myself.”

“We were trying to ‘paint with the broadest brush we could.’”

“I was maybe not artfully stating here.”

“Maybe it was imposing hindsight on events.”

“That is a less than accurate description.”

“Obviously it was a self-serving answer.”

“I think everything I have said there is accurate to the degree I have said it.”
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According to Liddy, he chided Dean into litigation so “the country will have the chance to find out whether, as the defendants believe,
Silent Coup
is an important work of history, or, as the Deans told the judge, a ‘tissue of lies.’ In the process, this lawsuit should provide the country with the opportunity to learn the real history of the Watergate break-in. Why were we ordered to go into the DNC in the first place?”
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That question has perplexed historians for decades. There was particular interest in information pertaining to the CIA-Mafia connection in the Bay of Pigs and beyond, purportedly stored in a file called the “Cuban Dossier.” There was also the Hughes Loan information, which posed a potential danger to Nixon’s reelection. The Hughes Loan dirt, it was believed, may have been in the possession of Larry O’Brien, who had done lobbying work for the reclusive billionaire.

The burglars, though, did not seem to have a particular interest in the office of Larry O’Brien. Indeed, the lookout room (Room 723 of the Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn) where McCord hire Alfred Baldwin was conducting his surveillance work, gave a line of sight directly into the office of Spencer Oliver, where the phone bug was planted during the first break-in. O’Brien’s DNC office of was not visible from Baldwin’s vantage point. When Carl Shoffler and two other police officers caught the men, one of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, kept reaching for a key that was on his person. The key, which was not seen by the Watergate Committee or federal prosecutors, was determined by the FBI to “fit the desk of MAXIE WELLS,” the secretary of Oliver.
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It later became clear to G. Gordon Liddy, that although he had been persuaded to organize and direct the Watergate break-ins, he had been used. Although there were men in the White House interested in what Larry O’Brien knew, what O’Brien knew was of no particular interest to John Dean.

“The orders I received were to break into the office of Larry O’Brien . . . and to put in two bugs,” recalled Liddy. “One on his telephone to monitor those conversations and the other, a room bug to monitor any conversations in the room and photograph anything laying about. Those are the instructions I gave to Mr. Hunt. Those instructions were not carried out. Someone countermanded them. They didn’t go anywhere near Mr. O’Brien’s office. In fact, they went to the four-button telephone that was in the office of Ida ‘Maxine’ Wells. It was clear that I served as what we call in the intelligence a cut out, a circuit breaker between John Dean and John Dean’s baby, which was Watergate.”
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What in particular was John Dean looking for?

It is the contention of many (including Colodny, Gettlin, author Phil Stanford, Liddy, Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson, and others) that, in the first break-in, Dean was looking to get his hands on sexual dirt that could be used against the Democrats. The phone bugged in the first break-in, it is postulated, had been used to arrange meetings between politicians and prostitutes.

Indeed, even left-wing Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
journalist J. Anthony Lukas had to admit, “So spicy were some of the conversations on this phone that they have given rise to unconfirmed reports that the telephone was being used for some sort of call girl service catering to congressmen and other prominent Washingtonians.”
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Some of the phone calls on this particular line dealt with “political issues,” most dealt with “personal matters.”
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Many of the calls were made with the confirmation, “We can talk; I’m on Spencer Oliver’s phone.”
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While being deposed, Baldwin admitted that most of the phone calls he was tapped into concerned a dining arrangement with “sex to follow” and that “eight out of ten” people would have surmised that the calls regarded the scheduling of an escort for the evening.
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In 1991, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin released
Silent Coup.
Colodny and Gettlin asserted that the second and final break-in was enacted by Dean to protect his future wife, Maureen “Mo” Binder, who was involved in a call girl ring that supplied courtesans to the DNC and White House politicians. According to Phil Stanford:

[Dean] is, in fact, Watergate’s arch villain. Not only did he order the fateful break-in at the DNC offices, but once the burglars were arrested, he directed the White House cover-up. And then, when it became obvious that the cover-up was going to crumble, Dean switched sides in exchange for a deal and became the star witness for the prosecution. Precisely what Dean expected to accomplish by sending burglars into the DNC—whether to gather information on some of the call girl ring’s clients, who were being referred from the DNC, or to save himself from a possible political sex scandal remains unclear . . . if he did in fact order the break-in, it undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that Dean’s live-in girlfriend at the time, Maureen, was a close friend and former roommate of [Heidi Rikan].
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Dean has labeled many of those who have advanced this theory as “revisionists” and “Nixon loyalists.” In fact, it was Lukas who first wrote about the connection between the Columbia Plaza prostitution ring and the Democratic National Committee. Investigative journalist Anthony Summers also raised questions about the call-girl ring, citing a
Washington Evening Star
story that exposed the operation, which was run by a Washington attorney and staffed by part-time secretaries and office workers. Summers noted that among the clients was “a lawyer at the White House.” The
Evening Star
reported that White House aide Peter Flanigan had called the US attorney to determine if there was potential damage to the Nixon administration.
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Neither Lukas nor Summers can be considered “revisionists” or “Nixon loyalists”; both are respected liberal journalists.

Before she was Mrs. Maureen Dean, Mo Biner was a roommate of Erika “Heidi” Rikan, aka Cathy Dieter, an ex-stripper described by Mo as a girl who was “single, well-to-do, and had plenty of time to spare.”
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Rikan’s younger sister Kathie called Heidi a “high class prostitute” and Rikan had also once told her maid that she was “a call girl at the White House.”
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Mo Dean herself wrote, “I ‘moved in’ with Heidi . . . My mail came to Heidi’s apartment, most of my clothes were deposited there.”
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Dentist Jack Garfield, who once dated Biner, said Mo described Riken as “my wild friend” and a “courtesan.”
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Indeed, Rikan and Biner were so close that a photograph of Rikan appears in Maureen Dean’s book on Watergate, “
Mo
”
: A Woman’s View of Watergate.
It’s a snapshot of her posing with Mo and John Dean at their wedding, hastily arranged as the Watergate scandal took down the White House.

Riken was also a girlfriend of Joe “Possum” Nesline, the crime boss of DC who ran illegal gambling halls and call girl operations. The Nesline/Rikan relationship was confirmed to Colodny and Gettlin by a Washington police detective who had investigated Nesline,
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and also by a 1965 FBI report on Nesline.
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Rikan even joined a threesome with Nesline and her girlfriend Josephine Alvarez while touring in Rome.
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“No question, Heidi is the mob’s girl,” Stanford wrote in
White House Call Girl
.
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“Before the year is out, the mob will even be using Heidi to lobby Dean over Hoffa’s release from prison.”
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Rikan’s connection to Nesline also provided her a valuable network of customers and illegitimate businessmen to frequent a cathouse in the Columbia Plaza Apartments.

Phillip Mackin Bailley, a young Washington lawyer, helped Rikan expand her business into the Watergate offices and the DNC. Bailley met Rikan at an orgy she hosted in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC “Don’t be afraid,” Rikan told Bailley. “My name is Erika. Take off your clothes. We’re going to have some fun.”
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As Bailley was leaving, he handed Rikan his business card, and later tipped Rikan off to a sting on the whorehouse.
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Bailley later helped Riken set up a base of clients in the DNC. Bailley had bragged to Rikan that he had a close relationship with R. Spencer Oliver, and Rikan sent him to establish contact. On the day Bailley went to see Oliver, according to Colodny and Gettlin, he was out of the office and Maxie Wells gave the lawyer a tour of their Watergate offices. A deal was eventually struck, and one client per day was referred to Rikan from DNC headquarters.

According to Stanford, Bailley showed up at the Columbia Plaza apartment in late September 1971 and was greeted at the door by none other than Lou Russell,
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the hard-living ex-FBI man who worked for CIA man Jim McCord and later admitted to a conspicuous schedule on the night of the Watergate break-in. It was on this early autumn day that Bailley also stumbled into the room with recording equipment.

“What Bailley has stumbled into appears to be nothing less than a CIA sexual blackmail operation,” wrote Stanford. “Certainly, it has all the earmarks. We may never know for sure, if only because at the height of the Watergate scandal despite a specific request from a Senate committee attempting to pursue the CIA’s role in Watergate—the CIA simply destroyed all its records of its internal taping system.”
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It is evident that Russell had, in fact, purchased $3,000 worth of surveillance equipment around this time.
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Although Colodny and Gettlin did not have actual records of the call girl ring, author Phil Stamford obtained Heidi Rikan’s “little black book” from her daughter, found amongst her mother’s possessions. Rikan had listed former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, who was the finance chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, Deputy Directory of Protocol and former Nixon traveling aide Nick Ruwe, Deputy Director of CRP Jeb Stuart Magruder, Senate Watergate Committee Counsel Sam Dash, and Connecticut Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr. Along with their names were their unlisted phone numbers.

How did these men come to arrive on Rikan’s list? How many were introduced to her by John Dean?