The Watergate Theory That Never Made It Into the Movies

I thought I understood the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon in August of 1974.

After all, as a ten-year-old boy the televised Senate hearings had played constantly as a daily drama in my house, my parents and the country talked incessantly about it, and when in 1976 I saw the film, All the President’s Men, I thought there could be no higher calling than becoming an investigative journalist like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

And this was despite my parents having both supported Nixon in 1968 and 1972. After all, the two of them had met at the Republican Convention in 1956, which renominated Eisenhower and Nixon. But the family discussions were never tense. I remember all of us being riveted by the story, and my parents just shaking their heads and saying, “You think you know somebody.”

And so, I continued on in my life, getting married, having kids, and to my surprise, publishing a fair number of non-fiction books myself, focusing on government and corporate whistleblowers.  But it was in the course of writing my eighteenth book, with a former CIA officer who’d turned whistleblower, that I found myself revisiting the Watergate story.

The first oddity was the burglars themselves, the five men who actually broke into the Democratic National Headquarters, and their two handlers, G. Gordon Liddy, and E. Howard Hunt. Five of the seven men involved had CIA connections. That was unusual. Another oddity was that the famed “Deep Throat,” the anonymous source for many of Woodward and Bernstein’s tips, was later revealed to be the number two man at the FBI, an individual named Mark Felt.

Had the break-in been a combined CIA/FBI operation designed to embarrass the Nixon White House?

During the break-in, the burglars had installed listening devices on two phones, one belonging to the head of the Democratic National Committee, Larry O’Brien, and the other on the phone of a secretary named Ida Maxwell Wells. If you’re going to engage in political surveillance, I understand tapping the phone of the head of the political opposition, but why tap a secretary’s phone?

Then I ran across allegations made by G. Gordon Liddy, that the reason they’d tapped Wells’ phone was their suspicion that she was the point person for a call-girl ring being run out of the Democratic National Headquarters (the so-called ‘Columbia Plaza Call Girl Ring’), a rogue CIA operation being run by a madam named Heidi Rikan. An account of Heidi Rikan can be found in the book, White House Call Girl by Phil Stanford.

Wells sued Liddy for defamation in 1997. The case ran five years and reached the Fourth Circuit twice; both times the court ruled in her favor on the questions before it — she was a private citizen, not a public figure, and a jury could reasonably find Liddy at fault. The court noted that Liddy’s only direct source tying Wells to the ring was a disbarred attorney who had changed his story repeatedly and whom Liddy himself admitted was unreliable. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and the case ultimately ended without Wells prevailing — which means less than it sounds like, since a defamation plaintiff must prove the speaker was at fault, not merely wrong. No court ever found the photographs were in her desk.

Then I did a deep dive on John Dean, Nixon’s Associate Deputy Attorney General, and later White House Counsel, who was the first to turn against Nixon.

During his time in Washington, Dean was divorcing his first wife and started dating and eventually married a woman named Maureen “Mo” Elizabeth Kane. In her 1975 book about Watergate, Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate, there’s this passage about her future roommate, Heidi Rikan, the alleged Columbia Plaza Call Girl Ring madam:

Heidi, the friend I had stayed with in Lake Tahoe, now lived in Washington, D.C., and she had often invited me to visit her. Since Mike and I were having such a pocky time, going to visit Heidi seemed the wisest thing to do. I spent a month in Washington with Heidi, and then persuaded her to drive back to California with me. Heidi was single, well-to-do, and had plenty of spare time, so we piled into her new Corvette and headed west.

Does that description of a young woman in the early 1970s seem a little suspicious to you?

In 1987, though, Maureen Dean published a spicy novel entitled Washington Wives, with a character, Echo Bourne, who bore a suspicious resemblance to Heidi Rikan. As described on pages 18 and 19 of the book:

Echo Bourne was of medium height, shorter than Jan, and probably in her late thirties. Her dark print dress was understated, her gold jewelry tasteful. Over her right shoulder was draped a silk shirt in a print contrasting to the dress . . .

“Perhaps I can make things a little easier,” Echo said as she exhaled. “I’ve done business with the Protocol office before, as your assistant may have mentioned. The code phrase she left with my service was that she was inquiring about a ball gown. That tells me you have a VIP who requires the services of a transvestite.”

Echo runs a call girl outfit which works in collaboration with the State Department, providing sexual partners for visiting foreign dignitaries, while at the same time compiling blackmail information on politicians. Echo is the villain of the story who unfortunately dies a grisly death at a fancy party when she’s accidentally set on fire with the chafing fuel that keeps the food warm for guests.

I really can’t make this stuff up.

The claim made about Dean’s testimony is that he was being blackmailed about his wife’s participation, at least for a short time, in her roommate Heidi’s call girl ring, operating out of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Dean has always denied it, calling the theory baloney and saying there was never any evidence of a call girl ring at the DNC.

For more background on an alternative explanation of the Watergate scandal I read Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Secret Agenda by Jim Hougan, Haig’s Coup by Ray Locker, Tricky Dick by Roger Stone, Chaos by Tom O’Neill, Poisoner in Chief  by Stephen Kinzer, and Bond of Secrecy by Saint John Hunt. These books paint a picture of President Nixon trying to do quietly what President Kennedy had been doing publicly, namely diminishing the power of the CIA, and the other intelligence agencies. Was Watergate the revenge of the intelligence agencies?

I can’t tell you if any of that is true, nor did I feel I had enough good evidence to write a non-fiction book on the subject. While my non-fiction books may arouse controversy, they’re usually backed up by three to four hundred solid references. I don’t know how solid a basis any of these claims have in reality.

And yet, it was a story that wouldn’t let go of me. But maybe it was better told as a fictional tale, a satire of presidential politics, with echoes of what we see in today’s news.

As Quentin Tarantino reimagined the Manson murders in his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I thought I might make a similar effort in fiction, by reimagining the Watergate scandal, which explains my new novel, This Never Happened: A Call Girl in D.C.

I’ll be interested to learn from readers if I succeeded in that effort.