Blind Ambition: The End of the Story (68 page)

The next section of the book, its centerpiece, invented a totally new account of Watergate, to which I will return shortly. The third and last section claimed that Nixon’s post-Haldeman Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig, had forced Nixon to resign in order to protect himself from his involvement in the Moore-Radford incident, claiming that Haig had orchestrated “a silent coup,” so to speak. It also argued that Haig was Deep Throat. While Haig could be devious and duplicitous, he did not force Nixon to resign. Rather, by the time Nixon left, most everyone in the White House wanted him to leave because they were terrified they were going to go to jail like their predecessors if they continued defending the indefensible Nixon. There was nothing silent about the rumblings and the “CYA” memos written during those final days. Nor was there a coup, under any definition of that word.

The core of
Silent Coup
is found in its twelve chapters (over 180 pages and almost half the book) relating to Watergate. It is a complex and convoluted account that claims, in short, that the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Impeachment Inquiry, the FBI, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, along with countless journalists and historians, all got Watergate wrong. As I understand, the gist of
Silent Coup
is that I was, in fact, responsible for the Watergate break-ins and cover-up. I purportedly ran a rogue operation, and after the arrest of Liddy’s men, I tricked my superiors into covering it up. Indeed, I manipulated the President of the United States as if he was a puppet. For this account to fly, of course, it means that virtually everything I testified about, or have written about in this book, is a bald-faced lie.

According to
Silent Coup
, I became aware of a call-girl ring, located in the Columbia Plaza Apartments (near the Watergate complex), which operated in association with the Democratic National Committee. I had learned about this operation from my fiancé and later wife, Maureen. The call-girl ring was allegedly managed and advised by a Washington, DC attorney, Phillip Mackin Bailley, who was arrested and indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia on prostitution charges shortly before the second Watergate break-in. Just before Bailley’s arrest, the story goes, I summoned the Assistant U.S. Attorneys handling the case to my office at the White House and instructed them to bring Bailley’s address book, where I discovered the name of my fiancé—Maureen Biner. For reasons not fully explained in
Silent Coup
, I ordered the second Watergate break-in because I was looking for something inside the DNC. It was Colodny’s collaborator—another St. Martin’s author—Gordon Liddy who filled in the blanks when he openly joined Colodny and Gettlin to promote
Silent Coup
.

Liddy’s Collaboration in, and Promotion of,
Silent Coup

Liddy’s account is quite convoluted as well, but he repeated it time and again during radio interviews throughout the United States when promoting
Silent Coup
, and in a new Postscript to
Will
that incorporated as much as St. Martin’s would allow of this new account. Liddy developed a bizarre monologue describing what occurred, in which he explains away his own bungled Watergate activities, while inventing a new story out of whole cloth in order to place the blame for everything that went amiss on me. Liddy has also sullied the names of two innocent women in his quest to accomplish his dirty work—the woman who was a victim of his earlier criminal activity, Ida Wells, and my wife, whom he attacks in order to hurt me.

Below, I have condensed Liddy’s monologue by removing the stuttering, the “ahs” and “hmms,” as well as a few extraneous comments, in order to focus on the relevant parts of his fantasy. I have added, in brackets, a few points to clarify Liddy’s material, and broken it into paragraphs to make it more readable:

[Dean] was in business for himself…I was the cutout in the classic parlance of the intelligence community. And the real “ops officer” was E. Howard Hunt, who was nominally my subordinate. And so [Dean] would tell Jeb Stuart Magruder orders [for] me. Magruder would then relay them to me. And about the only thing in this world that I agree with Jeb Stuart Magruder on is what my orders were. And my orders, which came from Dean through Magruder, were to go into the Watergate office building where the Democratic National Committee then had its headquarters on the sixth floor and to install wiretaps on the telephone of Larry O’Brien, who was then the Chairman of the DNC, and also put in a room monitoring device and go into his desk drawer to find out whatever dirt he might have on the Republicans so we could [deal with] it.

Well, the men went in and instead of putting, they didn’t go anywhere near Larry O’Brien’s office. The lookout wasn’t set up to see Larry O’Brien’s office, it was to see into three offices which were [across the street], one was that of R. Spencer Oliver, the other was his secretary Ida Maxie Wells, and the last was a very infrequently used office of the Chairman of the State Democratic Governors. And that makes no sense at all. I didn’t realize, of course, at the time, they told me they’d gone in they’d put it into Larry O’Brien’s, and I’m getting this feed back [from the wiretap], of nonsense, hairdressing appointments and things of that sort, which were incidentally not recorded. All I got was what they said they were listening to.

What has been found out is, and this is in
Silent Coup
, in the Columbia Plaza apartments, which was not very far from [the Watergate complex], there was a call-girl ring operating. A very, high-priced, high-class call-girl ring by all accounts. And the DNC decided to just sort of tap into that for the entertainment for visiting firemen [referring to visiting officials]. And according to
Silent Coup
, the madam was a woman whose real name was Heidi Rikan, whose alias was…Cathy Dieter. And the counsel, the lawyer for Cathy Dieter was one Steven [sic] Mackin Bailley. Well, apparently, what was going on was my men were monitoring the telephone calls of people who were calling over to make appointments with the call girls, photographing them, telephoto lenses, cause they could see right across the street to what they were doing.

So I, learning of this call-girl ring, and we’ll get to how he [Dean] learned in a minute, learning of the call-girl ring he [Bailley] directs, you know, [and] this surveillance through Hunt. [Liddy says in other monologues that I directed this surveillance of the call-girl operation through Hunt.] Well then there was sort of an accident. Now if you read both
Silent Coup
and you read my book, which is a commentary on
Silent Coup
, it doesn’t go into this, but there is a standard that the authors of
Silent Coup
held themselves to—they wanted to have two sources for everything. [St. Martin’s Press would not let Liddy include this material in his addendum to
Will
.]

Well unfortunately for this piece of information one of the sources is dead. Heidi Rikan is now dead. So [Colodny] went to Phillip Mackin Bailley and because they only had one source they didn’t put this in, so because this is my life we’re talking about, I subsequently went to Phillip Mackin Bailley and I talked to him. And I found him very credible. He said look, I was the lawyer for Heidi Rikan or Cathy Dieter, I was not a pimp, even though he was arrested and, and charged with the white slave traffic act.

And to make a long story short [according to Phillip Bailley] what happened was there was an envelope, a manila envelope that had an assortment of photographs of women in see-through nighties, plus one group photograph, which was given to the DNC as a sort of a catalogue. And it was kept in a particular desk, which could be observed directly by the people who were working for John Dean, ostensively for me. And that [catalogue] was, you know, what you see is what you get. You go in there and you look. And there came a time when the roommate of the madam, one Maureen Biner, established a relationship with the Counsel to the President of the United States, John Dean.

And according to Phillip Mackin Bailley she was one of the girls, but her photograph was not in that thing [referring to the envelope]. In any event, after she established this relationship, some of the other girls in the ring became offended because, according to them, again, according to Bailley, she started putting on airs and acting as if she was better than the rest of them. So one of the girls who was down, according to Bailley, from the Xaviera Hollander ring up in New York, one Marion Taylor I think it is, who was the woman principally offended by Maureen Biner, whose code name by the way was Clout, given to her by the other girls because of this relationship. She [Marion Taylor] stuck two photographs of Maureen Biner in the envelope and said let’s see how Clout likes getting this exposure.

Well, in the meanwhile, Phillip Mackin Bailley was arrested and his notebooks were seized by the police and they had the names of the girls and their code names, such as Clout, listed. Along with the names of his other clients and other people that he knew. And John Dean called the—this is in
Silent Coup
—John Dean called the prosecutor, whose name was [John] Rudy, Assistant United States Attorney, demanded that he come up with the photographs and come up with the notebooks. And to [Dean’s] horror, in the [Bailley] notebook, is the name of Maureen Biner, code-name Clout. And not too long after that it is speculated by Bailley, someone must have called Maureen.

But at any rate, [after Dean talked to the prosecutor] then I received instructions to go back into [the Watergate building], this is the second entry into the DNC. First one was successful. And I was told that the wiretaps were not working properly, put in new ones, photograph everything and so on. And I passed this information which I received from Jeb Stuart Magruder on to Hunt. And I assumed that was what Hunt was doing. What actually happened was Hunt gave to one of the Cuban cohorts Eugenio Rolando Martinez ...unbeknownst to me, a map of the interior of the DNC. On that map marked with an X was a particular desk, which of course was the desk in question where these photographs were. They [Dean and Hunt] gave him a key and when he was arrested, he had the map and the key and he tried to get rid of it. His instructions according to him, which is reported in
Silent Coup
, were to…retrieve the contents of the desk, give them to Hunt, who presumably I guess would give them to John Dean. Because he certainly wasn’t going to give them to me, because I had no idea that any of this was going on. [In other monologues, Liddy would discuss the desk that belonged to Ida Maxie Wells, and then repeat Phillip Bailley’s false charge that she was booking dates for men visiting the DNC with prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza.]

Taking Legal Action

I first learned about the publication of
Silent Coup,
and its incredible account, shortly before its publication, when Mike Wallace of
60 Minutes
called to quiz me about it, and to request I go on camera to respond. They were going to do a story on it, and Mike told me that
Time
magazine was going to run an excerpt, for both considered it a major news story. To make a long story short, after a bit of digging, both
60 Minutes
and
Time
cancelled their stories, although both were all but ready to go, with
Time
pulling its story after it had already gone to press. As soon as I learned about the book, I asked Wallace to send me a copy. He said he could not, for St. Martin’s had required
60 Minutes
to sign a confidentiality agreement. A similar arrangement had been made with
Time
, which was prohibited from showing the book to Hays Gorey, who had covered Watergate for them, and to Carl Bernstein, Woodward’s partner in covering Watergate for the
Washington Post
, who was then working at
Time
. St. Martin’s refused to discuss this with me, so I placed them on notice, informing them that the book was bogus, and advised them that if they published it, the Deans would file a defamation action.

To say I was shocked by this account is a gross understatement. To say that my wife was stunned and deeply hurt is also a major underestimation. She is not a political person, other than to be an informed citizen who cares about her country. One reason that Watergate was such a difficult time for her was because I had told her nothing about what was happening at the Nixon White House, and she did not think, when marrying the Counsel to the President, that her husband would someday be headed to prison. By 1991, when
Silent Coup
was released, our lives had returned to normal. We had become relatively private people, and placed the past behind us. All that changed, however, with the promotion of
Silent Coup
, and Liddy—who I believe was largely motivated by nothing more than revenge against me for attempting to stop him and then testifying truthfully about it all—traveled the country telling every radio and television station that would have him that my wife was a call girl, and that this was the reason I had cut him out of the real action with the burglary and bugging of the DNC.

Liddy had never met Maureen, and all who know her understand that she is not someone who could ever engage in prostitution. It was tragic what Liddy and Colodny did to her. By nature a happy, highly self-confident person, who loved to be with other people, she fell into a deep depression, even needing medical attention. That depression would last for years, which is one of the reasons I have not previously spoken about this publicly. Even to this day, she remains withdrawn, shy, and concerned that other people may have heard about
Silent Coup
and Liddy’s charges, and may believe that these false statements are true. Until you, or someone you love, have been so brutally and falsely attacked, it is difficult to understand the impact, but it is devastating.