Prostitution, Blackmail and the Presidency

By David Martin | 28 July 2016

DC DAVE — A person would have to be very gullible, indeed, to believe that the prosecution of the so-called DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, was all about just cracking down on the call girl business in our nation’s capital.   One can quickly disabuse oneself of that notion by reading my 2008 article, “The ‘DC Madam’ Outrage.”  Much more obvious call girl operations advertise openly, and they are ignored by law enforcement.  The official story of her suicide death by hanging is also highly improbable.   From the looks of things, very high level covert politics was involved.

The connection between prostitution and the spook business, after all, is as old as human history.  Why would it not be so?  Both businesses operate in the shadows and they take advantage of human frailty.  The examples that one could cite, just from very recent times, are very numerous.  To take just one very recent example, you have to read the story between the lines, but apparently Chinese American Navy lieutenant Edward C. Lin was induced into divulging national secrets to the Chinese through the charms of one or more ladies of the night.

Britain’s Profumo scandal in the 1960s is perhaps the most celebrated case in our lifetime in which prostitution and at least potential espionage are linked.  Closer to home, it is widely rumored that Ellen Rometsch, the beautiful German woman with whom President John F. Kennedy apparently had an affair, was a spy for East Germany.  Least known, but very likely the most important was the prostitution ring connected to the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.  This is from the R-rated Feral House publishing company page entitled “What Do Prostitutes Have to Do with Watergate?

When Phil Stanford, a friend of mine from Portland, brought me White House Call Girl, I was puzzled by the book’s premise—that a call girl ring, in league with mobsters and intelligence operatives, was a blackmail operation and the little-known back story to the Watergate scandal.

“Do you mean,” I asked, “that the famous story made into books and films are wrong?”

“That’s only half the story,” Phil replied. “And it’s partly invented, too.”

“Really? Why?”

“Why don’t you read the book?”

So I read it and was bowled over. Though it’s a fully sourced political non-fiction, it reads like a detective novel, full of whores, mobsters, political operatives, and even football team players. And it’s got plenty of evidence, including photos of an address book owned by the main call girl in question, chock full of very interesting phone numbers and addresses.

Stanford’s book verifies and adds to the controversial Watergate revisionism tomes Secret Agenda by Jim Hougan (who also contributed a piece about Jonestown to Feral House’s Secret and Suppressed II), and Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin.

What those Watergate burglars were apparently fishing for was the dirt that the Democrats might have picked up related to a high level call girl ring catering to Washington politicians.  For more see White House Call Girl, The Key to Watergate, and It’s the 40^th Anniversary of the Watergate Conspiracy.

Did China Blackmail Bill Clinton?

When it comes to human frailty in the sexual realm and high level politics one can hardly fail to think of former president Bill Clinton.  Might his very well known weakness have been exploited for purposes of political intrigue at one time or another?  Author Gordon Thomas has made one such allegation.  He claims in his book Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad that Israel blackmailed Clinton using lurid tapes of his telephone conversations with intern Monica Lewinsky.

From what I was told some years ago but have never previously written about, Israel might not have been the only country to use Clinton’s weakness against him.  My source is Bernard Yoh, the communications director of the conservative watchdog group in Washington, Accuracy in Media (AIM).  Yoh died in late 1995.  This is from his New York Times obituary:

Mr. Yoh first arrived in the United States in 1947. In the late 1950’s, he was an adviser to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and helped form and equip a counterinsurgency force, the Sea Swallows, operating behind Vietcong lines.

Returning to the United States in 1963, he settled in the Washington area and commuted to Montgomery, Ala., to lecture on counterinsurgency and psychological warfare at the Air War College. He joined Accuracy in Media in 1974.

It sounds like he might be a pretty solid source for what he told me.  His source, he said, was someone working for the intelligence service of the government of Nationalist China in Taipei.  That source told him, said Yoh, that when Clinton was governor of Arkansas he led a trade mission to Taipei and while there he made his own characteristic contribution to the local economy by patronizing the “swankiest brothel” that the city had to offer.

That brothel, said Yoh’s source, was penetrated by mainland Chinese intelligence, which had installed videotaping equipment there, and they had obtained some choice shots of Bill in flagrante delicto.  They had later informed Clinton of what they had and had been holding it over his head ever since, that is to say, they were using the tape to blackmail him.  Perhaps here we have one explanation for all the economic cozying up to China that this country did during the years of the Clinton presidency. […]