Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Well, sexual blackmail may have a more enduring place in Washington politics than we tend to suspect. More than one vice investigator in Washington believes that mob-controlled call girls, intelligence operatives, and even Washington lobbyists have long run an underground racket aimed at sexually compromising Congress and the administration.
Conspiracy researcher Peter Dale Scott calls it "an ongoing, highly organized, and protected operation." Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, goes so far as to suggest that Washington's sex syndicate, exploited by intelligence spooks and the mob, has "driven the major scandals of Washington since at least the beginning of the Cold War."
Apparently, behind every good political scandal is a prostitute. Scott isn't alone in this thinking. According to Scott, "a retired Washington detective, one who played a small but important role in Watergate," believes that mob pimps and bigwig lobbyists use pricey call girls to put the squeeze on key officials. This is apparently a reference to Carl Shoffler, incidentally the arresting police officer who slapped cuffs on the Watergate burglars.
During a 1982 investigation into the use of "drugs and sexual activity to lobby congressmen," Shoffler did indeed advise congressional investigators to look into a male prostitution ring that serviced Capitol Hill. The veteran police detective believed that the sex ring might be linked to a high-flying Washington lobbyist, Robert Keith Cray, who had more than a few connections to CIA folk. According to Peter Dale Scott, some Washington investigators also suspected that the gay sex ring was connected to D.C. crime boss Joe "the Possum" Nesline.
Unfortunately, the congressional probe petered out before it got anywhere. Summing up the untested Libido-gate hypothesis, however, one of the congressional investigators put it this way to author Susan Trento: "If a lobbyist wants to use hookers to influence legislation, there's a pool of talent he draws from. There are certain madams in town that they make connections with. By simple logic, if you're in the business of influencing people with male prostitutes of kids, there has to be that supply chain…. [If] we start to identify some of the clients, it's possible we could find the suppliers for intelligence, organized crime, and lobbyists." In other words, follow the honey.
Former (and fugitive) CIA officer Frank Terpil had no compunction about identifying one such client, his former employer. Terpil told investigative author Jim Hougan that CIA-run sexual blackmail setups were common in Washington during the Watergate years. Terpil fingered his former partner, Ed Wilson, as the facilitator of one such CIA operation. Terpil claimed that Wilson ran the CIA mantrap from Korean agent Tong Sun Park's George Town Club, the Korean intelligence front that figured in the 1970s Koreagate scandal.
"Historically," Terpil explained, "one of Wilson's agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary…. Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasy in the flesh…. A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras."
Of course, we should note the Terpil hasn't offered any proof to back up that claim, and ex-CIA officers - not least of all, ones who have been convicted in absentia for terrorist activities - aren't celebrated for their candor. On the other hand, sexual blackmail was indeed a favorite CIA method of "turning" foreign agents or otherwise compromising them to do Uncle Sam's bidding. Considering all of the Agency's illegal doings on domestic soil during the last four decades, Terpil's story certainly seems plausible.
Interestingly, Robert Keith Gray, the omnipresent superlobbyist whose name came up during the 1982 gay sex ring investigation, also pops into the George Town Club-Terpil milieu. Gray, who (coincidentally or not) gravitates toward spy nests, was the club's first overseer and also a director at Terpil's firm, Consultants International, a notorious CIA proprietary front.
Colodny, Len and Robert Gettlin. Silent Coup: The Removal of a President. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Hougan, Jim. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. New York: Random House, 1984.
Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley, CA: University of California press, 1993.
Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Trento, Susan B. The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington. New York: St Martin's Press, 1992.
Colodny, Len and Robert Gettlin. Silent Coup: The Removal of a President. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Hougan, Jim. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. New York: Random House, 1984.
Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley, CA: University of California press, 1993.
Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Trento, Susan B. The Power House: Robert Keith Gray and the Selling of Access and Influence in Washington. New York: St Martin's Press, 1992.
In June 1982, the FBI began investigating allegations made by a male congressional page (a high school student working for Congress, usually as a messenger) that he had been solicited by a congressman, and that several of his fellow pages had told him about sexual activities with members of Congress. A couple of weeks later, on July 1, Congressman Louis Stokes, the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known as the Ethics Committee, annonuced that the Committee was joining the FBI and local law enforcement in their investigations. Stokes said the Ethics Committee would widen the scope of the investigation to include a range of alleged irregularities on Capitol Hill including sexual relations between pages and congressmen, and charges that a cocaine and marijuana ring operated in Congress and used pages and congressional employers as couriers. Stokes appointed Joseph A. Califano, Jr as the Special Counsel to the Committee to handle the investigation.
(Robert Keith) Gray's name first surfaced as the result of an anonymous tip to the House Ethics Committee accusing Gray of using drugs and sexual activity to lobby congressmen. Richard Powers, an investigator who received the call, wrote a memo to Califano. Powers and other staffers could not find the memo when they looked for it later.
On July 21, 1982, Donald Purdy, and Ethics Committee counsel, and Jack Moriarity, a former DC Police officer who (Carl) Shoffler admired, and who then worked as an investigator for the Committee, interviewed Shoffler regarding his knowledge of sex and drug related matters on Capitol Hill....
In a memorandum to Shoffler's Washington Police Department superiors, Shoffler wrote of the meeting:
"Over the past several years, the undersigned has received information suggestion corruption on the part of Mr. Gray. Briefly, the allegations indicate that he is gay; that he has used and supplied narcotics; that he has thrown wild drug and sex orgies at Rehoboth Beach; that he was affiliated with the infamous Ed Wilson; that he was used by the CIA. As a result of his past connections with the aforementioned areas and his close association with President Reagan, his conduct has to be suspect in light of the fact he ended up with the foremost lobbying firm presently operating in DC."
Shoffler told Moriarity of the above allegations and added that two individuals, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official at the Justice Department who had worked for Congress and was now a consultant, and a photographer who worked at a Washington photographic studio, were reputed to be running a male prostitution service on Capitol Hill. The consultant was on the payroll of the Diamond Shamrock Corporation, a Gray and Company client. "
Wombaticus Rex » Sun Oct 06, 2013 10:18 am wrote:Power House, pg. 176In June 1982, the FBI began investigating allegations made by a male congressional page (a high school student working for Congress, usually as a messenger) that he had been solicited by a congressman, and that several of his fellow pages had told him about sexual activities with members of Congress. A couple of weeks later, on July 1, Congressman Louis Stokes, the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known as the Ethics Committee, annonuced that the Committee was joining the FBI and local law enforcement in their investigations. Stokes said the Ethics Committee would widen the scope of the investigation to include a range of alleged irregularities on Capitol Hill including sexual relations between pages and congressmen, and charges that a cocaine and marijuana ring operated in Congress and used pages and congressional employers as couriers...
House Select Committee on Assassinations
Thomas_N. Downing was appointed Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations by Carl Albert, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.[1] The Committee was tasked to look into evidence that was not available to the Warren Commission during its investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[1] Upon his retirement from Congress in 1977, Louis Stokes succeeded Downing as Chairman.[1]
Downing stated before[2] and after[1] the HSCA's investigation that he believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. He said that he was skeptical that Lee Harvey Oswald could accurately fire a bolt-action rifle within a short span of time, and he believed video footage of the assassination showed that Kennedy was struck from the front and the rear.[1] According to a theory provided by Downing, one which he said was without evidence and based on speculation, anti-Castro Cuban exiles killed Kennedy due to his failure to support them after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.[1] Downing stated that they expected pro-Castro Cubans would be blamed for the assassination in retaliation for the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro by United States agents.[1] Downing said: "I am firmly convinced, I am sincerely convinced, that more than one person was shooting at President Kennedy in Dallas that day. It is so obvious to me."[1]
Downing described JFK, Oliver Stone's 1991 film about the assassination of Kennedy, as "implausible".[1] He said: "It's impossible to tell where fact stops and fiction starts, it blends in so well."[1]
Prior to the investigation, James J. Kilpatrick described Downing as "a man of exception integrity and common sense" yet "not altogether unbiased in the matter of Kennedy's assassination". Robert P. Gemberling, head of the FBI's investigation of the assassination for thirteen years after the release of the Warren Commission's report, said in 1976 that Thomas_N. Downing and his successor, Henry B. Gonzalez, had "preconceived conspiracy theories".[3] ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_N._Downing
MinM » Wed Sep 12, 2012 7:16 am wrote:
Gaeton Fonzi, Investigator of Kennedy Assassination, Dies at 76
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: September 11, 2012
Gaeton Fonzi was one of the most relentless investigators on the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, remembered by former colleagues with both awe and echoes of the impatience he inspired with his pursuit of the full story behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
They called him Ahab.
Mr. Fonzi was also the staff member most publicly dismayed by the committee’s final report, which concluded in 1979 that the president “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”
Of course it was a conspiracy, said Mr. Fonzi, a journalist recruited mainly on the strength of scathing magazine critiques he had written about the Warren Commission and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. But who were the conspirators? What was their motive? How could the committee close its doors without the answers?
Mr. Fonzi, who died in Florida on Aug. 30 at 76, nailed those questions to the committee’s locked doors, figuratively, in a long article he wrote the next year for Washingtonian magazine and in a 1993 book, “The Last Investigation.” In both, he chronicled the near-blanket refusal of government intelligence agencies, especially the C.I.A., to provide the committee with documents it requested. And he accused committee leaders of folding under pressure — from Congressional budget hawks, political advisers and the intelligence agencies themselves — just as promising new leads were emerging.
“Is it unrealistic to desire, for something as important as the assassination of a president, an investigation unbound by political, financial or time restrictions?” he asked in Washingtonian.
He never got the answer he had hoped for. Congress never authorized a follow-up to the work of the committee, which, from 1977 to 1979, also re-examined the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., concluding that it, too, “likely” resulted from an unspecified conspiracy.
But historians and researchers consider Mr. Fonzi’s book among the best of the roughly 600 published on the Kennedy assassination, and credit him with raising doubts about the government’s willingness to share everything it knew. The author Jefferson Morley, a former reporter for The Washington Post, said “The Last Investigation” had refocused attention on a handful of reported contacts between C.I.A. operatives and Oswald — tantalizing leads that had long been fascinating to conspiracy buffs but that had never been fully scrutinized by a veteran investigative reporter.
The Central Intelligence Agency has denied that any such contacts occurred, and Mr. Fonzi spent most of his two years with the committee crisscrossing the world trying to prove otherwise. He considered it impossible that the C.I.A. had never made contact with Oswald, a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, repatriated with his Russian wife and baby in 1962, and settled in Dallas, where he openly espoused Communist views.
“We called him Ahab, because he was so single-minded about that white whale,” said G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel and staff director of the House committee, now a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. The white whale for Mr. Fonzi was the meaning of those supposed contacts.
Mr. Blakey was criticized by Mr. Fonzi as overly deferential to the C.I.A., and he now concedes that Mr. Fonzi was probably right on that score. Mr. Blakey said he was shocked in 2003 when declassified C.I.A. documents revealed the full identity of the retired agent who had acted as the committee’s liaison to the C.I.A. The agency never told Mr. Blakey that the agent, George Joannides, had overseen a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Dallas in the months before the assassination, when Oswald had two well-publicized clashes with them.
At the time of the revelation, the C.I.A. said Mr. Joannides had withheld nothing relevant from the committee. Mr. Joannides died in 1990.
“Mr. Joannides obstructed our investigation,” Mr. Blakey said. Asked how that had affected the committee’s work, he added: “We’ll never know. But I can say that for a guy like Gaeton, a guy who really wanted to know what happened to Kennedy, it kind of tortured him.” ...Jim DiEugenio wrote:Wow, I am kind of shocked. That was actually kind of good.
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