Craig Spence

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Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 10, 2012 6:56 pm

Navigation
Craig Spence Chronology
Great Big Source Dump
Arnaud de Borchgrave

I appreciate the fact this forum has grown asymmetrically largely due to personal obsessions. Craig Spence has always been a detail that haunted me. The nature of his activity vs. his background, the specifics of his suicide scene, and most of all, the nagging question of his White House visit.

He came up yesterday in an excellent but unrelated article about Albrecht Muth: Georgetown's Worst Marriage

New York Times wrote:There’s a long history of fabulists who have ascended Washington’s social pyramid. There was the lobbyist Edward von Kloberg III (the “von” was an affectation, as was the title of baron he used and the silk-lined capes he wore), whose motto was “Shame is for sissies.” Starting in the 1980s, he specialized in representing autocrats like Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceausescu. In 2005, he killed himself, plunging from the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Before Kloberg, there was Craig Spence. In 1989, Time dubbed him “Washington’s Man From Nowhere,” because he never explained the genesis of his wealth. While guests like Ted Koppel and William Safire attended Spence’s parties, he eavesdropped on their conversations with microphones and two-way mirrors hidden in his home. Dressed in a tuxedo, he committed suicide at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, after his enormous expenditures on male prostitutes were exposed. Then there was the pioneering work of Steven Martindale, who legendarily invited Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Henry Kissinger to his home by telling each that he was giving a party in honor of the other.

Washington’s susceptibility to fakery explains how Muth could continue living his Iraq fantasy. Although there is no evidence — no photos, no sightings — that he ever set foot in Iraq, when he returned to Georgetown, he began walking its streets in an olive uniform and a red beret. “I saw him in uniform at the Safeway talking about Sadr,” Roland Flamini recalls. His e-mails began appearing with the signature “Albrecht Muth, Staff Brigadier General.”


Then again, perhaps this piece is not so irrelevant after all...I have to append something Muth said that probably resonates with whatever Nameless Mission that Spence was locked into...

New York Times wrote:Muth, in other words, perfected the methodology for his social Ponzi scheme. For parties, he would start with bait. He theorized that Drath’s ties to Nebraska’s representatives in Washington — Senator Chuck Hagel, in particular — would bring in other politicians. Muth would also approach military officials attached to the embassies, who he knew were often lonely figures in town; he understood that their attendance would help him attract foreign-policy columnists. “The whole Western alliance was represented,” according to Roland Flamini, a former Time correspondent. In a 2010 e-mail to Drath, Muth explicitly detailed his approach: “You meet someone of import, check him out, determine [if] he can be of use, you make him yours. At some point you must decide whether to run him as a useful idiot, he not catching on as to who you are and what you do.”


So I view Spence's story with an eye to what kind of dramatic domestic and foreign policy changes were going on during and immediately after that time. Blackmail operations are usually simple moneymakers, but this brings me around the nature of the suicide scene. As per the Jimmy Wales Project:

On November 10, 1989 Spence was found dead dressed in a tuxedo in Room 429 the Boston Ritz Carlton, the city's most expensive hotel with three dollars in his pocket. When found by hotel employees was attired in the style he affected at his lavish dinner parties, according to the police report: "black Tux with white shirt, bow tie, white suspenders, black socks and shoes", with a telephone cradled in his ear and a Walkman headset containing a cassette tape of Mozart's "A Little Night Music".

Found hidden in a false ceiling in the bathroom were seven small packets of Xanax, an anti-anxiety prescription drug, with one pill removed. In black felt-tip marker he had written on a mirror of his room:

Chief, consider this my resignation, effective immediately. As you always said, you can't ask others to make a sacrifice if you are not ready to do the same. Life is duty. God bless America.

As a postscript, he wrote, "To the Ritz, please forgive this inconvenience."

During a lengthy interview at a Manhattan apartment a few months before his death, Spence alluded to more intricate involvements. "All this stuff you've uncovered (involving call boys, bribery and the White House tours), to be honest with you, is insignificant compared to other things I've done. But I'm not going to tell you those things, and somehow the world will carry on."


For the record, the source for every factual assertion made in that passage is the same: Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper, "In Death, Spence stayed true to form" 'The Washington Times Monday, November 13, 1989
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 10, 2012 8:02 pm

Being a Constantly Shifting Chronology of One Craig Spence (Not the Golfer)

Disclaimer: Again, not the golfer. All sources suspect, especially the journalists.

1971: Spence arrives in Tokyo.

1979: Spence arrives in Washington, DC and "adopted as his mentor John Mitchell, former Nixon attorney general" as per Greve & Schwartz July 1989.

1980: Becton Dickinson & Co, "New Jersey biomedical supplies firm" begins to pay Spence "about $100,000 a year to provide unspecified assistance." as per Greve & Schwartz July 1989.

1982: Moon family operatives establish The Washington Times.

January 18, 1982: NYT Publishes profile of Spence as DC fixer: "HAVE NAMES, WILL OPEN RIGHT DOORS."

April 1983: Spence has initial legal problems with Japanese Policy Study Group.

May 1988: Spence sells his home on Embassy Row to repay Shiina.

June 29th, 1988: Washington Times states that Craig Spence visited the White House with "a 15 year old he falsely identified as his son."

June 30, 1989: Washington Times published front page article on Spence, "POWER BROKER SERVED DRUGS, SEX AT PARTIES BUGGED FOR BLACKMAIL."

July 24th, 1989: Time publishes one paragraph blurb about "Washington's Man From Nowhere"

August 3rd, 1989: Seper & Hedges ask "Where in the world is Craig Spence?"

November 12th, 1989: Spence reported dead by suicide.

November 14th, 1990: Washington Times states that Reginald A. deGueldre was sentenced to 100 hours community service for guilty plea in May to the charge of taking a piece of White House china.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jul 10, 2012 8:19 pm

strange:

Sarah Booth Conroy wrote:Stangers in the Night; Tiptoe Tourists Get the Silent Treatment

by Sarah Booth Conroy

The outlanders, suspicious always of the Washington Runaround, may not believe they just came too late, that Craig J. Spence, the lobbyist and host said to have arranged the midnight tours, has had his fax machine disconnected, and Reginald A. deGueldre, the Secret Service agent who conducted the late late tours, is currently patrolling Embassy Row by foot, according to media reports. .

Horrors! Could it be that foul fiends, intent on visiting the mansion at less than legal hours, slipped [Millie] a Mickey? Or lulled her to sleep with ancient Oriental acupunctures? Is there evidence to suggest a doggone deed: Is the Millie now on duty at the White House a Manchurian Candidate, and the real Millie dognapped by midnight marauders?

In the coming dog days of August, do we need to investigate the possible complicity of the First Dog herself in the Affair of the Late Night Guests? Surely Millie is above suspicion. Certainly she could not be silenced by the extra dog biscuit or the luscious meat bone. Clearly she would not be diverted from duty by the scratch behind her ears, or the admiration expressed for her offspring.


2009 Obit for SJC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02770.html

Just seemed oddly flippant given the facts of the case.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jul 11, 2012 8:20 pm

Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times Editor

Per the Jimmy Wales Project:

The Washington Times is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and until 2010 was owned by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate associated with the church.

Former speechwriter for President George W. Bush David Frum, in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The '70s, wrote that Moon had granted the Times editorial independence.[6] But some former employees, including the newspaper's first editor and publisher, James R. Whelan, have insisted that the paper was under Moon's control from the beginning. Whelan, whose contract guaranteed editorial autonomy, left the paper when the owners refused to renew the contract, asserting that "I have blood on my hands" for helping Moon acquire legitimacy. Three years later editorial page editor William P. Cheshire and four of his staff resigned, charging that, at the explicit direction of Sang Kook Han, a top official of the Unification Church, then-editor Arnaud de Borchgrave had stifled editorial criticism of political repression in South Korea.

The Times was read every day by President Ronald Reagan during his terms in office. In 1997 he said: "The American people know the truth. You, my friends at The Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn't always the popular thing to do. But you were a loud and powerful voice. Like me, you arrived in Washington at the beginning of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And—oh, yes—we won the Cold War."


But, Arnaud:

Image

He is on the board of CSIS -- "Director and Senior Adviser, Transnational Threats Project": http://csis.org/expert/arnaud-de-borchgrave
And the Atlantic Council -- http://www.acus.org/users/arnaud-de-borchgrave
And presides over the fallen UPI newswire service -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Pre ... al#Decline
Where he asks, like, really deep questions -- http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/wor ... nd-anarchy
Published a spy novel in 1980 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spike_%281980%29
Details and interesting apocrypha re: said novel -- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... propaganda
Has internet beef with reliable source Gordon Duff -- http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/27 ... the-press/



On June 30th, the Washington Times published this passing sentence by Hedges & Seper:

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-in-chief of The Times went to dinner once at Mr. Spence's home to honor Mr. James Lilley.


Standalone sentence. A month later, on July 29th, Greve & Schwartz publish this passing sentence in the Philly Inquirer:

Spence's decade-long party ended recently when a favorite guest, Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, published a story that Spence spent up to $20,000 a month on homosexual prostitutes.


So, this post is earmarked for collecting information about Mr. de Borchgrave. After all, there's another sentence from that July 29th article that really leaps off the screen:

Hundreds of credit card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal accounts and made payable to the Washington-based escort service ... have been examined by The Washignton Times.


...and what does a de Borchgrave do with a list like that?

Image

per Sourcewatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... Borchgrave

Borchgrave worked for Newsweek but, according to Louis Wolf and Fred Clarkson (page 35), was fired in 1980 "in part for keeping dossiers on fellow employees".

....

Asked whether the United States engages in disinformation, de Borchgrave said that present and former U.S. officials trying "in a free society… to put the best face possible" on what they are doing or did in government is not disinformation "That is called management of the news."
—Louis Wolf, Fred Clarkson, op. cit. p. 35.


NNDB: http://www.nndb.com/people/948/000129561/

NNDB "mapper" social graph http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?id=129561
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jul 11, 2012 10:04 pm

My Great Big Source Dump




June 30th, 1989

Washington Times wrote:POWER BROKER SERVED DRUGS, SEX AT PARTIES BUGGED FOR BLACKMAIL
Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper The Washington Times; Final Section: A Page: A1 Friday, June 30, 1989


Craig J. Spence, an enigmatic figure who threw glittery parties for key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, media stars and top military officers, bugged the gatherings to compromise guests, provided cocaine, blackmailed some associates and spent up to $20,000 a month on male prostitutes, according to friends, acquaintances and records.

The 48-year-old D.C. power broker has been linked to a homosexual prostitution ring currently under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Its clients included several top government and business officials from Washington and abroad.

Among the clients identified in hundreds of credit-card vouchers obtained by The Washington Times - and identified by male prostitutes and escort operators - are government officials, locally based U.S. military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals.

Mr. Spence's influence appeared unlimited, aptly demonstrated by his ability to arrange midnight tours of the White House, according to three persons who said they took part in those tours.

"It was a show-the-flag time for Craig Spence," said one person who went on a July 3, 1988, tour that included two male prostitutes. "He just wanted everyone to know just how damned powerful he was," said the person. "And when we were strolling through the White House at 1 o'clock in the morning, we were believers."

One man who was on the tour but asked not to be named for fear it would damage his business said it was cleared by a uniformed Secret Service guard whom the man had seen attending Mr. Spence's parties as a bodyguard.

"For once in his life, Craig was doing something nice. We just thought, neat, we get a free midnight tour of the White House," the man said. Another person on the tour said the group walked through all the public areas of the White House and "even took pictures of ourselves in the barber's chair."

After arriving in Washington in the late 1970s, Mr. Spence was hosting parties during the early Reagan years attended by, among others, journalists Eric Sevareid, Ted Koppel and William Safire; former CIA Director William Casey; the late John Mitchell, attorney general in the Nixon administration; conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly; Ambassador James Lilley; and Gen. Alfred M. Gray, the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-in-chief of The Times, went to dinner once at Mr. Spence's home to honor Mr. Lilley.

Efforts to reach Mr. Spence in the past week were unsuccessful. He contacted The Washington Times yesterday in response to a telefaxed message but hung up when queried about his activities.

According to many current and former friends, Mr. Spence was a dangerous friend to cultivate. Several former associates said his house on Wyoming Avenue was bugged and had a secret two-way mirror, and that he attempted to ensnare visitors into compromising sexual encounters that he could then use as leverage.

One man described having a limousine sent to his home by Mr. Spence and being brought to a gathering at which several young men tried to become friendly with him. "I didn't bite; it's not my inclination," the man said. "But he used his homosexual network for all it was worth."

The man, a business associate of Mr. Spence who was on the White House tour, said: "He was blackmailing people. He was taping people and blackmailing them."

One former friend said he saw an 8-foot-long, two-way mirror overlooking the library of Mr. Spence's home which, he said, he was later told was used for "spying on guests."

Georgetown University law professor Richard Gordon said he was a close friend of Mr. Spence's until his "behavior began deteriorating quite markedly."

Mr. Gordon recalled being at a gathering at Mr. Spence's home and having a conversation with veteran NBC and CBS correspondent Liz Trotta.

"We were sitting in a corner, talking about our mutual concern about Craig's physical condition. He came down later and said he had been listening to us and didn't appreciate it at all," Mr. Gordon said.

Ms. Trotta, contacted in New York City, yesterday confirmed Mr. Gordon's comments and said it was "one in a series of incidents" in which she began to question Mr. Spence's emotional and physical stability.

"He was fragmenting right before our eyes," she said. "I was very concerned about him."

One former Reagan administration official who worked at the U.S. Information Agency and is an open homosexual said he went to private parties at Mr. Spence's home and saw a great deal of recording and taping equipment.

"It was my clear impression that the house was bugged," he said. Another man, an Air Force sergeant who worked for Mr. Spence as a bodyguard, said: "The house was definitely bugged. I can't say what he was doing with the information. I don't know that. But he was recording what occurred there."

Several others confirmed that Mr. Spence had bragged on several occasions that he had his house bugged and that conversations between guests often had been overheard. They said Mr. Spence often would come down late to parties he hosted and told close associates that he had been listening to what was being said about him.

Several people also said Mr. Spence boasted about getting control of the million-dollar home on Wyoming Avenue by blackmailing clients in Japan.

William Harbin, a former U.S. Foreign Service official who worked for Mr. Spence in the mid-1980s, said: "He pretty much blackmailed a Japanese client. He had represented this firm in Washington, the Policy Study Group.

"The Japanese put up the money for Spence to buy a big house on Wyoming Avenue," Mr. Harbin said. "I heard he later had a quarrel with this Japanese because he was really using this house to advance his own purposes, not for the Japanese. But he threatened to expose that they had transferred the money illegally, so it made the Japanese back down."

Another longtime friend confirmed that Mr. Spence bragged about the Wyoming Avenue deal, saying he had beaten "a very rich, old-line Japanese family."

Secret Service spokesman Bob Snow, when asked yesterday for records about Mr. Spence's visits to the White House, said only the White House counsel could authorize release of the material.

C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel, said he did not know why Mr. Snow referred The Times to him, adding that he was unaware that his office was required to release such information. "I just don't know anything about that," Mr. Gray said. "But maybe there's something I don't know about." Federal law enforcement authorities, including the Secret Service, involved in the probe of the homosexual prostitution ring have told prostitutes and their clients that a grand jury will deliberate over evidence gathered in the ongoing investigation throughout the summer.

Hundreds of credit-card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal accounts and made payable to the Washington-based escort service operated by the homosexual ring, have been examined by The Washington Times.

Mr. Spence, a former ABC-TV correspondent who covered the war in Vietnam, was one of the biggest spending clients of the homosexual prostitution network, according to credit-card vouchers obtained by The Times. For example, on Oct. 5, 1988, he made four separate payments totaling $1,525 with his American Express card for male escorts from Professional Services Inc.

On. Oct. 8, he paid $600 for male escorts, and another $600 payment Oct. 20, the documents show. There were some months when Mr. Spence spent as much as $20,000 for male escorts hired to provide him sexual services, according to documents and interviews with prostitutes who served him.

Many of Mr. Spence's guests soured on his hospitality when his darker behavior emerged. A case in point is his relationship with former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

According to Mr. diGenova, he attended a few of Mr. Spence's parties both as U.S. attorney and after he left the government to enter private practice. He eventually traveled to Japan last December on a business trip with Mr. Spence and Wayne Bishop, chairman of the Washington law firm of Bishop, Cook, Purcell & Reynolds, where Mr. diGenova works.

"When I got back from Japan, some anonymous person suggested that he (Mr. Spence) might be using cocaine. Well, of course my antennae went up right away and I checked those rumors out . . . and found much to my surprise that people suspected the worst," Mr. diGenova said.

At that point, Mr. diGenova said, he severed his relationship with Mr. Spence. "When you compared it to his other eccentric behavior, it made sense. But I had no evidence whatsoever," he said.

Mr. diGenova said he never took his concern that Mr. Spence might be using drugs to authorities.

Others interviewed said they witnessed drug use and other crimes at parties thrown by Mr. Spence but also never shared their observations with law enforcement officials.

The saga of Mr. Spence, described by one friend as "Washington's Jay Gatsby," began unraveling when federal and D.C. police raided a male prostitution ring in Northwest Washington and discovered credit-card vouchers signed by Mr. Spence and others.

But for several years - even as publications such as The New York Times were describing Mr. Spence as Washington's ultimate power broker -acquaintences noticed bizarre behavior.

Mr. Spence was generous with cocaine at his parties, according to several people who said they witnessed drug use at the exclusive Kalorama house.

"I know he was a coke freak," said the business associate who was on the White House tour. "A lot of people saw it. His behavior spoke for itself."

Several friends said Mr. Spence bragged that U.S. military personnel, for whom he had built a gymnasium in El Salvador, had smuggled cocaine back to him when they returned to the United States.

"I heard he was selling drugs, or smuggling drugs into the country from El Salvador," said a friend who worked closely with Mr. Spence. "He went down there two or three times or maybe more. He was trying to interest a Japanese firm with buying a fishery in El Salvador.

"I found out the United Nations had rejected a similar scheme; they found if you put more boats in there the fish would just get smaller. So I told him that it was no good," the former associate said.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials said this week they had no evidence of any such operation.

Others said the drugs came from a more mundane source - midlevel dealers in Northwest Washington.

How a man whom even his closest friends describe as a flawed, malevolent personality managed to court Washington's biggest names is a quintessential Washington story.

Mr. Spence arrived in Washington in the late 1970s. Even intimate friends said his depiction of his background was as shifting as his guest list. What can be confirmed is that he attended Syracuse University and worked as a journalist with ABC in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

One former friend, who became acquainted with Mr. Spence in Tokyo, said that the latter had a "falling out" with ABC News because of his political views. The former friend said Mr. Spence was a hard-line conservative and was opposed to what he described as "the liberal treatment of the news by the network."

Mr. Spence made good contacts in Japan and among Chinese expatriates, often bragging of his close association with former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and appearing in public with a Chinese businessman who once served as an unofficial representative of Communist China in Washington, sources said.

The businessman said this week that he did not know exactly what work Mr. Spence did, but that he often bragged about his contacts with Japanese businessmen and political leaders, particularly Mr. Nakasone.

He described Mr. Spence as "strange," saying that he often boasted that he was working for the CIA and on one occasion said he was going to disappear for awhile "because he had an important CIA assignment."

According to the businessman, Mr. Spence told him that the CIA might "doublecross him," however, and kill him instead "and then to make it look like a suicide."

The businessman also said he attended a birthday bash for Roy Cohn at Mr. Spence's house. He said Mr. Casey was at the party. "One time he stormed into another party with a big, white hat and an entourage of security guards," the businessman said. "It was all rather bizarre."

Mr. Spence's trump card in courting the rich and famous apparently was his access to high-ranking orientals at a moment when Japan was flowering as an economic giant and relations with China were thawing.

"Craig had an interest in the Japanese economy," said Mr. Gordon. "He was very interested in breaking through the bureaucratic level and getting people to come to seminars.

"He developed a kind of genuine and effective influence among important doers and thinkers in Washington and from New York," Mr. Gordon said. "I met some interesting senators and representatives at his parties."

He was doing extensive business with Japan in the early 1980s, some of which former Reagan administration officials said appeared to violate trade laws.

Mr. Gordon said he warned Mr. Spence of the need to be registered as a lobbyist, and documents show that in January 1985 he became a registered agent lobbying for Japanese businesses.

A January 1982 New York Times profile of Mr. Spence was headlined "Have Names, Will Open Right Doors." The article quoted a Washington Post columnist in 1980 saying of Mr. Spence: "Not since Ethel(D-) Kennedy used to give her famous Hickory Hill seminars for great minds of our times during the days of Camelot has anyone staged seminars successfully on a continuing social basis in Washington. That's what Craig Spence has been doing."

Mr. Spence was described in the New York Times as "something of a mystery man who dresses in Edwardian dandy style, a former television correspondent who now wears many hats, including international business consultant, party host, registered foreign agent and something called 'research journalist.' "

Those who knew Mr. Spence best were astonished by his ability to court the rich and powerful.

"He conned people into going to parties - big people, Cabinet members and personalities and so forth," said Mr. Harbin, who wrote research papers that Mr. Spence peddled to Japanese clients.

"Everybody likes to go to a free party around here. He'd have a photographer there, get his photo taken with a great man, and use that," he said.

"He was quite secretive, but from what I could see these things had little or no substance," Mr. Harbin said. "Usually a grain of truth, but he'd build a pile of lies on top of it. Usually he'd start with a photograph of himself with some guy and build a lie around it that he was his top adviser. Nakasone was one."

Mr. Spence also bragged about social companions, telling friends that he had hosted Mr. Cohn, Rock Hudson and others at his Wyoming Avenue home.

The former Reagan administration aide said he decided to sever a friendship with Mr. Spence when he witnessed him trying to force his off-duty military bodyguards into homosexual acts.

"I'm openly gay myself," he said. "Most gays find that type of behavior reprehensible."

Several people who attended Mr. Spence's parties remarked at what one guest called "his personal honor guard." "I don't know where he got them, but he liked to surround himself with tall, handsome, stalwart young men. He liked to surround himself with decorations," one frequent guest said.

Mr. Spence has been living on Massachusetts Avenue in recent months, friends said. His legitimate business contacts have "one by one dropped away," said one close friend.

He has told a number of his friends that he plans to leave the country by Aug. 15. Mr. Spence also has said his health is failing.

"I can unhappily confirm that. He has been in ill health. I am not truly aware of what it is that is wrong with him," said Mr. Gordon.


July 7th, 1989: Washington Times

White House mute on 'call boy' probe
Frank J. Murray The Washington Times; Part A; Pg. A1
July 7, 1989, Friday, Final Edition


Administration officials continued yesterday to stonewall reporters on the growing federal "call boy" investigation, apparently hoping the scandal will fade before President Bush is asked his view of a late-night White House tour that reportedly included two male prostitutes.

Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, who heads the Secret Service, reluctantly conceded yesterday at the White House that the agency is looking into the July 3, 1988, tour - one of several arranged by a Secret Service officer for lobbyist Craig J. Spence.

Meanwhile, White House sources confirmed that President Bush has followed the stories of the late-night visit and Mr. Spence's links to a homosexual prostitution ring under investigation by federal authorities since they were disclosed June 29 in The Washington Times. But top officials won't discuss the stories' substance, reportedly even among themselves.

"Mr. Bush knows about the story. Yes he does. He's aware of the story," said one White House source who, like virtually all the others, insisted on anonymity.

Press officers have rebuffed repeated requests to obtain Mr. Bush's reaction and decline to discuss investigations or fallout from the disclosures.

"I don't have anything on that," said Deputy Press Secretary B. Jay Cooper, the latest member of the press office to respond.

"There's no gain in talking about it," explained an official who declined to be quoted by name. "It only makes the story grow and helps keep it alive."

The president has not had "serious discussion" about the reports even with his most senior aides, including Chief of Staff John Sununu, according to another source.

Reports on the matter have been included in the Daily Press Summary, a comprehensive half-inch-thick digest of print and broadcast media stories and editorials prepared by a division of the White House press office for the president and aides throughout the complex.

Because the summary is an internal document, officials would not disclose its reports on the news stories. One official said, "I'm sure that the story was summarized, but the president also reads The Washington Times and The Washington Post."

Mr. Brady, the ranking administration official to speak publicly about the episode, appeared nonplussed when asked yesterday about Reginald A. deGueldre, a uniformed White House officer who moonlighted as Mr. Spence's bodyguard and arranged the late-night White House tours.

"Sir, were any Secret Service policies violated by Officer deGueldre's moonlighting relationship with Craig Spence, and, if so, what actions have you taken to correct that?" he was asked.

"Would you repeat that again?" Mr. Brady requested.

"Yes, sir, I'm talking about the UD [Uniformed Division] officer, Reginald deGueldre, who was working moonlighting for Craig Spence and who arranged the tours for him. I'm wondering if any Secret Service policies are violated by such moonlighting, and whether these visits to the White House are . . ."

Mr. Brady interrupted at that point and said, "I can't give you a precise answer on that now. We'll certainly look into it."

"You don't know if your own Secret Service is conducting an investigation into something that's been this prominent?" the secretary was then asked.

"I am sure they're looking into it," he said. "The nature of that investigation I cannot report to you at this time."

A Treasury Department spokeswoman said later, "The director of the Secret Service is looking into whether or not any policies have been violated" by the moonlighting or admission of outsiders to the White House compound.

She said neither Mr. Brady nor the Secret Service would comment on additional matters involved in a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office of the homosexual prostitution ring that Mr. Spence patronized.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater and several of his deputies have said repeatedly that they do not know if Mr. Bush considered it appropriate for male prostitutes to be touring the White House at 1 a.m.

Yesterday, while talking informally to several reporters at the White House, Mr. Fitzwater parried one question this way: "What are they saying, that you should have sexual-preference checks on people that come into the White House?"

He also said, "We don't have any involvement that I know of."

Although he has talked repeatedly to individual reporters, including those for The Washington Times, Mr. Fitzwater has not held a general briefing since before the prostitution ring stories broke, largely because of the holiday weekend and because administration experts gave briefings on Mr. Bush's European trip, which begins Sunday.

The last of those briefings was scheduled for today, but Mr. Fitzwater reportedly was considering holding a general briefing as well, his first in nine days.

Mr. Fitzwater and his staff have declined consistently to say if they would take the question to Mr. Bush, a practice done only rarely and generally only on matters they expect the president might be willing to discuss.

One senior official, who insisted on anonymity, said it was unlikely any staff member would ask Mr. Bush such a question, discounting any threats to security and portraying it as a sordid sex matter beneath presidential dignity.

Photo, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady concedes a probe is under way., Photo by Kevin T. Gilbert/The Washington Times,



[b][size=130]July 9th, 1989: Meet Reginald deGueldre


White House Guard Who Gave Private Tours Is Investigated

OAKTON, Va. (AP) - The Secret Service searched the home of one of its White House guards after he acknowledged he had escorted a Washington businessman and his associates on late-night tours of the executive mansion.

Rich Adams, a spokesman for the Secret Service, confirmed on Friday that the service, which protects President George Bush and other high-ranking officials, searched the home of the guard, Reginald A. deGueldre, on Thursday night. Adams declined to provide details of the search.



July 10th, 1989: Contours of an Investigation

Spence was target before raid on ring
Jerry Seper, and Michael Hedges The Washington Times; Part A; Pg. A1 July 10, 1989, Monday, Final Edition; Correction Appended


Craig J. Spence, the Washington lobbyist and power broker, was the subject of a Secret Service investigation even before a February raid on a homosexual prostitution ring to which he has been linked, The Washington Times has learned.

The Secret Service last week expanded its investigation with inquiries about friends and associates of Mr. Spence.

Two of those friends are former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, a former deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's criminal division.

During interviews last week with friends and associates of Mr. Spence, the Secret Service made copies of photographs from a July 4, 1988, party showing him mugging for the camera with Mr. diGenova and Miss Toensing, who in one photo is draped in an American flag.

It was on that same weekend that Mr. Spence arranged a 1 a.m. tour of the White House, which one participant said included two male prostitutes.

The Secret Service also wants to talk to Mr. Spence, but has been unable to locate him, according to persons the agents have interviewed.

Mr. diGenova couldn't be reached yesterday for comment. He has been interviewed twice by The Times over the past two weeks. In the first conversation, he described a fleeting contact with Mr. Spence which, he said, was based solely on mutual business interests.

In a second conversation, he said he attended a few of Mr. Spence's parties, as U.S. attorney and later after he left the government to enter private law practice. He eventually traveled to Japan last December on a business trip with Mr. Spence and Wayne Bishop, chairman of the Washington law firm of Bishop, Cook, Purcell & Reynolds, where Mr. diGenova works. Business contacts made on the trip proved fruitful and are still being pursued, he said.

"When I got back from Japan, some anonymous person suggested that he [Mr. Spence] might be using cocaine. Well, of course my antennae went up right away, and I checked those rumors out . . . and found much to my surprise that people suspected the worst," Mr. diGenova said.

At that point, Mr. diGenova said, he severed his relationship with Mr. Spence. He said he didn't report his findings or concerns to authorities.

Although the Secret Service hasn't said what sparked its interest in Mr. Spence, one of the persons questioned by the Secret Service said investigators appeared to be "interested" in the connections the lobbyist had made.

The Secret Service was the lead agency in a Feb. 28 raid on a house on 34th Place NW used by a homosexual prostitution ring, a ring with which Mr. Spence spent up to $20,000 a month, according to call boys, his friends and documents obtained by The Times.

The federal investigation, headed by the office of U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens and conducted by Secret Service agents, appears to be aimed at determining whether Reagan and Bush administration officials and others were compromised by Mr. Spence, through the use of female and male prostitutes and with electronic audio and video eavesdropping at parties at his house in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood in Northwest Washington.

Another focus of the probe, persons interviewed by the Secret Service have told this newspaper, is whether White House security was compromised by the late-night tours arranged by Mr. Spence.

Mr. Stephens has said only that his office is investigating "possible credit-card fraud" in connection with arrests made in the 34th Place raid. But numerous sources have told The Times that the Secret Service is asking about Mr. Spence's activities.

Secret Service agents on Friday also asked a former Spence colleague detailed questions about attempts by the lobbyist to obtain information about the Delta Force, an elite U.S. commando team involved in top-secret military operations.

The former friend said Mr. Spence had given a gold Rolex watch to a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who is now associated with Army anti-terrorist units. Later, according to the former friend, Mr. Spence alluded to the gift of the watch and asked the veteran detailed questions about the Delta Force operations.

The Vietnam veteran was one of six persons on the July 3 White House tour, arranged by Mr. Spence. A uniformed Secret Service guard, who admitted the group to the White House and served as an unofficial host, also told The Times that he had received a gold Rolex watch worth about $8,000 from Mr. Spence but said Mr. Spence had asked for nothing in return.

Mr. Spence collected key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, media celebrities and high-ranking military officers, among others, for his glittery dinner parties at his Kalorama home. According to friends, visitors to Mr. Spence's Wyoming Avenue NW house and records, the host eavesdropped on some gatherings to compromise guests and blackmailed some associates with threats to disclose their indiscretions.

Efforts to reach Mr. Spence during the past three weeks have been unsuccesful. He telephoned The Times on June 29 in response to a telefaxed message but hung up when asked about his activities. His fax machine number has since been disconnected.

Mr. diGenova was nominated by President Reagan to be U.S. attorney in 1983. Prior to that, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Washington office, chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Rules Committee and chief minority counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In 1981, as chief counsel for the Senate Rules Committee, Mr. diGenova was responsible for overseeing the Reagan transition after Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 1980 elections. From June 1975 to April 1976, Mr. diGenova was counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the so-called Church Committee that investigated allegations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing.

Mr. diGenova announced his resignation as U.S. attorney in January 1988, and he left office to begin his private practice on March 1.

Miss Toensing, who also is in private practice, was chief counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from 1981 to 1984 when she resigned to join the Justice Department as a deputy assistant attorney general.

At Justice, she headed the criminal division's procurement fraud unit and was instrumental in a number of high-profile indictments, including several involving General Dynamics. She also was responsible for the investigation and prosecution of terrorists.

A number of photographs, including more than a dozen from the 1 a.m. White House tour, were taken over the July Fourth weekend in 1988 by a participant in Mr. Spence's revelries. The photos, copies of which were obtained last week by The Times, have been reviewed by the Secret Service.

Of the several snapshots of the July 4, 1988, tour reviewed by the Secret Service, only two - both of which included Mr. diGenova and his wife - were copied.

Craig Spence was a registered lobbyist for several Japanese firms through 1987 and established close friendships with a number of leading Japanese politicians, including Motoo Shiina, considered by Tokyo analysts to be an inside favorite to replace scandal-plagued Sousuke Uno as prime minister.

Mr. Spence and Mr. Shiina were embroiled in a real estate deal involving the house in Kalorama, a two-story Victorian showpiece valued last year by real estate agents at $1.15 million.

By the time a lawsuit filed by Mr. Shiina over the property was settled, the Japanese official had admitted in court papers to giving Mr. Spence $345,000 in cash.

Mr. Spence has told several current and former friends that he obtained the money to buy the house by blackmailing Mr. Shiina. Mr. Shiina has denied he was blackmailed by Mr. Spence.

The lobbyist moved in November 1988 from the Kalorama house, on Wyoming Avenue, to an apartment on Massachusetts Avenue NW, but apparently his operations remained unchanged.

A female prostitute who worked for the escort service that supplied Mr. Spence with call boys, said he hired her to have sex with young military men in his part-time employ.

The prostitute, describing herself as retired, said Mr. Spence ordered her to engage in those assignations in certain specific locations in his Massachusetts Avenue apartment, enabling him to eavesdrop on the encounters. One of her clients, an enlisted man stationed at a local Army base, confirmed that he worked for Mr. Spence, and the prostitute's account.

"Some of the men were married," she said. "They told me he was using what I did with them against them."

Once, Mr. Spence's influence with the Washington power elite appeared almost limitless, demonstrated by his ability to arrange midnight tours of the White House. The Times has confirmed that Mr. Spence arranged at least four midnight tours of the White House, including one June 29, 1988, on which he took with him a 15-year-old boy whom he falsely identified as his son.

One man Mr. Spence apparently cultivated was a uniformed Secret Service officer assigned to the midnight shift at the White House. The officer, Reginald A. deGueldre, was interrogated for more than 10 hours last week about his association with Mr. Spence. Five Secret Service agents, armed with search warrants, searched his house for nearly two hours Friday night, although they wouldn't say what they were looking for. The agents seized several photographs from Mr. deGueldre's home.

Mr. deGueldre said he has been told he will be called to testify before a federal grand jury. According to one law enforcement official, Mr. deGueldre failed the portion of a polygraph test involving favors he may have done for Mr. Spence.

Photo, In a snapshot copied by the Secret Service, Craig J. Spence (right) and former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova watch Mr. diGenova's wife, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Victoria Toensing, clown at a party.; Photo, Reginald A. deGauldre, a uniformed Secret Service officer, holds the door to the White House open for two of the six persons who were given a tour at 1 a.m. on July 3, 1988. The tour, arranged by Craig J. Spence, is the subject of a Secret Service probe. The photo was taken by another tour pa[rticipant.]

CORRECTION-DATE: July 14, 1989, Friday, Final Edition

CORRECTION:

Due to an editing error, a story Monday in The Washington Times incorrectly said that photographs of former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, an ex-deputy assistant attorney general, were taken during a July 3, 1988, tour of the White House arranged by former Washington lobbyist Craig J. Spence.

Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing did not go on the July 3 tour, which, according to one participant included two male prositutes. However, the couple did attend a party at Mr. Spence's house on the same weekend, during which the photographs were taken.



July 18, 1989: Meet Motoo Shiina

Spence ma[y] be Shiina's downfall
Edward Neilan The Washington Times, Part A; Pg. A1 July 18, 1989, Tuesday, Final Edition

TOKYO
apanese nuclear-physicist-turned-politician Motoo Shiina has been described here as "a good friend of the United States" - and as a shrewd businessman who may have passed U.S. aerospace secrets to the Soviet Union.

The magazine "Shukan Shincho," a popular weekly, raised past allegations that Mr. Shiina leaked sensitive U.S. information to the Soviet Union - allegations the magazine said have never been explained.

Mr. Shiina, 54, a member of Japan's lower House of Representatives, has been keeping an extremely low profile lately amid a swirling scandal involving his relationship with Craig J. Spence, a onetime U.S. lobbyist for Japan and business associate of Mr. Shiina's.

Mr. Shiina has declined to answer telephone inquiries on his dealings with Mr. Spence, but has responded cautiously to direct questions through a lawyer, Chikahiko Soda. The questions have dealt mainly with a loan by Mr. Shiina to Mr. Spence to purchase the Wyoming Avenue NW house where homosexual parties took place.

"If his [Mr. Shiina's] involvement in any of this is true, then it would create a serious political problem for Shiina and his political life will probably be damaged considerably," said Hisao Imai, a well-known Japanese political commentator.

Mr. Imai, head of the Japan Commentators Association and a former political editor of Sankei Shimbun newspaper, said yesterday that there is hope among younger ruling Liberal Democratic Party members that Mr. Shiina will be a future party leader or even prime minister.

"If we lose him, this is a great loss not only for the LDP [the ruling Liberal Democratic Party] but for the nation," Mr. Imai said.

"The reason that Mr. Shiina is touted as a rising star is that he has been previously untainted by any scandal and he is an internationalist," said another political commentator, Kan Ito.

With his own independent style of diplomacy he has established himself as a leading expert on U.S.-Japan relations, analysts said.

Although several Diet members speaking anonymously yesterday described Mr. Shiina as a "true internationalist" and "good friend of the United States," one Japanese magazine came close to calling him a spy for the Soviet Union.

The magazine "Shukan Shincho," a popular weekly, raised past allegations that Mr. Shiina leaked sensitive U.S. information to the Soviet Union - allegations the magazine said have never been explained.

The magazine quoted a newsman covering the Japan Defense Agency as saying that General Dynamics Corp. in 1979 allowed Mr. Shiina to photograph on microfilm specifications of the new F-16 fighter.

In exchange, the newsman was quoted as saying, Mr. Shiina agreed to lobby for the company's involvement in the joint U.S.-Japan production of the FSX jet fighter.

The magazine noted that stories surfaced in Japan that the technical data of the F-16 was leaked to the Soviet Union by "the son of an influential Japanese politician." No name was given, but the magazine followed with a description of Mr. Shiina's father, the late Etsusaburo Shiina, who was a former LDP kingmaker and holder of several key Cabinet posts.

But Mr. Ito said yesterday, "Any charges that he is soft on the Soviet Union doesn't add up in my opinion. He's always speaking out about the Soviet buildup in Northeast Asia."

Mr. Ito also said, "Mr. Shiina is regarded as well-informed on foreign affairs and defense matters and has been known to criticize both ruling and opposition members for talking nonsense on those subjects in the Diet."

Mr. Imai said political circles around Nagatacho - the Tokyo area akin to Washington's Capitol Hill - are talking more and more these days about stories in The Washington Times about Mr. Spence and Mr. Shiina.

He said some rumors hold that the Central Intelligence Agency cooked up the whole thing to discredit Mr. Shiina.

"I hope Mr. Shiina is not such a bad guy as was described in recent Japanese periodicals' reports," said Mr. Imai. "It has been believed that he will sooner or later become foreign minister. But because of this scandalous news, he may have some difficulties in reaching a Cabinet post or beyond.

"The news that Mr. Shiina was closely associated with Mr. Spence was quite a shock to LDP members and those in the Diet. But a possible examination into the matter will not come before the July 23 Upper House elections for which they are waging an unprecedentedly defensive campaign," he said.

An article profiling Mr. Shiina published 10 years ago in The Daily Yomiuri English-language newspaper began:

" 'What should I say about myself?' he asks smilingly, taking a slow, deep drag at his cigarette between sips of hot, steaming coffee which Hideko, his charming wife, had served. Meanwhile, outside, the gently falling snow had blanketed Shiina's quite ample garden, giving up an impression of serene quiet.

"In his well-modulated voice, Motoo talked of what he calls his 'humble' existence.

"Not so, for this diminutive (5 feet, 5 inches) man has been his father's active and devoted campaigner for a number of years. His father is Etsusaburo Shiina, former vice-president of the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party, Diet member, ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, ex-Minister of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and ex-Minister of Finance."

The article said Mr. Shiina spent his campus days at Nagoya University, graduating in 1954 with a major in nuclear physics, a field in which he was awarded a scholarship by the U.S. State Department for one-year's study of nuclear reactors at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Leaving his infant daughter behind with his mother, a friend was found to sponsor Hideko's stay in the United States. "It was quite tough for both of us, but somehow we managed," he told The Daily Yomiuri, crediting his success to his wife's devotion and care.

On his return to Japan in 1954, the younger Shiina set up his own company which manufactures precision instruments. He founded two other companies, one a joint venture with an American firm, according to newspaper reports that provided no additional details.

Mr. Shiina's lawyer said yesterday of his client's business affairs, only that he resigned as an officer of the Tokyo-registered company Samutaku Co. Ltd. on becoming a Diet member in 1979 but still holds a large number of shares in the company and remains an adviser.

In addition, Mr. Shiina in 1979 was a board member of two non-profit organizations - the World Economic Information Service and the Asian Club, the latter funded by MITI.

Mr. Shiina told a reporter at the time that World Economic Information Service collates and studies economic information from all over the world for the guidance of the Japanese government and business world."

The Asian Club, established in 1975, aimed at "promoting economic goals." Mr. Shiina told an interviewer prior to his first election that he devoted much time to a private organization called Participation which sent out Japanese artists and musicians to various Southeast Asian countries.

On July 5, The Washington Times published a story describing a business deal between Mr. Shiina and Mr. Spence in which the latter made more than $700,000 in four years working for Mr. Shiina's Policy Study Group.

Mr. Spence also bought a Kalorama house using cash loaned to him by Mr. Shiina. When he refused to pay back the loan, Mr. Shiina sued.

* Special correspondent Hiroyasu Tomaru contributed to this report.


July 24th, TIME Magazine takes note

''Hang a lamb chop in the window,'' was the advice legendary hostess Perle Mesta gave those who wanted to make a place for themselves in the capital.Craig Spence, a would-be power broker with a taste for Edwardian suits, took that advice to heart when he arrived in Washington in the late 1970s and hurled himself into high-intensity party-giving at his elegant town house in the fashionable Kalorama section of town. Before long, the man from nowhere (he was, in fact, briefly a reporter for ABC in Viet Nam, and was said to have ties to Asian businessmen who were paying for his house, two bodyguards and Mercedes) had reportedly been host to John Mitchell and William Casey, journalists Ted Koppel and William Safire, and several Congressmen. By 1982 he had served enough lamb chops to merit a profile in the New York Times. The story trumpeted his ability to open doors all over town, even though the paper could not quite put its finger on who he was. It called him an international business consultant, party host, foreign agent and research journalist. A city that remakes itself every four years is perfect for a Gatsbyesque creature like Spence, with a past he is unwilling to talk about and a present that consists of convincing mysterious clients that he has plenty of influence. Spence would probably still be throwing dinners at the posh Four Seasons Hotel for people like Donald Gregg, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, as he did last spring, if the police had not raided a male prostitution service in February.The raid turned up thousands of dollars' worth of credit-card receipts signed by Spence. Though he was not the only Washington figure to use the service (the Washington Times, which broke the story, says some White House and congressional aides will be implicated), Spence must have been among its best customers. He ran up a $1,525 tab in one day, $20,000 in a month. To show off his clout last year, Spence took two clients and a pair of male prostitutes on a midnight July 4 tour of the White House.That same weekend, Spence gave Secret Service agent Ronald deGueldre, who arranged the tour, his $8,000 Rolex; deGueldre gave Spence his $22 Casio -- all out of friendship, says deGueldre. The agent's house in Virginia was searched last week for pieces of Truman china, a set of presidential cuff links and a tiepin that disappeared mysteriously after the tour. Officials will not say if anything was found. Evidence is being presented to a grand jury that will decide whether indictments are warranted. But Spence's days of trading on his guest list have ended, and he has gone underground. Those who once dined at his table are wondering out loud about the curious 8-ft.-long two-way mirror in his house, and the young men, and what exactly Craig Spence did to earn all the money he was throwing around. They wonder only now that the party is over.

~~~~~~~~

By Margaret Carlson and Hays Gorey


July 29, 1989: Party's Over

Party's Over An Influence Broker Vanishes Amid Sex Charges, Leaving Some D.c. Heavyweights Unnerved.
July 29, 1989|By Frank Greve and Nelson Schwartz, Inquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — "Millionaire" was the occupation Craig Joseph Spence gave last year when he was arrested on a charge of drunken driving.

At his peak, Spence, 48, earned more than $300,000 a year at a job highly prized in Washington. He was a people broker who introduced Japanese businessmen informally to American decision-makers.

No one knew where he came from, and Spence was no help. He "constantly reinvented himself," as a friend put it, telling Washington friends he was a Boston Brahmin and Boston Brahmins he was a New Yorker.

Nobody cared. They called him a Gatsby and let him send his Cadillac limousine for them. They sipped the chardonnay that his white-gloved butler served and stayed late at his big fieldstone home on elegant Embassy Row.

"There was always freshly squeezed orange juice and interesting people to talk to, and in Washington that's an irresistible combination," explained partygoer Scott Thompson.

Spence's decade-long party ended recently when a favorite guest, Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, published a story that Spence spent up to $20,000 a month on homosexual prostitutes. In a second story, headlined ''Power Broker Served Drugs, Sex at Parties Bugged for Blackmail," Spence was said by unnamed sources to have blackmailed participants in sex acts secretly videotaped through a two-way mirror.

Spence did not respond to the charges. He has not returned repeated phone calls, and a doorman said he had not been seen for weeks.

No known evidence has linked Spence's famous guests to X-rated parties. Nor have blackmail victims surfaced. In fact, federal investigators announced this week that they had uncovered no evidence that would link high-ranking government officials to the alleged homosexual prostitution ring or to blackmail.

KOPPEL, SEVAREID

But the events have sent shock through Spence's party cast, including media supernovas Ted Koppel and Eric Sevareid, and a score of senators, ambassadors, generals, academics, senior bureaucrats and hangers-on.

And the vulnerability of Washington VIPs to the flattery, hospitality - and sometimes the money - of a rich pretender has been made embarrassingly clear. So has the subtlety of Japan's lobbying.

With the backing of its government and industrialists, Spence played host for parties and seminars - even a radio show - that exalted decision-makers, particularly big and fading names. What they got was flattering attention. What Japan got was sympathetic ears. What Spence got was the seat at the head of the table, flanked by the powerful, which he hungered for more than money.

"He was a madman who thought he was Napoleon and had the ability to persuade other people that he was Napoleon," said William Harbin, a retired Foreign Service officer who sometimes worked for him.

That could be said of lots of Washingtonians. What was extraordinary, friends and enemies agree, was Spence's approach: the non-stop party. Dressed like an Edwardian dandy, snapping his fingers at dawdling help, guiding sheepish Japanese guests toward Washington's celebrated ones, Spence appeared to own the town.

PHALANX OF GIS

Late at night, his limousine would draw up to the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown, where $25 is a moderate breakfast tab. A half-dozen muscled young men, mostly off-duty GIs from nearby bases, were instructed to precede Spence through the lobby and peel off at the dining room so Spence could enter first, wearing a black cape lined in red silk.

In retrospect, most of his social effects seem equally calculated.

After arriving in Washington in 1979, Spence adopted as his mentor John Mitchell, former President Richard M. Nixon's attorney general. "Mitchell opened up to him like a flower," recalled Spence partygoer Timothy Dickinson.

With Mitchell as co-host, Spence threw parties in honor of bigger fish, such as Robert G. Neumann when he was U.S. ambassador-designate to Saudi Arabia.

To woo VIPs, Spence paid them up to $5,000 to address seminars on topics his Japanese sponsors picked. Black-tie dinners at Spence's home followed naturally.

Other guests were drawn, or met, through a Saturday afternoon radio talk show Spence hosted for a year. TV commentator Sevareid, another flattered

mentor, often was his high card, party invitees said.

Spence would tell them he "was having a party for Eric Sevareid and say, 'Sevareid wants you to come,' whether or not that was true," according to Robert Cassidy, an international trade lawyer. Sevareid declined to comment.

Japan's VIPs were easy to come by. The Japanese ambassador coaxed staff to go, a Japanese correspondent recalled, "and once Japanese businessmen saw officials from the embassy going to Spence's seminars and events, they were afraid they would miss out on something if they did not attend."

Few guests knew it, but Spence for several years was paid a $12,000-a-month retainer, plus thousands more in living expenses and fees, by the Japanese Policy Study Group, a think tank sponsored by more than 30 Japanese bankers, industrialists and traders, according to Justice Department records.

Its president is Motoo Shiina, the leading defense thinker in the Japanese Diet and the Liberal Democratic Party. In addition to hiring Spence as the study group's "overseas representative," Shiina lent him $345,000 cash from personal savings and Spence used the money to buy his Embassy Row home, according to court records.

Unlike most Washington influence vendors, Spence was neither lawyer nor lobbyist. He had been neither an elected official nor an appointed one. He did not, as the pros say, "follow legislation." He simply put people together.

Gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire was so impressed with Spence's skills as a host that she compared him to Ethel Kennedy. Wrote Phil Gailey of the New York Times in 1982: "What most impresses, if not benefits, his clients is his ability to master the social and political chemistry of this city, to make and use important connections and to bring together policy makers, power brokers and opinion shakers at parties and seminars."

FAMOUS NAMES

They included Sens. John H. Glenn Jr. (D., Ohio) and Alan Cranston (D., Calif.), CIA Director William J. Casey, influence broker Roy Cohn, anti- abortion leader Phyllis Schlafly, Marine Corps Gen. Alfred M. Gray, former Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson, ambassador to China James R. Lilley and scores of senior bureaucrats.

Spence's foundation cracked badly in April 1983 when his principal Japanese backer backed off. Just what went wrong in the relationship is unclear. ''Having a representative in a foreign capital," Shiina wrote him, was considered "dubious behavior" in Japan. He would be terminated in a month.

In court action that followed, Spence faced down Shiina's demand that the $345,000 cash loan be repaid. Instead, they reached an out-of-court settlement just as Shiina was ordered to appear with financial records for a deposition.

Ultimately, in May 1988, Spence sold the Embassy Row house, repaid Shiina's $345,000 plus 6 per cent interest - and kept the difference.

By then, the limousine was gone and Spence reduced to a 1,700-square-foot apartment. Some clients remained, principally Becton Dickinson & Co., a New Jersey biomedical supplies firm which recently completed a plant in Japan. Becton Dickinson hired Spence in 1980 for about $100,000 a year to provide unspecified assistance, according to a spokesman, and the latest in an unbroken series of contracts pays him $250,000 a year plus expenses until May 1990.

But the party was winding down. Spence, to demonstrate his influence, resorted to extravagant gimmicks such as having his off-duty military friends pose as bodyguards, associates said.

On one memorable occasion, Spence insisted that White House Secret Service guard Reginald A. deGueldre remove his $22 Casio wristwatch and replace it with Spence's $8,000 gold Rolex, according to a search warrant affidavit.

A Secret Service agent claimed in the affidavit that deGueldre "admitted" stealing green and gold Truman china from the White House pantry. A plate was ''prominently displayed at his home," it stated.

In addition, on four occasions Spence and friends, according to published reports, entered the White House for unauthorized nocturnal tours, at least once with deGueldre's cooperation.

In an interview with the Washington Post, deGueldre denied stealing the china and said he had done no special favors for Spence.

Spence's social circle shrank until "the more often you came to Craig's house, the more likely you were a misfit," Scott Thompson concluded. "The more you were a real catch, the less likely you were to come back."

It seemed that his life - the real life nobody in Washington knew about - was coming full circle.

He was not from a Boston Brahmin family and patrician money.

He was one of three children of a middle-class, widowed nurse, according to contemporaries who grew up with Spence in Kingston, N.Y., 50 miles north of Manhattan.

He was also, according to William Dedrick, a 1959 classmate at Kingston High School, the senior who walked alone, carrying a major briefcase.

He had attended Syracuse University, then Boston University and earned a degree in broadcasting. He and anchorman Koppel, a sometime party guest, met as Vietnam correspondents for ABC-TV in 1969.

He arrived in Tokyo in 1971, colleagues recalled, and for some years worked both sides of the street: They said he sold to Western publications adaptations of articles produced by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. And they said he sold to MITI reports that were based on English language articles.

Shiina, in recent interviews with Japanese reporters, did not detail how he met Spence. Washingtonians who once enjoyed his orange juice and glamour are hastening to forget him. And Spence has disappeared after boarding his white Maltese terrier, Winston, with a friend.





August 10, 1989: Craig Spence Arrested

Lobbyist Is Arrested in New York
Published: August 10, 1989

Craig J. Spence, a Washington lobbyist who is a subject of a Federal investigation of male prostitution in Washington, is facing cocaine and gun possession charges in New York, the Manhattan District Attorney's office said yesterday.

Mr. Spence, 48 years old, was arrested July 31 at the Barbizon Hotel at 140 East 63d Street in Manhattan. Gerald McKelvey, a spokesman for District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, said Mr. Spence had called the police to say a man in his room had just robbed him of $6,000 at gunpoint.

When the police arrived, Mr. McKelvey said, they found Mr. Spence and another man, Casey Regan, 22, in the room arguing. Mr. Spence told the police that Mr. Regan had stolen a gun from him and then used it to rob him. The police also found a small amount of cocaine in an envelope, Mr. McKelvey said.

Mr. Spence was charged with criminal possession of a loaded .32-caliber pistol, a felony that carries a maximum seven-year sentence, and with criminal possession of an illegal drug. He was released on his own recognizance. Mr. Regan was charged with possession of the gun and the drug and also with armed robbery.

At his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Aug. 1, Mr. Spence said that he met Mr. Regan on Times Square and that they returned to his hotel room.

Mr. Regan lives in Brooklyn and works as a loader in a warehouse, Mr. McKelvey said.

Mr. Spence's court-appointed lawyer did not return a reporter's telephone calls, and his business in Washington, Craig Spence Associates, does not have a listed number.

The Secret Service, the District of Columbia Police Department and the United States Attorney's office in Washington are investigating Mr. Spence's alleged patronage of a homosexual escort service there. In the 1980's, he built a reputation as an influential lobbyist who represented many Japanese concerns and threw extravagant parties but who kept his private life to himself.






November 12, 1989: Craig Spence Found Dead

Lobbyist Linked to Sex Case Is Found Dead
AP November 12, 1989

Craig Spence, a lobbyist linked to a homosexual escort service under Federal investigation, was found dead in a hotel room here, the police said today.

Mr. Spence, 49 years old, was found in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Friday after firefighters used a saw to cut open his door, which was barricaded with a bed. Leonard Atkins, the Suffolk County Medical Examiner, said that an autopsy had been completed but that it might be weeks before a cause of death was announced.

The Washington Times reported in August that Mr. Spence disclosed he had AIDS and had threatened to commit suicide.

Mr. Spence was identified by the paper as a customer of a homosexual escort service being investigated by the Secret Service, the District of Columbia police and the United States Attorney's office for suspected credit card fraud. The newspaper said he spent as much as $20,000 a month on the service. He has also been linked to a White House guard who has said he accepted an expensive watch from Mr. Spence and allowed him and friends to take late-night White House tours.


November 13, 1989: Seper & Hedges Again

SPENCE AS MUCH AN ENIGMA IN DEATH AS HE WAS IN LIFE

by Jerry Seper and Michael Hedges

The Washington Times, 11/13/89

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The room where Craig J. Spence died was awash in the small mysteries and ironies that had followed him - and that he had perpetuated - since he came to Washington in the late 1970s, already an enigmatic figure with strange Asian connections and friends in high places.

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The sergeant, who also participated in the July 3 White House tour, allegedly was asked by Mr. Spence for information on Delta Force, a special forces counterterrorism unit based in Fort Bragg, N.C.
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On the bed was a newspaper clipping referring to CIA undercover agents. Scrawled on the mirror was a note written to some unnamed "chief," which also contained an obscure phrase in Japanese, "Nisei Bei," which means second-generation American.

But hidden from view, in the room's false ceiling, were personal papers, including a birth certificate describing his arrival as a small-town, middle-class boy - a heritage he spent his life trying to restyle.

"Death, you know, is only painful to the ones you leave behind," Mr. Spence told The Washington Times during an interview in August. "As a matter of fact, I'm looking forward to it. At 48, I'll still look good in hell."

The focus of a summer sex scandal, Mr. Spence was found dead Friday in his room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston. He had celebrated his 49th birthday just three weeks ago at a lavish Washington party.

The Ritz was among Mr. Spence's favorite hostelries, one of several posh accommodations he demanded in his frequent travels throughout the United States, Europe, South and Central America and the Orient.

"I've always been a first-class person in a second-class world, but I've learned to adjust," he said in the interview. "But there are places I've found where a civilized man can exist with some style and dignity."

Mr. Spence's name surfaced this summer after The Times identified the former lobbyist and prominent social host - who could arrange unauthorized late-night tours of the White House for his friends with a single telephone call - as a major client of a homosexual prostitution service being investigated by the Secret Service, Metropolitan Police, the U.S. Attorney's Office and a federal grand jury.

That investigation centered on a homosexual call-boy service that operated out of a house on 34th Place NW. The ring's clients, according to hundreds of credit-card vouchers obtained by The Times, included government officials, military officers, foreign and U.S. businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals.

The vouchers showed that Mr. Spence spent as much as $20,000 a month for call boys from various escort services run by the ring, including Man-to-Man, Dream Boys, Ultimate First Class and Jovan. He admitted in the interview with The Times that he had used credit cards to purchase sexual services, but strongly hinted of having "firsthand information" about people "high in government" who also were involved.

During the past few weeks, Mr. Spence told several friends that he knew "for a fact" that the call-boy operation was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office and other federal authorities as a CIA front. He told the friends the CIA used the service to compromise other federal intelligence officials and foreign diplomats.

Mr. Spence claimed in the interview that he had worked for the CIA on numerous occasions and had been instrumental in a number of covert actions in Vietnam, Japan, Central America and the Middle East - a claim denied by the agency.

"How do you think a little faggot like me moved in the circles I did?" he said. "It's because I had contacts at the highest levels of this government.

"They'll deny it. But how do they make me go away, when so many of them have been at my house, at my parties and at my side?"

The grand jury investigation begun in June by U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens was described as a "credit card" probe. It is not clear, however, how vigorous federal prosecutors have been nor where the case may be headed.

The Times, in contacting a number of principal witnesses and active participants in the case, discovered that few of them had been interviewed and only a handful asked to testify before the grand jury. Several key figures had not been contacted at all. Those who were questioned were being asked mainly about national security concerns and possible security breaches at the White House.

Among those not contacted by law enforcement officials or the grand jury were:

* Officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations who were identified in The Times as having used the call-boy service and paid with credit cards.

* Those running the prostitution ring raided in February, and persons who kept the credit-card records of visits with prostitutes by people who worked in the Reagan and Bush White Houses.

* Any of several high-profile friends of Mr. Spence's who attended parties at his Kalorama home or spoke for pay at numerous seminars he sponsored as a registered foreign agent.

* Prostitutes who said they serviced Mr. Spence and military personnel whom the former lobbyist hired as bodyguards.

"I haven't heard one word from the U.S. attorney, the FBI or anyone else," said one of the men whom Mr. Spence got into the White House for a 1 a.m. visit on July 3, 1988. "The Secret Service talked to me back in the summer, after the stories were out, but nothing since then."

Mr. Spence was one key figure who was handed a subpoena more than two months ago but had yet to testify. What arrangements had been made with the former lobbyist are not known. Mr. Spence vowed during the August interview, however, that he would "never be brought back alive before any damned hearing."

Mr. Stephens has declined to comment on the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alan Strasser, who is handling the matter before the grand jury, also has refused comment. A spokeswoman, Judy Smith, said yesterday that the U.S. Attorney's Office would have no comment on Mr. Spence'sdeath or its potential impact on the investigation.

A participant in one of the late-night White House tours testified before the grand jury two weeks ago and was asked about the tours, missing china out of the presidential mansion and Mr. Spence's interest in the U.S. military's top-secret Delta Force. The witness, a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Spence's who had spent considerable time as a guest in his home, was not asked any questions about credit cards, Mr. Spence's alleged involvement with the homosexual call-boy ring or about the ring itself.

The witness - who was among those taking the July 3 White House tour - also described a lengthy interview with Mr. Strasser, Secret Service agents and then a brief questioning period before the federal panel.

"They pulled out a picture book containing the White House china collection and asked me about the Truman china," said the witness, who asked not to be identified. "They wanted to know if I had seen anything like that. They strongly intimated that more things were missing."

Mr. Strasser, according to the witness, also asked during the private discussion and before the grand jury about the gift by Mr. Spence of an expensive Rolex watch to a U.S. Army sergeant. The sergeant, who also participated in the July 3 White House tour, allegedly was asked by Mr. Spence for information on Delta Force, a special forces counterterrorism unit based in Fort Bragg, N.C.

"They asked me what I thought Spence wanted to know about the Delta project," the witness said. "I said it could mean he was just interested in the young guys there or something else."

The questioning by federal authorities became most detailed when it turned to the subject of the late-night tours. "They asked if we went in any offices, if I had seen any documents or if any documents had left the White House," the witness said.

Secret Service officials have publicly stated there was no breach of security during the tours and that they had no concern that entry was made by the late-night visitors into unauthorized areas of the White House.

Mr. Spence also gave an $8,000 Rolex watch to Secret Service uniformed officer Reginald A. deGueldre, who was assigned to the White House security detail. Mr. deGueldre has admitted in an affidavit that he gave Mr. Spence a piece of Truman china from the White House collection.

In August, Mr. deGueldre and another Secret Service officer, who has not been identified, were suspended indefinitely without pay and a third was placed on administrative leave with pay. Secret Service officials said at the time that the suspensions were the first step to possible criminal prosecution of the two men, although none has yet taken place.

Mr. deGueldre said recently he had not been approached by any federal authorities for an interview or asked to testify before the grand jury. "I have no idea what is going on," he said. "I have not heard from anyone at all."

The grand jury witness said federal authorities also inquired about Mr. Spence's alleged drug use. In his interview with The Times, Mr. Spence admitted to being a heavy cocaine user. He was arrested for possession of cocaine in New York last summer.

The witness also was shown a collection of photographs of male youths between "14 and 17 or 18 years old" and asked if any were a youth Mr. Spence lived with and introduced as his son. "They were a rough bunch of customers," the witness said. "The photographs looked like things that might have been found in the house they raided. I was asked if Craig had a son, and I said I didn't believe he did."

In the August interview, Mr. Spence admitted to using the 34th Place call-boy service, but said the amounts of the charges had been inflated by someone connected with the operation. As a result, he said, he fired his accountant over charges he said he had not authorized.

The accountant, Peter Chase, denied he had been fired and said all the credit-card charges had been verified and each contained Mr. Spence's signature. He steadfastly has declined to comment specifically about his former client, but did confirm that records involving Mr. Spence had been subpoenaed by the Secret Service, that no one from the U.S. Attorney's Office had talked with him and that he was not scheduled to appear before the grand jury.

Mr. Spence, who said in August that he had AIDS and who threatened to commit suicide rather than die of the disease, was scheduled for a hearing Feb. 2 in New York City on weapons and drug charges. He was arrested July 31 at the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street with a 22-year-old Brooklyn man identified by police as Casey Regan, an alleged male prostitute. Two other hearings, one in September and the other last week, had been postponed.

Police seized a loaded .32-caliber pistol and confiscated a small quantity of a white powder believed to be cocaine after a report of a disturbance at the hotel.

During his days as one of Washington's premier hosts, Mr. Spence dressed in finery and lived extravagantly, affecting touches like scarlet-lined capes and stretch limousines.

Among those who attended his parties and were featured at seminars he sponsored were journalists Eric Sevareid, Ted Koppel, William Safire and Liz Trotta; former Ambassadors Robert Neumann, Elliott Richardson and James Lilly; the late John Mitchell, attorney general in the Nixon administration; Mr. Casey and other CIA officials, including Ray Cline, former deputy director of intelligence for the agency; former Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, an expert on the Strategic Defense Initiative who now heads High Frontier Inc.; Sen. John Glenn, Ohio Democrat, and Sen. Frank Murkowski, Alaska Republican; and Joseph diGenova, former U.S. attorney in Washington, and his wife, Victoria Toensing, a former deputy assistant attorney general.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-in-chief of The Times, attended a party for Mr. Lilly hosted by Mr. Spence at the former lobbyist's Kalorama home.

Following the August interview in New York, Mr. Spence returned to Washington and reportedly stayed with friends. He maintained a high profile on the bar and restaurant circuit, and was spotted at several places during the past two months.

Meanwhile, several members of Congress, federal officials, military officers and others have told The Times that they are concerned that the lavish parties and Japanese-sponsored seminars thrown by Mr. Spence, at which the elite of Washington and officials from Japan, China and elsewhere mingled, might have compromised U.S. security.

Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, Maryland Republican, for one, recently questioned the former lobbyist's ties to the Japanese government in a speech on the floor of the House. Citing news articles in the United States and Japan, Mrs. Bentley asked whether plans for the F-16 jet had been transferred by Mr. Spence to a Japanese government official, Motoo Shiina, and later turned over to the Soviet Union.

"I bring this to the floor today, Mr. Speaker, because I am frankly puzzled that these stories are out - in print both in Japan and in America -and there seems to be no official investigation into what to me are very grave charges," she said.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby bks » Fri Jul 13, 2012 4:56 pm

Hundreds of credit card vouchers, drawn on both corporate and personal accounts and made payable to the Washington-based escort service ... have been examined by The Washignton Times.


[quote]...and what does a de Borchgrave do with a list like that?[/quote]

Well, your guess is as good as mine, though if things were different we wouldn't need de Borchgrave's cooperation to know who and what was on that list. It was Henry Vinson who was prosecuted for running the Washington call-boy ring, and it's Vinson who told Bryant that Spence and King requested underage males. Alas:

And what are we to make of Craig Spence's avowal to Washington Times reporters that the blackmail equipment in his home was furnished by a “friendly" intelligence agents? Henry Vinson claims to have divulged to federal prosecutors that the pedophiliac blackmail enterprise of King and Spence had connections to the CIA. The CIA has denied its affiliation to Spence, and Vinson is a convicted felon, but thousands of documents were sealed in Vinson’s case.

http://franklincoverup.com/index.php?op ... emid=10011


And thanks for that reminder that the Secret Service was once housed in the Treasury Department! So bizarre.


The vouchers showed that Mr. Spence spent as much as $20,000 a month for call boys from various escort services run by the ring, including Man-to-Man, Dream Boys, Ultimate First Class and Jovan. He admitted in the interview with The Times that he had used credit cards to purchase sexual services, but strongly hinted of having "firsthand information" about people "high in government" who also were involved.

During the past few weeks, Mr. Spence told several friends that he knew "for a fact" that the call-boy operation was being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office and other federal authorities as a CIA front. He told the friends the CIA used the service to compromise other federal intelligence officials and foreign diplomats.

Mr. Spence claimed in the interview that he had worked for the CIA on numerous occasions and had been instrumental in a number of covert actions in Vietnam, Japan, Central America and the Middle East - a claim denied by the agency.

"How do you think a little faggot like me moved in the circles I did?" he said. "It's because I had contacts at the highest levels of this government.

"They'll deny it. But how do they make me go away, when so many of them have been at my house, at my parties and at my side?"

The grand jury investigation begun in June by U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens was described as a "credit card" probe. It is not clear, however, how vigorous federal prosecutors have been nor where the case may be headed.

The Times, in contacting a number of principal witnesses and active participants in the case, discovered that few of them had been interviewed and only a handful asked to testify before the grand jury. Several key figures had not been contacted at all. Those who were questioned were being asked mainly about national security concerns and possible security breaches at the White House.

Among those not contacted by law enforcement officials or the grand jury were:

* Officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations who were identified in The Times as having used the call-boy service and paid with credit cards.

* Those running the prostitution ring raided in February, and persons who kept the credit-card records of visits with prostitutes by people who worked in the Reagan and Bush White Houses.

* Any of several high-profile friends of Mr. Spence's who attended parties at his Kalorama home or spoke for pay at numerous seminars he sponsored as a registered foreign agent.

* Prostitutes who said they serviced Mr. Spence and military personnel whom the former lobbyist hired as bodyguards.

"I haven't heard one word from the U.S. attorney, the FBI or anyone else," said one of the men whom Mr. Spence got into the White House for a 1 a.m. visit on July 3, 1988. "The Secret Service talked to me back in the summer, after the stories were out, but nothing since then."



Of all the Franklin personages it's Vinson, I think, with whom one might have the most fruitful conversation.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 14, 2012 10:04 am

Appreciate it. Obviously most posts I've got so far are works in progress and the Vinson / Frank angle, I was having a hard time parsing through. During the 80's "gay" was still such a loaded smear there's a lot of noise in all those articles. I am primarily interested in Craig Spence for the sake of Craig Spence, though. I don't mean that as some kind of judgement call about the Franklin material, just being honest and upfront about where my interests lie.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Dec 30, 2012 8:00 pm

Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/18/us/ha ... doors.html

HAVE NAMES, WILL OPEN RIGHT DOORS
By PHIL GAILEY, Special to the New York Times
Published: January 18, 1982


WASHINGTON, Jan. 17— Craig J. Spence finds much to admire in Oriental society. He likes to tell the story of a Japanese food service manager who, after some of his customers suffe red food poisoning, committed suicide as a way of apologizing.

''Now that's what I call quality control,'' said Mr. Spence, who is something of a mystery man
who dresses in Edwardian dandy style. Mr. Spence, 41 y ears old, is also a former television correspondent who now wears many hats, including international business consultant, party host, registered foreign agent and something called ''research journalist.''

Mr. Spence can be equally pithy in the assessments of Washington events and personalities that he provides his clients, among them a number of American multinational companies and the Tokyo-based Policy Study Group, a nonprofit group financed by Japanese business interests and affiliated with a faction of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

But it is not Mr. Spence's way with words that has made him successful in his business. What most impresses, if not benefits, his clients is his ability to master the social and political chemistry of this city, to make and use important connections and to bring together policy makers, power brokers and opinion shapers at parties and seminars.

There seems to be an inexhaustible demand in Washington for the sort of thing Mr. Spence offers.
To unravel the mysteries of the capital, special-interest groups, both foreign and domestic, retain lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and public relations specialists by the score, although few cut as broad a swath.

Mr. Spence, whose personal phone book and party guest lists constitute a ''Who's Who'' in Congress, Government and journalism, is hired by his clients as much for whom he knows as what he knows. Still, Mr. Spence insists that he provides important, hard-nosed information and research analysis to his customers, enabling them to make decisions, and moves, with much greater confidence and skill.

For example, when Richard V. Allen's troubles began, Mr. Spence says, he wrote off the White House national security adviser as ''a Bert Lance without brains'' and told clients he would not survive questions about his judgment. Referring to Mr. Allen's acceptance of two wristwatches from Japanese friends, Mr. Spence said that he, too, had been given wristwatches, ''but I always gave them to my butler.''

He also says that he predicted the downfall of the Shah of Iran for his clients six months before it happened, and more recently told them the Camp David accords ''are dead.'' After a visit to El Salvador last year, he said he advised his clients to stay away.

Those assessments bring in a six-figure income, says Mr. Spence, who likes to live elegantly and a bit mysteriously.

Although he occasionally adds his zesty personal perspective to Washington and world developments, Mr. Spence spends a good part of his time arranging for others to explain political, economic and social events to his clients, especially the Japanese. Toward that end, Mr. Spence stages black-tie parties at his house in the fashionable Kalorama section of the capital and seminars at local university campuses to bring together American and Japanese businessmen, Government officials, scholars and journalists who figure in this city's power equation.

He calls the seminars ''Operation Sunshine,'' explaining that they are designed to give the Japanese and the Americans a better understanding of each other and issues. Reporters, he said, always are invited.

A Washington Post columnist wrote of Mr. Spence two years ago: ''Not since Ethel Kennedy used to give her famous Hickory Hill seminars for great minds of our times during the days of Camelot has anyone staged seminars successfully on a continuing social basis in Washington. That's what Craig Spence has been doing.''

Indeed, his parties do glitter with notables, from ambassadors to television stars, from Senators to senior State Department officials. According to Mr. Spence, Richard Nixon is a friend. So is John Mitchell. Eric Sevareid is termed ''an old, dear friend.'' Senator John Glenn is ''a good friend'' and Peter Ustinov is ''an old, old friend.''

It is not a one-way street. Knowing Mr. Spence can be good business for Government officials, members of Congress and their staffs, and even some journalists who cash in on it by accepting speaking and writing fees. Most of the time it all works smoothly, but occasionally the players find themselves on slippery ground.

Take, for example, four Washington reporters who said they were shocked to find their names on a Justice Department form Mr. Spence filed as a registered foreign agent. Mr. Spence had hired them to do ''research'' work, the reporters contend, and never bothered to tell them of his foreign agent status. ''Nonsense, '' he said. ''I report everything. I am very fastidious about reporting everything I do. I'm completely in the open, and I told them that.'' The reporters, Sarah McClendon, who runs th e McClendon News Service, and Ira Allen, Gregory Gordon and Robert Mackay of United Press International, said they would not have done ''research'' for Mr. Spence had they known he was a foreign agent.

Mrs. McClendon, in a letter to the Standing Committee of Correspondents of the Senate Press Gallery, said that she wrote one profile for Mr. Spence before learning that it had been sent to the Japanese. ''This worried me greatly,'' said Mrs. McClendon. ''I decided not to write any more profiles for Mr. Spence. I could not forget Pearl Harbor.''

Mr. Allen, who received more than $3,300 in one six-month period for writing profiles on Administration officials, said Mr. Spence told him he wanted profiles written in ''Time magazine style'' that included a summary of the subject's career, political views and personal interests and habits.

He said Mr. Spence told him that his Japanese business clients, in order to be good hosts to American officials, wanted to know such things as what kind of whiskey, if any, they preferred, what they liked to smoke and whether they like to go to bed early.

Some of the reporters say they found Mr. Spence to be extremely conservative in his political views and secretive about his work, refusing to disclose the identity of his clients. For that matter, they note, Craig Spence Associates does not have a listed phone number.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 13, 2013 8:07 am

1985. Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/26/us/wa ... niche.html

WASHINGTON TIMES AND ITS CONSERVATIVE NICHE
By ALEX S. JONES, Special to the New York Times
Published: May 26, 1985

WASHINGTON, May 24— Staff members of The Washington Times tell of how the newspaper's new editor, Arnaud de Borchgrave, sometimes prowls the newsroom late in the evening in blue silk pajamas, roused from the bed in his office by an idea that might help crack what he considers the liberal bias of many news organizations in general and the ''incredible arrogance'' of The Washington Post in particular.

In the two months that Mr. de Borchgrave has been in charge, his ideas have included offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal, and a front-page editorial announcing a drive by the paper to raise $14 million for the Nicaraguan rebels after Congress refused more aid.

Such attention-attracting moves are only one aspect of the paper's declared mission of being a conservative alternative. But attention is important if the paper is to win significant visibility outside conservative circles, a problem journalism critics say has dogged it since it was founded three years ago by the Unification Church.

''To me, The Times seems to be saying, 'Look at me!,' but in fact very few people in Washington do,'' said Katherine Evans, editor of The Washington Journalism Review.

Reagan Reads It Each Day

Mr. de Borchgrave remains confident, saying: ''The Washington Times is the first thing Ronald Reagan reads each morning. He called me up and told me so.''

As further evidence of the paper's influence, Mr. de Borchgrave noted that when President Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador came to town a few days ago the first newspaper he visited was The Washington Times.


As for circulation, though the church has equipped the paper with modern facilities and provides an annual subsidy estimated to be $25 million, it has failed to attract wide readership. The paper, published Monday through Friday, had a March circulation of 75,354 copies in the Washington area, with 8,608 more copies distributed around the nation, according to a publishing statement by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. By comparison, circulation of The Washington Post was 771,253 daily and over a million Sunday.

Most journalists, academics and Government and political figures in Washington seem to think The Washington Times is unlikely ever to challenge The Post as a traditional, if conservative, daily in the manner of The Washington Star, whose closing prompted the creation of The Washington Times. Generally cited as reasons for its inability to make more headway are its identification with the church's leader, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon; the entrenchment of The Post and a sense that ideology often appears more important than news in the paper. A chronic lack of advertising suggests that it is likely to continue to depend on a subsidy.

Still, the paper has created a niche for itself in the capital's crowded journalistic marketplace, where almost every news organization of any size is represented. It is generally seen as a showcase for the evolution of conservative thought and perspective on the news, with more and more journalists and officials saying they read it for tips in that area and more and more of its articles appearing in the news summaries distributed widely in Government agencies and on Capitol Hill.

''They are frequently ahead on news of what's happening in conservative thinking,'' said David R. Gergen, a former communications director for President Reagan who is now a syndicated columnist. ''And for conservatives it has become a valuable networking device that they use to talk back and forth and they turn to The Times when they want to get something out.''

The paper sometimes seems to get significant news breaks from the Administration. Mr. Reagan's first interview after his re-election was with a reporter from The Washington Times. ''A White House correspondent would not read it at his own peril,'' said Chris Wallace, who covers the White House for NBC News.

But while it thus has become a factor on the Washington journalism scene, as a basic provider of information and opinion it is said to remain in the second tier of news organizations, along with regional newspapers.

''Its visibility is low and its importance in the news chain is lower,'' said Michael J. Robinson, director of George Washington University's Media Analysis Project, which studies the effect of American journalism on politics and institutions.

Officials at The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and United Press International say they regularly review The Washington Times for news leads and pick up important news items. For example, a recent article about Vernon A. Walters's complaints that he would not have the access he wanted as chief delegate to the United Nations was picked up by The Post, The New York Times and others.

Evidence of Liberal Bias

But Mr. de Borchgrave says other news organizations do not pick up nearly enough articles originating in his paper. He says this is evidence of a liberal bias.

As for his own politics, Mr. de Borchgrave, 58 years old, says he was a ''Scoop Jackson Democrat'' until the party's conservatives were cowed into silence by people with a ''radical third-world ideology.''

He has never been shy about his outspoken views about what should and should not appear in the press. His office confirmed that those views led to his being asked to resign from Newsweek in 1980 after 30 years as a foreign correspondent. Subsequently, before joining The Washington Times, he was co-author of ''The Spike,'' a novel about reputed Soviet influence on this country's press.

Though the paper is clearly conservative, most journalists from other organizations say its news columns are not a mouthpiece for the Unification Church. The paper uses news agency articles to cover church issues, and Mr. de Borchgrave says he is guaranteed total editorial independence from the church.

In the view of many journalism critics, the paper's conservatism tends to show not so much in how articles are written but in what news is selected for publication and how prominently some articles are displayed. Articles regarding Soviet influence and intelligence-gathering efforts, for instance, are usually prominently displayed, as are articles involving Nicaragua and Cuba.

Explaining this approach to journalism, Mr. de Borchgrave says he wants The Washington Times to be like such European newspapers as Le Figaro, which reports the news from a conservative perspective in France.


1989. Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/busin ... tinue.html

Washington Times Gets Aggressive as Its Big Losses Continue
By DAVID JOHNSTON, Special to The New York Times
Published: October 16, 1989

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15— The Washington Times is reaching for a new foothold in its uphill battle for readers in the nation's capital, with sensational articles like its front-page reports on Representative Barney Frank's relationship with a male prostitute.

The hallmark of The Times has been its sharply conservative editorial stance. After it was founded in 1982, The Times gained influence and contacts in the Reagan White House.

But with the arrival of President Bush, the number of exclusive articles about national security matters and international affairs, attributed to anonymous sources within the Adminstration, seems to have declined.


Meanwhile, the owners of The Times, including members of the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, lost tens of millions of dollars. But the paper has failed to dent the dominance of its chief rival, The Washington Post.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, The Times's editor in chief and self-described journalistic ''activist,'' said he placed a priority on high-profile articles like those on Representative Frank, which have led to a House ethics inquiry that might end the Massachusetts Democrat's career.

Mr. de Borchgrave offers incentives like $1,000 bonuses for reporters who produce such articles.
''We're scrappier,'' he said. ''There's no question that The Post has become a money-making machine.''

The Times trails far behind The Post in both circulation and advertising. As of March, the latest period for which figures are available, The Post's average weekday circulation of 812,419 dwarfed The Times's circulation of 103,539, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported. Mr. de Borchgrave said The Times, which does not publish on weekends, recently reached a circulation of 115,000.

The Post's advertising volume totaled 5.9 million inches in 1988 and advertising revenue totaled $535 million. The Washington Post Company's news division had an annual operating income of $140.7 million.

The Times, like other privately held newspapers, does not disclose precise advertising or financial information. But Editor & Publisher, a newspaper trade publication, reported last May that The Times's ad linage for 1988 totaled 553,738 inches.

The Times is estimated to have lost about $35 million a year in previous years, and Mr. de Borchgrave said the paper would require an operating subsidy this year of about $25 million from its South Korean owners.

''I'm not aware of any newspaper that is apparently losing money at those levels and kept going,'' said John Morton, a media analyst for Lynch, Jones & Ryan, a New York brokerage firm.


The Times is published by News World Communications Inc., whose directors include South Korean businessmen who are members of the Unification Church. Company's Top Officers

News World's senior vice president for operations at The Times is Sang Kook Han, an associate of Mr. Moon's who once served as a South Korean army colonel and as ambassador to Iceland, Norway and Panama. The president of News World is Bo Hi Pak, who is also president of the World Media Association, a Moon-founded group that says it studies journalistic ethics.

On several occasions over the years, editors have left The Times in protest over the role of the Unification Church at the paper.

But Mr. de Borchgrave insists that the paper's owners have not influenced the news coverage and dismissed assertions that The Times is a ''Moonie'' paper as ''twaddle in all its unrationed splendor.''

Still, Mr. Moon, in a full-page advertisement in The Post in March, took credit for bringing The Times to Washington. ''I am most well-known as the person who provided the alternative voice in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital,'' the advertisement quoted Mr. Moon as saying.

The news coverage in The Times has drawn a mixed reaction. For instance, Jack Nelson, the Washington bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times, said The Washington Times's investigation of homosexual behavior ''has made me even more aware of the fact that they do provide some competition for The Post even though they kind of flogged it to death.''

But, he added, ''it is generally regarded as a newspaper with a political and philosophical ax to grind.''

Recently, the paper has been emphasizing local - and sometimes sensational - reporting. It won an award from the Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for articles on weekend furloughs for a convicted triple killer at Maryland's Patuxent Institution.

Last summer, before the Frank affair, it published articles about a male prostitution ring in Washington, asserting that the clients included high Government officials. But no senior officials have been identified.

In the case of the Frank coverage, The Times did not set out to investigate the Congressman. Instead, it was contacted by a male prostitute who said that he had a sexual relationship with Mr. Frank and that Mr. Frank was aware that his apartment had been used for prostitution. Mr. Frank has denied these assertions.

The prostitute approached The Post under a pseudonym, asking for money for his story, but he eventually broke off contact, according to a Post article in August. Mr. de Borchgrave said the man did not ask for money from The Times but did seek help in contacting a literary agent. Mr. de Borchgrave said he agreed to provide such help, but the man never followed up on the offer.

Senior Post editors acknowledge that they were initially slow to react to The Washington Times articles. ''They did break two or three stories about homosexual activities,'' said Leonard Downie Jr., The Post's managing editor. ''On the other hand, they have overplayed many stories and made allegations that have yet to be backed up in many cases.''

Times editors are not fazed by The Post's attitude. ''There's no question we beat them,'' said Wesley Pruden, the managing editor.

Mr. de Borchgrave said his reporters and editors handled the sensitive articles carefully.

Still, Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies the media, said: ''The Times is now looking for dirt. It's looking for scandals and it's found some.''
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jan 13, 2013 8:14 am

Note that Arnaud was long, long established in the, uh...information business.

Per some microfiche I found @ UVM re:Arnaud's tenure at Newsweek, some notebooked data points:

* 1951 - Arnaud joins NW as "Paris correspondent"
* 1955-1959 - Promoted for "Foreign editor" (there were many, it's a VP type position)
* "senior roving correspondent" - per NYT, a purview spanning Western Europe, Africa and Middle East
* per NYT: "Mr. DB will set up a dual headquarters in Paris and London and will act as consultant to the magazine's European bureaus" - 1963 article, prime Gladio era

And sure enough, there's plenty in public to document his time in the Agency's orbit. 20 years down the road, five years before he got tapped by Bo Hi Pak, he was pushing hard for Starling's "The Terror Network" material. Oh, and working with Michael Ledeen doing media hits on Billy Carter.

NYT Oct 29, 1980 wrote:A magazine editor testified today that a Libyan agent and a Western intelligence contact were the sources for an article that said Billy Carter met with Yasir Araft, the Palestinian guerrilla leader.

Michael A. Ledeen, executive editor of The Washington Quarterly, told a Senate subcommittee that Michele Papa, whom he identified as a Libyan agent in Italy, was the source for a statement that President Carter's brother and some friends received $50,000 in unreported expense money from Libya to travel to the North African country.

Mr. Ledeen said that "an extremely good Western intelligence source" told him that Billy Carter had met with Palestinian leaders. He said that there was a photograph of the meeting.

He testified under oath in an unusual public deposition given to Dennis Shedd, a counsel for the Senate subcommittee investigating ties between President Carter's brother and Libya.

Mr. Ledeen and Arnaud de Borchgrave, a former Newsweek correspondent, said in a recent article that Billy Carter met with Mr. Arafat and George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

[/quote]

Selling insider access? Not really something Arnaud ever wrestled with, and in fact a business model he's practiced openly at various points in his career. Arnaud ran a high-end "intelligence newsletter" circa 1983:

Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/30/us/br ... 31834.html

The 'Jugular' Newsletter

Washington is awash with newsletters. Hundreds of them scrutinize the minutiae of Government affairs for clients in industry and for subscribers interested in almost everything from air pollution to tax havens. And now there is ''Early Warning,'' a $1,000- a-year monthly newsletter for ''key decision-makers'' who want to know about ''matters of jugular concern.''

Everything about the nine-month- old venture carries hush-hush overtones. ''Personal and confidential'' is written on mass-distribution letters recently sent to solicit subscribers. On this basis, it is not surprising that Arnaud de Borchgrave, one of the publishers and writers, said the newsletter itself was ''ultraconfidential.'' According to Mr. de Borchgrave, this means that if you subscribe, you should not make copies on the office copying machine.

The newsletter is published by Mid- Atlantic Research Associates, consisting of Mr. de Borchgrave, former chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek; John Rees, who publishes Information Digest, another newsletter, and Robert Moss, a former editor at The Economist.

''Early Warning'' promises to scoop the daily news media on domestic and foreign news, as seen through the eyes of ''former intelligence officers, including ranking defectors from the K.G.B. and its proxy services and former government officials recently in sensitive positions.'' Mr. de Borchgrave said he recently offered early warnings on such things as Libya's troop buildup before its invasion of Chad and a currency devaluation in Venezuela.

''After studying our track record,'' Mr. De Borchgrave wrote to potential subscribers, ''Bill Casey of the C.I.A. took several subscriptions.''

William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, is on vacation, but Dale Peterson, an agency spokesman, said that no copies of the newsletter had arrived in the director's office, although he said Mr. Casey could be receiving them at home.


Mr. Peterson said he was not familiar with ''Early Warning,'' but that even if he were, he would not be able to comment on its contents.


Via: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/12/opini ... spies.html

BUM TIPS AND SPIES
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
Published: August 12, 1981

Washington - A year ago the disinformation activities of the K.G.B. and its proxy services in Western news organizations were not even deemed worthy of debate.

Now we are being asked to believe that while the Soviet Union does spend billions on propaganda and disinformation, American news operations remain untainted by these efforts.

According to a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, Soviet disinformation operations take place only in non-American news organizations, primarily in the third world and in allied countries. An effective forgery operation, we are told, requires, above all, a gullible audience. And, as we all know, the American public and American journalists are not gullible in the world of international intrigue. They can spot forgeries - or more subtle forms of disinformation - the minute they come clattering over the wires. Well, anyone who believes that must be suffering from terminal naivete.

What about the prodigious production of Philip Agee, the C.I.A.'s first ideological defector, whose close contacts with Cuban intelligence agents in Europe are well known to Western Europe's principal intelligence services?

Mr. Agee's allegations that the Administration's white paper on Communist influence in El Salvador was a fraud were avidly gobbled up by the so-called alternative press before finding their way into other news reports. His material - supplied by his Cuban friends - was a primary source for recent articles in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Mr. Agee claimed the credit in an interview with The Los Angeles Herald Examiner on July 1. It is worth noting that he met 39 times with a Cuban intelligence chief in Western Europe in a one-year period. The European services are not inhibited by law from keeping an American citizen and suspected agent under close surveillance.

In testimony before the House Committee on Intelligence in February 1980, Ladislav Bittman, a former deputy chief of the Disinformation Department of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service, spoke about his own successful efforts to plant disinformation in the European and United States press. The disinformation activities of East European and Cuban services are closely coordinated with the K.G.B.

Mr. Bittman said: ''If somebody had at this moment the magic key that would open the Soviet bloc intelligence safes and looked into the files of secret agents operating in Western countries, he would be surprised. A relatively high percentage of secret agents are journalists. A journalist operating in Britain, West Germany or in the U.S. is a great asset to Communist intelligence. He can be investigative, professionally curious. It is his job to get important, even highly sensitive, information. This is particularly true in the U.S. with its tradition of an aggressive adversary press.''

Mr. Bittman added: ''There are many journalists who are agents. There are important newspapers around the world penetrated by Communist intelligence services. There are one or two journalists working for a particular paper who are agents and who receive from time to time instructions to publish this or that story once or twice a year.''

A top-secret K.G.B. manual called, ''The Practise of Recruiting Americans in the U.S.A. and Third Countries,'' which was published by the First Chief Directorate of the K.G.B. and has been in the C.I.A.'s possession for years, listed, in order of priority, 12 categories of recruitment targets. The first was Government personnel with access to classified information. The second was journalists.

This observer has to question the motivations of those who suggest that American news organizations are so security conscious that all the

K.G.B.'s recruitment efforts among the many ideologically motivated journalists have failed. After the Pulitzer Prize hoax on The Washington Post, I do not believe it takes an overwhelming effort of the imagination to figure out that if a palpably fraudulent story can get by various fail-safe checkpoints, disinformation is a cinch.

Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet dissident, is a hero to liberals in the Western world. His political testament was smuggled out of his K.G.B.-imposed exile in his own country and was published as a cover story of The New York Times Magazine on June 8, 1980. Dr. Sakharov mentions the categories of agents of influence who are busy promoting Soviet ''expansionist objectives'' in Western governments, parliaments, businesses and news organizations. Among them he listed ''a great many writers and journalists.'' Even more important, however, are the unwitting dupes.

Louis F. Budenz, who was managing editor of The Daily Worker from 1940 to 1945, when he quit the Communist Party, said that ''peace offensives'' had been among the more successful disinformation campaigns. Their objective has been to disarm and defeat the United States, befuddling American opinion. They have been supported by many prominent men and women, from actors to professors to journalists. ''These prominent people infect others,'' said Mr. Budenz. ''They influence newspapers of large circulation. Their influence extends far out into the American community, causing bewilderment and hesitation at best, and, at worst, organized aid to Soviet aggression. They contribute to the general vacillation which has marked American policy.''

In recent years, I have had access to two score defectors from East European secret services, now living in nine Western countries. They are all astonished at the ease with which the K.G.B. can conduct disinformation operations in the United States.

No, we do not interpret an American journalist's contacts with a K.G.B. agent as sinister. What is sinister, however, is an American journalist meeting regularly with a K.G.B. station chief, then writing articles exposing the ''evils'' of the C.I.A. without mentioning his K.G.B. contact as one of his sources.
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Re: Craig Spence

Postby FourthBase » Sun Mar 24, 2013 3:15 am

I must have missed the point at which the Franklin Scandal was given its own top-billed sub-board. Is the general topic barred from the General Discussion board? Do people actually visit the sub-boards enough? Nevermind, I'm just typing out thoughts to myself. Anyway...

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Re: Craig Spence

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 04, 2015 11:02 am

Oddball take from celebrity gossip rag:
http://www.people.com/people/archive/ar ... 50,00.html

Craig Spence lived by the maxim that image is everything. Arriving in Washington, D.C., in the late '70s, he presented a rather mysterious figure. Though he had worked on the staff of a Massachusetts state legislator and had served briefly as an ABC correspondent in Vietnam, he appeared to have few important Capitol connections. Yet he swiftly transformed himself into a flamboyant man-about-town, working as a high-powered consultant for Asian businessmen by day and throwing parties in his elegant town house by night for such luminaries as newscaster Ted Koppel and former CIA director William Casey.

Then in June his career suddenly came crashing down amid allegations that his business practices included hiring male prostitutes for clients and himself. Disgraced and distraught, he registered on Nov. 4 at the venerable Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Six days later, maids could, not get into Spence's room and maintenance workers had to saw through the door. Inside, police found Spence lying on the bed in a tuxedo with a telephone cradled to his ear, dead from a presumed drug overdose.

To close friends, Spence's apparent suicide at 49 had a sad inevitability about it. In July he was arrested in New York City for possession of cocaine and an illegal handgun. He told people that he had AIDS and spread the fanciful story that he was working for the CIA. He apparently traveled to Massachusetts to see old friends one last time before ending his life. "He showed me a vial of sleeping pills," says a friend who saw Spence the night before he left for Boston. "I knew he'd do it. It was only a matter of time."

The irony is that some of the most sensational accusations printed in the Washington Times—that Spence had served drugs to friends, bugged for blackmail and taken a midnight White House tour with some call boys—may never be officially resolved. According to a recent account in the Washington Post, Spence's attorney said the government had withdrawn a subpoena on Spence. But the damage was done. Spence apparently left no suicide note, just a message scrawled in black marker on a hotel mirror: "Consider this my resignation, effective immediately."
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