Prostitution, Blackmail, and the Presidency

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really? Why?”

“Why don’t you read the book?”

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

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

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

Did China Blackmail Bill Clinton?

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

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

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

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

It sounds like he might be a pretty solid source for what he told me. His source, he said, was someone working for the intelligence service of the government of Nationalist China in Taipei. That source told him, said Yoh, that when Clinton was governor of Arkansas he led a trade mission to Taipei and while there he made his own characteristic contribution to the local economy by patronizing the “swankiest brothel” that the city had to offer. That brothel, said Yoh’s source, was penetrated by mainland Chinese intelligence, which had installed videotaping equipment there, and they had obtained some choice shots of Bill in flagrante delicto. They had later informed Clinton of what they had and had been holding it over his head ever since, that is to say, they were using the tape to blackmail him. Perhaps here we have one explanation for all the economic cozying up to China that this country did during the years of the Clinton presidency.

On the other hand, Yoh might not have been telling me the truth or his source might have lied to him. Both of them were in the spook business and lying is an essential part of their trade. Here is more about Yoh from my article “Spook Journalist Goulden.”

Yoh, a charming, cultured, broadly-educated man with whom I conversed by phone almost daily for a couple of years, when he talked about intelligence, [Joseph] Goulden, and psychological warfare, certainly was one to know whereof he spoke. Here he is alluded to by Douglas Valentine in his 1990 book, The Phoenix Program:

Eight years later, after enduring religious persecution in Laos, Father Hoa was persuaded by Bernard Yoh--a Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) intelligence officer on loan to the CIA--to resettle his flock in the village of Binh Hung on the Ca Mau peninsula in southern South Vietnam. (p. 37)

Here he is colorfully and disparagingly described doing his public relations work for the President of South Vietnam in the 1965 book by Hilaire du Berrier, Background to Betrayal, the Tragedy of Vietnam:

Bernie Yoh was the stooge to fly back and forth between Washington and Saigon; to Saigon so he could say he had been there, then back to America to tell editors, women's clubs and congressmen, “Don't believe what you hear. I have just come from Vietnam. I have been in the jungles with the guerillas, killing Communists, and we are winning. You are not going to desert Vietnam as you did my country, are you?” (p. 143)

Yoh denied to me that he had ever worked for the CIA, saying that he thought they were too stupid for him to have anything to do with them, but he had lectured to the U.S. Air War College on a subject in which he claimed world-class expertise, psychological warfare.

To my knowledge AIM never wrote anything about the supposed Clinton blackmail by China, and maybe Yoh, no friend of Bill Clinton and his politics, told his story to me and other people just to get the rumor started. It’s not the sort of thing that anyone is likely to be able to verify or discredit using other sources. On the other hand, he was the first person to tell me that Joe Goulden, the top assistant at the time to AIM’s director Reed Irvine, was connected to the CIA, and as one can see from my article, I was able to do a reasonably good job of confirming later that that allegation was true. One can certainly agree that Yoh’s story of Bill and the brothel has the ring of truth, but, then again, maybe that is what makes it such an effective lie, if that’s what it is.

Before we leave the subject of hard to verify allegations from an estimable source, we have to mention those of former senior editor of Forbes magazine, James Norman. In a long radio interview in 1995 he alleged that Hillary and Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, who had been Hillary’s law partner in Arkansas, were both under investigation for very lucrative espionage work for the government of Israel. The fact that Foster had a couple of National Security Agency folders in his possession that seem to have disappeared after his death lends some credence to Norman’s charge. No one has offered any explanation as to what they were about and why he should have had them. If Hillary was engaged in the same nefarious business that seems to have gotten Foster killed, it would certainly open up another possible blackmail front for her.

Is Hillary More Blackmailable?

If Hillary Clinton were to become president, her “co-president” would continue to have his vulnerability on the sexual front. From all that we now know, however, Hillary’s blackmail vulnerability might be even greater than Bill’s. It might still come as a surprise to some people, but Hillary’s blackmail exposure could be not just from the obvious one related to her emails, but on the same sexual front as Bill’s. How that might be is well illustrated by a joke that made the rounds in Washington some years ago: “How did Hillary and Bill meet?” goes the joke. “They were both dating the same girl.”

I explore that question in some depth in my article, “Is Hillary Clinton a Lesbian”? In that article, written upon the occasion of her bid for the presidency eight years ago, I conclude that her evident, but not admitted, proclivities would make her particularly vulnerable to blackmail. However, in the intervening period, our national opinion molders have been so effective that they have almost managed to maneuver sexual deviance onto a moral plane higher than that of sexual normality in the eyes of the public. While the press is now celebrating Hillary’s candidacy as “historic” because she will be the first woman to represent one of the two major parties in a national presidential race, one needs little imagination to see them celebrating even more the first open homosexual (“gay” as they prefer to call it) person to be in that position. That brings us back to the emails.

Now that FBI Director James Comey has told us that the email servers on which she, as Secretary of State, sent extremely sensitive state secrets were even less secure than the average gmail account, and Wikileaks has demonstrated how easy it was for someone to hack into the insecure emails of the Democratic National Committee, one may safely assume that any foreign intelligence agency worth its salt, not just the one in Russia, is in possession of those emails. As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has hinted, that trove would no doubt include the ones that Hillary deleted and failed to turn over to our own government.

So, yes, sex has historically been a very powerful blackmail tool, and Hillary and Bill are both vulnerable to it on those old-fashioned grounds, but as things stand now, it looks to this one observer that this modern phenomenon, easily purloined emails, is even more powerful.

David Martin

July 28, 2016

Home Page    Columns Column 5 Archive  Contact