The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

by James Rosen

  Mitchell began showing up at Global every day, walking the four blocks. He remained with the firm until his death, not merely because he “hit it off” with the two former military men who started it, but more likely for the more depressing reason that, as one intimate put it, he received “no better offers.” The trio compartmentalized its work, each man pursuing his own deals, involving the others only as needed, pooling and dividing proceeds in the few instances when their efforts produced results. “Of all the activities that we undertook, very few of them were successful,” Tully said years later. “There were some big numbers in terms of dollars earned; whether they were collected or not was another matter.”

  Global Research’s core activity was the nebulous realm of overseas consulting: representing foreign firms seeking a foothold in America and American firms looking to do business abroad. At other times, Global acted as a middleman, playing matchmaker to different companies and, occasionally, to governments. A bizarre cast of foreigners paraded past Mitchell’s nose and pipe, pitching Byzantine money transfers, oil deals, rice deals. Former Kentucky governor Louie Nunn, a key witness in the ITT scandal a decade earlier, lured Mitchell into a time-consuming, and ultimately fruitless, bid to standardize interstate billing for cellular phone calls. “Oh, we had everything proposed to us,” Tully said. “I mean anything you can think of, we had, short of white slavery and murder.”

  Though in time his work would require extensive overseas travel—London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, the Caymans—Mitchell at first acted as a faux senior partner, the heavyweight whose mere presence, it was hoped, would compel reluctant brides to the altar and scare fakers away. Key to success was dispelling the “fear of rejection” Brennan still sensed in the older man. Since one of Global’s most bankable clients was Hess & Eisenhardt, world-renowned maker of armored cars (including the limousine carrying President Kennedy when he was assassinated), Mitchell thought to contact old colleagues at the State Department, thinking they could be persuaded to retain the firm. But he wouldn’t make the call. “I knew all these guys just loved Mitchell,” Brennan said.

  And I would, for a long time, try to get Mitchell to call and make an appointment, and he wouldn’t. He would just make excuses. And it occurred to me that he was afraid that they would say no, that they didn’t want to see him…. And of course [we] called the State Department and they couldn’t wait to see him! They were just delighted to see him!

  Late in 1983, Brennan stumbled on what seemed like a fabulous deal: brokering the sale of $181 million in hospital, prison, and military uniforms to Iraq, which was then engaged, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, in a long-running war against Iran. Since the seizure of the American embassy four years earlier, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Tehran and was now beginning to tilt toward Iraq in the conflict. Brennan said he received “encouragement” from individuals “very high in our government” to go forward. So did Mitchell. “John spoke directly to [CIA director William] Casey,” recalled Deborah Gore Dean, “and Bill Casey…suggested other areas where John may be helpful to Iraq.”

  As Brennan soon found, the manufacture of uniforms is a labor-intensive business, and American companies, with their stringent union requirements, found it difficult to compete with overseas firms. So Brennan outsourced the job to Romania. But he had Mitchell do something Brennan later wished he’d done himself: ask Nixon for a letter of introduction to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Nixon complied on May 3, 1984, writing Ceauşescu: “I can assure you that Colonel Brennan and former attorney general John Mitchell will be responsible and constructive.” More than two years later, after the Romanians had partnered with a Saudi firm, Pan East International, to produce the uniforms, Nixon again wrote to Ceauşescu: “My good friend John Mitchell told me recently that the contract between the [Romanian] Ministry of Light Industries and Pan East International was completed, and I wanted to let you know how highly Mr. Mitchell spoke of the diligence of the Romanian workers.”

  Global’s commerce with the Iraqi regime proceeded on other fronts. On a trip to Baghdad, Brennan had been instructed by Saddam’s men to deal through Sarkis Soghanalian, a three-hundred-pound ethnic Armenian, born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, who now lived in Miami and was renowned as “the Cold War’s largest arms merchant.” Soghanalian, whose clients included Muammar Qaddafi and CIA, helped Global broker the sale of twenty-six helicopters from Hughes Aircraft and the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, a $27.4 million deal from which Mitchell and Brennan stood to reap a $584,000 commission. The only problem, in both the uniform and helicopter deals, was that Soghanalian never sent Global its fees, worth $3.54 million.

  “These arms dealers are having a hell of a big impact on us,” Mitchell grumbled to a friend. He wrote Soghanalian in August 1985 complaining about the “long, dry spell in our dealings” and demanding “your remittance at the earliest date.” The collection effort went nowhere. In fact, Global’s partnership with Soghanalian ended in the most rancorous way. “They would sell their mothers if they could,” the arms dealer spat. Global sought recourse in the courts, but saw only Pyrrhic victories. When Mitchell was later found to have died intestate, his survivors quarreling with each other in probate court, it was the set of judgments against Soghanalian, ordering him to pay Brennan and the Mitchell estate $3.54 million in outstanding fees, that pitted Marty Mitchell against her half sister, Jill Mitchell-Reed, and other members of the Mitchell family. The money never materialized.4

  “Everybody in this town loves me,” Mitchell joked a few months before his death. But he had returned to Washington a ghostly figure from another era. Former chief justice Warren Burger—who owed his robes to Mitchell—once espied his old patron being treated like a leper at a National Geographic Society party. “John Mitchell was off in a corner, I think with his daughter,” Burger recalled. “Nobody was going near him and talking to him. And my wife and I said, ‘Let’s go over and talk to him.’ We went over and shook hands with him and engaged him in conversation for a little while, and that broke the ice and a lot of other people did, too.” Other times the pariah was not so fortunate. An Associated Press reporter never forgot the lonely sight of Mitchell walking the streets of Georgetown, “a gray man plodding along in his gray way.”

  Mitchell’s financial troubles could have been eased considerably, even eliminated, had he availed himself of the obvious option, so appealing to his fellow Watergate convicts: writing a book. In fact, he had quietly contracted to do just that, with Simon & Schuster, on July 21, 1975. Mitchell’s Untitled Memoir of the Nixon Years, as the publishing agreement hailed it, was to run 100,000 words and be delivered no later than April 1, 1976; in return, Mitchell received an immediate signing bonus of $50,000, with another $100,000 due before publication.

  Mitchell reportedly arrived at Maxwell with a satchel full of notes for the project. In his letters from prison, he solicited stories and materials from former associates, and mused about publishing more than one book. Years later, Jill Mitchell-Reed claimed to have found her father’s incomplete handwritten manuscript, but she declined repeated requests to see it.

  Others suggested the project never got very far. John Ehrlichman, a full-time author after Watergate, told an interviewer the day after Mitchell died that Simon & Schuster had hired veteran reporter Nick Thimmesch, one of the few reporters Mitchell actually liked, “to write Mitchell’s book for him,” but Thimmesch supposedly grew “totally frustrated” because “Mitchell didn’t cotton to him and wouldn’t talk to him.” Bill Hundley, who represented Mitchell in his book deal, never saw Into the Fire from his client. “[The publishers] were very unhappy because he wouldn’t write about Watergate and he wouldn’t write about Martha,” Hundley said. “I think they always thought they could persuade him, but they couldn’t.” “He thought everybody had already had enough trouble,” said Mary Dean, “and he didn’t want to add on to any of it.”

  In the end, executives at Simon & Schuster never
saw Into the Fire of Mitchell’s manuscript either, and in February 1981, the publisher filed suit in New York State Supreme Court. Mitchell was forced to cough up an immediate $7,500, and to sign a repayment schedule mandating annual payments of $10,000 for the next six years. Thereafter, he had until 1991 to pay off the accrued interest. Ultimately, he repaid only $40,000, roughly 60 percent of his debt. Simon & Schuster sued his estate and settled, in November 1992, for a $10,000 payout. Thus ended the saga of John Mitchell’s Untitled Memoir of the Nixon Years.5

  The toll Watergate took on Mitchell’s family was his “deepest sorrow,” Jill Mitchell-Reed recalled—and the full extent of the damage may never be known. “John, I think more than anything in the world, was sorry about the way his own family turned out,” recalled another intimate. “He really felt that he was responsible. And although everybody in the world tried to tell him, ‘You know, John, only so much of this can be your fault,’ he just always felt that without him, everybody would have been happy.”

  [His children] fell apart. And he blamed himself. Now everything that went wrong from then on [was], “Well, gee, if you hadn’t gone to jail, my marriage wouldn’t have broken up,” and “If you hadn’t gone to jail, I’d be able to get a job.” And it went a little bit too far.

  Some have even suggested Mitchell’s disgrace played a hidden role in the decline of his son, Jack, who, having battled alcoholism and left a series of good jobs, finally developed a malignant brain tumor. He battled bravely but died, in 1985, at the age of forty-four. Mitchell was devastated. He adored his son’s wife, Jacqueline, and their three children. “I could have sworn my father would die the day he rode from Riverhead to New York in the ambulance with [Jack],” Jill recalled. “It touched my father deeply, quite deeply. He was white when he went in and shaking when he came out. I thought that I would lose both of them that day.” “The only things that he ever really was unhappy about,” Mary Dean said, “was that if any of this [the Watergate scandals] affected his children.”

  MRS. DEAN: It was the low point of his life when he lost his son.

  ROSEN: How did he deal with it?

  MRS. DEAN: By remaining even more quiet. I think he didn’t want to make it too bad for those that were around him, but he couldn’t hide what was happening to him.

  With his brother, James, with whom Mitchell had frolicked in the sands of Patchogue a half century earlier, the former attorney general maintained virtually no relationship at all. The last time he saw his brother Robert was at a post-prison release party thrown by the Wall Street firm of Standard and Poor’s in 1979, almost a decade before Mitchell died. This obvious estrangement the brother, also a lawyer, attributed both to Mitchell’s innate inwardness and “a psychological reaction” on his own part. Robert never once took his older brother aside and asked what the hell had happened in Watergate, never sought even feigned reassurance he was not the irredeemably evil character that Time and Newsweek had made him out to be. “I never really had the opportunity,” Mitchell’s brother said, “and I don’t think he would have talked about it, anyway.”

  Asked what it was like to watch his brother go down the way he did, one of the most vilified Americans of the twentieth century, Robert said: “Very unpleasant. You try—to try and defend him, and yet not agreeing in my heart with him. Just, just put yourself in that position. What would you do? I mean, you have your loyalty to your brother and you have your loyalty to your own principles.” What did your brother do that clashed with your principles? The eighty-three-year-old retired lawyer paused before answering, in a quiet voice. “Well, I don’t want to think about that, if you don’t mind, yeah?”6

  Mitchell went to his grave knowing he was going to cause still more pain to those he loved. For among his ventures at Global Research was a set of deals that came to haunt Deborah Gore Dean, Mary’s attractive and outgoing daughter, who had come to regard Mitchell as a father.

  After earning her bachelor’s degree in political science from Georgetown University and tending bar at family-owned restaurants, Debbie secured a job, with Mitchell’s help, at the Department of Energy; from there, using his name as a reference, she went to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as an assistant to Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the Reagan cabinet’s sole African American. A disinterested administrator, Pierce delegated ever greater authority to the twenty-nine-year-old Dean, and in June 1984 appointed her executive assistant. She stepped right into the vacuum Pierce created. “It’s common knowledge on the Hill,” a representative remarked, “if you wanted to get something done in the secretary’s office you talked to Deborah Dean.”

  Among the many projects Dean oversaw was HUD’s Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation Program. Established in 1978, Mod Rehab, as insiders called it, was essentially a giveaway program, a multimillion-dollar bonanza under which developers of low-income housing projects received rent subsidies and tax credits for approved renovations to their housing stock. Developers eager to obtain federal funding happily paid hefty fees to GOP consultants who promised direct access to HUD officials and an inside track on Mod Rehab contracts.

  In early 1983, Mitchell’s old friend Louie Nunn, the former governor of Kentucky, wrote the former attorney general requesting assistance on behalf of one of his clients, a Florida real estate developer named Aristides “Art” Martinez. The regional HUD office in Jacksonville had denied Martinez’s request for loan increases to help refurbish Marbilt, one of the developer’s low-income housing complexes; could Mitchell help? Though no record of it survives, Mitchell evidently contacted Debbie Dean. Documents show they communicated about Marbilt as early as February 1983. The following month she wrote Mitchell a “Dear Dad” letter in which she noted that the relevant HUD office had “tried as best it could to be lenient,” but otherwise refused to get involved in the matter. “As you know,” she wrote, “I stand behind the decision of the carreer [sic] people in Headquarters.” Four months later, in October 1983, when the department reversed itself and approved Marbilt’s loan increases, she sent Mitchell a copy of an internal HUD document announcing the decision and scrawled on it: “Daddy. F.Y.I.” In July 1984, Nunn sent Mitchell a check for $8,613.94.

  Impressed with Nunn’s effectiveness, Martinez retained the former governor again, in early 1984, this time to help obtain Mod Rehab funding for 293 units in the developer’s Arama project. Nunn’s fee was set at $225,000 for legal fees and $150,000 in consulting fees; on the consulting contract, Nunn scribbled his intention to pay half to Mitchell. That July, Debbie Dean sent Nunn a letter—care of Global Research—informing him that the Arama request would be approved. A year later, Nunn made good on his scribbled promise and sent Mitchell a check for $75,000.

  The timing of the Arama deal coincided with another on which Mitchell had been working—not with Nunn but with Richard D. Shelby, a former Reagan White House aide and regional director of the 1984 Reagan-Bush campaign. In May 1985, Shelby, also a consultant, contacted Mitchell—wholly ignorant, he later claimed, of Mitchell’s relationship to Debbie Dean—to discuss the Park Towers Apartments in Miami. The Park Towers’ developer, Martin Fine, had retained a local consulting firm, EMF & Associates, which had in turn subcontracted with Shelby in a quest to secure Mod Rehab funding for the complex’s 143 units.

  Amid a number of one-on-one meetings Shelby held with Mitchell and Dean, the three met together once, in September 1985, to discuss the project. Shelby later testified he intentionally withheld from Dean the fact that Mitchell stood to share in Shelby’s fee if the deal came off; as far as Shelby knew, Dean never learned that fact until after she left HUD. Two months after the three-way meeting, the Park Towers got its Mod Rehab contract, a project worth $14 million. It took another seven months for the legal details to be worked out, but that came with a waiver which exempted the Park Towers from regulations prohibiting it from receiving the approved funds. On January 4, 1987, Shelby sent Mitchell a check for $40,000.

  Art Martinez, meanwhile
, must have been hard-pressed to believe his good fortune. Things had worked out so swimmingly at Marbilt and Arama, he decided to hire Louie Nunn once more. This time Martinez paid the former governor $200,000 to help obtain Mod Rehab funding for a development called South Florida I, also in Dade County. For unknown reasons—perhaps because Mitchell feared leaving his fingerprints on too many HUD deals—Nunn this time worked through Jack Brennan. The next month, in May 1986, Martinez sent letters to Nunn and Brennan audaciously requesting that they not only secure the Mod Rehab contracts, but with them an explicit declaration from HUD that the funding was set aside for 219 units.

  Three weeks later, Brennan met with Debbie Dean and turned over some paperwork on South Florida I. Three months after that, HUD once again authorized Mod Rehab funding for the Metro-Dade Public Housing Authority—for precisely 219 units. Four days after the agency formally approved Martinez’s proposal to refurbish the 219 apartments, in December 1986, Nunn sent Brennan a check for $109,000. That Brennan’s involvement was an act of subterfuge, concealing Mitchell’s role, was suggested by separate deposits into the men’s personal bank accounts within the next forty-one days: $60,000 for Mitchell, $50,000 for Brennan.

  All this—the intrigues surrounding Marbilt, Arama, Park Towers, and South Florida I—would likely have remained known only to a small circle of developers, consultants, and bureaucrats, denizens of HUD’s obscure nether regions, had Debbie Dean not sought the position of Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development, a post requiring Senate confirmation. That led to hearings, and hearings led to investigations.