The Dark Side of Camelot
Page 47
He had "no question" at the time what the unusual assignment was all about, Cram told me: to learn whether "one of the Kennedys" was dealing with the Profumo girls. "They wanted to be forewarned if [the American names] became public, and forewarned is forearmed." Charles Bates informed him, Cram said, that he had checked with FBI colleagues in Washington and learned that his order from Hoover originated at the White House. Cram said he snooped around, too, and learned that he was sent to MI5 to look for American involvement because of a "specific request from [President] Kennedy.
"That's, you know, pretty electrical," Cram added. When he did not immediately report to CIA headquarters on his findings from the MI5 files, he said, "we got a blast from McCone. 'What are you guys doing? Get busy and find something. Aren't the British cooperating?' We had to write back and say, 'Yes, they're cooperating one hundred percent, but we just haven't turned up anything.' They kept niggling at us every other day. It was terrible. We had never received a request like this before and, to my knowledge, we never received a similar one afterward."
Cram said that he found nothing in his research indicating that any high-level Americans were involved in the British scandal. Nor did he find any evidence that the Profumo-Keeler relationship posed a serious national security threat to Britain. Christine Keeler did ask Profumo questions, Cram said, "like, 'Are you going to move nuclear warheads in Germany?' and things like that. I doubt that he answered anything." The scandal resulted from the mere fact that Ivanov was working for Soviet intelligence. "He was, through this source, Miss Keeler, in touch actually with John Profumo," Cram said. "It was a very important case for MI5, I can tell you. They had this woman who was sleeping with John Profumo and was also sleeping with Ivanov."
On June 23 Kennedy arrived in Bonn to begin his first trip to Europe since the Vienna summit, and on June 26 he got his first look at the Berlin Wall. His speech was a triumph; a million people jammed a plaza, now named after Kennedy, and broke into prolonged and emotional cheering when the president said in German, "Ich bin ein Berliner." It was one of the memorable scenes of his presidency. "There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world," Kennedy said. He paused a beat, then said, "Lassen sie nach Berlin kommen!" ("Let them come to Berlin!")*
The presidential entourage went on to Ireland, where Kennedy, greeted everywhere like a rock star, spent a few days paying homage to his family roots. On Saturday, June 29, Kennedy flew to England for a lonely dinner with the battered Harold Macmillan. England was the last place Kennedy wanted to be during the Profumo scandal, and his closest ally among the European leaders, whose government was on the run, was the last person he wanted to spend time with. The British Foreign Office had been told earlier that the president, after spending three days touring in Ireland, would visit England for only one. The British were further told that Kennedy wished to visit the prime minister at his country home in Surrey, and not in the more public London.*
While Kennedy faced a gloomy Saturday-night meal with Macmillan, Bobby Kennedy was facing his own gloom: the result of a copyrighted story in the New York Journal-American, part of the Hearst chain, linking "a man who holds a 'very high' elective office" in the Kennedy administration to "a Chinese girl" in the Profumo scandal. The article, published Saturday afternoon, was written by two solid investigative reporters, James D. Horan and Dom Frasca, and splashed on page one under a three-line headline that said: "High U.S. Aide Implicated in V-Girl Scandal." It quoted Maria Novotny as saying that a Chinese-American woman---identified by Horan and Frasca as Suzy Chang---was the "former paramour of the American government official."
The story was pulled after one edition. Horan and Frasca both died in the 1980s. Before his death, Horan told his sons, Brian and Gary, that Bobby Kennedy had done everything possible to yank the story. "Bobby was putting the arm on Dad and saying this isn't going to happen," Brian Horan told me in a 1997 interview for this book. "It went up to Bill Hearst and it was spiked." Hearst, son of William Randolph Hearst, was chairman and director of the Hearst Corporation, publishers of the Journal-American.†
That afternoon, the attorney general telephoned Warren Rogers, a trusted reporter who was a Washington correspondent for Look magazine, and urged him to call anyone he knew at the Journal-American to get the name of the unidentified American official in the Horan-Frasca article. Kennedy's plea for help was memorable, Rogers said in a 1997 interview for this book, because he and his wife were having a backyard party that afternoon. "My guests never saw me," Rogers told me. "Bob [Kennedy] was persistent, and I kept getting called to the telephone." As usual, "there was no chitchat," Rogers said. "Bob was all business. He asked me if I'd seen the story. I had not. He wanted to know who it was." Rogers had no luck; the one senior editor he knew at the Journal-American would not say.
Jack Kennedy carried on as usual, while his brother struggled to keep the lid on at home. The last stop was Italy, where the president was to meet with government leaders and the newly elected Pope, Paul VI. The president had worked hard to arrange a long-planned dalliance at Lake Como with Marella Agnelli, the wife of Gianni Agnelli, a prominent Italian businessman. He had been forced to ask Dean Rusk, not one of his usual go-betweens, to arrange the perfect hideaway. Years later, Rusk described the painful incident to Pat Holt, a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While planning the trip, Holt told me in a 1994 interview for this book, "Jack said to Rusk, 'Mr. Secretary'---he never called him anything else---'can you find a place that's sort of quiet and restful where we could stop on the way home?'" Rusk was conflicted about recommending a villa at Lake Como that was owned by the Rockefeller Foundation. As a former president of the foundation, Rusk knew that there were long-standing rules against the use of its facilities by public figures. "Nonetheless," Holt recounted, "they made it available, and Rusk was looking forward to it. He hadn't been in office very long and he hoped to spend a day or two with the president, letting his hair down. The plane stops in Milan and Rusk is thinking they're going to Lake Como. Instead, the president says, 'Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for arranging this. I'll see you back in Washington.' And he goes off."*
On Monday, with his brother still in Italy, Bobby Kennedy summoned Horan and Frasca to the Justice Department. A summary of the meeting, written by Courtney Evans, the FBI liaison officer to the attorney general, emphasized the reluctance of the two reporters "to volunteer information." Kennedy was forced to ask for the name of the American official. "It was the President of the United States," Frasca told the attorney general, according to Evans's memorandum, made public under the Freedom of Information Act. The two journalists added, under questioning, that the source of their information was a conversation on June 28 between Frasca and a London journalist named Peter Earle of News of the World, a popular tabloid. News of the World had earlier signed a contract with Novotny for her story of the Profumo affair, and Earle had been assigned by his newspaper to write it for her. Novotny listened in on an extension telephone as Frasca and Earle talked, the Evans memorandum said, and spoke "very briefly." Most of the information came from Peter Earle, Evans wrote. Frasca and Horan had tape-recorded the conversation, Evans added. Kennedy asked the journalists, Evans wrote, if they had written a story involving the president of the United States "without any further check being made to get to the truth of the matter." At that point, Evans reported, "Frasca contended that he had other sources of a confidential nature."
The meeting must have been very difficult for Robert Kennedy. Initially he asked Evans not to put anything in writing, but he changed his mind after learning that Evans later discussed the meeting with J. Edgar Hoover. In a note to Hoover two days later, July 3, made public under the Freedom of Information Act, Evans tried to put the best light on Kennedy's initial request for silence by reporting that the attorney general, upon learning that Hoover had been told of the meeting, "was glad that this had be
en done and ... he hoped I had not misunderstood his earlier admonition not to write a memorandum. He just wanted to be assured that you had been informed." Evans further noted that Kennedy "treated the newspaper representatives at arms' length and the conference ended most coolly and, in fact, there was almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters."
Horan, discussing the meeting with his sons years later, recalled the attorney general's intensity. "Bobby was just sitting there, looking at him," Gary Horan said in a 1997 interview. "'I'll never forget those steel blue eyes,' [Dad] said."
The one-edition Horan and Frasca story slipped quickly into obscurity. Over the next few weeks, with prodding from Bobby Kennedy, the FBI was able to document, according to files made available under the Freedom of Information Act, that Suzy Chang had flown from London to New York many times, allegedly to visit her ailing mother in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Now married and living under a different name on Long Island, Suzy Chang politely told me in two 1997 telephone conversations that she had nothing to say. In 1987, however, she was quoted by the journalist Anthony Summers, in Official and Confidential, his biography of Hoover, as admitting that she knew Jack Kennedy. "We'd meet in the 21 Club," she told Summers. "Everybody saw me eating with him. I think he was a nice guy, very charming. What else am I going to say?" Other FBI files provided to Bobby Kennedy showed that Maria Novotny, who died in the 1970s in London, had been arrested for prostitution in New York in 1961. Before her death, Novotny wrote an unpublished manuscript, made available for this book, in which she claimed to have been recruited by Peter Lawford, Kennedy's brother-in-law, to engage in group sex with Jack Kennedy a few weeks before his inauguration. She and another prostitute, Novotny said, pretended to be nurse and doctor; the president-elect was their patient.
Bobby Kennedy soon had more on his mind than the Journal-American and its uncooperative reporters. On July 3 Hoover informed him of yet another allegation about his brother---one involving Ellen Rometsch. Hoover reported, according to a summary written by Courtney Evans to an assistant FBI director, that a sometime bureau informant had spent time with Rometsch and been told that she was having "illicit relations with highly placed governmental officials." That phrase, Evans and Bobby Kennedy had to assume, included the president. There was an ominous new factor in Hoover's revelation, however: "Rometsch is alleged," Evans quoted Hoover as saying, "to be from East Germany and to have formerly worked for Walter Ulbricht," the communist leader of East Germany. The Profumo affair had arrived in Washington.
Bobby Kennedy quickly sought to minimize the report, telling Evans that "he was appreciative of the Director's sending this information to him on a confidential basis, and there always are allegations about prominent people that they are either homosexuals or promiscuous." But the attorney general was anything but casual about Hoover's allegation. "It was noted," Evans said in a memorandum to Hoover, "that the AG made particular note of Rometsch's name." Bobby Kennedy also expressed "his appreciation," Evans said, for the FBI's discretion in handling the matter.*
That summer, the FBI's counterintelligence division opened an investigation into Rometsch as a possible spy. "I knew the allegations," Raymond Wannell, head of FBI counterintelligence, said in a 1997 interview for this book. "I knew it was a serious matter. I didn't know if they were proved" or disproved.
The Kennedy brothers did not wait for the FBI's report. On August 21, 1963, Rometsch was abruptly deported to Germany, at the official request of the State Department. She was escorted home by LaVern Duffy, one of Bobby Kennedy's associates from his days on the Senate Rackets Committee; the two flew to Germany on a U.S. Air Force transport plane. There are no known records documenting her departure, according to the State Department. Rolf Rometsch left the country a few days later; he was granted a divorce in late September on grounds of his wife's "relations with other men."
Duffy, a lifelong bachelor who died in 1992, had been dating Rometsch for months before she was deported; he was seen having drinks with her in the summer of 1963 at the Quorum Club. It was that connection, apparently, that prompted Bobby Kennedy to ask for Duffy's help in getting Rometsch out of Washington and in keeping her quiet. There is much evidence that Rometsch and Duffy were in love. Over the next few months, Rometsch sent Duffy a series of passionate letters, expressing her deep feelings about him---and also thanking him for sending her money. One of Rometsch's letters, dated April 8, 1964, and made available for this book, urged Duffy to send her money by personal check rather than by money order. "Which way you send it is up to you," Rometsch wrote in her fractured English. "The bank is telling me that it would be more easy for them and the money would be fester in my hands if you should make up a check payable to me. you ask your Bank about it." It was not clear whether Rometsch was referring to a token gift from Duffy or a substantial transfer of funds.
In interviews for this book, Duffy's brother and one of his close friends both said that Duffy gave money---lots of it---to Rometsch on behalf of the Kennedys.
Wayne A. Duffy, a retired California banker, told me that he had been close to his brother LaVern and, after his death, found Rometsch's letters to him while sorting through his personal papers. "The letters show she was getting paid," Wayne told me. "You don't send a gal out of the country and tell her to keep quiet and not pay her." Asked if the money given to Rometsch had been his brother's, Wayne Duffy said, "Absolutely not." The money that was sent, in deutsche marks, came from the Kennedys, he said. The amount, he added, in response to questioning, "could have been five thousand dollars or fifty thousand."
Wayne Duffy told me that he had always assumed that Ellen Rometsch was a spy for East Germany. "Most people thought she was for a long time," he said, adding that he had no direct knowledge of such matters. The fact is, Duffy said, "she could have" been a spy. "It would have been very easy for her to be one." He and LaVern had often discussed the Rometsch matter, Wayne Duffy said, and his brother told him of Rometsch's relationship with the president. "Obviously, [the White House] was scared because they didn't want it to become public," Duffy told me. "But everybody on the inside knew it." Duffy added that his brother had been offered a White House job by Jack Kennedy early in the administration, but turned it down to continue his investigative work in the rackets for the Senate.
Georgia Liakakis, who worked as a secretary and girl Friday for a number of Washington lobbyists and power brokers in the 1960s, including Bobby Baker, was one of LaVern Duffy's close friends in 1963. Liakakis told me in a 1997 interview for this book that "the Kennedys gave [Rometsch] a lot of money." Her source for that information, Liakakis told me, was LaVern Duffy: "He told me the Kennedys put him up to it ... Bobby Kennedy was pushing him to keep her away and to keep her mouth shut," Liakakis added. "They [the Kennedys] were afraid. There was a lot of money changing hands."
LaVern Duffy and Kennedy money may have combined to get Ellen Rometsch out of Washington and keep her quiet, but there was one event even a Kennedy could not control in 1963: the political demise of Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Democrats. In September newspapers and magazines began unraveling a seamy story of Baker's financial ties to a fast-growing vending machine company. Baker and a group of investors, it turned out, had been awarded many contracts while the new company was still being organized, and had also received instant credit from a bank controlled by Democratic senator Robert Kerr, of Oklahoma, and his family. By October the Baker scandal had turned into a newspaper tempest, and reporters were beginning to dig up dirt on a number of present and past senators---including Baker's mentor, Vice President Johnson. A Maryland insurance broker named Donald Reynolds met privately with Senator John Williams of Delaware, a Republican, and complained to him about advertising he had been forced to buy on the vice president's radio and television stations in Austin, Texas, as a condition of writing Johnson's life insurance policy. Johnson also demanded, and got, a television set and a new stereo from Reynolds as a cost of doing business. John Willi
ams's best friend in the Senate was Carl Curtis of Nebraska, the senior Republican on the Rules Committee. As the scandal spread in the newspapers, alarming other Democrats---including senators who had received many thousands of dollars in campaign contributions through Baker---the Rules Committee announced an all-out investigation. Baker's personal life was soon thrust into the limelight, along with the mysterious goings-on at the Quorum Club. It took only days for the Republicans on the committee to find out all they needed to know about Ellen Rometsch.
The next step was inevitable. On October 26, 1963, the investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff published a dispatch in the Des Moines Register revealing that the Rules Committee was planning to hear testimony about Ellen Rometsch and her abrupt August expulsion from the United States. Mollenhoff's story, like the one on the Profumo scandal published four months earlier by Horan and Frasca, did not name names, but it noted that the committee was "in the process of examining allegations regarding the conduct of Senate employees as well as members of the Senate" with Rometsch. The committee's interest went beyond the Senate: "The evidence also is likely to include identification of several high executive branch officials as friends and associates of the part-time model and party girl," Mollenhoff wrote.
Mollenhoff, who died in 1991, obviously had good sources, one of them being John Williams of the Senate. His story noted that Senator Williams "has obtained an account of the woman's life in Washington over a period of more than two years." Rometsch was born and raised in East Germany, Mollenhoff wrote, and "still has relatives on the other side of the iron curtain. The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern to security investigators because of the high rank of her male companions."