Many readers may be familiar with the late “DC Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who reportedly committed “suicide” in 2008 prior to her revealing more details about her top flight clientele, which ranged from Vice President Dick Cheney to top officials of the Central Intelligence Agency. Most have likely never heard of Heide Rikan.
Decades before Palfrey arranged trysts, paid for by the CIA, between her Pamela Martin and Associates escorts and visiting Arab sheiks and foreign oil company executives, Rikan plied the same trade for Langley from her headquarters on the sixth floor of the Columbia Plaza apartment complex next door to the ill-famed Watergate hotel and condominium. Palfrey bought an apartment in East Berlin at a bargain basement price said to have been arranged by the number three CIA man, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who was later imprisoned for fraud. The apartment was reportedly a former CIA safe house that Foggo was ordered to sell.
Rikan, a former Army private who used her actual name Adelheidecharlotte Riecken while she was on active duty in Germany and Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC, was born in Germany. After leaving the army, the attractive blond became a popular stripper along the old 14th Street corridor of strip clubs just a few blocks from the White House. After hooking up with notorious DC mob boss Joe Nesline, Erica or Erika “Heide” Rikan, as she was known, began working for another notorious outfit, the CIA. As with Palfrey’s Pamela Martin and Associates, Rikan had a corporate cover called Business Services Consultants, located at 5101 River Road, Suite 415, Bethesda, Maryland. Rikan’s business cards listed her as “Erika L. Rikan.”
According to the book “White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story” by Phil Stanford, Heide also used the name Kathie Dieter, especially when she was doing business with her Columbia Plaza business partner, one James McCord of McCord Associates. McCord was one of the burglars of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate and a top CIA surveillance expert. McCord also happened to videotaped trysts between Heide’s call girls and leading DC celebrities and politicians. It is not known who was actually taped and which tapes made their way into the hands of Richard Helms at the CIA but Heide’s black book included two key members of the Senate Watergate Committee that was investigating the Nixon White House: Senator Lowell Weicker (R-CT) and Sam Dash, the Democratic counsel for the committee, whose unlisted phone number was in Heide’s book. Also in Heide’s black book was Nixon aide and chief committee witness against the president John Dean; Dean’s wife, Maureen “Mo” Biner Dean (sometimes referred to with the code name of “Clout” in Heide’s black book); Nixon aide Jeb Magruder; and a number of professional football players, including the Washington Redskins’ Sonny Jurgensen and Ed Khayat, the Dallas Cowboy’s Don Meredith and Lance Rentzel, and the Green Bay Packers’ Paul Hornung, as well as team owners Clint Murchison, Jr., of the Cowboys and Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns.
Rikan’s and McCord’s operation at the Columbia Plaza was the main base from which chief White House “plumber” G. Gordon Liddy, McCord, and E. Howard Hunt, along with three Cuban CIA contractors, launched their bugging operation against DNC headquarters at the Watergate. McCord and Liddy set up their surveillance nest at the nearby Howard Johnson’s Hotel, across the street from the Watergate. It is now assumed that Nixon aides were interested in seizing a list DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien maintained of blackmailed customers of Heide’s ring, which included DNC officials as well as top Nixon aides.
While carrying out some dubious tasks in Antigua involving casinos for the Meyer Lansky-connected Nesline, Heide became more involved with the dark side of the mob-CIA relationship. One of the names listed in Heide’s black book was Alvin Kotz, a gambling gangster from Potomac, Maryland. From 2002 to 2004, Kotz ran an off-shore gambling operation called World Wide Wagering, Inc. headquartered in Dominica in the Caribbean. In 2005, Kotz was sentenced to three years in federal prison for running the gambling racket.
Heide also had interaction with a number of figures linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including Texas businessman Clint Murchison, Jr., the principal owner of the Dallas Cowboys and son of Clint Murchison, Sr., the Texas oil baron; Joe Campisi, the owner of Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant in Dallas, who reportedly hosted Jack Ruby, Lee Oswald, Dallas “cop” J.D. Tippit, and others at a November 21, 1963, dinner while Murchison, Sr., was hosting a party for J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, H. L. Hunt, Fort Worth millionaire Sid Richardson, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Heide’s black book includes phone numbers for Fred Black, LBJ’s neighbor and close friend of Bobby Baker and Morris Jaffe, LBJ’s financial adviser.
As with Palfrey, Heide’s ultimate successor in the CIA’s call girl operations, Rikan was left out to dry after the Watergate affair and downfall of Nixon. In 1978, it is reported that Heide, while drunk, tripped down a flight of stairs in Reading, Pennsylvania and died. We are also led to believe that after being convicted on mail fraud and other criminal counts, Palfrey committed suicide by hanging herself in her elderly mother’s home in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Of course, the CIA would never think of simply eliminating two women who had enough information on the sexual peccadilloes of America’s most powerful leaders to shake the American political system to the ground.
CIA archives contain two articles dated September 29, 1953, published in The Washington Post and Washington Star, regarding the horrible death by burning of a stunningly attractive red-headed stenographer for the CIA. CIA veterans confirm that as a stenographer, Jeanne Fecteau, 27, would have had access to the senior executives of the agency, including director Allen Dulles. Fecteau’s burned body was found on September 29 underneath a bed in a cabin in Avalon Shores, Maryland, between Annapolis and Chesapeake Beach. The story of the beautiful CIA stenographer becomes murkier. Her husband, Army civilian administrative assistant Richard G. Fecteau had disappeared in December 1952 while on a transport flight from Japan to Korea. The cabin where Jeanne Fecteau’s body was discovered was owned by Major Carl Garver, 39, an Air Force ROTC instructor at George Washington University. When flames broke out inside the cabin at around 6 pm, Garver claimed he tried frantically to break into the house but was “driven back” by the flames. The conclusion by fire inspectors was that the fire was caused by faulty wiring in a hot plate in the kitchen. The Anne Arundel coroner stated that Fecteau’s death was caused by burns and carbon monoxide poisoning.
According to the Post article, Garver’s residence was at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington while Fecteau’s residence was listed as the Dupont Plaza Hotel, a luxury hotel on Dupont Circle in downtown DC. The Star reported Garver’s residence as 3801 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, just north of the Cleveland Park neighborhood.
No one will likely ever know what sinister plotting resulted in the deaths of Palfrey, Rikan, and Fecteau. However, given the recent disclosures of CIA sexual abuse and homoerotic torture meted out to kidnapped detainees, it is high time that the CIA be held accountable, as representing the world’s second oldest profession, for aiding and abetting the world’s oldest profession and leaving a trail of victims in its sordid wake.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2014 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
