Rush River Lodge
 Rush River Lodge(Sex club, Sexual blackmail?)   | |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1971 |
| Membership | •  John Paisley• Donald Burton •  Carl Bernstein |
| Washington DC sex club set up by spooks, attended by high-ranking politicians, journalists spooks from the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA and others. Possible sexual blackmail operation. | |
The Rush River Lodge was a 1970s swinger's sex club outside Washington DC. organised by the spook John Paisley along with CIA colleague, Donald Burton. Those who attended these parties included politicians, journalists and many high-ranking spooks from the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA and others.
Overview
Joseph Trento told the story in his 1989 book Widows. It might contain some limited hangouts, such as the 1986 FBI investigation that "failed" to question Burton.
Not all of Paisley's parties were in suburban homes. Paisley would, in later years, hold several sex parties on his sailboat Brillig. One female guest present said that "ten people trying to make love on a thirty-foot sailboat can get pretty intimate." Paisley loved to take nude photographs of his dates, and some of the parties were even videotaped.
Today the Rush River Lodge is a peaceful country home near Washington, Virginia, about an hour south of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. In May 1972, Donald Burton and John Paisley formed the Rush River Lodge Corporation and bought the old lodge with the help of some other CIA friends in the hopes of turning it into a ski resort. The place never worked out as a ski resort, but Burton and Paisley staged several sex parties at the lodge. According to Burton, this was done without the knowledge of their "straight investors."
In the days when Paisley and Burton decided to throw their swingers' party, the lodge was extremely rustic. One guest describes the experience: "The whole idea of going to a swingers' party is to have comfortable sex in a relaxed and unobtrusive environment. ... " The guest's wife finished the story: "Paisley and Burton decided it would be fun and very private to go down to their place. Well, there was nothing like it. A dozen people having sex with each other in every imaginable position for hours and then discovering that your weekend of passion doesn't include running water! The damn plumbing failed."
Most of the partygoers were middle-class, some were reporters, and most dropped out of the scene by 1980, when herpes came to wide public attention. Burton recalls bringing a clandestine CIA employee to one of the swinging parties. And some of Paisley's fellow guests were on the bizarre side. One high-level Nixon appointee enjoyed tying up women and beating them. A United States senator would walk around the parties nude and proclaim to every woman present that he was a senator.
Why was Paisley at the parties? Why in the world would he host some? As word got out about the parties and the fact that employees of the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA, Capitol Hill, and the administration were attending, the KGB resident in Washington wanted them penetrated. It was the perfect place for blackmail and recruitment. It was also the perfect place to make contact with other intelligence agents.
Paisley crossed paths at these parties with an attractive Czechoslovakian couple who would turn out to be high-level penetration agents from the Czech intelligence service. Karl Koecher was a tall and aloof man, and his wife, Hana, was a beautiful woman and Karl's opposite in personality. Worried intelligence officials now believe that Paisley may have worked in tandem with the Koechers.
The Koechers were placed in the United States as what counterintelligence agents call "sleepers" -agents who would work for years to build a solid reputation and a cover story before actually collecting intelligence. The Koechers left Czechoslovakia for New York in December 1965. They told U.S. immigration officials they were political defectors and had been forced to leave because of Karl's secret work for Radio Free Europe. In reality, Koecher had been a Czech intelligence agent since 1961.
Trained in Prague in physics, Karl taught at Wagner College in New York between 1969 and 1973. Like Paisley, Koecher benefited from a connection to Columbia University. When Koecher took a two-year course offered by Columbia University's Russian Institute, he encountered Zbigniew Brzezinski. Prior to becoming well known as President Carter's National Security Adviser, Brzezinski had spent some time on the CIA's payroll. Koecher hardly had to work at his role as a sleeper agent. The CIA was in such desperate need for language specialists that it did few background checks when he was recruited at Columbia for a job as a CIA translator in February 1973.
Koecher easily passed the CIA's vaunted Office of Security polygraph examination. He joined a long list of spies who had been "fluttered" and had fooled the operators completely. He went into the DDO, the covert side of the CIA, to translate cables from agents. His assignment to such a sensitive post is remarkable. It shows how lax security at the CIA had become. Koecher was given access to material from this country's most prized double agents, men hidden in the Kremlin bureaucracy.
Hana Koecher, an attractive blonde who was Karl's partner in espionage, remained in New York, working in the wholesale diamond business and assisting her husband in funneling out the secrets. The CIA put Karl to work in Rosslyn, Virginia, in a nondescript office building. Here, Koecher had access to important message traffic concerning Soviet Bloc agents and their CIA handlers. The name of this operation was the AE Screen Unit. Its job was to sift through material that was so sensitive that few people on the covert side of the CIA Operations Directorate could see it in its raw form. Koecher was given a top-secret clearance and access to some codeword intelligence. This practice was almost unheard of for defectors of any sort, according to the former deputy chief of CIA counterintelligence, Leonard V. McCoy.
The details of the sex parties and CIA involvement can be found in a lawsuit filed by the owners of one of the houses used for the parties. The neighbors grew tired of the traffic and noise in the usually quiet, posh, suburban Washington community of Fairfax Station, Virginia. The owners were a military officer and his wife, then stationed abroad. When word reached them that their home was being used for illicit purposes, they filed suit.
The owners had turned their sprawling, seven-bedroom house over to a Virginia realtor for management while they were out of the country. The owners and the realtor agreed before they left for their overseas tour that no singles would be considered for tenants. The owners then discovered that their house had ended up in the hands of a sex club known as the Virginia In-Place. Complaints over activities at the house caused the Fairfax County police to put the house under surveillance one weekend. It was during that weekend that several Paisley friends were identified as having attended a party. One car whose license plate was written down by the police belonged to Donald Burton. Burton was summoned for a deposition.
Burton confirms he attended the parties and recalls bringing Paisley to some at a later period. But another Paisley friend went through his old calendars, which indicate he met Paisley in the swinging scene in 1972. In the major investigations that followed Paisley's disappearance, no references can be found anywhere to the parties or the Koechers. One reason is that Donald Burton says he never notified the CIA's Office of Security of the potential problem of his identity coming out in the court documents. To make matters worse, despite the FBI investigation into the Koechers, which led to their arrest and eventual trade for the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky on February 11, 1986, no one from the Bureau ever questioned Burton.
Burton is candid about why he did not reveal his attendance at the parties to the CIA's Office of Security: "They would have fired me if I told them." He said if someone had attempted to blackmail him, he was fully prepared to "run right down to Security and tell them."
That so many intelligence officials were involved in the sex clubs, had contact with the Koechers, and never were asked to reveal it in any investigation is a devastating comment on the current state of counterintelligence in the United States. Though evidence of Paisley's involvement was easily obtainable, investigators for the CIA's Office of Security, the FBI, and the Senate Intelligence Committee all failed to follow up leads on the swinging groups.
But, perhaps more significantly, Paisley also crossed paths with former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein at several parties. In the opinion of some people interviewed for this book, the fact that Paisley was serving as CIA liaison to the White House Plumbers at the time of his meeting Bernstein at sex parties raises many interesting questions. Could Bernstein's sexual activities, they ask, have made him vulnerable to pressure from a man like Paisley who may have wanted to get specific news stories slanted in a certain way? Bernstein denies even knowing Paisley. In a December 1979 telephone interview, Bernstein denied having attended any such parties. A few days later he called back to say, "I may have attended the parties, but I never met anyone named John Paisley."
Half a dozen Paisley intimates place Bernstein and Paisley at the same sex parties beginning as early as 1971. Donald Burton recalls: "Carl Bernstein, when I first met him, was going to the parties about 1971. I didn't know who he was .... One day he says to me or my wife Nancy he is on to something big. He said he is working on something and something is going to come out. You know all we knew was here was this guy with long hair and I saw him at two or four of these parties and then he disappeared."
In a more recent interview, Bernstein confirmed that he attended swinging parties, but claimed he did not know Paisley and "Paisley wasn't Deep Throat." "I gotta tell you off the bat, I don't even know who the guy is," Bernstein said.
But the behavior of his reporting partner on the Watergate affair, Bob Woodward, in the aftermath of Paisley's disappearance, raises questions. Woodward, by 1978, was an editor at the Washington Post. After Paisley disappeared, Woodward assigned two reporters to investigate Carl Bernstein. When asked if he was aware of the investigation into his activities, Bernstein said, "Oh that's crazy, Jesus ... I think you got something very wrong there. I don't think there was such a thing." Bernstein said the question should be put to Woodward.
Woodward confirms that he and other Post editors authorized the investigation into Bernstein's activities. Woodward explained that two reporters came to him with "allegations about Carl and Paisley and he felt obliged to follow up."[1]
Known members
2 of the 3 of the members already have pages here:
| Member | Description |
|---|---|
| Carl Bernstein | Became famous with his fellow journalist Bob Woodward. |
| John Paisley | A spook who died before he could testify in the HSCA. |
