Cal Thomas noted: “Columnist Jim Pinkerton, who worked as an aide in the Reagan White House from 1981 to 1983, said on Fox News Watch (where I also appear): ‘Reagan was the opposite of a gay-basher. . . . He was a guy from Hollywood. He dealt with gays all his life. He was not a homophobe and a bigot.’”

All of which casts a weird light on the intersection of two little-known homosexual—indeed, pedophiliac—rings with Reagan administrations in California and Washington. (Recall that Reagan opposed legislation in California designed to prohibit homosexuals gaining access to children via teaching positions.)

While serving as Governor of California, Kitty Kelley relates, Reagan was presented with evidence that two male staffers, “both married with children, had been involved in homosexual activity, some of which involved boys under the age of eighteen. Professing shock, the governor summoned the men and told them they were out. No charges were pressed, and the men resigned quietly.”

Unfortunately for Reagan, a column by Drew Pearson appeared in the New York Post, reporting that “‘a homosexual ring had been operating out of Governor Reagan’s office’ for six months with his full knowledge and that the governor did not act until pressured by aides into firing the men. The columnist alleged that Art Van Court [Reagan’s bodyguard, later a federal marshal, who conducted the investigation into the affair] had a tape recording ‘of a [homosexual] sex orgy which had taken place at a cabin near Lake Tahoe, leased by two members of Reagan’s staff.’”

Reagan “denied everything and called the columnist a liar.” At a press conference he “slammed his fist on the lectern and yelled at reporters,” refusing to identify the two men.

The shadowy homosexual ring allegedly involving underage boys associated with top Reagan officials in California in 1967 was paralleled by another ring in the upper echelons of the Reagan White House two decades later.

An explosive 1989 Washington Times investigative report by Paul M. Rodriguez and George Archibald revealed that a Washington, D.C. homosexual prostitution ring was then under investigation. The ring, which operated in the nation’s capital, numbered among its clients “high officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations” (including Charles K. Dutcher, associate director of presidential personnel, who placed “Reagan-oriented conservatives into the career Civil Service during the closing years of Mr. Reagan’s presidency”), as well as members of major news organizations and top Pentagon officials. (“Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush: ‘Call boys’ took midnight tour of White House,” June 29, 1989.

“In addition to credit card fraud,” Rodriguez and Archibald noted, “the investigation is said to be focused on illegal interstate prostitution, abduction and use of minors for sexual perversion, extortion, larceny and related illicit drug trafficking and use by prostitutes and their clients.”

One former top-level Pentagon officer said that for the past eight years [i.e., Reagan’s entire Presidential tenure –P.W.], military and civilian intelligence authorities have been concerned that ‘a nest of homosexuals at top levels of the Reagan administration may have been penetrated by Soviet-backed espionage agents posing as male prostitutes,’ said one former top-level Pentagon official.

A major concern, said the former official with longtime ties to top-ranking military intelligence officers, was that hostile foreign intelligence services were using young male prostitutes to compromise top administration homosexuals, thus making them subject to blackmail.

One homosexual client of the prostitution ring was lobbyist Craig J. Spence [.gif image], who represented Japanese business interests in Washington. Spence conducted a 1 a.m tour of the Reagan White House on July 3, 1988 for six friends, including two homosexual call boys.

In a remarkable book, The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, 2nd edition (Lincoln, Nebraska: AWT, 1996), attorney and former Republican Nebraska State Senator John W. DeCamp adds that Craig Spence himself “maintained a call boy ring that catered to the political elite and, unlike most D.C. call boy rings, offered children to its clients.” (169)

Spence turned up dead in a Boston hotel room five months after the Times broke the story quoted above—a “suicide,” authorities said.

During the Vietnam War, DeCamp, today married to a Vietnamese, was an assistant to Deputy Ambassador to South Vietnam (in reality, CIA Station Chief and, later, director of the CIA) William E. Colby, who developed and ran the murderous Operation Phoenix program. Colby was DeCamp’s friend and mentor.

Colby died in a suspicious canoe accident in 1996.