Lou Russell, in the period between June 20 and July 2, 1973, was working for a detective
agency that was helping George Bush prepare for an upcoming press conference. In this
sense, Russell was working for Bush.
Russell is relevant because he seems (although he denied it) to have been the fabled sixth
man of the Watergate break-in, the burglar who got away. He may also have been the
buglar who tipped off the police, if indeed anyone did. Russell was a harlequin who had
been the servant of many masters. Lou Russell had once been the chief investigator for
the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had worked for the FBI. He had
been a stringer for Jack Anderson, the columnist. In December, 1971 he had been an
employee of General Security Services, the company that provided the guards who
protected the Watergate buildings. In March of 1972 Russell had gone to work for James
McCord and McCord Associates, whose client was the CREEP. Later, after the scandal
had broken, Russell worked for McCord's new and more successful firm, Security
Associates. Russell had also worked directly for the CREEP as a night watchman. Russell
had also worked for John Leon of Allied Investigators, Inc., a company that later went to
work for George Bush and the Republican National Committee. Still later, Russell found
a job with the headquarters of the McGovern for President campaign. Russell's lawyer
was Bud Fensterwald, and sometimes Russell performed investigative services for
Fensterwald and for Fensterwald's Committee to Investigate Assassinations. In
September, 1972, well after the scandal had become notorious, Russell seems to have
joined with one Nick Beltrante in carrying out electronic countermeasures sweeps of the
DNC headquarters, and during one of these he appears to have planted an electronic
eavesdropping device in the phone of DNC worker Spencer Oliver which, when it was
discovered, re-focussed public attention on the Watergate scandal at the end of the
summer of 1972.
Russell was well acquainted with Carmine Bellino, the chief investigator on the staff of
Sam Ervin's Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Practices. Bellino was a
Kennedy operative who had superintended the seamy side of the JFK White House,
including such figures as Judith Exner, the president's alleged paramour. Later, Bellino
would become the target of George Bush's most revealing public action during the
Watergate period. Bellino's friend William Birely later provided Russell with an
apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, (thus allowing him to leave his room in a rooming
house on Q Street in the District), a new car, and sums of money.
Russell had been a heavy drinker, and his social circle was that of the prostitutes, whom
he sometimes patronized and sometimes served as a bouncer and goon. His familiarity
with the brothel milieu faciliatated his service for the Office of Security, which was to
oversee the bugging and other surveillance of Columbia Plaza and other locations.
Lou Russell was incontestably one of the most fascinating figures of Watergate. How
remarkable, then, that the indefatigable ferrets Woodward and Bernstein devoted so little
attention to him, deeming him worthy of mention in neither of their two books.
Woodward and met with Russell, but had ostensibly decided that there was "nothing to