Anonymous Tip Led to Hart’s Fall : Stakeout Was ‘Audible Called From Line of Scrimmage’

When she called the first time, she was selling pictures. Gary Hart and a Miami actress, together on a yachting trip.

Tom Fiedler, the Miami Herald political editor who was in the office late that Monday purely by chance, thought she was a nut.

Yet what transpired over the next five days slowly convinced Fiedler and, eventually, others at the Herald that the woman might be telling the truth.

Last Sunday, as a result of that conviction, the Herald touched off the controversy that ultimately destroyed Hart’s presidential candidacy by publishing a front-page story alleging that the former senator had “spent Friday night and most of Saturday in his Capitol Hill town house with a young woman who flew from Miami and met him.”

Fiedler only took the call that night because he had stayed late. The woman on the other end seemed flip. She was calling, she said, because of a story Fiedler had written that morning saying that the press was aware of but uncertain how to deal with the perception that Hart was “a womanizer.”

She knew, she told him, that the perception was true.

Promised to Call Back

The following day she called back with a story that Hart had invited the Miami actress in the photos to spend the next five days with him, first at his town house in Washington and later on a campaign trip to New York. She even promised to call back later with the flight number the actress was taking to Washington Friday evening.

It was worth examining, Fiedler thought, but still some of it sounded wrong.

For one thing, the Herald Washington bureau told him that Hart had a home in Bethesda, not a Capitol Hill town house. But then Hart’s campaign headquarters confirmed that the candidate had sold the home and moved.

More troubling, the source never called back with the promised flight information. By late Friday afternoon, Herald investigations editor Jim Savage said: “I was on the verge of scrapping the whole thing.”

Yet Fiedler decided on Friday to try and verify the tip on his own. Hart was scheduled to spend the weekend in Kentucky, not Washington. Fiedler called Hart’s campaign staff to confirm that and found the schedule had been changed. The senator had decided to spend the weekend in Washington resting and working on a speech.

How would the woman have known that if she didn’t have some inside information, Fiedler thought? He rushed into Savage’s office. It was nearly 5 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Would Fly to Washington

Savage summoned reporter Jim McGee, a specialist in investigative reporting. McGee would fly to Washington and go to Hart’s house. Maybe he could identify the woman on the flight from the anonymous tipster’s description.

“He was going to see if there were a way to check out the news tip, which would be probably by observation,” said Heath J. Meriwether, executive editor of the Herald and the man ultimately responsible for the decision to publish the story.

There were only two nonstop flights from Miami to Washington that night, one at 5:30, another at 7:30. Try the earlier flight, Fiedler told McGee. If no one fitting the description got on, try the 7:30.

After Meriwether agreed to the plan, McGee rushed to the airport. At least two women aboard the 5:30 flight fit the tipster’s description.

Arriving in Washington at 9 p.m., McGee took a cab from the airport to Hart’s home on Capitol Hill and stood outside. By chance, a former Herald staffer named Doug Clifton, who recently had transferred to the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau, decided to drop by and ended up joining the surveillance.

While Clifton went around to check the back door of Hart’s house, McGee reports seeing the former senator and a woman leave through the front door, get into a car and drive away. McGee followed them to a stop light and took the license number. The time, he says, was 9:30 p.m.

‘Legitimate News Story’

“It was only at this point,” Meriwether said, “that we felt we were dealing with a legitimate news story.”

The woman with whom Hart left was Miami actress and model Donna Rice. At the time--and even later, when they wrote their story--the Herald reporters did not know her identity or occupation.

After Hart and Rice left, McGee went to call his editors in Miami, leaving Clifton behind.

When he returned, McGee and Clifton began an unplanned stakeout of Hart’s home. “We never intended a surveillance,” Fiedler explained. “This was an audible called from the line of scrimmage.”

The two reporters decided they needed a car, and Clifton left to rent one. He returned, Clifton told The Times, around 11:30, give or take five minutes.

The timing here is critical. At 11:17 p.m.--while Clifton was gone--McGee reports that he saw Hart and the woman return. He says he did not see anyone leave the house again for nearly 20 hours.

William Broadhurst, a friend of Hart’s and key figure in the controversy, argues that the reporter missed what happened next, because he was alone and unable to watch the back door of Hart’s town house.

Pulled Into Garage

Broadhurst says that he and another woman, Lynn Armandt, were pulling into the garage behind Hart’s house about the time that Hart and Rice were arriving at the front. Ten or 15 minutes later, Broadhurst says, he, Armandt and Rice left through the same rear entrance.

That was roughly the time that Clifton returned from the airport in the rental car. Does the timing leave open the possibility that the three did indeed leave through the unwatched back door? “I guess it does,” Clifton said.

Broadhurst contends that the three went to his home, about eight blocks away. The women spent the night, he said, in his guest bedroom.

From 11:30 until 3 a.m., Clifton and McGee saw no one enter or leave the house, and at 3 a.m. they took off for two hours to relax and get something to eat. They returned at 5 a.m.

At 11 a.m. Saturday, Fiedler, Savage and photographer Brian Smith arrived from Miami and joined the surveillance team. From that point on, Clifton said, at least four people were watching the house at all times.

It is well-publicized now that Broadhurst, Rice and Hart all contend that Rice walked back to Hart’s house the next morning. Broadhurst also contends that around midday he pulled up in front of Hart’s town house, double-parked, and then left with Hart, Armandt and Rice to go sightseeing around Virginia.

Broadhurst also contends they returned that evening with dinner.

The reporters say they saw none of this.

Saw Couple Leave

Instead, they say, they next observed Hart leave with Rice through the rear entrance around 8:40 p.m. arm in arm, then abruptly turn and re-enter the house. Hart, they say, emerged through the front door about 30 minutes later, walked up and down neighboring streets, and strolled right by a car containing Savage and McGee.

At that point, the Herald reporters explain, they believed Hart knew he was being watched. Savage and McGee say they got out of the car and caught up with Hart as he entered the alley behind his home. Hart agreed to a sidewalk interview in which Fiedler joined.

The nature of that interview would prove crucial in the Herald’s decision to publish.

Savage described Hart as evasive, nervous and somewhat confused.

“I said ‘we are going to write this story unless you can tell us what is going on and why we shouldn’t. . . . We asked him to let us talk to the girl. I implored him,” Fiedler said. “I said ‘Senator, you know how sensitive this situation is.’ ”

“He told me there was nothing to it,” Fiedler said. “I told him ‘you’ve got to be more forthcoming with me about this,’ and (his arms folded) he said, ‘I’m being forthcoming,’ ” Fiedler said.

20-Minute Conversation

The conversation took about 20 minutes. “I felt strongly we had the story,” Fiedler said. The Herald team returned to its hotel and began writing. Sometime close to midnight, roughly two hours after the meeting with Hart, Broadhurst called.

Broadhurst now says he told them: “If you come over here right now before you write your story,” you can talk with the two women.

They refused to hold their story, Fiedler said, because they worried that doing so would allow Hart “to call a press conference and put out such a smoke screen that what would come out would not be true.”

Over the phone from Miami, Meriwether agreed.

“We felt that with the interview with Gary Hart--and this was the key piece of this for me--we had given Gary Hart every opportunity” to explain himself, Meriwether said.

“I went over this with Tom Fiedler particularly, the fact that we had given him (Hart) an explanation of what we had seen with our observation, and we intended to give those every prominence in the newspaper, which we did,” Meriwether said.

It is unclear whether Meriwether, who made the ultimate decision to print the story, knew of the specific gaps in the stakeout. At the time, the reporters had not yet sat down with Broadhurst and heard his charges that they has missed several events.

Herald’s Contention

The Herald argues that Broadhurst did not offer these explanations in the beginning. He did so, Fiedler said, only after he knew the details of their surveillance.

“That’s not correct,” Broadhurst said Thursday. “There was a lot of cat and mouse that night. There’s no doubt about that. They were playing games with me, and I was trying to see what they were up to.”