Ellen Rometsch: “She was a Washington party girl with a quality that made her natural for Jack Kennedy: she was stunningly attractive … The President [John F. Kennedy who had a sexual relationship with her in 1963]did not know [that she was born a German in 1936 in a village that became part of the DDR after World War II, that as a child she had been a member of a Communist youth group and as young adult she joined another CP group. She fled with her family to the BRD in 1955 and moved to the US in 1961 with her second husband, a sergeant who was assigned to the BRD Ambassy in Washington.] Rometsch, 27 when they met, fulfilled another essential criterion for the president: she was a professional, a prostitute who would take her money, do what was wanted, and keep silent. Kennedy stumbled upon Rometsch in the usual way, through one of his many procurers in Washington, this time Bill Thompson, the railroad executive. Rometsch had become one of Bobby Baker’s girls by early 1963. [Baker was the secretary to the Senate Democrats]. He was also the man who did what the Democratic senators needed done, and discreetly got them what they wanted, including women. … It was arranged … for Thompson to pick Rometsch up at her apartment in northwest Washington and take her to the White House. … When he next went to the White House … “the president told me that she was the most exciting woman that he had been with.” … In all, Baker estimated, Rometsch visited Kennedy at least ten times that spring and summer [of 1963]. In June the Harold Macmillan government was rocked by a sex scandal that led to the resignation of John Profumo, the British minister of war … There were fears, the press breathlessly reported, that Profumo, while cavorting with [call-girl Christine] Keeler and at least four other prostitutes, including a Chinese beauty named Suzy Chang and a bleached-blond Czech named Maria Novotny, was spending his weekends answering the girls’ questions – planted by Ivanov [a Soviet naval attaché] – about British nuclear policy. … Maria Novotny and Suzy Chang worked as high-class prostitutes in New York as well as London, and, as Novotny would tell reporters later, she and Chang had serviced Jack Kennedy before and after the 1960 presidential election. …[On June 29, 1963 the New York Journal-American published a story,] linking “a man who holds a ‘very high’ elective office” in the Kennedy administration to “a Chinese girl” in the Profumo scandal. [It was written by James Horan and Dom Frasca.] On Monday [July 1, 1963], with his brother still in Italy, Bobby Kennedy [secretary of Justice] summoned Horan and Frasca to the Justice Department … Kennedy was forced to ask for the name of the American official. “It was the President of the United States”, Frasca told the attorney general. [The source of their information was a conversation on June 28 between Frasca and a London journalist named Peter Earle.] … On July 3 Hoover [informed] him of yet another allegation about his brother – one involving Ellen Rometsch. Hoover reported … that a sometime bureau informant had spent time with Rometsch and been told that she was having “illicit relations with highly placed governmental officials”. … “Rometsch is alleged … to be from East Germany and to have formerly worked for Walter Ulbricht”, the communist leader of East Germany. … That summer, the FBI’s counterintelligence division opened an investigation into Rometsch as a possible spy. … The Kennedy brothers did not wait for the FBI’s report. On August 21, 1963, Rometsch was abruptly deported to Germany, at the official request of the State Department. (S.M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot [Boston 1997], p. 387 e.v.)
In 1987 Suzy Chang only wanted to admit that she had met and dined with Kennedy at the 21 Club in New York during the 1960 campaign. She also said that Stephen Ward was “a good, good, good friend” and that she knew all the people he knew. (A. Summers and Steve Dorrill, Honeytrap (Coronet edition, 1988), p. 266-267.]