Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  In the early days of America’s Saigon, Black Luigi saved the life of another man who was at Vann’s funeral: Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg had been part of Lansdale’s CIA-based “country team” in Vietnam. Since his Vietnam days, Ellsberg’s conscience had changed radically, and he’d smuggled a secret history of the Vietnam war to the press. Published the year before Vann’s funeral, that history came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In order to attend Vann’s funeral, Ellsberg had had to fly to Arlington from Los Angeles, where he was on trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

  Less than a month after publication of the Pentagon Papers, President Nixon’s men formed the White House Special Investigations Unit, a covert group to stop news leaks. The secret unit was headquartered next door to the White House in the basement of the castlelike Old Executive Office Building: Room 16—which was actually four rooms equipped with a telephone scrambler whose code was changed daily by Secret Service technicians.

  The sign on the door read DAVID R. YOUNG/PLUMBER.

  As he sat at his friend Vann’s funeral, Ellsberg didn’t know that a covert team commanded by White House aides had already twice burgled the Los Angeles office of his psychiatrist, looking for dirt with which to smear him.

  Sen. Edward Kennedy sat near Ellsberg. Eleven months earlier, the White House had hired a former CIA agent officially to investigate the Pentagon Papers and secretly to investigate a tragedy in which a female companion of Kennedy’s drowned. This ex-CIA agent was one of the men who burgled Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  The most important active CIA official at Vann’s funeral was World War II hero William Colby, who helped organize the CIA’s Phoenix Program, in which 40,994 Vietnamese civilians suspected of being the enemy were killed. Colby eventually became the Director of the CIA.

  Within the CIA on the day of Vann’s funeral, two secret investigations were hunting the Soviet mole supposedly burrowed deep in America’s security apparatus. One investigation would claim that chain-smoking poet James Jesus Angelton, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence and a legendary mole hunter himself, was a Soviet agent. The other investigation implicated Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser to President Nixon, as a mole who’d been recruited in post-World War II Germany, given the code name COLONEL BOAR, and catapulted into the power elite of the United States.

  On the day of Vann’s funeral, Nixon bid farewell to the President of Mexico, who’d been in town for a state visit. A state visit by the nearest Latin American neighbor of the United States was a foreign policy paradox in Washington on that muggy Friday in 1972.

  On the one hand, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger expressed the administration’s view of Latin America when he told a Chilean diplomat, “What happens in the South is of no importance.”

  On the other hand, there was Chile.

  Three days after Marxist Salvador Allende had been elected president of Chile, the CIA told the Nixon White House that the United States “had no vital interests within Chile, the world military balance of power would not be significantly altered by an Allende regime, and an Allende victory in Chile would not pose any likely threat to the peace of the region.”

  But President Nixon sicced his CIA Director on Chile with orders “to make the economy scream.” The President said that more than $10 million was available for the effort, and that the American embassy in Santiago was not to be involved. Two days before Vann’s funeral, the Washington Post reported that Allende’s cabinet had offered to resign as Chile’s economic crises worsened and it renegotiated its $1 billion foreign debt.

  After his farewell to the Mexican president, Nixon flew to a multimillionare friend’s private Bahamian island for a weekend rest. Where it rained.

  Gray clouds left a sheen of precipitation on Washington’s black streets that Friday night.

  Washington is a political city, never more so than in those days of the Vietnam war, when every step by every citizen was a political compass oriented to the jungles of Southeast Asia. The politics of elections obsessed the city that year, too: the vote to choose who would be the next president was drawing close.

  Incumbent President Richard Nixon was clearly destined to be the Republican Party’s choice.

  Two Democratic senators, George McGovern, an unpopular peace advocate, and Ed Muskie, a more electable middle-of-the-road Democrat, were battling for their party’s nomination. Muskie was making a comeback from a disaster called the Canuck letter, a press-exposed “private letter” that portrayed Muskie as a racist. In defending himself, Muskie cried.

  The Canuck letter was a forgery perpetrated by top White House aides. They called such things rat-fucking.

  On Friday, June 16, 1972, the day Vann was buried at Arlington, sunset came to Washington at 8:35 P.M.

  Jud was at work.

  When darkness came, the White House glowed.

  President Nixon had reversed custom as dictated by such authorities as the Boy Scout Handbook and decreed that the American flag should fly twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, from the top of the White House. Rain or shine. Day or night.

  More than a residence, the White House was an office building for those men and women who governed America’s executive branch. Through the tall iron-bar fence surrounding the wide lawns and bushes, up the immaculate sidewalks, inside the closed doors and bulletproof windows, they labored.

  And they labored as much as possible in secret.

  Six months earlier, in December 1971, Kissinger and Nixon had been caught by a muckraking columnist secretly tilting American support toward the President of West Pakistan, who was waging a genocidal war that killed between 500,000 and 3 million people in a land that would come to be called Bangladesh. As a military tactic, America’s allies raped women or cut their breasts off with specially fashioned knives. The tilt was partially a payoff for Pakistan’s acting as a liaison between Kissinger and mainland China in the negotiations to resume diplomatic relations between the two superpowers, and partially a global chess maneuver based on assumptions that later all proved to be false.

  The administration’s investigation of the December tilt leak accidentally uncovered military spy Yeo. Charles Radford—but the unmasking of an American serviceman assigned to spy on the White House was still secret from the American public. As was a secret and illegal CIA investigation of the muckraking columnist who broke the tilt story.

  There were so many secrets to keep safe inside the black iron White House fence in June of 1972. There was Cambodia, where for fourteen months Nixon and Kissinger had deceived the public, Congress, and high military officers and ordered 3,630 B-52 raids in which 110,000 bombs were secretly dropped on people who knew exactly where the bombs had come from. In America, the White House men had developed schemes for covert political warfare in the U.S., including plans for break-ins, buggings, prostitutes wired for blackmail, kidnappings: “dirty tricks” designed to neutralize Democratic Party candidates and antiwar activists. The President’s men were pressuring the Internal Revenue Service to target people on Nixon’s enemies list for income tax investigations designed to turn up damaging personal-income secrets useful as political weapons. Some of the White House men were themselves the victims of White House–authorized wiretaps designed to uncover disloyalty.

  On that Friday, the men of the White House were awash in money. That week, the press reported that more than $10 million had been contributed to President Nixon’s reelection campaign before the new elections disclosure laws had taken effect. Former top cop Attorney General John Mitchell, who was now Chairman of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, pronounced creep), declined to reveal the sources of that money.

  What no one outside of those involved knew was that thirteen major American corporations had given $780,000 in illegal campaign contributions to CRP. Milk producers had raised additional millions in exchange for the President’s raising the federal price support level for milk. Spooky recluse billionare Howard Hughes funneled $100,000 to th
e reelection campaign, while Robert Vesco, a fugitive from multiple U.S. charges involving billions of dollars of fraud and a key suspect in a heroin smuggling ring, had secretly given the Nixon team $200,000.

  That night, campaign contributions of questionable legality had been laundered through Mexico to fund a group of eight men who were mounting a covert operation from Room 723 of the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street from the Watergate.

  And that night at the White House, the glowing White House beneath the flag, Jud Stuart stood watch.

  Not upstairs in the family quarters that First Lady Pat Nixon had redecorated in sunny California floral patterns of gold and rose wallpaper, wicker furniture. Jud was downstairs in the White House. The first floor. In the Oval Office.

  In the heart.

  And he was alone.

  Eleven P.M., June 16, 1972.

  He had an hour before his shift ended. Less than an hour to do that night’s work.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead, though the White House’s central air-conditioning washed the city’s foul air and kept the building cool. Sometimes President Nixon liked to crank up the air conditioner to its maximum cooling potential and sit in front of a roaring fire. The radio mounted on Jud’s hip crackled through its earplug. He wore a white uniform shirt, dark pants with a gold stripe down each leg, spit-polished black shoes. On his chest was the gold badge of the Executive Protection Service, the uniformed branch of the Secret Service. The heavy utility belt that held his radio also held a holstered .357 magnum revolver guaranteed to stop a grizzly bear.

  Or an intruder into the inner sanctum of America’s democracy.

  Jud stood with his back pressed against the wall. To his right was the main door with a red velvet rope dangling across its open width. The cold fireplace and mantel were to his left. A portrait of George Washington hung above the fireplace. The black eyes of the first president watched visitors wherever they stood. Whatever they did.

  The radio crackled in Jud’s ear: Guard Post 23, checking in, confirming all clear. Jud’s last scheduled check-in had been four minutes earlier: All clear, he’d reported.

  Security was tight, rigid with rules and procedures, option plans. That night, the men in charge of White House security, the uniformed officers such as Jud, the suit-and-tie agents of the Secret Service Protection Detail, stood ready but breathed easy: SEARCHLIGHT was in Florida. They didn’t need to worry about his being assassinated on turf they were responsible for securing. They didn’t need to worry about running into him during one of his late-night meanderings through the presidential complex. He often worked across the street in a hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building, drinking Scotch and drafting memos for his secretary to distribute during daylight hours. Even with all the presidential tracking systems and devices, in the middle of the night a dark-suited, tightly-knotted-tie, white-shirted SEARCHLIGHT would sometimes startle a White House guard with a sudden, silent, flitting-eyes appearance.

  “Scares the hell out of me,” one of the other guards told Jud as they dressed for work in the Security locker room that night. “Who does he think he is?”

  And Jud laughed.

  The light in the huge Oval Office was dim. Jud’s gaze followed the circle of the curved White House wall.

  To his left, past the door to the office of the appointments secretary, was a framed, giant color photograph of the earth taken from the moon. Then came the three French doors overlooking the South Lawn and the Rose Garden. The dark night shone through translucent, gauzy white inner drapes pulled closed across the glass. A table sat in front of the French doors, flanked by the American and presidential flags. The table held a pen and pencil set, a black bust of Abraham Lincoln, and a color photograph of Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding.

  The flags of the Armed Services stood in front of the wall beyond the French windows. Two years earlier, President Nixon and “the King,” Elvis Presley, nervously shook hands in front of those flags. They decried the scourge of drugs. The President arranged for Elvis to get a badge as an honorary federal narcotics cop and gave him presidential cuff links. Elvis gave Nixon a gun.

  Beyond the service flags and an arched alcove case of porcelain birds was the door to the office of the President’s personal secretary. Farther along the curved wall hung a presidential seal embroidered by the President’s oldest daughter, Julie. Next came the velvet-roped door.

  Then Jud pressed quietly against the shadowed wall.

  As quietly as he could. Fifteen months earlier, the Secret Service’s Technical Division had been entrusted by the President with the highly secret task of installing a covert, voice-activated tape-recorder system in the Oval Office. The White House already had a hidden taping system in the Cabinet Room down the hall from the Oval Office. Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered it installed when he was president, and it was activated by a switch in front of the president’s chair under the long oval table.

  Only a handful of people in the world were supposed to know about the new Nixon taping system, a handful that specifically did not include military groups who normally handled presidential communication systems. What Nixon wouldn’t learn until it was too late to affect his political survival was that there were two more covert taping systems in the Oval Office, systems that kept complete control of history’s record out of the hands of the man whose office this was that June night in 1972.

  Jud knew about the Oval Office’s three taping systems. He couldn’t be sure which ones were turned on, waiting to be activated by any sound other than rustle of air-conditioned atmosphere. Jud knew his survival depended on leaving no more of a trace of his work than absolutely necessary. He was quiet, so very quiet.

  The President’s desk was close to the French doors. A black phone sat on the desk’s left-hand corner. In the front center of the polished flat top was a silver cigar music box embossed with the presidential seal. When opened, the box played “Hail to the Chief.” Propped against a pen and pencil set was the green-bound schedule of the President’s day.

  The black leather executive chair had softened very little after three years of use, thought Jud, who during more than one late-night shift had sat in its comfort.

  The Red Phone, the secure-line phone instantly connecting the President to the machinery of nuclear Armageddon, waited in the lower right-hand desk drawer.

  A Dictaphone and tape recorder sat on a stand to the right of the President’s chair. A brown Samsonite attaché case initialed “RN” stood beside the Dictaphone table. Jud’s best time for picking the locks on the attaché case was nine seconds.

  His watch showed 11:02 P.M., June 16, 1972.

  The radio earphone crackled: Post 12 calling in his All clear, the Command Post Roger-ing back.

  A mile from the White House at the Watergate complex, an ex-CIA agent who was now employed by the Committee to Re-Elect the President was taping open the locks on doors leading into the building from the stairwell.

  In the Oval Office, Jud took an ordinary-looking pen flashlight from his shirt pocket. Jud pointed the flashlight at the President’s desk: nothing. The invisible ultraviolet light from Jud’s torch would have reflected a purple glow on the wood’s surface if the desk had been dusted with a powder designed to rub off on the hands and clothing of anyone who touched the desk.

  He glanced around the edge of the door, down the corridor beyond the velvet rope: no one.

  Quietly, one step at a time, he left the shadows, crossed toward the wall next to the door leading to the office of the President’s personal secretary. His flashlight made no purple glow on the wall. He pushed the secret button in the molding. A panel in the Oval Office’s wall slid open to reveal a safe whose existence was almost unknown. The light showed no powder on the safe.

  Unlike the five men who were at that moment in the process of the third burglary of the Watergate complex sponsored by the President’s team, Jud dared not wear surgeon’s gloves. A surprise inspection of the White House guard deta
il that turned up surgical gloves in Jud’s possession would spell his doom; the flashlight would pass any routine examination, and the lockpicks secreted in his ballpoint pen did not interfere with its writing. Jud covered his hand with his handkerchief to dial the combination that had taken him six separate nights of patient, fragmented effort to figure out.

  His radio crackled: Guard Post 4, checking in.

  The flashlight showed no purple glow from the contents of the safe.

  Dozens of memos, most of which Jud had seen before, most of them from Kissinger to the President. Some dated back to the early days of the President’s term, including TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE memos in which Kissinger bureaucratically knifed the secretary of state. One memo discussed the “madman” strategy of negotiation Kissinger was using with various communist powers. The strategy called for Kissinger to portray Nixon as maniacally out of control, which would theoretically make Kissinger’s pleas for the communists to concede certain diplomatic issues more compelling. The “madman” theory of diplomacy was popularized by Hitler in the Munich era of conciliation before fighting erupted in World War II—and had been analyzed in 1959 for Kissinger at Harvard by then-cold warrior Daniel Ellsberg. On top of the pile, Jud found a three-page “Eyes Only” memo from Kissinger to the President outlining strategies for dealing with Premier Chou En-lai that Kissinger planned to follow in his visit to China the next week.

  Infiltrate, Jud’s orders had been. Monitor. Report.

  He closed but did not lock the safe, closed the secret panel. Getting into the personal secretary’s office, photocopying the Chou En-lai memo, took three minutes. One more minute, and he was putting the original memo back in the Oval Office safe.