Back in Washington, Edgar took a remarkable step. He asked Andrew Tully, a journalist he trusted, to join him for lunch in his private dining room. ‘I have some things to say,’ he told Tully, ‘but I don’t want you to publish it until after I’m dead.’ Tully agreed, asked one question, then sat back and listened. The question was: ‘Is the President pressuring you to retire?’
‘Not anymore he’s not,’ Edgar replied. ‘I put the kibosh on those jaspers who want to get rid of me … The President asked me what thoughts I had about retirement and I said none, then I told him why. I told him he needed me around to protect him from those people around him. Some of those guys don’t know a goddamned thing about due process of law. They think they can get away with murder. I told the President I hoped I’d live long enough to keep those people from getting him into bad trouble.’
Edgar was scathing about Nixon’s advisers. ‘John Mitchell,’ he said, ‘he’s never even been in a courtroom. He’s not equipped to be Attorney General. Ehrlichman, Haldeman and [Ron] Ziegler [Nixon’s press spokesman]… they don’t know anything except how to sell advertising. That counsel, Dean – he doesn’t know law. I ignore the son of a bitch.’
Edgar spoke of men in ‘the President’s kindergarten’ who kept ‘coming up with half-baked schemes.’ He told how he had squashed the 1970 White House plan for a coordinated campaign against internal unrest. Then, with chilling prescience, he effectively predicted the Watergate disaster. ‘The President,’ he said, ‘is a good man. He’s a patriot. But he listens to some wrong people. By God, he’s got some former CIA men working for him that I’d kick out of my office. Someday that bunch will serve him up a fine mess.’
Whether or not Edgar still had any protective feelings toward Nixon, they were not reciprocated. ‘The hatred of Hoover by Nixon and his staff,’ said James McCord, ‘appeared to be becoming intense … My own experience at CREEP verified this … It was an open secret there that Nixon was out to get Hoover … by any means he possibly could.’
Within days of giving his secret interview to Tully, Edgar provoked the administration even further. A year earlier, against Edgar’s wishes, Attorney General Mitchell had approved secret FBI surveillance of a foreign embassy that the CIA regarded as essential. On February 3, 1972, a report reveals:
Hoover had advised that he was to testify in Congress and would advise the Congress that the installation in the [Chilean mission] was initiated at CIA request.
Edgar was threatening to expose domestic snooping, snooping the administration wanted continued. It fit the scenario painted by McCord, then regularly in touch with his contacts at the CIA and the FBI. ‘Nixon,’ he said, ‘planned to fire Hoover. Hoover learned of it and resolved that he would have to go to Congress with the facts of Nixon’s wiretapping of the news media, the National Security Council staff and of Ellsberg. This Nixon feared.’
The coverage Edgar objected to was discontinued. Edgar made no reference to it in his routine appearance before Congress’ Appropriations Committee, on March 2, 1972. Already, though, he was about to cross Nixon again. In late February, the columnist Jack Anderson had shaken the government with a story claiming the Republicans had accepted a huge cash donation from International Telephone and Telegraph as a payoff for government intervention in an antitrust suit against the company. The story was based on a memo apparently written by Dita Beard, an ITT lobbyist, and authenticated by Anderson before publication. Now, knowing Edgar detested Anderson, Nixon’s counsel John Dean went to see the Director. His mission – to have the Bureau prove the Beard memorandum was a forgery.
‘Hoover,’ Dean recalled, ‘was poised at the end of a long, polished conference table, waiting for me as if I were there to photograph him.’ Dean noticed Edgar was wearing perfume, then launched into his request. Edgar, all sweetness and light, agreed that Anderson, the journalist who had organized the raid on his garbage, was ‘the lowest form of human being to walk the earth … a muckraker who lies, steals … he’ll go lower than dog shit for a story.’ Certainly, he said, he would be happy to have the Bureau Laboratory examine the Beard memorandum.
A confident Dean concluded that the memo, so compromising to the government, would soon be exposed as a fake. He was wrong. Far from demolishing the document, the Bureau report concluded it was probably genuine. When Dean called Edgar’s office to bring pressure, Edgar exploded. ‘Call Dean right back,’ an aide remembers him saying. ‘Tell him I said for him to go jump in the lake!… This request is completely improper.’
Improper it was, but the President himself tried to intervene – by penning a personal note to Edgar. Still the Director refused to budge. Nixon, Colson told colleagues, was angrier than he had ever seen him. There was renewed talk of firing the Director, or at least of shifting him to a grand-sounding new post that carried no power.
At the height of the row, the President was embarrassed by a damning expose in Life magazine. It spelled out, in detail, how the White House had intervened to help the banker Arnholt Smith, one of Nixon’s best friends, and a bookmaker called John Alessio, another Nixon backer, to shake off corruption and tax charges. Edgar, Life reported, had used his personal influence to help defeat the White House moves and to see that Alessio faced trial. It was this, McCord believed from his White House contacts, that had really set Nixon at Edgar’s throat. And now it was all coming out.
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‘Nixon was determined to get rid of Hoover at the earliest opportunity after the 1972 election, and he wanted to supply no hostages that might impede the process.’
Henry Kissinger, former National Security Adviser
In late March 1972, Gordon Liddy sat closeted with the President’s adviser Charles Colson. When they finished talking, Colson picked up the phone. ‘Gordon Liddy,’ he told CREEP organizer Jeb Magruder, ‘can’t get a decision out of you people on an intelligence program. I don’t want to get into a debate of the merits … Let’s get on with it.’
The program at issue was the project code-named ‘Gemstone’ and it was about to be approved. This was Liddy’s brainchild, his response to a high-level White House request. Two months earlier, in the office of the Attorney General of the United States, he had explained his concept to John Mitchell, John Dean and Magruder.
Gemstone, Liddy suggested, should include electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Convention, including a chase plane to intercept radio-telephone communications; break-ins to obtain and photograph documents; kidnapping teams to capture radical leaders and smuggle them, drugged, to a safe house in Mexico; mugging squads to beat up demonstrators; prostitutes to lure Democratic politicians to a specially rigged yacht, there to be filmed having sex; and sabotage of the airconditioning in the Convention hall. It was all to cost around $1 million.
Liddy’s superiors did not fire him out of hand for proposing such a scheme. They merely sent him back to the drawing board, with orders to ‘tone the plan down a little.’ The next version of Gemstone, which concentrated on surveillance, wiretapping and surreptitious photography, was better received. Several targets were discussed, one of them the office of the Democratic National Committee. Though there would be no go-ahead until April, the die had been cast for the break-ins at the Watergate.
In the weeks that followed, Liddy and Howard Hunt ran around the country pursuing harebrained schemes. They flew to Los Angeles with orders to snatch damaging documents that would ‘blow [Democratic hopeful Senator] Muskie out of the water.’ The plan aborted. Sporting a red wig, Hunt rushed to Colorado to persuade ITT lobbyist Dita Beard to deny authorship of the memo that, according to columnist Jack Anderson, proved Republican corruption. Then, around March 24, Hunt and Liddy had lunch at the Hay Adams Hotel, just across the street from the White House, with a former CIA doctor. Their mission this time was an operation to ‘stop’ Anderson – perhaps by killing him.
The columnist had aroused the fury of the Nixon administration time after time, publishing more than seventy articles based
on intelligence sources. He was already, illegally, under CIA surveillance. Hunt, himself a former CIA officer reported to have been involved in plots to assassinate foreign leaders, told Liddy that Anderson had finally gone too far. As a result of one of his columns, he asserted, a key U.S. intelligence source abroad had been fatally exposed.
Hunt later told associates that the order to kill Anderson came from a ‘senior White House official.’ Liddy claimed the idea as his own. The man said to have admitted to one past killing had – by his own account – recently acquired a CIA 9 mm parabellum pistol, ‘for use in the event Bud Krogh or other of my White House superiors tasked me with an assassination.’
In the paneled luxury of the Hay Adams dining room, Hunt, Liddy and the ‘retired’ CIA physician discussed the possibilities. Should Anderson be killed in a staged car accident? Should he become the victim of a fatal mugging? Or should they try ‘Aspirin Roulette’ and plant poison pills in his medicine cabinet?
The CIA had been hatching such plans for years. Its Technical Services Division had produced botulism-injected cigarettes to kill President Nasser of Egypt, a poisoned handkerchief to do away with General Kassem of Iraq, a chemical to be smeared on the toothbrush of Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba, gelatine capsules and a booby-trapped ballpoint pen to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro. While none of these plots came to fruition, governmental murder by poison had been established as a concept in the secret world.1
‘I was willing to obey an order to kill Jack Anderson,’ Liddy wrote later, ‘… this killing would not be retributive but preventive.’ Whichever method was to be used, he and Hunt decided the plot should include exiled Cubans – as had the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and as would the Watergate operation. Liddy was to be disappointed. After arranging to obtain a poison that would leave no traces, Hunt was told the plan to kill the columnist had been called off. The pair resumed work on the nefarious schemes that would lead to Watergate.
Some believe Watergate was only the tip of the iceberg. During the Nixon administration, unidentified intruders invaded the homes and offices of numerous people whom the administration considered to be its ‘enemies.’ There were at least a hundred such break-ins, all apparently politically motivated, all unsolved. Radicals and foreign diplomats deemed to be subversive were regular targets. But so were respected reporters. There was a break-in at the home of then CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather in April 1972, and later at the office of his colleague Marvin Kalb. Tad Szulc, a thorn in the Nixonian flank, was raided too. So were prominent politicians – Democratic Party Treasurer Robert Strauss in 1972, Senator Lowell Weicker the following year. And there may have been an even more famous victim – J. Edgar Hoover.
Some of the victims of the mysterious break-ins possessed documents thought to be compromising to the Nixon regime. Edgar, more than any other potential target, had knowledge of a whole range of sins and an unknown quantity of documentary proof.
A year after Watergate, Mark Frazier, a young reporter working in Washington, was to pick up an intriguing lead. Three sources, he learned, had given affidavits to the Senate Watergate Committee referring to two break-in operations at Edgar’s home in Rock Creek Park. They were, allegedly, ‘directed by Gordon Liddy.’
In the welter of news arising from Watergate, Frazier was unable to get the story published in a Washington paper. Instead, it ran in a university publication, The Harvard Crimson. The article drew on interviews with a source on the Watergate Committee, with a ‘past associate of Howard Hunt’ and with Felipe DeDiego, a Cuban who worked with Hunt and Liddy on both the raid against Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the first of the two Watergate raids.
Edgar had been the target of two operations, according to these sources. A first break-in attempt, in ‘late winter of 1972,’ was designed to ‘retrieve documents that were thought to be used as potential blackmail against the White House.’ It failed, but was followed by a second, successful break-in. ‘This time,’ Frazier reported, ‘whether through misunderstanding or design, a poison of the thiophosphate genre was placed on Hoover’s personal toilet articles.’
Thiophosphate is a compound used in insecticides, highly toxic to human beings if taken orally; inhaled or absorbed through the pores of the skin. Ingestion can result in a fatal heart seizure and can be detected only if an autopsy is performed within hours of death.
Former staff members of both the Watergate Committee and the Special Prosecution Force have recalled being told of operations against Edgar’s house. The files of the Prosecution Force reflect an inquiry to the FBI about ‘possible burglaries’ at his home. Former Force attorney Nathaniel Akerman remembered the matter as ‘something that certainly didn’t fall into the nut category.’2
Gordon Liddy has denied knowledge of any break-in at Edgar’s house. Hunt, when contacted for this book, said curtly it was ‘a matter of total disinterest to me.’ Nixon’s former Chief of Staff, Haldeman, however, accepted that something of the kind may have happened. ‘I have to concede the possibility,’ he said.
Watergate burglar Felipe DeDiego, who later claimed ignorance of the Hoover break-ins, was interviewed by Frazier twice in 1973. At first he said he knew about the operation and hoped soon to be able ‘to talk about everything.’ Then, questioned again, he withdrew his comments. At home in Florida, however, he told Dade County State’s Attorney Richard Gerstein that he had information on ‘other burglaries of a political nature.’3
Another of the Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis, said that DeDiego told him about the Hoover break-ins immediately after Edgar’s death. ‘Felipe told me about it,’ he said. ‘I suspected the CIA was behind it. I told him, “I guess our friends probably wanted to go over there and see what kind of documents Hoover had stashed away.” Felipe laughed and said, “That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous …” And we didn’t talk about it anymore.’
Sturgis admitted that the burglars were active in Washington earlier than emerged from the official Watergate investigation. Asked if he himself was involved in the Hoover break-ins, he hedged. ‘I’m not saying yes to my involvement. Let me say “no” to that. It opens up a can of worms.’
*
One day in early April 1972, Edgar had his usual lunch at his usual spot – grapefruit and cottage cheese salad in a dim corner of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. With him were Clyde and Thomas Webb, the trusted attorney and FBI veteran whom Edgar had long ago recommended to serve Clint Murchison. They listened, taken aback, as Edgar talked about his struggles with President Nixon.
Edgar was tired now. Weeks earlier, when he had told reporter Andrew Tully about Nixon’s ‘kindergarten,’ he had paused and closed his eyes. ‘I’m getting old,’ he sighed. ‘I know that. Hell, even I can’t live forever.’
Sometime earlier, Washington plastic surgeon Gordon Bell had surgically removed a small skin cancer from Edgar’s face. ‘He was a big baby,’ Dr Bell’s widow recalled, ‘a classic hypochondriac. He had a great fear of surgery, and Clyde Tolson stood beside him and did everything a female would do to console him. Hoover made Clyde look at what we were injecting, and said, “I don’t want you injecting any truth serum.” Afterwards, he brought us copies of his books with flowery inscriptions. “You know,” my husband said then, “the man’s losing his mind.”’
On another occasion, Clyde phoned the doctor in the early hours of the morning. ‘He said Mr Hoover had suffered a bad fall,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘We opened up our office and they came in. Hoover had gashed his forehead and an eyebrow – to the bone. I would say they’d been drinking. My husband, who had a dry wit, turned to Clyde and said, “Next time you hit your boss, you should try to miss the eyebrow.” Clyde got so upset that he left the room. People don’t fall at home and gash themselves every day, and my husband gave Hoover a lecture and told him it was time to start making allowances for his age.’
For months past, Edgar had spent much of his time in the office staring out the window, as the girders of the new F
BI building rose, very slowly, across the street. He kept a photo album of it on his desk, which aides updated constantly. ‘At the rate it is going up,’ he would say, ‘none of us will be around by the time it is finished.’
Many of ‘us’ were already gone. Of his oilmen friends, Billy Byars had died in 1965, Clint Murchison in 1969, and Sid Richardson was long gone. The previous fall, looking unsteady himself, Edgar had buried the old classmate he had been close to in the early days at the Bureau, Frank Baughman. Baughman was one of the few who still called Edgar by the old nickname, Speed. Two months earlier, Walter Winchell had died of cancer in Los Angeles. Edgar had not bothered to go to the funeral.
Others were failing fast. Lewis Rosenstiel had suffered a stroke. Clyde had been in the hospital again with heart problems. Edgar himself was talking about God more than usual. ‘For me,’ he told a writer for an Evangelist magazine, ‘Jesus is a living reality … I know that I can count on our Redeemer.’ Edgar had recently made his last will, leaving almost his entire fortune to Clyde.
In late April, when Cartha DeLoach saw him at a Hearst Newspapers lunch in New York, Edgar seemed feisty enough. Roy Cohn, his protege from the McCarthy days, was there, too. He thought the Director looked well, younger than his seventy-seven years. ‘I had a checkup and everything is fine,’ Edgar said. ‘If I retired, I’d fall apart and rot away. That’s what happens when you quit. I’m staying.’
There was another reason to hang on. ‘You’ve been through the same type of persecution,’ he told Cohn. ‘My time had to come. But I’ve got the bums on the run. And I’m staying right where I am.’
Back in Washington, Edgar dined at the Cosmos Club and attended the Saturday racing at Pimlico as usual. On Sunday, April 30, he drank martinis with neighbors across the street, pottered about in the garden and watched ‘The FBI’ on television.
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