Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Ehrlichman delegated the critical assignment to Plumbers’ co-chief David Young, who “is hounding this one for us,” a White House aide reported the next day in a memo: “The Anderson article . . . reveals an incredible leak” and authorities are “making a mammouth [sic] effort to track down the culprit.” Pentagon investigator W. Donald Stewart, who had unsuccessfully tried to unearth other Anderson informants, also joined the case. The likelihood of pinpointing the columnist’s source seemed remote; a federal report estimated that more than three hundred officials in the State Department alone—as well as many more in the White House, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency—“had access to the documents involved.” The CIA blew up freeze-frame images from Anderson’s televised interviews to try to trace the secret memos that the columnist waved at news conferences, but he had carefully removed from the papers any telltale signs that might expose his informant.

  Nevertheless, investigators soon got a lucky break. It turned out that only five copies had been made of one of the classified memos quoted in the “Merry-Go-Round,” and they could be easily traced. Instead of hundreds of possible culprits, the list of potential Anderson sources now narrowed to a handful. Investigators quickly settled on a chief suspect: Navy yeoman Charles Radford, a gangly twenty-seven-year-old typist-stenographer who turned out to be a fellow Mormon and social friend of Anderson, and who had recently been passed over for a promotion. Assigned to the sensitive liaison office between the National Security Council run by Kissinger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Radford had top-secret security clearance and shuttled back and forth between the White House and Pentagon with some of the most classified documents in the government, including all that Anderson had just published. In the words of Stewart, “no newsman could have ever hoped to have a single source more centrally located.”

  Exactly how many records Radford gave Anderson may never be known; terrified of criminal prosecution, the sailor steadfastly maintained his innocence even under oath. But the evidence against him was overwhelming. Radford was sympathetic to India because he had served there as both a Mormon missionary and as a clerk in the U.S. embassy, where he befriended many locals. The yeoman also met two visiting American tourists in New Delhi’s Mormon church: Orlando and Agnes Anderson, Jack’s parents. When Radford was transferred to Washington, the Andersons invited him to supper at their son’s home. The reporter quickly discovered that his parents’ new friend “had easy access to Kissinger’s office. Suddenly I began to view our dinner guest as the main course.” Jack began cultivating Radford, and their wives started taking shopping trips together, bonding over their mutual interest in tracing Mormon genealogy. The impressionable young sailor was dazzled by the muckraker’s celebrity. Anderson gently coaxed the navy clerk into confiding his misgivings about the temperamental Kissinger, whose tantrums Radford regularly witnessed at work. The yeoman thought Kissinger had an “animus toward India” that was “irrational” and that the secret American tilt toward Pakistan was “very hypocritical, very two-faced.” Radford was particularly concerned that rushing a nuclear naval fleet to the Bay of Bengal put the United States “on the verge of another war” in Asia—until, he said, “Jack’s column stopped it dead. His one single act there was actually the finger in the dike that stopped the flood.”

  On December 12, the night before Anderson’s first India-Pakistan column was published, Jack and Olivia Anderson treated Chuck and Tonne Radford to dinner at the Empress, a Chinese restaurant located just a few blocks from the White House. (The Empress also happened to be Henry Kissinger’s favorite Washington eatery. Fortunately for Radford, the national security advisor did not catch him there with Anderson that night.) Less than twelve hours later, millions of copies of Anderson’s first India-Pakistan exposé rolled off the printing presses of newspapers around the world. “Boy, the shit hit the fan,” Radford recalled. “It was like somebody had just stirred up an ant’s nest because people were scurrying all over trying to cover their tracks.” An officemate who knew of Radford’s friendship with Anderson urged the navy stenographer to sever his ties with the journalist. “If people don’t trust me by now,” Radford replied, “breaking off my relationship with Jack Anderson won’t help.” The yeoman was soon summoned for a private meeting with his commanding officer, Admiral Robert Welander.

  “Radford, did you give my memo to Jack Anderson?” Welander asked.

  “No, sir,” Radford replied, “I didn’t.”

  The yeoman’s supervisor didn’t believe him but kept a poker face so as not to alarm Radford further. The admiral wondered what other documents might also be published in the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” After all, he realized that his typist had access to papers “of ten times more consequence than anything that’s been leaked out in the Anderson articles” so far. Welander reported his suspicions to his superiors, including Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who believed that Radford “became a crusader against those who were attacking his beloved India and that Jack Anderson took advantage of and exploited his attitude.” Overnight, Pentagon security guards changed the locks on thirteen file cabinets filled with classified documents in Radford’s office. The next day, the yeoman was relieved of duty.

  On December 16, investigators began several days of grueling interrogations of Radford, including four lengthy polygraph exams. “We decided we should talk generally to get him to relax and then jump around—creating a sense of tension and pressure and then backing off,” White House aide David Young said. The sailor was cross-examined in detail about his relationship with Anderson and his whereabouts, hour by hour, during the previous week. “I was very suspicious” of the polygraph, Radford recalled, “but felt that I had no alternative and that I had to do it. I felt that if I refused, that would make me look even guiltier.” The navy clerk denied providing documents to Anderson but displayed an “extreme amount of general nervous tension” and was “emotionally distraught” under questioning, investigators reported. “He was quite nervous, swallowed a bit hard at the beginning, and very, very seldom looked anyone in the eye.” According to White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Radford’s “polygraph makes clear that he did it.”

  Pentagon investigator Stewart was convinced that at long last he had caught “the son of a bitch that’s giving everything out to Anderson.” The rough-hewn gumshoe repeatedly cursed at the stenographer and called Anderson a “bastard” and a “traitor.” Stewart said that Radford and Anderson “could do time” for their “clear-cut violations” of the Espionage Act. The security agent also drew up elaborate contingency plans to arrest the two men if they tried to flee the country and suggested obtaining a search warrant to seize the columnist’s notes and documents to use as evidence to prosecute him. “Anderson was taunting us,” Stewart raged, “flaunt[ing] stolen classified material in his possession on television, exhibiting classified stamps and reading excerpts from the material in an effort to ridicule the classified subject matter . . . Vital security matters were in Jack Anderson’s hands and he had become the sole judge of what would be made public.” The newsman “made the enemy aware” of U.S. military secrets, Stewart added, divulging “more devastating security information [than Daniel] Ellsberg could ever hope to do.”

  After his first, bruising interrogation, Radford returned home on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “I was afraid I was going straight to prison,” he recalled. “I felt like I’d have a knock at the door and be whisked away in the middle of the night and I wouldn’t see my family again.” His wife called the Andersons, who then rushed over to the Radfords’ house that evening. “We can’t talk here,” the journalist warned, because of the likelihood the government was listening. “Let’s get in my car.” In the dark, the two men used a flashlight to search Anderson’s vehicle for eavesdropping equipment—“under the seats, under the dashboard, behind the steering wheel, in the trunk, underneath the car and around the gas tank,” Radford remembered. Once the auto passed
inspection, the two climbed inside and Anderson drove the sailor around the streets of Washington, keeping a wary lookout to see if they were being followed.

  The columnist listened quietly as Radford filled him in on the government’s ongoing probe. The yeoman feared his military career was now over and worried how he would make a living. Anderson reassured him, offering to use his connections to help Radford get a new job to support his family. More crucially, Anderson coached him to simply deny that he had leaked the classified documents in the first place. “I won’t tell them anything,” the reporter vowed, “so the only way they will know is if you tell them.” As long as Radford stood firm, the government could never demonstrate that he was Anderson’s source, because there were no other witnesses. “The way they get you is to get you to confess small things and go from there,” the muckraker warned. “Don’t tell anyone anything. They can’t prove it.” Instead, Anderson advised, “attack the lie detector. Attack those who would attack you. Discredit them.” The newsman recounted the hard-won knowledge that a quarter century of Washington combat had taught him: a good offense always makes the best defense.

  In the days that followed, Anderson and his wife made repeated trips to visit the Radfords at their home. Grateful for the moral support, the stenographer calmed down. “Because of my talking with Jack, and actually knowing that I had somebody that was in my corner, I didn’t feel as vulnerable,” Radford said later. “Jack was very helpful with his comments and his direction.”

  The yeoman followed Anderson’s advice and steadfastly denied leaking him classified files. During interviews with federal investigators, Radford claimed that he “could not recall what specifically precipitated Anderson’s invitation” to dinner the day before his first India-Pakistan article was published but allowed that “it was rather funny that Anderson called on such short notice.” Radford implausibly insisted that on the night after his first traumatic polygraph interrogation, he did not even bother to talk to the columnist, who drove more than forty miles round-trip to Radford’s house around midnight—because, the yeoman claimed, it was past his bedtime and the discussion only involved Mormon genealogy. “You are going to hurt a lot of other people if you don’t come clean and tell us why you gave these papers to Anderson,” Agent Stewart growled. “I have nothing to add on my own,” Radford replied. “I’ll be glad to answer your questions.”

  The next day, the Pentagon investigator tried again: “I am a cop and I am going to get to the bottom of this, and we are going to find out what happened [so you better] tell us all that you know right now.” Radford’s response was nearly identical to his earlier one: “I will be glad to answer any questions which you might have, but I really don’t have anything else to say.” Stewart tried insulting the navy clerk: “Don’t you realize that there is only one reason why Anderson has been friendly to you—to cultivate you as a source?” Radford replied, “I think I would know if I were being cultivated. I’ve been around long enough to realize that.” Besides, he added, “all you have is circumstantial evidence.” Stewart called the well-mannered typist “undoubtedly one of the cleverest individuals I have ever interviewed” and complained that he “was trying to ‘out con’ the investigators.” The government sleuth correctly surmised that “Anderson told him if he ‘confessed’ he would go to jail.”

  On the evening of December 21, President Nixon received a personal briefing on the Anderson investigation. The conversation was secretly recorded on Oval Office audiotapes.

  Ehrlichman explained that investigators “were able to pinpoint that there was really only one place in the whole federal government where all of those documents” that Anderson published “were available. That was here in the Joint Chiefs of Staff liaison office” right inside the White House.

  “Jesus Christ,” the President exclaimed.

  Ehrlichman went on to describe Radford’s role in the operation over the past thirteen months: “He has access to everything from State, the Pentagon, National Security Council, everywhere else. And he just xeroxed this material for Anderson. There’s no question.”

  “Can I ask how in the name of God do we have a yeoman having access to documents of that type?” the President inquired.

  “Well, he’s the key man,” Ehrlichman replied. “He’s the fellow that, that typed” up the secret memos in the first place, and as a result had access to “contingency plans, political agreements, troop movements, behind-the-scenes politics, security conferences going on between our government and foreign governments . . . This sailor is a veritable storehouse of information.”

  Nixon marveled at the betrayal: “If you can’t trust a yeoman in the navy, I don’t know goddamn who can you trust?”

  Attorney General John Mitchell informed the President that “the yeoman served in India. He married his wife in India.”

  “Oh, he’s pro-Indian?” Nixon asked. “Well, then, he did it.”

  The President added that “this young son of a bitch” must also have been Anderson’s source of classified documents about Vietnam earlier in the year: “They had to all come from him! I don’t mean just this but I mean previous” secret files as well. Ehrlichman assured the President that the Plumbers were “running down now all these columns for the last thirteen months to determine whether or not there’s any relationship” to Radford.

  But despite their certainty that Radford was Anderson’s informant, Nixon’s advisors cautioned the President that the deceptively innocent-looking yeoman was proving a slippery target. “He handled his interrogation . . . just the way a pro[fessional] con man would,” Mitchell noted, “very cool. [He said], ‘Well, this is all circumstantial.’ ”

  “Yes,” Ehrlichman agreed, “he’s very bright and very precise and [said] . . . ‘I’m here to answer any questions you gentlemen have.’ . . . This guy was trained.” Obviously, by Jack Anderson himself.

  It all reminded the President of Alger Hiss, whose testimony was also “too perfect,” Nixon believed. The President paraphrased how Hiss tried to finesse his answers to investigators a quarter century earlier: “ ‘I can’t, to the best of my recollection, recall.’ ‘To the best of my recollection, I do not remember.’ ” “This guy is exactly the same,” Ehrlichman observed.

  The next day, the President switched from worrying that Radford was another Hiss to a more contemporary foe. “He’s another Ellsberg,” Nixon feared. “That’s the thing that concerns me.” “Except that he probably knows a hell of a lot more than Ellsberg,” Haldeman replied. “Yeah,” the President concurred, “he really knows more . . . because he’s been in on hard-core things . . . In terms of [other] documents that have been leaked . . . we can’t be sure for the past thirteen months whether this son of a bitch didn’t do it!”

  The real problem, Nixon said, wasn’t Radford but the columnist who had befriended him: “This son of a bitch Anderson really knows how to work us.”

  “He does,” Ehrlichman agreed. “He’s a master.”

  “He has more people around this government than, I guess, anybody has ever had,” Mitchell said. “Far more than Drew Pearson ever had.”

  “Got more out of ’em,” too, the President observed. “I think we better check everybody that Anderson knows and talks to.”

  “It’s the hidden guys like this, who bootleg stuff to him, that we just stumble onto occasionally, that we’ve got to root out,” Ehrlichman added.

  The more Nixon thought about Anderson’s source, the angrier he became. “That Radford,” the President exclaimed, “the culprit who turned this crap over to Anderson . . . goddammit, leaking it, that son of a bitch should be shot! He has to be shot!”

  The next day, Ehrlichman proposed a less violent way to handle the yeoman: dispatching a trusted high-ranking Mormon officer who worked at the Pentagon to try to extract a confession from Radford, including “whether Anderson has been blackmailing him or paying him.” The designated Mormon official agreed to warn the sailor that his conduct was “gross in the e
yes of the Church” and that he must “make a clean breast” of his sins and “cooperate fully” with the government. But Nixon vetoed the plan. “Those Mormons” who worked with Radford, the President decided, “are really turning out to be a bunch of scabs.”

  Initially, the President believed that Anderson must have bribed Radford to get him to leak classified documents. But Nixon soon came up with a more astounding explanation: homosexuality—a double-barreled blast that would simultaneously discredit both the obstreperous columnist and his source. The President concluded that “there is no apparent motive for this fellow turning these papers over to Anderson” unless they were gay lovers, Ehrlichman said.

  It was a ludicrous notion on its face. Between them, Anderson and Radford had fathered seventeen children and each would remain married to the same wife for more than forty years. As members of the Mormon church—“one of the more puritanical religions on the planet,” as Anderson put it—the two men were not only teetotalers, they did not smoke or even drink caffeine, let alone have homosexual trysts. “It’s comical,” Radford said later of Nixon’s homosexual explanation. “It’s embarrassing.”

  Nonetheless, on the evening of December 21, the President phoned Ehrlichman to inquire: “Is [the] yeoman [a] deviate?” Ehrlichman wrote the question down in his calendar, along with Nixon’s recommendation: “Further interrogate.” Nixon also contacted White House aide David Young to see “if there was any homosexual angle in Radford’s relationship with Anderson.” Young replied that “Radford was somewhat effeminate in his manner” and the President “directed that this be explored—especially in regard to Anderson.” The next morning, in an Oval Office meeting with top advisors, Nixon announced that “after sleeping on it,” he had decided to instruct investigators to find out whether the relationship between the columnist and the yeoman was, as Nixon indelicately put it, “sexual up the ass.”