Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Still, Nixon was not optimistic. “The only two guys who can prove it are the source and Anderson,” the President told his advisors. While they could “bring Anderson in [to testify], I think everybody agrees that would be a fatal mistake—you can’t bring a newsman in [without generating a media backlash],” Nixon said. The most likely way to nail Anderson, Nixon thought, was “to prosecute this bum [Radford].” If convicted, perhaps the yeoman would then implicate Anderson to avoid prison. But unless Radford confessed that he “stole the Anderson papers,” any case against him would be strictly circumstantial. “We cannot prove it because we have no witness,” the President recognized. “The only witness is Anderson”—who, of course, was far too savvy to incriminate himself or his source: “We know he did it. We know no one else could’ve done it. But that cannot convict a man in a court of law.” To stop Anderson, Nixon instructed his aides, “you’ve gotta find something [else]” on him or “you just gotta invent something.”

  Vice President Agnew urged Nixon to introduce legislation to make it easier to imprison journalists who published classified documents. “One piece of information, revealed by a Jack Anderson” could “blow the cover of an important operative,” Agnew argued. The President was sympathetic but worried about the political fallout: “We can’t be in the business of prosecuting the press . . . prior to an election,” Nixon told his Vice President. “I can definitely assure [you], though, that if we survive, it will be done.” Agnew was glad to hear it. “Anderson [is] on television every day,” the Vice President lamented. “We’ve gotten lambasted on this issue.”

  For his part, the columnist loudly welcomed prosecution by the administration. Anderson believed he would defeat any criminal charges brought against him, and that a legal ruling in his favor would expand press freedom. He also understood that asking to be indicted made good theater and helped keep his name in the headlines. Perhaps, too, the muckraker thought a little reverse psychology might persuade the White House to back off. If so, he was mistaken.

  “I’d love to take that bastard Anderson” and prosecute him, the President reiterated.

  “Well,” Attorney General Mitchell replied, “if there’s any way we could do it, we would.”

  “I would,” Nixon emphasized.

  “Not with this one” case, Mitchell added, “but—”

  “Maybe find some others,” the President suggested.

  In the meantime, Haldeman argued, Anderson’s source had to be stopped from inflicting further damage. “I can see you can’t arrest him, you can’t prosecute him, you can’t take overt” action, Haldeman conceded, but “isn’t [there] something you can do to bottle him up?” Nixon agreed that the yeoman should be kept “under wraps” to avoid a public scandal: “I think he’s got to be told that a criminal offense hangs over him, that it’s going to hang over him . . . to scare the son of a bitch to death!”

  But the attorney general was concerned that “Jack Anderson and some of these friends that have gotten to Radford” are “telling him not to worry because he’s got the upper hand with all the information he has [about] the Joint Chiefs participating in this.” Indeed, the wily Anderson began using the news media to deliver precisely that message to the White House. “If my sources were identified, it would embarrass the administration more than it would me,” Anderson told the National Observer. “It would make a very funny story.” The columnist sent out similarly unmistakable threats during interviews with CBS News and the NBC Today show. “If the Government points a finger at my sources, they’re pointing a finger at themselves,” he warned The Washington Post. “If they want to finger them,” he repeated to The New York Times, “they’re going to wind up with bubble gum all over their faces.”

  In essence, Anderson was effectively blackmailing the President of the United States: if Nixon attempted to go after the newsman or his source for revealing the India-Pakistan papers, Anderson would reveal the far darker secret about the Pentagon espionage ring.

  The President’s men got the message. “Anderson would obviously know what [Radford] was doing, and how he was [spying on them],” the attorney general told the President. So “if you start opening up on Anderson—assuming you did make the case, turned [Radford], give him immunity and so forth—then Lord knows where this is going to lead to. . . . because he’s going to come out with a story about the military espionage ring. Nixon concurred: such a story by Anderson “blows the Joint Chiefs right out of the Pentagon, through the roof of the Pentagon.”

  The President realized his options were limited. “The real sad thing is that the real culprit is Anderson,” Haldeman said. “And we do not [do] a goddamn thing about him.”

  Ehrlichman proposed that Charles Colson, the hard-nosed White House aide, contact the columnist and “say to Anderson: ‘Look, we’ve got the goods on you. You’ve printed top-secret material. You’ve suborned a yeoman to theft. There are violations of federal statutes. And we’re [going to] forbear to prosecute you. But we just want you to know we know . . . You’ve made your fatal mistake and we’ve got you.’ ”

  Nixon liked the idea but suggested that the threat be delivered instead by Murray Chotiner, his take-no-prisoners political advisor who had wrestled with Anderson for two decades. Haldeman thought Chotiner a good choice because he was now technically a private consultant and not directly on the administration payroll. That “keeps it” away from the White House but “would give Anderson the worry without the certainty” that the President was behind it. Ehrlichman amplified on his plan. “Just have Murray come in and say, ‘Jack, I just think you ought to know—’ ”

  “ ‘—that they’ve got the goods on you,’ ” Haldeman interjected.

  “ ‘They’ve got the yeoman and—’ ” Ehrlichman added.

  “ ‘—he’s confessed,’ ” Nixon embellished. “ ‘He had a polygraph.’ ”

  The Oval Office erupted in laughter at the thought of finally getting Jack Anderson. But then the President had second thoughts. “The son of a bitch, Anderson,” Nixon realized, “he’ll be very likely to write that story . . . that ‘I was approached by Murray Chotiner and he tried to blackmail me.’ ” Which of course is exactly what Anderson would have done.

  The White House plan to blackmail Anderson—in retaliation for Anderson’s blackmailing the White House—was dropped.

  In any case, the President still had other blackmailers to contend with. Admiral Welander, for one, was now threatening to blow the military espionage case “out of the water” by implicating higher-ups in the spying if he was charged with wrongdoing. Admiral Moorer was potentially even more dangerous. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was an Alabama native and close friend of Governor George Wallace, whose presidential candidacy three years earlier had nearly cost Nixon the White House. With November’s election just ten months away, the President could not risk alienating right-wing voters by having a public falling-out with Moorer and Wallace.

  Attorney General Mitchell, who managed Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968 and would do so again in 1972, warned his boss that “if you pursued it by way of prosecution of Moorer or even a public confrontation,” it would directly pit “you against the Joint Chiefs.” The law-and-order prosecutor unabashedly advised a cover-up: “I think that the important thing is to paper this thing over.”

  “Hmmph!” the President snorted.

  But Nixon, always desirous of appearing tough, risked looking weak and ineffective if it came out that the Pentagon had spied on him. In an election year, the political fallout from such a public scandal could be devastating. In addition, disclosure of the military spy ring risked unraveling other administration scandals, especially the White House Plumbers’ secret criminal activity.

  The President pondered what to do. “If you go after Radford,” Defense Secretary Melvin Laird argued, “you have to go after everyone else” in the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was involved in the spying as well, with wholesale court-martial proceedings and a huge nati
onal scandal. Ehrlichman agreed: “I lost more sleep [agonizing] on what to do with this guy. And I have finally come to the conclusion that you can’t touch him.”

  Ultimately, Nixon came to the same conclusion: “The Joint Chiefs, the military [are] not to be viewed as our enemy. We cannot have it.” The President decided his advisors were right to recommend covering up the scandal: “[We] can’t let it get out.” Not that Nixon was happy about it. “See, what we’re doing here is, in effect, excusing a crime,” the Chief Executive realized. “So it’s a hell of a damn thing to do.”

  The final result, Haldeman wrote in his diary, was “a monumental hush-up all the way around” as the President’s aides followed his orders to “sweep it under the rug.” In effect, the military was able to cover up its espionage against the White House by blackmailing Nixon the same way Jack Anderson had.

  At a news conference, the President announced, “We have a lot of circumstantial evidence” about Anderson’s source, but it was not “adequate to take to court. You can be sure that the investigation is continuing.” In fact, it was just the opposite: no criminal investigation was under way even though the evidence of criminality—by the military’s spies, not Jack Anderson—was substantial.

  Kissinger, not surprisingly, was apoplectic: at the military’s spying on him, at the Anderson columns that exposed his duplicity, and at the failure of the White House to punish those responsible. By his own account, the national security advisor was “beside myself . . . indignant . . . [and] enraged” upon learning that the Pentagon had targeted him for espionage. “Moorer should be in jail,” Kissinger insisted. But Nixon dismissed the idea out of hand; it is “the most ridiculous thing I can think of,” he said, “just ridiculous!” What mattered wasn’t justice, the President argued, but damage control: “The main thing is to keep it under as close control as we can . . . We’ve really just got to keep the lid on it.” Kissinger literally stormed back and forth in the White House, shouting in anger about Nixon and the Joint Chiefs: “They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them!”

  The President tried to calm his volatile national security advisor. “You see, Henry, if you were to throw Moorer out now,” Nixon said, “the shit’s gonna hit the fan. And that’s gonna hurt us. Nobody else. We get blamed for it.” Besides, the President pointed out, there were also benefits to this strategy: “Henry, you gotta realize that for better or worse, Moorer is still the chairman of the Chiefs. You gotta deal with that. He will carry out what you want.”

  In other words, Nixon and Kissinger could now blackmail Moorer into supporting their policies just as he had effectively blackmailed them into covering up his espionage operation. So the President let Moorer know that “we had the goods” on him, Ehrlichman said. “After this, the admiral was preshrunk.” In subsequent weeks, the White House took advantage of the scandal to wrest concessions from the newly pliant chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Ironically, the Pentagon spying on the White House had boomeranged to Nixon’s benefit.

  Radford, too, had learned to wield blackmail to his advantage, threatening to “get counsel and call their bluff.” Federal investigators feared that “if Radford got a lawyer, we were through.” Defense Secretary Laird phoned the White House. “This damn yeoman [is] getting cockier than hell,” he warned. “Do you have a specific proposal for what to do with him?” Ehrlichman asked. “I’d send him someplace . . . where he’d be relatively innocuous,” but where we “could keep an eye on him,” Laird replied. Someplace where Radford would not have access to classified documents that could wind up in Jack Anderson’s hands. Ehrlichman agreed: Radford should be told that for “national security reasons, you’re not being prosecuted. But at the same time, you’re going to be under constant surveillance, and the first minute you step out of line, the roof is going to fall in on you” because “the Anderson thing will send you up forever.”

  Three days later, Radford received a phone call from the Pentagon informing him that he was being transferred to a navy base in Oregon. His family was given just a few hours to pack their belongings, so little warning that the yeoman had to rush to burn any remaining incriminating paperwork before a moving van arrived at their home.

  In the end, the President wrote in his memoirs, Radford was “a potential time bomb that might be triggered” at any moment and it was simply “too dangerous to prosecute the yeoman.” Pentagon investigator Stewart put it more bluntly: Radford had Nixon “by the balls.”

  It was a Washington merry-go-round of blackmail: Radford, Anderson, Welander, and Moorer could each expose the military spy operation if Nixon tried to go after them. The President in turn could prosecute each of the men if they dared go public about the scandal. The end result was an uneasy balance of mutually assured destruction. Meanwhile, Nixon blackmailed the Joint Chiefs into supporting policies they would have otherwise opposed. “Finding out what you can and using it to your advantage,” Radford said with disgust, “that’s what that cesspool was all about. Washington was nothing but a big fester[ing] sore.”

  In a rare moment of self-awareness, the President realized that it was his own secret scheming that had started it all. “Damn, you know, I created this whole situation—this, this lesion,” Nixon confessed. “It’s just unbelievable. Unbelievable.” But he soon reverted to blaming his adversaries for the problems of his own making. “There have been more back-channel games played in this administration than any in history,” the President conceded, but only “[be]cause we couldn’t trust the goddamn” bureaucracy.

  “The thing that disgusts me about this,” Ehrlichman said of the military spy ring, “if they’ll do that—”

  “What else are they doing?” Haldeman interjected.

  “Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup,” Nixon agreed.

  “The worst thing about it,” Haldeman pointed out the next day, “is that you start getting paranoid, and you start wondering about everything and everybody, and—”

  “I know,” the President affirmed.

  “—you figure you can’t—”

  “But don’t be too damn sure of anybody!” Nixon exclaimed. “Don’t be too damn sure about anybody!”

  10

  CAT AND MOUSE

  By January 1972, Jack Anderson’s source had been exiled to a military base in Oregon with the threat of criminal charges hanging over his head. As a result, President Nixon boasted, “there were no further leaks” about India-Pakistan.

  But Anderson continued his siege by publishing more classified government documents unrelated to India or Pakistan. On January 6, the newsman embarrassed the President while he met with Japan’s prime minister by exposing secret White House briefing papers that warned of potential Japanese rearmament. HAVE CHECKED OUR FILES AND FIND THAT ANDERSON ARTICLE CONTAINED ACCURATE QUOTES, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo cabled Washington. The Embassy was GREATLY DISTRESSED by the EXTENSIVE COVERAGE of Anderson’s story and warned that diplomatic initiatives might be JEOPARDIZED. The next week, Anderson published columns revealing “secret cables” about American duplicity in Cambodia, “classified cable traffic” on bickering between Israel and the United Nations, and “secret” administration plans to cut troops in Europe. “Congress and the American people should not have to get their information on such important questions through the newspapers,” Republican senator Clifford Case objected. According to a top CIA official, “If these security breaches continue, we will have to limit severely the distribution of sensitive intelligence information.”

  Still, Anderson’s security breaches continued. He revealed “secret cables from Saigon,” a “suppressed study” on wasted foreign aid, “classified reports” of global anti-Americanism, and “intelligence reports” about U.S. battle failures. “I continue to get documents,” Anderson announced, “and I’ll continue to publish them because I believe that it is in the public interest to do so.”

  The public interest was not the muckraker’s only motive. “I wanted to put out stuff from other
sources to muddy the waters,” Anderson later acknowledged, to camouflage the identity of his key informant, Yeoman Charles Radford. Legman Les Whitten spread word that the “Merry-Go-Round” now “had a great volume of material flowing in as a result of Anderson’s notoriety,” and a White House aide worried that “we might be in a for a real flood of disclosures of [a] damaging nature.” But Pentagon investigator W. Donald Stewart carefully tracked the latest Anderson columns and found that they were based on old documents that had already passed through Radford’s hands before he was transferred out of Washington. Stewart correctly concluded that the columnist was continuing “to publish data to make us believe we [had not caught] his source.” Anderson “milked these leaks for about three months,” Admiral Elmo Zumwalt said, “sometimes repeating quotes, sometimes fuzzing up that he had merged messages” from different records, to prevent the detection of his informant. Intelligence analysts meticulously dissected Anderson’s reporting and traced seventy-three of his columns to classified documents that Radford had handled. CIA director Richard Helms assured fellow spies that he had “established where Anderson got this group of papers” and “action has been taken to see that it doesn’t happen again . . . You [have my] assurance that this is not a running sore. It has been cauterized.”

  Once again, Anderson’s columns were more politically embarrassing than militarily sensitive. But in one case, the Nixon administration charged that the newsman jeopardized an important covert operation by reporting that the United States bugged “the most private conversations of Kremlin and other world leaders.” The columnist wrote that Pentagon eavesdropping established that Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin “is in poor health,” that President Nikolai Podgorny was serviced by a masseuse named Olga, and that General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev “sometimes drinks too much vodka and suffers from hangovers.” Anderson did not divulge that the American operation was code-named Gamma Gupy or, more important, that the information was gleaned from mobile Russian limousine phones: “For obvious security reasons,” he wrote in his column, “we can’t give a clue as to how it’s done.”