Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Who was doing the spying? Anderson had irritated so many different branches of the government—the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, the IRS—that the reporter had trouble narrowing the list of possible suspects. Indeed, it did not even occur to Anderson that the CIA was behind the surveillance because he naïvely believed it was following the law that restricted the agency only to foreign operations. Instead, Anderson focused on Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, who was conducting his own investigation of the columnist, separate from the CIA probe. Anderson decided to give Mardian “a taste of his own medicine.” The muckraker assigned a college intern to track the prosecutor the same way Anderson was being shadowed. “This junior reporter tailgated Mardian wherever he went, staying conspicuously at his heels, occasionally whipping out a notebook and dramatically scrawling notes in full view of his prey,” Anderson recalled. “If there is garbage on the doorstep,” the intern was told, “make sure Mardian sees you going through the garbage.” The assistant attorney general contacted the FBI and the ubiquitous Mark Felt quickly discovered that the culprit was Jack Anderson. It was the “same as going through [FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s] trash,” Felt told Mardian. The columnist explained his strategy to another reporter: “If Mardian’s investigating me, I’m going to investigate him.”

  Eventually, Anderson traced the license plates of the vehicles that had been tailing him and discovered that he was being tracked by the CIA, not the Justice Department. So the muckraker decided to turn the tables on the intelligence agency in a similar manner. “What the CIA didn’t know,” Anderson said, “was that I had my own trained spooks at home, nine of them”—Anderson’s children—“plus their sundry teenage friends, all with time on their hands and spring fever.”

  Anderson turned his “Katzenjammer Kids” loose on the CIA operatives. “We drove around to where they were,” Anderson’s son Kevin, then fifteen years old, remembered. “We pulled up behind them and blocked them in” with our cars. “We started taking pictures and they put on their sunglasses and pulled up newspapers to block their faces.” Twelve-year-old Tanya Anderson went “right up to the window” of a CIA surveillance van to take photos. “They called in another car,” she said, and it came “screeching behind us, trying to pin us in.” So her sister, eighteen-year-old Laurie, drove “over the lawn and jumped the curb and the next thing you know we’re in a high-speed chase through the neighborhood.” Tanya then climbed in the backseat and started taking more photos of the CIA spies with her 35-millimeter camera. “When they saw me taking the pictures, they screeched off,” she said. “They’d been totally busted,” Kevin recalled gleefully.

  The Anderson children reveled in the excitement. They dressed up to look like their father—complete with overcoat, hat, and briefcase—to lead the CIA agents on wild-goose chases. On one occasion, the teenagers all gathered together and suddenly climbed into several different parked cars and “took off in a hurry in different directions” all at once for no reason “other than to harass these guys,” Kevin remembered. Even Anderson’s wife, Olivia, joined in. “It got to the point where sometimes you just flashed your lights” at the spies, “and we’d all go by and wave at them,” she said. “I was having as much fun as the kids were.”

  The CIA operatives were not amused. “On 27 March 1972 at 0915 hours, an unidentified female . . . approached two of the surveillance vehicles . . . [and] took photographs from her vehicle of both surveillance vehicles,” officers reported. “All units were withdrawn from the area.” Six days later, while following the Anderson family to church, the undercover spies noticed that “two young females seemed to be staring at the surveillance vehicles and one surveillance unit reported that the two females waved at them.” The operatives deduced that this was “a further indicator” that the Anderson family “may be becoming ‘surveillance conscious.’ ” The next day, CIA spooks observed a woman “copying down the license number of the surveillance vehicle.” Intelligence officials decided to end the operation in Anderson’s neighborhood but continue spying on his downtown office. The columnist now “appeared extremely ‘tail conscious,’ ” agents noted. “He kept looking around, sideways, behind his shoulder, and his gait was slower than usual.”

  By April, the CIA gave up: “The surveillance operation failed to establish the existence and/or identity of any individual who might have been supplying Anderson with classified government data,” analysts concluded.

  Anderson lampooned the “CIA farce” in his column. “Trained to skulk around the bazaars of the Middle East or the backstreets of Moscow snooping for intelligence to make the world safe for democracy,” he wrote, “my CIA shadows were dunking donuts and sipping coffee in a church parking lot in suburban Washington and taking pictures of my yard full of bicycles.” Anderson joked that “all those cops back there, tripping over their night sticks but gaining on me,” had succeeded in keeping his “menopausal quirks and temptations . . . on the straight and narrow.” The muckraker delighted in recounting how his children “outclassed” the CIA “in style and stealth, if not in electronics . . . The CIA could no longer stand this game of cat and mouse, especially when the mice were having so much fun.” His taunt to the intelligence agency: “Watch out, CIA! The kids on my block are ready for you.”

  “It was high, mocking theater, and Anderson won the publicity war hands down,” a Washington Post journalist wrote. “But at the time, there was no guarantee he would win his battles with the Powers That Be, and Anderson showed real nerve, even bravery, in his zealous crusades against the outrages of Nixon and his minions.”

  In truth, Anderson actually took the CIA surveillance quite seriously, and filed a lawsuit against the government for violating his privacy. As a result, the CIA was ordered to release many of its files and allow Anderson’s lawyers to question intelligence operatives under oath. In turn, CIA director Richard Helms was forced to testify that he had personally authorized the spying even though it was “not general policy” for the CIA to investigate reporters. Helms stated that “so many” classified documents had “fallen into the hands of Mr. Anderson’s office” that he “felt it incumbent” to try to plug the leaks. Indeed, according to the CIA’s security director, Helms requested that surveillance reports on Anderson “be brought to his attention immediately on a daily basis.” Who was behind such a high-level decision to have the CIA violate the law? “I don’t recall any instructions or injunctions from the White House” to target Anderson, Helms testified. “I don’t recall ever having discussed [it] with President Nixon.” “Bullshit!” Anderson later exclaimed in an uncharacteristic burst of profanity. “It was clear he was lying,” said the columnist, who sat in on the Helms deposition.

  The muckraker was not alone in his belief that the Nixon White House was behind the illegal spying. Such surveillance, one author observed, was “the sort of operation that would have been anathema to the usually cautious Richard Helms.” Certainly President Nixon had a stronger motive to stalk his longtime nemesis than did the CIA director, who had a reputation for prudence and aversion to publicity. To those who knew Helms, it was unthinkable that he would take the risk of such a politically dangerous and unlawful assignment without the President’s personal authorization.

  In any case, the CIA surveillance was more effective than the government realized. Years later, when Anderson reporter Les Whitten obtained a copy of his CIA file under the Freedom of Information Act, he was shocked to see a surveillance photo of himself with one of his best sources. Yet administration sleuths never understood what their own files revealed. “These guys were nothing but a bunch of cheap, lousy, unimaginative, dumb thugs!” Whitten exclaimed. Indeed, the fact that Anderson’s teenage children were so easily able to thwart the covert operatives charged with protecting American interests only underscored the larger incompetence of the CIA, whose repeated intelligence failures would continue into the twenty-first century.

  In the meantime, President Nixon’s fury over his failu
re to stop Anderson intensified. And as the muckraker continued his exposés, the White House escalated its plans for retaliation.

  11

  BROTHERS

  Richard Nixon and Jack Anderson shared more than mutual contempt, hardscrabble childhoods, and slash-and-burn histories. Both were also shadowed by jealous ne’er-do-well younger brothers who created embarrassment trying to cash in on the reflected glory of their siblings’ fame and power.

  Donald Nixon first came to public attention during the disastrous Howard Hughes loan scandal of 1960. Nearly a decade later, with his brother at last in the White House, Don boasted that he would “make a million in the next four years.” He began his quest even before Richard took office when he checked into a luxury Washington hotel and forwarded the bill to the government. Yet as White House aide John Ehrlichman acidly noted, although Don “surely tried,” he “lacked the wit to reap the benefits of being a Presidential brother.” In an earlier era, Ehrlichman realized, Don “might have been a patent-medicine salesman or a carnival barker.” Instead, “he was the modern equivalent, a ‘consultant.’ ” Not that Don had any true expertise to offer, but as the President’s brother, he was suddenly presented with a multitude of lucrative business opportunities. “Don could not admit to himself that the reason people were cultivating him, giving him cars and money, was that he was Richard Nixon’s brother,” Ehrlichman observed. “When Don’s abilities were taken into account, whatever they gave him to do would be nothing but a sham.” What Don lacked in ability, however, he made up in his unbridled sense of entitlement. He “clearly resented” Richard’s success, Ehrlichman believed, and “would often complain to me about the countless hardships he suffered” as a result; his open “bitterness at his lot in life” was obviously because he “had spent a lifetime in the shadow of Richard the super-achiever.”

  So the President’s brother once again turned to the one patron who never let him down: Howard Hughes. The opportunistic billionaire, ever eager to sink his tentacles deeper into the Nixon family, did not disappoint, and dispatched an aide to befriend the needy presidential sibling. “Having gone through the Donald Nixon loan scandal during the 1960 presidential campaign,” Hughes aide Robert Maheu recalled wearily, “I thought I had seen the last of” the President’s brother. But soon Don Nixon and Hughes became involved in bogus mining claims, stock deals with mobsters, and vacation junkets paid for with Hughes money. Addicted to “playing the big shot,” Ehrlichman wrote, “Don could not stay away from the flame . . . often to Richard’s acute private embarrassment.”

  The President tried to keep an eye on his brother by assigning Ehrlichman to be his handler. Don was summoned to the White House for questioning about whether he was once again pocketing money from Hughes. “His denial to me was so loud and red-faced that I felt intuitively he was lying,” Ehrlichman said. He delivered a “sermon” to Don to “get off the gravy train at once, leave [Hughes] alone and lead a life of quiet rectitude” by dropping all “phony consulting jobs having business with the Government.”

  The President didn’t believe his brother’s denials any more than Ehrlichman did and decided to have federal agents tail Don to find out what he was up to. “I don’t want to use Hoover,” Nixon told Ehrlichman, because “he can use it against me. See if the CIA will do it.” But, unlike with Jack Anderson, where a national security rationale, however implausible, could at least be asserted, the CIA refused to undertake such a patently illegal personal errand as spying on the President’s brother. Nixon turned instead to the Secret Service. Under the guise of protecting the President, his bodyguards tapped Don’s phones and conducted surveillance on him.

  Twice a week, the White House received written reports on Don’s activities and quickly ascertained that he was indeed lying about his involvement with Hughes. Secret Service wiretaps disclosed that Don, once again in financial trouble, was plotting some “really big deals” with Hughes and other government contractors. The electronic bugs also revealed that the President’s brother tried to use his connections to promote a Las Vegas casino. Most troubling of all, the dreaded Jack Anderson apparently knew about these machinations: federal agents observed the newsman dining with a top Hughes aide, who turned out to be a secret source of Anderson’s. The columnist also bribed a hotel bellman to supply copies of Donald’s phone messages during his visits to Washington.

  The President was understandably worried about a scandal. “Nixon never forgot that I was the one who had uncovered the [1960 Hughes loan] story,” Anderson said. “He also never forgot that his brother could get him into trouble.” White House tapes show repeated conversations between the President and his staff about his brother’s chicanery—and Nixon’s fear that Anderson would once again expose it. “Don must not get any money” from Hughes or any other government contractors, the President told his aides; the risk of Anderson once again uncovering such impropriety was simply too great.

  To try to keep Don out of trouble, the White House embarked on a search to find the President’s brother a job, something safely lucrative with low visibility. Nixon instructed Ehrlichman to approach Republican businessman J. Willard Marriott, founder of the world’s largest hotel chain, and explain the delicate problem. To “protect the President’s interests,” Nixon told Ehrlichman, “Marriott should be asked to hire Don” to keep him from trying to peddle his influence elsewhere. The hotel magnate agreed to “carry Don on the Marriott payroll,” Ehrlichman reported back, but only “if the President personally asked him to.” Nixon complied with the request and Marriott took on the Chief Executive’s hapless brother as a corporate vice president.

  But Anderson soon learned about this make-work job because he and Marriott were both part of Washington’s tight-knit Mormon community. Soon, the columnist persuaded Marriott that his new employee should grant Anderson an interview. Ehrlichman rushed to the Oval Office to inform the President that his brother had agreed to talk to the muckraker the very next day.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nixon exclaimed, Don was just “so stupid.” The President understood what his naïve brother and Marriott did not: that the scandal-prone Don could be dangerously malleable in the reporter’s experienced hands.

  “These Mormons are all nuts,” the President declared. Ehrlichman didn’t disagree, but pointed out that “Marriott claims to have some kind of influence on Anderson.”

  “Bullshit!” Nixon exclaimed; the newsman was obviously feigning sympathy to get access to Nixon’s unsophisticated brother. “See, Anderson is a smart son of a bitch,” the President added.

  White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman concurred: “Anderson plays both sides.”

  “That’s right,” Ehrlichman now echoed. “He’s very opportunistic.” Clearly, the dim-witted Don would be no match for Anderson’s wiles.

  The President pondered it all. “That poor Don,” Nixon muttered. He pounded his fist on his desk, then lowered his voice to a near whisper: “Son of a bitch.” Don “knew that, after all, Anderson and [Drew] Pearson were partners,” Nixon marveled. More than that, they “were snakes! You don’t talk to ’em!” the President repeated, incredulous at his brother’s foolishness.

  After consulting with Attorney General Mitchell, the President concluded firmly that we “cannot allow Don to see Anderson under any circumstances.” Nixon’s men had their marching orders. But the White House soon learned of what Haldeman called “the latest horror story” involving the President’s brother. “E[hrlichman] discovered that Don had already talked to an Anderson reporter who he thought was just a personal friend” of a Hughes advisor, Haldeman wrote in his diary. “So [Don] spilled a whole bundle of stuff to him, which Anderson is going to run in a series of three columns starting later this week. Don now knows this and that’s why he feels he has to see Anderson.”

  Indeed, after Anderson found out that the President’s brother was “again sniffing around the Hughes trough,” as the columnist put it, he dispatched one of his anonymous legmen to inf
iltrate Don’s circle in California. Posing as a potential investor, Anderson’s reporter George Clifford cultivated the President’s brother and successfully maneuvered himself into position to overhear Don informing Hughes’s staff that they “owe me” a lucrative contract. Ehrlichman hurried to the President’s Executive Office Building hideaway office to brief him on the alarming news.

  “Jack Anderson . . . sent a reporter out to the [West] coast and Don had talked to the reporter [that] Anderson had [dispatched],” Ehrlichman told Nixon.

  “Oh shit,” the President replied. “I just wonder how Don could be that dumb,” Nixon added. “I try to keep the son of a bitch out of all kinds of trouble, but he had an unerring ability to “go out and make an ass of himself.”

  The President pondered the ramifications. “Doesn’t this make it imperative that I not see him?” Nixon asked. “Yeah,” Ehrlichman concluded; damage control now trumped familial obligations. The President sighed. “Anderson has it all,” Nixon realized, and that meant “Anderson can use it” in his column.

  Well, perhaps it might not be as bad as they feared. According to Ehrlichman, Marriott told Anderson that the White House had carefully “admonished Don not to have anything to do with any piece of business that involves the government” and that “anything Don did that was improper was on his own.”

  “That could be the solution,” the President decided. “You know, to be fair,” he added, “that’s a legitimate story. Goddamn Don.” Nixon had to admit that Don was indeed “throwing [my] name around.” Perhaps a negative “Merry-Go-Round” column would force the presidential brother to behave.