The White House decided to launch a formal campaign against its journalistic bête noire. “To take us off the defensive,” presidential counsel John Dean declared in a memo, the administration must start “impeaching Jack Anderson.” It was not enough just to react to each of his stories one at a time, after the fact, by “discrediting the allegations in his column,” White House Plumber E. Howard Hunt realized; rather, Nixon’s men had to become proactive by portraying Anderson as unreliable before his next attack. The goal, Hunt said, was to “diminish his reputation . . . personally and professionally.”
To do so, the White House once again began trying to dig up dirt on the newsman. An informant promised “considerable derogatory information concerning Anderson,” but it proved to be a disappointment—merely pages copied from a five-year-old book. Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman dispatched investigator Jack Caulfield to interview Anderson’s family and friends “under a subterfuge,” but the results were equally meager. “Neighbors of the Anderson’s [sic] advised that family was of good repute,” Caulfield wrote in a memo. Another White House private eye, Tony Ulasewicz, began “asking questions about some scam” in which Anderson’s troublesome brother Gordon was supposedly involved, but once again, Nixon’s men came up empty-handed.
Still, the White House pressed on. A “Merry-Go-Round” fan from rural Maryland called Anderson to warn that “a man with a black bushy moustache was out there poking around for confirmation that I had obtained valuable shorefront property from the University of Maryland at a sweetheart price,” the columnist recalled, “in return for exerting political influence to get the university a grant of some kind.” The mustachioed man turned out to be Nixon operative G. Gordon Liddy, who later confirmed that he was ordered to “check out a rumor—which proved impossible to substantiate—that Anderson had been involved in a land fraud.” At the behest of Nixon’s campaign deputy Jeb Magruder, Liddy was also assigned to investigate rumors that Anderson was involved in a “kickback scheme” with the Democratic Party. That probe, too, went nowhere. In addition, Liddy said that he tried and failed to prove that Anderson “sent someone to break into our [campaign] headquarters but was thwarted by our security.”
Frustrated by its inability to uncover wrongdoing by Anderson, the White House turned to investigators working for the private security firm Intertel, which was staffed by former prosecutors and retired agents from the FBI and the CIA. Intertel had already been hired by ITT to dig into the columnist’s background, and the White House now piggybacked on its work, ordering up additional “specific assignments” for investigation. Intertel forwarded its reports on Anderson to the White House and the Justice Department, which in turn passed them to the Nixon reelection campaign and Republican Party headquarters. The impropriety of federal prosecutors and presidential aides conspiring with private political and corporate interests to undermine a newsman did not even faze those involved.
The President’s men tried to plant derogatory stories about Anderson in the media, but the move backfired when journalists reported not the baseless charges but the heavy-handed government retaliation. The White House “is directing a major effort to discredit columnist Jack Anderson,” The Washington Post reported in a front-page story; the administration’s “extensive search for facts” about the muckraker also “includes feeding negative material about Anderson . . . to the press” and using “the resources of the Republican National Committee, the Committee for the Re-election of the President, and the Justice Department.” The Post concluded dismissively that the only accurate information provided by the administration “deals with already known and generally uncontroversial details about Anderson” and was nothing more than a “panicky—and exceedingly clumsy—campaign” against him.
In the White House, Chief of Staff Haldeman informed the President that “unfortunately,” instead of exposing Anderson, the press reported that Nixon’s men were targeting him. “Who the hell put that [out]?” the President demanded. One of Nixon’s own public relations aides, Haldeman acknowledged, who became “overly excited about some of these things.” The President sighed in frustration: “You forget that sometimes people talk.”
Still, Nixon’s desire to go after Anderson remained undiminished. “I would like to get him,” the Chief Executive reiterated to his staff, “get Anderson discredited.”
The President’s men escalated their efforts and infiltrated undercover operatives into Anderson’s office. The Nixon campaign hired Lou Russell—an investigator for Congressman Nixon in the late 1940s who remained friendly with the President’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods—to spy on the columnist. Russell successfully ingratiated himself with Anderson by passing on story tips and the newsman took pity on the “down-on-his-luck” gumshoe, giving him “odd jobs” to do and allowing him to “hang around” the “Merry-Go-Round” office. Russell began filing secret reports on Anderson with the Nixon campaign’s security director, James McCord, the future Watergate burglar. But Anderson’s eagle-eyed secretary, Opal Ginn, soon “surprised Russell poking around my desk,” the muckraker recalled. Opal began watching more closely and noticed Russell “in unaccustomed parts of our suite, not lolling about as usual but with a kind of furtive alertness, ears cocked for conversations, eyes peeled for desk-top papers.” Anderson got rid of Russell but soon agreed to take on a young intern who turned out to be the son of another spy hired by the Nixon campaign. To this day, it is unclear what Nixon’s men learned from their infiltration of Anderson’s office.
Meanwhile, the President personally proposed other undercover tactics to ensnare the muckraker. Why couldn’t the White House “find someone to rifle [through] Anderson’s files—the way [he] seemed to be doing with ITT and the government”? Nixon demanded. Better still, campaign operatives could plant fraudulent documents with the columnist to undermine his credibility. “Don’t we have some spurious stuff that we can give to Jack Anderson?” Haldeman asked. “Let’s play on Anderson’s notoriety now. Let that out. He’s a big man” now. Colson replied that he was already working on such a trap. “We got a whole plot concocted,” he said eagerly. “I got just the scheme for that.” Haldeman was skeptical that Anderson would fall for it: “He won’t. He always checks it out.” But Colson suggested a diabolical way to make the plan work: “We can get into his office and type some documents in his office—on his typewriter, on [official] stationery—that are explosive. And then get them back and feed them to him and let him publish them.” Afterward, the White House could “prove they were typed in his office” and destroy Anderson once and for all. “Well,” Haldeman replied, “that’s screwing Jack Anderson.”
It was not just idle talk. According to an FBI memo, the Nixon campaign faked a letter on Democratic National Committee stationery and mailed it to Anderson in an effort to discredit both the opposition party and the investigative columnist. In addition, Anderson said he received several government documents that were sent anonymously in the mail filled with “explosive” allegations. One was typed on White House letterhead. Anderson showed it to a trusted source who worked in the President’s office. “He said, ‘Yeah, this has got all the right signatures on it but let me check it and I’ll call you back,’ ” Anderson recalled. After investigating, Anderson’s source was startled to discover that no such document had been written: “It’s a perfect forgery. It’s got all the right signatures, the right routings, everything. But it doesn’t exist!” Anderson realized that only someone with extraordinary sophistication and inside knowledge of White House procedures could have produced such convincing forgeries.
What other forms of retaliation did Nixon’s men plan? “I don’t know whether my doctor’s office was broken into, my phone tapped, my mail intercepted, my files photostatted,” the columnist told one of his reporters, “or what other White House routines were invoked.” He certainly had no idea that Nixon’s men had already come up with a plot to silence him by the one method guaranteed to be permanent: murder.
I
n the middle of March, in the midst of the ITT scandal, Charles Colson summoned his top clandestine operative to the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. According to E. Howard Hunt, Colson had apparently “just come from a meeting with President Nixon,” whose hideaway office was next door, and seemed uncharacteristically “nervous” and “agitated” about the message he had to deliver. Colson told Hunt that Nixon “was incensed over Jack Anderson’s frequent publication of leaks,” that the “son of a bitch” columnist “had become a great thorn in the side of the President,” and that it was imperative to “stop Anderson at all costs.” Hunt stated that Colson proposed assassinating Anderson in a manner that would appear accidental, perhaps by using a special poison that could not be detected during an autopsy. Colson suggested various specific ways to get rid of Anderson, Hunt said, and “asked me if I could explore the matter with the CIA,” where Hunt had previously worked as a spy. According to Hunt, Colson explained that neutralizing Anderson was “very important” to the White House and Hunt was “authorized to do whatever was necessary” to eliminate the investigative reporter.
The Nixon operative knew exactly who to contact to get the job done. He began with his sidekick G. Gordon Liddy, who had just been transferred to the Nixon campaign’s intelligence operation and was “forever volunteering to rub people out,” as Hunt put it. Liddy wasted little time before expounding on the obvious solution to his latest White House assignment: “They charged us with the task: ‘Come up with ways of stopping Anderson.’ We examined all of the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion [that] the only way you’re going to be able to stop him is to kill him.”
To lay the groundwork, Hunt and Liddy conducted physical surveillance of Anderson, tailing the columnist in Liddy’s green Jeep as Anderson drove from a parking garage in downtown Washington to his residence in the Maryland suburbs. “The purpose was to locate Anderson’s home and examine it from the outside for vulnerabilities,” Hunt recalled. It turned out to be “just an ordinary house” with “no pits around it,” so “if housebreakers wanted to get in they would have very little difficulty.” Hunt concluded that he and Liddy could easily sneak into Anderson’s home and “get rid of the pesky journalist” by putting “a drug-laden pill” in whatever medicine bottles Anderson used.
But what kind of poison should be slipped to the muckraker? This was a question beyond the expertise of the White House operatives. After all, while Hunt had plotted at the CIA to overthrow leftist leaders in Central America, he had no personal hands-on experience in murder; and while Liddy boasted that he “could kill a man with a pencil in a matter of seconds” by jamming it into a victim’s neck, he was not an expert in the toxicology of poisons. So Hunt reached out to a former intelligence colleague who had been part of a CIA team that tried to poison Fidel Castro a decade earlier with botulism toxin—a plot, ironically, that had recently been exposed by Jack Anderson.
Hunt turned to the aptly named Dr. Edward Gunn, a CIA physician involved in the conspiracy to murder Castro, who was known as an expert in the “unorthodox application of medical and chemical knowledge”—which, Liddy knew, was “just a euphemism for assassination.” Hunt telephoned Dr. Gunn at his home in suburban Washington and explained that he was now working for President Nixon.
“Oh,” the poison expert responded. “Sure, I’ll cooperate.”
The men set up a lunch date across the street from the White House at the venerable Hay-Adams Hotel. On March 24, Hunt and Liddy walked the short distance from their offices to meet their lunch guest and plot Anderson’s assassination.
“Well,” Hunt told Liddy during their stroll along Pennsylvania Avenue, “Colson has just laid another one on me here. He wants me to find out” whether any particular “hallucinogenic drugs”—especially LSD—could be slipped to Anderson. LSD was the CIA’s drug of choice during the 1960s, a synthetic psychedelic acid that sometimes led unsuspecting targets to go berserk and commit suicide. Dr. Gunn could provide details of the CIA’s previous LSD experiments and explain which hallucinogens to avoid because they would leave behind traces that could be detected in Anderson’s body. Hunt took care to emphasize that Dr. Gunn had recently retired from the CIA. “I took ‘retired’ to be in quotes,” Liddy recalled, “since that is a standard technique” used to give the intelligence agency deniability in clandestine operations.
Nixon’s aspiring assassins entered the Hay-Adams. The weather was too chilly to lunch on the rooftop, with its spectacular view overlooking the White House. So instead, Hunt and Liddy headed downstairs to the subterranean old grill, whose darkness could better cloak their plotting.
Hunt warmly greeted “Manny,” the nickname preferred by Dr. Gunn, and introduced the toxicologist to Liddy, who was using the name of George Leonard as his “operational alias.”
Hunt and Liddy explained that “they had an individual who was giving them trouble,” Dr. Gunn recalled, and “they wanted something that would get him out of the way” without leaving any visible traces behind. Dr. Gunn’s response was not what the Nixon operatives wanted to hear: that “there was nothing undetectable” that could be used on Anderson because any drug could eventually be discovered in a thorough medical test such as an autopsy. Perhaps Dr. Gunn was uncomfortable with such an explicit discussion of murder. Hunt shifted the conversation to the more neutral topic of prior CIA experience with poisons. Dr. Gunn seemed to relax a bit as he recounted his previous scientific exploits with LSD. “We painted the steering wheel of a car for absorption through the palms of the hand,” Dr. Gunn recalled, and also “put it on a car door handle.” Indeed, he advised, “there are many” kinds of hallucinogens besides LSD that could be administered surreptitiously to a target like Anderson. Still, Dr. Gunn cautioned that the CIA had encountered considerable “unpredictability of individual reaction” to such poisoning.
Hunt asked whether a “massive dose” of LSD would “cause such disruption of motor function that the driver of a car would lose control of it and crash.” Dr. Gunn reiterated that individual reactions varied. Besides, in cold weather, Anderson might be protected from absorbing the drug by wearing gloves; and in warm weather, sweaty palms could have a similar effect. In addition, regardless of the weather, such a plot would be thwarted if Anderson didn’t touch the contaminated steering wheel because his wife or children drove his car instead.
Liddy, a man of action, grew impatient with the inconclusive discussion. Uncertain “halfway measures were not appropriate,” he declared. The only “logical and just solution” was that Anderson “be killed. Quickly. My solution was received with immediate acceptance, almost relief, as if they were just waiting for someone else to say for them what was really on their minds.”
If the White House wanted to kill Anderson while he was in his car, there were simpler ways to do so than by poisoning him with LSD. Dr. Gunn pointed out that in other countries, the CIA had success ramming autos into a targeted vehicle during “a turn or sharp curve” to make it “flip over, crash, and, usually, burn.” According to Liddy, Dr. Gunn suggested a specific street intersection that Anderson routinely drove through on his way to work whose “configuration [was] ideal” for such a crash, in part because it was already “notorious as the scene of fatal auto accidents” in Washington.
But Liddy feared that assassinating Anderson in this fashion was just “too chancy.” Besides, there were also bureaucratic obstacles. “Dr. Gunn’s method would require the services of an expert to ensure success,” Liddy pointed out, and such a trained operative “might not be available to us” if the CIA refused to supply the experienced personnel to carry out Anderson’s execution. Even if the intelligence agency agreed to take part in the muckraker’s murder, the White House would be vulnerable to CIA blackmail afterward.
Hunt returned to the idea of poisoning Anderson and requested “an LSD-type drug” from the CIA. “Hunt always wanted to give LSD to people,” Liddy later explained. But Dr. Gunn begged
off on the grounds that he had retired from the intelligence agency a few months earlier and no longer had access to such hallucinogens. Although the CIA “refused to cooperate,” Hunt later said, he didn’t “press because he thought Liddy could get the drug” from his own contacts “if the time came when any controlled substance were needed.”
No matter where Hunt obtained the hallucinogen, however, the question remained: how could it be slipped to Anderson without his knowledge?
“Of course, there’s always the old simple method of simply dropping a pill in a guy’s cocktail,” Dr. Gunn offered. But Hunt realized that wouldn’t work because “Anderson was a Mormon” with nine children and “they were very abstemious, they wouldn’t even touch Coca-Cola.”
“Aspirin roulette” seemed more plausible. Anderson might swallow a deadly dose, Liddy said, if “a poisoned replica of the appropriate brand of headache tablet [was slipped] into the bottle usually found in [his] medicine cabinet.”
Anderson’s house seemed easy enough to break into, as Hunt and Liddy had discovered during their surveillance of the columnist. But “to perform an entry operation simply to put one or two pills in a bottle seemed highly impractical,” Hunt decided. After all, “how would you go clandestinely into a medicine cabinet with a household full of people and pore over all of the drugs and the pharmacopoeia assortments there until you found the one that Jack Anderson normally administered to himself?”
Poisoning The Press Page 33