Zumwalt

by Larry Berman

  To investigators Young and Stewart, it was a slam dunk. Still, Radford refused to confess anything related to Anderson, swearing time and again that he had not passed classified materials to Anderson. Following his initial interrogation, Pentagon security agents arrived at Radford’s office to change all the locks on his file cabinets. Radford’s access to the building was revoked as well. Radford was certain he was going to prison. “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.” In desperation, Radford’s wife, Tonne, called the Andersons, who soon arrived at the Radford home. Jack warned that it was not safe to speak because the government probably had the home under surveillance. Anderson recommended taking a drive in his car, but not before the two men, with flashlights in hand, thoroughly searched Anderson’s automobile for bugs. “Under the seats, under the dashboard, behind the steering wheel, in the trunk, underneath the car and around the gas tank,” recalled Radford.70

  Driving around Washington, Anderson reassured Radford that only two people knew how Anderson got the classified materials. “I won’t tell them anything, so the only way they will know is if you tell them,” said Anderson.71 There were no other witnesses. Nothing could be proven. Radford agreed that the only way to save his career was to deny everything, to say he could not recall, to stand shoulder to shoulder with his friend Jack Anderson. “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,” warned Agent Stewart. Radford never changed his story about Anderson, who went to his grave insisting that his source was not Radford.

  If Radford had not given classified materials to Anderson, then what did he do with them? Here Radford offered up a bombshell, admitting to stealing documents from Kissinger and Haig and giving them to Welander, who slipped them to Moorer.72 “When we broke Radford that night, that’s where I got the Seven Days in May idea,” recalled Agent Stewart. “I said Jesus Christ, here’s the military actually spying on the President of the United States . . . this is a hanging offense.”73 In the end, Radford was “a reverse agent,” not really working for Anderson, although he appears to have been the source, but for the Joint Chiefs. Nixon and Kissinger had their back channel to cut out Laird, “and here they find that Moorer’s been double-dealing them.”74

  At 6:07 p.m. on December 21, 1971, ten minutes after arriving at the White House by helicopter, President Nixon met in the Oval Office with Attorney General John Mitchell and presidential assistants H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.75 Haldeman wrote in his diary that the meeting had been called because the investigation of recent Jack Anderson columns “had uncovered the fact that a yeoman in the NSC shop, assigned to liaison with the Joint Chiefs, was the almost certain source of not only the leaks, but also the absconding of information from Henry’s and Haig’s and other people’s briefcases, which were turned over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The President was quite shocked, naturally, by the whole situation and agreed that very strong action had to be taken, but very carefully, since we don’t want to blow up the whole relationship with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  During this personal White House briefing, Ehrlichman told the president that Young and Stewart’s investigation yielded only one place the leak could have originated, “right here in the Joint Chiefs of Staff liaison office” inside the White House.76 “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed Nixon. Ehrlichman explained that Radford had “access to everything from State, the Pentagon, National Security Council. Everything else. And he just Xeroxed this material for Anderson. There’s no question.”

  Nixon wanted to know, “How in the name of God do we have a yeoman having access to documents of that type?” Ehrlichman explained that he’d been traveling with Kissinger to India and Vietnam with Haig. Nixon grasped that Radford had “been right at the precipice.” Ehrlichman pointed out that Radford typed all the documents for “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.”77 Nixon wondered aloud, “If you can’t trust a yeoman in the navy, I don’t know goddamn who you can trust.” Attorney General Mitchell reminded Nixon that “the yeoman served in India. He married his wife in India.” That was enough for Nixon. “Oh, he’s pro-Indian? Well, then, he did it.” The president was aghast that the information came from Kissinger’s briefcase: “Oh my God. Can him. Can him. Can him. Get him the hell out of here.”78

  When Nixon first heard the news, he blurted that the Joint Chiefs had committed “a federal offense of the highest order.”79 John Mitchell thought “Zumwalt was involved in this.” Nixon repeated, “Zumwalt.” Ehrlichman said, “I’ll hazard that this was basically a Navy operation with Moorer, Zumwalt and a Yeoman involved.” Nixon agreed.80 The president felt that Bud Zumwalt was involved because of his strong objections to sending the Seventh Fleet task force into the India-Pakistan front, endangering his men. The JCS are “a bunch of shits,” said Attorney General Mitchell, and Zumwalt is “the biggest shit of all.”81

  Nixon thought Al Haig must have also been involved. The Pentagon’s general in the White House “must have known,” said Nixon. Haldeman and Nixon discussed wiretapping Haig. “It seems unlikely he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t have known,” repeated Nixon. Mitchell agreed that a wiretap made sense.

  Welander was summoned to the White House by John Ehrlichman, where he confessed that he had been aware of Radford’s actions “as a thief in the employ of the nation’s military commanders.”82 He admitted to ordering Radford to look specifically for materials bearing on withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and notes from Kissinger’s secret meetings with Zhou Enlai and Le Duc Tho. Welander also acknowledged taking these directly to Admiral Moorer. When Ehrlichman presented him with a prepared statement on White House stationery for his signature, Welander balked at signing a “statement [that] would have had me admit to the wildest possible, totally false charges of ‘political spying’ on the White House.”

  Nixon was soon comparing Radford with Alger Hiss and Daniel Ellsberg. “He’s another Ellsberg. That’s the thing that concerns me.” Haldeman agreed, “except that he probably knows a hell of a lot more than Ellsberg.” Nixon agreed. “Yeah, he really knows more . . . because he’s been in on the hard-core things. . . . That Radford, 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!”83

  Ehrlichman suggested sending in a high-ranking Mormon from the Pentagon to break Radford, but Nixon rejected the idea, saying, “Those Mormons are really turning out to be a bunch of scabs.” Nixon obsessed about how Anderson got Radford to turn over classified documents. He needed to find out what was in it for Radford. There had to be something besides his love of the navy. Nixon did not think it was bribery, so it had to be homosexuality. On December 21, Nixon asked, “Is [the] yeoman deviate [sic]?” Ehrlichman wrote the query down in his calendar for the next day’s Plumbers’ assignment. Two days later, in an Oval Office meeting, Nixon said that “after sleeping on it” he had instructed investigators to see if the relationship between Radford and Anderson was “sexual up the ass.”84 Nixon saw an analogy with Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. “Hiss and Chambers, you know, nobody knows that, but that’s a fact how that began. They were both that way. That relationship sometimes poisons a lot of these things.”

  Kissinger was furious upon learning about Radford and wanted the yeoman and Moorer in jail. Nixon explained to Kissinger that none of them could afford to have the truth come out that the Joint Chiefs were spying on their president. “You see, Henry, if you were to throw Moorer out now, the shit’s gonna hit the fan. And that’s gonna hurt us. Nobody else. We get blamed for it.” The presidential election was less than a year away. “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, the m
an who had authorized taps on his own staff, could not believe Nixon’s response. “They can spy on him and spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them.”

  Instead of prosecution, Mitchell urged that the JCS liaison office be closed immediately and that those involved in the theft be transferred. This would amount to a de facto admission of guilt on the part of the Pentagon. “The important thing, in my way of thinking, is to stop this Joint Chiefs of Staff operation, and the fuck-up of security over here. And if Moorer has to order Welander off to Kokomo or wherever it is—what to do with Robinson I don’t know—then they have taken recognition of this. And they, in effect, are admitting to this operation.”85

  Mitchell warned the president “as to what this would lead to if you pursued it by way of prosecution or even a public confrontation. You would have the Joint Chiefs allied on that side directly against you. What has been done has been done and I think the important thing is to paper this thing over. First of all, get that liaison office the hell out of the NSC and put it back in the Pentagon.”86

  In the end, all the parties entered into a high-stakes confidentiality agreement.87 Haldeman described it in his diary as “a monumental hush-up all the way around.” In his memoirs, Nixon acknowledged that Radford could not be prosecuted because he was a potential time bomb and state secrets could be released—“it was too dangerous to prosecute the yeoman.”88 Radford, Anderson, Welander, and Moorer “could each expose the military spy operation if Nixon tried to go after them,” later concluded journalist and professor Mark Feldstein in Poisoning the Press. “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.”89

  The president telephoned John Mitchell at 5:33 p.m. on December 24 to convey this very message. “I think the main thing is to keep it under as close control as we can. But I—We cannot move to do anything to discredit the uniform. That’s what I’m convinced of. . . . Our best interests are served by not, you know, raising holy hell.”90 In an election year, Nixon could not afford to have a story about a military establishment gone berserk. Ehrlichman thought Moorer was now “preshrunk,” meaning that when Nixon said, “Jump!” the chairman would ask, “How high?”

  With the decision made to cover up the episode and retain Moorer as chairman of the JCS, Nixon had to decide what to do about Radford and Welander. If Radford was not going to be prosecuted, they would have him transferred.

  On January 4, 1972, Acting Secretary of the Navy John Warner called Bud, saying he had orders from the White House to get the first-class yeoman assigned to Rear Admiral Bob Welander out of town. Warner directed Bud, in the name of the president, “to get the orders written in such a way that no one other than me would ‘know what was going on.’ ” When Bud questioned this move, Warner told him not to challenge a direct order from his commander in chief.91

  The CNO dutifully contacted the senior naval officer in the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Rear Admiral Jim Watkins, “and ordered him not to ask any questions but write a set of orders assigning Radford to the Thirteenth Naval District, whose headquarters were in Seattle, and to get it done that day.”92 Zumwalt and Moorer believed that Radford deserved, out of fairness and due process, to be charged and that the system should deal with him. The White House rejected this course of action. Bud went to Warner and recommended that because Radford was a navy man, formal charges be brought. Warner refused to do this and ordered Bud to cease his inquiry. Shortly thereafter, Warner called to change Radford’s orders from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, because the White House did not want Radford going to John Ehrlichman’s home state.

  The next day, January 5, 1972, at ten p.m., Radford’s household goods were picked up, and he was out of town, heading to Salem, Oregon, for assignment at a naval reserve training center. Wiretaps were installed in Radford’s home in Salem and stayed in place until June 20, 1972. The taps, authorized by Mitchell, yielded only one congratulatory call to Anderson after the columnist won the Pulitzer Prize for the December 1971 stories on the secret White House tilt.

  Meanwhile, two secret investigations of the spy ring were initiated. The first was conducted from the White House by John Ehrlichman. Once Laird learned about the White House investigation, he assigned his general counsel of the Department of Defense, Fred Buzhardt, responsibility to supervise his own Pentagon investigation of the unauthorized disclosures as well as of all communication channels between the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Council staff.

  Young’s report concluded that the military had “trained” Radford “how to steal” and that “he stole” for the Pentagon and then for Anderson. Buzhardt’s report was delivered to Laird on January 10, 1972. It documented “a morass of mistrust and spying—the inevitable offspring of Nixon’s own secretive and manipulative style that infected every office from the White House on down.” Buzhardt’s investigation concluded that Welander and Moorer knew how Radford was getting the documents and did not ask him to stop.93

  After reading Buzhardt’s report, Laird called Moorer into his office to say that “it was the greatest personal disappointment that I’d had.”94 Moorer said he had done it for the good of the Pentagon “and for your good too, Mr. Secretary.” Laird understood but also told the chairman, “Well, I just want it to stop.”95 Copies of Buzhardt’s report have disappeared.

  In Bud’s view, “Henry’s duplicity left booby traps everywhere.”96 In this one instance, Nixon seems to have agreed with his CNO. “The real culprit is Henry,” Nixon told Haldeman. “We’d all like to find someone else to blame—the goddamn state department or the defense department. But Henry could never see anything wrong with his own staff.”97

  On July 1, 1972, Admiral Thomas Moorer began his second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the principal military advisors to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense. Overshadowed by the Watergate scandal and the investigation of the Plumbers, the story about internal espionage remained buried until January 1974. After the story broke in the papers, Admiral Moorer assembled the JCS for a briefing on January 11, 1974, to offer his side. He began by saying that Ehrlichman and the other Plumbers, who had recently been indicted for the Los Angeles break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, were trying to justify their actions by reference to national security leaks. In his tape transcripts, Bud stated that this was the first time he learned that Welander had improperly provided information from Kissinger’s NSC to the Joint Chiefs.98

  Moorer told his colleagues that, in his opinion, Radford had changed his story, saying he had been ordered to steal for the JCS, because he had lawyered up and was trying to deflect the investigation from him and Anderson to Moorer. Moorer swore that he did not know that the documents supplied by Radford to Welander had been purloined. In another wheel within wheels, “Ehrlichman was trying to discredit Kissinger at the time of the investigation as part of the power struggle within the White House, and Laird was trying hard to insulate Kissinger from the Pentagon. And this is what led to two separate investigations, neither of which Admiral Moorer had ever seen.” When Moorer asked Laird why Radford had not been court-martialed, he answered that he was told not to, on orders of the president.99 “Ten years from now,” Moorer told the chiefs, “no one would remember that Kissinger hated Laird and that Laird hated Ehrlichman and Haldeman, but the important thing was not to let the JCS get sullied by this.”100

  In February 1974, the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Stennis, held hearings that resulted in the report Transmittal of Documents from the National Security Council to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.101 Appearing before the committee were most of the principals—Radford, Welander, Kissinger, and Buzhardt. After four days of testimony, Stennis later told Seymour Hersh, he realized that if he dug any deeper, he would “destroy the Pentagon.”

  When the story broke in 1974, there was a new secretary of defens
e in place, James Schlesinger, who wanted to speak with Bud about the spy ring. Bud contacted Welander, who had just returned from a private meeting with Senator Stennis. The conversation between Zumwalt and Welander focused on whether or not Welander knew that Radford had stolen from burn bags as well as Kissinger’s briefcase. “Was I correct [in telling Schlesinger] that the only one you really knew had not been [a] legitimate acquisition was the burn bag?” asked Zumwalt. “Yes sir, that’s correct,” replied Welander. “Is it correct that Senator Stennis has the appreciation that Chairman [Moorer] was not aware of any illegitimate acquisition?” asked Zumwalt. “Yes, that’s correct,” said Welander. “I just need to be sure of that because that’s the way I understand it and relayed it when asked. So you don’t feel that anything that Senator Stennis has been given changes the parliamentary situation that concerns you and the Chairman?” asked Zumwalt. “Not at all, sir,” replied Welander.102

  A few days later, Bud asked his staff to prepare an Eyes Only—Sensitive talking-points memo titled, “Principal Points of CNO Recollection Re: Radford/Welander Matter.”103 The memorandum provides a fascinating chronology of events from the perspective of the CNO: On January 4, 1972, Acting Secretary of the Navy John Warner called Bud with orders to have Radford reassigned. “CNO was told he could not be told the reason or other particulars.” Warner told Bud to do so in such a manner that “contacts in Navy should be kept to an absolute minimum.” Only after the story broke in the newspapers did Warner tell Bud that his orders concerning the reassignment of Radford “had come from Mr. Laird and Mr. Buzhardt” and not from the president. After receiving this order, Bud went directly to Admiral Moorer “in an effort to find out the reason in order to insure Radford’s rights and interests were protected.” Moorer said that “there was evidence that Radford had passed classified information to columnist Jack Anderson.” Bud thought that proceedings should be initiated against Radford, leading to a possible court-martial. Moorer agreed, but told Zumwalt that “Mr. Laird had said that the President had said not to court martial Radford. He should just be transferred.” Warner wanted Radford sent to Oregon, to any area except Portland, and he selected the Naval Reserve Training Center in Salem.