* * *
The Watergate break-in itself eventually diminished in importance as the nation discovered what John Mitchell labeled the “White House horrors” and the clear patterns of presidential abuses of power. The subsequent attempts by the White House to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate affair—the “cover-up,” which itself led to more abuses of power—further detracted from the significance of the break-in. But if they seemed to diminish with time, the events of June 1972 rekindled the mood of cynicism and distrust toward officialdom that the Nixon Administration had inherited in 1969.
Inevitably, the generally received version of the Watergate break-in has attracted its share of skepticism. Traumatic national events generally do so. “Official” versions of events such as the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb, for example, have evoked critical challenges, some verging on the paranoid, delusional, and absurd, others posing worthwhile questions for which there are no satisfactory answers.
At the time, the certainties of the Watergate break-in were three: the burglars were real; they had entered the office complex; they had bugging devices with them. The five perpetrators eventually were convicted for breaking and entering and for violating laws prohibiting unauthorized wiretaps. Hunt and Liddy were also found guilty. As the prosecutors developed their case, they discovered, as did subsequent investigations, that the seven men had important links to CREEP and the White House; in particular, all had received money from questionable campaign contributions. But what was the purpose of the break-in? Clearly, the operation was political. But what had been its end? For what specific gain had the break-in been planned?
One theory traces the break-in to a convoluted plot masterminded by Charles Colson. Colson involved Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in his scheme, so this account goes, but he later used them to take responsibility when the attempt failed.
Colson and his spymaster, Hunt, it is suggested, in effect usurped CREEP’S Operation Gemstone for their own purposes. The plan’s immediate objectives were Nixon’s re-election, the elimination of George Wallace, and the isolation of the Left. By this theory, Colson and Hunt worked in their own way, financing Wallace’s would-be assassin and planting left-wing literature in his apartment. With Wallace no longer a factor in the 1972 election and victory assured, Nixon’s other aides signed off on Gemstone, abandoning the plan to bug Democratic headquarters, but Colson and Hunt continued to pursue it, for their own reasons. They planned the initial, successful, Watergate break-in to find or plant evidence linking the Democrats to left-wing radicals and to install phone taps. The second break-in, the one that was foiled, was to fix a faulty tap. Colson and Hunt also planned widespread violence for the Republican Convention which would be blamed on radical groups. Colson would use that violence as a pretext to persuade the President to call a state of emergency and declare martial law. When the second break-in failed, the plan collapsed. In the final scene of this suggested scenario, Colson and Hunt concealed their true objectives and managed to implicate the rest of the Nixon Administration.22
Arthur Kinoy, the lawyer who successfully challenged the Administration’s broad claims for inherent presidential powers to wiretap without warrants, offered a second hypothesis to account for the break-in. Earlier in the spring, Kinoy had represented federal judge Damon Keith, who had ordered the Administration to disclose wiretaps in a case involving alleged White Panther members. Throughout the proceedings, the Justice Department attorneys had pressed luxuriant claims of inherent executive powers to wiretap. If the Supreme Court had accepted the government’s position, the Administration would have had a perfect cover for wiretaps and “black” operations already underway or planned. The Watergate break-in occurred, Kinoy suggested, because the Administration was privy to the Court’s adverse decision and someone ordered that the phone taps be removed before the Court gave its ruling, scheduled for announcement the Monday after the break-in. Why were so many men caught at Democratic headquarters if their mission was only to repair one faulty tap? Kinoy theorized that the burglars were removing equipment.23
More vivid convolutions appear when other theories link the CIA to the break-in. Two key players, Hunt and McCord, had been employed by the CIA, and other figures connected to the affair had tenuous or alleged ties with the Agency. The CIA role was given a certain cachet by Haldeman’s endorsement. According to him, Nixon intensely disliked the CIA and its Director, Richard Helms. The animosity went back to the 1960 campaign. Nixon blamed the CIA for providing John F. Kennedy with inaccurate estimates of Soviet missile capabilities, thus enabling Kennedy to exploit a so-called “missile gap.” Nixon also blamed the Agency for Kennedy’s advocacy of armed intervention in Cuba after the CIA had briefed the Democratic candidate on its proposed Bay of Pigs invasion. When Nixon became President, according to Haldeman, the White House and the CIA often were at odds. Furthermore, the CIA, Haldeman believed, like the FBI, saw the proposed Huston Plan of 1971 as a “disembowelment” of its power and from that moment began to monitor the White House. Haldeman also endorsed Senator Howard Baker’s 1973 comment: “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.”24
Haldeman was no stranger to Nixon’s hostility toward the CIA. A month before the break-in, the President told him that the Agency needed a “housecleaning”; its “muscle-bound bureaucracy” had “completely paralyzed” its brain. It had too many Ivy League and Georgetown types, Nixon claimed, rather than the kind of people recruited by the FBI. Nixon wanted a study made of how many CIA people he could remove through a reduction in force. Henceforth, in addition, he insisted that the CIA recruit applicants from schools whose presidents and faculty supported the war. Publicly, the Administration would rationalize the CIA dismissals as necessary budget cuts, but the President said, “you … know the real reason and I want some action to deal with the problem.”25
Haldeman later argued that the CIA and the Democratic National Committee knew about the first Watergate break-in and that, singly or together, they sabotaged the second. He claimed that the Cubans, Hunt, and McCord remained on the CIA payroll. The CIA’s animosity toward the Administration, its fear that after his re-election Nixon would move decisively to bridle its power, and its determination to protect an old ally, industrialist and financial manipulator Howard Hughes, Haldeman argued, explained the failure of the break-in.
Haldeman traced the initial motivation of the break-in to the obsession of Nixon and Colson with gaining derogatory information on Lawrence O’Brien, particularly regarding his ties to Hughes. Mitchell, Haldeman wrote in his memoir, was too cautious and politically astute to approve such an operation—implying, as Haldeman intended, that Nixon knew about the break-in in advance.26
Haldeman’s later solicitude for Mitchell was apparently not at work in April 1973, when he, with the President and Ehrlichman, connived to implicate Mitchell as solely responsible for Watergate. And for all the fascination with Haldeman’s projection of CIA mischief in the case, it is instructive to remember that he contended only that the CIA sabotaged the effort—in short, Haldeman acknowledged that the break-in originated from the President’s camp.
Jim Hougan’s book, Secret Agenda, fleshes out Haldeman’s claims for a pervasive CIA role in Watergate. Hougan has established the most thorough reconstruction of the crime. As evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the events of May–June 1972, Hougan traced the Agency’s dealings back to Howard Hunt’s roles in the Pentagon Papers case and the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Throughout this period, Hougan argues, Hunt was a CIA operative and regularly reported on Administration doings, particularly the sexual peccadillos of various politicians.
Hougan claims that the second Watergate break-in had nothing to do with the original one, but instead occurred because Haldeman and John Dean possessed information that the Democratic headquarters had something to do with a
call-girl operation, curiously involving both Democratic and White House officials. Hougan suggests that the prostitution ring was a CIA operation or was under the Agency’s surveillance. Consequently, he argues, McCord, like Hunt still a CIA operative, deliberately sabotaged the second break-in to prevent its uncovering the call-girl ring. Other undercover CIA agents then played a prominent role in leading journalists to various aspects of the White House involvement in the break-in and thereby successfully covered up the Agency’s role in the origins of the President’s downfall, Hougan concludes. Hougan has ventured the most revisionist account of the origins of Watergate; his story, he insists, proved the common understanding of Watergate to be one based on “fraudulent history.”27
Questions regarding the CIA appear in various segments of the Watergate story. The Agency’s role, however, seems destined to remain shadowy. Such CIA principals as Helms, Deputy Director Vernon Walters, and future Director William Colby have adamantly denied any CIA role in initiating any Watergate events or in implicating the White House. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert charged, and Colby admitted, that the CIA had withheld cooperation with the investigation. What eventually emerged from the inquiries into Watergate—wholly apart from the events of the break-in and subsequent cover-up—was the CIA’s changed relationship to other power centers in the government. Richard Nixon’s entanglement with Watergate surely allowed the Agency to escape confrontation with a President apparently bent on tightening his own command and control of it. But at the same time, that escape ironically gave force to the concept and even the existence of congressional oversight of the CIA.28
Nixon had a longstanding interest in Lawrence O’Brien. O’Brien had been a Kennedy political operative, both in Massachusetts (where Charles Colson was an old adversary) and in national politics. Later, he faithfully served Lyndon Johnson. Nixon also knew that O’Brien had been retained by Howard Hughes as a secret lobbyist, although, unlike himself, the Democrat never had to answer politically for the link. Nixon bitterly resented continuing Democratic efforts to connect him to Howard Hughes, efforts which included a Kennedy Justice Department investigation in 1961 because of a Hughes loan to Nixon’s family. Haldeman noted that when matters involved connections to Hughes, “Nixon seemed to lose touch with reality.” Partly because of the Hughes connection, Colson maintained a large folder of materials on O’Brien, labeled “Political Statements by Lawrence F. O’Brien.”
When George McGovern sought a vice-presidential candidate to replace Thomas Eagleton in the summer of 1972, the President advised his aides to say nothing of Eagleton’s problem, but “then hit the successor all out—esp. if it’s O’Brien.” Ehrlichman and Nixon discussed O’Brien’s taxes and a reputed loan from Hughes at some length on August 7, 1972, after Rose Mary Woods had called Bobby Baker for information on the Democratic Chairman. Several weeks later, the President instructed Ehrlichman to get busy to “worry O’Brien,” and to work through John Dean. In January 1971, Nixon told Haldeman that “the time is approaching when Larry O’Brien is held accountable for his retainer with Hughes.” Perhaps, the President added, “Colson should make a check on this.” Haldeman, however, ordered Dean to make a report. Word for word, he repeated the President’s words.
Dean thought that the Watergate break-in had its origins in Nixon’s obsessive desire to incriminate O’Brien. Magruder tentatively agreed some years later but then admitted he was uncertain. Haldeman firmly believed that Nixon’s orders to Colson, which he had conveyed, made their way to Hunt and Liddy. More than that, as Haldeman wrote, “Nixon knew what had happened,” as he repeatedly told Haldeman after the burglary that “Colson must have done it.”29
Dean turned the O’Brien matter over to John Caulfield, Ehrlichman’s in-house private detective. Caulfield found little on O’Brien, but he kept running into more details of the Hughes-Nixon connection and warned Dean that it might be dangerous. Nevertheless, the IRS began a tax audit of Robert Maheu, Hughes’s ousted chief aide. Maheu retaliated with a leak to columnist Jack Anderson about a reported $100,000 Hughes payment to Nixon through Bebe Rebozo. Las Vegas journalist Hank Greenspun told Herb Klein that he had information the money had been used to furnish the President’s San Clemente estate.
Stories regarding the Hughes-Nixon connection included a controversial loan to Donald Nixon, the President’s brother, in late 1956 which purportedly resulted in a favorable IRS ruling for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and allegations of Donald’s involvement with a convicted Hughes associate. The rumors began to mushroom early in 1972. Dean noted that Nixon particularly blamed O’Brien for sensationalizing the Administration’s decision not to bring an antitrust prosecution against the International Telephone and Telegraph Company.
As a result, the President and Colson added pressure for more intelligence on O’Brien. Shortly afterward, Mitchell and Magruder approved the original break-in of Democratic headquarters, and Magruder enthusiastically pushed for improved bugs when the initial fruits proved insignificant.
At one point, Liddy allegedly was instructed to find out about O’Brien’s “shit file” on Nixon as well as about the Hughes-O’Brien connection. According to this account, spelled out in a biography of Hughes, Nixon later told Haldeman his real reason for wanting to get O’Brien. That conversation occurred on June 20, but the biographer conveniently claimed that it was part of an erased 18½-minute segment of a taped conversation in the Oval Office. He also suggested that the CIA undermined the Nixon cover-up to protect its own links to the Hughes organization.30 Such speculations had no evidentiary accompaniment.
Months after the break-in, Nixon still was preoccupied with “getting something” on O’Brien. On August 9, he informed Haldeman that the IRS had investigated the Hughes Tool Company and found payments to O’Brien, possibly during the time he served as Hubert Humphrey’s reportedly unpaid campaign manager in 1968. Nixon had learned all this from Treasury Secretary John Connally, who urged the President to make use of the information as soon as possible. The problem was in forcing the IRS to publicize the payments; apparently, the agency had resisted doing so. Nixon expected Haldeman or Ehrlichman “to ride IRS.” He wanted the agency to call O’Brien in for voluntary interrogation. If he refused, the IRS was to subpoena him—“before O’Brien stonewalls it.”31
The so-called “Greek Connection” provides yet another theory for the Watergate break-in. Once again, there is a link to Lawrence O’Brien, and the motive may, like the O’Brien-Hughes theory, lie in G. Gordon Liddy’s contention that the Watergate break-in “was to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.” James McCord also testified that the purpose of the June 17 break-in was “to do photocopy work of documents” as well as to install new listening devices. The story has its origins in a September 1968 campaign speech delivered by vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew. Agnew earlier had promised Elias P. Demetracopoulos, a Greek newspaperman who had escaped Greece shortly after an army coup in 1967, that he would maintain public neutrality toward the Greek Colonels’ dictatorship; privately he relayed word that “my hopes are that we will see Greece in proper hands very shortly.” But in response to a question at the National Press Club on September 27, Agnew strongly endorsed the regime and vigorously denounced the opposition as Communist-inspired and -dominated.
What had happened? According to Demetracopoulos, the Greek KYP—the intelligence service which had been founded by the CIA and subsequently subsidized by the Agency—had transferred three cash payments totalling $549,000 to the Nixon campaign fund. The conduit was Thomas Pappas, a prominent Greek-American businessman with close links to the CIA, the Colonels, and the Nixon campaign. (Agnew insisted that he “had absolutely no knowledge” of such money.) The charges that KYP money had come into the presidential campaign, with CIA knowledge, were circulated in the United States and in Greece. CIA Director Richard Helms commented with studied ambiguity: “Even if somebody s
uggests they would like to do it, I would insist that they don’t tell me about it because that is dynamite.” In 1987, an authoritative KYP official confirmed that the money had flowed from Greece to the Nixon campaign in 1968. Pappas had well-known ties to Nixon, and he was widely regarded as the man who had persuaded Nixon and Mitchell to put Agnew on the ticket, although Agnew later claimed that he disliked the businessman.32
Demetracopoulos arranged a meeting with O’Brien through former California Governor Pat Brown. He reluctantly provided Brown with sketchy information, fearing quite correctly that his telephone was bugged. (Later revelations proved that the FBI had tapped Demetracopoulos’s telephone in this period.) Demetracopoulos saw O’Brien on October 19 and gave him the particulars of the cash transactions. During the meeting, it was suggested that the CIA be brought in to confirm the charges. But Demetracopoulos long had been persona non grata with the Johnson Administration, which had tried to block his entry into the country in 1967. LBJ already had resumed aid to the Greek Colonels at the time, and he was known to be infuriated with Demetracopoulos’s lobbying activities against the military regime. He or the CIA may even have known that the Greek regime had planned to kidnap Demetracopoulos, according to the junta’s ambassador to the United States. Two days after the O’Brien meeting, Demetracopoulos’s lawyer received word that a deportation hearing was scheduled on October 23 for his client, but he managed to get a continuance.33 After the meeting on October 19, Demetracopoulos had further telephone contacts with O’Brien and his aides, and they met again on October 26. O’Brien said that nothing could be done to alter the Administration’s position, although he publicly denounced the Nixon-Agnew-Pappas-Greek connections.
The Wars of Watergate Page 30