by Russ Baker
The ostensible reason for these complex arrangements was to enable the White House to control the money. The actual effect, however, was to create the impression of something illicit, such as a money-laundering operation aimed at hiding the identities of the donors.25
Somewhere along the way Gleason began to detect an odor stronger than that of quotidian campaign operations. What seemed suspect to him was not that Nixon would help Republican candidates—that was how things worked. What bothered him were the operational details. Many seemed positively harebrained, the kind of things with which no president should be associated. But Gleason just figured that Richard Nixon, or his subordinates, had a blind spot when it came to appearances of impropriety.
Deep-Sixing Nixon
Late in the election season, Gleason’s superiors told him to add a new component to the Townhouse Operation. Gleason found this new development particularly disturbing. It was called the “Sixes Project.” Launched in October 1970, when the midterm elections were almost over, it provided an extra personal donation of six thousand dollars to each of thirteen Senate candidates—in cash.
Gleason’s job was simple enough: get on a plane, fly out to meet each of the candidates, and personally hand over an envelope of cash. He was to add a personal message: “Here’s a gift from Dick and Pat.” And he was to keep meticulous receipts, noting who received the cash and the date of the transaction.
Gleason was not happy about his role as dispenser of envelopes full of cash. As he told me in a 2008 interview,
Of all the silly things I’ve ever been asked to do in this life, traveling around with six thousand dollars to give the guy and say, “This is from Dick and Pat,” was colossally bad . . . Now you crank me up, leave a paper trail a mile long and a mile wide of flight tickets, hotel reservations, rental cars, everything, and have me traipsing all over the country giving these guys six thousand dollars in cash, [and besides], the six thousand doesn’t matter, doesn’t get you anywhere. If we give you a quarter of a million, what’s another six thousand? . . . The six thousand dollars itself was a disconnect, because everything else was largely done to keep the whole thing under wraps.26
In those days, the campaign finance laws, most of which were at the state level, were limited and rarely enforced. Reporting requirements were thin, but those candidates who wanted to abide by the law made sure to report any cash they received to their respective campaign committees. That posed a challenge for a candidate caught in a grueling nonstop schedule, who was handed an envelope of cash. It would be easy enough to forget to report it, whether deliberately or accidentally.
Even back in 1973, Gleason could come to only one conclusion. When special prosecutors in the Watergate investigation later grilled him about the Townhouse Operation, he told them as much. “The purpose of these contributions was to set up possible blackmail for these candidates later on.”27 However, at that point Gleason assumed that the sponsors of the blackmail were Nixon loyalists—perhaps even authorized by the president himself.
Alarmed at this arrangement, and cognizant that he might be generating myriad campaign law violations, Gleason asked the White House for a legal analysis. But despite multiple requests, he never got it. Finally, he asked for a letter stating that nothing he was being asked to do was illegal. (That letter, Gleason later explained, would somehow disappear before it could arrive at the offices of the Watergate prosecutors.)
Since the six-thousand-dollar donations were ostensibly generated by “Dick and Pat,” one could easily surmise that Richard Nixon, or those under his authority, were indeed out to get something on Republican candidates. Once they took the cash, the recipients would have to do as he wanted, or else risk exposure. As Assistant Special Prosecutor Charles Ruff wrote to his boss: “It has been our guess that [the Nixon White House] hoped to gain some leverage over these candidates by placing cash in their hands which they might not report.”28
Had this become known, Nixon would have had trouble explaining it. Few would have believed that such a scheme could have been run under White House auspices without Nixon’s approval. And yet that seems to have been the case. In fact, Nixon’s name rarely appears in the Townhouse files of Watergate prosecutors—for whom the evidence of Nixon’s wrongdoing would have been the ultimate prize.
Even the complex and calculating Charles Colson, who served as special counsel to the president in 1970, admitted to prosecutors that Nixon was not involved. Colson said that he had sat in on a Townhouse planning meeting and later briefed the president about “political prospects in that race”— but “did not recall that the fundraising aspects were discussed with the President.”29
John Mitchell, who was attorney general before he resigned in 1972 to head up Nixon’s reelection campaign, attended a meeting for “substantial contributors” and later told prosecutors that “the President stopped by, but was not present during discussions of campaign finances.” Mitchell himself denied participation in or knowledge of the Townhouse plan.30 Even Herb Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, seems to have been involved only in the most benign part of the operation: the legal solicitation of funds from wealthy donors.31 Of course, all this could be about denials and deniability— but as we shall see, it apparently was not.
Meet John Dean
At the time Townhouse was becoming operational, the position of counsel to the president opened up. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s trusted aide, was moving to head up domestic affairs, and Ehrlichman was looking for someone to replace him—a smart lawyer and good detail man who was also loyal to the president. The man who came on board on July 27, 1970, was John Wesley Dean III.
Dean arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just as President Nixon was trying to figure out how to deal with massive street demonstrations against the Vietnam War. A month before, a White House staffer named Tom Huston had drawn up a plan to spy on the demonstrators through electronic surveillance, recruitment of campus informants, and surreptitious entry into offices and meeting places.
In hindsight, this sounds especially odious, and it was, but at the time, and from the vantage point of the administration and its supporters in the “silent majority,” America was besieged. The general atmosphere in the country and the domestic violence, actual and hinted, surrounding the Vietnam War debate, felt like chaos was descending. Even so, Attorney General John Mitchell shot down the notorious “Huston Plan.” John Dean, however, took an immediate interest in some of the proposals.
Although his official duties centered on giving the president legal advice— often on arcane technical matters—Dean was considered a junior staffer and had virtually no contact with Nixon. Nevertheless, the White House neophyte quickly began taking on for himself the far edgier and dubious mantle of political intelligence guru.32
Among the bits of intelligence Dean collected were the details of the townhouse Operation. In November 1970, following the midterm elections, Jack Gleason turned over all his files to the White House, where Haldeman had them delivered to Dean. Watergate investigators would later discover that “Haldeman also gave Dean several little notebooks which pertained to the 1970 fundraising.”33 Those little notebooks would have told Dean who the donors were, how much they gave, and the identity of the recipients. 34
Shortly after the files ended up in Dean’s hands, the media began receiving—perhaps coincidentally—leaks about the Townhouse Operation. One of the first reports was an AP article with no byline that appeared in the New York Times on December 27, 1970. It said that seven ambassadors had received their positions as rewards for their contributions to the Townhouse Operation: “Mr. Jack Gleason left the staff of a White House political operative, Harry Dent, this fall to run the fundraising campaign from a basement back office in a Washington townhouse.” And there it was: Gleason caught up in something that sounded sinister, complete with the townhouse basement back office, all purportedly on behalf of Richard Nixon.
IN FEBRUARY 1972, someone cranked Townhouse back up again. Jim Polk,
an investigative reporter at the Washington Star with an impressive track record on campaign finance matters, got more information about the fund from “inside sources.”
Polk published an article headlined “Obscure Lawyer Raises Millions for Nixon.” It sounded even more disturbing than the previous one. Polk’s article did two things: it introduced the public to Nixon’s personal lawyer Kalmbach and it provided many new details about the Townhouse fund.
A little-known lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., has raised millions of dollars in campaign contributions as an unpublicized fundraiser . . . [and] as Nixon’s personal agent . . . to collect campaign checks from Republican donors . . . Kalmbach helped to raise nearly $3 million in covert campaign money . . . The checks were sent through a townhouse basement used by former Nixon political aide Jack A. Gleason. But the operation was run from inside the White House by presidential assistant H.R. (Bob) Haldeman . . . Only a portion of this money has shown up on public records. The rest of the campaign checks have been funneled through dummy committees.
When I spoke to Polk in 2008, not surprisingly, he no longer recalled the identity of his source. But whoever had leaked this story to him was no friend of Nixon’s. Yet if it was intended to provoke further interest, it failed. Someone had attempted to light a fuse with Townhouse, but it did not ignite.
Just four months later, however, another fuse was lit. And this one would burn on and on.
The Brazen Burglary
If Townhouse was engineered to discredit Nixon, it had one potential flaw. The wrongdoing involved technical financial matters that reporters might find daunting. Watergate, on the other hand, was inherently sexy; it had all the elements of the crime drama it became. The break-in was brazen and easily grasped, and carried out in such a manner as to just about guarantee both failure and discovery. It also involved a cast of characters that neither reporters nor television cameras could resist (as the Watergate hearings later would demonstrate). It was like a made-for-TV movie: burglars in business suits, living in a fancy suite near the scene of the crime; Cuban expatriates; documents in pockets leading to the White House. Even Nixon had to interrupt his reelection campaign to confront it.
But the burglars didn’t appear to take anything, so what was the intended crime? Breaking and entering—for what purpose?
As with the JFK assassination, theories abound. The burglars were found with bugging equipment. But that made little sense; Nixon didn’t have much to worry about from his presumed Democratic opponent, George McGovern. The risks of a bugging operation far outweighed any conceivable gains. And if Nixon had really wanted inside dope on the McGovern campaign, which he hardly needed, he could have sent teams into McGovern’s headquarters up on Capitol Hill, or to Miami, where the Democrats would hold their convention.
If, on the other hand, the intent was to fire the public imagination, the Watergate complex was far better—and Washington itself a necessary locale if the national press was to stay with the story week after week.
With all this in mind, Nixon’s observation in his memoirs that “the whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup” seems on the mark.
If the Cubans were really trying to do the job, their supervisors were guilty of malpractice. They might as well have called the D.C. police to reserve an interrogation room.
The flubs were so obvious it was as if they were the work of amateurs— which it was not. Burglary team member James McCord left tape horizontally over a lock, so that it could be spotted, as it was, by a security guard when the door was closed. If he had taped the lock vertically, it would have been invisible to a passerby. And if the intent was to pull off a real burglary, there was no need for tape anyway—as the burglars were already inside. Even so, after the security guard discovered and removed the tape, McCord put it right back.
The entire operation reflected poor judgment. An experienced burglar would have known not to carry any sort of identification, and certainly not identification that led back to the boss. How elementary is that? Among the incriminating materials found on the Watergate burglars was a check with White House consultant E. Howard Hunt’s signature on it—and Hunt’s phone number at the White House, in addition to checks drawn on Mexican bank accounts. Despite the obvious risks, the burglars were also instructed by Hunt to register at the Watergate Hotel, and to keep their room keys in their pockets during the mission. These keys led investigators straight back to an array of incriminating evidence, not the least damaging of which was a suitcase containing the burglars’ ID cards. Everything pointed back to CREEP and the White House.
The most interesting thing was that the materials identified the burglars as connected not just to the White House, but to the CIA as well. And not just to the CIA, but to a group within the CIA that had been active during the controversial period that included the Bay of Pigs invasion and the assassination of JFK.
Hunt, whose status in the CIA was described earlier, was a high-ranking (GS-15) officer and a member of the “Plumbers,” a White House special investigations unit ostensibly dedicated to stopping government leaks to the media. As discussed in chapter 6, Hunt had been a key player in the coup in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion, in addition to working very closely with Allen Dulles himself. As noted previously, Dulles was in Dallas shortly before November 22.
And Hunt had been there on the very day of the assassination, according to an account confirmed in 1978 by James Angleton, the longtime CIA counterintelligence chief. Angleton, clearly concerned that investigations would uncover Hunt’s presence in Dallas anyway, went so far as to alert a reporter and a House Committee to Hunt’s being in the city that day, and then opined that Hunt had been involved in unauthorized activities while there; “Some very odd things were going on that were out of our control.”35
Watergate burglar and electronic surveillance expert James McCord, like Hunt, had also been a GS-15 agent, serving for over a decade in the CIA’s Office of Security. Around the time of the Kennedy assassination, he began working with anti-Castro Cubans on a possible future invasion of the island. Allen Dulles once introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel, saying, “This man is the best man we have.” Regarding Nixon, McCord dismissed him to a colleague as not a team player, not “one of us.”36
In a long-standing tradition, both Hunt and McCord had officially “resigned” from the agency prior to the Watergate time frame. But their continued involvement in CIA-related cover operations suggested otherwise. Indeed, as noted earlier in the book, many figures, including Poppy Bush’s oil business colleague Thomas J. Devine, officially took retirement prior to participating in seemingly independent operations in which deniability was crucial.
Though Hunt claimed to have cut his CIA ties, he actually went out of his way to draw attention to those ties while working in the Nixon White House. He ostentatiously ordered a limousine to drive him from the White House out to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was as though he was trying to broadcast the notion that Nixon was working closely with the agency—with which, as we now know, the president was in reality battling.
After Hunt’s alleged retirement, he was employed at the Mullen Company, a public relations firm that served as a CIA cover. In a 1973 memo, Charles Colson recounted a meeting he’d just had with Senate Republican minority leader Howard Baker. Charles Colson wrote, “Baker said that the Mullen Company was a CIA front, that [Hunt’s] job with the Mullen Company was arranged by [CIA director] Helms personally.” Baker also informed Colson that, during Hunt’s time at the Mullen Company, his pay had been adjusted to the exact salary he would have been making had he stayed at the spy agency.37
Eugenio Martinez, one of the anti-Castro Cuban burglars, was another CIA operative in the break-in crew. Indeed, he was the one member of the team who remained actively on the CIA payroll, filing regular reports on the activities of the team to his Miami case officer. Then there was Bernard L. Barker, who first worked as an FBI informa
nt before being turned over to the CIA during the run-up to the Bay of Pigs.38 Frank Sturgis, too, had CIA connections. Martinez, Barker, and Sturgis had worked with Hunt and McCord on the Second Naval Guerrilla operation.
So Nixon, who had been trying to see the CIA’s file on the Bay of Pigs, was now staring at a burglary purportedly carried out in his name by veterans of the same “Bay of Pigs thing” with strong CIA ties. It was like a flashing billboard warning. CIA professionals, Cuban exiles, all tied to the events of 1961 through 1963, suddenly appearing in the limelight and tying themselves and their criminal activity to the president.
Layers and Layers
If most of us ever knew, we have probably long since forgotten that before the June 1972 Watergate break-in, there was another Watergate break-in by the same crew. With this earlier one, though, they were careful to avoid detection and were not caught. At that time, they installed listening devices. The second burglary, the one that seemingly was designed for detection, and designed to be traced back to the Nixon White House, ostensibly revolved around removing listening devices installed earlier—and therefore drawing attention to the devices and the surveillance.