Shortly before the attorney’s call, Woodward had reached Mrs. Beard’s 24-year-old son, Robert, in Denver. Woodward asked if he recalled a visit to his mother by Howard Hunt. Beard said that a “mysterious” man wearing a cheap wig and makeup had visited his mother in the hospital just before she issued her statement. “From pictures I’ve seen, it could have been Howard Hunt, but I couldn’t tell. The man refused to identify himself. He seemed to have inside information about what would happen next. . . . He was very eerie, he did have a red wig on, cockeyed, as if he’d put it on in a dark car. I couldn’t have identified my brother like that.” Beard added that he would give his mother a message to call Woodward back. If Robert Beard knew of a new “relapse,” he didn’t mention it.
Shortly before deadline the next evening, Woodward read Gerald Warren the text of a two-column re-examination of the Dita Beard affair based on the new information. The reopening of the ITT controversy so long after the White House had thought the matter disposed of left the President’s men uncharacteristically speechless for the moment. Warren took three hours to say, “No comment.” Colson was in Russia, on a trade-mission junket. The next day, Robert G. Kaiser, the Post correspondent in Moscow, found Colson and told him about the story. “That’s a good one,” Colson said, flashing a grin and walking away.
• • •
If the reporters were to learn what else Hunt and Liddy had done at the White House they would need more on the Plumbers. The first step was to study Egil (Bud) Krogh. Bernstein had met Krogh once, at a ribbon-snipping ceremony. Krogh at the time was the President’s adviser on national-capital affairs. He jogged around the Ellipse in a sweatsuit before he went to work mornings, so Bernstein had asked him why the administration couldn’t find room in the District budget to build some paths for cycling and jogging. Krogh had made a sympathetically bureaucratic reply about “priorities.” He had seemed like a nice enough fellow. Kind of bland, Bernstein had thought. “Nice” was an understatement, the reporters learned as they searched for an explanation of why Krogh had hung around with the likes of Hunt and Liddy. Egil Krogh was the White House Mr. Clean, so straight an arrow that his friends mockingly called him “Evil Krogh.” He had been a member of John Ehrlichman’s law firm in Seattle, then he had served on the White House Domestic Council staff and coordinated the Nixon administration’s worldwide war against drug trafficking. At 33, Krogh had become the youngest undersecretary in the Nixon Cabinet—at Transportation, appointed in February 1973.
Woodward placed a call to Capitol Hill to learn if the record of Krogh’s confirmation hearing contained any leads. It didn’t. But a congressional investigator who had worked on the hearing provided Woodward with the names of some of Krogh’s friends and acquaintances.
The reporters started calling. Soon there was a break: “Bud said . . . that Hunt and Liddy were being routed information from national-security wiretaps,” Woodward was told. Krogh’s friend could recall no details. Krogh had mentioned it shortly after Hunt and Liddy had been indicted.
Working from a 1972 White House telephone directory, the reporters started calling the people under Ehrlichman’s jurisdiction. One former and one current member of the White House staff provided identical versions of the next link in the chain. David Young, the former appointments secretary to Dr. Henry Kissinger and Krogh’s deputy on the Plumbers’ project, had regularly routed transcripts of wiretapped conversations to Hunt and Liddy in 1971 and 1972. Both sources thought that reporters, and those suspected of leaking information to them, might have been tapped.
Woodward called Kathleen Chenow, the Plumbers’ ex-secretary, and asked about the tapped data Young had forwarded to Hunt and Liddy. “I can’t talk about that,” she said now.
The wiretapping activities—actual and suspected—of the Nixon administration had always been controversial. Under the administration’s “national security” wiretap policy, also known as the Mitchell Doctrine, the President’s men had claimed unprecedented authority to conduct electronic surveillance. Until the Supreme Court declared it illegal on June 19, 1972—two days after the Watergate arrests—the Justice Department had used electronic eavesdropping without court authorization against those suspected of domestic “subversive” activity. Radicals and civil-libertarians had long insisted that the term “subversive” was a euphemism for those who dissented too vigorously from the Nixon administration’s policies. Now the reporters attempted to learn if their colleagues in the news media were among the “subversives” the Justice Department had claimed the right to listen in on.
Judging from the reception their inquiries received, they were coming close to something. Some officials were less than convincing in their denials, others refused to discuss it and some admitted they shared the reporters’ suspicions. The reporters had reached a dead end.
Woodward drafted a story based on the bare details. It reported that Hunt and Liddy had received information from national-security wiretaps; that it was routed to them by David Young, Dr. Kissinger’s assistant who was also a Plumber. The story noted that the Plumbers were in the business of investigating news leaks. Readers were left to form their own conclusions.
This time, too, Gerald Warren took a few hours to answer with the White House’s one-sentence denial: “After thorough checking, we can find absolutely no basis for the report.” Tiring of the game, Woodward asked him if that was a flat denial.
Warren, who became cold and formal in such situations, said, “I can’t say anything else,” and appealed for understanding. The article noted that Warren had not flatly denied the report.
Two weeks later, Time magazine published the first detailed account of the Nixon administration’s zealous campaign to trace news leaks by tapping the telephones of news reporters and government officials. According to the Time account, the phones of half a dozen reporters and twice as many White House and government aides had been tapped by the FBI for reasons of domestic “security.” The taps were begun in 1969, under a reluctant J. Edgar Hoover, and were continued under his successor, acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, until the Supreme Court decision of June 19, 1972. Hoover, said Time, had permitted his agents to install the taps only after John Mitchell authorized each tap in writing. In 1971, when the administration had tried to force Hoover to retire, Time said, the old bulldog-faced director had successfully resisted by threatening to reveal the details of the wiretapping campaign.
On February 26, the day Time’s edition hit the newsstands, Bernstein spent the morning at Justice, trying to confirm the details. Chasing from office to office after Time’s work on this one was less than fun. Bernstein got nowhere and took a cab back to the office. Dejected, he stepped into the elevator in the Post lobby and suddenly felt his arm grabbed and then his body being pulled back into the lobby. He started to struggle, then heard a female voice.
“Boy, am I glad to see you!” It was Laura Kiernan, a young news aide who had recently been promoted to reporter on the local staff. “There’s a guy upstairs in the newsroom with a subpoena for you and your notes. Bradlee doesn’t want you up there to get it. He wants you out of here, fast.”
Bernstein dashed to a stairwell at the end of the lobby, then up seven flights of steps to the accounting department. Closing the door of an office with an adding machine on the desk, he dialed Bradlee’s extension. Woodward was off for a few days in the Caribbean, but they had long before agreed on what to do if they were subpoenaed. Turning over notes or naming sources in either a grand-jury proceeding or a judicial hearing was obviously out of the question. There would be plenty of time to fight that in court. The first thing to do was move their files to a safe place. Bernstein told Bradlee where the files were. They would be moved immediately, he said.
CRP had issued subpoenas for five people at the Post: Bernstein, Woodward, Jim Mann (who had worked on some of the initial Watergate stories), Howard Simons and Katharine Graham. Also reporters from the Star-News, the New York Times and Time magazine. Simons an
d Mrs. Graham, the only non-reporters on CRP’s list, had already been served. The subpoenas demanded that those served testify by deposition in CRP’s civil suit and bring with them all notes, tapes and story drafts in their possession regarding Watergate. Bradlee told Bernstein he couldn’t find the Post’s lawyers and he didn’t want him served until he’d heard their advice. “Get out of the building,” he said. “Go to a movie and call me at five o’clock.”
Bernstein went to see Deep Throat—the movie version. When he called at five, Bradlee told him to return to the office and explained the strategy. Bernstein would accept the subpoena. Custody of at least some of the reporter’s notes would pass to Mrs. Graham.
“Of course we’re going to fight this one all the way up, and if the Judge wants to send anyone to jail, he’s going to have to send Mrs. Graham. And, my God, the lady says she’ll go! Then the Judge can have that on his conscience. Can’t you see the pictures of her limousine pulling up to the Women’s Detention Center and out gets our gal, going to jail to uphold the First Amendment? That’s a picture that would run in every newspaper in the world. There might be a revolution.”
That night, Bernstein was at his desk typing when he saw the CRP page hurrying down the middle aisle, arm outstretched. Bernstein continued to type. “Carl Bernstein?”
Head down, Bernstein raised one hand and picked off the subpoena. But the page stood there silently. Finally, Bernstein glanced up from the typewriter. The page looked about 21, tousled blond hair, wearing a V-necked sweater, very collegiate.
“Hey, I really feel bad about doing this,” he said. “They picked me because they thought somebody who looked like a student could get upstairs easier.” He was a law student who worked part-time at the firm headed by Kenneth Wells Parkinson, the chief CRP attorney. He promised to keep alert for any information that might be useful to the Post and gave Bernstein his home phone number.
13
AFTER WOODWARD RETURNED from the Caribbean later that week, a short, heavy-set young man with a thin beard ringing his face and wearing small, thick glasses arrived in front of his desk. “Tim Butz,” he said conspiratorially. He had once worked in Army intelligence, he said. Now he worked with a volunteer group of ex-intelligence types that was investigating people involved in domestic spying activities.
“I think we’ve found a George Washington University student who spied for CRP,” Butz said. “It will take some more work.” He told Woodward a rather disjointed tale. Woodward urged him to continue his researches and received almost a dozen telephoned progress reports in the next several days. After about a week, Butz called and said he had found a fraternity brother of the student spy who was willing to tell all. A dinner meeting was set that night, in the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel. When Woodward arrived, Butz was pacing the lobby with a young man he introduced as his “source”—a tall, nervous student named Craig Hillegass. The three went to a booth.
Hillegass described in vivid detail how Theodore F. Brill, his Kappa Sigma fraternity brother, had told him about being paid $150 a week by CRP to infiltrate the group of Quakers who had maintained a 24-hour-a-day vigil in front of the White House for several months. Brill’s assignment had been to make regular reports to CRP on the personal lives and plans of the demonstrators, he said, and then to assist in setting them up for arrests on drug charges. Eventually, the Washington police raided the vigil, but found nothing.
Brill, 20, was chairman of the Young Republicans at George Washington University. His job at CRP was terminated two days after the Watergate arrests. “The idea,” Hillegass said, thumping his water glass excitedly on the table, “was to create an embarrassment to the Democrats, because any embarrassment to radical groups would be considered an embarrassment to liberal politics and Senator McGovern.”
With unrestrained gusto, he went on to describe the James Bond way in which Brill was paid. “Ted said he once was told to meet a woman in a red dress with a white carnation, carrying a newspaper. He exchanged his written report for an envelope containing his pay. Another time, Ted told me, he went to a bookstore on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania [Avenue] and was handed a book by someone with his pay in the book.
“But it was part of a larger network. Ted said there were at least twenty-five others—and the information went to some pretty high-up people at CRP.”
Woodward was mindful of Harry Rosenfeld’s continuing pleas to find more of the 50 spies mentioned in the October 10 Segretti story. “Where are the other 49?” Rosenfeld would ask every week or two, though perhaps 25 had surfaced by that time. Theodore Brill did not seem exactly like a big-time operator, but—if his fraternity brother was telling the truth—he was part of the pattern.
George Washington University, five blocks from the White House, was on spring vacation. The next night, Woodward reached Theodore Brill at his home in River Edge, New Jersey. Playing the heavy with a 20-year-old history major made Woodward uneasy, but Brill might be one of those unexpected openings to something bigger. Eventually, Brill confirmed his fraternity brother’s story and added a few details. He had been hired and paid by George K. Gorton, 25, CRP’s national college director. “I was paid five weeks in May and June—once in cash and four times with Gorton’s personal check. I learned later that it was a mistake that I got paid in check because there were supposed to be no records kept. I got the impression from Gorton that there were a couple of others elsewhere doing the same work . . . and Gorton said there was someone higher up who knew. I was supposed to go to the convention in Miami to do the same thing there with radical groups.”
Why didn’t you go? Woodward asked.
“My job was terminated two days after the Watergate bugging broke. Gorton took me to lunch and said I had to stop because of Watergate. He said the operation was to be considered super-secret. People at the White House were upset,” said Brill, neatly undercutting the CRP-White House contention that nobody in either place had divined a relationship between Watergate and other spying and sabotage.
Did Brill have any thoughts about the ethics of his work?
“Ethics?” Brill repeated. He sounded astonished at the question. “Well, not illegal but maybe a little unethical.”
Woodward, feeling a bit too pious, thanked him and hung up. He found George Gorton’s home number and called. Rock music was blaring in the background and a young man’s voice said Gorton was out. After Woodward returned home, he tried again. It was nearly one A.M. More rock music. Gorton came to the phone and Woodward explained the story.
“Are you crazy?” Gorton shouted. “No Post reporter would call at one A.M.”
Woodward felt slightly wounded. Why didn’t people ever say that to Bernstein when he called at all hours of the morning? Woodward spelled his name and gave Gorton his home and office phone numbers.
“We’ll see,” Gorton shouted. “I’ve got a date here.” He slammed down the phone.
Woodward sat at his desk looking out the ninth-floor window at the lights of the capital city. “Creepsters,” Nicholas von Hoffman, the Post’s iconoclastic columnist, had called them. He stared out the window until he felt his anger subside.
The next morning, he was awakened by the phone ringing. “George Gorton,” the voice said. “I just couldn’t believe it was you calling in the middle of the night.”
Woodward asked him some questions.
“Oh, yeah, Ted Brill did a little work for me. . . . Spying is a funny way to put it. My direction to Brill was only to find out what radicals were doing. It was part of my job to know what all of youth was thinking.”
That, said Woodward, was a quaint way to conduct sociological research—planting an undercover agent, essentially an agent provocateur.
Gorton denied that Brill had helped arrange the raid on the Quakers and insisted that Brill’s termination had “coincidentally” occurred two days after the Watergate break-in.
Then Gorton, who had been director of the Youth Ball for the President’s inaugural, dec
lared proudly that he had people gathering information on radicals in 38 states.
“It was my idea,” Gorton said, not too convincingly. He had reported to Kenneth Rietz, director of CRP’s Youth Vote Division. “Rietz knew that I could supply him with information on what radicals were thinking. I supplied the information, but Rietz didn’t ask where I got it.” Then he changed the story, claiming that Brill had been his lone operative.
Ken Rietz, 32, was Haldeman’s choice as the next Republican national chairman. He had left CRP for the National Committee to head the 1974 Republican congressional campaigns.
Brill’s $150 weekly salary had not been reported under the new campaign disclosure law. After the Brill story appeared, the General Accounting Office audited the CRP books again. The audit helped establish that Rietz had headed a “Kiddie Corps” of young spies for the President.
• • •
Around this time, Woodward went to visit a well-placed CRP official. The man seemed disaffected, disgusted with the White House and the tactics that had been used to re-elect the President. “If there was an honest and a dishonest way to do something,” he said, “and if both ways would get the same results, we picked the dishonest way. . . . Now, tell me why anyone would do that.”
For instance?
“It’s hard to think of specifics,” the CRP man said. He thought for another moment. “Remember the decision to mine Haiphong about five months before the election? Some of us felt that that decision could make or break the President. We spent $8400 on false telegrams and ads to stir up phony support for the President’s decision. Money was used to pay for telegrams to the White House, to tell the President what a great move it was, so that Ziegler could announce that the telegram support was running some large percentage in support of the President. Money also went to pay for a phony ad in the New York Times.”
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