Nixon's Secret (57 page)

John Ehrlichman supervised a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsburg’s Los Angeles–based psychiatrist in a search for files damaging to Ellsburg—an example of how Nixon’s men operated outside the law. LBJ invented a “national security cover” when he wanted the FBI to wiretap or burglarize a target. Nixon’s men stood on no such formality. It reveals a mindset and arrogance of those Nixon men who believed they were invulnerable and their deeds would never be scrutinized. A practical pol would reject such tactics, but not the coterie of ad men and marketing types who filled the Nixon White House.

At the same time, the Nixon men believed the Kennedy campaign used extra legal means to wiretap Nixon during the 1960 campaign. LBJ had used the technology too. It’s easy to see how the Nixon men rationalized the break-ins, and even the president himself. “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” Nixon later told television journalist David Frost.
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Any review of Watergate must begin with two vital questions. Nixon was leading McGovern by nineteen points in the Gallup polls at the time of the first break-in. He needed no new political ammunition to win his impending landslide. So why break in? McGovern was “by far the weakest national candidate that the Democrats could nominate,” Bob Haldeman later wrote. “So Nixon didn’t need political information to defeat him.”
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And why the Democratic National Committee? Any seasoned political veteran knows that during a presidential campaign the action is at the nominee’s campaign headquarters. The national party committees are sleepy backwaters controlled at arm’s-length by the nominees. “Why would anyone break into a National Committee Headquarters?” Nixon asked Haldeman after the break-ins. “Nothing but crap in there. The real stuff is in the candidate’s headquarters, not the Committee’s.”
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Author Lamar Waldron has argued compellingly that the burglars were seeking a record of the CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro, approved by Nixon as vice president and cemented by ex-FBI man Robert Maheu, later a major domo to Howard Hughes. There is also compelling evidence that Nixon was after records he believed were in Democrat headquarters that further exposed the Hughes loan to his black sheep brother.

Moreover, some of the burglars were looking for photographs of call girls and related documents potentially damaging to the White House.

To understand Watergate, and the various political interests behind it, we must first look at the complicated relationship between CIA Director Richard Helms and Nixon. The CIA and President Nixon shared dark secrets. Until 1959, Vice President Nixon headed a task force within the Eisenhower administration to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Nixon also approved the CIA outreach to the Mafia, authorizing ex-FBI man Robert Maheu to reach out to dapper mob fixer Johnny Rosselli and involve the Mafia in anti-Castro efforts. The operation culminated in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion sanctioned by President Kennedy.

Several of the CIA operatives and assassins involved in Nixon’s plans to overthrow and kill Castro, including E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, were subsequently involved. Nixon understood that the backlash from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion inspired his allies in the CIA to join the 1963 plot to murder John F. Kennedy. Hunt, Sturgis, and fellow Bay of Pigs operative Bernard Barker all resurfaced on the ground in Dallas that day. These same men turned up in the 1972 Watergate burglaries. This is not a coincidence.

Nixon was well aware that former CIA Director Allen Dulles had buttoned up the Warren Commission investigation and suppressed the agency’s role in Kennedy’s death. He clearly understood LBJ’s central role in the assassination. Nixon was correct when he called the Warren Commission “The greatest hoax ever perpetuated.”
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When he became president, he tried to seize proof of what really happened.

“Who shot John?” Nixon asked Helms. “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame?”
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According to Haldeman, Nixon’s frequent references to the Bay of Pigs were code. “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination,” he wrote. So when Nixon warned of the “incident” being exposed, he was referring to the truth behind JFK’s murder. Despite Haldeman’s later attempts to recant this theory, his cowriter on the book, Joseph DiMona, insists the passage is authentic. “It is preposterous to think that Bob Haldeman, of all people, would allow any writer to ‘invent’ information or erroneous theories to be published in a book under his name. The ‘theory’ survived five drafts of the most meticulous editing known to man.”
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Clearly, Nixon badly wanted to get his hands on the CIA records of the Bay of Pig veterans. If the covert assemblage of CIA assassins with underworld bosses was a frightening secret held by the commander in chief, the idea that the Nixon-arranged Operation 40 was somehow involved in the Dallas coup d’etat was terrifying. Although Haldeman said that Nixon had turned him down when he suggested reopening and gathering the facts surrounding the JFK assassination, White House domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman said Nixon requested all of the CIA records on the Kennedy assassination and was rebuffed by the agency. It is logical that Nixon, a lawyer, asked Ehrlichman, a fellow lawyer, to obtain the records rather than Haldeman, an ad man.

The CIA resisted. “Those bastards in Langley are holding back something,” a frustrated Ehrlichman told Haldeman. “They just dig their heels in and say the President can’t have it. Period. Imagine that. The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document and the spooks say he can’t have it . . . From the way they’re protecting it, it must be pure dynamite.”
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At the same time, Nixon understood that his approval of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, if exposed, could sink his reelection. Presidents aren’t supposed to have open dealings with the Mafia. Nixon knew that Helms had intimate knowledge of Operation 40, and therefore his efforts to obtain proof of the CIA’s involvement in Kennedy’s murder was a desperate bid to acquire the documentation to check Helms’s possession of Nixon’s anti-Castro role. “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe,” said Senator Howard Baker.
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Nixon’s battle to obtain the JFK assassination records was also an attempt to gain leverage over the rogue agency. This was to be Nixon’s “insurance policy” against the CIA. If threatened, Nixon would expose the agency’s involvement in Kennedy’s death, which took place at the time that he, Nixon, was in political exile without formal governmental influence of any kind.

Haldeman held these very same suspicions and shared them in his 1978 book about Watergate,
The Ends of Power:

And here’s what I find most interesting: Bill Sullivan, the FBI man that the CIA called at the time, was Nixon’s highest-ranking loyal friend at the FBI. (In the Watergate crisis, he would risk J. Edgar Hoover’s anger by taking the 1969 FBI wiretap transcripts ordered by Nixon and delivering them to Robert Mardian, a Mitchell crony, for safekeeping.)

It’s possible that Nixon learned from Sullivan something about the earlier CIA cover-up by Helms. And when Nixon said, “It’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs” he might have been reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro—a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.
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It
was
clear Helms wanted to closet the Mafia-CIA compact, even after it was eventually revealed to the public. He never gave the lethal partnership a mention in his nearly five-hundred-page, whitewashed biography
A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency,
published in 2003.

“I was never sure why President Nixon distrusted me, aside from associating me with Allen Dulles and other East Coast, Ivy League, establishment figures whom he loathed and thought of as dominating the upper brackets of OSS and subsequently CIA,” Helms wrote. “In contrast, I always had an excellent relationship with Lyndon Johnson, who had at least as much claim as Nixon to have been born in a log cabin, and whose views of Ivy Leaguers were, at the best, reserved.”
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A scene in Oliver Stone’s
Nixon
further explored the dichotomy between Nixon and Helms. “I’m honored, Dick, that you’d come all the way out to Virginia to visit us at last,” said Helms (played by Sam Waterson). “My friends call me Mr. President,” replied Nixon (played by Anthony Hopkins).
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  Nixon and Johnson had contrasting relationships with Helms because they both had two important, yet different, roles in his career. Helms oversaw the Cuba fiasco, which Nixon had spurred forward. He was the deputy director for plans of the CIA at the time of the Kennedy assassination and had intimate working knowledge of Operation 40, their use of Mafioso, and was in deep with many of the main players. In 1966, to ensure the secrets of the assassination were kept safe, President Lyndon Johnson promoted Richard Helms to director of the agency.

Richard Helms was also a harsh opponent of Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization, the drawdown of American troops that would turn responsibilities of the war over to the South Vietnamese forces. The CIA was heavily invested in Vietnam and thought that the election of Nixon would remove the restraints they felt under LBJ to conduct a more aggressive effort of sabotage and terrorism. The agency was also deeply involved in the drug trade, and an American pullout would have severely hampered their operations; thus, the CIA’s motives for the removal of a crippled Richard Nixon as well as those of the JCS and the Pentagon.

Former Director of the CIA and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles described Helms as “useful,” a man who “knew how to keep his mouth shut.”
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Richard Helms was a CIA man to the marrow; his loyalty was to the agency alone, and he became bitterly obstinate whenever asked to divulge CIA secrets. Richard Helms’s arrogant disdain for questioning surfaced during a recess of the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings. The
Washington Post’s
George Lardner reported the following exchange:

“Helms told reporters during a break that no one would ever know who or what Lee Harvey Oswald represented. Asked whether the CIA knew of any ties Oswald had with either the KGB or the CIA, Helms paused with a laugh and said, ‘I don’t remember.’ Pressed on the point, he told a reporter, ‘Your questions are almost as dumb as the Committee’s.’”

Helms maintained close ties with his Operation 40 associates following the assassination. He disclaimed any close relationship post-Watergate, but he considered CIA agent and author E. Howard Hunt a protégé. Helms not only lent Hunt money when the veteran spook was in financial difficulties, but he also urged several television and movie producers to adapt Hunt’s spy novels for the screen.
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As a security measure and to further collect information on executive activity, Helms made moves to place Hunt in the White House.

In
Watergate: The Hidden History
, Lamar Waldron explained the advantages of Hunt’s “reassignment”:

Getting Hunt into the Nixon White House was the perfect solution to several problems, but the approach would have to be made carefully, to avoid arousing the suspicions of Nixon or his aides that CIA veteran Hunt was some type of CIA “plant.” In hindsight, it’s obvious to many that’s exactly what Hunt was. Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
journalist J. Anthony Lukas wrote that “there are those who believe that Hunt had never really resigned from the CIA and was still acting more or less on behalf of the Agency” when he went to work for the Nixon White House. Included among those with that opinion would be Charles Colson, who—after Watergate—realized that “all the time Hunt was on the White House payroll . . . Hunt’s secretary was on the CIA payroll.” That led Colson to ask, “Was Hunt, supposedly a retired CIA agent, actually an active agent while in the White House?”
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Hunt “retired” from the agency for the third time in his storied career on April 30, 1970. He had done so previously in 1960 and 1965 to advance counterintelligence projects.
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Clearly, Hunt worked simultaneously for the White House and the CIA.

Helms placed Hunt in the Robert R. Mullen Company, a public relations firm representing a Howard Hughes tool company strategically located at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the building that in 1971 would headquarter the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP).
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Senate Republican minority leader Howard Baker later filled in Special Counsel to the President Chuck Colson on the particulars of Hunt’s arrangement. “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.” While Hunt worked at the Mullen Company, Baker added, his pay had been adjusted to equal his CIA salary.
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The Mullen Co.
was
, in fact, a CIA front. The company was run by Robert Bennett, the son of Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, a longtime friend and supporter of Richard Nixon and an elder in the Mormon Church. After the
Washington Post
broke the Watergate story, Bennett boasted to his CIA handlers about providing information to
Post
reporters Woodward and Bernstein that led the aggressive reporters away from the CIA’s role in the Watergate operation.

It was confirmed in a June 1972 FBI memorandum that Hunt continued to work for the agency on an “ad hoc basis.”
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Retired Air Force colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who had approached the Mullen Co. to find a White House contact, knew that Hunt’s job at the PR firm was a cover. “The date was in either February or March of 1971,” stated Prouty in sworn testimony to the Church Committee. “It was in the offices of the Mullen Company. The man I went to see was Bob Bennett. After a brief talk, primarily with what I wanted done, he said, well, I have a man that can help you with that. And he called in an office and said, Howard. And Howard came out and it was Howard Hunt.”