Nixon's Secret (58 page)

“I knew Howard Hunt,” Prouty continued. “I had known him since at least the Bay of Pigs program. But I knew in CIA practice you don’t recognize people. So, I never said a word, I never batted an eye to him. But I knew he was CIA, and I knew in my mind he was on duty.”
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Hunt referred Prouty to Alexander Butterfield, a CIA operative who had already secured employment in the White House. Butterfield was a retired US Army Air Force pilot who in 1969 resigned to become the deputy assistant to President Nixon. Just prior to his Pennsylvania Avenue appointment, Butterfield was “the senior American military officer in Australia,” and was the military’s “CIA liaison there.”
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By the 1970s, the agency had “positioned CIA personnel and agency-oriented disciples inconspicuously throughout the White House,” according to Prouty.
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“There were contact people from the CIA in various parts of government,” Prouty explained to Church Committee Counsel Michael Madigan. “And that used to be my job. I used to be the contact man in the Pentagon. And I knew that when I called Treasury or the Customs Bureau I would call a certain person. And when I would call even different departments in the Pentagon I would call contact people, people who were cleared, they had Agency clearances. And they had sometimes specific project clearances, and it is a procedure, it is a network, it is designed for that . . . and the only way I heard about the contact was, not that I was able to say that Butterfield was the contact, but that they brought up the name of Butterfield, and they said, we will get this business done.”
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“The [1975 House of Representatives Inspector General] Report revealed there were CIA agents in “intimate components of the Office of the President,” Haldeman later wrote. “I was ‘intimate,” Ehrlichman was. Kissinger was. Who else was intimate in an official sense? Alex Butterfield, who sat right outside the President’s office?”
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At the height of the Watergate scandal, Butterfield exposed Nixon by revealing the existence of the secret White House taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee. He was not asked about the taping system while under oath. Instead, he simply dropped a bombshell.

Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary, always considered Butterfield a CIA plant in Nixon’s midst.
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That Hunt, a CIA operative, would refer Prouty to Butterfield, bolstered the suspicion that Butterfield was a CIA plant in the Nixon White House. Butterfield also had ties to General Alexander Haig; both Haig and Butterfield worked for Joseph Califano, who was special assistant to Army Secretary Cyrus Vance. Ironically, it was Haig who wrote and coordinated many of the drafts for the plan for a coup in Cuba in the summer and fall of 1963.
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Haig proved to be the pivotal figure in Nixon’s downfall. Haig was closely affiliated with a core of senior military officers who revered geopolitical and military strategist Fritz Kraemer. Kraemer, a hard-liner, was adamantly opposed to Nixon and Kissinger’s détente with the Chinese. In fact, many military officers feared they were merely instruments of Nixon and Kissinger’s dictator-like control, and felt an information gap widening between themselves and the White House.

In his 1976 memoir,
On Watch
, Naval Operations Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. expressed his concern about “the deliberate systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts, of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of the inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security: the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) and various other of the aspects of ‘détente,’ the relations between the United States and its allies in Europe, the resolution of war in Southeast Asia, the facts about America’s military strength and readiness. Their concealment and deceit was practiced against the public, the press, the Congress, the allies, and even most of the officials within the executive branch who had a statutory responsibility to provide advice about matters of national security.”
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Nixon and Kissinger were conducting foreign policy outside the normal channels. “Nixon’s style of governance was highly secretive, and his presidency hung precariously on the constantly shifting lines of ‘back-channel’ communication that he encouraged among Kissinger, Haig, the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and Secretary of State William Rogers,” wrote James Rosen in
The Atlantic.
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The Joint Chiefs, deeply suspicious of détente, were desperate to know what Nixon and Kissinger were up to.

This breach of information between the White House and the military led to further infiltration of outside agents at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue carried out by a naval spy ring. The spy ring was a precursor to Watergate, involved Alexander Haig, and was detected and disclosed to Nixon. In December 1971, Charles E. Radford, a twenty-seven-year-old navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council, working closely with both Kissinger and Haig, confessed to sifting through burn bags of top-secret White House documents and delivering these documents to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer. The back channel later became known as the “Moorer-Radford affair.”

“Yeoman Radford collected literally thousands of documents from the White House and, while on foreign trips, documents that ranged from private messages between Kissinger and Nixon that involved their secret China gambit, to negotiating stances over sensitive European military bases, to closely guarded policy papers put together by Kissinger’s staff, to Nixon’s strategy and timetables for withdrawing troops from Southeast Asia,” wrote Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in the meticulously researched
Silent Coup.
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When first questioned by White House aides John Ehrlichman and David Young, Weilander confessed his role in the spy ring and confirmed that Radford had passed on copies of purloined documents, which in turn were sent to JCS Chairman, Admiral Thomas Moorer. More importantly, Weilander implicated Haig in the operation. To cover Haig’s tracks, Department of Defense General Counsel Fred Buzhardt reinterviewed Weilander and this time the admiral omitted Haig’s involvement.

On December 21, 1971, Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman met in the Oval Office to discuss what to do about the spy ring.

“The important thing is to handle [Radford’s superiors] in a way that they do not talk,” Nixon said.
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It is important to note that Nixon’s first reaction was not to conduct an intense examination of the spy ring and purge the government of the malcontent conspirators. In a move that characterized Nixon, he buried the espionage. In doing so, he left those involved in power, able to “bury” him given the chance. This decision was made in spite of Nixon’s suspicions of Haig.

“I’m afraid that Haig must have known about this operation,” Nixon said. “It seems unlikely he wouldn’t have known.”
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In fact, at the same time Haig was working closely with another young naval officer who served as a liaison between the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon. His name was Bob Woodward. Three years later, supplied with a steady diet of information from Haig and other malcontents in the military and intelligence community, the
Washington Post
reporter kept the Watergate story alive and pinned it directly on the president and his top staff.

“How does a guy that is nine months at the
Washington Post
City section have a source at the highest level of our government, who trusts him with damaging information about the President of the United States?” asked Len Colodny.
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It is a question we will return to.

E. Howard Hunt petitioned Charles Colson for work at the White House during his entire year of employment at the Mullen Co. A fellow Brown University graduate, Colson, like Dean, knew intelligence was the key to gain favor with the president. Colson, who once said he would run over his grandmother for Nixon,
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was tangled in Nixon’s dark side. He was eager to feed the malignant inclinations of the president. At the time he was being courted by Hunt, Colson, at the direction of John Dean, was compiling Nixon’s “enemies list,” which catalogued politicians, journalists, and activists the administration perceived as threats.

To Attorney General John Mitchell, Colson was bolstering “[t]he president’s worst instincts.”
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“That fucking Colson is going to kill us all,” Mitchell told Len Garment.
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Hunt’s White House employment was approved on July 7, 1971. Nixon needed someone skilled in the clandestine arts to compile unfavorable information on military analyst Daniel Ellsburg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times
. Nixon also needed someone to ransack the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit liberal think tank in Washington, and obtain information to shed negative light on the Vietnam bombing halt devised by LBJ in 1968.
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The president hoped the pilfered reports from Brookings would help counteract negative attacks on the White House. Clearly, Nixon knew about Hunt prior to his employment at the White House. A week before Hunt’s hiring, Nixon’s demand for the spy was clear:

President Nixon: Brookings, I want them just to break in and take it out. Do you understand?

Haldeman: Yeah, but you have to have somebody to do it.

President Nixon: That’s what I’m talking about. Don’t discuss it here. You talk to [E. Howard] Hunt. I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in . . . just go in and take it . . . I mean clean it up!
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Richard Helms was an opportunist who had maneuvered to get Hunt into the White House, offered a prompt recommendation to Haldeman. “[Richard] Helms describes this guy [Hunt] as ruthless, quiet and careful, low profile,” Haldeman told President Nixon. “He gets things done. He will work well with all of us.”
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Helms later denied not only his recommendation, but any knowledge of Hunt’s initial employment at the White House.
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Some of Hunt’s work for Nixon was linked with an event the seasoned agent was well acquainted with: the JFK assassination. All of Hunt’s work for the White House was communicated back to the CIA.

Washington attorney Doug Caddy, who later served as the criminal lawyer for the burglars in the Watergate break-in, is another notable who confirmed Hunt’s continued employ with the CIA. Caddy said that in April 1972, Hunt and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston tried to recruit him for work with the agency. Caddy worked at the Mullen Agency, but did non-CIA work for the General Mills account.

On one occasion, Hunt traveled to Miami to meet with two Cuban exiles with whom he had worked during the Bay of Pigs invasion. These men, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, who we will find later were part of “The Plumbers” outfit, accompanied Hunt to a meeting with a woman who claimed to have information about Castro’s reaction to the Kennedy assassination. White House counsel Charles Colson told Washington lawyer Henry Cashen, a veteran Nixon advance man and lawyer at the Shapiro Law Firm that Colson would join after leaving the White House that Hunt’s trek to Miami was at his direction and in response to a letter the woman had written to the president.

Colson told Cashen, a dapper man who wore a fresh boutonniere and jauntily tied bow tie every day, “I brought the letter to the president’s attention. He sat bolt upright and said ‘Send someone down!’ Nixon had a voracious appetite for information about the Kennedy assassination.”
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The woman said Castro had been morose. Hunt reported this back to both the White House and the CIA. The fact that the Cuban leader was not jubilant over the death of his rival would, of course, confirm Nixon’s suspicion that Kennedy was not murdered by a “communist,” as J. Edgar Hoover had insisted to him. Nor had it been a plot by the Cubans, as LBJ had told many in the aftermath. Johnson repeated this fiction to journalist Leo Janos, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Warren Commission member Richard Russell, and TV journalist Mike Wallace.

Hunt’s role dramatically increased alongside Nixon’s concern about the Pentagon Papers, which was intensified by Henry Kissinger. National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State, Kissinger left Watergate relatively unscathed, but was instrumental in playing to the insecurities that drove Nixon to order the illegal activities of “The Plumbers.” Kissinger, who similarly concealed his role in the cover-up of military atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia, buried his part in encouraging break-ins and wiretaps.

Nixon was initially unconcerned with the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret Department of Defense study about the origins of the Vietnam War. He thought it would reflect badly on Kennedy and Johnson, who had escalated the war, but not on himself: he had been away from politics for most of the period. Kissinger convinced him otherwise. “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” Haldeman overheard Kissinger arguing. “The fact that some idiot can publish all of the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own is damaging to your image, as far as the Soviets are concerned, and it could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.”
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* * *

The Special Investigations Unit, tasked with collecting intelligence and plugging leaks, later known as simply “The Plumbers,” was created on July 24, 1971. The unit included Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, David Young, and Egil “Bud” Krough. The “plumbers” recruited Frank Sturgis, Bernard “Macho” Barker, and Eugenio Martinez for the break-in of Dr. Fieldings office and their penetration of the Watergate. Liddy recruited James McCord.

Oddly, a month before the Pentagon Papers were published and two months before his employment at the White House, Hunt began to rally Bernard Barker and other members of his old Operation 40 outfit. “Hunt’s visit to Barker [in April 1971] was, pure and simple, a get-ready-for-action call. You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise,” Charles Colson later said. “But there wasn’t any action anticipated. Not then. The Pentagon Papers hadn’t been published. The Plumbers were months away. So you tell me: How did Hunt know [in April] that he’d need the Cubans?”
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