Nixon's Secret (62 page)

“Of all the accusations made about me and about my leadership of the agency itself, I have resented none more than the charge I blackmailed President Nixon,” Helms told British television host David Frost. “It is nonsense. I did not blackmail him; I threatened him with nothing.”

Yet, a threat
was
issued. On November 20, 1972, Helms was summoned to Camp David and told that his time as director of the CIA was coming to a close. Jim McCord sent the following letter to Jack Caulfield on December 21: “Sorry to have to write you this letter but felt you had to know. If Helms goes and the WG [Watergate] operation is laid at the CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at a precipice right now. Just pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course. I’m sorry that you will get hurt in the fallout.”
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* * *

This was not the first time the CIA attempted to destroy Nixon. In fact, according to CIA assassin Edward Kaiser, the CIA had attempted to assassinate the president on two separate occasions in early 1972. Although Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis recruited Kaiser for the Nixon job, Kaiser backed out when he learned Nixon was the intended target.

Howard Liebengood, the chief of staff for two senators and prominent Washington lobbyist, told Kaiser that “[t]he president was supposed to be assassinated.” The first place he was supposed to be assassinated at was in Key Biscayne, the second place was when he was supposed to give a speech at the time of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War convention in Miami Beach 1972. Veteran CIA assassin Edwin Kaiser was to supply the weapons to assassinate Nixon with. Kaiser was recruited by Sturgis for the plot, but Kaiser didn’t want any part of domestic assassination. Kaiser told Liebengood, “I don’t get myself involved in politics.” Liebengood was a longtime aide to Howard Baker, one of the first Republicans elected to Congress in Tennessee who moved onto the US Senate. An amiable moderate, Baker began his service on the Watergate Committee as a partisan of Nixon. Baker and his Republican counsel Fred Thompson picked up the CIA thread in the Watergate story but its revelations were essentially stalled by the committee Democrats that Republican Senator Lowell Weiker habitually joined on procedural votes. A further investigation of the CIA role was denied. Baker’s incredible report was in the back of a six-hundred-page book gathering dust at the Library of Congress, missed by the media but largely unknown until today. Liebengood assisted Thompson in the Baker-authorized investigation of the CIA connection to Watergate.

Liebengood and I were friends because he worked for Baker while I was working for Reagan. In 1989, Liebengood’s highly successful lobbying firm, Gold and Liebengood, was acquired by Young and Rubicam, as was my own lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly. We became collegues. “Kaiser and Sturgis were both CIA assassins,” Liebengood told me. They both insisted that they had not been informed that Richard Nixon was the target until after the intended weapon was obtained and Kaiser recruited for the hit. Both Sturgis and Kaiser insisted they had been led to believe that they were to execute a “Communist,” said Baker’s longtime confidant. “Kaiser balked when he realized it was a domestic political hit,” Liebengood continued.

Scott Kaiser, the son of Ed Kaiser, learned much from his father about the assassination attempts on Nixon:

The 1972 Republican Convention was coming to Miami Beach, Florida. Nixon frequently spent weekends on Key Biscayne with his crony Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo. In a “Secret, Eyes Only” memorandum prepared for USDC Judge William M. Hoeveler, CIA operative Gerald Patrick Hemming Jr. claimed that: “During January 1972 I was contacted by FBI Agent Robert Dwyer in reference to assisting a Miami FBI project involving Ed Kaiser and Frank Sturgis that motivated a 1972 meeting with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Miami Supervisor Hale for backstop briefing. Sturgis was at the time a White House/Special Operations Group operative, and was later arrested at Watergate during June 1972.”

In April 1976, my father told Author Dick Russell: “There were some plans for the convention. I talked to some of the people participating in it, who later participated in the Watergate thing. Create a shoot-out using the Yippies and the Zippies and the other ‘hard core commies’ they were so worried about. The people I spoke to were going to put some of this equipment in their hands, and some in law enforcement hands, and use some of the local vigilantes to start a shoot out. This would finally straighten out Washington as to where the priorities were on overcoming the ‘domestic communist menace.’” Hemming stated to this researcher in 1993: “I get a phone call from (CIA operative) Bob Dwyer. I hadn’t talked to him in months, since the Nixon compound thing (Nixon had complained about protestors outside his compound in Key Biscayne, and Sturgis and Kaiser had been ordered to rough up some demonstrators). Some of Veciana’s boys had a scheme to have a Cuban Comar fire a STIX missile at the compound. There was a similar plan to attack Guantanamo during the Bay of Pigs. They were gonna take out Nixon and put Agnew in power. I told Dwyer that to me it was all a provocation, and would end up in arrests, and I’m the fucking guy standing in the middle.

Ed Kaiser was involved in both plots to assassinate Nixon, but after he found out that it was a “political assassination” he didn’t want any part of it, when Nixon was giving a speech in Miami Beach at the VVAW Convention there was suppose to be a shoot hit, my father was suppose to have supplied the silencers, others were suppose to shoot into the crowd of demonstrators while Frank Sturgis was suppose to take out Nixon, but none of this happened because my father went to the FBI. AJ Weberman who was there said Kaiser saved his life that day. Those against detente with Russia or China, later to be called neocons wanted Nixon out. The right wing Big Oil Barons close to furious about Nixon’s hedging on the Oil depletion allowance and his outreach to the Reds wanted him gone. When the Assassination plots failed the Dean driven, Liddy and Hunt executed break-in at the DNC, infiltrated and thus monitored by the CIA provided the “boys” at the Pentagon and Langley the chance they needed for a coup de etat.
115

Gerald Patrick Hemming was no stranger to conspiracy. As an ex-CIA man, he served as Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, a point of origin for top-secret U-2 flights. Hemming was later part of an American effort aiding Fidel Castro to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. A CIA memo later stated that Hemming, along with E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, were involved in the assassination of John Kennedy, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti. The memo was invoked in the 1983 libel suit
Hunt v. Liberty Lobby
, which Hunt brought against Marchetti and his publisher over a Marchetti article linking Hunt to the JFK assassination.
116
In 1976, under arrest for gun smuggling, Hemming began to divulge facts about his CIA past.

Helms wanted to ride out his post as director until his sixtieth birthday on March 30, 1973. This allowed Helms to go out on his own terms, voluntarily leaving his post at the minimum age of retirement. His wish was not granted. A new director was named on February 2, and Helms was effectively ousted.

McCord followed through on his threat. On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read a letter from McCord aloud to the Senate Committee. The letter detailed political pressure from the White House and the perjury of defendants as a result, as well as his claim that the Watergate break-ins were not a CIA operation (with the caveat that the Cubans might have been misled to believe that it was). The letter was the biggest sham in the Watergate hearing, until the masterful performance of John Dean.

Dean came to represent what went wrong with the Nixon presidency. Upon becoming president, Nixon separated himself from his coterie of trusted advisors and confidants, the men who appealed to the Nixon’s better decisions and actions. With the exception of Attorney General John Mitchell, the men who occupied the White House were not Nixon men and he did not have control of them, having handed authority over to Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

“Haldeman and Ehrlichman shield the President by monopolizing him,” an assistant to the president noted. “One of them is present at every meeting in the Oval Office—Nixon sees no one alone. Every meeting follows precisely, down to the second, the ‘talking paper’ prepared in advance. Haldeman sees everything—even the daily news summary is reviewed before it goes in to the Old Man. Nixon’s made himself their captive. How can he find out whether his orders are carried out? All the channels flow back to Haldeman.”
117

Nixon, of course, demanded the isolation that the “Berlin Wall” would impose. After resigning and departing for his exile in San Clemente, Nixon would be visited by a lawyer from President Ford’s staff to discuss the disposition of his papers and records. “You know,” Nixon said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t spend more time in the White House talking to people like you. Bob, of course, always prevented it. But I’ve been thinking over the last few days. If I had it to do all over again, that’s one of the things I would do differently. Talk to people like you, I mean.”
118

Richard Whalen, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who had helped Nixon reinvent himself in ‘68, had, like so many of the other “bright young men,” slipped away from Nixon. Whalen experienced Nixon’s withdrawal firsthand and had the foresight to predict the damage it would cause. “No potential danger is more ominous in a free society than the secret leaching away of presidential authority from the man the people choose to the men he chooses,” Whalen wrote the year of the break-in. “To whom are they responsible? To him and their own consciences, of course, which is the essence of the danger when a President is protected even from the knowledge of what is said and done in his name.”
119

“The way you, you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful,” Nixon told Dean on September 15, 1972, “because you—putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there.”
120

A year later, in testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, Dean implicated President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell in the break-ins and the cover-up, exposed the distribution of “hush money” from the White House to keep a lid on the scandal, set the Watergate investigators on the trail of the secret White House recording system and revealed the creation of a Nixon’s enemies list. Jeb Magruder, who reprehensibly heaped the blame for the break-ins at the Attorney General’s door, would also smear Mitchell in slanderous testimony.

In fact, Mitchell and Nixon did not order or have extensive knowledge of the break-ins. In the end, Nixon’s paranoia and solitary nature left him without loyal and able men to turn to.

In the end, Nixon was alone in the White House.

NOTES

1
.     Tad Szulc,
Compulsive Spy
, p. 180.

2
.     Author’s conversation with Jim McCord.

3
.     George Will, “If the President does it, it’s legal?”
New York Post
, Aug. 17, 2013.

4
.     H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 5.

5
.     Ibid., p. 8.

6
.     Kevin Anderson, “Revelations and gaps on Nixon tapes,” BBC News. March 1, 2002.

7
.     Larry Sabato,
The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy
, p. 313.

8
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 198.

9
.     Russ Baker,
Family of Secrets
, p. 181.

10
.   Lamar Waldron,
Watergate: The Hidden History
, p. 436.

11
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 40.

12
.   Richard Helms,
A Look Over My Shoulder
, p. 27.

13
   Oliver Stone,
Nixon
, Hollywood Pictures, 1995.

14
.   Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept the Secrets
, p. 38.

15
.   Lamar Waldron,
Watergate: The Hidden History
, p. 42.

16
.   Lamar Waldron,
Watergate: The Hidden History
, pp. 848–849.

17
.   Jim Hougan,
Secret Agenda
, p. 6.

18
.   Tad Szulc,
Compulsive Spy
, p. 106.

19
.   Russ Baker,
Family of Secrets
, p. 200.

20
.   Jim Hougan,
Secret Agenda
, p. 9.

21
.   Church Committee Testimony of L. Fletcher Prouty, July 16, 1975.

22
.   Lamar Waldron,
Watergate: The Hidden History
, p. 779.

23
.   Kathryn S. Olmsted,
Challenging the Secret Government
, p. 77.

24
   Church Committee Testimony of L. Fletcher Prouty, July 16, 1975.

25
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 109.

26
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 203.

27
.   Lamar Waldron,
Watergate: The Hidden History
, p. 242.

28
.   Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
Silent Coup
, p. 10.

29
.   James Rosen, “Nixon and the Chiefs,” The Atlantic, April 2002.

30
.   Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
Silent Coup
, pp. 13–14.

31
.   James Rosen, “Nixon and the Chiefs,” The Atlantic, April 2002.

32
.   James Rosen, “Nixon and the Chiefs,” The Atlantic, April 2002.

33
.   “Book Discussion on Silent Coup: The Removal of a President,” Booknotes C-SPAN, Jan. 25, 1991.