Richard
Nixon's battle with the Central Intelligence Agency
began in 1958. He was then vice-president, and (he CIA
was secretly financing and supporting an armed Insurrection
against the Sukarno regime, in Indonesia. When the CIA
effort collapsed, to the embarrassment of the United
States government, President Eisenhower ordered his
vice-president to purge those in the CIA involved in
the fiasco. Nixon personally arranged for Frank Wisner,
the highly respected deputy director of plans for the
CIA, and other top officials of the agency to be brusquely
relieved of duty, according to Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty,
then liaison officer between the CIA and the Air Force.
Prouty notes in his book The Secret Team:
Since the Indonesian campaign
was ... highly classified, most other government workers
did not know why all these nice people (in the CIA]
had been fired, and since they were cool to Nixon anyhow,
they arose in unison to damn him when he ran for President
in 1960.
Indeed, Nixon reportedly believed
that the CIA was responsible for providing the press
in 1960 with very damaging data on a "missile gap"
between the United States and Russia-which turned out
to be questionable, if not wholly fictitious. He held
the agency's leaks to be at least partly responsible
for his defeat in the close 1960 election. When he ran
again for election, in 1968, it developed that the CIA
was keeping his national security advisor-at that time,,
Richard Allen-under some sort of surveillance, and Nixon
suspected that CIA officials were again trying to compromise
him by finding embarrassing information (this time about
his efforts to block a peace settlement in Vietnam).
This suspicion did not end entirely when he was elected
president: at an early meeting of the National Security
Council, which superintends the Central Intelligence
Agency, Nixon asked Richard Helms to brief the council
and then leave. Helms, a Harvard-educated aristocrat
of the intelligence community, could not believe that
Nixon would break the long-standing practice of having
the director of Central Intelligence attend National
Security Council meetings.
As president, Nixon fully understood
that those who opposed him in the executive branch of
the government had the power to undercut any of his
programs, projects, or appointees by leaking embarrassing
information-or misinformation-to the press or to Congress.
William Safire, a chief speech writer for President
Nixon, has pointed out:
... the press has been frequently
used by the bureaucracy to build its protective shell.
An adept bureaucrat, his domain threatened by a cutoff
of funds, is able to alert those interest groups about
to be adversely affected and to zero them in to the
appropriate newsmen. A judicious leak, a horrendous
prediction of the homelessness, starvation, pestilence
the cutback would cause, a follow-up reaction story
about the interest group, a letter campaign by them
to influence congressmen, a severe editorial or two,
and the public interest [as represented by the president)
gives way to the bureaucracy focused interest.
Since bureaucrats are entrenched
in their positions by the traditions and tenure of civil
service, or protected directly by powerful congressional
subcommittees, a president has little power to countermand
this insubordination unless he can first pierce the
veil of anonymity provided to the bureaucrats by the
press (or the staff of congressional committees). In
order actually to rule over government, rather than
merely reigning as a figurehead for the independent
fiefdoms in the executive branch, Nixon needed to control
at least one federal agency with investigative powers.
As his staff quickly found out, this was no easy requisite
to fill. Nixon feared not only the Central Intelligence
Agency but also the Federal Bureau of Investigation
while it remained under the directorship and control
of' J. Edgar Hoover. He told close associates in the
White House that he believed that Hoover had used information
he had acquired through wiretaps and to blackmail Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, according to Krogh.* Although early
in the administration, in 1969, Nixon had sought Hoover's
help in wiretapping newsmen - and government officials
(after the attempt to wiretap a newsman's phone by John
Caldwell, a private detective hired by the White House
with campaign funds, was thought to produce very quick
results), the president's concern that Hoover would
use the transcripts of these wiretaps became acute when
it was discovered that Hoover was keeping these transcripts
in a private file in his office. (Subsequently, in July,
1971, John Ehrlichman authorized William Sullivan, then
an associate director of the FBI, to remove this incriminating
file from Hoover's FBI office; on July 12, 197 1, it
was brought to Ehrlichman's White House office.) In
any case, by spring, 1970, the demands of Hoover that
the White House provide him with written requests for
its surveillance operations against leaks, and his shrewd
maneuvers to gain control over the transcripts of wiretaps,
convinced President Nixon that the FBI could not be
relied on for more sensitive investigative work for
the White House.
* Nixon's suspicions about
Hoover's blackmailing of President Kennedy were not,
it turns out, baseless. The investigation of the Senate
select' committee chaired by Frank Church stumbled during
the course of its inquiries on the intriguing fact that
1. Edgar Hoover had himself been briefed on a liaison
that the president was then having with a young woman
who was also having liaisons with reputed racketeers
involved in organized crime. After the FBI's electronic
surveillance turned up this possibly embarrassing connection,
Hoover had a luncheon meeting with President Kennedy;
afterward, the telephone communications between President
Kennedy and the young woman stopped. Subsequently, Attorney
General Robert Kennedy intervened to block the investigations
of a wiretap involving these organized racketeers on
the grounds that they were involved in "dirty business,"
on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency, directed
against Fidel Castro.
On June 5, 1970, frustrated
by his inability to gain control over an established
investigative agency or to stop the recurring leaks
from the bureaucracy, President Nixon summoned the heads
of the various intelligence agencies to the White House-including
J. Edgar Hoover; Richard Helms; Gen. Donald V. Bennett,
of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Adm. Noel Gayler,
of the National Security Agency and described his dissatisfaction
with them in reportedly "blistering" terms.
He demanded a new mechanism for coordinating intelligence
activities, especially domestic ones that were extralegal,
and he proposed that a committee be formed immediately
to achieve this objective. Tom Charles Huston, a young
speech writer at the White House and a Nixon loyalist,
was assigned the task of directing this committee toward
creating a new investigative structure which could bypass
the authority of both Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover.
After only three weeks of meetings, the ad hoc committee,
under Huston's effective control, recommended that the
president authorize secretly the use of illegal wiretapping,
illegal mail covers, and illegal break-ins for domestic-intelligence
purposes. In a highly classified document entitled "Operational
Restraints on Intelligence Collection" the committee
noted that surreptitious entries (break-ins) were It
clearly illegal," and explained, "It amounts
to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result
in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also
the most fruitful tool and can produce the type of intelligence
which cannot be obtained in any other fashion."
Although the "Huston Plan" was initially approved
by the president, it ran into such powerful opposition
from J. Edgar Hoover that after five days it was rescinded.
Nixon and Ehrlichman did not believe that Hoover had
opposed this plan because of any "qualms about
civil liberties," as Krogh put it; the FBI had
performed hundreds of illegal break-ins for other presidents,
as well as illegal wiretaps (and had an entire program
organized to harass Martin Luther King and other civil
rights leaders through extralegal means). The CIA also
had an ongoing program to open mail from foreign countries,
and in certain instances engaged in domestic surveillance.
The National Security Agency, which specializes in communications
and codes for the government, had intercepted telephone
transmissions for over ten years. The point was not
that these were new or unprecedented transgressions
but that the Nixon administration was proposing a new
structure to direct them, and Hoover was not about to
allow the FBI to be bypassed by such a committee. On
August 5, 1970, Huston attempted to override Hoover's
objections by recommending in a memorandum to Haldeman:
At some point, Hoover has to
be told who is President. He has become totally unreasonable
and his conduct is detrimental to our domestic intelligence
operations.... It is important to remember that the
entire intelligence community knows that the President
made a positive decision to go ahead. Hoover has now
succeeded in forcing a review.
Huston apparently did not realize
that Hoover already possessed incriminating wiretaps
on newsmen, which he could leak, and that Nixon had
no choice but to acquiesce. Although an interagency
domestic-intelligence unit was temporarily set up, it
was allowed to lapse a few weeks later into obscurity.
"The whole thing just crumpled," John Dean,
the president's counsel, explained to Nixon while discussing
the need for "a domestic national security intelligence
system" in 1972. (This conversation was recorded
by Nixon's ubiquitous tape recorder.) Soon afterward,
Huston was eased out of the administration. The first
attempted coup had thus failed.
The quest for control of an
investigative agency was not to be abandoned because
of the objections (and temporary power) of J. Edgar
Hoover. While John Ehrlichman and his staff attempted
to discredit the FBI director by leaking stories to
the press that he was senile and "losing his grip,"
President Nixon turned his attention to the Treasury
Department, which had under its control such potent
investigative agencies as the IRS, Customs (with its
unhindered "search authority"), and the Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms unit (which had an eight-hundred-man
force and wiretap authority). Nixon was fully aware
that the Kennedy administration had used the IRS for
its own purposes. Under the cover of prosecuting organized
crime, a list of names that the Kennedy brothers desired
to prosecute was circulated within the executive branch,
and this became the priority list for IRS investigations.
The vast majority of crime cases during the Kennedy
administration turned out to be revenue cases, according
to the records of the Department of Justice. When Kennedy
wanted to call attention to his war on crime, he persuaded
the IRS to initiate investigations against gamblers
in order to force the FBI to investigate. Indeed, Kennedy
was so successful in commanding the loyalty of the Internal
Revenue Service that he was able to persuade that agency
to grant large tax deductions to American drug manufacturers
who contributed to paying the ransom demanded by Premier
Fidel Castro in return for the CIA-trained Cuban immigrants
who had been captured in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion
in the first year of the Kennedy administration. (In
fact, the drug companies participating were allowed
to deduct the full retail price, rather than the actual
cost, of the drugs as their contribution, which allowed
them to make profits on the transaction.)
The White House strategists
saw no reason why the IRS could not be made equally
responsive to the special needs of the Nixon administration
and in 1970 pressured the tax-collecting service into
creating the Special Service Staff (SSS). According
to a White House document, "The function of the
SSS was to gather information on the finances and activities
of extremist organizations and individuals, both left
and right, and make this information... available to
the appropriate division of the IRS." The internal-security
division of the Justice Department, then headed by Robert
Mardian, an Arizona lawyer with close connections to
the White House, provided the SSS with a computerized
list of protestors (which was also provided to the CIA).
However, despite constant prodding from Huston and the
White House, the SSS refused to move against any organizations
(for example, the Black Panthers) that the Nixon administration
considered enemies. Huston noted in a September 21,
1970, memorandum to H. R. Haldeman:
Nearly eighteen months ago,
the President indicated a desire for IRS to move against
leftist organizations.... I've been pressing IRS since
that time to no avail.... What we cannot do in a courtroom
via criminal prosecutions to curtail the activities
of some of these groups, IRS could do by administrative
action. Moreover, valuable intelligence-type information
could be turned up by the IRS as a result of their field
orders.
By the end of 1970 it became
clear to the White House that the IRS was "dominated
by Democrats" who could not be counted on to cooperate
with the Nixon administration. The Treasury Department
had also rejected the attempts of the White House group
to place first John Caulfield and then Liddy in the
job of chief of the enforcement branch of the Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms unit. Randolph Thrower, then commissioner
of the IRS, had testified that he opposed these White
House appointments because of his concern about "the
potential for a personal police force which Would not
have the insulation of the career staff." Finally.
Rossides became very definitely the enemy in the eyes
of the White House when, according to Krogh, he informed
Ehrlichman in early 1971 that he planned to dismiss
Liddy from his key position as his assistant for law
enforcement matters in the Treasury Department. Liddy,
who had distinguished himself in both Operation Intercept
and the crusades against Turkey, had become a main liaison
with the White House staff and had reported to them
frequently on what resistance Rossides and other bureaucrats
at the Treasury Department were planning against White
House actions and objectives. Krogh presumed that Liddy
was being fired because "he was too loyal to the
White House," and therefore obtained Ehrlichman's
permission to hire him on the Domestic Council. Although
Krogh continued to warn Rossides that the president
"would not tolerate bureaucratic maneuvering,"
the intrepid assistant secretary of the treasury steadfastly
refused to yield to the White House any control over
the operations of the IRS and Customs, even to the point
of denying Krogh's staff information. Krogh found that
the former all-American football player "didn't
know when his side had lost or when the game was over."
Rossides subsequently-explained, "My job is to
protect the autonomy of the Treasury Department's law
enforcement agency.... If Krogh or Ehrlichman wanted
to run them, they first would have to fire me."
Since they couldn't fire Rossides without a major struggle
(and Secretary of the Treasury Connally apparently backed
Rossides), White House strategists, temporarily, at
least, suspended their ambition to gain control over
the Treasury agencies.
Even though the White House
staff had directly participated in hyping the so-called
drug menace into a national emergency, they found that
they had little influence over the independent-minded
director of BNDD, John Ingersoll. When a private poll
indicated in the spring of 1971 that the American public
remained largely unaware of the law-and-order measures
of the Nixon administration to eradicate narcotics,
Krogh called Ingersoll into his office and demanded
t hat Ingersoll increase the number of narcotics arrests
before the 1972 election. The actual number of narcotics
arrests had substantially decreased during the highly
publicized heroin epidemic because Ingersoll had changed
the focus of the bureau's efforts from street arrests
in America to seizures of narcotics abroad. Although
this policy may have made sense in terms of curtailing
the amount of heroin entering the United States, it
seemed a potentially damaging policy to the White House
strategists in an election year. When Krogh suggested
that some mass arrests of narcotics addicts by federal
agents might help alleviate the situation, Ingersoll
again argued that such revolving-door arrests would
relieve neither the crime nor the drug problem, and
again might tempt federal agents into working hand in
glove with underworld informers. Although Krogh cut
the discussion short by saying, "We cannot accept
your thesis," Ingersoll, who knew he had the support
of key congressmen. professional police organizations,
and even John Mitchell, simply ignored Krogh's orders.
The White House was stymied. Its attempts to seize control
of one of the investigative arms of the government had
been so effectively frustrated by the spring of 1971
that plans were made to establish a privately financed
investigative organization that could do political work
for the White House. John Caulfield, who was then doing
private wiretaps and investigations for the White House,
drew up plans for a private detective agency. As the
plan finally developed,* it was modeled after Intertel,
a "detective agency," formed by former members
of the Kennedy administration's Department of Justice,
that sold its services, at least ostensibly, to corporations
concerned about organized crime. The new organization
designed by Caulfield would perform security services
for corporations supporting the Nixon administration
(e.g., Hughes Aircraft, Northrop, Gulf Oil) but would
actually use part of the funds it collected to perform
covert operations for the White House, including wiretaps,
break-ins, collection of political information, and
surveillance of "enemies." According to Caulfield,
the plan he liad in mind involved Vernon Acree's and
Roger Barth's resigning from the Internal Revenue Service
in order to provide their services and contacts, and
Joe Woods, brother of Nixon's personal secretary, Rose
Mary Woods, would also join the firm, as a vice-president
and head of the Chicago office. Caulfield would run
the intelligence-gathering operation, which would be
clandestinely based in New York City, on East Forty-eighth
Street, and would infiltrate rival campaigns, steal
embarrassing documents from opponents, and release derogatory
information. Caulfield drew up a memorandum in June,
1971, which noted, "The offensive involvement outlined
above would be supported, supervised, and programmed
by the principals but completely disassociated (separate
foolproof financing) when the corporate structure had
located in New York in extreme clandestine fashion."
Although this memorandum called for the new organization
to be staffed by former FBI agents, the White House
strategists were concerned that Caulfield would not
be able to find an adequate number of former FBI agents
for the task, and even if he could, these agents would
have no effective cover if they were caught in any covert
operations. Moreover, such a private organization, dependent
on corporate financing, would not have the necessary
authority to alert the Internal Revenue Service and
other investigative agencies of the government to possible
suspects.
* See Appendix, "Operation
'Sandwedge."'
While the White House
staff was debating the merits of' creation of this privately
financed "detective agency," Liddy came up
with a superior plan, calling for a new special narcotics
unit which would report directly to the White House.
In a presidential option paper that he drew up late
in the summer of 197 1, according to Krogh and others
familiar with the plan, Liddy proposed more concretely
that since neither Ingersoll nor Rossides could be easily
fired from his position before the election, the president's
most effective option for gaining control over the narcotics
agents would be to detach agents and specialists who
could be relied upon by the White House from the BNDD,
the IRS, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division,
and the Bureau of Customs. This new office would operate
directly out of the executive office of the president.
The beauty of the Liddy plan was its simplicity: it
did not even need approval from Congress. The president
could create such an office by executive decree, and
order all other agencies of the government to cooperate
by supplying liaisons and agents. Congress would not
even have to appropriate funds, according to those familiar
with the Liddy plan: the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA), which was located in John Mitchell's
Department of Justice, could funnel monies via local
police departments to finance these new strike forces.
The new office would have all the investigative powers
of the privately financed detective agency: it would
have wiretappers from the BNDD; Customs agents, with
their unique "search authority" IRS agents,
who could feed the names of suspects into the IRS's
target-selection committee for a grueling audit, and
CIA agents for "the more extraordinary missions."
In addition, since it would control grants from LEAA,
this new office could mobilize support from state and
local police forces in areas in which it desired to
operate.
The most important feature
of the Liddy plan, however, was that the White House
agents would now act under the cloak of combating the
drug menace. Since public fears were being excited about
this deadly threat to the children of American citizens
and their property, few would oppose vigorous measures
against alleged pushers by this new office, even if
its agents were occasionally caught in such excesses
as placing an unauthorized wiretap. On the contrary,
if the dread of drugs could be maintained, the public,
Congress, and the press would probably applaud such
determined actions. Krogh and the White House strategists
immediately saw the advantages to having the new office
operate its agents under the emblem of a heroin crusade
rather than under the cover of a private security organization,
and Liddy's option paper, much modified in form to remove
any embarrassing illegalities, was sent to the president
with the recommendations of Krogh and Ehrlichman. In
the fall of 1971, with the election rapidly approaching,
the president gave his assent to the plan.
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