The White
House timetable for consolidating its power over the
Investigative agencies of the government was rudely
interrupted on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C.,
police arrested five men in the national headquarters
of the Democratic party in the Watergate apartment and
office complex. Although the arresting officers did
not know it at the time, these burglars were actually
part of an intelligence-gathering unit working surreptitiously
for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP).
This unit was coordinated by G. Gordon Liddy, who was
then working as counsel to the finance committee of
CREEP, and by E. Howard Hunt, who still maintained an
office in the executive office of the president as a
consultant. Under other circumstances the covert relationship
between the five burglars, Liddy, Hunt, and the Nixon
White House might never have been disclosed; but with
Nixon's impending reelection threatening the very independence
of the power base of the bureau chiefs of the investigative
agencies, there were strong forces within the executive
branch of the government which would not only refuse
to help cover up the embarrassing connection but would
actively work to disclose it.
The most convenient way for
the president to assure that the FBI investigation into
the Watergate burglary would not uncover any damaging
links to the White House, without embarrassing its recently
appointed director, L. Patrick Gray, was to ask the
Central Intelligence Agency to intrude on the FBI's
investigation of the case. Since 1950 the CIA and FBI
had a standing arrangement whereby if either agency
asked the other to limit its investigation of a case
so as not to reveal an intelligence operation or a secret
agent, the other agency would acquiesce. When, for example,
the Kennedy administration in 1961 wanted to terminate
an FBI investigation into a wiretap placed, on the behalf
of a Chicago racketeer, in the room of Dan Rowan, the
well-known television personality, Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy warned Hoover that the investigation
would uncover a CIA operation directed at Fidel Castro.
After the CIA Supplied the necessary paperwork, Hoover
reluctantly called off the investigation.* In the case
of the Watergate break-in, the CIA could also have plausibly
claimed that a full-scale FBI investigation into the
matter could have disclosed agency operations and secrets.
Four of the five burglars arrested in the Democratic
headquarters that night had previously worked for the
CIA: James McCord had been employed in the highly sensitive
position of assistant director for security for the
entire Central Intelligence Agency up to a year before
the break-in; Eugenio R. Martinez, a Cuban refugee.
was still receiving a $100-amonth retainer from the
agency and reporting to his case officer in Miami; Bernard
Barker, another refugee, had worked for the CIA both
Cuba and, later, the preparations for the Bay of Pigs
invasion; and in anti-Castro activities. More important,
E. Howard Hunt had been a CIA official for more than
twenty years, and the CIA's technical services division
had supplied much of the equipment used in previous
intelligence operations that Hunt had undertaken for
the White House. Indeed, at the time of the Watergate
burglary, Hunt was employed by Robert R. Mullen and
Company, which was ostensibly a public-relations firm
but which handled many sensitive foreign assignments
for the CIA and had a case officer assigned to it. President
Nixon thus assumed, five days after the burglary, that
the CIA would intervene with the FBI to prevent disclosures
that would be damaging to his administration. On June
23 the president instructed Bob Haldeman to tell Richard
Helms that "Hunt... knows too damn much.... If
it gets out that this is all involved... it would make
the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt took bad and
it's likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which
you would think would be very unfortunate-both for the
CIA and for the country ... and for American foreign
policy. Just tell [Helms] to lay off." Nixon made
it clear to Haldeman that he believed that Helms and
the CIA were vulnerable to very damaging information
that had been kept secret about the Bay of Pigs invasion
for more than ten years, and that the threat of these
disclosures would be sufficient to gain CIA cooperation
in covering up the Watergate burglary. (Earlier, Ehrlichman
had been ordered to ask Richard Helms to submit a report
on the secret in-house investigation of the CIA's role
in the Bay of Pigs invasion, but Helms resisted the
request. After discussing i t with Nixon in person,
he submitted only an abridged report.)
*According to the story supplied
to the FBI by the CIA (and Robert Kennedy), the private
detectives arrested in Rowan's room for the attempted
wiretap were employed by the CIA as a favor to Sam "Mo"
Giancana, an organized-crime figure who had been recruited
to help in the assassination plots against Fidel Castro
by Robert Maheu, a CIA agent (and also a close friend
of Larry O'Brien's, who was then Kennedy's chief of
staff). Whatever the reasons were for this racketeer's
being assisted by the administration, the revelation
would have been highly embarrassing.
Frank Sturgis had also been
employed by the CIA
Richard Helms, however, was
not about to provide the cover for Watergate that the
president expected. He had been told that Nixon planned
to replace him immediately after the election, and he
feared, as he told me subsequently, that Nixon also
planned "to destroy [his] agency." Nixon,
it will be recalled, had already excluded Helms from
some meetings of the National Security Council. The
director of CIA was also well aware that in the reorganization
of the Investigative agencies in the narcotics program
the White House strategists had twice attempted to detach
CIA agents and use them for their own domestic purposes.
Krogh had, fact, demanded and received surreptitious
funds from the CIA to pursue his war against heroin.
Although Helms denied that
he had specific knowledge of Hunt's activities on the
special-investigation unit, he could not have been entirely
unaware of the extraordinary nature of the relationship
between Hunt and the other Plumbers and the White House.
In any case, Helms saw that these White House maneuvers-and
the demands being put upon his agency-could jeopardize
the integrity of the CIA (and diminish its autonomy
within the government). When Haldeman and Ehrlichman
approached Helms with the president's suggestion that
he inform the FBI that a deeper investigation of the
Watergate burglary could uncover CIA activities, he
pointedly refused, saying that the burglars arrested
in Watergate were not involved with the CIA. The White
House was thus deprived of its most expedient way of
covering up the burglars.
Not only did the CIA refuse
to intervene for the president to limit the FBI investigation,
but Robert Foster Bennett, president of Robert R. Mullen
and Company, which acted as a coordinator for Hunt in
a number of his prior activities, began planting stories
in the Washington Post which suggested that the Watergate
burglary was directly connected to other White House
activities. Indeed, Bennett sent a memorandum to his
CIA case officer, Martin J. Lukasky-who controlled the
covert activities of Mullen and Company-which described
how he had established a relationship with Bob Woodward,
of the Post, and was seeking to direct the attention
of the Post to Charles Colson's activities and away
from those of the CIA. In return for these stories,
Bennett said that Woodward was protecting the covert
activities of Mullen and Company and the CIA, according
to a memorandum written to the CIA on July 10, 1972.
As Colson saw material appearing in the Post which implied
that he was behind Watergate, he began planting detective
stories on his own behalf. The "battle of the leaks,"
as Colson called it, thus began to sink the Nixon administration.
At the Federal Bureau of Investigation
there was also an open rebellion. The selection of Gray
as acting director after the death of Hoover was resented
by FBI executives who were bypassed for the position
or who believed that the position should go to an insider
at the FBI instead of to a friend of the president.
A number of senior agents also believed that Gray was
"too liberal" because he allowed agents to
wear colored shirts and to grow their hair long, and
even considered recruiting women as agents. To demonstrate
to the president that Gray could not control the FBI.
and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to
the administration, the disgruntled FBI officials leaked
to the press the "302" files, which were reports
of the interviews FBI agents had with individuals who
could supply information about the Watergate affair.
Mark W. Feldt, Jr., then deputy associate director of
the FBI, also provided off-the-record briefings to journalists
that implied that the White House was attempting to
conceal its involvement with the Watergate burglars.
With these `302" reports circulating around Washington
and occasionally surfacing in the newspapers, President
Nixon complained to his counsel John Dean, who was then
supervising the Watergate cover-up, that "the Bureau
is leaking like a sieve." It thus became painfully
clear to the president that Gray would not succeed in
suppressing the leaks from within.
There were also insurgents
in the Treasury Department. Although the White House
strategists had succeeded in easing Rossides out of
his key position as assistant secretary for law enforcement
and operations, and had managed to detach from the Bureau
of Customs a large part of its investigative capacity,
they had created dangerous enemies for themselves in
the Internal Revenue Service and in other branches of
the Treasury Department. Early in 1973, officials of
the IRS surreptitiously leaked copies of President Nixon's
tax returns, which showed that he paid no taxes while
he was president, to a Rhode Island newspaper. It subsequently
turned out that the tax deduction which allowed the
president to forgo taxes during those years proceeded
from a document that had been illegally backdated by
the Nixon appointee who had replaced Rossides, Edward
Morgan. Morgan was forced by the disclosure to resign
immediately. The leaks from the Treasury Department
thus further undercut the planned reorganization of
the Treasury Department's investigative agencies.
Even though the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs was scheduled to lose its independent
status as an investigative agency and to be merged into
a new superagency in 1973 by Reorganization Plan' Number
Two (and the position of its director, John Ingersoll,
was to be abolished entirely), die-hard officials at
BNDD and at other agencies kept fighting the consolidation
by leaking damaging information about Myles Ambrose,
who was, according to Krogh, being considered by the
White House for the job of administrator. For example,
It was recalled that Ambrose had been the house guest
of a Texas rancher who was later arrested for gun-running,
as well as suspected of narcotics-smuggling; and information
poured out of BNDD (and the Bureau of Customs) on the
Collinsville raids by the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.
However, Ambrose had no interest in heading the new
agency, and he retired to private law practice in 1973.
As late as September 15, 1972,
President Nixon believed that despite the leaks he would
be able to win control of major investigative agencies
through his planned reorganization and then use these
agencies to complete his consolidation of power over
the rest of the executive branch of the government.
He told John Dean, "This is a war. We take a few
shots and it will be over. . . ." When Dean replied
that he had taken notes on the enemies of the administration,
the president further explained:
I want the most comprehensive
notes on all those who tried to do us in.... They were
doing this quite deliberately and they're asking for
it and they are going to get it. We have not used the
power in the first four years as you know. We have never
used it. We have not used the Bureau and we have not
used the Justice Department but things are going to
change now and they [the investigative agencies] are
either going to do it right or go.
Dean realized, however, that
with each disclosure, the carefully planned reorganization
was coming undone, and the domain that Nixon was attempting
to gain over the investigative agencies was, in fact,
slipping from his grasp.
The new superagency, which
was to be called the Drug Enforcement Agency, was still
moving ahead; and in this reorganization many of the
bureaucrats who had opposed Nixon's will were replaced.
The Nixon strategists, however, who were to coordinate
the activities of this new investigative agency on Nixon's
behalf, were all vulnerable to leaks and disclosures
in the Watergate affair. John Ehrlichman and Egil Krogh,
who were the powers behind the scene in establishing
the new agency, had both supervised the activities of
Hunt and Liddy in the special-investigations unit. It
was only a matter of time before Hunt and Liddy, who
were then indicted as co-conspirators in the Watergate
burglary, named Krogh as their immediate superior in
other burglaries (and even if they both remained silent,
minor officials in the CIA and secretaries in the executive
office of the president knew of these activities). Krogh
thus was quietly moved from the Domestic Council to
the Department of Transportation. Morgan, Krogh's former
staff assistant who replaced Rossides in the Treasurv
Department, was compromised by the leaks from the IRS
on Nixon s tax returns and had to resign. Caulfield,
who was to take over the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
unit for the White House, had been involved by John
Dean in the cover-up, and therefore also had to resign.
Santarelli, who had been appointed the new administrator
for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, had
been seriously damaged by a leak from the Department
of Justice about candid but embarrassing remarks he
had made about President Nixon, which were surreptitiously
recorded at a luncheon by FBI agents and disclosed to
the press. He was thus forced to resign. In short, all
the key loyalists whom the White House strategists had
counted on for the takeover of this new investigative
agency had been driven from the government either by
leaks from the agencies they were planning on reorganizing
or by their involvement in the Watergate affair. As
Eugene Rossides said to me in 1974, after he returned
to his private law practice, "If not for Watergate,
can you imagine what they would have done with the Drug
Enforcement Agency?" The revolt of the bureaucrats
thus succeeded in blocking Nixon's plan to gain control
over the investigative agencies of the government in
his second term.
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