1972 CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE DOUGLAS CADDY

[Douglas Caddy]

AFFADAVIT

1972 CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE DOUGLAS CADDY,

Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following facts regarding my involvement with the Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy, who represented the burglars known as the Watergate Seven. On Saturday, June 17, 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Watergate and were arrested at 2:30 A. M. by Washington, D.C. Police Officer Carl Shoffler. At the time the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department employed me as a Confidential Informant and assigned me to work directly with Officer Shoffler. Two weeks before the arrests at Watergate I provided information to Shoffler about the planned break-in of the DNC that I had obtained as a Confidential Informant from a highly unusual source. By using this advance information, Shoffler developed a successful triangulation strategy that in effect set the burglars up in a form of entrapment. The Watergate scandal thus began and ultimately forced the resignation of President Nixon.

Shoffler came to my apartment in Washington, D.C. late in the morning of the day of the events at Watergate and exulted in having made the arrests. He told me that he had secretly telephoned the Washington Post soon after the arrests to tip the newspaper off to what had occurred. He then demanded his special birthday present from me, which I was only too happy to perform.

(First meeting) Three days later, on June 20, 1972, Shoffler showed up at my apartment with his supervisor, Police Sgt. Paul Leeper. They asked me if I knew someone by the name of Douglas Caddy, who lived at the Georgetown House, a high-rise apartment, at 2121 P St., N. W., which was directly across the street from my apartment. They told me Douglas Caddy was an attorney who was representing the Watergate burglars and that Douglas Caddy was a communist and pro-Cuban and was a leader of the Young Americans for Freedom.

They wanted me to establish a sexual relationship with Douglas Caddy to find out how Douglas Caddy knew to show up for the arraignment of the burglars after their arrest. They asserted that Douglas Caddy had to be in on the conspiracy with the burglars and that in the past he had been shadowed when he frequented a leather-Levi gay bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

Shoffler and Leeper related that Douglas Caddy had been working as a White House attorney in a sensitive position. They claimed that I was butch enough to entice Douglas Caddy, a masculine gay guy, into a sexual affair to obtain the information they wanted. They told me that this was the most important thing that I could do for my country and that I would be well-paid if I undertook the assignment. Their initial offer was $10,000.

I asked Shoffler about who it was that so desperately wanted this information from Douglas Caddy and he said that it was from very high up sources in the Department of Justice and the U. S. Attorney’s office.

I did not commit to doing the assignment.

Two days later, on June 22, 1972, which was my birthday, Shoffler came to my apartment to give me my birthday present. He spent the entire day with me. Afterwards, when we were relaxing in bed, he gently tried to persuade me to cooperate with him and Leeper regarding the Douglas Caddy assignment. I emphatically told him “No.” I didn’t know Douglas Caddy and I didn’t know how to get to know him and I was bothered that undertaking the assignment could lead to the destruction of another gay person who apparently was still in the closet and merely attempting to represent his clients.

We talked about the break-in and Shoffler told me straight out that the burglars were hired indirectly by one of the 100 families of America, which Shoffler named as the Kennedy Family.

Shoffler said, “The intention of the Watergate break-in was to destroy the Nixon presidency. President Nixon was guilty of nothing in its planning.”

Shoffler said that there were hidden motivations involved, such as the fear of law enforcement agencies that their turf would be reduced by President Nixon through a

scheme known as the Houston Plan, the CIA’s concern that President Nixon planned to reorganize the intelligence agencies and their operations, and the Defense Department’s opposition to President Nixon’s new China policy.

I asked Shoffler if he was angry at me for refusing to take the Caddy assignment and he smiled at me and said he was glad that I didn’t.

(Third meeting) In the March 1973, nine months after the initial overture and a month after the first Watergate trial ended, I met with Shoffler and Leeper, FBI agents Terry O’Connor and Bill Tucker and their FBI Agent-In-Charge, whose name escapes me. Leeper did most of the talking. He again tried to persuade me to take on the Douglas Caddy assignment, making an initial offer of $25,000. I refused outright. The group then said that I could be paid as much as $100,000 if I took the assignment but I still refused without providing any explanation. Once it was understood that I would not accept the offer, Leeper declared that the least I could do was to spread the rumor around Washington, D. C. that Douglas Caddy was gay in an effort to force him to come out of the closet. Their intention was to defame Douglas Caddy. This was the last attempt to persuade me to take the Douglas Caddy assignment. The group departed angrily, with the exception Shoffler, who secretly winked at me as he went out the door.

DISCLOSURE OF SECOND MEETING

On June 17, 2009, 37 years after Watergate, I notified Douglas Caddy, now an attorney in Houston, Texas, of a well kept secret and informed him of a new Watergate revelation. (Previously I had disclosed to Douglas Caddy that there had been two meetings regarding the Caddy assignment as discussed above.)

I then informed Douglas Caddy that there had been a second meeting about the Caddy assignment. It took place on June 28, 1972, with Shoffler and four others agents who were never introduced to me. I am quite certain that these agents were from either Military Intelligence or the CIA. I know that they were not FBI agents from their manner and the special type of assignment they asked me to do regarding Douglas Caddy.

Shoffler and these agents met with me in my apartment at 2122 P Street, N.W. Douglas Caddy did in fact live across the street from me in the Georgetown House at 2121 P St., N.W.

One of the agents, whom I will never forget, had two plastic bags, one containing two small blue pills and another that had a laboratory test tube with a small gelatin substance that was approximately ¼ inch in diameter. He referred to it as a suppository.

The assignment was to become intimately acquainted with Douglas Caddy as quickly as possible.

The exact description of the assignment was to engage in oral sex with Douglas Caddy and in doing so I was suppose to fondle his b---- and a--, and at the same time insert the small gelatin like suppository into his rectum, which would have caused death within minutes.

If there were any delay in the lethal process that would prevent me from leaving fast from his presence, then I was to take the small blue pills, which would have caused me nausea, providing me with an excuse to leave for home immediately.

The agents told me that Douglas Caddy had to be eliminated without fail.

My first reaction was that they were “nuts.” But then Shoffler pulled me aside and whispered that this was a very real and serious situation and the decision was entirely up to me.

The agents were planning a pre-arrange way for me to meet Douglas Caddy, which they did not disclose at the time.

I asked the agents what the reason was that they wanted for me to go to this length and why they and the government were taking such a risk. I was told that this matter involved a high national security situation that they were not at liberty to disclose. The agents stated that their orders did not allow them to know the answers and that they were only following orders from their superiors who sometimes did not know the answers either and merely implemented instructions from those above. However, from the agents’ comments I inferred that because Douglas Caddy was gay, that was reason enough.

The agents informed me that I would be well taken care of for this assignment. They also said that I would never have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.

I was totally repulsed by the entire assignment and proposition. After I emphatically refused, the agents swore me to secrecy and left.

Only in July of 1986 when I was subpoenaed by Shoffler to testify before the grand jury in the Lenny Bias case in Upper Marlboro, Maryland did he ever discuss this subject again. At that time he said, “Butch, I am glad that you did not go through with that Douglas Caddy assignment because I found out that those two little blue pills would have caused your instant death.”

I regret that I never disclosed these facts until now. I suppressed this information out of fear for my life.

Some of the background information in this affidavit about my relationship with Shoffler as a Confidential Informant was disclosed by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-selling book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (see pages 320-323). Some was also disclosed in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Memorandums of its two interviews of me and one of Officer Carl Shoffler in 1973.

This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury.

Robert Merritt

Subscribed and sworn to before me on the 28th of July, 2009, to certify which witness my hand and seal of office.

Notary Public in and for the State of New York

Ricardo S. Castro

Notary Public, State of New York

No. 01CA5041272

Qualified in Bronx County

Comm. Exp. 08/29/09

__________________________

7/29/09

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The Wall Street Journal

Editorial Page

March 24, 1998

WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY?

By Douglas Caddy

(Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer)

The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures.

The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years.

Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail.

On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.

From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights.

Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.”

In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?”

Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with

[Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.”

Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?”

The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney.

However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.”

Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice.

I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham.

Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.”

Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

[Douglas Caddy]

Statement of Douglas Caddy regarding Robert Merritt’s affidavit of July 29, 2009:

When Robert Merritt informed me on July 17, 2009, of the 1972 conspiracy to assassinate me, I was both taken back and puzzled. I asked myself why would these CIA intelligence agents want this done? The reasons they gave Merritt were that I posed a nationals security threat and that I was a homosexual.

There is no way to know what was in their minds. However, to try to figure out their thinking, I decided to engage in role playing to see how I looked in their eyes. By doing this, I may have come up with a scenario as to why they were so concerned. This is as follows:

When I was graduated from New York University Law School in 1966, I went to work for General Foods Corporation, then the world’s largest food manufacturer. My assignment was to advise the corporate officers on government relations, legislation and regulation that might affect the company’s operations. In 1969 General Food transferred me to Washington, D.C. I was to open an office for the company after a year that would handle government relations, with the emphasis on lobbying.

General Foods told me that for the first year I would be working out of the offices of the public relations firm that had long handled its government relations. This firm was the Robert Mullen Company. What General Foods did not tell me was that the Mullen Company was a CIA front, having been incorporated in 1949 by the CIA and that General Foods

was a partner in this arrangement.

So I started carrying out my General Foods assignment, which consisted primarily of close coordination with the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade organization that represented food manufacturers.

In mid-1970 Robert Mullen informed me that Howard Hunt was joining the staff of his company. Hunt and I quickly found we had something in common: I had worked closely with William F. Buckley, Jr. in founding the conservative movement and Buckley not only was the godfather to Hunt’s children but had served under Hunt years previously in the CIA’s office in Mexico City.

Howard Hunt and his wife, Dorothy, became my closest friends in Washington. Howard and I conversed daily on any number of topics.

At one point Robert Mullen told Hunt and me that he was making plans to retire and asked if we were interested in buying his company, making payments on the purchase price from the profits over the future years. In the end Robert Mullen sold his company to Robert Bennett, a key associate of the Howard Hughes operation and of the CIA. Today Robert Bennett, Senator from Utah, serves in the U.S. Senate, where he is known as the tool and operative of the CIA.

I left General Foods in late 1970 and joined Gall, Lane and Kilcullen, a law firm in Washington, as an attorney. Hunt immediately became a client and I handled his personal and business matters.

In early 1972, the law firm assigned me to do volunteer presidential campaign legal work out of the office of John Dean, then White House Counsel to President Nixon. Hunt was pleased to learn of this assignment.

Around April 1972, two months before the Watergate case broke open, Hunt invited me to join him and the CIA’s General Counsel in what turned out to be a meeting about whether I would be interested in working for the CIA. If I were interested, the General Counsel told me that my CIA assignment would be to construct and open a luxurious hotel on the seashore in Nicaragua, then dominated by the Sandinistas. I told them I would think about it but in my heart knew that I could not accept CIA employment because the vetting process would inevitably reveal that I was homosexual. The CIA did not employ anyone who was homosexual. As with other federal agencies, there was a constant witch hunt against homosexuals, who were driven out and blackballed.

On June 17, 1972, the Watergate case broke with the arrests of the five burglars inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The same day Hunt and Gordon Liddy retained me as an attorney to represent them and the five arrested individuals.

On June 28, eleven days later, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Carl Shoffler showed up with four intelligence agents at the apartment of Robert Merritt where they attempted to enlist Merritt in assassinating me, as disclosed in Merritt’s affidavit.

Why did they want me eliminated? One must look at it through their eyes:

(1) I was one of Howard Hunt’s closest friends and his attorney in the Watergate case. What had Hunt told me about the CIA operations during the period of our friendship? Did I know some of the CIA’s darkest secrets? After all, Hunt was a protégé of Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA, and had worked for the agency his entire life.

(2) What had I learned while working inside the Robert Mullen Company as an employee of General Foods Corporation? Had I gained access to the CIA files and documents inside the Mullen Company and acquired knowledge of its world wide operations? [For example, Robert Mullen had once spoken to me on the telephone when he was sent by the CIA to Chile to organize the media campaign to overthrow Allende.]

(3) Could I have recorded the conversation that I had with Hunt and the CIA’s General Counsel about the Nicaragua plan?

(4) Had Hunt told me about the role played by key CIA officers and agents in the assassination of President John Kennedy? In his deathbed confession that was audio recorded in January 2004, Hunt fingered CIA officers Cord Meyer, David Philips, Frank Sturgis and David Morales as being part of the assassination plan that originated with Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

In summary, it appeared to these CIA agents on June 28, 1972, that I had somehow worked myself into a position of knowing too much about the CIA, and thus of being a potential national security threat and of being a hated homosexual to boot. They feared that the mushrooming Watergate case could lead to my opening a Pandora’s Box that threatened to expose some of the darkest secrets of the CIA. So the easiest solution would be to make me an early casualty of a domestic Operation Condor (see article below.)

In reality, these agents’ fears were unfounded. Hunt was always circumspect in what he told me, I never even thought of examining the files and documents housed inside the Mullen Company, I did not record the conversation between the CIA’s General Counsel, Hunt and me about Nicaragua, and I knew nothing about the CIA agents’ role in the JFK assassination.

Actually, I did not know for certain that the Robert Mullen Company was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker disclosed this in his separate report released as part of the final report of the Senate Watergate Committee.

But the CIA agents on June 28, 1972, feared the worst and concocted a plan to remedy the situation.

What probably made them later change their course was that on June 28, 1972, I was served in the courthouse with a subpoena to appear “Forthwith” before the Grand Jury investigating the Watergate scandal and this event made national headlines. In short, I became too hot to be offed.

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Shades of Operation Condor

by Jacob G. Hornberger

by Jacob G. Ho

Find this article at:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/riggenbach3-1.html

July 30, 2009

The CIA’s assassination plan, which it chose to keep secret from Congress, brings to mind Operation Condor, a similar plan run by DINA, which was Chile’s counterpart to the CIA under the dictatorial regime of military strongman Augusto Pinochet.

After Pinochet took power in a coup, his agents proceeded to round up communists and other opponents to his regime and torture, sexually abuse, rape, indefinitely incarcerate, and kill them, without any trials or due process of law. It was during that time, in fact, that the CIA, which supported Pinochet, played a role, as yet undetermined, in the murder of a young American journalist named Charles Horman.

Pinochet knew that his war on communism, however, could not be limited to Chile, given that communists were located all over the world. Thus, Chile, along with other South American right-wing regimes, established Operation Condor, a secret program of assassination, torture, and political repression. According to Wikipedia, files discovered in 1992 in Paraguay revealed that Operation Condor succeeded in murdering 50,000 people, “disappearing” another 30,000, and incarcerating 400,000.

One day in 1976, however, Operation Condor hit a stumbling block here in the United States. As part of its global war on communism, it took out Chilean citizen Orlando Letelier with a car bomb that succeeded in killing not only him but also his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. The killing took place on the streets of Washington, D.C.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Weren’t Chile and the other members of Operation Condor involved in a major war? Didn’t they have the right to kill the enemy, wherever the enemy happened to be found? Wasn’t the entire world, including the United States, a battlefield in the global war on communism?

After all, what was different about the Letelier assassination and the CIA’s firing of a missile into a car in 2002 in Yemen that was carrying suspected terrorists, including one who was an American citizen? Didn’t the car in Yemen contain people who the CIA was sure were terrorists or terrorist sympathizers? Didn’t the car in Washington contain people that DINA was sure were communists or communist sympathizers, one of whom was a Chilean citizen?

There were some Americans who didn’t feel that Operation Condor should be permitted to extend its global war on communism to the United States. Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were murder victims, they argued. The wartime analogy was hogwash, they said. Letelier, after all, was really just a former member of the cabinet in Chile’s Salvador Allende regime, which had been ousted in the Pinochet coup, who had continued his political battle against Pinochet’s dictatorship in the United States.

The Operation Condor agents who killed Letelier and Moffitt were ultimately indicted for murder in a U.S. District Court in Washington.

As it turned out, the DINA agent who orchestrated the murder of Letelier and Moffitt was a man named Michael Townley, who also – surprise, surprise – had worked for the CIA. Owing to public pressure, Townley was extradited to the United States to stand trial. The feds ultimately offered him a plea bargain that required him to testify against his underlings and that enabled him to live the rest of his life here in the United States under the federal witness protection program.

Assuming the CIA is telling the truth in its claim that it never carried out its assassination program, did the CIA factor in the Letelier-Moffitt case in deciding not to carry through with its assassination program? Perhaps. After all, if CIA assassins were to be arrested in a foreign country and indicted for murder, how would they be able to distinguish what they did from what Operation Condor did to Letelier and Moffitt?

July 30, 2009

Jacob Hornberge] is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Edited August 1, 2009 by Douglas Caddy