Watergate and the JFK Assassination Options

[John Simkin]

There is a very interesting section in Cord Meyer’s autobiography, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (1980) about Watergate. In July, 1967, Meyer was appointed assistant deputy director for plans (or as he admits, the department of dirty tricks). His boss was Thomas H. Karamessines. The two men were in charge of all covert operations abroad (and at home for that matter).

On 1st February, 1969, Nixon had a meeting with Helms (director of the CIA), Karamessines, and Meyer. Nixon gave his commitment to covert operations. However, he gave them one bit of advice: “Don’t get caught”.

Nixon’s attitude towards the CIA changed when James McCord got arrested on 17th July, 1972. He was understandably upset when McCord admitted to being CIA. This was followed by the way Hunt and the CIA was linked to the White House. Nixon also knew that another one of the Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez, had been working for the CIA. Nixon now believed he was being set-up by the CIA. As Haldeman pointed out in The Ends of Power, Nixon was convinced that Martinez had been reporting on the planned break-in to his CIA case officer. This is probably why Haldeman claimed that the CIA operation was linked to this “Bay of Pigs” thing.

Nixon knew that the CIA had a lot of secrets about the JFK assassination. He decided to blackmail the CIA into submission. He did this by forcing Richard Helms to resign. He was replaced as director of the CIA by James Schlesinger (up until then head of the Atomic Energy Commission). Schlesinger was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did (a cut of 7 per cent). Karamessines resigned (claiming a bad back had made it difficult for him to carry on working) and Meyer was demoted and sent to London where he was quickly exposed by the UK media as being responsible for bribing leading figures in the Labour Party and the trade union movement between 1945 to 1951. It was Meyer and his boss, Tom Braden, who was blamed for the right-wing shift in the Labour government of this period.

However, the important thing Schlesinger did was issue a directive to all CIA employees on 9th May, 1973. This is what Schlesinger said of his directive:

“I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”.

There were several employees who had been trying to complain about the illegal CIA activities for some time. As Meyer points out, this directive “was a hunting license for the resentful subordinate to dig back into the records of the past in order to come up with evidence that might destroy the career of a superior whom he long hated.”

This was all out war. High-ranking CIA officials had no choice, Nixon had to be removed from office as soon as possible. It is at this point that the CIA began giving information on Nixon’s illegal activities to the Washington Post. As a key player in Operation Mockingbird, Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post was the obvious vehicle for the destruction of Nixon. In this way, the CIA involvement could be contained. This is why Carl Bernstein was in a position to expose the activities of Operation Mockingbird in the Rolling Stone in October 1977.