Nixon was not an idol to (his own) "elite fascist guard," but instead (seen by them as) a mere unsophisticated rube? Contending that is letting Nixon off the hook, as is contending he "was merely a puppet whose wims and idiosyncracies were becoming a liability to their secret teams real agenda." ...I guess since Speer and me are the only ones who care enough to fight about this, I'll have to stay in the fight --- and begrudge you fun folks the time wasted when more important things are pressing. But we all have to choose what we consider as important, and right now it's pretty clear that this should be it.

Whatever. As you can tell, I believe you are a fraud, "Ashton" or "Nick" or whatever your name may be. But you can, of course, prove me wrong. All you have to do is post what you have written or edited under your name. Any articles or links to articles of the Kansas City Free Press will do, just as long as it's not a "ghost-written" piece (if it's not under your name, then you didn't write it, nicht wahr?). As a quid pro quo, to prove my own bona fides, I post here an excerpt from the book I'm currently re-writing which has already been published under this copyright information:

They Will Not Follow a Stranger
© 2004 by D. W. Dunn. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 06/22/04
ISBN: 1-4184-6184-9 (e-book)
ISBN: 1-4184-2684-9 (Paperback)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003097515


This is the beginning of Chapter 11:


We are limited by textual sources and the images they evoke when we try to envision an ancient figure in an historical sense. If contrary images arise due to contrary information in different texts, we are forced to examine underlying assumptions and motivations on which the texts might be based. Then we have to deal with images evoked in the midst of assessing the assumptions and motivations. And all of these will be interpreted in different ways by people, as they evoke different images and suggest different conclusions for different minds. When the subject of an historical study is an object of religious faith such considerations are magnified, and the best we can hope for is a fair appraisal of the available evidence and the drawing of merely tentative conclusions. That is unsatisfactory, since we want certainty instead of ambiguity; but it is especially relevant in a study of John the Baptist, since there is so little information about him.


Consider the figure of Apollos with which this study began. According to Paul, Apollos was a prominent leader among early Christians, on a level of authority with Simon Peter and Paul himself, who had succeeded Paul as the principal missionary for the Corinthian congregation. According to the author of Luke-Acts, Apollos was an Alexandrian Jew active at Ephesus and Corinth, who taught “accurately” about Jesus but “knew only John’s baptism.” This combined information is very suggestive and open to interpretation but one clear conclusion can be drawn: Apollos and Paul were actively involved in a movement inspired some twenty years earlier by Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist which had spread as far as Greece. This implies a close original association between John and Jesus; it should also make us think twice about ideas that John and Jesus were archaic figures shrouded in mystery, or that information about them can self-evidently be of dubious accuracy (a quarter of a century is not a tremendous period of time).

Then consider once more the figure of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, who ordered the beheading of John the Baptist. According to Josephus, Antipas was apprehensive about John’s popular authority and so had him captured and executed. According to the Synoptic Gospels, Antipas was upset about criticisms of adultery and so had John imprisoned. But there the Synoptics diverge, with Matthew indicating that Antipas was distressed at the prospect of the political repercussions of executing John (a perspective Josephus seems to confirm by relating that people thought Antipas’ later misfortune was God’s judgement for the execution). Mark absolves Antipas of much of the blame for the execution, making him distressed because he really thought a lot of John, while Luke presents Antipas—far from being apprehensive about anything—as pretty excited at the prospect of getting to meet Jesus. Josephus and Matthew appear to be somewhat closer to the real world than Mark or Luke.

Finally, reconsider the image of John the Baptist in Mark’s Gospel. There we find a prophet from the past who is referred to only in connection with matters pertaining to Jesus. While that is appropriate in a Christian Gospel, if we assume that Mark is the earliest Gospel, how do we account for a remote image of the Baptist? In the previous chapter a divergence was indicated among the Synoptics on the message, “repent, for the kingdom is upon you”: Matthew has both John and Jesus proclaiming it, while Luke has neither and describes general themes (repentance, teaching, good news, and so on); but Mark has only Jesus proclaiming it and not John. If the other two Gospels are based on Mark, the originality of such a message may be in doubt since it could be understood as a theme of concern to later Christians being retrojected into the past—in anticipation of Christ’s return, repentance is required. Mark presents Jesus as the authority behind the later message while Matthew has both John and Jesus as the authorities, revealing a “tendency” to associate the two men together.

But the best argument against this view and in favor of the originality of the message is how early the entire focus of Christian belief seems to have been on confessing that Christ is Lord. And Mark specifies that the Baptist’s “proclamation ran: ‘After me comes one who is mightier than I. I am not fit to unfasten his shoes. I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ ” In the immediately following passage Jesus appears, and so John’s proclamation becomes a testimony to Jesus’ messianic identity. This tends to further argue in Matthew’s favor, since he seems less concerned with John providing testimony and immediately tells us that John’s message involved the need for repentance in light of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of Heaven (and later informs us that Jesus took up the same message).

But this brings up once more the issue of the Q Gospel and Mark’s relation to it. If the author of Mark was inspired by Q material, he appears to have been less comfortable with certain images than with others. The appearance of some questioners (QS 16) and Jesus’ comparison of the qualities of the two children of wisdom (QS 18) might have been reinterpreted to draw a sharper contrast and allow for an exposition on the church’s relationship to its bridegroom. Jesus’ tribute to John (QS 17) disappears except for the connection to Malachi 3.1 (becoming the first thing Mark indicates about John) and an oblique reference to Elijah without mentioning John’s name. And far from expressing any doubts about Jesus’ messianic identity, John is presented as proclaiming a message reduced to just those terms which express such an identity for Jesus.

If Mark’s author was unable to avoid the figure of the Baptist, it may have been all the more important to have John appear in an initial summary emphasizing his heraldic role and then presenting him more distantly. In this sense an image of John as some ancient prophet from bygone days is stressed and reinforced by a seemingly common identification of Jesus with “John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the (other) prophets.”


According to the Gospel of Mark, the message of John the Baptist was a testimony to the identity of the Messiah. This is the same testimony provided by the forerunner and witness to the light in the Gospel of John. There the Baptist’s message from QS 4-5 appears even further reduced and transformed: “This is the man I meant when I said, ‘He comes after me, but takes rank before me’; for before I was born, he already was” (John 1.15). From this we begin to see that the Fourth Gospel’s presentation of John might be an extended lyrical interpretation of the presentation of Mark, similar to the way Mark may have reinterpreted his Q Gospel source.

At John 1.23, questioners come to the Baptist and he identifies himself with the passage from Isaiah 40.3, the second passage of Mark’s opening prophecy on John (Mark 1.3). John then answers another question by referring to someone in the immediate vicinity “who is to come after” him (John 1.26-27), which results in the development of the remaining elements of John’s proclamation on baptizing with water and being unfit to unfasten. And all of this comes to an initial conclusion with the testimony that Jesus had been revealed as the one “who is to baptize in Holy Spirit” when John “saw the Spirit coming down from heaven like a dove and resting upon him”—but without mentioning Jesus’ actually having been baptized by John, and giving every indication that revealing the Messiah was the sole purpose for John’s baptizing in the first place (John 1.31-33).

The next reference in Mark involves the question on fasting disciples, which becomes an exposition on a bridegroom and his friends (Mark 2.18-22). In the Fourth Gospel there was some dispute (with “Jews”) about purification and Jesus’ popularity, which resulted in John’s deferential observations about a bride belonging to the bridegroom (John 3.25-30). The final reference by Mark involves Jesus’ authority in the temple and the validity of the baptism of John (Mark 11.29-33). This also seems to correspond with the Fourth Gospel’s story about Jesus answering a “charge” (in the temple?—see John 5.14) with an extended exposition on honor and authority (John 5.19-47) in which John’s “testimony to the truth” is brought up to remind the challengers of it for their “own salvation.”

None of these are dependent parallels in the sense that Matthew and Luke contain such parallels to Mark or Q, but they are very close thematic correspondences in the same sense that Mark’s comparison of non-fasting by Jesus’ disciples with the fasting of the Pharisees and John’s disciples corresponds closely to a comparison between John and the Son of Man in QS 18.

Dan,

I'm lost here.

Thanks,
Ter

Being a supporter of Lyndon Larouche, you apparently are.

But good luck with it.

Dan

*****************************************************

"Being a supporter of Lyndon Larouche, you apparently are."

I could be among worse company.

From Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket Books), 1979. (Chapter 14)

QUOTE ON>

In retrospect Watergate seems to have had the momentum of a river. The burglary of 1972 and the investigation which followed cut an ever-widening channel through the Nixon administration. The flood might be deflected, rerouted, or even dammed momentarily, but eventually it resumed its downward course. In trying to halt the investigation in the summer and fall of 1972, Nixon, fearful of its impact on the election in November, only succeeded in building a record of obstruction of justice which would bring him to the verge of impeachment two years later. The problem from the beginning was the burglary team itself, seven men whose patience and loyalty gradually eroded as they felt the judicial machinery closing in around them. Not two weeks after the break-in, John Dean told the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, General Vernon Walters, that the burglars were already “wobbling,” and they were never restrained for long by Nixon’s parsimonious bribes and vague secondhand promises of clemency.

But for a moment in mid-September 1972, Nixon thought he had won. On September 15 the grand jury finally indicted the seven men, ignoring the officials of the Committee for the Reelection of the President (CREEP) who had paid them and given them their orders. It looked as if the case might be disposed of as the “bizarre affair” of no consequence described by the White House from the beginning. On the day of the indictments Nixon congratulated John Dean for plugging all the leaks in the White House levees. After discussing ways of keeping further investigations “buttoned up,” Nixon, in a confident mood, began to talk about getting even. This was a familiar subject for H.R. Haldeman, who was also present. “I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in,” Nixon said. “They didn’t have to do it...they were doing this quite deliberately and they are asking for it and they are going to get it....”1 But the difficulty, as both Dean and Haldeman pointed out, was a recalcitrant bureaucracy, most of it Democratic, and just about all of it beyond the President’s reach.

Well, that was all going to change, Nixon said. The Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and all the rest of the departments were going to start toeing the line. When the election was over there was going to be a thorough housecleaning, a clean sweep.... “The point is, I want there to be no holdovers left,” Nixon said. “The whole goddamn bunch is to go out....And that’s the way it’s going to be played. Now that’s the point. See....”3

As always when it came to threats, Nixon was as good as his word. On November 5, 1972, the senior White House staff was called into the Roosevelt Room for what they doubtless expected to be something in the nature of a victory celebration. They were in error. Nixon came in and made a short, abrupt announcement: he wanted them all to resign. They were thunderstruck. Nixon left and Haldeman spelled it out. Things were going to change. Some would stay and some would go. They’d find out who later. For the present he wanted the resignation of every man and woman in the room on his desk before night fell. Later that day the same message was relayed to the Cabinet Room, and during the following days the word went out to the rest of the government: every presidential appointee was expected to submit his resignation....

At the CIA, General Walters informed Helms he planned to submit his resignation, as ordered. But Helms told him not to do it. Only political appointments were properly covered by the President’s order, Helms felt, and he did not consider running the CIA to be a political job. He did not intend to submit his own resignation, and he did not want Walter to submit his, either. Walters acquiesced.

There was probably an element of calculation in Helms’s decision, a hope that Nixon would not insist if Helms made no offer to go, but he also had reason to feel he was on firm ground. The day of the election Helms had phoned Kissinger’s chief assistant, Alexander Haig, to invite him to lunch....During the lunch in Helms’s office Haig asked him about his plans. Helms...said he thought perhaps his time was drawing to a close, he’d been DCI for more than six years...; he’d like to stay on at least another year but then perhaps he’d be ready to leave. Haig said that sounded reasonable, another year or two, after which Helms could probably pick his own successor. Helms was not announcing a plan to leave, exactly; just discussing his job, and Haig’s reaction convinced him his position was secure. It was probably with this conversation in mind that Helms decided not to submit his resignation.

But Nixon had other plans, and he had not been discussing them with Haig. Immediately after the election Nixon retreated to Camp David with Haldeman and a small staff and began the process of cleaning out the government. The firings lasted for weeks, and the sheer number of them turned the process into something as abrupt as execution. Haldeman would meet the victim of the moment, tell him his time was up, and then take him in to see the President for a final conversation. Helms’s turn came on November 20....

The conversation which followed lasted perhaps 30 minutes. Haldeman said nothing, just sat and listened. Nixon wasted no time in getting to the point. He said he planned to make some changes among the top officers of his administration....He wanted to bring in new blood. He planned to appoint a new Director of Central Intelligence. It was pretty abrupt and businesslike....
(pp. 307-311)


Sometime during the evening of Saturday, June 17, 1972 — probably between nine and ten o’clock — Helms received a call at home from Howard Osborn, the CIA’s chief of security. During Helms’s tenure as DCI it was standing policy for him to be informed whenever someone connected to the Agency ran afoul of the law, and this call has been described by Helms and Osborn as strictly routine. But the implications of Osborn’s message were hardly routine: a former high-level security officer of the CIA, James McCord, had been arrested at two o’clock that morning with four other men while installing wiretaps in phones at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. On top of that, Osborn told Helms, another former CIA officer named E. Howard Hunt was involved in the burglary.24

...Bad enough to begin with, everything Helms learned in the following two days made it immeasurably worse....at the Director’s regular morning meeting on Monday, June 19, [Helms said,] “Hunt! Hell, Osborn tells me that Hunt was involved. How can that be? I haven’t seen Hunt’s name in the papers.” But Hunt’s name had turned up in the pocket notebooks of two of the Watergate burglars,25 and he had been a suspect since Saturday night. This complicated matters considerably because Hunt, Helms knew, had been working for the White House. One subject raised at the Monday morning meeting, in fact, was the stenographic record of General Robert Cushman’s conversation with John Ehrlichman a year earlier, when Ehrlichman had called the then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence to ask the CIA to help Hunt.

That brought the number of CIA people involved in the burglary to three — McCord, Hunt, and a Cuban exile named Eugenio Martinez. A veteran of Operation Mongoose, Martinez was actually still employed by the Agency at the time of the break-in, receiving a retainer of $100 a month for reporting on the Cuban exile community in Miami. After his arrest inside the Watergate, Martinez was immediately dropped from the payroll, and the following day, on Tuesday, June 20, Helms took the first public step in his campaign to put a moat between the CIA and Watergate. At an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where Helms testified on SALT, Senator Percy asked, just before Helms ended his testimony, “Do you want to volunteer any information on Mr. Jim McCord?”

“Yes, I’ll volunteer anything you would like,” said Helms. “I just want to distance myself from my alumnus.” A bit later he added, “I don’t have — I can’t conceive of what that caper was all about, I really can’t conceive it.”26

This was probably true as far as it went: what the “caper was all about” is still a subject of debate.27 But Helms was already in a position to conceive quite clearly who the burglary team had been working for, and thus to sense the dimensions of what had happened. In particular, Helms knew a good deal about the relationship of Howard Hunt and the White House, and what he knew explains what he did....

Before his tour in Spain ended [during late 1960s] Hunt requested a transfer back to Washington because his son needed medical treatment which was unavailable in Madrid. Helms approved the transfer and assigned Hunt a new job as chief of the covert-action staff in the DDP’s Western European Division. There he was not a success. “Can you imagine a right-winger like Hunt trying to deal with the Social Democrats in Germany?” asked a CIA officer, who thought one of Helms’s principal administrative failings was his willingness to go on giving high-level jobs to incompetents for no better reason than a desire to avoid hurting their feelings. Later, Hunt was shifted to the Domestic Operations Division. In April 1970, apparently realizing that his career was permanently blocked in CIA, Hunt asked Helms for early retirement. Helms said okay and wrote a letter of recommendation which Hunt used to obtain a job with a Washington public relations firm, Robert R. Mullen and Company.30 So far as is known, that was the last Helms heard of Hunt until July 1971.

During that fifteen-month period, however, Hunt was busy. Bored with his routine job in public relations, and disappointed when the firm was sold to someone invited in from the outside, he renewed a casual friendship with Chuck Colson, a fellow graduate of Brown University whose White House connections impressed Hunt. Colson, in turn, was impressed by Hunt’s “leading role” in the Bay of Pigs. Lunching together often, they found themselves politically congenial and imagined that their shared taste for intrigue might make them good partners. All they needed was a project, and Daniel Ellsberg gave them one.

After the New York Times began to publish the Defense Department study of decisionmaking in Vietnam, known as the Pentagon Papers, in June 1971, Colson suggested that Hunt join the White House as a “consultant” in order to mount an operation which would discredit Ellsberg, and thus turn the episode into a public-relations triumph for Nixon. After all, this was exactly the sort of thing Hunt had excelled at abroad. Years before, Paul Linebarger, an expert in psychological warfare, had praised Hunt as having one of the two great “black minds” in CIA. John Ehrlichman approved Colson’s plan after a meeting with Hunt on July 7, 1971, and the same afternoon he telephoned the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, General Robert Cushman, to ask the CIA’s help. Hunt, he said, “may be contacting you sometime in the future for some assistance. I wanted you to know that he was in fact doing some things for the President. He is a longtime acquaintance with the people here. You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche....”31

When Hunt first went to work for the White House in July 1971, he seems to have undertaken three separate projects at once: an attempt to discredit Senator Edward F. [sic - M.] Kennedy with new information about the Chappaquiddick scandal, a plan to discredit the Kennedys more generally by “proving” a direct and deliberate U.S. role in the murder of Diem, and an effort to embarrass Daniel Ellsberg. In all three, pursued simultaneously throughout the summer and fall of 1971, Hunt depended heavily on aid provided by the CIA. On Jusy 22, two weeks after Ehrlichman’s phone call, Hunt visited General Cushman in his seventh-floor office at the CIA and requested some special equipment for a “sensitive” interview — “a one-time op — in and out.”32

“I don’t see why we can’t,” Cushman said, and the following day an officer from the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD) delivered a wig, a speech-altering device, and a miscellany of identification to Hunt at a safe-house in Washington. On July 28 Hunt suggested to Colson that the CIA be asked to prepare a psychological profile of Ellsberg, who was described by Washington rumor as being erratic and unstable. Colson passed on the idea to David R. Young, a White House aide working with the leak-plugging specialists known as the plumbers. Young, in turn, called Howard Osborn at the CIA with the request. Osborn asked Helms if they should comply, and Helms, initially reluctant, finally said, “All right, let’s go ahead and try it.”33

If Helms was wary of directly involving the CIA in White House efforts to plug security leaks, he was nevertheless glad somebody was concerning himself with the problem. When the first attempt at an Ellsberg profile proved too vague to satisfy Ehrlichman and the plumbers, Helms agreed to try again, and the following day, on August 13, 1971, he called either Egil Krogh or David Young with his own request for a leak hunt, after a New York Times story on India by Tad Szulc....A couple of weeks earlier the Agency had agreed to lend the plumbers a CIA polygraph expert for the questioning of a State Department officer suspected of having leaked information which had appeared in a new story on the SALT negotiations.

But Hunt was a different matter. His requests for CIA help, beginning on July 22, suddenly escalated the following month: on August 18 he asked the CIA to lend him his old Agency secretary, at that time working in Paris. On the twentieth, he requested a tape recorder and some alias business cards, and at about the same time — the date is not certain — he also asked for a “backstopped”34 telephone number in New York with matching driver’s license and credit cards. On the twenty-fifth, Hunt picked up the business cards and tape recorder and requested a concealed camera as well as disguise materials and identification for Gordon Liddy, who had accompanied him to the meeting. On the following day, August 26, Hunt called his contact in the Technical Services Division and asked him to pick up some exposed film at Dulles Airport the next morning, which the CIA man did.

At this point low-level officers in the CIA began to wonder, and to ask their superiors, just what Hunt was up to. The TSD had told Hunt to return the materials provided for the “one-time op,” but Hunt held on to them. A protest was lodged with Cushman’s executive assistant, Karl Wagner, who told TSD to refuse any further Hunt requests, and then sent Cushman a memo protesting the involvement of the unknown Liddy and Hunt’s frequent demands for help, and raising the “question of [the material’s] use in domestic clandestine activity.”35 Cushman called Ehrlichman, who agreed to “call a halt to this.”36 Hunt’s developed film was delivered to him as promised (although the CIA retained Xerox copies in a special file marked “Mr. Edward” — Hunt’s alias in dealing with the TSD), but on August 31, when Hunt called once again about the backstopped telephone number, he was told that no more help would be provided. The period during which the CIA most actively helped Hunt, then, lasted only ten days, August 18 to 27, but Hunt’s other projects continued to involve the CIA indirectly.

In July, Hunt had begun a search for State Department documents which might implicate President Kennedy in Diem’s murder, and at the same time he arranged to interview General Paul D. Harkins, the U.S. military commander at the time of Diem’s death in November 1963, and Lucien Conein, the CIA officer who had been in contact with the Vietnamese generals behind the coup. None of these efforts turned up what Hunt was looking for, so he suggested to Colson that the CIA’s Diem file be obtained by the White House. Hunt was apparently hoping that the CIA file would contain the sort of damaging cables missing from the State Department files, or that they might help him in an alternative scheme to fabricate the documents he needed. According to John Ehrlichman, Hunt gave Colson a list of about fifteen separate CIA files which might contain material embarrassing to the Kennedys. Colson passed the list on to Nixon, who gave it to Ehrlichman and told him to get the documents from Helms.

On the morning of September 22, 1971, Ehrlichman had breakfast with Helms at CIA headquarters and asked for Agency files on the Diem coup, the assassination of Trujillo, the Bay of Pigs, and the landing of U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1958.37 Helms was polite but evasive, telling Ehrlichman he would look into it.

This was not the first time Helms had been asked for CIA files. According to Haldeman,38 Nixon made a request for the Bay of Pigs “file” shortly after he took office in 1969, but Helms somehow dissuaded him in mid-year. Of course there is no such thing as a single, coherent Bay of Pigs “file.” Instead, there are hundreds of separate files having to do with the Bay of Pigs. At one point, while Nixon was still pressing for the file, the CIA told him that it did not have a copy of the Taylor report of 1961, possibly in the hope the President would then shift his attention to the National Security Council’s files. Helms says he does not remember Nixon’s earlier request, but Lawrence Houston recalled it vaguely, saying there was some worried discussion of a Nixon plan to make the file “public.” No one at the CIA seemed to know quite what he had in mind. The new request in September 1971, much broader in scope, was naturally more alarming, but Helms apparently hoped it would die just as the first had. This time, however, the President was insistent. On October 1, Ehrlichman again went to see Helms to ask for the files. Helms, worried that ordinary White House staffers would read the files and leak the contents, told Ehrlichman he wanted to see Nixon personally before handing them over. Ehrlichman said, “All right, but I speak for the President.” Helms said he understood that, but insisted he wanted to see Nixon personally.39

A week later, on October 8, 1971, Helms met in the Oval Office with Nixon and Ehrlichman. After a brief discussion of Helms’s relations with J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon explained why he wanted the files. An election year was rolling around and he “must be fully advised in order to know what to duck” when questions came up concerning Diem or the Bay of Pigs. Nixon assured Helms he would not “hurt the agency not attack [his] predecessors.” Helms responded that there is “only one President at a time” and “I only work for you.” With that he handed Nixon an envelope containing three documents: a Bay of Pigs report by Colonel Jack Hawkins, a John McCone report on the murder of Diem, and a third file on Trujillo.40 Nixon slipped the envelope into his desk drawer and then told Helms that in future he was to deal with Ehrlichman “as you would me.”

“I’ll be making requests for additional material,” Ehrlichman added.

“Okay,” Helms said, “anything.”

Later, still worried about who would be reading the files, Helms asked Ehrlichman if they were going to be returned. When they were not, Helms asked an assistant, Kenneth Greer, to be responsible for getting the files back, but Greer failed.41

There is no evidence that Hunt ever saw the files surrendered by Helms, or that Helms knew anything of Hunt’s attempt to discredit the Kennedys at the time, but the Agency continued to pick up intermittent echoes of Hunt’s activities. In mid-October 1971, Thomas Karamessines had lunch with Hunt in Washington to discuss cover arrangements with Mullen & Company. When Karamessines had first learned of the CIA’s aid to Hunt in August he had asked, “Who ordered this?” The answer — General Cushman — did not altogether satisfy him, and he insisted on being fully briefed. Not long before the lunch Karamessines had seen the photographs developed for Hunt by the Technical Services Division, pictures which one CIA officer said looked like “casing photographs” to him. Whether Karamessines shared his suspicion is not known, but he was certainly curious about the nature of Hunt’s new job, and Hunt’s air of elaborate mystery during their lunch together struck him as odd and troubling. “What do you do down there, Howard?” Karamessines asked. Hunt was vague in reply. “Well, you know, political work,” he said, adding that he worked with Chuck Colson.

Another echo of Hunt’s new job was picked up in Miami, where the CIA still maintained a major station and an elaborate network of informers among the Cuban exile community. In April 1971, Hunt had reestablished an acquaintance with Bernard Barker, a real estate salesman who had worked for Hunt in 1960 and 1961 on the Bay of Pigs operation. That August, Hunt returned to Miami to ask Barker to join him in a secret operation which turned out to be the burglary of the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.42 One of the Cubans recruited to help in the plan was Eugenio Martinez, a veteran of hundreds of clandestine boat trips to Cuba during the Bay of Pigs operation, and, later, in connection with sabotage and agent-dropping activities during Operation Mongoose. Martinez was the only one of the Cubans recruited for the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, or the later Watergate break-in, who was still working on retainer for the CIA. Martinez was an experienced clandestine operator who understood that operations were often secret even within the CIA, and there is no evidence that he ever told his case officer about the break-in at the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Nevertheless, in November 1971, Martinez did mention that Hunt had been down in Miami recruiting people, and the following March he mentioned Hunt again, telling the Miami chief of station, Jacob Esterline, that Hunt was apparently working for the White House. Esterline was sufficiently worried to ask his superiors in Langley what was going on. On March 27, 1972, Karamessines’s assistant, Cord Meyer, confirmed Martinez’s report, said Hunt was on some sort of domestic assignment, and told Esterline to leave him alone — to “cool it.”43 The day after Martinez’s arrest inside the Watergate, Esterline cabled a ful report to Langley on Martinez.

When Helms’s regular morning meeting ended on Monday, June 19, 1972, then, he knew plenty about what was going on. So far as is known, Watergate itself — that is, the actual break-in of the Democratic national Committee headquarters — was still a mystery in Helms’s mind. He did not know what the burglars were after, who was paying them, or precisely who was issuing their orders. But he did not really need to know: the facts that Hunt was working for the White House, that Ehrlichman had intervened on his behalf, that his work involved the paraphernalia of classic clandestine operations, that McCord was the chief of security for CREEP, told Helms who stood to suffer from the burglars’ blundering. If Helms had known less he might have made an effort to learn more. A call to McCord or Hunt, with even the barest hint of help, would have brought the whole story tumbling out. Both men were desperate. But Helms issued orders against any contact of any kind with either man, for fear the CIA would be dragged into the heart of the case. Helms preferred to remain on the shadowed periphery, and his response to the discussion of Monday, June 19, was narrow and cautious: he appointed William Colby, the CIA’s Executive Director/Comptroller, to handle the Agency’s end of the investigation which was bound to follow, and he adopted a policy of withdrawal.

Colby later described Helms’s guidelines as, “Stay cool, volunteer nothing, because it will only be used to involve us. Just stay away from the whole damn thing.”44 This policy was affirmed in practice almost immediately when General Cushman’s executive assistant, Karl Wagner, quietly told Colby about Hunt’s visit to the general the previous summer, something of which Colby had not known. Colby took Wagner to see Helms (who, of course, knew of Hunt’s original requests for help, and of the call to Ehrlichman which ended the CIA’s cooperation) and was told that this had nothing to do with “Watergate” — that is, with the break-in — and to keep it to himself. The CIA had no legal or moral obligation, in Helms’s view, to press all sorts of “peripheral information” (Colby’s phrase) on the FBI. Later, when Howard Osborn was preparing a memo which Colby was to pass on to the FBI, Helms called him and said, “About Karl Wagner, you forget about that. I will handle that. You take care of the rest of it.”45 In other words, he was hiding the fact that the CIA had been helping Hunt on orders from the White House.

It has been suggested (by Chuck Colson and H.R. Haldeman, among others) that the CIA was really “behind” the Watergate break-in, and that the Agency followed a policy of passive resistance during the investigation because it wanted to hide its guiding role. In particular, the proposition has been advanced that the CIA knew about the actual burglary before it took place. Helms himself concedes that “the Agency is large; it’s impossible for me to say that nobody in the Agency, but nobody, knew anything about it.” But he insists he didn’t know about it, that nobody in the Agency has ever come forward to confess prior knowledge, that Hunt was not being “run” by the Agency, and that CIA was completely free of responsibility for the Watergate break-in. The evidence tends to support his claims. Hunt’s work for the White House has been too densely detailed to admit doubt he was genuinely in their employ, just as CREEP’s responsibility for the intelligence-gathering program which led to the break-in is too clear, deliberate, and certain to admit of a hidden hand. Watergate elicited plenty of lying, but the lion’s share of it was committed by the White House. The break-in and the cover-up were the doing of Nixon and the men who worked for him, and they would hardly have tried so hard to hide their responsibility if they had ever seriously conceived that the blame might plausibly be shifted elsewhere.

The only real questions concerning the CIA’s role in Watergate are how far it acquiesced in the early stages of the cover-up and, later, whether or not it pointed reporters — especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post — toward CREEP and the White House....In the absence of evidence, the charge is only conjecture, and it ignores internal evidence in Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting, and in their book All the President’s Men, that “Deep Throat” was best informed about events in the White House and in CREEP. In addition, Bernstein and Woodward themselves would probably have exposed a CIA “Deep Throat” by now as a result of suspicion that they were being manipulated by the Agency....

This point deserves emphasis because Watergate, far from being a triumph of CIA political engineering, marks a violent break in Agency history, the first step in a process of exposure which has pretty much destroyed the unwritten charter established by Allen Dulles. Watergate was the foot in the door. The CIA had been in unwelcome spotlights before, but Watergate did what the Bay of Pigs had not: it undermined the consensus of trust in Washington which was a truer source of the Agency’s strength than its legal charter, and it gave outsiders their first good look at CIA files and tables of organization. In addition, Watergate ended the long congressional acquiescence to the special intimacy between the CIA and the President, an intimacy which allowed Presidents to use CIA as they might, beholden to no one so long as congressional oversight remained a kind of charade. Watergate, in short, made the CIA fair game.

Helms seemed to have feared this from the beginning. He treated Watergate as he would the cholera, isolating the Agency from those who had been infected46 in the hope, vain as it turned out, the disease might sweep on by. Helms’s strategy worked well enough in the beginning. No CIA people were destroyed by Watergate, with the possible exception of Helms himself, other than those former agents and officers directly involved in the break-in. But the effect of Watergate was profound all the same: once congressional investigators, and the reporters in their wake, got inside the agency’s door they grew curious, restless with the narrow answers to their questions, and hungry to learn where all the personal histories led. No one learned any secrets from Helms, or from the men who worked for him as long as he was still around, but when he left he might have said, and probably felt: Apres moi, le deluge.

But Helms had another reason, as well, for trying to abstract the CIA from the Watergate mess: the White House was in charge of the cover-up, and was keeping a close watch on who was telling what to whom. If Helms had been quick to forward every suspicion or tangential piece of evidence to the FBI or the federal prosecutors, the President would have known about it in short order, with predictable results. If there had ever been any doubt in Helms’s mind about White House involvement in the affair, it was abruptly dispelled on Friday, June 23, not quite a week after the break-in, when he and his Deputy Director, General Vernon Walters, were summoned to the office of John Ehrlichman without explanation. Helms and Walters met for lunch together in downtown Washington, where they concluded the subject of the meeting could only be Watergate.

Walters...had built a military career on a facility for languages and discretion in the service of high officials. He had served as Nixon’s translator on two crucial occasions in 1959 and 1960: during an interview with Fidel Castro in April 1959 47 and in Venezuela when the Vice-President was attacked by a mob. Nixon had appointed Walters to his post as DDCI only six weeks earlier, and Helms treated him as Presidents traditionally treat their Vice-Presidents — politely enough, while ensuring they have nothing of importance to do. At that luncheon on June 23, Walters knew only what Helms had said during the Monday meeting, that he didn’t know what this caper was all about. Helms, in short, did not entirely trust Walters. Before Walters succeeded Cushman as DDCI, for example, Helms quietly arranged for the removal of the taping system which Cushman had used to record a conversation with Hunt the previous summer. The summons to Ehrlichman’s office had specifically included Walters, and Helms was not sure why.

Late the previous afternoon L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, had called Helms to say that some of his men, trying to find a motive for the break-in, were wondering if it may have been a CIA operation of some kind. Helms insisted it was not, and (in Gray’s words) that he had “been meeting on this every day with his men, that they knew the people, that they could not figure it out, but that there was no CIA involvement.”48 Less than an hour after the phone call, Gray mentioned the CIA theory to Dean, and he, in turn, later that same night, passed it on during a meeting with John Mitchell in the latter’s office. Mention of the CIA turned on a light in Mitchell’s mind; he suggested that Dean explore the possibility of shutting off the FBI’s investigation with the aid of the CIA. Either John Ehrlichman or Bob Haldeman could probably handle this, Mitchell said.

Dean thought this a good idea, since the FBI had already traced money found on the burglars to a Mexican bank and to a Republican contributor named Kenneth Dahlberg. If the FBI investigation were not halted it would quickly discover that the checks in question, totaling $114,000, had not been given directly to the burglars, but to the Committee for the Reelection of the President.49 At eight fifteen Friday morning, June 23, 1972, Dean called Haldeman and said the FBI was closing in quickly on the CREEP connection but there might be a way out.

“The FBI is convinced it’s the CIA,” Dean said, according to Haldeman. “McCord and the Cubans are all ex-CIA people. Practically everyone who went in there was connected to the Agency. And now the FBI finds a Mexican bank involved which also sounds like CIA....Gray has been looking for a way out of this mess. I spoke to Mitchell, and he and I agree the thing to do is for you to tell Walters that we don’t know where that Mexican investigation is going to lead. Have him talk to Gray — and maybe the CIA can turn off the FBI down there in Mexico.”50

The reference to Cubans and the CIA puzzled Haldeman and piqued his curiosity. Three days earlier, on the night of Tuesday, June 20, Nixon had called Haldeman, as he often did when he wanted to think out loud, and said the “Cuban angle” might save them yet. “Those people who got caught are going to need money,” Nixon said. “I’ve been thinking about how to do it.” He suggested “an anti-Castro fund” to be organized by his friend Bebe Rebozo; “publicize the hell out of the Cuban angle. That way we kill two birds with one stone.” But then Nixon gave Haldeman an enigmatic order: “Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.”

“The Bay of Pigs?” said Haldeman. “What does that have to do with this?”

“Ehrlichman will know what I mean,” said Nixon.51

But if Ehrlichman did, Haldeman certainly didn’t. When Dean proposed another “Cuban angle,” Haldeman decided to ask about it. At five minutes after ten that Friday morning, June 23, he told Nixon where the FBI investigation was — one step away from CREEP, and closing fast — and related Dean’s proposal for bringing in the CIA. Nixon mused over the idea, briefly wondering what reason to give for calling Helms in, then deciding no reason was really necessary. “Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said.52 The problem, Haldeman explained a bit elliptically, was that no one quite dared to tell Gray to just stop the investigation. He needed a reason, and CIA concern for national security was just the thing.

The more Nixon ruminated on this plan, the better he liked it. “When you get in [unintelligible] people, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details — don’t lie to them to the extent to say no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And ah, because these people are plugging for [unintelligible] and that they should call the FBI in and for the good of the country don’t go any further into this case period!’”53

After the discussion ended at about 11:40 a.m., Haldeman went off to arrange the meeting with Helms and General Walters for that afternoon, while Nixon continued to brood over the Watergate problem. He hoped the connection between CREEP and the burglars might still be disguised, and seems to have convinced himself that the CIA could run off the FBI investigation and end the problem once and for all. When Haldeman popped in at 1:00 p.m., on another matter...Nixon went over the gambit one more time. “Tell them that if it gets out, it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA.”54

At 1:30 p.m. Helms and Walters arrived at Ehrlichman’s White House office and chatted with him for a few minutes until Haldeman arrived. The latter went right to the point: the break-in was making a lot of noise and the Democrats were trying to exploit it. The FBI investigation “was leading to a lot of important people and this could get worse”;55 was there any CIA connection with the break-in? Helms said there was not. Haldeman then said “it was the President’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Patrick Gray and suggest to him that since the five suspects had been arrested that this should be sufficient and that it was not advantageous to have the enquiry pushed, especially in Mexico, etc.”56 Helms said he had already discussed the investigation with Gray the day before, and had assured him the CIA was not involved and that none of the suspects was working for the Agency.

At this point Haldeman ventured the gambit suggested by Mitchell and Dean, and honed down by Nixon. “The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown....”

Helms’s reaction was immediate. He gripped the arms of his chair, leaned forward, and shouted: “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this! I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs!”

Haldeman was taken aback by the vehemence of Helms’s reaction. “I’m just following my instructions, Dick,” he said. “This is what the President told me to relay to you.”

“All right,” said Helms, calming down.57 But inside he cannot have been calm in the least; he had just been put on notice that the President might try to pin Watergate on the CIA. If the Agency was to take the fall, then so must Helms, since he ran it. This was a threat well designed to make a man alert, and it worked. Helms, after all, had been told by Nixon that Ehrlichman spoke in his name. Now Ehrlichman and Haldeman were telling Helms to intervene with the FBI. Before the meeting ended Helms repeated that the CIA had nothing to do with the break-in — something Haldeman knew perfectly well on his own — but Helms did not object when Walters agreed to see Gray, to say that they had talked to “the White House,” and to request that the FBI halt its inquiries in Mexico.

Helms and Walters left the white House together and then spoke briefly by the car waiting for them outside. There Helms put a slightly different interpretation on what Walters was to tell Gray. “You must remind Mr. Gray of the agreement between the FBI and the CIA,” Helms said, according to Walters, “that if they run into or appear to expose one another’s assets they will notify one another.”58

Helms then returned to CIA while Walters went to see Gray at FBI headquarters, where, by Walters’s own account,59 he not only reminded Gray of the delimitation agreement, as directed by Helms, but also told Gray that pursuit of the FBI’s investigation in Mexico might expose CIA assets. The effect was precisely as predicted and desired: Gray told his agents not to question either Manuel Ogarrio or Kenneth Dahlberg, who had written the checks which were the source of the funds discovered on the burglars. The FBI’s investigation, for the moment, came to an effective halt, one step short of establishing a crucial link between the burglars and CREEP.60

Later that afternoon Haldeman reported on the meeting to Nixon, said he had raised the Bay of Pigs as instructed, and concluded, “So at that point Helms kind of got the picture. He said, ‘We’ll be very happy to be helpful, and we’ll handle anything you want.’”61

Apparently delighted with their success in enlisting the CIA, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Dean decided to press their advantage....On Monday, June 26, Dean called Walters at Ehrlichman’s request and asked the general to meet him at the White House. After checking with Ehrlichman to make sure Dean was really authorized to discuss the Watergate matter, Walters went to see him then and on the two succeeding days. By this time Walters had learned from Colby that the CIA had no connection with the Mexican lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio, that the Agency was not involved in the break-in, and that there was no secret message traffic coming from Mexico on CIA channels which the Agency was not reading. The latter fact convinced Walters there were no secret White House negotiations — between Nixon and Castro, say — which an investigation might compromise. In short, by Monday, Walters knew there was no good reason for the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation, something he had not known at the meeting in Ehrlichman’s office the previous Friday. This knowledge put Walters in a position of relative strength when he met Dean — no CIA involvement, period. In addition, Walters didn’t much like Dean, he resented being summoned across town by a kid half his age, and he was appalled by Dean’s naked requests that the CIA pay the burglars’ bail and arrange to pay their salaries if they should be sentenced to jail. Walters did not refuse outright, but said nothing of the sort could be done without Nixon’s personal order, insisted he would resign if pressed, and predicted general disaster if this sort of thing went on.

At times an almost pleading note entered Dean’s voice; he was obviously in a corner and desperately looking for a way out. The meeting on Monday was followed by others on June 27 and June 28. In one of these conversations Dean attempted a new threat, saying that one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, had apparently been involved in a break-in at the Chilean Embassy in Washington.62 Walters said he knew nothing about that. In effect, with Dean’s new requests for bail money and other aid, the White House was asking the CIA to accept responsibility for the entire cover-up. This Helms and Walters would not do. They discussed Dean’s requests at length after each meeting and apparently agreed to stick to the original request to the FBI, already made, but go no further. On June 28, Helms phoned Gray at the FBI and asked him not to interview Karl Wagner, the CIA officer who had pushed for the Agency’s break with Hunt the previous summer. Helms had already told Howard Osborn to “forget about” Wagner, he would handle it. Clearly, Helms did not want the CIA’s aid to Hunt in August 1971 to become entangled with the Watergate break-in. Two earlier CIA reports to the FBI’s office in Alexandria, Virginia, about the CIA’s relationship with Martinez and Mullen and Company, had promptly leaked to the papers. Helms did not want the CIA’s aid to Hunt to become public by the same route. He informed Gray that Hunt had been working for Ehrlichman, and suggested Gray take it from there....
pp. 320-337

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ENDNOTES

1. The White House Transcripts (Viking, 1974), p. 63.

3. H.R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (1978), pp. 171 ff. Haldeman quotes from transcripts which were not made public by Nixon.


24. Question has been raised about Helms’s account of when he first learned of the Watergate break-in. A freelance writer named Andrew St. George, a man with at least some connection to intelligence circles, claimed that Helms was informed by a CIA “watch officer,” not Howard Osborn, and that the conversation had gone like this:

HELMS: Ah, well. They finally did it.
WATCH OFFICER: It’s a pity about McCord and some of those guys.
HELMS: Well, yes. A pity about the President, too, you know. They really blew it. The sad thing is, we all think, that’s the end of it, and it may be just the beginning of something worse. If the White House tries to ring me through central, don’t switch it out here, just tell them you reported McCord’s arrest already and I was very surprised. (Lukas, op cit., p.285)

This strikes me as being utterly unlikely. The first rule of intelligence security is compartmentalization: the greater the secret, the fewer in the know. The last person to be in the know would be a routine watch officer, and yet St. George suggests Helms would casually discuss a secret of this magnitude with such a figure. In addition, the tone is all wrong. The watch officer was reporting the bungling of an operation in which the CIA’s involvement was transparent. The roles of McCord, Martinez, and Hunt in the Watergate break-in have caused the CIA generally, and Helms personally, endless trouble. Helms seems to have anticipated exactly such trouble from the very beginning. This was a disaster of the first magnitude, but St. George makes Helms sound as if he thought it a matter of no consequence. Finally, the White House did not call Helms about the break-in until Friday, June 23, 1972, six days after the arrests, and the reason it called him then has been established in abundant detail.

A second account of when Helms first learned about the Watergate break-in was provided by Carl Rowan in a newspaper column published in the Washington Star-News, May 11, 1973. Rowan said he had met Helms and his wife Cynthia at a movie screening a couple of days after the break-in, that they discussed the case in a casual way, and that Helms said, “Cynthia and I had been up late and had just fallen asleep when they telephoned me to tell me that these fellows had been arrested in the Watergate.” Rowan took this to mean that Helms had been up late on Friday night, June 16, and that he was called in the wee hours of Saturday, June 17 — that is, within an hour or two of the arrests. This would suggest the CIA learned of the arrests from some other source than the FBI or the Washington police. Hunt, of course, was on the loose after the arrests that Saturday morning, and could have called someone in the CIA. Helms was frequently questioned on this point during the Watergate investigations; he and Howard Osborn, the man who phoned him, both testified repeatedly that the call was made at about nine thirty or ten o’clock in the evening, on Saturday, June 17, about eighteen hours after the arrests. Neither Hunt nor anyone in the CIA has ever testified to anything else, so the matter must rest there.

25. Hunt’s name was also found on a personal check for $6.36 made out to the Rockville, Maryland, Country Club, which he inadvertently left behind the night of the break-in.

26. Percy read these remarks into the record at Helms’s public testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 21, 1973. Since the CIA by custom retains the transcripts of all congressional briefings, Percy must have asked the Agency for the June 20, 1972, transcript to see what it was Helms had said.

27. Specifically, what were the burglars after? Almost every observer finds it hard to grasp their motive in tapping Larry O’Brien’s phone at the DNC, an office he rarely used. Some writers have suggested the tappers wanted to learn what O’Brien knew about Nixon’s relationship to Howard Hughes, and in particular if he had known about the $100,000 which Hughes had contributed to Nixon through Bebe Rebozo, who held the money in his own safe deposit box. Haldeman suggests that Nixon asked Colson to find out, and that Colson, in turn, gave the job to Hunt and Liddy. Colson denies it. The Hughes theory merely wraps a mystery inside an enigma, further complicating the puzzle. There is no question the break-in grew out of plans for a Republican intelligence-gathering effort, and that it was unhappiness with the results of an earlier tap which led to the June 17 attempt. The target makes sense if you assume Hunt and Liddy thought the DNC was where the secrets were, or at least enough secrets to satisfy John Mitchell.

28. David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (1977), p. 88n.

30. Mullen at one point claimed that Helms and the CIA had put pressure on him to hire Hunt; later he reversed himself and said nothing of the sort had happened. No evidence has turned up to indicate Mullen’s initial claim was correct. Mullen & Company had a tangential role with the CIA through provision of cover for agents working abroad, principally in Scandinavia. Hunt’s covert security clearance was maintained after he left the Agency so that he might handle cover arrangements in Mullen’s absence, something he seems to have undertaken on only two occasions. Helms says he did not know Mullen personally, and that he did not even know Mullen & Company was being used for cover until some time after the break-in, when publicity surrounding Hunt’s connection with the firm brought an end to the relationship. See Report of the Rockefeller Commission, pp. 173 ff.

31. Lukas, op cit., p. 109. Ehrlichman’s remarks were transcribed by Cushman’s secretary, listening in on a “dead key.” The offices of Helms and Cushman were both fitted with taping systems which could be turned on by either man whenever he wanted to record a general conversation in his office or a discussion over the phone. Since February 1971, the President’s office and phone were also connected to recording systems, but in Nixon’s case the systems were automatic and recorded everything. A tape transcript of Cushman’s conversation with Hunt on July 22, 1971, was destroyed in January 1973, at a time when Helms did not consider it to have anything to do with “Watergate” — that is, with the break-in per se. A copy of the transcript was later discovered, however. So far as I know, none of Nixon’s recorded conversations from the pre-burglary period had been made public, with the exception of fragments from a meeting between Helms and Nixon in October 1971, to be discussed below. When these are eventually released they will presumably establish just how closely Nixon followed the work of his “plumbers,” and whether or not he knew of their switch to intelligence gathering for CREEP after the beginning of 1972. Whatever may have been on tapes made in Helms’s office is, for the most part, lost forever.

32. Lukas, op. cit., p. 110.

33. Ibid., p.124.

34. “Backstopping” identification means arranging for its verification if someone should check it out.

35. Report of the Rockefeller Commission, p. 180.

36. Ibid.

37. Why the Lebanon file was included is not known, since the landing occurred before Kennedy took office. It may have been on the list simply to disguise the anti-Kennedy thrust of the request as a whole. Ehrlichman says he browsed through all the files but found the one on Lebanon the most fascinating for the extreme care Eisenhower had taken with “downfield blocking” — clearing things in advance with Britain and France....

38. Haldeman, op. cit., pp. 25-26.

39. Report of the Rockefeller Commission (pp. 190 ff.) says the White House called in Helms, but both Helms and Ehrlichman agree that it was Helms who insisted on the meeting. The Report also says that Helms gave some of the files to Ehrlichman on October 1, refusing to hand over only the Diem file. Helms says he held on to all the files until his meeting with Nixon. Ehrlichman does not remember whether Helms surrendered any of the files on October 1 or not. Helms told the Rockefeller Commission that there must be a tape of his meeting with Nixon on October 8, since it had apparently been quoted by Walter Pincus in a New Republic article, “The Duping of Richard Helms,” published in the issue of February 15, 1975. For obvious reasons, however, the Commission — which had been appointed by Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford — elected to ignore the tape and to depend instead on a CIA memorandum of the meeting written by Helms. The Commission criticized Helms for surrendering the files, and recommended that future DCIs be figures from outside the government who would have sufficient authority to resist such requests. Helms condemns this conclusion as thoroughly unfair, asking how any DCI could properly refuse a President access to files which were, in fact, his.

40. Nixon did not request either the IG report on the Bay of Pigs written by Lyman Kirkpatrick or the 1967 IG report on assassinations. Helms says Nixon did not know of the existence of either document.

41. The three documents, as well as the one on Lebanon which Ehrlichman remembered so clearly, are presumably still somewhere among Nixon’s impounded papers.

42. This was part of Hunt’s effort to discredit Ellsberg. After the CIA’s first psychological profile of Ellsberg seemed too thin for Hunt’s purposes, he suggested that the FBI or the Secret Service steal the files which Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, had refused to surrender voluntarily to the FBI. Liddy told Hunt that was out of the question; Hoover had banned black bag jobs in 1966. So Hunt proposed that he recruit some old CIA contract officers in Miami, and do the job himself. Egil Krogh drew up a plan, Ehrlichman approved it, and on September 3, 1971, Hunt, Gordon Liddy, and three Cubans burglarized Fielding’s office, apparently without finding what they were looking for.

43. Wise, op. cit., p. 236.

44. William Colby, Honorable Men, p. 321.

45. Wise, op. cit., p. 249.

46. One possible exception to this policy occurred on Monday, June 19, 1972, the same day Helms and his principal deputies and aides met to discuss Watergate for the first time. On that day a CIA contract officer named Lee R. Pennington, Jr., who worked for Howard Osborn on a $250-a-month retainer, went to McCord’s house and helped McCord’s wife to burn McCord’s files. According to Pennington, he then called Osborn to report what he had done, but the CIA and Pennington both insisted later that he had been acting on his own; McCord was a friend and Pennington was only trying to help. Whether this is true I do not know. There is no question, however, that the CIA attempted to hide its connection to Pennington. When the FBI asked Osborn for a report on “Pennington” in August 1972, the Bureau was given a description of one Cecil Pennington. The Agency’s relationship to the correct Pennington did not become known until January 1974, when an officer working for the CIA’s Inspector General went through the files of the Office of Security. Osborn wanted to lift Pennington’s file before the IG could get to it, but two men working for Osborn insisted it be left where it was. See Wise, op. cit., pp. 255-256. This is the only known post-break-in contact between the CIA and any of the Watergate burglary team, and the evidence is sufficient only to establish it as a contact once removed. But even if Osborn, or both Osborn and Helms, authorized the episode, it does not really alter our view of what happened thereafter. Helms, and the Agency at his direction, were trying to get out of the way.

47. After the interview Nixon said the U.S. could not tolerate Castro’s regime. For some reason, General Walters does not mention this interview in his memoirs, Silent Missions.

48. Lukas, op. cit., p. 312.

49. This, of course, would have been a disaster. It was tough enough trying to convince the public that five men inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, including the chief of security for CREEP, in fact had nothing to do with CREEP. Once the burglars’ money was traced to CREEP, the Committee would have to insist on something more incredible still — that CREEP had given $100,000 or more to the burglars without knowing what the money was for. One amazing aspect of the whole episode is that CREEP’s hollow denials stood up for as long as they did. John Dean thoroughly deserved the congratulations which Nixon gave him in September 1972, when it became clear there would be only seven defendants — the five burglars, plus Hunt and Liddy.

50. Haldeman, op. cit., p. 31.

51. Ibid., pp. 24-25. At that early date Nixon could have learned of the Bay of Pigs “connection” — Howard Hunt — from only one source: Chuck Colson, who had recruited Hunt for the “plumbers.”

52. The transcript of the June 23, 1972, conversation was finally released on August 5, 1974, just four days before Nixon resigned. Nixon later claimed (in March 1976) that he had been thinking of the legal support the administration had provided for the CIA in its effort to block publication of the Marchetti book. Helms says he does not know what the President had in mind; the only favor he could remember was a Nixon offer to let him use Camp David one weekend, an offer Helms declined.

53. Lukas, op. cit., pp. 313-314. The phrase “for the good of the country” comes from Haldeman’s version of Nixon’s remarks (op. cit., p. 33).

54. Ibid.

55. Walters described the meeting at some length in a memo for his files written on June 28, 1972, following three successive meetings with John Dean on June 26, 27, and 28. By that time it was abundantly clear this episode was a potential minefield. Helms himself preserved no memo of the conversation. Haldeman’s version of the meeting can be found in The Ends of Power, pp. 37-38. See also Lukas, op. cit., p. 314.

56. Walters’s memo, quoted in Lukas, ibid., p. 314.

57. Haldeman, op. cit., p. 38. Helms told David Frost he didn’t shout. Helms’s voice does not often run away with him, but it happens occasionally, and I think this must have been one of those times. Walters’s memo makes no mention of Haldeman’s remark about the Bay of Pigs, but Helms described it during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 21, 1973. “Mr. Haldeman made some incoherent remark about the investigation running into the Bay of Pigs and I said I was not concerned about the Bay of Pigs, that was years before, and I had no interest or concern about it any further.” (Nomination of Richard Helms..., p. 85). By Haldeman’s own account, he did not understand Nixon’s reference to the Bay of Pigs at the time, and still does not understand it now. In his memoirs he speculates that “Nixon might have been reminding Helms” of the CIA’s attempts on Castro’s life, which the CIA had never reported to the Warren Commission, and which “may” have triggered a successful Castro attempt to kill Kennedy. “It’s possible,” Haldeman says, that Nixon knew of the CIA plots from William Sullivan of the FBI (op. cit., pp. 39-40). That strikes me as pretty heavy use of the conditional tense. It’s apparent that Nixon was aware of Hunt’s role in the Bay of Pigs, something he presumably learned from Chuck Colson, but there is no evidence Nixon knew about the assassination plots, and Hunt’s book about the Bay of Pigs, Give Us This Day, indicates he did not know about them either. Helms told me specifically that Nixon did not know of the 1967 IG investigation fo the plots. I think it more likely that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was intended as a crude threat by Nixon which worked initially but backfired in the long run.

58. Lukas, op. cit., pp. 314-315. In his testimony on May 21, 1973, Helms recalled his words slightly differently: “I told him that I thought that he should limit his remarks to Director Gray to saying if any investigations in Mexico run into CIA operations that in keeping with the delimitation agreement between the CIA and the FBI that he simply notify us that this had occurred.” (Nomination of “Richard Helms..., p. 85.) Nixon wanted Walters to tell Gray to halt the investigation, which Walters agreed to do, and in fact did do. Helms wanted him to see Gray as directed, but to stop short of asking specifically for a halt in the investigation. In this way the CIA might follow the President’s orders without assuming responsibility for a halt in the investigation. Helms, clearly, was walking a fine line. He understood perfectly well why Nixon wanted the investigation halted, not in detail, perhaps, but in general. His main concern was not whether Nixon would be successful or not, but to ensure that the CIA did not have to do the dirty work.

59. Walters, op. cit., p. 589.

60. Haldeman’s guess that Gray was looking for a way to be “helpful” seems to have been right. Manuel Ogarrio was a Mexican, but how could an interview with Kenneth Dahlberg have compromised the CIA? Dahlberg was a Midwestern businessman, but Gray halted his interview anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

61. Leon Jaworski, The Right and the Power (Reader’s Digest Press, 1976), p. 258.

62. This charge has never been satisfactorily cleared up.

QUOTE OFF>

But you can feel better about one thing: I won't be here any more.