PART I: The CIA Watergate Bait-and-Switch—17–18 June 1972

During the crucial eleven days from 17 June 1972 to 28 June 1972, E. Howard Hunt, John Dean, and L. Patrick Gray, in collusion with Director CIA Richard Helms and Deputy Director CIA General Vernon Walters, railroaded the Watergate investigation completely away from CIA, where it belonged, and onto the White House.

They did far more than simply that: they also conspired to contrive false crimes with which to frame the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces during time of war, then Dean and Gray effected the CIA-engineered bait-and-switch that in one stunning day took virtually all public focus away from CIA and put it permanently onto the Committee to Re-Elect the President and the White House.

It is one of the most blatant and arrogant public frauds of all time. It could not have been accomplished completely and well without the knowing cooperation of Intelligence Cult propaganda mouthpieces Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

What follows, in annotated timeline form, is damning enough in and of itself. A complete understanding of it, though, can only be realized with the primary comprehension—condensed in the articles cited below—that there never was a Watergate "first break-in" at all over Memorial Day weekend 1972:

1. The "Pentagon Papers" Leak Was a CIA Op
2. There Was No "First Break-In" at the Watergate

Beginning with the "Pentagon Papers" leak—an act of war to throw the White House into over-reaction panic—everthing "Watergate" was a felonious domestic CIA operation being waged against the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States while hundreds or thousands of Americans continued to die and be maimed in the jungles of southeast Asia. The two articles linked to above, and their internally referenced foundational articles, detail two key campaigns of the CIA-NSA war on the United States of America that culminated in what is known as "Watergate."

From 13 June 1971—the date of the first release of the "Pentagon Papers"—until the resignation of Richard Nixon, the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States was under a relentless covert internal siege and assault from double agents of his own clandestine forces, while attempting to manage a war against enemies of the United States half a world away. He was brought down like a blinded wildebeast by a pack of hyenas.

A year after the "Pentagon Papers" release, this war on the Presidency climaxed when five CIA operatives carefully arranged to get "caught" inside the Watergate on 17 June 1972—as planned and carried out by the two CIA double-agent "commanders," Hunt and Liddy—and the rest was dénouement. But in the crucial first few weeks that followed the arrests, it was vital for the CIA to erase all public and press interest in the countless CIA connections, and to focus a bright spotlight on the White House as the culprit. The following excerpted and annotated timeline lays out exactly how John Dean and L. Patrick Gray, in collusion with Hunt, Helms, and Walters, did exactly that.

Because of the complexity of what is being reported, even though it only focuses on a few crucial days, nonetheless, it has to be broken down into a series of articles, each with its own set of contributing factors and actions by the perpetrators.

Although the timeline focuses largely on the acts of Dean, Gray, and the CIA from 19 June 1972 to 28 June 1972, it really begins during the daylight hours of Saturday, 17 June 1972, after the burglars had been "caught" very early that morning.

The first thing that E. Howard Hunt had done after the "arrest" was go directly to his White House office at around 3:00 a.m., and plant incriminating "evidence" consisting of what he and Liddy described as "surplus electronics equipment," most of it in two attaché cases that Hunt merely left out sitting in the open, on the floor in his White House office.

At essentially the same time, Alfred Baldwin, "the forgotten man" of Watergate, was driving a van James McCord had bought with tax dollars that was full of incriminating electronic equipment McCord had bought with tax dollars to park it at James McCord's house. (Baldwin testified Hunt had instructed him to do just that, Hunt testified that Hunt had instructed Baldwin to do anything but that. These violent contradictions in testimony are nothing at all but CIA psy-ops to generate maximum confusion.)

So CIA's Hunt has planted his "evidence" to incriminate the White House. Baldwin has planted his "evidence" to incrimnate the White House. (No one bothers to explain how Baldwin left McCord's house after driving the van there. No one bothers to ask.)

If the above isn't preposterous enough, what you will read below about the later events of Saturday, 17 June and Sunday, 18 June 1972, alone, will be too implausible for belief, but these events carefully set up what begins on the following Monday, 19 June 1972—and it only gets worse from there.

Here begins the introductory part of the timeline, with my notes below:

Saturday, 17 June 1972
• After having engineered the "arrests" at the Watergate, planted electronic evidence in his White House office safe, and gone home for some sleep, E. Howard Hunt is awakened at about 11:00 a.m. by his maid telling him there is a phone call. It is Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward notifying Hunt that his name has been found in the address book belonging to Bernard Barker, setting up one of the important planned links to both the White House and the CIA. (James McCord is the other.)
• "Toward midafternoon," two FBI agents come to Hunt's house. He refuses to talk to them without a lawyer. They go away.
• Reporters purportedly congregate later in the afternoon around Hunt's home, causing his children concern when they "return home." (From where, Hunt doesn't say. There is no mention of Hunt's wife at all. Note that this is a Saturday.) Hunt claims his home resembles "a fortress under seige." Television and radio reports are saying that "the name of E. Howard Hunt, a White House aide," has been found with the burglars.
  
  Sunday, 18 June 1972
• The Washington Post breaks its first story on the Watergate break-in, all planned and timed to be released on Sunday, the biggest newspaper circulation day. Despite Woodward having called Hunt the morning before to tell Hunt that the trap had been set, and despite other news sources naming Hunt, there is no mention of E. Howard Hunt in their Sunday lead story. There is, though, mention of James McCord's background with CIA. And most importantly for what is to come, there is mention of the burglars having "almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence." [NOTE: The Washtington Post will incrementally build the CIA links, then will be the propaganda mouthpiece to perfect the CIA bait-and-switch.]
• Although his home supposedly is "under seige" by reporters, the following is what Hunt does according to his autobiography: "Sunday morning I left the house early and drove to the Old Executive Office Building [EOB—adjacent to the White House]. I entered it as before [showing his White House credentials], went to my office and opened my safe. I put the contents of the two attaché cases [that Hunt had left on the floor of the office after the "arrests", containing McCord's "surplus electronics equipment"] into my safe and locked it again, removing the two empty attaché cases from the office and taking them home. As I drove into my property, I could see television cameras stationed on River Road. Reporters followed my car up the drive on foot but I asked them to leave."

For any serious student of Watergate, I could end this timeline right here on this utterly incredible note, and you would easily know or could figure out the rest. You will already know that Hunt's safe purportedly is booby-trapped at the time with the (fictional) forged "Diem cables" that supposedly have been sitting there uselessly for eight months. But these non-existent "fabricated cables" are only one more layer of the criminal CIA hoax, which later will further hobble the Presidency in riveting spotlighted melodrama. See The Diem Cables: Did They Exist or Not for full exposure of that part of the criminal CIA black operation on the Presidency.

So on this date, with his name purportedly already in lights (but see Part II), Hunt goes to his White House office for no other purpose than to further "load" his White House safe with incriminating "evidence" against the White House, then walk out with two now empty briefcases that had contained that electronic "evidence" (which never existed for any other purpose than to incriminate the White House in the first place). Empty.

The brazen intentional planting of the "evidence" in the safe alone is the act of the most craven criminal mind that can be conceived. The timing of the act bespeaks complete knowing "in your face" immunity being provided to Hunt by CIA. To then layer upon it the straight-razor cuts of an "admission" (made long after the fact) of having walked away with two empty briefcases that easily could have carried away all purported incriminating "evidence" against the White House simply is an act of vicious sadism. There is no other possible explanation.

But Hunt still is not done. He will want to rub salt, now, into the razor cuts. And so we come to the events of Monday, 19 June 1972, and the entrance of John Dean and L. Patrick Gray into the willful sabotage of the Presidency during time of war.

Continued in the next article:

PART II: The CIA Watergate Bait-And-Switch—19 June 1972

Ashton Gray

Ashton Gray writes:

Sunday, 18 June 1972

The Washington Post breaks its first story on the Watergate break-in, all planned and timed to be released on Sunday, the biggest newspaper circulation day. Despite Woodward having called Hunt the morning before to tell Hunt that the trap had been set, and despite other news sources naming Hunt, there is no mention of E. Howard Hunt in their Sunday lead story. There is, though, mention of James McCord's background with CIA. And most importantly for what is to come, there is mention of the burglars having "almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence." [NOTE: The Washington Post will incrementally build the CIA links, then will be the propaganda mouthpiece to perfect the CIA bait-and-switch.]

Here's that article in the Washington Post by Alfred E. Lewis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...es/061872-1.htm

I agree. I cannot understand why your critics keep on rejecting this idea by involving members of the White House in this conspiracy. Their behaviour makes sense if you understand their motivation as being directed by self-survival.

Do you think McCord and Hunt were in this conspiracy from the beginning? Or were they fall guys as well?

The background to the release of the Pentagon Papers is interesting. They were first published by the New York Times. The editor, Abraham Michael Rosenthal, was the man who made this decision. This is itself very interesting as Rosenthal was at the time a strong advocate of the Vietnam War. It was later disclosed that Rosenthal used his position to keep out stories from the New York Times that were hostile to the CIA. For example, Raymond Bonner’s reports on CIA involvement in El Salvador in 1982. Bonner was recalled to the United States and placed on the New York business desk.

The next person to publish extracts from the Pentagon Papers was Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. Bradlee had links to the CIA since the early 1950s. He was another supporter of the Vietnam War.

Were Rosenthal and Bradlee following CIA orders when they published the Pentagon Papers?

As the release of the Pentagon Papers galvanized the anti-war movement, and helped move the anti-war movement from college campuses into the board rooms (and news rooms), the orchestrated release of these documents was almost certainly performed by forces fighting against the war. I've read nothing, ever, in the dozens of books I've read on this period of history, to indicate the CIA was secretly against the war. I find it hard to believe they'd have undertaken Operation Chaos and Operation Phoenix if they had been.

It created the exact intended effect: unrest approaching near civil war in the United States, which allowed the Communist reps to make a mockery of "peace talks" from there on out. Just a total, seditious game of cat-and-mouse, and why not: the Commander in Chief of the United States was under seige and relentless timed public scandals and attacks originating from his own covert forces from 13 June 1971 straight through to the resignation. He was a fatally wounded animal the entire time and never had a clue.

The Paris "peace talks" broke down on 13 December 1972 (these worms love 13) while "Watergate" was taking the White House apart brick-by-brick.

The only war that mattered to CIA and their minions was the one they were waging on the United States themselves, without the slightest regard for casualties anywhere in the world. And ultimately it increased their power, funding, and control, no matter how many lies their minions come in here and tell to the contrary.

AFTERTHOUGHT UPDATE

For the love of Christ (almost literally), they worked together to make Ellsberg a big, holy martyr right up to the moment the hammer was lifted to drive in the nails. And the whole time CIA had his "salvation" sitting in their files, because CIA, with Hunt and Liddy, had created the death's-door reprieve with the staged photos, taken with a CIA camera, and developed in CIA's own labs!

Then the very same day that Ellsberg's "trial" started, CIA sent a CIA agent to hand-courier the photos to Watergate prosecutors! Then they still had St. Ellsberg drag his cross through the streets and wear a crown of thorns, and suffer mightily the slings and arrows of outrageous martyrdom, right up until the nails and hammer were taken out of the tool box, and then...Oh! Wait! John Dean and E. Howard Hunt suddenly get that ol' time religion, and "confess" their guts out about the "fun at Dr. Fielding's office" CIA op Hunt and Liddy had done, and the CIA says, "Oh, well we have already delivered some photos of that tax-funded Beverly Hills vacation the boys took," and the martyr Ellsberg is saved! Hallelujah! Hosanas! Hose the world: there's a new Christ!

You know, at some point, it's time to check in to the actual universe of reality and see if it's even still there.

Ashton

Of course the CIA was in favour of the war. However, in 1972 it was more important to begin the process of removing Nixon from power than trying to win in Vietnam. Anyway, by this stage, the CIA was aware that the war could not be won and were becoming more interested in the fight against communism in other countries.

The New York Times and the Washington Post were also in favour of the war. That is why it is especially interesting that these two newspapers got involved in undermining the fight against communism by publishing the Pentagon Papers.

Rosenthal died in May of this year. In his Guardian obituary, Christopher Reed argued that it came as a great shock to the newspaper industry when Rosenthal published the Pentagon Papers. This was based on the knowledge of his views on the war and his willingness to protect the establishment. If Rosenthal was working on behalf of the CIA in its struggle with Nixon, his decision now becomes logical and rational.

And of course the overriding consideration is: They always play both sides of the game.

Ashton

It is also interesting that in the very first paragraph of the very first Pentagon Papers report in the Times, if memory serves, the blame for Vitnam is laid squarely at the door of JFK. The report begins with the assertion that JFK had bequeathed to Johnson "a broad commitment to war."

This report was written by Neil Sheehan, but I suspect that Harrison Salisbury weilded a strong hand in the editing and the spin that the Times gave to the Pentagon Papers

I've updated the opening article to correct an important omission about Alfred Baldwin's planting of "evidence" to incriminate the White House. The text which inadvertently was omitted earlier by the posting of a wrong version is this, concerning events happening simultaneously with Hunt planting "evidence" in his White House safe:

At essentially the same time, Alfred Baldwin, "the forgotten man" of Watergate, was driving a van James McCord had bought with tax dollars that was full of incriminating electronic equipment McCord had bought with tax dollars to park it at James McCord's house. (Baldwin testified Hunt had instructed him to do just that, Hunt testified that Hunt had instructed Baldwin to do anything but that. These violent contradictions in testimony are nothing at all but CIA psy-ops to generate maximum confusion.)

So CIA's Hunt has planted his "evidence" to incriminate the White House. Baldwin has planted his "evidence" to incrimnate the White House. (No one bothers to explain how Baldwin left McCord's house after driving the van there. No one bothers to ask.)

The corrected article also corrects a misspelling.

Ashton Gray

_____________________________________

As fellow Forum member Jim Marrs wrote in "Rule By Secrecy": "Aid to communist North Vietnam came from Russia and China while South Vietnam grew more and more dependent on American support. The balance of power steadied. The stage was set for war."

But it wasn't about winning the war. It never is. It's the good ol' Hegelian Dialectic, which Ash alluded to in one of these recent postings, referring to the "chaos" of the times.

The confluence of these early Seventies events - all of them orchestrated, manipulated and brought together on the chess board (thesis) - gave the elites a chance to proffer a solution (antithesis) and get their man (Rockefeller, certainly not Ford) - in position (synthesis). They succeeded, of course, and came awfully close to going that one big step further, didn't they?
JG

The background to the release of the Pentagon Papers is interesting. They were first published by the New York Times. The editor, Abraham Michael Rosenthal, was the man who made this decision. This is itself very interesting as Rosenthal was at the time a strong advocate of the Vietnam War. It was later disclosed that Rosenthal used his position to keep out stories from the New York Times that were hostile to the CIA. For example, Raymond Bonner’s reports on CIA involvement in El Salvador in 1982. Bonner was recalled to the United States and placed on the New York business desk.

The next person to publish extracts from the Pentagon Papers was Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post. Bradlee had links to the CIA since the early 1950s. He was another supporter of the Vietnam War.

Were Rosenthal and Bradlee following CIA orders when they published the Pentagon Papers?
[/quote]

______________________

Please allow me to give dubious distinction to that most virtuous of organs, The Boston Globe
(from usinfo.state.gov):

"In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered a full-scale evaluation of how the United States became involved in the Vietnam War. A study team of thirty-six persons took more than a year to compile the report, which ran to forty-seven volumes, with some 4,000 pages of documentary evidence and 3,000 pages of analysis. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department economist who had grown disillusioned with the war, copied major portions of the study and then turned them over to the press. On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing the papers, and the Nixon administration immediately sought to stop further publication.

In Near v. Minnesota, Chief Justice Hughes had noted that the rule against prior restraint would not apply in certain cases. No one would question, Hughes declared, "that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing days of transports or the number and location of troops." Using this theory, the Justice Department secured a temporary injunction against the Times. The Washington Post then picked up publication, and when the administration went to court against that paper, the Boston Globe began publication.

In an unusual move (emphasis added), the Supreme Court expedited the appeals process, and heard oral argument on June 26, and four days later, on June 30 -- seventeen days after the Times ran the first installment -- handed down its decision."

Amazing, how the Court chose to move with alacrity on this one, n'est ce pas?! Sarcasm aside (I'm reading too much Ash), the above is a pretty nice thumbnail on the 'P' papers and The Court's subsequent action(s).

Regards,
JohnG

The first rule of human behavior is self-preservation. When the burglars got caught, the rats scurried. If Baldwin, or McCord, or Hunt, or Dean, or Colson, or Gray, failed to adequately protect Nixon at all times, perhaps just perhaps, they were more concerned with saving their own necks. Baldwin, I believe, succeeded in his efforts. If he'd made the move to destroy evidence, he would have been indicted for something or other.


While most people can appreciate the complexities of human behavior, others seem at a complete loss, and constantly fill in the blanks with "Because the CIA said so." Of course to someone with this affliction the only reason I would say such a thing is "Because the CIA said so." Scary.

Your whole argument is based upon the theory that the North Vietnamese were willing to accept a divided nation, and that the peace movement in the U.S. led to the "loss" of Vietnam. This is reactionary thinking at its worst. Have you been channeling Barry Goldwater's ghost, Ashton?

As far as your suggestion that the CIA somehow benefited from the release of the Pentagon Papers and/or Nixon's downfall: malarkey. Anyone with a brain cell knows the CIA was picked apart and partially dismantled after Watergate, only to return in all its glory after a certain incident in the Iranian desert. Now if you're looking for a possible CIA/right-wing conspiracy to undermine a President, THAT would be a good place to start. And yet you only seem interested in imaginary crimes committed against Richard Nixon. I wonder why that is.

_______________________________

My God! Ash, you wanna take this? I defer because it is obvious by now that, unless pablum is on the menu, certain of the customers don't have much of an appetite. Sorry Pat, but most of what lies above just isn't worth the time of day.

John G

These media accounts so rarely get around to saying who put the copies of the report into Ellsberg's hands to begin with.

I'm not shy: it was Harry Rowan, president of the Rand Corporation, who kept himself 3,000 miles away while the dirty work was being done in the Rand D.C. offices on Tuesday, 4 March 1969. Here's a Phun Phact: that was just a little over a month after Nixon's inauguration.

Ellsberg was "sworn in as a top secret courier," and ordered by Rowan over the phone not to let anyone, including security officers at Rand, know that he had it. Also in the loop were Leslie Gelb, Paul Warneke, and Morton Halperin, and it's Gelb and Halperin who later deposit copies in the National Archives the day before the first New York Times release. It's so in-your-face that it's suffocating.

The surface hasn't even been scratched on Ellsberg and Rand yet. Ellsberg is the boy who—while in the bosom of Rand—more than anyone else gave the world the gift of M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. Like venereal disease, it's the gift that keeps on giving. And it took a madman to spawn it.

This is the Great Saint of Eternal Peacedom. This is the Great Ally of Love and Brotherhood.

As these layers continue to peel back, they're going to peel back to what "think tank" means. In another level of "in your faceness," it is the hidden mind. It's where all these black ops are hatched. All of them. It's where the "brightest and best" go—as long as they wipe their morality off on the door mat before they enter. It's where six-figure salaries are paid to people who spend their day with their heels on their desk, gazing at the ceiling.

It's where all the dirty details are worked out. It's where all the lies are manufactured. It's where psy-ops are honed to utter perfection.

They plan decades in advance. Literally.

That's why Ellsberg was handed the documents just a little over a month after Nixon was inaugurated. Ellsberg, with his Rand buddies, wrote himself a big, glorious starring role in the script.

CIA is an execution arm made up of amoral thugs who will do anything. Anything. Tell any lie. They are professional deceivers, and their purpose is to deceive. That's what they do. They are the slickest con artists in history, with an almost unlimited budget.

At some point somebody's going to pull the string on Daniel Ellsberg and Rand and the JFK assassination.

Ashton

Take it? I don't even read it any more. I've been reading the same old crap in the newspapers for 40+ years. It's just the same old propaganda line. It doesn't change.

Take it? I might print it out if I needed to wrap some fish. I wouldn't take it, though, to the dump.

Ashton

What? Am I reading you correctly? Now you're accusing Daniel Ellsberg of complicity in the Kennedy Assassination?
It just gets wilder and wilderer.

And please explain why we should believe the CIA's "purpose is to deceive." Somewhere I read they were fighting a cold war, for the purpose of defeating what they believed to be a great evil, communism. The record indicates their perception of this evil was distorted, however, so that everything that was good for American interests became good and everyhing bad for American interests became a possible communist plot. Do you really mean to imply that deception was never a means to an end, but the actual end?

Have you ever actually talked or met someone from the CIA? Or from the Rand Corporation? In your upside down world, you've twisted the Watergate story from Nixon's men discussing the firebombing of the Brookings Institute to the Rand Corporation's killing Kennedy and deliberately driving Nixon from office. You also villify Ellsberg for his M.A.D. theory, a concept that kept the United States and Russia at arms length, but seem completely comfortable with Nixon and Kissinger's Madman theory, in which he deliberately targeted North Vietnamese civilians in hopes it would drive the North Vietnamese back to the bargaining table. In short, the only pattern in your ramblings seems to be that Richard Nixon was a victim. You're probably the only person in history to feel more sorry for Nixon than Nixon himself.

P.S. On a lighter note, what are your feelings on The Beatles? John Lennon protested the war. Was he CIA?

After much longer than I could have imagined possible, I finally have posted Part II of this series:

The CIA Watergate Bait-and-Switch—19 June 1972

I had made promises to several people in several threads that I was going to post such an article, which first became a series, and now is practically threatening to become book-length. Although I was very familiar with the events (and false claims of events), and although I knew of their complexity, I had not come even close to correctly estimating the difficulty of attempting to explain that complexity, and the malevolent CIA machinations involved, to others.

It became so daunting that I finally had to extract from the work an entirely separate article, CIA Psy-Ops of Watergate and Beyond, which is an indispensable companion piece to the series. I strongly advise not to attempt to read the Part II article without visiting that outline of CIA psy-ops used in Watergate.

Even then, Part II may be as difficult to read as it was to write. There enters a subjectivity factor where authorship becomes welded to the very confusion that is built into the psy-ops one is attempting to explain and analyze, and objective assessment almost can't be made by the writer himself about whether the enormous confusion generated is from the inherent pernicious nature of the material, or just really awful writing.

I finally had to submit it as it is, and hope that, for those who can endure, it will somehow reveal the underlying motives and malign design of the instigators and perpetrators who visited this catastrophic fraud on the world.

To those who I promised an article on this subject over a week ago, I apologise for having taken this long, and for even now being probably only half way through. I only can devote so many hours of the day to it, but with your continued forbearance I will get there.

Ashton Gray