Douglas Caddy

again demanded any information he might have about the plan to break-in the DNC. He again refused to answer their questions.

Merritt was an integral part of COINTELPRO infiltration of the Weather Underground. Felt was in charge of it. Who sent agents Tucker and O’Connor to see Merritt on these occasions? Felt. If the two agents had picked up a rumor about a planned break-in, this would have been documented in an FBI report as required under standard FBI procedure. Thus, the FBI had knowledge of a planned break-in within a few days after Merritt learned this from Rita on June 1. Of course, nothing of this role of the FBI came out in the Watergate investigation. Instead Felt used his official status as second in command to leak FBI investigative documents to Woodward and Bernstein. He did not leak any FBI internal document that showed the FBI had prior knowledge of a planned break-in.

William F. Buckley, Jr. in his column of June 5, 2005, after Vanity Fair named Felt as Deep Throat, wrote:

“Now Mr. Felt steps forward and says that it was he who in effect staged the end of the Nixon Administration. What he did, over a period of months, was to report to two industrious journalists of the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, everything that came to his attention through the fish-eye lens. Mr. Felt wanted to know everything about the traffic of dollars to and from the Committee to Reelect the President, and everything about the background and activities of everyone associated with the White House, from the Attorney General down to the plumbers.

“As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), but to two journalists. Bob Woodward was thoughtful enough to have recorded, the day after the news about Felt broke, his first meeting with Deep Throat back in 1970, two years before the Watergate break-in. There they both were, waiting in the West Wing of the White House, Woodward to deliver a message from the Chief of Naval Operations, the Assistant Director of the FBI on a mission of his own. ‘I could tell he was watching the situation carefully. There was nothing overbearing about his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a gentlemanly surveillance. After a few minutes I introduced myself. “Lieutenant Bob Woodward,” I said carefully, appending a deferential “sir.”

“Mark Felt,” he said.

“Mark Anthony, meeting Brutus, deserved no greater headline in history.”

Wrapping Everything Up

In evaluating Merritt’s story, here are some points to keep in mind:

There would probably have never been a Watergate scandal had Merritt not told Shoffler what he had learned from Rita.

Despite the multiple government and media investigations into Watergate that led up to Nixon’s removal from office, none ever focused on the background of the arresting officer, Carl Shoffler. It was as if he, despite his quest for fame, played a cameo role in the drama when even a cursory examination could have uncovered a clue that would have led to the unraveling of his scheme.

For example, the Senate Watergate Committee made little effort to pursue an allegation made by Captain Edmund Chung, Shoffler’s former commanding officer at NSA’s Vint Hill Farm Station. Chung claimed that Shoffler told him not long after Watergate broke that the arrests were the result of a tip-off and that if Shoffler ever made the whole story public, “his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel.”

It would be exceedingly difficult to pass judgment on Merritt’s revelations without first reading what Jim Hougan wrote in his 1984 best-seller, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. Only Hougan traced the actions of Shoffler in the hours before the arrests, noting that he skipped his planned birthday party when his shift ended at 10 P.M. to volunteer for a second shift. Hougan observed that Shoffler then joined a plainclothes unit that cruised the streets and that the unit’s three officers parked their vehicle only a block from Watergate, “as if they were awaiting the dispatcher’s summons.”

Hougan wrote further that, “The mysteries surrounding Shoffler are peculiar in the extreme and none more so than the allegations made by one of Shoffler’s former informants, Robert ‘Butch” Merritt. A homosexual, Merritt was employed by the police and the FBI in spying on the New Left, a task that ultimately led to his infiltration of the Institute for Policy Studies, a bête noire of America’s right wing. According to Merritt, Shoffler approached him sometime after June 16, 1972, and asked him to undertake a bizarre assignment. If we are to believe the disaffected informant, Shoffler told him to establish a homosexual relationship with Douglas Caddy, stating that Caddy was gay and a supporter of Communist causes. In fact, Caddy was about as conservative as they come…

“Predictably, perhaps, Shoffler ridicules Merritt’s accusation, calling it absurd. One can only agree with the police detective, and yet, where Merritt is concerned there appears to have been more going on than met the eye.”

Hougan then described Merritt turning up after the Watergate case broke at Buster Riggin’s porn store, one of whose frequent customers being Carl Bernstein. Hougan disclosed that an internal inquiry by the Post uncovered that “Bernstein was a participant in the frolics of an informally organized ‘social club’ whose membership seemed to be dominated by CIA officers, their girl friends and their wives.” Merritt said that Riggin frequently was host to these “frolics” and that for one party Riggin sent him to bring back a sheep from a farm in Virginia.

There would have been no cover up and no resignation by President Nixon if within the first week or two of the case evidence had been produced linking Shoffler with having prior knowledge of the planned break-in. The whole investigation would have then turned attention on Shoffler, the two other intelligence agents who also had advance knowledge, Merritt’s role, the disappearance of Rita Reed, and what the FBI knew. An early resolution of the case would have prevented the poisonous atmosphere that has permeated Washington ever since, which has led to extreme political partisanship making it almost impossible to implement successfully necessary government policies.

Why is Merritt telling his complete story now, 39 years after the scandal broke open? There is no single answer. First and foremost, however, is that Merritt would have been killed if he had attempted to reveal what he knew while Shoffler was alive. Shoffler died in 1996 at the age of 51 years from a rare blood disease. Shoffler knew Merritt’s whereabouts and kept in contact with him until 1994, two years before his death.

Shoffler was not the only Intelligence Agent whose life was on the line if the real story of Watergate had come out. Two other Intelligence agents heard Merritt’s story of the planned break-in on June 3, almost two weeks before the arrests. There were obviously others, those named in Crimson Rose.

What was “Crimson Rose,” the two words overheard by Rita Reed when she listened in on the telephone conversation on May 31, 1972? Crimson Rose, an acronym, stood for a 400 page CIA document whose title was “Confidential Report on Intelligence of Military Secret Operations on Nixon” and whose subtitle was “Report of Operations of Secret Surveillance and Eavesdropping.” It was marked “Eyes Only.”

Both Military Intelligence and the CIA had wire-tapping operations located in the Columbia Plaza Apartments in the weeks prior to the Watergate case breaking open. The CIA had an office that was located at 2430 E Street, N.W., within walking distance of both the Watergate and Columbia Plaza Apartments.

Authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their 1991 book, Silent Coup: The Removal of the President recounted in detail a military intelligence spy ring that reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon that penetrated the White House and that was opposed to Nixon’s foreign policy goals. Crimson Rose, the secret CIA report, dealt with this military intelligence spy ring. Its title spoke volumes about its contents.

It would be interesting to find out if Crimson Rose contained information about Bob Woodward , who from 1969-70 as a Naval Lieutenant, served as liaison to the White House from Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Woodward’s assignment at the White House was to brief General Alexander Haig inside the office of the National Security Council. It was this period when the military intelligence spy ring operated inside the White House that was secretly chronicled in the CIA’s Crimson Rose document.

Upon learning of its existence, Military Intelligence devised a plan to steal Crimson Rose, which it viewed as an explosive and incriminating report, from within the bowels of the CIA. Military Intelligence deemed retrieving the sole “Eyes Only” copy of the Crimson Report as being absolutely essential. This was because, in the wake of Watergate and the disclosure of other unseemly government activities, in 1975 the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church, initiated hearings into the activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The great fear of Military Intelligence was that should the Church Committee (or the Pike Committee) get its hands on a copy of Crimson Rose in the course of its investigation of the CIA, disclosure of its contents would lead to exposing the role of Military Intelligence in bringing down the Nixon Administration and would drastically affect how the American public perceived its military. Disclosure could lead to a complete reorganization of the Pentagon and court martial trials, perhaps criminal trials, of those involved.

Shoffler played the key role in carrying out the plan to obtain Crimson Rose. In June 1975 Mitchell Rogovin, General Counsel to the CIA, was lured by someone he knew and trusted to dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. In the course of the dinner his drink was spiked, causing him to appear inebriated. Several men who were Military Intelligence agents assisted him to a freight elevator that transported them to a floor above. The elevator operator for the special occasion was Merritt, who in prior years had held that position at the hotel. The regular operator of the freight elevator had been given one hundred dollars and told to get lost for an hour. Rogovin was then carried into a hotel room and quickly stripped naked. He was positioned on a bed and a prostitute climbed into bed beside him. Shoffler had arranged with Buster Riggin for the use of the prostitute from the prostitution ring operated by Riggin. Graphic photographs were taken of Rogovin and the woman in different sexual positions. Subsequently, Rogovin was shown the photographs and told that unless he obtained and delivered the Crimson Rose report from within the CIA, the incriminating photographs of him would be leaked. He was also threatened that his son would be set up and falsely charged with selling illegal drugs if he did not cooperate.

Presented with these horrific threats, Rogovin chose to retrieve the Crimson Rose report and give it to the military agents involved, whose leader was Shoffler. When Rogovin gave it to Shoffler, the 400-page Crimson Rose file was encased in a formidable binder bearing the seal of the CIA that had a broken chain dangling. The “Eyes Only” document had been protectively situated, chained to a circular table in a secure room inside CIA. In the center of the table were a large number of other CIA “Eyes Only” documents in their chained binders, allowing the documents to be read but not removed from the table. When given to Shoffler, the chain to the Crimson Rose document had been cut.

Rogovin resigned as CIA General Counsel the next year.

Who were the burglars actually wire-tapping? There is reason to believe that the wire-tapping was of the prostitution ring being run out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments and not of the DNC. Examination of the tapes and the transcripts of the taped conversations would go far towards resolving this issue.

The Washington Evening Star on June 9, 1972 published an article that announced the prostitution ring had been broken and its manager, Phillip Bailley, arrested. The same day John Dean summoned the prosecutor handling the case to his White House office and requested that the case file be brought. At the meeting Dean made a careful and detailed examination of the manager’s “trick book” that contained the names of the “Johns” and the women who were the prostitutes. He asked if he could keep the “trick” book but the prosecutor refused his request. Dean and Magruder each had a special reason to want to know what names were in the book.

What was the intent of the team of burglars headed by James McCord who were arrested inside the DNC? Gordon Liddy expressed shock in the A&E Investigative Report “The Key to Watergate” upon learning that the burglars were caught around the desk of a secretary (under whose telephone, Shoffler had led them to believe, was planted the key to the desk containing the prized envelope.) Liddy had been under the impression that the team had gone into the DNC to wiretap Chairman Larry O’Brien’s phone. Furthermore, none of those at the scene of the arrests, including Shoffler’s fellow officers and the five arrested burglars, could recall any struggle between Shoffler and Martinez that resulted in Shoffler grabbing a notebook with a key taped on its back from Martinez. Only Shoffler maintained such a struggle took place.

There also has existed the question of whether Shoffler contaminated the notebook as evidence while it was in his personal possession and before he turned it in at the police precinct. The precise date on which he surrendered possession of the notebook and key was not recorded. Did he remove one or more pages from the notebook containing information that would have revealed the wiretap triangulation that he used to set up and entrap the burglars?

To view the A&E Investigative Report “The Key to Watergate” go to:

http://www.nixonera.com/library/watergate.asp

The time line of the DNC break-in raises a fundamental question as to who ordered the burglars to go back in on June 17:

May 28: First break-in at DNC

May 31: Rita Reed overhears telephone conversation about Crimson Rose and a break-in planned for the date of June 18. Those speaking on telephone express hatred of Nixon and desire to bring him down

June 1: Rita Tells Merritt what she heard

June 3: Merritt informs Shoffler of Rita’s information

June 9: Washington Star reports the investigation of Columbia Plaza call-girl ring

June 9: Dean summons prosecutor handling call-girl ring investigation to his White House office

June 12: Magruder tells Liddy to mount a second DNC break-in

June 17: Burglars arrested during second break-in

If this time line is accurate, then the two persons having the telephone conversation on May 31 knew of a second break-in being planned for June 18 before Dean, Magruder or Liddy could have known. Crimson Rose was a CIA operation. Thus, someone in the CIA either knew or was calling the shots that a second break-in had to be mounted. Dean did not get concerned about the call-girl ring linked to the DNC until June 9. Magruder told Liddy on June 12 to go back in. Who told Magruder?

The evidence shows that three of the men on the burglar team were active CIA agents: Howard Hunt, James McCord and Eugenio Martinez.

It is likely that the two people having the Crimson Rose telephone conversation on May 31 did not plan for the burglars to be arrested. Instead they wanted to use the break-in information to blackmail Nixon or his key aides later on. They did not count on Shoffler setting-up the burglars to be arrested. The arrests shocked them and affected their over-all strategy.

In regard to my own story, despite homophobic Judge Sirica falsely accusing me of being a “principal” in the crime and trying to frame me because I was gay, I was never indicted, never named an unindicted co-conspirator, never disciplined by the Bar or even interviewed by the Senate Watergate Committee. In fact, at the trial of those accused of the cover-up it was revealed that when I was approached by a mysterious caller to disburse the “hush” money, Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, testified “Well, the sum and gist of it was that Mr. Caddy refused to accept the funds.” There can be no doubt but that Sirica’s contempt citation against me, upheld by the Court of Appeals, spurred the cover-up.

Watergate would have had a different ending had not homophobia reigned supreme. The police, FBI, the government investigations all mistreated Merritt because he was an open homosexual. Even the Oval Office tapes revealed anti-gay conversations between Nixon and his aides. My being pulled “forthwith” before the grand jury and later being falsely accused by Sirica stemmed from anti-gay bias.

Merritt and I realize that our book Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up is not the final word on the scandal. There still exist a large number of unreleased government files that would confirm and elaborate on what Merritt claims. The FBI, in response to Merritt’s Freedom of Information Action request, provided some 400 documents to him but withheld 300 other papers. Release of Merritt’s complete government file and that of Shoffler’s would go far in clearing up what really happened in Watergate.

Merritt’s story, and to a lesser extent my own story, present a revisionist history of Watergate. This revisionist history joins the controversy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in raising questions of what actually occurred at the time of these two events, which saw both Presidents removed from office in different ways.

It may take a historian, grand jury or congressional committee, building on what Merritt and I supply in Watergate Exposed, to reopen and bring true justice to the case.

On June 28, eleven days after the arrests (and the same day that Shoffler and the four CIA agents approached Merritt with their scheme to assassinate me), I was working on the case in the federal courthouse when I was stopped by one of the three prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell. When he saw me Campbell thrust a grand jury subpoena authorized by John Sirica, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, into my hand. The subpoena stated that I was to appear Forthwith before the grand jury. Campbell then grabbed me by my arm and pulled me into the grand jury room.

Over the next three weeks I was to appear before the grand jury five times, answer hundreds of questions and have my personal bank account records subpoenaed. On July 10, the prosecutors submitted to the court 38 questions that I had refused to answer on the grounds of the attorney-client privilege. I did so on the advice of five attorneys who were representing me in the grand jury proceeding. On July 12 Chief Judge Sirica in open court that was packed with the press ordered me to answer the 38 questions under threat of being held in contempt of court if I failed to do so, declaring:

You see, to put the matter perfectly bluntly, if the government is trying to get enough evidence to indict Mr. Caddy as one of the principals of this case even though he might not have been present at the time of the alleged entry in this place, I dont know what the evidence is except what has been disclosed here, if the government is trying to get an indictment against Mr. Caddy and he feels that way and you feel it and the rest of you attorneys feel it, all he has to say is I refuse to answer on the grounds what I might say would tend to incriminate me. That ends it. I cant compel him to say he knows Mr. Hunt under the circumstances. He doesnt do that, understand? He takes the other road. He says there is a confidential communication. Who is he to be the sole judge of if it is confidential or not? That is what I am here for.

Sirica, a homophobic jurist cut from the same cloth as the police, FBI and CIA agents whose actions against me have been previously chronicled, used his position to try to frame me. He was to fail but at a severe cost to the defendants and to the nation.

On July 13, I appeared before the grand jury and refused to answer the 38 questions. Sirica immediately convened a court hearing and held me in contempt of court and directed that I be jailed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit later that day ordered that I be released, pending an appeal before it of my contempt citation. The headline in The New York Times the following day read, Lawyer Held in Contempt in Democratic Raid Inquiry.

On July 18, the Court of Appeals upheld Siricas order holding me in contempt. On the advice of my five attorneys the next day I went before the grand jury and answered all the questions. Had I not done so I would have been jailed for an indefinite period or until I did agree to answer the questions.

The actions of Sirica and the Court of Appeals did not go unnoticed by the White House. In an Oval Office tape of July 19, 1972, an incredulous President Nixon asked John Ehrlichman, Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify? to which Ehrlichman responded, It [unintelligible] to me, except that this damn circuit weve got here with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.

Nixon then asked, Why didnt he appeal to the Supreme Court?

What Nixon and Ehrlichman did not realize was that I and my attorneys firmly believed that we had created a strong legal record of the violation of the constitutional rights of both the defendants and me as their attorney so as, if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested defendants were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned as a result of the abusive actions of Sirica and the Court of Appeals.

Siricas vitriolic courtroom antics, aided and abetted by a biased Court of Appeals, had the effect of encouraging the defendants to embark on a hush-money cover-up after they realized early on that the courts were not going to give them a fair trial. Hunt later wrote that If Sirica was treating Caddy an Officer of the Court so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate. Bear in mind all the above described courtroom events involving me occurred in the first 23 days of the case. The dye was cast then by the prosecutors and the courts to deny the seven defendants a fair trial.

In December 1972 Dorothy Hunt, Howard Hunts wife, died in what some believed was a mysterious plane crash at a Chicago airport. When the trial of the burglars began in January, 1973, Hunt, along with the four Cuban-Americans pleaded guilty, the four Cuban-Americans staying loyal to Hunt and following his lead. The death of his wife had devastated Hunt and he had no stomach for the fight. Burglar James McCord and Gordon Liddy chose to stand trial and were found guilty. I testified at the trial both as a witness for the government and as a witness for the defense.

In March 1973, on the eve of being sentenced to prison, McCord wrote a letter to Judge Sirica revealing that there had been a cover-up by the White House and that hush money had been paid. This led to subsequent investigations by the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Judiciary Committee and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.

Merritts attempts to come clean

Shoffler moved out of the apartment he shared with Merritt the day after the two FBI agents visited Merritt on June 19, 1972, attempting to extract information he had about prior knowledge of the break-in. The media spotlight was now focused on Shoffler and he had to make certain no one connected him to Merritt, who was both openly gay and knew too much. To keep Merritt quiet and away from prying reporters he decided to assign Merritt undercover informant work in a porn shop run by Buster Riggin, a leader in the prostitution ring that operated out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments.

Merritt won Riggins confidence at their first meeting by blatantly posing as an ex-CI who was thoroughly disaffected with the police and FBI. Riggin promptly named Merritt manager of the porn shop and gave him an apartment above it to live in. Riggin was a talkative kind of guy and soon had told Merritt much of the criminal operation that he ran with his Mafia associate, Joseph Nesline.

One of the regular customers of the porn shop was Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. When Bernstein entered the store shortly after Merritt became manager, Riggin wasted no time introducing him to Merritt. Riggin even told Bernstein that Merritt had worked with Carl

Shoffler of Watergate fame, the police and the FBI. This information did not seem to register with Bernstein, who, according to Merritt, was preoccupied with perusing and buying S&M, bestiality and golden shower films. Years later, after Merritt had left employment at the book store, he telephoned Bernstein at the Post and asked him to reveal the truth about Merritts role in the Watergate arrests and being an informant for the government. Bernstein claimed that he had never met Merritt and as far as he was concerned he and Bob Woodward had left no stone unturned in pursuing the Watergate scandal. Merritt even talked to Woodward and got the same attitude and feed-back. Woodward refused to believe anything he told him about Bernstein and Buster Riggin.

In early 1973 Merritt decided to go public with what he knew about the roles of the police and FBI in the COINTELPRO activities that he had been directed to engage in. By a stroke of luck he got free legal representation in this endeavor from David Isabell, a partner in the distinguished law firm of Covington and Burling and a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union. In another stroke of luck, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson took up Merritts cause and wrote several columns about Merritts CI work for the police and FBI.

A few months later Merritt was subpoenaed to appear before a closed Executive Session of the Senate Watergate Committee. He had to testify by himself, without Isabell, his attorney, being permitted in the room. Shoffler was alarmed by this turn of events and told Merritt to stay clear of discussing what they knew about the origins of Watergate, adding that, in any event, being an open homosexual he would be attacked and ridiculed and his word discounted.

As Merritt entered the building to testify, he was stopped by Wayne Bishop, the Committees chief investigator. Bishop warned him that if he proceeded to testify, he would be jailed the same day. Bishop suggested that he should turn around and return home and let Bishop inform the committee that he had been suddenly taken ill. Merritt, shaken by Bishops overt threat, nevertheless went ahead and testified. After being administered the oath the first question asked him by one the Senators was whether he was a homosexual. When he responded that he was, several senators denounced him as being immoral. At that point Senator Howard Baker ordered the court reporter charged with transcribing testimony to take her machine and leave the room. Merritt says that he testified under oath about the COINTELPRO activities for about six hours over a three day period and never again saw the court reporter with her machine in the room during this period.

In late 1973, Merritt appeared before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force headed at that time by Archibald Cox. Again he testified about his COINTELPRO activities but he also told the special prosecutor about the visits paid him by Officers Shoffler, Leeper and FBI Agents Tucker and OConnor asking him to get to know me on an intimate basis.

A lengthy Watergate Special Prosecutor Force memorandum of November 20, 1973, included the following excerpts:

Merritt provided the following concerning the Schoffler (sic) [redacted] incident. Merritt stated that a few days after June 17, 1972, the date of the Watergate arrests, he was contacted by Schoffler and Leper (sic) who came to Merritts home. Schoffler and Leper asked Merritt it he knew [redacted] and Merritt said he did not know him. They then stated that [redacted] was a homosexual with pro-Cuban contacts and was involved with the Young Americans for Freedom. They asked Merritt to take the assignment of getting close to [redacted], know him intimately, socially, and to get the names, addresses, and phone numbers of people [redacted] was in contact with. Merritt asked why they wanted him to do this and all they stated was that this was the most important assignment that they had ever given to him and that it came from a high source, and that he would be paid well. They stated that the assignment was not for the MPD, CIA, FBI, or ATF. Merritt stated that he would think about it and let them know. A few days later, Merritt called and told Schoffler that he would not do it. Schoffler was annoyed. Schoffler also denied that the assignment had anything to do with Watergate. Several months later, in the fall of 1972, Merritt was talking to Schoffler and arguing about various things concerning the police. Schoffler told him the assignment was to get close to [redacted] because he was involved in Watergate.

In June 1973, after the testimony of Schoffler and Leper before the Senate Select Committee, Merritt made an anonymous call to Jim Flug, of Senator Kennedys Subcommittee on Administrative Practices and Procedures, and told him that he thought Schoffler and Leper had been lying to the Select Committee. Flug suggested to Merritt that he call the Senate Select Committee, which Merritt did. Merritt spoke to Wayne Bishop of the Senate Select Committee and began to tell him his story concerning Schoffler. At first, Merritt would not identify himself but later he called Bishop back and identified himself and began to tell his story. As he proceeded, he decided it would be better if he had Bishop contact his lawyer, Mr. Isabell. Shortly after this, Schoffler came to see Merritt. Merritt stated that Schoffler appeared to come on a friendly pretense, but then stated that he understood that Merritt was trying to get involved in Watergate and if Merritt knew what was good for him, he would stay out of it. Schoffler then reminded Merritt of certain things that had been said to him by Tucker at the time Merritt

stopped working for the FBI. The conversation with Tucker had taken place in May of 1972, at which time Tucker told Merritt to remember the bad checks he had passed in West Virginia and not to participate in any further demonstrations because wed hate to see you get shot accidentally. Tucker had gone on to tell Merritt that he should remember what happened to someone else who he knew and stated, Wed hate to find you in the Potomac with cement over-shoes.

[At the time it was made, Merritt took this last threat from Tucker as a reference to the sudden disappearance of Rita Reed on the night of June 1, 1972, after she told him what she had learned.]

CIA retaliation

A Watergate Special Prosecution Force memorandum of December 20, 1973 on the Forces interview of Shoffler contained the following:

Schoffler (sic) was questioned concerning the incident involving [redacted.] Schoffler stated that at some time after the Watergate arrests, Schoffler and Leper (sic) were in their car and met Merritt near his residence at 2121 P Street. Schoffler stated that he had first seen [redacted] the day after the Watergate arrests when [redacted] came to represent the Cubans. When Schoffler and Leper met Merritt, Merritt stated that he might know [redacted] and Merritt had an article from the newspaper with a picture of [redacted] in it. Schoffler told Merritt to let him know if Merritt found out who [redacted] was and if he was funny, i.e., homosexual. Schoffler stated that this was an off-hand comment and he never expected Merritt to do anything, and Merritt never told Schoffler anything about Caddy.

Schoffler stated that in the summer of 1973, after he had testified in the Watergate hearings, Schoffler met Merritt. Merritt stated that he had made all sorts of calls to Senators concerning Watergate and the Caddy incident with Schoffler. Schoffler stated that he told Merritt if he, Merritt, reported something that was only in his head it was going to come back on him. Schoffler said that he did not in any way threaten Merritt.

Schoffler stated that he introduced Merritt to FBI Agents OConnor and Tucker and that it took about a week for them to find out that he was a xxxx. Schoffler stated that of the leads that Merritt gave, only perhaps one in ten or twenty would turn out to be of any value but that Schoffler always followed the leads because of that one in twenty chance.

Shofflers statement to the Watergate prosecutor about Merritt being a xxxx directly contradicted the FBI Inspectors reports of February and April 1972, which had rated Merritt as being an Excellent CI who had showed no signs of emotional instability or unreliability.

In regard to the interview with Shoffler, it should be noted that in two places my name, Caddy, was left unredacted. So there is no doubt but that the actions proposed against me by MPD Officers Shoffler and Leeper and FBI Agents Tucker and OConnor were not figments of Merritts imagination. Had Shoffler and the four CIA agents had their way, I would have been assassinated.

At this point it might be appropriate to ask why these government agents wanted me killed. There is no way to know what was in their minds but my guess is that they targeted me because (1) Although I was a General Foods Company employee, I had worked inside the Robert Mullen Company, which as a CIA front, and may have gained access to the extensive files stored there, (2) Robert Mullen had once telephoned me from Chile and told me he was there as part of the U.S. government operation to overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was later killed, (3) Howard Hunt may have discussed CIA activities with me, (4) Two months before Watergate broke, Hunt and the CIAs General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, had interviewed me about becoming a CIA agent and, if I accepted, my assignment was to build a luxurious tourist hotel on the seashore in Nicaragua as a means to lure leaders of the Sandinistas there, (5) Hunt may have told me about the role of CIA agents in the assassination of President John Kennedy, which he revealed in 2004 in his deathbed taped confession, and (6) and I was gay, and involved as an attorney in Watergate, the countrys biggest criminal case of the Twentieth Century.

The agents approach to Merritt took place on June 28, 1972, eleven days after the arrests, which was the same day that I was subpoenaed to appear forthwith before the federal grand jury investigating Watergate. My appearing before the grand jury, which resulted in news stories, made me too visible to be taken out by government assassination.

In 1975 Merritt testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, known as the Pike Committee after its chairman, Representative Otis Pike of New York. Pike held hearings on the illegal activities of the CIA and other government agencies. When presented with a draft of the Committees report, CIA legal counsel Mitchell Rogovin was quoted as declaring, Pike will pay for this, you wait and see…there will be political retaliation…we will destroy him for this. Indeed The New York Times led the attack on Pike, joined by other media outlets. In the end, because of the pressure brought to bear by the CIA, FBI, other agencies and the media, the Committees 1976 report was never accepted by the full House of Representatives.

Here is what the suppressed Pike Committee report stated in regard to Merritt:

The Committee investigated another example of lack of control over informants. The FBI used Robert Merritt as an informant on New Left activities during the early 1970s. His duties included reporting on activities at the Institute for Policy Studies. Merritt told the Committee that his FBI handling-agents instructed him to conduct break-ins, deliver unopened mail acquired illegally, and solicit and provide information to the FBI regarding homosexual proclivities of politically prominent people and individuals of the New Left.

The FBI agents who handled Merritt denied these allegations under oath. They stated that Merritt acted on his own.

The handling-agents [named in the Committee Reports footnotes as FBI Special Agents Tucker and OConnor] stated that they terminated Merritt because they ascertained that he provided false information on one occasion and had reason to believe he provided false information at other times in the past. If this was true, it does not fit with other facts. During the seven months that Merritt was an FBI informant, he provided over 100 reports on at least 25 people. He had, in fact, been categorized as reliable in FBI records.

No effort was ever made to correct the Merritt reports by indicating that the information contained therein might be unreliable. No prosecutive actions were ever recommended as a result of Merritts alleged wrongdoing. His effort apparently fit well with intelligence operations.

Further, Merritt told staff that he had committed numerous illegal acts at the direction of the District of Columbia Police.

His FBI handling-agents stated that although they acquired Merritt from the Metropolitan Police Department, they never inquired as to the nature of his prior activities as a police informant. This attitude of see no evil, hear no evil appears to violate the seemingly rigid regulations of the FBI manual, designed to effect the recruitment of responsible and reliable informants.

Conflicting testimony in the Merritt matter reveals the problem itself. Since FBI agents instructions to their informants are, by necessity, given orally and without witnesses, it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately fix responsibility for an informants actions.

Of course, there was a reason why the two FBI agents statements to the Pike Committee about Merritt did not fit well with the facts. Had they acknowledged their responsibility for directing Merritts illegal COINTELPRO activities, they would have opened themselves to criminal prosecution. In fact, in 1980, four years after the Pike Report was issued but never accepted, two high-ranking FBI officials, Associate Director Mark Felt and Assistant Director Edward Miller, were found guilty of illegal COINTELPRO black bag break-in jobs conducted by FBI agents under their direction.

The Mysterious Role of Mark Felt

The occasion of criminal prosecution of Felt and Miller serves appropriately to examine the mysterious role of FBI Associate Director Mark Felt in Watergate, who gained fame in 2005 when Vanity Fair magazine revealed him to be Deep Throat.

When J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972, Merritt was sitting with Agents Tucker and OConner in a Volkswagen at the bottom of a hill near Hoovers residence. When word came over the FBI radio that Hoover had been found dead, OConnor quickly gave Merritt money to catch a taxi home, after which the agents rushed into Hoovers home.

President Nixon named L. Patrick Gray III as the FBIs Acting Director, passing over Mark Felt, who was named Associate Director. This did not sit well with Felt, who believed he should have been named Director.

When Watergate broke, Felt decided to get even with Nixon for not naming him Director. As second in command, Felt saw everything compiled on Watergate before it went to Gray. He started leaking key information gathered by the FBI investigation to Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. His actions did not go unnoticed. In an Oval Office tape of October 19, 1972, H.R. Haldeman told the President that Felt was speaking to the press: You cant say anything about this because it will screw up our sources but theres a real concern. [John] Mitchell is the only one who knows about this and he feels strongly that we better not do anything because …if we move on him, hell go out and unload everything. He has access to everything.

In April 1978 Felt, Miller and Gray were indicted for engaging in a conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants. The case against Gray was dropped but a jury in November 1980 found Felt and Miller guilty. President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, only a few months after taking office, granted pardons to the two men.

Ironically Merritt may have been responsible for the indictment and trial of the FBI officials because of his detailed testimony before an Executive Session of the Senate Watergate Committee, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and the Pike Committee about the FBI directing his activities in COINTELPRO.

In the early 1970s, Felt had overseen COINTELPRO. Jennifer Dohrn was one of the persons targeted for illegal abuse by the FBI because her sister, Bernadine, was a leader in the Weather Underground. Jennifer Dohrn, appearing on Amy Goodmans Democracy Now program on June 2, 2005, recounted that:

I remember when I was pregnant with my firstborn feeling extremely vulnerable because I was followed a great deal of the time, and then it was revealed when I received my Freedom of Information Act papers, over 200,000 documents, that there actually had been developed by Felt a plan to kidnap my son after I birthed in hoping to get my sister to surrender…I was not asked to testify [at Felts criminal trial in 1980], and it is interesting that the concrete thing that he could be convicted of were burglaries against me and several other people, break-ins, which were documented and recorded.

FBI Agents Tucker and OConnor were Felts right-hand soldiers in carrying out COINTELPRO. They, in turn, directed Merritt. As has been recounted here, they visited Merritt two days after he told Shoffler what he had learned from Rita about the planned break-in of the DNC. They told Merritt that they had heard rumors that he knew of a planned break-in. He refused to answer their questions. They returned again two days after the Watergate arrests and

of relief that he was free at last from contact with the FBI. As events turned out shortly thereafter, this was not to be the case.

Rita Reed makes a dangerous discovery

On June 1, 1972, a week before the FBI discharged him, Merritt received a visit in his apartment from Rita Reed who appeared visibly upset. Close friends, Merritt and Reed invariably chatted on a daily basis. This time Rita told Merritt that she had desperately urgent news but didn’t want to meet in Butch’s apartment. She knew of Butch’s sexual relationship with Shoffler, and his CI work for him, having found them together. She feared the apartment was wiretapped. She had also recently seen Shoffler at the Columbia Plaza Apartments where he and other cops used a trunk room to monitor the telephone traffic of the Nazis and a major prostitution ring, which was routed through her PBX switchboard.

Rita insisted that they go outside to talk but even then was paranoid about speaking openly on the street. Instead they headed to P Street Beach, an area two blocks away, a grassy hill that sloped down into Rock Creek Park. Once they reached the bottom of the hill and began walking through the woods, Rita began to relax.

She told Merritt that the day before, May 31, she had indulged her habit of secretly listening to random conversations going through her switchboard. The switchboard had three unassigned holes held in reserve, though hole number two had been used to make calls out from an undetermined location within the building. She disclosed that the previous day a call had gone out using hole two and within minutes a call back came in for the same hole…the first time this had ever happened. So Rita, her curiosity piqued, listened in. She heard two men discussing a planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) office in the Watergate Complex scheduled for Sunday, June 18, 1972. The two men spoke venomously about Richard Nixon and referred to their project as “Crimson Rose,” which they boasted was about to bloom and could destroy the Nixon presidency.

After Rita told Merritt what she’d overheard they continued on through the woods. They reached the end of the trail where an old gate spanned the waters of Rock Creek. Directly before them was the complex of buildings known as the Watergate. Rita raised her right arm, pointed to Watergate and ominously declared, “Butch, this will be the fate of the President of the United States.” She then again referred to “Crimson Rose” saying, “Butch, I think this rose stinks.”

Rita swore Merritt to secrecy and asked that he not tell anyone of the telephone conversation she had overheard. However, the next day, June 2, true to his calling Merritt telephoned MPD Sergeant Dixie Gildon and started telling Rita’s secret. Gildon cut short his recital, saying she was rushing to a meeting but promised to meet him later at a safe location they regularly used for exchanges. For some reason Gildon failed to show up.

The next day Shoffler returned to their apartment and Merritt told him Rita’s story. Shoffler became flushed with excitement and ordered Merritt not to talk to anyone about the subject, including Gildon. Shoffler left but returned later with two government agents, one a retired CIA employee. They asked Butch to retell the story. When he finished answering questions one of the agents remarked to Shoffler, “Carl, this is going to make you the most famous cop in the world.” The three men left after again swearing Merritt to secrecy.

Rita disappeared that same evening. Merritt became alarmed. She was not at her apartment and had failed to show up for work at the Columbia Plaza Apartments. Several days later Merritt brought up Rita’s disappearance to Shoffler but Shoffler told him to “forget about that drag queen.” Butch never saw Rita again and felt that breaking his promise to keep her secret may have led to her death.

Two days later (FBI agents) Tucker and O’Connor knocked on Merritt’s apartment door. They’d heard a rumor that Merritt knew something about burglars planning a break-in at an office building. They wanted the whole story. Merritt declined because he was still upset from being harassed by the homophobic agents and because of his emerging ethical concerns about his assignments. He also remembered Shoffler’s edict not to tell anyone Rita’s discovery. The agents left but not before telling Merritt that they found his attitude uncooperative and troublesome.

Shoffler’s Plan: entrap the burglars and get famous

About a week later Shoffler boasted to Merritt that he had implemented a plan to catch the burglars. It involved wire-tapping “triangulation”, a strategy he’d learned as an Army Intelligence Agent at Vint Hill Farm Station, the National Security Agency’s wiretapping school in Virginia. His scheme set the burglars up by temporarily splicing into the wiretap that they were using…then carrying on a phony two-person telephone conversation that he himself had orchestrated. The burglars were duped into believing what they heard, never realizing that it was not the usual telephone line they used for wiretapping. According to Merritt, Shoffler bragged that the message he left, and overheard by the burglars, falsely disclosed that there was an envelope in a secretary’s desk in the Democratic National Committee offices that contained a vital document and a key to a safe deposit box…a box which contained even more important materials. The envelope had to be picked up on Saturday, June 17, before Noon. A key to the desk would be left under the telephone on the secretary’s desk. The message further required the burglars to move their planned break-in forward from June 18 to the 17th; Shoffler planned to give himself a very special birthday present. The burglars unwittingly complied.

A few days before the planned break-in, Merritt went to a nearby locksmith store at Shoffler’s request and purchased a blank safe deposit key. When he returned to their apartment Shoffler used his finger nails (to avoid putting his fingerprints on it) to give Merritt a plain envelope and a sheet of paper that had garbled language on it. Shoffler directed Merritt to fold and insert the sheet of paper and blank safe deposit key inside the envelop and seal it. Once this was done, he asked Merritt to place the sealed envelope in a pocket inside his jacket.

Now all it took for Shoffler was to wait for the burglars to break-in so he could make the arrests.

On Friday, June 16, Shoffler’s shift ended at 10 P.M. Though it was late, he arbitrarily volunteered for another shift, even though his wife and children had gone to Pennsylvania to stay at his parents’ home where they awaited his arrival looking forward to celebrating his birthday the next day. Shortly after midnight, at Shoffler’s suggestion, Shoffler, Sergeant Paul Leeper and Officer John Barrett parked their undercover police vehicle a block from the Watergate, at Shoffler’s suggestion. Just before 2 A.M. dispatch alerted them that Watergate security had called – urgently requesting support. It appeared that someone had broken in, leaving a door with its lock taped behind them. Shoffler, Leeper and Barrett responded immediately and within minutes arrested five burglars inside DNC offices.

The Two Keys

In recounting what took place during the arrests, Shoffler claimed that after the five burglars had been forced to lean against a wall with their hands, he saw one of the burglars, Eugenio Martinez, slide his hand to something in his pocket. Shoffler asserted that he struggled with Martinez and seized a small notebook that had a key taped on its back. In a deposition, this is how Shoffler described the event under oath on March 13 and 15, 1995. Lawyers for Maureen and John Dean had filed suit against St. Martin’s Press, Inc., publishers of Silent Coup: The Removal of the President, whose co-authors are Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. Shoffler testified:

“We had placed them on the wall with their hands against the wall and their feet out. And we started on the extreme right of the five to search and seize the evidence.

“Martinez was on the extreme left.

“As I was writing what [Officer] Barrett was seizing, I observed that Martinez was sliding his hand down the wall. We had padded them down initially for weapons. And I didn’t feel that he had a pistol or anything on him. But I wasn’t certain at this point while he was sliding his hand down.

“So I moved quickly over to him, pushed his hand forcefully back up. He struggled a little. I had my revolver out. [burglars] McCord or Frank Sturgis, I believe, instructed him to calm down and just follow our instructions. I think that there was a realization on their part that we were younger officers and we were aggressive. And he started calming Martinez down, and asking him to follow our directions.

“Martinez did not comply. At some point, within seconds, his hand was back again going into the area of his coat pocket. We had a struggle again. I was very forceful with him. The others were yelling. We thought things were getting out of hand.

“I decided to follow Martinez’s hand. He was grasping something. I’ve always said that I had the impression that whatever he was grasping he was going to get rid of or eat. I don’t know how to put that into words any better than that.

“I struggled with him. And I recovered from his hand what he was so concerned about, even to the point of possibly risking being shot. And it turned out to be a simple notebook with a key on it. And that was certainly a bit of a puzzle.”[pp. 23-25]

With the arrests wrapped up, Shoffler telephoned the Washington Post and alerted the newspaper to what had transpired at Watergate.

At around 7 A.M., nearly five hours after the arrests, Shoffler returned to the P Street apartment that he shared with Merritt and woke him up. Shoffler was happy and excited and he embraced Merritt and kissed him, proudly exclaiming “I arrested five burglars.” He showed Merritt the notebook the he had taken off one of the burglars. He also showed Merritt the envelope that Merritt had previously sealed, now open, along with the paper inside. He produced two keys, one of which was the blank safe deposit key that Merritt had purchased at Shoffler’s request. He took a roll of duct tape from a drawer in the kitchen and taped the second key to the back of the notebook. He then again swore Merritt to secrecy, making him promise never to tell that they knew two weeks in advance of the burglars’ break-in plan of the DNC. He then departed, saying he was going to get breakfast at nearby Hartnett Hall and afterwards go to court to assist the prosecutor in the arraignment of the arrested burglars.

The “Missing” Notebook and Key

What happened to the notebook and key, which, pursuant to police standard operating procedure should have been bagged and tagged, and included in the list of items seized at the crime scene inside the DNC? In his sworn deposition of March 15, 1995, Shoffler provided the answer when asked additional questions posed by the Dean’s lawyer:

“Q. Now, what did you do with the notebook and key?

“A. Well, it was only recently that I became aware of the fact that, in the logs for all the evidence that we seized, it doesn’t appear that there was an entry for the notebook. And the only explanation I could offer of that is that I was shown a photograph of the national archives. My initials are clearly on the book and the date.

“My recollection is that when I got back to the precinct, because we had deviated in our game plan from the actual persons to list and search and seize, because of that shuffle and the fact that I had to actually seize the notebook, I believed I retained possession of it, noted it, and it was my responsibility to process it.

“And I believe that’s why it isn’t in the entry that you’ve shown me or someone has shown me recently.”

“Q. All right. Let me show what I’ll ask the court reporter to mark as Exhibit 6, which is, and I will represent to counsel, a copy – excuse me, it’s a photocopy of the key and the notebook that is now at the National Archives and was recently copied there, and ask you if you can identify whether that is the notebook and the key that you took from the burglars that night?

“A. Yes, sir. I believe this is the notebook and the key. My initials appear in the upper right-hand corner.

“Q. Can you show that to the videographer, please?

“A. (Witness complied.)

“Q. Okay, thank you. Now, at the time of the arrests, did you conduct any investigation to determine whether this key that you seized from the burglars fit any particular lock?

“A. No, sir, I didn’t.

“Q. Do you know if any such search, excuse me, any such investigation was ever made?

“A. I pointed it out to who would be responsible for the furtherance of the investigation. That was the FBI. I don’t recall the particular agent, but I believe I may have even supplied him the notebook. And I read, years later, read a 302, a bureau report, in which two weeks after the burglary, apparently they had taken the key back down and determined it fit the desk of the secretary of whom some of that [burglars’] material was laying on.” [pp. 30-32]

Thus, Shoffler admitted that in contravention of universal and standard police procedure he retained personal possession of two primary pieces of evidence from the crime scene, the notebook and the key, which should have been listed and bagged at the crime scene.

There is further discussion of the matter in the same sworn deposition:

“Q. Mr. Shoffler, you personally obtained some of the evidence, or not obtain, but collected some of the evidence from the Watergate burglars on the morning of June 17, ’72; is that correct?

“A. The notebook and the key, yes, sir.

“Q. That’s it?

“A. From the burglars?

“Q. Yes.

“A.Yes, sir.

“Q. Those are the only items of evidence that you personally collected from the burglars?

“A. I was a listing officer. Officer Barrett was a seizing officer.

“Q. So, Officer Barrett did not collect the notebook and key, you did?

“A. Correct.

“Q. Everything else was collected by Officer Barrett?

“A. That’s correct.

“Q. How did you handle the notebook and the key when you took it from the person of Mr. Martinez so as not to contaminate it?

“A. I maintained possession of it and I properly disposed -- deposited it at the precinct. And my last recollection was it was collected by the FBI.

“Q. What was inside the notebook that was attached to the key?

“A. I provided – the only recollection that I can provide, there was some sort of chart or like a little diagram or line X, whatever you want to describe it as. There were -- something else was written on it, I don’t recall what it was, and there was a key taped to it with gray tape. [pp. 459-460]

“Q. Did you ever testify about the key when you testified before the Senate Watergate Committee?

“A. I was not asked.

“Q. Is there any reason why you didn’t bring it up?

“[lawyer for St. Martin’s Press] He just said he wasn’t asked.

“Q. Is there any other reason?

“A. The room was full of cameras, a bunch of senators, and they wanted to get on with the show and the police were asked – and I was asked one or two questions, did you – were you there? Did you arrest them? Have a nice day. [p. 538]

“Q. Have you ever discussed it with Don Campbell [one of the original three Watergate prosecutors]?

“A. Numerous times.

“Q. And when did you first discuss the key with Mr. Campbell?

“A. Around the time that I started getting real interested.

“Q. Which was 1973?

“A. ’73, ’74, somewhere in there.

“Q. And when was the last time you discussed the key with Mr. Campbell?

“A. Oh, I don’t recall. Maybe a year ago.

“Q. Do you recall what you said to him a year ago about it?

“A. Just that I was still attempting to find out – I was curious that there was no major interest generated. It seems to me that anyone who is still puzzled over a burglary that occurred 20 something years before, as to the motive of the burglary, yet a key that is found on one of the burglars under the circumstances I described, fitting a desk in there, didn’t seem to generate interest. I was puzzled about that.” [pp. 542-543]

Like a pyromaniac who cannot resist going back to watch the fire he has set, Shoffler kept returning to the subject of the key, which was the linchpin of his triangulation plan that set up the burglars. Like a serial killer who always left his signature piece of evidence as a way to taunt law enforcement, Shoffler was puzzled why his brilliant scheme involving the key did not attract the attention and interest it obviously deserved.

Developments after the break-in

On June 19, two days after the arrests at Watergate, FBI Agents Tucker and O’Connor returned to Merritt’s apartment. This time they were adamant that Merritt tell them what he knew about the break-in. Since the FBI had terminated his CI job less than two weeks before, Merritt felt he was under no obligation to respond to their questions.

Later the same day Shoffler, accompanied by Sergeant Leeper, approached Merritt with their proposition that he get to know me on a personal basis, as described previously in The Advocate article. He declined, primarily because he did not think it was feasible that our paths would cross.

A few days later Shoffler and Leeper again returned to Merritt’s apartment, this time accompanied by FBI Agents Tucker and O’Connor, in an attempt to persuade him to accept the assignment of getting to know me on a personal basis. He refused their entreaties.

On June 28, eleven days after the arrests, Shoffler again showed up at the apartment, this time accompanied by four CIA agents. Their proposition to Merritt was somewhat different: they wanted him to assassinate me.

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

Even though the government agents offered him $100,000 to undertake the assassination assignment, Merritt steadfastly refused.

My Own Watergate Story

We now must take a temporary detour from recounting Merritt’s involvement in Watergate to explain my own, if the full story of the scandal is to be told.

In 1956 I enrolled in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1958, still enrolled, I and my roommate, David Franke, founded the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, which was the first national conservative youth organization. This led to our founding Youth For Goldwater for Vice President whose aim was to get Nixon to choose the Arizona Senator as his running mate in the 1960 presidential election. After being graduated from Georgetown in May 1960, I accepted a position as an assistant to former Governor Charles Edison of New Jersey, the son of Thomas Edison. Governor Edison was chairman of the McGraw-Edison Company and lived in the Towers of the Waldorf Astoria where his neighbors and fellow bridge players were former President Herbert Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur.

In July of 1960, at the Chicago Republican Convention which nominated Nixon, Goldwater emerged on the national scene as a major political figure. After Nixon chose Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate, Senator Goldwater spoke to his young supporters urging those who had coalesced around his Vice Presidential candidacy to form a permanent organization. This led to the founding of Young Americans for Freedom in September 1960 at Great Elm, the family estate of William F. Buckley, Jr. in Sharon, Connecticut. I was chosen to be its first National Director. YAF sponsored the first mass conservative rally the next year in the Manhattan Center in New York City and followed this up with another mass rally the following year in Madison Square Garden. After decades of being dormant, Conservatism was on the march.

In 1962 I enrolled in New York University Law School where I attended night classes while working during the day for New York Lieutenant Governor Malcolm Wilson, a conservative. His office was on the fifth floor of a townhouse at 22 West 55th Street owned by Governor Nelson Rockefeller whose offices occupied the remaining floors in the building.

After being graduated from NYU Law School in 1966, I went to work for General Foods Corporation in White Plains, New York, where my task was to advise the company on government relations. In 1969, General Foods transferred me to Washington, D.C. with the aim of opening up an office there to represent the company in its government relations. However, for the first year General Foods wanted me to work out of the offices of its public relations firm, the Robert Mullen Company. What General Foods failed to tell me at the time was that the Robert Mullen Company was a CIA front operation, having been incorporated by the CIA in 1959 and that General Foods lent its name as a client of the Mullen Company as a cover for secret CIA activities.

Soon after I began working in the Mullen Company offices in 1969, Howard Hunt became a Mullen employee. His sponsor was Richard Helms, Director of the CIA. Hunt and I immediately became close friends when we found that we had something in common: our friendships with William F. Buckley. Buckley was the godfather of Hunt’s children and had served as a CIA agent under Hunt when the latter headed the CIA’s office in Mexico City. I, as noted previously, had worked with Buckley in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, literally, founding the modern conservative movement.

In early 1971 Mullen approached Hunt and me about purchasing his company as he was nearing retirement age. The discussion dragged on until Mullen suddenly announced that he was selling the company to Robert Bennett, son of the Republican senator from Utah. About that time I was offered employment as an attorney with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Gall, Lane, Powell and Kilcullen. I accepted the offer and one of my first clients was Howard Hunt.

In March 1972, John Kilcullen, a partner in the firm, assigned me to do volunteer work for the Lawyers Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon. For the next three months I periodically performed legal work under the direction of John Dean, Counsel to the President, and Gordon Liddy, Counsel to the Finance Committee for the Re-Election of Nixon.

On June 17, 1972, the story of Watergate broke with the arrests of the burglars. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, who had remained in a room in the Watergate Hotel while the burglary operation was undertaken, fled the hotel within minutes after the arrests of the five burglars. How I became involved as an attorney was recounted by Hunt in his biography, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (Berkley, 1974):

“From there I drove to the White House Annex – the Old Executive Office Building, in bygone years War Department and the Department of State.

“Carrying three heavy attaché cases, I entered the Pennsylvania Avenue door, showing my blue-and-white White House pass to the uniformed guards, and took the elevator to the third floor. I unlocked the door of 338 and went in. I opened my two-drawer safe, took out my operational handbook, found a telephone number and dialed it.

“The time was 3:13 in the morning of June 17, 1972, and five of my companions had been arrested and taken to the maximum-security block of the District of Columbia jail. I had recruited four of them and it was my responsibility to get them out. That was the sole focus of my thoughts as I began talking on the telephone.

“But with those five arrests the Watergate affair had begun…

“After several rings the call was answered and I heard the sleepy voice of Douglas Caddy. “Yes?”

“Doug? This is Howard. I hate to wake you up, but I’ve got a tough situation and I need to talk to you. Can I come over?

“Sure. I’ll tell the desk clerk you’re expected.

“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” I told him, and hung up.

“From the safe I took a small money box and removed the $10,000 Liddy had given me for emergency use. I put $1,500 in my wallet and the remaining $8,500 in my coat pocket. The black attaché case containing McCord’s electronic equipment I placed in a safe drawer that held my operational notebook. Then I closed and locked the safe, turning the dial several times. The other two cases I left beside the safe, turned out the light and left my office, locking the door.”

Hunt arrived at my apartment at 3:35 A.M. and told me what had happened at Watergate. He retained me as his attorney in the case. He telephoned Liddy, who also retained me as his attorney. They then both retained me to represent the five arrested burglars. Our goal was to attempt to keep the case from attracting public attention, although it was later learned that Shoffler was alerting the Washington Post of the break-in and arrests even as we spoke. At that point I called Robert Scott, a partner at Gall, Lane et al, and explained the situation. He then contacted a criminal lawyer. The criminal lawyer and I agreed to meet at the courthouse at 9AM for the arraignment of the burglars. Hunt left for home.

Strangely, and coincidentally, I came to learn that Merritt had lived right across the street from me during this whole affair but our paths had never crossed. Merritt lived at 2122 P Street and I lived at 2121 P Street. On the morning of the break-in, after the arrests, Hunt came to my apartment at 3:35 AM and departed around 5 AM. At 7AM Shoffler arrived at the apartment across the street that he shared with Merritt, exuberant about having arrested the burglars at 2:30 AM. He left at 8 A.M. to get breakfast, and then went to court. I left my apartment building at 8:30 AM to meet my new co-counsel who would represent the burglars at their arraignment. All this activity between strangers, and truly principal players in Watergate, took place within a radius of 200 feet, with none of us the wiser. It was lucky timing that I and Shoffler didn’t crash into each other as we each prepared to go the arraignment at the courthouse.

CRIMSON ROSE AND THE SECRET OF THE TWO KEYS

By Douglas Caddy

I must tell you that I am disturbed about what we dont know about the Watergate break-in and that I am convinced that what we dont know about the Watergate break-in may well be more important than what we do know twenty years after.

-- Howard Liebengood, Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, in an A&E

Investigative Report The Key to Watergate broadcast in 1992

http://watergateexposed.com/

When in early 1977 I began reading an article in the national gay publication, The Advocate, I had no inkling that 39 years later my doing so would lead to unraveling what really happened in Watergate. Watergate was mostly a spent scandal, or so I thought, as did most Americans. It began with five burglars being arrested inside the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Office complex on June 17, 1972, and ended with twelve men being sent to prison for the break-in and subsequent cover-up and with President Richard Nixon being forced to resign from office in disgrace.

The Advocate published the lengthy article, Revelations of a Gay Informant in two parts in its February 23 and March 9, 1977 issues. The subject of the revelations was Robert Butch Merritt, who in January 1970 at the age of 26 had been recruited by the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to become a Confidential Informant (CI). Soon thereafter the FBI and other law enforcement agencies also enrolled him as a CI. Over time, his handlers would order him to infiltrate, disrupt and spy on hundreds of organizations and individuals that they, or the government, had arbitrarily targeted as threats to national security. The list is long and diverse and includes groups such as the New left, liberal, right-wing, Nazi, womens lib, homosexual, and civil rights and individuals ranging from Members of Congress to Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy.

Washington Police Detective Carl Shoffler was the officer who enrolled Robert Merritt as a CI. Shoffler would become famous some two years later as the police officer who arrested the five Watergate burglars. His true role in Watergate will be explained shortly one which turns the entire scandal on its head.

As I read The Advocate article I was overwhelmed with the amount of detail it contained about Merritts CI activities as told by Merritt himself. As I neared its end I was startled to read the following:

Two days after the Watergate burglary, Carl Shoffler (one of Merritts former police contacts) turned up with Sgt. [Paul] Leeper (these officers had been two of the three to have arrested the burglars) with what Merritt recalls as an offer of the biggest, most important assignment hed ever had.

The officers, Merritt said, asked if he knew one of the Watergate attorneys. They said he was gay. Merritt did not. They asked if I could get to know him. I asked them why. Wed like you to get as close to him as possible, they said, to find out all you can about his private life, even what he eats. Merritt says he explained that even if the attorney was gay, it wouldnt be likely that he could arrange to meet him. The officers, Merritt asserts, offered him the money to frequent the type of place a well-to-do homosexual might visit. They said I would be paid quite well, that they werent talking about dimes and quarters that they were talking about really big money.

Merritt says he refused the offer, but the police kept returning to him with the same request, as late as December 1972, months after the police claimed to have ended their Watergate investigation.

I was surprised because I realized that I was the gay attorney who had been targeted, even though my name was not mentioned. This was the first time I became aware that my sexuality was mentioned in connection with my being the attorney for the five arrested burglars, and for Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, who were not arrested at the crime scene. I was shocked because, although I was sexually active, I had fastidiously remained closeted. Even my employers over the years, closest friends and college roommates did not know I was gay.

I was to learn decades later that Merritt had discussed my being gay in another lengthy interview that he gave to The Daily Rag, a respected alternative Washington, D.C. newspaper, long before the Advocate story appeared. Its October 5-12, 1973, issue carried the banner headline, FBI Informer Confesses. Its opening paragraph trumpeted, With the disclosure of Robert Merritts role as an FBI and Metropolitan Police informer, the reality of police surveillance of active community groups and illegal police activity in the District is confirmed. Such groups as the D.C. Statehood Party, RAP, Common Cause, Off Our Backs, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Gay Activists Alliance have been under surveillance. While the information Merritt provides on widespread police intelligence is substantial, it leaves open many questions as to what else is going on.

Further inside the article the word Watergate appears outlined in a black box with the following written underneath it:

What was your contact with the Watergate affair? The article continued…

In June 1972, a few days after the Watergate break-in and arrests, MPDC Intelligence [Officers Carl] Shoffler and [Paul] Leeper approached me and tried to get me to do one last job. They said it was the most important thing I had ever done, that it was for my country….

They wanted me to get close to Douglas Caddy [the lawyer for the burglars caught inside the Watergate], who was gay. They wanted me to get to know him socially, sexually or any other way. They said he had been born in Cuba, that he liked Cubans and was associated with communist causes.

Sgts. Shoffler and Leeper were among the arresting officers of the burglars inside Watergate, and one of the first witnesses before the Senate Watergate Committee. Leeper testified second and Shoffler third, if memory serves.

When Leeper was on the stand, I saw him on television, he was asked one question at the end of his testimony, have there been any attempts at further investigation of the break-in? He answered no. That was not true.

I had not seen the article in The Daily Rag when it was published in 1973. However, after I read the article in The Advocate in 1977, I said to myself that Merritt undoubtedly had an incredible story to tell about Watergate. Yet the years rolled by without reading anything further about what he might know. Then out of the blue in May 2008, I received a telephone call from Merritt who wanted to know if I would help him write a book about what he knew and the world did not know about Watergate. I agreed without hesitation because in the back of my mind I still felt he had something vitally important to say. My only proviso was that the book also had to carry my own story about Watergate, which had never been fully or accurately reported.

So we began work on the book, which was published by TrineDay earlier this year. Its title is Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up as told to me as original attorney for the Watergate Seven by Merritt in his capacity as a CI to the FBI and Washington, D.C. Police Department.

Merritts role in Watergate

In 1962 Merritt at age seventeen fled an unhappy home life in West Virginia just two months short of being graduated from high school. He arrived in Washington, D.C. determined to find work and to enjoy his gay sexual freedom. Over the next eight years he held a wide variety of jobs and much of his social life centered on Dupont Circle, which was only about ten blocks from the White House. Dupont Circle served as a unique gathering place for people of all political, social and sexual persuasions. Merritt was a good looking young man and was popular with everyone. His nickname was Butch and he was known by this name by those at Dupont Circle.

In January 1970 one of the street-looking people who frequented Dupont Circle showed up several times at the drug store where Merritt worked, which was located only two blocks from the White House. On each occasion the person would have a quiet conversation with the owner of the drug store. Suddenly, without any advance notice, the store owner told Merritt that he was fired from his job as cashier. Dejected, Merritt walked home to his small apartment located at 2122 P Street, N.W., just a few blocks from Dupont Circle. He was beside himself because half of the seventy dollars weekly income from his job went towards paying the rent and the rest was used to live on.

That same night there was a knock on his door. When he opened it, there stood the street-looking person he had seen at Dupont Circle and who had visited the drug stores owner. The shabbily dressed man reached into his pocket and pulled out a Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police detective badge. He asked if he could enter the apartment and Merritt, still startled, acquiesced. Once inside, the detective introduced himself as Carl Shoffler. He said he was an undercover policeman. He then reached into his pocket again and this time produced an envelope that he thrust into Merritts hand. The envelope contained one thousand dollars.

Shoffler explained that he was the cause of Merritts losing his job at the drug store. He told Merritt that the government had been profiling him for several months as a possible candidate to be recruited as a Confidential Informant. He fit the bill of who they were looking for: someone who was white, young, good looking, popular, apolitical and gay. The government wanted a gay person for the role because the homosexual community was going to be one of its targets. Shoffler appealed to Merritts patriotism, telling him that because he was gay he could not serve in the military but he could still serve his country by going undercover as a CI.

Shoffler, who radiated charisma, was persuasive and his proposal appealed to Merritt, who readily agreed to become enrolled as a CI. The matter settled, they smoked pot to celebrate the sudden and dramatic turn of events in Merritts life and as the evening wore on, Shoffler asked if he could spend the night. Merritt consented and Shoffler lay down on the couch while Merritt retreated to his bed. Within minutes, however, Shoffler slipped into bed beside Merritt and lost no time in initiating sex. This began a secret sexual relationship between them that was to last two and a half years even though Shoffler was married and had a wife and children who resided in Maryland.

Merritt recruited for COINTELPRO

At the time Merritt was 26 years old and Shoffler was a year younger. After they became friends and lovers, Shoffler told Merritt that he was actually an Army Intelligence Agent assigned to the Washington, D.C. Police. He swore Merritt to keep this information confidential. Later Shoffler confided in Merritt that he was also an agent for Interpol and that he had an Interpol account at Riggs National Bank in the name of Karl Maurice Schaffer. Accompanied by Merritt, he occasionally withdrew large sums of cash from the account.

Merritts initial CI work dealt with monitoring certain persons at Dupont Circle whom the government deemed to be national security risks, many of whom he knew personally and considered friends. Before long the D.C. Metropolitan Police Intelligence Division tapped him to do undercover intelligence gathering in other parts of the District of Columbia. He still worked under Shofflers direct supervision but also took orders from Sergeant Dixie Gildon of the MPD Intelligence Division, who told him his modest pay came from a Huston Plan administered by a senior official in the White House.

In 1971, Merritts reputation as an effective CI caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which then recruited him as its principal CI in Washington, D.C. He worked directly under the supervision of FBI Special Agents Bill Tucker and Frank OConnor as he engaged in a variety of COINTELPRO activities. COINTELPRO, an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program, was a series of covert, and often illegal, espionage projects conducted by the government. Merritts two principal targets were the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the violence-prone Weather Underground. The latter organization had attempted to plant bombs inside the U.S. Capitol Building, the State Department and the Pentagon. Merritt was ultimately successful in infiltrating both the IPS and the leadership of the Weather Underground.

Merritts evolving career, his devolution and his act of defiance

One of Merritt oldest and closest friends from Dupont Circle was James Reed, who led another life as a drag queen known as Rita Reed. Rita was also from West Virginia. She worked as a PBX switchboard operator at the high-scale Columbia Plaza Apartments located across from the Watergate complex. In October 1971, Rita alerted Merritt to an American Nazi ring that was selling incendiary devices and munitions and that was operating out of one of the apartments in the building. Merritt promptly informed FBI Agents Tucker and OConnor and soon thereafter the FBI authorized him to make munitions purchases from the Nazi ring using Rita as a go-between to make the necessary introductions. On two occasions he was able to buy various devices, including bombs and rockets. For successfully uncovering the ring and subsequently carrying out this operation FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent his personal commendation to Merritt for a job well done, relayed to him by agents Tucker and OConnor.

In early 1972, even though he was gaining the reputation of being a highly skilled CI, Merritt began to have second thoughts about some of the activities he was assigned to do. Among these were stealing mail from the IPS and the anti-war Hebrew Congregation, disrupting anti-war demonstrations by cutting wires to the public address system, planting illegal drugs on targeted individuals, distributing sickness inducing candy to anti-war demonstrators, breaking into the offices of peace groups to steal signed petitions in a name-gathering operation, planting wire-tapping devices on individuals, and supplying names and license plate numbers of persons who attended anti-war meetings. He was also directed to have gay sex with over seventy targeted men, some of whom were diplomats and prominent individuals. On each occasion he later filed a written report with the police, which went into a government central file. He also engaged in gay sex with six targeted policemen, again acting under orders, and later identified them through a two-way mirror at police headquarters.

One task that Shoffler excelled in and in which he took great enjoyment was to telephone the employers of targeted individuals and spread rumors about them, rumors that in most instances were false. For example, he telephoned the head of a major department store located in Washington, D.C. and told him that a vice president of the store was embezzling money. It was false but led to the targeted individual being fired, losing his home, his wife and children and ultimately his life when he committed suicide. False information about targets was also fed to credit bureaus, which resulted in financial hardship in most cases. Merritt told me that I also was a target of Shoffler who decided to destroy my professional reputation in the early weeks of the case. With Shoffler at his side and feeding him dimes, Merritt made telephone calls from a pay phone at Peoples Drug Store on Dupont Circle to dozens of Senators and Representatives telling them that I was a homosexual. Shofflers select list contained the private telephone numbers that were answered by these Members of Congress themselves.

It was about this time that Merritt received an FBI evaluation of his work dated April 12, 1972, which stated that The file pertaining to the above-captioned individual has been reviewed by the Inspector Staff, and the individual has been rated as Excellent. A prior FBI document dated February 4, 1972, reported that During the period the informant has been contacted, he has shown no signs of emotional instability or unreliability. He has maintained very regular contact and there has been no indication that he has furnished any false information. As snitches go, Merritt was as dependable as they come. But as these reports show, the FBI had no inkling that Merritt had begun to doubt the unethical, immoral and illegal CI work that he was being ordered to do.

Merritts disaffection with his CI work reached a crisis when his mother died in April 1972 and FBI Agents Tucker and OConnor ordered him not to attend the funeral in West Virginia. They claimed that his pending work in infiltrating the Weather Underground had reached a crucial stage making it more important. Merritt defied them and attended the funeral.

In early June Merritt told the two FBI agents that he was going to accompany Jack Davis, a key leader of the Weather Underground, on a weekend trip. It was a lie. The FBI monitored Davis movements and realized that Merritt had instead made a trip to New York City by himself that was in no way connected with the Weather Underground. He later admitted that he did this as an open act of rebellion that stemmed from his growing disaffection with the bureaus COINTELPRO and from the agents constantly harassing and berating him for being gay. This led to an explosive confrontation between Merritt and Agents Tucker and OConnor on June 5, which ended in their threatening his life and soon resulted with the FBI discharging Merritt as a CI on June 8, 1972. When he learned that his job had been terminated Merritt gave a huge sigh

Phone hacking: Panorama to name sixth journalist in News of the World scandal

Hacker hired by senior News of the World executive to intercept emails, BBC documentary says

By Nick Davies

guardian.co.uk,

Sunday 13 March 2011 18.07 GMT

The News of the World phone-hacking scandal is set to reach a new peak of embarrassment for the paper and for Scotland Yard with the naming of the sixth and most senior journalist yet to be implicated in illegal news-gathering.

A BBC Panorama programme claims that Alex Marunchak, formerly the paper's senior executive editor, commissioned a specialist snooper who illegally intercepted email messages from a target's computer and faxed copies of them to Marunchak's News of the World office.

The embarrassment is heightened by the fact that the target was a former British army intelligence officer who had served in Northern Ireland and was in possession of secrets which were deemed so sensitive that they had been suppressed by a court order.

Rupert Murdoch's News International, which owns the News of the World, has claimed repeatedly that only one of its journalists – the former royal correspondent, Clive Goodman – was involved in illegal news-gathering. When Goodman was jailed in January 2007, Scotland Yard chose not to interview any other journalist or executive on the paper.

And Panorama reports that the illegal interception of emails happened in July 2006, when the prime minister's former media adviser Andy Coulson was editing the paper.

Coulson has given evidence to a parliamentary select committee and on oath at a criminal trial, denying that he knew anything of any illegal activity during his seven years at the News of the World.

Panorama obtained details of a fax sent to the office of Marunchak on 5 July 2006, apparently containing copies of emails which had been written by Ian Hurst, a former army intelligence officer. Marunchak was then based in the News of the World's Dublin office, editing the Irish edition. Hurst was believed to be involved in writing a book titled Stakeknife, eventually published under the pseudonym Martin Ingram, which details the alleged involvement of British intelligence in assassinations in Northern Ireland. Hurst had been the subject of court orders obtained by the Ministry of Defence.

Panorama traced Hurst and showed him the fax. He confirmed on camera that the emails had come from his computer. "The hairs on the back of my head are up," he told them. Hurst then contacted a specialist hacker who he suspected was responsible, met him in a local hotel and confronted him, while the BBC secretly filmed the exchange.

The hacker – whose name cannot be revealed for separate legal reasons – confessed his role and added: "It weren't that hard. I sent you an email that you opened, and that's it ... I sent it from a bogus address ... Now it's gone. It shouldn't even remain on the hard drive ... I think I programmed it to stay on for three months."

Hurst then asked the hacker who had commissioned him to do this. The hacker replied: "The faxes would go to Dublin ... He was the editor of the News of the World for Ireland. A Slovak-type name. I can't remember his xxxxing name. Alex, his name is. Marunchak." Marunchak declined to answer questions when the BBC confronted him.

The BBC claim that Marunchak was introduced to the specialist hacker by Jonathan Rees, the private investigator whose involvement with corrupt police officers was detailed by the Guardian on Saturday. Internal News International records show that Marunchak regularly employed Rees from the late 1990s, and that during 2006, the News of the World paid Rees more than £4,000 for research relating to Stakeknife, the codename for the British intelligence mole inside the IRA whose activities were known to Ian Hurst.

Marunchak is the sixth News of the World journalist to be implicated in the affair. Documents published by the Guardian in 2009 include an email containing the transcripts of 35 illegally intercepted voicemail messages, sent by a junior reporter, Ross Hindley, for the chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck. Paperwork disclosed in court cases suggests that Clive Goodman, Ian Edmondson and Greg Miskiw commissioned phone-hacking. Goodman was jailed; Edmondson has been sacked but not charged with any offence; Miskiw is believed to have been interviewed by police in 2005 but never charged with any offence.

Monday's edition of Panorama includes an interview with Sean Hoare, the News of the World's former showbusiness writer, who last year told the New York Times that Andy Coulson had actively encouraged him to hack voicemail. Hoare tells the programme that the news desk commissioned private investigators to access targets' bank accounts, phone records, mortgage accounts and health records.

The former deputy assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, Brian Paddick, who believes his own voicemail may have been intercepted on behalf of the News of the World, told the programme "I think that the new investigation should be carried out by an external force and it should be independently supervised. Otherwise, certainly some of the victims of phone-hacking will not be satisfied that the thing has been investigated thoroughly."

In a separate development, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, has taken the unusual step of publicly challenging a senior serving police officer, who has been closely involved in the hacking affair. In a letter published in the Guardian, Starmer accuses the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police John Yates of quoting him out of context in attempting to justify evidence which he has given to two parliamentary select committees.

In the House of Commons last week, Chris Bryant MP said that Yates had misled the committees by claiming that it is illegal to hack voicemail messages only if they have not already been heard by the intended recipient. This was a key factor in justifying the Yard's claim that there was only a small number of victims of the News of the World's activities. Yates wrote to the Guardian defending his position and quoting a sentence from evidence submitted by the DPP's office to one of the select committees.

However, in his letter to the Guardian, Keir Starmer says it was "regrettable" that Yates used this sentence out of context; that the original prosecution did not use this interpretation of the law; and that this interpretation had no bearing on the charges brought or the legal proceedings generally. "The issue simply did not arise," he writes

Duke of York's friend could be back in US courts

Lawyers to question Prince Andrew's sex offender associate.

The Independent

By Jonathan Owen

Sunday, 13 March 2011

The Duke of York's attempts to quell the furore surrounding his relationship with the billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appeared doomed this weekend when it emerged that more lurid details are to be aired in a US court within the next two weeks.

Buckingham Palace was forced to deny that the Duke of York had postponed plans for a trip to Saudi Arabia next week, because of negative media coverage, amid reports in some media that the controversy had made him "toxic". A spokesman said: "Buckingham Palace has never announced any overseas visits for the Duke of York."

The issue refuses to die down, with two Lib Dem ministers breaking rank last night and privately suggesting they think Prince Andrew should quit as trade envoy. One said: "If he was a politician doing this, he would have gone by now, and rightly so." Another added: "That in the 21st century we should be putting up with this is obscene. It is incredibly difficult for the Government, more so the Tory side, but it cannot carry on."

Even attempts by supporters to rally to his cause have been of mixed benefit. The Duchess of York's apology for a "gigantic error of judgement" in accepting money from Epstein only served to fuel reporting, as did reports of the Prince's links to Kazakhstan and the socialite Goga Ashkenazi, who is reported to have had been involved in the sale of the Duke's home to Kazakh oil billionaire Timur Kulibayev. There was also criticism last week when it emerged that the prince lobbied MP Mark Field this week to help to boost UK exports to oil-rich Azerbaijan, a country with a questionable human rights record.

Now US lawyers hope to use a legal dispute between Epstein and Brad Edwards, a Florida attorney, to insist that Epstein reveal more about his relationship with the prince. Epstein will be questioned on allegations he procured sexual favours from minors for friends and forced to answer allegations that he abused up to 40 girls. Many of the most damaging recent headlines about the Duke of York have centred around a photograph of him with his arm around a girl who claims she was abused by Epstein.

Jack Scarola, one of the lawyers close to the case, said: "We are in the process of scheduling a further deposition of Mr Epstein at which we intend to question him regarding the details of his child abuse, including all circumstances in which he may have been involved in procuring sexual favours from minors for his high-profile friends."

Asked whether the duke was with Epstein when minors were present, he said: "The details of that relationship will be a subject of inquiry when Mr Epstein's testimony is taken." The FBI is said to be ready to reopen its criminal investigation into Epstein, convicted in 2008 for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. A number of women are challenging a plea bargain deal which allowed the billionaire to avoid trial. Epstein, 58, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after admitting two sex offences.

None of this will help Prince Andrew's attempts to damp down coverage questioning his judgement and his choice of associates as he travels the world as a commercial envoy for the UK.

Additional reporting by Andrew McCorkell, Emily Dugan and Matt Chorley

Prince Andrew's link to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein taints royalty in US

The Duke of York's friendship with billionaire convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has put him on American front pages

By Paul Harris in New York

The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

The British press has a new admirer. Spencer Kuvin, a Florida lawyer who has fought several cases for young women alleging sexual abuse by the disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, is delighted – and relieved – that newspapers are now examining Prince Andrew's relationship with the convicted paedophile.

"I am glad the British press has picked this up," Kuvin told the Observer. "The British people have a right to ask why he [Prince Andrew] is hanging out with a convicted paedophile. I think that is a very good question to be asking."

Kuvin has been asking it for a while. He believes Epstein has in effect got away with most of his crimes because of his wealth and his connections with the powerful and well-connected across America and the world.

"He's fine. He has a great life," he said of the man who spent less than two years in jail after pleading guilty to child sex offences.

That is probably true. Florida law allows anyone to find out the whereabouts of a convicted sex offender via an online database. According to the website last week Epstein's location was St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. He owns a private island there: one that Prince Andrew has visited. "Epstein is probably sunning himself on a beach right now," Kuvin said.

The same cannot be said for the Duke of York. This weekend, as he considers the parlous state of his international reputation, he is likely to feeling a lot less comfortable than his one-time party friend.

It was not meant to be this way for the prince. America is supposed to be a happy hunting ground for the British royal family. It is a place where the people see them as exotic celebrities to be feted, admired and placed alongside the homegrown "royalty" of Hollywood.

American citizens and politicians – freed from the burdens of paying for a civil list of their own – can indulge in the sort of innocent worship of monarchical "glam" that typified Britain in the 1950s.

So recent headlines in the US media have come as a bit of a shock. "Seen around town: Prince Andrew and Perv Billionaire," blared the New York Post. "Duchess of York apologises for accepting money from sex offender," read the New York Daily News. So much for the eager anticipation of a slew of good publicity around the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

It was not just the American tabloids. Even the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy piece last week prompted by the fallout from Prince Andrew's long friendship and close relations with Epstein, 58, who served 18 months for sexual offences involving underage girls. No wonder New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser weighed in on the controversy about what she called a "bromance" between the pair. Prince Andrew, she concluded, was an "idiot prince".

It is hard to fathom the depths of the PR disaster that continues to unfold around the prince because of his links to Epstein. After he was snapped walking side by side with Epstein through Central Park last December, Andrew has seen his entire globetrotting existence as a trade ambassador put under the microscope. It has not borne up well.

Suddenly his life and times partying with Epstein have become public knowledge, complete with sordid details of being surrounded by young women and being present at topless pool parties. A woman, Virginia Roberts, who provided sexual services for Epstein and his rich friends while underage, saw the photograph and decided to speak about her experiences. Another picture rapidly surfaced, of Roberts side by side with the prince. To cap it all, Andrew's links to a whole series of unpleasant developing world autocrats and dictators have also come under fresh examination.

None of it has made a pretty picture and the royals – perhaps typically – have been slow to react in any meaningful way. First, the problem was ignored. Then it was dismissed. Only now, belatedly, have they begun to address it with reports that the Queen has talked to Andrew privately. It feels too little, too late.

Like many Europeans, perhaps, Andrew enjoyed the US because of the freedom and opportunities it afforded. The social scene in glittering hotspots like Manhattan and Florida's Palm Beach allowed him to free himself from the stuffy world of aristocratic Britain. He was courted and won over by the rich elite and he repaid the compliment.

No one knows why the prince carried on such a close friendship with a figure like Epstein for so long or why he refused to end it after Epstein went to jail. The facts alone should have been a warning sign. Epstein, a working class Brooklyn boy who became a super-wealthy money manager, was one of the world's most renowned playboys. But in 2008, after a three-year investigation into the young women he and his entourage procured, he wound up in jail. Nor was it an isolated incident. Epstein's case was ended via a plea bargain where he admitted guilt on a charge of felony solicitation of prostitution involving a minor. Yet as many as 40 young women had made allegations against him and, unusually, his plea deal allowed other accusers to sue him in civil court. So far at least 17 of them have settled civil cases against him.

The American drama is far from over for the prince. Instead the legal wranglings around Epstein and his exotic lifestyle threaten to drag the royal family right into the US court system.

Epstein is now suing Brad Edwards, a lawyer for some of the girls from the original investigation. In turn Edwards is counter-suing Epstein, alleging that the billionaire is using his vast resources to pursue expensive legal cases and thus intimidate other victims and their legal representatives. Either way, Andrew could be pulled into the mess as a witness. Edwards's lawyer, Jack Scarola, said last week that his team intended to try and get a statement from the prince about what he may or may not have seen while attending parties with Epstein.

Though the prince is likely to claim diplomatic immunity, that step will not keep his name out of the court papers or the headlines: it will just keep his presence out of the courtroom.

The same thing goes for previous cases involving Epstein. They amount to a potential source of PR torture for the royal family as media scrutiny continues. Recently released documents from a different case showed that two of Epstein's closest confidantes – his PA Sarah Ellen and an on-off girlfriend, Nadia Marcinkova – were repeatedly questioned by Kuvin about whether the prince had been involved in sexual acts with any of Epstein's entourage of young women. Both Ellen and Marcinkova declined to answer the questions and instead took the Fifth Amendment, which allows their legal silence.

Of course, there is no evidence or suggestion that Andrew was involved. But in PR terms there does not need to be. There is even a small chance that the FBI will use some of the new revelations emerging in the media to reopen the criminal case against Epstein, though legal experts think it unlikely.

Even the hint of a possibilty of a federal probe is another reason for the headline writers to start sharpening their pens for those with links to Epstein.

Prince Andrew is not the only one. Epstein has partied in New York with numerous people since he left jail, including big names and celebrities like Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos and Woody Allen. Perhaps they too should have known better.

Rosen's biography of John Mitchell is a tour de force of investigative reporting, at once insightful and meticulously well-documented. His account of the Watergate affair - including the sinister role played by James McCord, the involvement of the CIA, and the importance of the Democrats' link to the call-girl operation at the Columbia Plaza Apartments - is much the same as my own. (See Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA). Even so, Rosen adds enormously to the story, mining a previously unavailable trove of materials generated by litigation inspired by John Dean in what turns out to have been the juridical equivalent of an own goal. (See Dean vs. St. Martin's Press and Wells vs. Liddy).

That Rosen exonerates Mitchell from the accusation that it was he who ordered the Watergate break-in(s) is true. And it's also just. Whatever sins Mitchell may have committed - and Mitchell himself would have been the first to admit that there were many - authorizing the Watergate break-in(s) was not one of them. Simply put, he was railroaded.

If I were pressed to disagree with any aspect of Rosen's analysis, it would probably be with his take on the Washington police officer who was most responsible for the Watergate arrests - Carl Shoffler. I knew Shoffler well (or thought I did) and am convinced that he was tipped off to the June 17 break-in. It's an issue I raised in the book that I wrote, and which Shoffler's undercover informant, Robert Merritt, has recently corroborated (with the help of the burglars' attorney, Douglas Caddy).

Does Rosen explain why the CIA was so keen to remove Nixon?

Military Intelligence started surveillance of Nixon and Mitchell even before Nixon was elected President in 1968.

As reported by Rosen in The Strong Man, Nixon and Mitchell were accused of illegal intervention in the 1968 Paris peace talks when they during the presidential campaign, “with the aid of Anna Chennault, violated the laws of international diplomacy, directly contacting South Vietnamese officials to urge them not to be swayed by Lyndon Johnson’s last-minute bombing halt.”

Rosen concludes, “Thus, if Mitchell’s case is a parable of power, its acquisition, uses, and abuses the key to the story lay in the Chennault affair, which was the means Nixon and Mitchell used to acquire power. Those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. Top officials in the intelligence community, where the suspicious movements of Mrs. Chennault and her friends in the Nixon campaign were detected early on, determined even before Nixon and his strong man assumed office that the two did not feel bound by the (loose) norms under which that community acted; they would have to be watched, and when the opportunity presented itself, neutralized. Thus, the enlistment of Yeoman Radford as a thief of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s documents – selectively leaked to generals and admirals unsympathetic to the administration’s foreign policy – and the deployment of Messrs. Hunt and McCord as spies, respectively, inside the White House and Mitchell’s Committee for the Reelection of the President. These are best seen as institutional responses to the intrigues of 1968, products of the warped political atmosphere created by the protracted war in Vietnam.”

----------------------------------

Although Rosen does not mention it in his book, there were rumors that Nixon and Mitchell used gold bullion to pay off the key South Vietnamese officials to remain loyal to them during the presidential campaign. Nixon and Mitchell feared that LBJ would employ an “October” surprise using the Vietnam War to do so.

My personal opinion is that the U.S. Military and the CIA were both heavily involved in the drug trade using the Vietnam War as a base of operations and feared that the incoming Nixon Administration might mess up their lucrative arrangement. The Vietnam War is best viewed primarily not as a war against the spread of communism but as a means by these governmental entities to reap the financial awards of the drug trade. One only has to look at what is happening in Afghanistan today to see that the U.S. Military and CIA have not changed their ways.

Phone hacking: The dark arts of Jonathan Rees

Editorial

guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 March 2011 19.11 GMT

The collapse of a high-profile murder trial over evidential questions poses uncomfortable questions for the police. But the case is of much wider significance, since it poses equally difficult questions for the prime minister, for his former press secretary, Andy Coulson, and for all those at News International who have stuck to their claim that no one in the company – bar one rotten apple – had any knowledge of illegal behaviour by, or on behalf of, its journalists.

Jonathan Rees, who was yesterday cleared of murdering his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, is a private investigator of a particularly unpleasant and vindicative kind. In the late 1990s he was working for the News of the World, paid as much as £150,000 a year to use his dark arts to illegally trawl for personal information on the paper's targets. The work, which included bribing police officers, came to the attention of Scotland Yard's anti-corruption team, who bugged his office for six months. In December 2000 his newspaper work – which included work for the Mirror Group – came to a sudden and enforced halt when he was jailed for seven years after being caught planting cocaine on a woman. The aim was to discredit her prior to divorce hearings

Rees was one of four private detectives – all of them now convicted criminals – who are known to have been retained by the News of the World, apparently without the knowledge of a single executive. Rees's exploits were certainly no secret. They were written about in two articles published by the Guardian in 2002, while Rees was in prison. One of them named a News of the World executive, Alex Marunchak, who had been caught on tape discussing payments of thousands of pounds. Despite all this – Rees's links to corrupt police, his prison sentence, the publication of his links to, and payment by, the newspaper – he returned to work for the News of the World, now edited by Andy Coulson, in 2005 after he had left prison .

Rees was charged with murder in 2008, which meant that no newspaper could, until today, name him. But both David Cameron and Nick Clegg knew of the background to the story in early 2010, well before they entered Downing Street. The new prime minister chose to ignore it, appointing Coulson head of communications at Downing Street in May 2010. It was an extraordinary piece of bad judgment, and surprising that Clegg apparently did not demur or distance himself in any way. Did no one carry out any official vetting before Coulson was allowed across the doorstep of No 10? Or did Cameron and Clegg want the former Murdoch editor so badly that they pretended not to know, and ignored the ticking time bomb which exploded yesterday?

Meanwhile, what of Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates, who was so quick to assure the world that there wasn't much to the phone-hacking stories uncovered by journalists on this and other newspapers? He has hired one of the UK's most notorious libel firms to warn off this newspaper for reporting the claim that he misled parliament. In a Commons debate this week, Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, made the direct accusation that Yates did, indeed, mislead two parliamentary select committees. Moreover, it was alleged that Scotland Yard has known for five months that its evidence was incorrect. The two committees involved should, as a matter of some urgency, invite the police to explain its position.

Until now most of the attention around phone hacking has centred on the activities of Glenn Mulcaire, who was jailed in 2006 for his work on behalf of the News of the World. Rees was actually paid more than Mulcaire and is alleged to have deployed a wider armoury of illegal methods to acquire information for his Fleet Street clients. Now that his name is no longer protected by court restrictions, another chapter in this disturbing saga of intrusion, power and criminality can be written.

Private investigator cleared of murder was on Coulson pay-roll

The Independent

By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman

Saturday, 12 March 2011

A private investigator acquitted of one of Britain's longest unsolved murders had extensive links with corrupt police officers and was being paid thousands of pounds to supply information to the News of the World under the editorship of former Downing Street spin doctor Andy Coulson.

Jonathan Rees, who walked free from the Old Bailey after his trial for the murder of his business partner collapsed due to Scotland Yard failures, was rehired by Rupert Murdoch's Sunday tabloid despite being sentenced to six years' imprisonment for plotting to plant cocaine in a former model's car.

The decision to pay Mr Rees for his services after his release from jail in 2005 was made under the editorship of Mr Coulson. The Guardian reported last night that it had written to prime minister David Cameron prior to his decision to hire the former NOTW editor informing him of the fact that Mr Rees had been employed under Mr Coulson.

The private detective, who worked for the NOTW for two periods between 1993 and 2000 and then after 2005, enjoyed a lucrative relationship with several Fleet Street titles, using his contacts with corrupt Metropolitan Police officers, other law enforcement officials, bank workers and phone company employees to obtain personal and illegal information.

Mr Rees, 56 who reportedly earned up to £150,000 a year from the NotW, had numerous targets including former Labour Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair's press chief Alastair Campbell, rock star Mick Jagger, television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, and the singer George Michael, according to The Guardian.

The private detective allegedly inhabited a shadowy world where corrupt officers and former detectives would approach him with information relating to celebrities and high-profile criminals, including M25 murderer Kenneth Noye.

Yesterday, Mr Rees was formally acquitted at the Old Bailey along with two other men of the murder fellow private investigator Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe in his skull outside a south London pub 24 years ago.

The marathon trial, which had yet to reach a jury despite three months of legal argument, collapsed after the Metropolitan Police told the court last week that it had found four boxes of previously undisclosed documentation. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided that the admission rendered the proceedings unsustainable.

The family of Mr Morgan, who saw what is the fifth investigation into his murder collapse the day after the 24th anniversary of his death, called for a judicial inquiry into the handling of the case. In a statement, the family, who believe Mr Morgan had been about to reveal the involvement of corrupt police officers in a drugs ring, said: "The criminal justice system is not fit for purpose."

In a crime which became a byword for the corruption that dogged Britain's largest police force in the late 1980s, Mr Morgan's killing has proved a continuous embarrassment to the Yard. Its most senior murder detective offered an apology to the Morgan family and admitted that corruption had hampered the initial police inquiry.

Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell said: "It is with considerable regret that a trial cannot proceed. This current investigation has identified, ever more clearly, how the initial inquiry failed the family and wider public. It is quite apparent that police corruption was a debilitating factor."

Mr Rees, 56, who along with his co-defendants had denied murdering Mr Morgan, said outside court that he should not have been prosecuted. He said up to 40 suspects for the 1987 killing outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham had not been investigated. Mr Rees, who ran Southern Investigations with Mr Morgan, said: "When Daniel Morgan was killed it was an awful shock to me and to our business. I lost a friend and a business partner."

During a covert operation in 1999 by the Yard's anti-corruption branch CIB3, Mr Rees was recorded talking to reporters about information obtained from his police contacts.

An internal police report stated: "Rees and [others] have for a number of years been involved in the long-term penetration of police intelligence sources ... Their thirst for knowledge is driven by profit to be accrued from the media."

Police examined whether or not criminal charges could be laid against journalists. But none were brought because, it is believed, it could not be established that Mr Rees' clients would have known the source of his information.

Mr Coulson has consistently denied knowing about any illegal practices at the NotW, including the phone hacking activities of another private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.

A NotW spokesman said last night: ""Like other newspapers and broadcasters we pay tipsters and sources for information and stories. To date, no evidence has been brought to our attention of any wrong doing by us in relation to Jonathan Rees.

As shown by recent events, if we are presented with evidence we will act on it. The News of the World operates within the law and the PCC code."

Alistair Morgan, Daniel Morgan's brother, said: "For almost a quarter of a century, my family has done everything democratically and legally possible to secure justice for Daniel. We have been failed utterly by all of the institutions designed to protect us

Murder trial collapse exposes News of the World links to police corruption

David Cameron hired Andy Coulson despite knowing that as editor he employed Jonathan Rees, who paid police for stories

By Nick Davies and Vikram Dodd

guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 March 2011 18.17 GMT

A man cleared of murder can be named as a private investigator with links to corrupt police officers who earned £150,000 a year from the News of the World for supplying illegally obtained information on people in the public eye.

Jonathan Rees was acquitted of the murder of his former business partner, Daniel Morgan, who was found in a south London car park in 1987 with an axe in the back of his head. The case collapsed after 18 months of legal argument, during which it has been impossible for media to write about Rees's Fleet Street connections.

The ending of the trial means it is now possible for the first time to tell how Rees went to prison in December 2000 after a period of earning six-figure sums from the News of the World.

Rees, who had worked for the paper for seven years, was jailed for planting cocaine on a woman in order to discredit her during divorce proceedings. After his release from prison Rees, who had been bugged for six months by Scotland Yard because of his links with corrupt police officers, was rehired by the News of the World, which was being edited by Andy Coulson.

The revelations call into question David Cameron's judgment in choosing Coulson as director of communications at 10 Downing Street in May 2010. Both he and the deputy prime minister had been warned in March 2010 about Coulson's responsibility for rehiring Rees after his prison sentence.

Nick Clegg had been informed in detail about Jonathan Rees's murder charge, his prison sentence and his involvement with police corruption – and that he and three other private investigators had committed crimes for the News of the World while Coulson was deputy editor or editor.

In September 2002 the Guardian published a lengthy exposé of Rees's involvement with police corruption and illegal newsgathering. But since April 2008 the press have been prevented from revealing Rees's connections with the News of the World, or placing it in the context of News International's denials about any knowledge of illegal activity on behalf of the company.

News International had until recently claimed there was just one "rotten apple" at the company and that the paper had no knowledge of the illegal activities of another private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who was paid £100,000 before being sent to jail in 2007.

Rebekah Wade, now chief executive of News International, was deputy editor of the News of the World from 1998-2000 and editor from 2000 to 2003. Coulson was deputy editor of the News of the World from 2000 and editor from 2003 to 2007. Rees worked for the paper until 2000, when he was jailed for seven years, and then again after his release from prison in 2005.

Rees, now aged 56, worked regularly for the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror as well as for the News of the World. His numerous targets included members of the royal family whose bank accounts he penetrated; political figures including Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell; rock stars such as Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and George Michael; the Olympic athlete Linford Christie and former England footballer Gary Lineker; TV presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan; and people associated with tabloid story topics, including the daughter of the former miners leader Arthur Scargill and the family of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe.

Jonathan Rees paid a network of corrupt police officers who sold him confidential records. He boasted of other corrupt contacts in banks and government organisations; hired specialists to "blag" confidential data from targets' current accounts, phone records and car registration; allegedly used "Trojan horse" emails to extract information from computers; and – according to two sources – commissioned burglaries to obtain material for journalists.

On Friday the crown said it could offer no evidence against Rees and two other men accused of Morgan's murder. An Old Bailey judge ordered the acquittal of Rees and his co-defendants.

The prosecutor, Nicholas Hilliard QC, said the weight of paperwork – about 750,000 pages going back over 24 years – made it impossible to guarantee that defence lawyers would be able to see everything they may need for the trial to be fair.

Morgan's family has called for an inquiry into the case. Scotland Yard admitted that corruption in the first murder investigation had shielded the killers of Rees's one-time business partner.

The Rees case raises new questions about the failure of Scotland Yard's 2006 inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World. For more than a decade Scotland Yard has been holding detailed evidence of Rees's corrupt activities for the News of the World and other titles, including many hours of taped conversations from a listening device that was planted in Rees's office for six months from April 1999. Despite this the Met in 2006 accepted the News of the World's claim that its royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, who had been caught hacking voicemail, was a "rogue reporter". Detectives decided not to interview any other journalist or executive from the paper. They also decided not to seek a court order to force the paper to disclose internal paperwork.

In February 2010 the Guardian wrote to Coulson asking him to comment on his responsibility for hiring Rees. The Guardian's letter also asked about three other private investigators who were convicted of crimes committed on behalf of the News of the World. Steve Whittamore and John Boyall admitted buying confidential data from the police national computer, and Glenn Mulcaire was convicted of hacking voicemail messages. Coulson has always maintained he knew nothing of any of this activity.

He was also asked to comment on the fact that Scotland Yard was believed to have arrested and questioned Coulson's former assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, in 2005 and questioned him about the alleged payment of bribes to serving police officers and the employees of mobile phone companies. Miskiw declined to respond to Guardian questions about this.

Along with Rees, Glenn and Garry Vian were also acquitted yesterday in the Daniel Morgan murder case.

The police case involved a series of supergrasses and the crown dropped some of them during some of the longest legal argument ever seen in an English criminal court.

After his acquittal Rees said: "I want a judicial inquiry, ideally a public inquiry."

In a statement read on his behalf, Rees's solicitor said: "When Daniel Morgan was killed it was an awful shock to me and to our business.

Whatever anyone may say on 10th March 1987 I lost a friend and business partner."

Murdoch ally 'warned MPs not to pursue hacking scandal'

Chris Bryant says members were told that raising key issue 'would not be forgotten'

The Independent

By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman

Friday, 11 March 2011

MPs were "warned off" pursuing the phone-hacking scandal in Parliament as part of a cover-up, a Labour frontbencher claimed last night during an incendiary speech in which he accused the country's biggest police force of misleading a Commons committee, and its biggest newspaper group of engaging in the "dark arts" of tapping, hacking and blagging.

Damning the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police and Rupert Murdoch's News International, Chris Bryant claimed his friends had been told by an ally of Mr Murdoch that their raising the issue "would not be forgotten". Suggesting there was a "full-blown, copper-bottomed scandal", he said neither the police nor the newspapers had properly investigated the criminality and that attempts had been made to suppress the full scale of the wrongdoing. To a near-empty Commons chamber, Mr Bryant:

* Accused News International of carrying out illegal activities ranging from tapping phones to blagging phone records to conning health records out of doctors' surgeries;

* Stated he believed phone hacking had taken place at the News of the World from 2002, three years before it was formally acknowledged by police to have begun;

* Added that the alleged hacking had taken place under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, the current head of News International and Mr Murdoch's most senior UK newspaper executive;

* Claimed one of Britain's most senior police officers misled a parliamentary inquiry by saying there had been only "eight to 12 victims";

* Questioned the Met's "narrow, false" interpretation of the law on intercepting messages;

* Disclosed eight MPs had been told they may have been victims.

Mr Bryant, a former Europe minister, said it had been communicated to MPs that they should not pursue the scandal – which allegedly involved the hacking of the former prime minister Gordon Brown, the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and dozens of other public figures.

Scotland Yard launched a new inquiry into the hacking carried out for the NOTW in January, after civil litigants found the scandal had spread far beyond the paper's jailed royal editor, Clive Goodman.

"Almost as bad as the original illegal activity... has been the cover-up," Mr Bryant complained. "Other members and former members of this House have said they were warned off pushing this issue in the House and in select committees. When I raised the question of parliamentary privilege last September, my friends were told by a senior figure allied to Rupert Murdoch and a former executive of News International to warn me that this would not be forgotten." He listed all the covert tactics used to obtain or wheedle out information about private lives: all were part of the "dark arts" practised by News International.

The Met's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, had either inadvertently or deliberately given wrong information to the Commons Media, Culture and Sport Select Committee when he claimed that only eight to 12 people had their phones illegally tapped by journalists. "He used an argument that had never been relied upon by the Crown Prosecution Service or his own officers to suggest that the number of victims was minuscule. In fact he knew, and we know, that the number of potential victims is and was substantial. What was lacking was not possible avenues of investigation but, in my view, the will to pursue them."

The "narrow" interpretation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, that it was not a crime to eavesdrop messages already listened to by their intended recipient, "was misleading not on a minor point, but on the most substantial point of all".

But what astounded and infuriated him the most, he said, was that the scale of the scandal had only been wrung out of the Met by the civil litigants suing the NOTW once the Met had "failed to or refused to join up the dots of evidence" it already had.

Mr Bryant, a former Europe minister, spoke in the Commons hours after seeing evidence about him in material seized from Mulcaire's home in 2006. He is seeking a judicial review of the Met's handling of the phone hacking case, along with Lord Prescott, Brian Paddick, the former Scotland Yard Commander, and Brendan Montague, a freelance journalist.

News International last night declined to comment on Mr Bryant's claims. A company source said that no evidence had been presented that phone hacking was carried out on its titles beyond the NOTW or that the activity took place as early as 2002. Scotland Yard said Mr Yates believed the claims against him were wrong. A spokesman said: "It is disappointing that Chris Bryant has chosen to repeat these allegations."

His Commons speech: What Chris Bryant said on...

The 'dark arts' "This debate is about phone hacking – a term that covers a multitude of sins: tapping a phone call or line; hacking into a phone's operating systems so as to be able to access emails, texts, messages... There are, of course, other dark arts: ringing an office and pretending to deliver a parcel to someone's home address and thereby fraudulently getting the home address; ringing a phone call centre and pretending to be a client so as to be able to get a personal identification number... blagging a doctor's receptionist into giving out highly personal information about an appointment, or medication or other treatment... All of these dark arts were part of the systematic modus operandi of the News of the World for a sustained period."

News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks (née Wade) "I believe the practice started earlier than 2003 – in 2002, under the editorship of Rebekah Wade. I believe that evidence will very soon prove that to be the case."

The original Scotland Yard hacking investigation: "One day, there will have to be a full investigation as to why the Met's original investigation was so cursory. Was it laziness that meant people simply couldn't be bothered to wade through the material gathered from Glenn Mulcaire in 2006? Was it because of the closeness of senior officers to the newspaper? Was it just too ready an acceptance of News International's word? Or did the News of the World actually have something on some of the people involved in the investigation?"

The mass of missed evidence "What still astounds and frankly infuriates me is that in many cases, the Met already had all the information they needed: reams and reams of notes taken by Mr Mulcaire, with 91 personal identification numbers; copious invoices; pages devoted to individual targets with thousands of linked phone numbers, many of them garnered illicitly; and quite often the name of a commissioning journalist or executive... In other words, the Met had many of the dots. They just failed to or refused to join them up."

The targeting of MPs "The allegation that there were only a 'handful' of hacking victims is countered by the fact that I could name... at least eight members of the House of Commons who have been informed directly by the Metropolitan Police that they were not only a person of interest to Mr Mulcaire, but there may have been interception of their messages."

The relationship between the 'NOTW' and the Metropolitan Police "There are very serious issues here. On the face of it at least the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the News of the World is remarkably, and I would argue dangerously, close."

MY REVIEW OF JAMES ROSEN’S BOOK, THE STRONG MAN: JOHN MITCHELL AND THE SECRETS OF WATERGATE

James Rosen wisely chose Attorney General John Mitchell as the subject of his book. It allowed him to trace the life of a controversial but remarkable man and at the same time provide an account of what really happened in Watergate in which Mitchell played a key role, albeit one that ended in tragedy with his conviction and incarceration. His book is definitive on the subject and his style of writing is to be admired.

Mitchell was a graduate of Fordham University where he was a member of the golf team whose captain was Malcolm Wilson, who later became the Governor of New York. (I served on Malcolm Wilson’s staff when he was Lieutenant Governor.) While still in law school Mitchell conceived the tax-exempt municipal housing bond and by doing so earned large commissions from the law firm with which he was associated that provided legal opinions on the bonds to municipalities that rushed to issue them. So successful was Mitchell in his bond endeavor that in 1942 the law firm made him a partner and added his name to the firm’s name. Two years later he reported for duty in the Navy and saw service in the Pacific theater where he ultimately was promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant Junior Grade. After the war he returned to Wall Street to practice law and by 1960 was ranked among the nation’s elite lawyers.

After his defeat in the race for Governor of California in 1962, Richard Nixon headed east and joined a law firm that in 1966 merged with Mitchell’s firm, among whose clients was Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The firm’s new name was Nixon Mudge Rose Gutherie Alexander and Mitchell.

Nixon, in awe of Mitchell as a person and of his capabilities, appointed him campaign manager for his 1968 presidential campaign. The election was close and Nixon’s victory over Hubert Humphrey was credited by a large degree to Mitchell’s organizational skills and sage advice. Soon after the election Mitchell reluctantly agreed to take leave from his lucrative Wall Street law practice to become Attorney General.

Because the Vietnam War was still being waged, Mitchell faced many challenges in his new position. Rosen states that “Mitchell may have authorized the government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left, but the executioners of his policy often acted without his knowledge or consent.” Mitchell was later found to be totally unaware of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO, a covert and often illegal campaign to infiltrate and disrupt targeted groups deemed to be a threat to the national security. The May Day riot in Washington, D.C. in 1971 saw more than 12,000 persons arrested in the anti-war demonstration. Most of the criminal charges against those arrested were later dropped.

In 1971 Nixon began laying plans for his 1972 reelection campaign, which would be managed by Mitchell who was scheduled to resign as Attorney General in early 1972 to assume his campaign duties. However, the seeds of Watergate were planted when John Dean, Counsel to the President, escorted Gordon Liddy into the Attorney General’s office on November 24, 1971, for a brief meeting during which Liddy was appointed General Counsel to the Committee for the Reelection of the President. After the meeting, Dean ordered Liddy to draw up a comprehensive intelligence gathering plan for use in the ensuing campaign. On January 27, 1972, Dean, Liddy and Jeb Magruder, to whom Liddy reported, assembled in the Attorney General’s office for a presentation of Liddy’s wide-ranging plan, which he called Gemstone. Liddy, (using multi-color charts that had been drawn up by the CIA at Howard Hunt’s request!), proposed a complex scheme that included among other things illegal break-ins, wiretapping and bugs, prostitutes to seduce key Democrats, illegal photographing of documents, and sabotaging the air conditioning system at the Democrat national convention.

When Liddy was finished, Mitchell drily opined, “Gordon, that is not quite what I had in mind.” He was told to scale it down. The group assembled once again on February 4, 1972, in the Attorney General’s office where Liddy presented his revised version. Mitchell was less than enthusiastic at what he heard and politely told Liddy that he would get back to him on it. The final presentation took place on March 30, 1972, in Key Biscayne, Florida where Mitchell was on vacation with his family. This time is was Magruder by himself who presented a memo on the intelligence gathering plan to Mitchell. There is some dispute as to whether Mitchell gave his final approval of the plan that included a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Magruder claimed that he did but Mitchell and his assistant, Fred LaRue who was also present, were adamant that he did not approve the plan in any of its aspects. LaRue later proclaimed that, “Basically, the guy that’s lying is Magruder.” The evidence seems to support LaRue’s assertion.

Nevertheless, within hours of the Key Biscayne meeting Magruder gave Liddy the long-awaited word to proceed and, without Mitchell’s authorization, approved $300,000 to implement the plan.

For the record it should be noted that Mitchell was never formally charged with ordering the Watergate break-in. In fact it was never determined in a court of law who did order the June 17, 1972, break-in of the DNC. Rosen notes that, “the Senate Watergate Committee’s final report devoted only four of its 1,250 pages to the break-in. It did not say who ordered the break-in.”

Rosen writes, “If Mitchell did not give the order, who did?” In attempting to answer this question Rosen reports that “in an interview in February 1990, Magruder was asked, 'If you thought it through now, what would you say to a direct question, "Who told you to go in?" ‘I’d say probably John Dean,’ he answered. Six months later he went even further. 'Mitchell didn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘All Mitchell did was just what I did, [which] was to acquiesce to the pressure from the White House. We [at the Committee for the Reelection of the President] didn’t do anything. We weren’t the initiators. Hell, the first plan that we got had been initiated by Dean…The target never came from Mitchell.’”

Liddy and his team, comprised of Howard Hunt, James McCord and the four Cuban-Americans recruited by Hunt, made two break-ins at the DNC. The first was on May 28 and was adjudged afterwards by Magruder to be less than a success in wire-tapping. So on June 12 Magruder ordered Liddy and his team to go back into the DNC. This they did on June 17, at which time McCord and the four Cuban-American were arrested inside the offices of the DNC.

Rosen identifies three members of the burglars’ team as being actively connected to the CIA: Hunt, McCord and Martinez. He writes “that Langley received Gemstone updates from Eugenio Martinez, independent of Hunt and McCord, was further confirmed in a previously unpublished memo dictated by CIA director Richard Helms on December 3, 1973….The role of the CIA in the collapse of the Nixon presidency was a subject of intense controversy during the Watergate era, and a mystery that bedeviled Mitchell to his grave. It reminded him of the [Admiral Thomas Moorer-Yeoman Charles Radford 13 month] spying conducted against the administration by the Joint Chief of Staff. ‘I’m sure the CIA knew more about Watergate than it’s ever come out,’ he told an interviewer in 1987; by the time he died, the former attorney general had concluded ‘the CIA was behind the whole thing.’”

Mitchell was correct in his assessment of Watergate as both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. However, neither he nor Rosen knew of Crimson Rose, about which disclosure will be made by this writer on the Education Forum soon. This disclosure will confirm Mitchell’s worse fears.

Why did Magruder instruct Liddy on June 12 to go back into the DNC on the orders of Dean if Magruder is to be believed? Rosen reports that “On June 9, three days before Magruder’s order to Liddy, John Dean summoned two federal prosecutors to his White House office to brief him on their investigation into what had been dubbed, in that morning’s Washington Evening Star, a Capitol Hill call-girl ring. At one point in the meeting he asked to keep portions of the evidence in the case, a request the prosecutors, though awed by their surroundings, properly refused.” Dean had asked the prosecutors to bring the case file on the call-girl ring. From the file he asked to keep the ring manager’s “trick” book that contained the names of the “Johns” and the prostitutes. Both Liddy and Magruder had their own reasons for wanting to know what names were in the explosive “trick “book. They realized that disclosure of the names would have had a drastic and adverse effect on Nixon’s reelection campaign.

As Rosen reports, “One of the federal prosecutors summoned to Dean’s office that day subsequently testified that he had developed evidence that ‘employees at the DNC…were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at Columbia Plaza,’ but that his investigation was ‘shut down’ in the summer of 1972 by the district’s U.S. attorney, who felt ‘the DNC should not be pursued, that it was a political time bomb.” Prominent Democrats and well as Republicans had a lot to lose if the investigation were not curtailed. An investigation would have led to persons on Capitol Hill, in the White House and in the Committee for the Reelection of the President, although Nixon, Haldeman, Erlichman and Mitchell had no knowledge of any of this.

After the case broke open, Nixon, Haldeman and Erlichman designated Dean to coordinate the White House response to the crisis. The led to the cover-up and the payment of hush money to those arrested. Dean had a vested interest in managing the cover-up although Nixon, Haldeman and Erlichman were not aware of this at the time they assigned the task to him. Dean’s interests ranged from his attendance at the meetings held in the Attorney General’s office at which Liddy’s Gemstone plan was discussed to the names of the persons connected to the call-girl prostitution ring that operated out of the Columbia Plaza Apartments, which was just across the street from the Watergate.

Rosen observes in his meticulously documented book that “Alexander Butterfield, the aide who saw Nixon more frequently than any other save Haldeman and who publicly disclosed the existence of the taping system [used by Nixon], acknowledged that the [tapes’] transcripts betrayed in the president ‘a seeming incoherence of speaking style.’ ‘One of the things that did strike me when I read the transcripts,’ agreed Magruder, ‘was that really how much – or how little –information [Nixon, Haldeman and Erlichman] really did have.’”

Rosen concludes that Dean through his conflicts of interests in Watergate, “ended Nixon’s and Mitchell’s careers, producing in the president both everlasting fury and regret (‘Oh, the incredible treachery of that son-of-a-bitch!’) and exposing the limitations of the mental machines that had propelled the older men, respectively, from Whittier and from Blue Point to the White House and Wall Street. Dean was younger, smarter, more tightly wired into the bureaucracy, and better versed in the origins, players, and events of Watergate. Against this backdrop commenced Nixon’s infamous series of meetings and phone calls with Dean – twenty in all, between February 27 and April 17 [1973] – that marked the endgame in the Watergate cover-up and changed the course of American history.”

To Rosen’s observation should be added a course that changed the lives of the American service men and women in Vietnam who either were killed or maimed because of Dean's role in the cover-up during this crucial period that paralyzed the Nixon presidency.

Nixon, while blaming Dean primarily for Watergate, also targeted Martha Mitchell whose antics in the four years of the initial Nixon administration bordered on certifiable insanity. Nixon told David Frost in his television interview in 1977 that “I am convinced that if it hadn’t been for Martha – and God rest her soul, because she in her heart was a good person. She just had a mental and emotional problem nobody knew about. If it hadn’t been for Martha, there’d have been no Watergate. Because John wasn’t minding that store. He was practically out of his mind about Martha in the spring of 1972! He was letting Magruder and all those boys, these kids, these nuts run this thing. The point of the matter is that if John had been watchin’ that store, Watergate would never have happened.”

That is the bottom line on the whole scandal.

Mitchell, a broken man financially and mentally, died on November 9, 1988, from a massive heart attack as he was walking to his home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Had he never met Richard Nixon he probably would have died with his reputation intact as one of the nation’s elite lawyers, possessed of great wealth.

Life is like a dream. No one knows what twists and turns the future holds. This is true for those who lead the most humble of lives to those who are at the pinnacle of wealth and power.

I shall be the first to acknowledge that this review does not do justice to James Rosen’s superb book, which will be read for many years to come by those who want to know what really happened in Watergate.

James Rosen’s book, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate

I had wanted to read James Rosen’s book soon after its release in 2008. However, because I was working with Robert Merritt on our own book about Watergate, Robert and I decided not to read any books or major publications dealing with the scandal until our work was finished. This was because we wanted our product to reflect what we knew personally about Watergate and not be influenced by anything we read elsewhere.

About a month ago the publisher, Trineday, sent to print our book, Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up, and it has now been distributed to Amazon and bookstores. This allowed me at long last to turn my attention to Mr. Rosen’s book, which I have just finished reading.

My review will be brief. As long as there is a United States of America, there will be interest in what happened in Watergate, what really occurred. It is my opinion, having now read The Strong Man, that Mr. Rosen’s book will be considered as being among the very few books that are definitive on the subject. Historians will be obligated to consult it, not only because it is meticulously documented but also because Mr. Rosen is an extremely talented writer and the reader’s interest never flags. In summary, anyone who wishes to learn what really happened in Watergate, what really occurred must read The Strong Man.

As a postscript, and in no way to detract from the authoritative information compiled by Mr. Rosen, I wish to announce that soon, on or about March 15, I shall post an article on the Education Forum that contains new revelations about Watergate that will go far towards understanding the circumstances surrounding the break-in at the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. The heretofore unrevealed information was acquired since publication a month ago of Watergate Exposed.

I agree with Bill, regarding Prince Andrew at least it doesn’t seem to be a pedophilia issue. This supposedly happened in 2001 when he was 41 and he (supposedly) had sex with a 17 year-old prostitute who had been hooking since she was 15 and per her own account by choice. She said she got $200 per customer, thus if she serviced an average of one man a day / 5 days a week she would make $52,000/year tax free equal to about $60,000, that’s what 10 years a NYC cop makes after 4 years on the force. If she had a few customers a day she’d have made more than the commissioner!

Questions of semantics aside a 17-year-old is old enough to do what she wants. This wouldn't even be illegal in the UK.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364171/Females-Jeffrey-Epstein-The-damning-telephone-log.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/08/jeffrey-epstein-prince-andrew-chris-bryant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Solicitation_of_prostitution

Where does the Paedophilia come in?

I had to look it up and didn't read anything about anyone having sex with children.

Paedophilia and child pornography is a crime, but it appears that their appetites for young, beautiful women is otherwise normal.

If it concerned anyone other than a prince, would anyone care?

Or did I miss something?

From the Daily Mail article:

"The Duchess of York has today admitted to a 'gigantic error of judgment' after accepting £15,000 from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"Sarah Ferguson said she had made another big mistake in her life after the money was paid by the billionaire convicted paedophile to help her pay off her debts."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1363838/Prince-Andrews-ex-Sarah-Ferguson-Paedophile-Jeffrey-Epsteins-15k-error-judgement.html#ixzz1FxAy7PmP

MP threatens to lift lid on 'enormous issues' in phone-hacking case

The Independent

By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman

Monday, 7 March 2011

A Labour MP will make new claims this week about the extent of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal during a House of Commons debate which threatens to deepen the controversy engulfing Rupert Murdoch's News International.

Chris Bryant, a shadow minister who is taking legal action over an alleged failure by Scotland Yard properly to investigate the illegal eavesdropping of voicemails, said the true nature of the scandal remained unclear and raised important questions about democracy in Britain.

Mr Bryant has secured a 30-minute Commons debate on Thursday which will include a formal government response. He said: "It has become apparent that the extent of phone hacking is greater than either News Corporation or the News of the World have admitted to. Indeed, it would seem it was far more substantial than that found by the original investigation that the Metropolitan Police could be bothered to mount." The Rhondda MP said "enormous issues" had been raised by the scandal, which led to the jailing in 2007 of the private detective Glenn Mulcaire and NOTW's royal editor Clive Goodman.

A team of 45 Metropolitan Police detectives is leading a fresh investigation to determine whether Mulcaire was eavesdropping on individuals beyond the eight people he has already admitted to targeting. Mr Bryant is one of four people, along with the former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, seeking a judicial review of the failure of the Yard to inform them that they were likely victims of Mulcaire.

"There is also the political aspect of all this," Mr Bryant added. "What was the purpose behind all this phone hacking? Ultimately, I think its purpose was murky and nefarious. It raises questions of just who runs Britain."

Last week Tom Watson, a defence minister in the last government, told the Commons he believed evidence existed implicating journalists working for The Times and The Sunday Times and said he believed The Sun printed a story that may have been based on hacked conversations. News International said it did not believe Mr Watson had evidence to support the claims

Leading article: Rupert Murdoch gets his political payback

The Independent

Friday, March 4, 2011

There is something fishy about this meeting of minds between News Corp and the Government

What a difference two months make. In January, Jeremy Hunt said he was "minded" to follow Ofcom's recommendation that the bid of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to take full control of BSkyB should be referred to the Competition Commission. But yesterday he gave the green light for the bid to proceed without further interference from the regulators.

What changed Mr Hunt's mind? According to him, the answer is a special undertaking made by News Corp – in response to Ofcom's concerns about the impact of the acquisition on the

Mr Hunt said yesterday that the move will give Sky News "more independence" from News Corp. But this is doubtful. News Corp would retain a 39 per cent share in the new company and continue to cover the channel's losses. It might be a diluted form of ownership, but it is still ownership. Sky News will also, we are told, have an independent board of directors to guarantee integrity in its reporting.

But similar promises of editorial independence were made after Rupert Murdoch was permitted to buy The Times newspaper group in 1981. They were soon ignored. This proposal is a fig leaf; its purpose is to give the impression of a serious response to concerns about plurality, while avoiding any substantive action.

Promises of good behaviour from some media organisations might be credible. But we should remember the nature of Mr Murdoch's empire. The News of the World appears to have been at the centre of a massive and illegal phone-hacking operation. According to the Labour MP Tom Watson, speaking in the Commons yesterday, journalists employed at other Murdoch titles might have been involved in this, too. Fox News, the Murdoch-owned US channel, is a virulently right-wing broadcaster that has contributed to the disastrous polarisation of the political discourse across the Atlantic. News Corp simply does not merit the benefit of the doubt.

The proposed arrangement also ignores the primary objection to the bid: the power in respect of advertising sales that it will afford News Corp across its range of different media platforms, giving the company a market position that can only be regarded as anti-competitive. At a time when the newspaper industry in particular is experiencing unprecedented pressure on revenues, it could have a catastrophic impact on other publications. Furthermore, News Corp will be able to "bundle" online subscriptions to its newspapers in special offers when BSkyB customers renew their satellite packages – and there would also be scope for intensive cross-promotion of News Corp titles. It all adds up to an advantage for Mr Murdoch's media empire that verges on the monopolistic.

It does not require a conspiracy theorist to detect something fishy about this meeting of minds between News Corp and the Government. In opposition, Mr Hunt enthusiastically praised Mr Murdoch's entrepreneurial skills. David Cameron hired a disgraced former News Corp editor, Andy Coulson, to be his director of communications. And Mr Murdoch's newspapers all threw their weight behind the Conservatives in last year's election. Mr Hunt's agreement to allow News Corp to skip past regulatory hurdles as it accrues still greater market power looks uncomfortably like political payback.

This deal is not yet sealed. The proposals will go out to public consultation until 21 March. This is a time for all those who want to see a diverse, competitive and free-thinking media environment in Britain to make their objections heard. If the Coalition Government is sincere in its commitment to democracy, it ought to take full accountof the public reaction to yesterday's announcement

Phone-hacking inquiry spreads to Sunday Times, Prescott tells Lords

John Prescott uses parliamentary privilege in the House of Lords to allege that other Rupert Murdoch titles are being investigated

by James Robinson guardian.co.uk,

Thursday 3 March 2011 19.37 GMT

Other titles in Rupert Murdoch's media empire, including the Sunday Times, are being investigated for allegedly hacking into mobile phones belonging to well-known people, according to Lord Prescott.

The former deputy prime minister used parliamentary privilege to claim in the House of Lords: "The investigation into phone hacking has been extended now to the Sunday Times."

Scotland Yard announced a fresh inquiry into allegations of widespread phone hacking at the Murdoch-owned News of the World in January. The Met also told Prescott there was evidence his phone may have been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who was employed by the paper.

Prescott used a Lords debate on the government's decision to approve News Corp's purchase of BSkyB to claim the practice of phone hacking was not restricted to the NoW. "It is a number of papers owned by the Murdoch press and a number of employees who have been involved in withholding evidence and [hacking into phones]," he said.

The claims were echoed in the Commons by Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, who said: "I now believe that evidence exists showing that journalists currently employed on the Times and the Sunday Times were involved in the phone hacking and that damaging revelations were printed in the Sun from information possibly collected by illegal hacking."

The claims prompted an immediate response from News International, which vigorously denied that any of its titles apart from the NoW were under investigation. "We do not believe Tom Watson has any evidence to support his allegation," a spokesman for the company said. "It is not a coincidence that he has made such cowardly and unsubstantiated claims under the cloak of parliamentary privilege. If he has any evidence we urge him to send it to us and we will take immediate action."

Watson said he had passed all information in his possession to the Metropolitan police. He launched a scathing attack on Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun and News of the World editor who is now chief executive of News International. "She may accuse me of being cowardly but she has resisted three attempts by a parliamentary committee to interview her over ... matters to do with phone hacking."

Brooks repeatedly refused to appear before the Commons culture, media and sport committee to answer questions about phone hacking on the grounds that she was not running the company when it took place.

Prescott called on the government to extend the three-week consultation period on the proposed BSkyBdeal until the Met's phone-hacking inquiry is completed.

Mulcaire was jailed for illegally intercepting messages left on mobile phones in January 2007 along with Clive Goodman, the News of the World's former royal

No action against police who 'bungled' hacking case

By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman

The Independent

Thursday, 3 March 2011

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Scotland Yard has not taken any disciplinary action against officers on the original inquiry into phone hacking despite mounting evidence that they failed to follow leads and misled potential victims about the amount of information on them held by a jailed private investigator.

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed that no officer has been disciplined as a result of failings in the heavily criticised investigation into Glenn Mulcaire, who illegally accessed voicemails for the News of the World.

Since the launch of the new inquiry in January, detectives have made connections between cases and identified new victims who were previously told by officers that there was "little or no" information about them in files seized from Mr Mulcaire's home. Investigators have also been working with new email evidence that had apparently been undetected in the archives of the NOTW's owner, News International.

Operation Weeting appears to be evidence of the Met's determination to crack a case which has damaged its reputation. But questions remain about the original inquiry, led by Assistant Commissioners Andy Hayman and John Yates. They have defended the inquiry, pointing out that it led to the jailing of Mr Mulcaire and the NOTW's royal editor Clive Goodman and had sent out an important warning to reporters.

A Commons committee criticised the Met for not interviewing any journalists beyond Goodman, inquiring into the contract with Mulcaire or forcing the paper to disclose further information.

Referring to an emailed transcript marked "for Neville" – an apparent reference to the NOTW's chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck – the Media Select Committee said: "The email was a strong indication both of additional lawbreaking and of the possible involvement of others. These matters merited thorough police investigation

RFK assassin in bid for freedom claims 'I was brainwashed' into killing

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 12:43 AM on 1st March 2011

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361455/Robert-Kennedy-assassin-Sirhan-Bishara-claims-I-brainwashed-freedom-bid.html#ixzz1FSOA4ew6

Sirhan Sirhan claims not to remember killing

Lawyer claims he was 'brainwashed' and memory erased

The man who assassinated Robert Kennedy says he was ‘hypno-programmed’ into carrying out the attack.

The claim is at the centre of the latest appeal by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who shot RFK dead in a crowded hotel kitchen in Los Angeles in June 1968.

The murder changed the course of U.S. history. Kennedy was on course to win the Democratic nomination and may well have beaten Richard Nixon to the White House.

Freedom: Sirhan Sirhan will begin his bid for freedom in California on Wednesday

Caught: Sirhan is charged with the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy

His lawyer is expected to argue in a California parole hearing that he was a 'Manchurian Candidate', brainwashed into assassinating RFK in June 1968.

After years of hypnotherapy and psychological examination,attorney William Pepper said there was, 'no doubt he does not remember the critical events.'

Mr Pepper, who will argue for Sirhan's parole on Wednesday said: 'He is not feigning it. It's not an act. He does not remember it.

'It was very clear to me that this guy did not kill Bob Kennedy.'

Sirhan was convicted of shooting Robert Kennedy in the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Kennedy was there after claiming victory in the California presidential primary.

According to the New York-based lawyer, who also is a British barrister, there was a second gunman who shot and killed RFK.

More...U.S. Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy 'rented a Chilean brothel for the entire night', claimed FBI files

Proponents of the second gun man theory contend that 13 shots were fired at RFK while Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets, and that the fatal shot appeared to come from behind Kennedy while Sirhan faced him.

Mr Pepper also suggests Sirhan was 'hypno-programmed,' turning him into a virtual 'Manchurian Candidate,' acting robot-like at the behest of evil forces who then wiped his memory clean.

The claims are however not expected to have any bearing on the outcome of the parole hearing.

The board is not being asked to retry the case and lawyers are not allowed to present evidence relating to guilt or innocence.

At issue is whether Sirhan, 66, remains a threat to others or to himself, whether he has accepted responsibility for the crime and expressed adequate remorse and whether he has an acceptable parole plan if he is released.

Stricken: Robert Kennedy moments after being shot

His lack of memory makes expressions of remorse and accepting responsibility difficult.

It is not known whether Sirhan will address the hearing at Pleasant Valley men's prison in Coalinga.

He has rarely commented during 13 past parole hearings and some instances has not shown up at all.

If Sirhan is released, he would be the first imprisoned political assassin to win parole in the U.S.

In one of many emotional outbursts during his trial, Sirhan blurted out that he had committed the crime 'with 20 years of malice aforethought,' a statement that could now come back to haunt him.

When arrested Sirhan also said: 'I did it for my country'.

Mr Pepper notes has a personal tie to Kennedy, having been chairman of his citizens' committee when he ran for Senate in 1964.

Dynasty: The Kennedy brothers, John F. Kennedy (left) Robert Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy (right). The 'curse of the Kennedy's' blighted promising careers

Pepper also represented Martin Luther King's assassin, James Earl Ray, through 10 years of appeals and a civil trial which he said proved that Ray was not King's killer.

David Dahle, head Los Angeles deputy district attorney for parole candidates serving life sentences, said his remarks at the hearing will depend on what is presented by the defence.

'At this point, I am sceptical that I will see something that will cause me to not oppose the grant of parole,' he said.

Few high profile prisoners have been released in the California system.

Charles Manson and his followers have been repeatedly turned down for parole.

Manson follower Susan Atkins attended her final parole hearing on a gurney dying of cancer but was denied release and died in prison three weeks ago

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361455/Robert-Kennedy-assassin-Sirhan-Bishara-claims-I-brainwashed-freedom-bid.html#ixzz1FSOA4ew6

Marilyn Monroe: the unseen files

A new book reveals the extraordinary contents of Marilyn Monroe's private filing cabinets, thought lost for over 40 years after her death

By Tim Auld 7:00AM GMT 27 Feb 2011

The Telegraph

Printed March 2, 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8340357/Marilyn-Monroe-the-unseen-files.html

In November 2005 Millington Conroy, a businessman living in Rowland Heights, 40 miles east of Los Angeles, contacted Mark Anderson, a successful magazine photographer, to discuss an unusual commission.

He had in his possession two metal filing-cabinets, one brown, one grey, containing private papers and a collection of furs, jewellery and other assorted memorabilia, all belonging to Marilyn Monroe. Would Anderson be interested in photographing the collection?

The material – about 10,000 documents – had been thought lost for more than 40 years since the death of Monroe on the night of 4 August 1962. Now, here it was, a treasure trove, languishing in a Californian suburb.

It was the commission of a lifetime, the largest undocumented Monroe archive in existence. Yes, of course Anderson was interested, and, with the help of the biographer and Monroe aficionado Lois Banner, he set about creating a record of the archive's contents, which is now to be published for the first time as a book.

There are letters from Monroe glowing with admiration for Robert Kennedy; a half-finished love letter to her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio found in her room after she died from a drug overdose; unseen pictures of Monroe as a child and young woman; touching fan mail; rare insights into her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller; and extensive documentation of her squabbles with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century-Fox.

Related Articles

• The private files of Marilyn Monroe

28 Feb 2011

In these documents the flesh-and-blood Monroe, usually lost in the heady blaze of the images of her on film and in glamour photographs, comes alive in the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life.

We can see her bookshop receipt for The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, volumes one, two and three (she was a slave to therapy); the newspaper cuttings, both flattering and critical; her witty little telegrams. Then there are the bills for enemas, facials and prescription drugs, the uppers and downers that in her later years carried her through the day, and eventually killed her.

Frank Sinatra, one of Monroe's lovers, is said to have suggested she buy the filing cabinets to protect her privacy when she was living in New York in 1958. In early 1962, when she moved to Brentwood, Los Angeles, she had the cabinets shipped down.

The grey one, containing private correspondence, was kept in the guest cottage at the Brentwood house; the brown one, containing business records, was stored across town in her office at Twentieth Century-Fox studios.

One account of Monroe's last night claims that she actually died in the guest cottage and was subsequently moved to her bedroom in the main house and rearranged on her bed.

What is certain is that sometime on the night of 4 August the cabinet in the guest cottage was broken into, and that crucial files were removed – perhaps pertaining to Monroe's relationship with the Kennedys and their links with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, perhaps to her contractual arrangements with Twentieth Century-Fox.

How did these immensely valuable cabinets manage to vanish for so long only to resurface in a quiet corner of suburban California? The key to the mystery is Inez Melson, Monroe's business manager in the mid-1950s, guardian of Monroe's schizophrenic mother, and, following Monroe's death, administrator of her Los Angeles holdings.

In the days and weeks after Monroe died Melson, who received nothing in Monroe's will (the bulk of the estate and her personal effects were left to Lee and Paula Strasberg, her acting coaches), made sure the filing cabinets ended up in her possession.

She had the brown cabinet at Twentieth Century-Fox transported to her home in Hollywood Hills, and, fraudulently, using the name of one of her nephews, bought the grey cabinet for $25 at the Monroe Estate auction she herself had organised. Upon her death in 1985 Melson left her collection, including the cabinets, to her sister-in-law Ruth Conroy, who, upon her death, bequeathed it to her son Millington.

In the course of their research, it soon became apparent to Anderson and Banner that Melson had acquired the contents of her archive illegally and that Strasberg's third wife, Anna, was in fact the legal owner of the material.

'We told Mill what we had found,' writes Banner. 'Realising that his ownership of the collection could be in jeopardy, he threatened to sell it on the black market… We wanted to ensure that the [collection] remained intact and that it would eventually be shown to the public; so we informed Anna Strasberg of its existence. We were not privy to her ensuing negotiations with Mill. All we know is that, in the end, they reached a settlement.'

What is astonishing about the archive, says Banner, is quite how much material has survived, and also its quality. Amid the mass of bills, cheques, contracts and publicity shots there are insights into the most private corners of her life.

Monroe grew up effectively an orphan. She never knew her father, and her mother's illness meant Monroe spent her childhood and teenage years being passed from family to family, including a spell at the Los Angeles Orphan Home. She was left with a lifelong desire to truly belong in a family, and to bring up children of her own.

Monroe's horror at the idea of not being able to get pregnant is made starkly and rather zanily clear by a handwritten letter she taped to her stomach before having her appendix removed in 1952: 'Cut as little as possible,' it reads. 'I know it seems vain but that doesn't really come into it. The fact I'm a woman is important. You have children and you must know what it means. For God's sakes Dear Doctor no ovaries removed.'

Monroe suffered three miscarriages in the mid-1950s while married to the playwright Arthur Miller, and the archive is full of reminders of how painful that time must have been. There's a receipt for a maternity dress Miller bought, and a letter of condolence from the poet Louis Untermeyer, which sums up the paradox of her life – at once adored by millions and isolated in her suffering: 'It's grimly ironic that while the rest of the country was enjoying the comedy of your impersonations in Life [the December 1958 issue had a shoot in which Monroe spoofed the great sirens of history], you were going through your personal tragedy… Arthur's tribute was a model of good taste, artistic balance, and love. It must be an added comfort to know that everyone loves you – especially now.'

Most extraordinary is a letter she and Miller received on 24 January 1958, in the aftermath of her third miscarriage, offering them a child to adopt: 'Wonder if you might be interested in the adoption of a baby girl, that was born to an unwed mother about the same time your wife lost her child. It is a healthy and beautiful baby and the mother feels that you people would really make a good happy home for her… If you are interested you can reach me by phone.'

Would Monroe have been a good mother? Who can tell? But letters she wrote to her stepchildren, Bobby and Jane Miller, reveal a playfulness and understanding of childhood needs and disappointments that would surely have stood her in good stead.

In August 1957 we find her writing to them at summer camp in the guise of their basset hound, Hugo (she also wrote to them as their Siamese cat, Sugar Finney): 'It sure is lonesome round here! I made a mistake and I am sorry, but I chewed up one of your baseballs. I didn't mean to. I thought it was a tennis ball and that it wouldn't make any difference but Daddy and Marilyn said that they would get you another one, so is it all right for me to keep playing with this one as long as you are getting a new one? Love from your friend and ankle-chewer.'

The light-hearted, but slightly wistful tone of these letters (the word lonesome crops up again and again in her letters to the children at this time) are made more poignant by the fact that on 1 August Monroe had suffered her second miscarriage.

Anderson and Banner's selection of material presents Monroe in a positive light. She is a woman fighting to control her image in a man's world; a talented comic actress compared by directors to Garbo and Chaplin; a caring stepmother; a clever correspondent; a trustworthy friend.

The authors do not, however, gloss over her petulance ('I am exceedingly sorry but I do not like it,' reads her curt telegram to Twentieth Century-Fox on being sent the script for Pink Tights, which she'd already decided she did not want to make); nor over her refusal to compromise, which during the filming of The Misfits led to Dorothy Jeakins – a major Hollywood costume designer who had done costumes for Monroe on both Niagara and Let's Make Love – leaving the film ('I'm sorry I have displeased you. I feel quite defeated – like a misfit, in fact,' wrote Jenkins). Angry legal spats also bear witness to her legendary lateness, which resulted in almost everything she worked on running over schedule.

Despite knowing how infuriating she could be, it remains impossible not to like Monroe. She had a wit worthy of Mae West ('There is only one way he could comment on my sexuality and I'm afraid he has never had the opportunity!' she wrote of Tony Curtis, though he would later claim to have been her lover) and an ability to remain winsome even in adversity.

After she was fired from the film Something's Got to Give in 1962, as her drug habit escalated, she wrote to George Cukor, the director: 'I blame myself but never you. The next weekend I will do any painting, cleaning, brushing you need around the house. I can also dust.'

Marilyn always said it was the people and not the studios who had made her famous, and we see the best of her when she reaches out to her public. She received thousands of fan letters each week, and was meticulous about filing away those that had particularly touched her.

There is a charming letter from a 17-year-old Italian boy, who is clearly entirely overcome: 'I imagine that you and I dance wrapped in a sky of stars, and they smile on us.' He requests a lock of Monroe's hair. Monroe is clearly touched because along with the letter is found a note by her: 'Pic of him and dedication autographed and returned also a lock of hair. Also a letter which I will carry next to my heart always.'

Equally moving is a note from the mother of a soldier who saw Monroe perform in Korea in 1955. She quotes from the letter her son sent her: 'When she appeared on the stage, there was just a sort of gasp from the audience – a single gasp multiplied by the 12,000 soldiers present… The broadcasting system was extremely poor… However, it didn't matter. Had she only walked out on stage and smiled it would have been enough.'

If representatives of the Kennedys did remove documents from the filing cabinet on the night of Monroe's death, and Lois Banner is certain that they did ('I know who took them and what happened to them, but I don't feel at liberty to say at this point,' Banner told me), they were pretty thorough. The archive now has almost no material relating to Monroe's relationships with JFK and Robert Kennedy, which are thought to have dominated the final months of her life.

Tantalisingly, she makes two references to Robert Kennedy in letters written on 2 February 1962, the day after she had attended a dinner in the attorney general's honour. To Arthur Miller's son, Bobby, she writes: 'I had to go to this dinner last night as [Robert Kennedy] was the guest of honor and when they asked him who he wanted to meet, he wanted to meet me. So, I went to the dinner and I sat next to him, and he isn't a bad dancer either. But I was mostly impressed with how serious he is about civil rights.'

She is rather more circumspect when relating the incident to Miller's father, Isidore: '[Robert Kennedy] seems rather mature and brilliant for his thirty-six years, but what I liked best about him, besides his Civil Rights program, is he's got such a wonderful sense of humor.'

Smitten? Maybe. There are certainly no other letters here that emanate this wide-eyed flirty glow. But the remaining documents from Monroe's last spring and summer offer no hint as to where this relationship might have gone.

Instead there are ledgers and memos charting the increasingly poor state of Monroe's finances and revealing that her main expenditure was on medical bills. There is an eerie absence of anything else. Where are the letters from friends, the fan mail, the urgent telegrams of former times?

Stolen, perhaps? Or had the isolation that Marilyn always so feared begun to close around her. The only hint of human warmth to be found among a sea of cheques and tumbling balances is a note, signed with a heart, from Monroe's acting coach Paula Strasberg: 'Have faith,' it reads.

MM – Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe (Abrams, £22.50), by Lois Banner with photographs by Mark Anderson, published on Tuesday, is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk) at £20.50 plus £1.25

Assassin maintains he can't remember shooting RFK

Posted: Feb 28, 2011 3:18 AM CST Updated: Feb 28, 2011 5:58 PM CST

http://www.wfmj.com/Global/story.asp?S=14152495

By LINDA DEUTSCH

AP Special Correspondent

LOS ANGELES (AP) - More than four decades after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his convicted murderer wants to go free for a crime he says he can't remember.

It is not old age or some memory-snatching disease that has erased an act Sirhan Bishara Sirhan once said he committed "with 20 years of malice aforethought." It's been this way almost from the beginning. Hypnotists and psychologists, lawyers and investigators have tried to jog his memory with no useful result.

Now a new lawyer is on the case and he says his efforts have also failed.

"There is no doubt he does not remember the critical events," said William F. Pepper, the attorney who will argue for Sirhan's parole Wednesday. "He is not feigning it. It's not an act. He does not remember it."

Sirhan may not remember much about the night of June 4, 1968, but the world remembers.

They have heard how Sirhan was grabbed as he emptied a pistol in the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel here where Kennedy stood moments after claiming victory in the California presidential primary. They heard how he kept firing even as his hand was pinned to a table. They heard how Kennedy, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was shot and died, changing the course of American history.

Parole Board members are bound to review those facts, but they won't consider the many conspiracy theories floated over the years.

Pepper, a New York-based lawyer who also is a British barrister, is the latest advocate of a second gunman theory. Believers claim 13 shots were fired while Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets and that the fatal shot appeared to come from behind Kennedy while Sirhan faced him.

Pepper also suggests Sirhan was "hypno-programmed," turning him into a virtual "Manchurian Candidate," acting robot-like at the behest of evil forces who then wiped his memory clean. It's the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood movies, but some believe it is the key.

How Pepper plans to use any of this to his client's advantage remains to be seen because it will have little bearing on the decision of the panel that must determine if Sirhan is suitable for parole. The board is not being asked to retry the case and lawyers may not present evidence relating to guilt or innocence.

At issue is whether Sirhan, 66, remains a threat to others or to himself, whether he has accepted responsibility for the crime and expressed adequate remorse and whether he has an acceptable parole plan if he is released.

His lack of memory makes expressions of remorse and accepting responsibility difficult.

Sirhan could address that if he speaks at the hearing at Pleasant Valley men's prison in Coalinga. Whether he'll do that is uncertain. He has rarely commented during 13 past parole hearings and sometimes hasn't shown up at all.

Pepper said in an interview with The Associated Press that he has had Sirhan examined several times by psychologist Daniel Brown of Harvard University, an expert in hypnosis of trauma victims. He will not disclose exactly what was accomplished in the sessions but said, "There have been substantial breakthroughs."

Pepper said he may have more to say after the hearing.

"It was very clear to me that this guy did not kill Bob Kennedy," said Pepper.

Asked who did kill the senator, he said, "I believe I have it but I'm not going to deal with it at this time."

In one of many emotional outbursts during his trial, Sirhan blurted out that he had committed the crime "with 20 years of malice aforethought," a statement that could now come back to haunt him. That and his declaration when arrested: "I did it for my country" were his only relevant comments before he said he didn't remember shooting Kennedy.

Public opinion could be an invisible force in the board's decision.

If Sirhan is released, he would be the first imprisoned political assassin to win parole in this country. James Earl Ray, convicted of killing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jack Ruby, convicted of killing John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, both died in prison.

Sirhan was originally sentenced to death over objections by Kennedy family members who said they wanted no more killing. The sentence was commuted to life in prison when the U.S. Supreme Court briefly outlawed the death penalty in 1972.

Kennedy's son, Maxwell, who has spoken for the family previously, did not return phone calls from the AP regarding Sirhan.

The lawyer notes that he has a personal tie to Kennedy, having been chairman of his citizens' committee when he ran for Senate in 1964.

Pepper also represented James Earl Ray, through 10 years of appeals and a civil trial which he said proved that Ray was not King's killer. By then Ray was dead.

David Dahle, head Los Angeles deputy district attorney for parole candidates serving life sentences, said his remarks at the hearing will depend on what is presented by the defense.

"At this point, I am skeptical that I will see something that will cause me to not oppose the grant of parole," he said.

Few high profile prisoners have been released in the California system. Charles Manson and his followers have been repeatedly turned down for parole. Manson follower Susan Atkins attended her final parole hearing on a gurney dying of cancer but was denied release and died in prison three weeks later.

Dahle said the board will review Sirhan's behavior in prison and whether the explosive outbursts of the young man who stood trial in 1969 have continued as he aged. By all accounts, Sirhan has been a model prisoner. But he said there will also be discussions of how he might adjust to life on the outside.

His brother, Munir Sirhan, 64, will submit a statement and a plan for Sirhan to live with him in his Pasadena home if released. However, even Pepper says that is an unlikely prospect because Sirhan, who was a Palestinian immigrant from Jordan, will be considered an illegal alien and would be turned over to immigration officials for deportation.

Munir Sirhan told The Associated Press he has made arrangements with a family in Jordan to house Sirhan if he is deported there.

"I hope it comes out in his favor," said Munir Sirhan. "As Christians we hold a lot of faith. I stand ready to help him in any way possible. If he is not deported our house is still here for him. We feel for the senator, God rest his soul. But 43 years is a long time. "

Both Pepper and Dahle said Sirhan's Middle Eastern connections have always provided a backdrop for considerations of parole.

"I don't think there will ever be a disconnect between issues of Middle East politics and this case," said Dahle.

Pepper said Sirhan is a victim of misperception because of his Palestinian Arab background. He said most assume Sirhan is a Muslim and some have referred to him as "the first terrorist." In fact, he said, Sirhan is a Christian and had no ties to terrorist groups.

Among those attending the hearing will be one of the victims. William Weisel, who was an ABC-TV director, was shot in the stomach.

"There's no doubt he was the shooter," Weisel said. "Whether or not there was another one, I don't know. If there were 13 shots, who was the other shooter?"

Having covered the White House through seven presidents, he said he does not ascribe to conspiracy theories because, "The government can't keep a secret."

However, Weisel said he will tell the parole board he has no objection to Sirhan's release "if the district attorney and the parole board decide it's to everyone's advantage."

Another surviving shooting victim, Paul Schrade, said he was not attending and would have no comment.

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AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch covered the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Sirhan trial in 1968-69.