Douglas Caddy

This subject is thoroughly discussed in Russ Baker's magnificent book, Family of Secrets. I alluded to it in my posting on the forum last December: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15089 Russ Baker, author of the best-seller book, "Family of Secrets", will be the guest on the radio show coasttocoastam Saturday night, December 5. He spoke at the recent COPA conference in Dallas and in his informative remarks stressed that those assembled had not focused enough research upon the connection of George H.W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination. Bush was in Dallas on the day of the assassination but created a false trail of his whereabouts on that day by later making a long distance phone call from Tyler, Texas. After hearing Mr. Baker speak at COPA, I subsequently sent him an email about something that should have been included in his book. In 1986, I was informed by a contract agent under contract with the IRS Criminal Intelligence Division that the IRS had uncovered an illegal $10 million fund set up by George H.W. Bush as part of the presidential campaign to re-elect Reagan-Bush in 1984. The fund was administered by Bob Eckels, the County Judge of Harris County (Houston, Texas), who was close to Bush. After he retired, Eckels told the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post newspapers that he was writing a book about deep, dark secrets that he knew, which I interpreted as being a threat to tell about the secret $10 million illegal fund, among other things. I filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in the late 1980's, requesting the Commission to look into the illegal campaign fund. The Commission took my request seriously and launched an investigation. However, before it could complete its work Bob Eckels suddenly died. His unexpected death raised a question in my mind. So while the Commission was unable to complete its investigation, it did issue a formal opinion for the record that it had found "reason to believe" that the $10 million fund had existed. The FBI later interviewed me about the fund but the agents seemed only interested in finding out how I had had learned about the fund rather than investigating its illegality. As a postscript, the IRS District Director for Houston resigned the day after Clinton was elected President in 1992.

Weekend Edition January 29 - 31, 2010 CounterPunch Diary By ALEXANDER COCKBURN http://www.counterpunch.org/ David Price has a major scoop in our latest subscriber-only newsletter. He describes how, across the past five years, without a word of public debate, let alone concern the CIA, has successfully implanted spy schools on 22 university campuses across the country, many of them labeled “Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence” – ICCAE, pronounced “Icky”. It began in 2004,” Price reports, when “a $250,000 grant was awarded to Trinity Washington University by the Intelligence Community for the establishment of a pilot ‘Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence’ program. Trinity was in many ways an ideal campus for a pilot program. For a vulnerable, tuition-driven struggling financial institution in the D.C. area the promise of desperately needed funds and a regionally assured potential student base, linked with or seeking connections to the DC intelligence world, made the program financially attractive.” Price’s timing is impeccable. Last Monday, the day we were preparing to send his story to press, came news that a group of Fox News’ free-lance buggers - the same who set up ACORN – had been arrested, trying for phone sabotage in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. Three of the team were caught inside Landrieu’s office. A fourth was arrested as he sat in a car a few blocks away with what the police described as “a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. Dai is a veteran of Trinity Washington University’s spook school,. funded by the “Intelligence Community”. In 2008, Dai served as associate director of ICCAE at Trinity Washington. How many wannabe Howard Hunts and G. Gordon Liddys are being turned out by the spook schools? As Price writes, “Even amid the extreme militarization prevailing in America today, the public silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs like ICCAE is extraordinary. In the last four years ICCAE has gone further in bringing government intelligence organizations openly to multiple American university campuses than any previous intelligence initiative since World War Two. Yet the program spreads with little public notice, media coverage, or coordinated multi-campus resistance.” Did any tenured faculty member at the 22 campuses now hosting spook-schools publicly raise the alarm? Twenty years ago there would have been furious demonstrations. Not now. Faculty, most notably at the University of Washington, did write anguished, even angry memos. Price quotes them. But as he writes, “it’s far from clear that these private critiques had any measurable effect, precisely because they remained private... "Tenured professors on ICCAE campuses, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and speak out, on the record, in public... the split between the public and private reactions to ICCAE has helped usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses. The intelligence community thrives on silence.” Price can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu. Our newsletter features Price’s full, exclusive story. Also in this same newsletter Peter Lee reports on the sequel to Zbigniev Brzezinski’s supremely cynical plan back in the late 1970s to fund the largest CIA operation in its history to back fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden and local opium barons in Afghanistan to overthrow the leftist regime in Kabul, supported by the Soviet Union. The sequel has involved catastrophe for Afghanistan. It’s also led to Afghanistan becoming the world’s prime opium exporter (90 per cent of world supply) – a large portion of which is spreading addiction and death across Iran, Russia and the central Asian republics. At the urging of Richard Holbrooke, civilian supremo of Obama’s Af-Pak operations, the US has now formally abandoned the goal of opium eradication in Afghanistan, happy to have Iran and Russia expend huge sums in battling what one Russian bitterly describes as a “new opium war”.

“Watergate Exposed” Book Manuscript Now part of U.S. National Archives At the request of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, a copy of the book manuscript titled, “Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Burglars Were Set-up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven” has been deposited with the National Archives. On July 11, 2007, the Nixon Library became part of the Federal system of Presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The collections previously administered by the private Nixon Library Foundation are now owned by or in the custody of the Federally-controlled Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. Please visit www.nixonlibrary.gov for more information.

Landrieu phone plot: Men arrested have links to intelligence community By Sahil Kapur Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 www.rawstory.com http://rawstory.com/2010/01/men-charged-at...lligence-links/ WASHINGTON -- Two of the three men arrested on Monday along with "ACORN pimp" James O'Keefe for "maliciously tampering" with Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) phones in her New Orleans office have ties to the United States intelligence community. The three accused by the FBI of "aiding and abetting" O'Keefe are Stan Dai, Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel. O'Keefe is 25, and the other three are 24. Dai's links to the intelligence community appear to be particularly strong. He was a speaker at Georgetown University's Central Intelligence Agency summer school program in June 2009, and is also listed as an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity in D.C. The university's president Patricia McGuire told The Associated Press that it promoted careers in intelligence but denied that it trains students to be spies. The Trinity program received a "$250,000 renewable grant from the U.S. Intelligence Community" upon launching in 2004, according to its Web site. The program's goals are stated: The IC CAE in National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation's increasing need for IC professionals who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America's national security objectives. The CIA summer school packet also notes that Dai "served as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program." Dai has been an undergraduate fellow with the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (FDD), according to his College Leadership Program award biography at the Phillips Foundation -- as Lindsay Beyerstein first reported. FDD claims that it's partly funded by the US State Department. Its Leadership Council and Board of Advisers comprise many high-profile conservative politicians and public figures -- including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), former Bush official Richard Perle and columnist Charles Krauthammer. Dai traveled to Israel for two weeks in 2004 on an FDD-sponsored trip, the Daily Herald reported. "All expenses (room, board and travel) will be assumed by FDD," FDD's Web site said of its Israel program. A host of FDD testimonials from Academic Fellows reveal that many fellows have traveled to Israel for training and field trips. The Foundation says the course includes "lectures by academics, diplomats, military and intelligence officials, and politicians from Israel, Jordan, India, Turkey and the United States." FDD proclaims that "Like America, Israel is at the forefront in the war on terrorism." Further explaining its interest in Israel, FDD declares: Both the United States and Israel are democracies, and both face the same enemy. It is this connection between Israel's experience and the future of the United States that is the essence of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. One FDD testimonial, by 2004-2005 fellow Dr. Cathal J. Nolan, highlighted the group's bond with high-level intelligence and government officials in Israel: The access which FDD provided to top government officials--and to academic, police, security service, and intelligence experts at the highest levels--was truly remarkable. I know of no other foundation or fellowship program which is able to provide so much top-level access and first-hand intelligence and security service information in so compact a form, or in such an intellectually stimulating environment. The CIA and Office of Director of National Intelligence have both told Politico that despite Dai's evident connections to the intelligence community, he never officially worked for them. Dai's co-conspirator Robert Flanagan is currently seeking a Master of Science degree from the Missouri State University's (Fairfax, Virginia) Defense and Strategic Studies program, according to his LinkedIn profile (which was captured by Beyerstein before it was taken down Tuesday.) The DSS Web site description affirms its connections to "the intelligence community": The program’s location also provides DSS with the opportunity to draw adjunct faculty members from the top ranks of government, the defense industry, and the intelligence community. The program also appears to have a close relationship with the conservative establishment. Inside Higher Ed reported in 2007 that the program's "full-time faculty of three and its nine affiliated lecturers tend to come mainly from positions in Republican administrations and conservative-leaning institutions." It appears to be an elite program and one Facebook group bills it as ardently conservative on national security and foreign policy issues. "We Do Defense (far) Right!" it proclaims: Are you preparing for the inevitable U.S. v. ChiCom War? Are you praying every night for the employment of Ballistic Missile Defense? Do you think nuclear weapons are important for American security? Do you think MAD is a trashy liberal theory? Are you educated by great professors with real life experience? Then this is the place for you. Flanagan has also blogged for the conservative Pelican Institute until as recently as this month. In one post last month, he highlighted criticisms directed at Landrieu. Flanagan's father, William Flanagan, is currently the acting US Attorney for Louisiana's western district. But because Flanagan was arrested in the state's eastern district, his father will not oversee his prosecution. The New Orleans newspaper NOLA.com, which first broke the news, reported that "one of the four was arrested with a listening device in a car blocks from the senator's offices." The FBI's affidavit noted that Flanagan and Basel were in the building with O'Keefe, and a federal law enforcement official confirmed to AP that Dai was the one in the car. The New York Times pointed out that "[t]he [FBI] affidavit did not accuse the men of trying to tap the phones, or describe in detail what they did to the equipment." But the optics of the situation have led to suspicions that bugging Landrieu's phones was their intention. Although Robert Flanagan's Facebook page has been removed, the other three all list each other as "friends" on the social networking site. All four of the men arrested in the plotMonday have well-documented conservative ties, The Associated Press revealed. Three of the suspects wrote for conservative publications while in college, and Flanagan has written for the national Pelican Institute. Flanagan's blog, flanaganreport.com, has also been deleted, but some of its content can still be found in Google's archives. In one post, Flanagan criticized former vice president Dick Cheney. Joseph Basel was listed by the University of Minnesota, Morris in 2005 as one of its fifteen "College Republicans." The publications O'Keefe and Basel wrote for while in college allegedly received money from the nonprofit education foundation The Leadership Institute. "Leadership Institute Vice President David Fenner said in a phone interview this morning that the group had 'informal, above-board relationships' with both James O'Keefe and Joseph Basel when they were college students," Talking Points Memo reported Wednesday. Landrieu's office released the following statement on the incident, according to NPR: Because the details of yesterday's incident are part of an ongoing investigation by federal authorities, our office cannot comment at this time. The community activist group ACORN slammed O'Keefe, who angered them after unveiling their ostensibly dodgy practices. "Couldn't have happened to a more deserving soul," the group posted on its Twitter feed. The incident "is further evidence of his disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda," ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis told AP in a statement.

Interview of Robert Merritt in 1973 By Watergate Special Prosecution Force The following are brief but significant excerpts from the 10-page interview: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Department of Justice Watergate Special Prosecution Force November 20, 1973 Memorandum To: Files From: Frank Martin Subject: Interview of Earl Robert Merritt (AKA Robert Chandler) Earl Robert Merritt, accompanied by his attorney, David Isbell, was interviewed on three separate occasions. On October 18 and 19, 1973, Merritt was interviewed by Martin and Hecht; on November 1, 1973, Merritt was interviewed by Martin and Akerman. Merritt is a former informer for the Metropolitan Police Department, the FBI, and on one occasion, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division of the Treasury department. October 18, 1973 Interview Merritt stated that his first contact leading to his informant work was with Carl Schoffler of the MPD. In the spring of 1970 Merritt met Schoffler but did not know until the fall of 1970 that Schoffler was an undercover policeman. In the fall of 1970, Schoffler introduced Merritt to agents of the ATF, including Bill Seals, Richard Campbell, and Dick Caldan. Merritt was told that Seals was interested in making contacts to set up buys of firearms, explosives, and narcotics. Approximately two or three weeks later in October, Merritt introduced Seals to people he knew in the Washington area as someone interested in getting into organized crime and interested in buying firearms, explosives and narcotics. From October 1970 until April 1971, Merritt worked as an informer on narcotics and street crime cases for the Metropolitan Police Department. October 19, 1973 Interview Merritt added to his description of his May Day activities. Merritt stated that he was told that if he were arrested he was not to say who he was working for but to call intelligence offices after he was at the police station. Merritt stated that his first contact with the Institute for Policy Studies was on July 15, 1971, when he obtained a flyer on Studies of Marxism to be given at IPS. He gave this flyer to Officer Robinson. Later, Robinson and Scrapper asked Merritt if he knew IPS and said that IPS would be his next assignment that he was to take classes there and subsequently, Merritt did take classes there. On September 1, 1971, there was a job opening at IPS and Scrapper told Merritt to apply for the job. Merritt applied for the job but never got it. Also, in September, Merritt found that he could not get along with Scrapper and he was then assigned to Dixie Gildon of the MPD. Later in September, Special Agents of the FBI O’Connor and Tucker came to Merritt’s apartment with Officer Schoffler. At this time they were trying to locate the residence of [redacted]. At this time Merritt mentioned his financial problem and O’Connor suggested that he come to work for the FBI. Shortly thereafter, Merritt was informed by Dixie Gildon that he had been terminated due to lack of funds and the next day he received a call from O’Connor asking Merritt to work for the FBI. Merritt’s assignment was to be the Institute for Policy Studies, and he was to continue his work there. Merritt attended meetings such as a Prison Reform meeting given by Philip Hirschkop and other meetings held at the Institute. November 1, 1973 Interview: Merritt stated that the following concerning surveillance of IPS. Merritt stated that he believes that there was surveillance going on from the Dupont Plaza Hotel because the police always went into the hotel before going to IPS. Also, Merritt had been told in a conversation with Schoffler and Seals (shortly before May Day) that the 4th floor front corner room of the Dupont Circle Hotel was used for surveillance of IPS. Merritt stated that Tucker told him that a boom and/or sourcer-type microphone was used for surveillance of IPS. Tucker told Merritt this in November 1971 right after the meeting at IPS at which Robert Wall spoke. Tucker wanted to know from Merritt whether Wall told the people at IPS that such devices were being used against them. Schoffler-[redacted] Incident Merritt provided the following information concerning the Schoffler-[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 who came to Merritt’s home. Schoffler andLeper asked Merritt if he knew [redacted] and Merritt stated that he did not know him. They then stated that [redacted] was a homosexual with pro-cuban contacts and was involved with Young Americans for Freedom. They then asked Merritt to take the assignment of getting close to [redacted], know him intimately, socially, and to get any 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 with Schoffler and arguing about several things concerning the police and Schoffler told him that the assignment to get close to [redacted] was involved with 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 Kennedy’s Subcommittee on Administration Practices and Procedures, and told him that he thought Schoffler and Leper were lying to the Select Committee. Flug suggested to Merritt that he call the Senate Select Committee, which he did. Merritt spoke to Wayne Bishop of the Senate Select Committee and began to tell his story concerning Schoffler. At first, Merritt would not identify himself and then 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. Isbell. 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 that 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 of the FBI 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 “we’d 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 “we’d hate to find you in the Potomac with cement over-shoes.” Merritt stated that there were several attempts to plant narcotics on him and in his apartment. Merritt stated that at various times he destroyed the narcotics, put them in a police car, and on one occasion, he gave heroin and a syringe that had been planted on him to Dixie Gildon. Merritt stated that there were also attempts to plant informers close to him and that one informer actually moved in with Merritt. Merritt stated that there were two burglaries of his residence at 1703 R Street, N.W. On July 11, 1973, his apartment was ransacked. That night he received a phone call from [redacted] who stated that [redacted] would meet the next day at his doctor’s office. Merritt stated that there was an appointment slip in his home at the time it was ransacked and this would be the only way that [redacted] would know he had appointment. Merritt did not go to the doctor’s appointment, and instead, Mr. Isbell went and confronted [redacted.] Merritt stated that there was another burglary of this house on August 6, 1973. Merritt stated that he was followed on several occasions and on June 15, 1973, noted that he was being followed by a car bearing D.C. tag 781-456. Merritt confirmed through Dixie Gildon that this was an FBI car. Merritt stated that on Sunday, October 28, 1973, there was an entry into his house through the back door. On October 31, 1973, Merritt was told by a repairman that the flu in his hot water heater had been stopped up and that poisonous carbon monoxide was accumulating within the house. Merritt and his attorney, Mr. Isbell, stated that they would provide further documentation on Merritt’s allegations. [End of interview of Robert Merritt] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Commentary for the reader on the above interview of Robert Merritt: 1) Carl Schoffler’s correctly spelled last name is Shoffler. 2) Merritt’s attorney, David Isbell, was principal partner in the law firm of Covington and Burling. 3) The name Douglas Caddy, original attorney for the Watergate Seven, should be inserted in the pertinent redacted sections in the “Schoffler-[redacted] incident.” 4) On May 31, 1972, a highly unlikely source told Merritt about the break-in planned for Watergate on June 18, 1972. The next day, June 1, 1972, Merritt attempted to tell MPD Sergeant Dixie Gildon of what he had learned from his source but failed in this attempt. That same day, around 6 P.M., Shoffler returned to the apartment that he shared with Merritt and Merritt told him what he had learned from his source about the planned break-in. Shoffler ordered Merritt not to tell anyone else about this information and then departed their apartment. Later that evening Shoffler returned to the apartment with two men and had Merritt relate in detail to them what he had learned. Two days later, on June 3, 1972, FBI Agents Bill Tucker and Terry O’Connor appeared at the door of Merritt’s apartment and informed him that they had heard that there had been a meeting in his apartment a few days previously at which he disclosed information about a planned break-in at some location. In the two previous months Merritt had become totally disenchanted with his FBI assignments because these two agents had ordered Merritt not to attend his own mother’s funeral in West Virginia in April 1972, had physically threatened him subsequently and had the FBI discharge him as a Confidential Informant. For this reason Merritt refused to answer their inquiry. About two weeks later, two days after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, FBI Agents Tucker and O’Connor again appeared at Merritt’s front door and demanded that he inform them of any information he might have about the break-in. On this occasion, as disclosed in the above excerpts from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force interview of Merritt, Agent Tucker told Merritt that “he should remember what happened to someone else who he knew and stated, ‘we’d hate to find you in the Potomac with cement over-shoes.” Merritt interpreted this as an overt threat, especially so in light of the sudden recent disappearance from the face of the earth of someone he knew who had knowledge of the events leading up to the break-in. Merritt was deathly afraid of Agent Tucker but not of Agent O’Connor and had O’Connor appeared alone without Tucker at his door would have told him everything he knew about the origins of Watergate. 5) When Merritt spoke to Wayne Bishop, who was on the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee, and attempted to tell him the full story about the origins of Watergate, Bishop responded by threatening Merritt. This incident took place as Merritt was entering the Senate Building to testify before the Senate Watergate Committee in Executive Session, having been previously served with a subpoena. Bishop warned Merritt that if he attempted to tell what he knew about the origins of Watergate that he would be arrested and charged with perjury and with obstruction of justice. Bishop said that Merritt was a known homosexual and thus “had no credibility.” Bishop told Merritt that he should leave the Senate Building immediately and that Bishop would inform the Committee that Merritt would not be able to testify because he had suddenly been taken ill. Bishop’s overt threats and belligerent attitude instilled fear in Merritt, who felt he was but a single individual against whom were aligned the most powerful forces in the land. It left him with the impression that the Senate Watergate Committee was not interested in finding out what really happened in Watergate. 6) Merritt believes that Shoffler and other Intelligence Agents with whom Shoffler associated were behind the burglaries at his residence at 1703 R St., N.W. and attempts to have him die by stuffing rags in the flu of his hot water heater, so that carbon monoxide would accumulate. He believes some of these Intelligence agents might have worked with Shoffler in devising the wiretap triangulation by which Shoffler setup the Watergate burglars that led to their arrests on June 17, 1972.

His arrests of the burglars at Watergate on June 17, 1972, brought instant fame to Detective Carl Shoffler. About a month after the case broke Robert Merritt asked Shoffler how he was enjoying his new celebrity status. Shoffler’s reply revealed his frustration, “I’m not. I have to be careful. I am involved in so many things that I cannot afford to get more attention focused on me.” Shoffler found himself trapped in a tar pit of his own making once he succeeded as being known as ‘the world’s greatest detective.” Merritt knew among the numerous illegal things was Shoffler’s use of wiretap triangulation to set-up the burglars for arrests. Shoffler had described to Merritt how the triangulation worked but used a simple example. The actual triangulation, according to Shoffler, was “more detailed and sophisticated." Merritt, based on his work and experience as a Confidential Informant for the Washington police and FBI, estimated that perhaps 30 persons were involved, but with only 3 or 4 of these actually knowing its true purpose. The others naively carried out the tasks to which they were assigned, believing it to be a legitimate law enforcement/national security operation. Such an operation had to employ agents of a Government Intelligence organization. A few weeks ago as Merritt was completing his new book, “Watergate Exposed,” he received a phone call from the New York Police Department. The NYPD inquired whether he wanted to become an active CI again. NYPD was aware that he had files that could “make” 88 major felony arrests. After a period of brief contemplation Merritt agreed and was assigned a CI number. He informed the NYPD that he did not want monetary payment for his work but instead requested as part of the deal that the remaining eight month probation of a 22 year-old small-time Black drug dealer be canceled. The young man in Merritt’s opinion had saved his life when he fell from a serious heart condition on the street near his residence. Other passers-by offered no assistance as he lay prone on the sidewalk. In the last few days Merritt has discovered that NYPD is reneging on its agreement with him and instead wants to squeeze as much CI work out of him as it can while doing nothing to end the eight month probation of the young man. This has caused Merritt to cease his active CI work. Also something strange arose from the matter. The narcotics detective to whom he was assigned two weeks ago informed him this week that no one in NYPD could access his U.S. Government files. His files containing all the information about him-- date of birth, social security, CI history and everything else – are now marked “Access Restricted.” When Merritt learned this, he asked another acquaintance high in NYPD to double-check and he got the same result – “Access Restricted.” No one in NYPD has ever seen such files marked so that entry is denied. Merritt does not know what this means. My guess is that because of the dissemination of the new Watergate information that he has disclosed on the Education Forum, Government authorities at the highest level have imposed the “Access Restricted" while they gather records on Shoffler and Merritt from sundry places. Only a few days ago a U.S. Secret Service Agent casually informed Merritt that the Agency is following closely all postings on the Education Forum about him and Shoffler. There may yet be a major investigation of what really happened in Watergate.

A Series of Missed Opportunities There would have been no Watergate Soon after Merritt began working in January 1970 as a Confidential Informant for the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Officer Carl Shoffler expanded his CI duties to intelligence gathering. In this capacity Merritt reported to Sergeant Dixon Gildon, who was a senior officer in the MPD Intelligence Division. So when he learned from his highly unlikely source on May 31, 1972, of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee scheduled for June 18, he attempted to alert Sgt. Gildon. He telephoned her the next day, on June 1, 1972, and said, “Dixie, I have a matter of national security that I need to talk to you about as soon as possible.” Sgt. Gillon responded, “ I’m rushing to a meeting. I’ll see you later.” Merritt and Gildon had a working arrangement to meet at a set time during the day to exchange intelligence information. But for some reason Gildon failed to show up later that day at their pre-arranged meeting place. Subsequently, on that same day, June 1, Merritt rendezvoused with Shoffler at the apartment they shared at 2122 P Street, N.W. He told Shoffler what he had learned from his unlikely source about the planned break-in. Shoffler had met the unlikely source on a number of times as the source was a close friend of Merritt and frequently visited the apartment on P Street. Shoffler became excited at what Merritt told him and instructed Merritt to talk to no one about what he had learned. Shoffler specifically told Merritt not to inform Gildon who, for whatever reason, never followed up with Merritt about the urgent phone call that he had made to her. The next opportunity that arose for Merritt to tell what he knew about the origins of Watergate was in October 1972 when Gildon came to his apartment at 1705 R St., N.W., where he had relocated upon Shoffler’s direction. Merritt had worked closely with Gildon for over two years. She even on one occasion had him as a dinner guest in her spacious home in Maryland where she resided with her husband, a successful contractor, and their daughter and son. Because she was in MPD Intelligence and worked undercover, she always wore street clothes. But on her visit to Merritt in October – one month after Hunt, Liddy, McCord and the four Cuban-Americans had been indicted – Gildon was dressed in her police uniform. Instead of giving him a friendly hug as she normally did, she begged off, saying she had a cold. She then crossed the room and turned off the television. When she did so, Merritt spotted a bulge in her back and realized she was wearing a wire to record their conversation. Gildon started by bluntly asking Merritt, “Have you ever had sex with Carl Shoffler?” Merritt, aware he was being recorded, merely gave her a non-committal smile. Gildon the said, “Butch, have you run across something that Intelligence should know about, maybe even something that Carl has told you? Are you hiding something and not telling us? Did you tell something to Carl that we don’t know about?” She paused for a second and then declared, “It’s possible that you learned something on your own that is so volatile and sensitive that could destroy the presidency. We know you are good at what you do but we also know that you are not politically astute.” Merritt merely shrugged his shoulders and did not verbally respond. Gildon continued, “You should know that eyebrows being raised about Carl. Some people think he knows more about the Watergate arrests than he is letting on.” Merritt responded, “If you think so, why doesn’t MPD question him directly?” Gildon replied, “There are difficulties in doing that. He has reached celebrity status. Plus he is very clever.” Merritt asked, “What about giving him a polygraph test then? “ Gildon rejected the idea outright, saying “If it ever came out that we asked him to a take lie-detector test, it would make us look bad.” Gildon’s response triggered Merritt’s memory that Shoffler had once boasted that he had been taught at NSA’s Vint Hill Farm Station on how to beat a polygraph test. Gildon then cut to the chase. She told Merritt that “you have been involved in too many undercover activities that if disclosed would be very controversial,” clearly referring to the numerous illegal activities that he had engaged in under Shoffler’s direction and that of FBI Agents Bill Tucker and Terry O’Connor, such the theft of documents from the Institute for Policy Studies and sundry break-ins at other organizations. Gildon continued, “I realize now that I made a mistake when I told you that you were being paid for doing these things by White House funds from the Huston Plan.” She had previously informed him that an undisclosed high official in the White House was dispensing the funds for the illegal activities that Merritt had been directed to carry out. Gildon then asked Merritt to name a sum of money that it would take for him to remain quiet and relocate far from the nation’s capital. Merritt responded emphatically, knowing that his words were being recorded, “I don’t want any money and I’m not leaving Washington.” Gildon recognized by the tone of his voice that the conversation had reached a dead end. She asked Merritt to escort her to her car. When they exited the apartment building, Gildon mentioned she had parked a block away and began walking slowly. Merritt then spotted a photographer at the northeast corner of New Hampshire and R Streets who was taking their picture. He exclaimed to Gildon, “That man is photographing us” to which she replied, “What man? I don’t see anyone.” Once Gildon had driven away and he had returned to his apartment, Merritt realized that the MPD had attempted to set him up to keep him quiet about the illegal activities funded by the White House under the Huston Plan and that if he had accepted the offer of money, he would have been arrested on the spot. MPD obviously believed that he knew too much. He strongly suspected that had he accepted the money it was quite likely that he would have been quickly transported to some distant location, such as Alaska, and secretly incarcerated there or, more likely, committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and kept in a state of permanent sedation. But he also realized that her visit represented a missed chance to tell her about the origins of Watergate. Had he done so, Gildon, an ardent law-and-order Republican, might have whisked him directly to police headquarters where he would have been given protection. If that happened, the Watergate case would have taken a drastic change of direction. But then the thought came to him that because his highly unlikely source of information about the planned break-in was so shocking, the MPD probably would have chosen to cover this up rather than disclose it, even if it meant saving the presidency. The next opportunity that arose for Merritt to disclose what he knew about the origins of Watergate was when in 1973 he testified before the Senate Watergate Committee in Executive Session. After he was administered the oath to tell the truth, virtually the first question from one of the Senators was, “Are you a homosexual?” Merritt responded, “Yes”, to which there was an audible gasp by the committee members. Another Senator said, “Don’t you recognize that homosexuality is immoral and a sin?” to which Merritt replied, “I was created by God in His Image, the same way everyone in this room was.” Still another Senator virtuously proclaimed that “homosexuals have no credibility.” At that point Merritt realized that what Shoffler had warned him about was true – that if he told what he knew he would be “publicly hung” as a despised homosexual and his knowledge of the origins of Watergate curtly dismissed as lacking credibility. The next opportunity that arose for Merritt to disclose was when he met with the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in late 1973 when he repeated again what he had told the Senate Watergate Committee about the illegal activities he had engaged in under the direction of Shoffler, MPD and FBI. Prosecutor Archibald Cox was present at two of these meetings. At their second meeting Merritt began to feel that he could trust Cox and those who worked with him. He mentally decided to tell at their next meeting what he knew about the origins in defiance of Shoffler’s prior threats to him. But the very next day Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre and Merritt became afraid to spill what he knew. The next opportunity was in 1985 when Merritt wrote Chief Judge Carl Moultrie of the District of Columbia Superior Court and asked that he be allowed to testify under oath before a grand jury as to what he knew about the origins of Watergate. He received no response to his letter, so one day he showed up in the courthouse and attempted to enter the room where the grand jury was sitting to ask that he be allowed to testify. The prosecutor in the room promptly ordered armed guards to escort him out of the building. So many missed opportunities. What If Sgt. Gildon had not been rushing off to a meeting when Merritt telephoned her and if she had later shown up at their pre-arranged meeting place that same day, If she and the MPD had not tried to set him up at her meeting with him in his apartment, but instead focused solely on getting him to tell what he knew, If the Senators on the Senate Watergate Committee had not been so degrading in their insulting remarks about Merritt’s homosexuality and their alluding to the resulting lack of his credibility, If Cox had not been fired in the Saturday Night Massacre upon orders from the Nixon White House, If the Chief Judge of the Superior Court had permitted Merritt to testify before the grand jury? So now it is left to Merritt to tell his story in his book, “Watergate Exposed, A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Setup and Relates Other Dirty Government Tricks, by Robert Merritt as Told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven.”

Note: Reproduced below is the Watergate Special Prosecution Force memorandum of their interview with Carl Shoffler on December 3, 1973. This document was obtained from the U.S. National Archives and bears its official stamp. Several points need to be made with reference to the memorandum: Shoffler’s last name is misspelled as Schoffler throughout the document. Sgt. Paul Leeper’s last name is misspelled as Leper. The fourth paragraph contains four redactions; these redactions deal with my name. However, for whatever reason, my name was not redacted in the last sentence in that paragraph or in the following paragraph and appears in the document. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force interviewed Robert Merritt in depth on three occasions before their sole, two-page interview of Carl Shoffler. The Force’s ten-page, single-spaced memorandum dated November 20, 1973 opens as follows: “Earl Robert Merritt, accompanied by his attorney, David Isbell, was interviewed on three occasions. On October 18 and 19, 1973, Merritt was interviewed by Martin and Hecht; on November 1, 1973, Merritt was interviewed by Martin and Akerman. Merritt is a former informer for the Metropolitan Police Department, the FBI, and on one occasion, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division of the Treasury Department.” It should be noted that Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was present for a period of time at the October 19th Merritt interview, which was the day before Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre. Shoffler in his subsequent interview states that he “introduced Merritt to FBI Agents O’Connor and Tucker and it took about a week for them to find that he was a xxxx.” However, in preparation for writing his book Merritt obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). One of these documents is dated 3/22/72 and addressed to “Director, FBI” and states in regard to Merritt 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.” Another FBI document obtained under FOIA dated 4-12-72 and addressed to FBI SAC R.C Kunkel, states: “The file pertaining to the above-captioned informant has been reviewed by the Inspection Staff, and the informant has been rated as Excellent.” These facts should be kept in mind while reading the Force’s interview of Carl Shoffler, a/k/a Carl Schoffler. ----------- DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WATERGATE SPECIAL PROSECUTION FORCE MEMORANDUM Date: December 20, 1973 To: Files From: Frank Martin Subject: Interview of Carl Schoffler Sgt. Carl Schoffler of the Metropolitan Police Department was interviewed on December 3, 1973, by Horowitz, Akerman and Martin. Horowitz advised Shoffler of his right to counsel and his right to remain silent and Schoffler voluntarily provided the following information. From 1970 until April 1973, Schoffler worked in the Second District as a TAC officer doing semi-undercover work on street crime. Schoffler stated that he did not normally report on intelligence information but would occasionally do so if while he was working on street crime he came across any information of interest to Intelligence. Schoffler stated that he met Robert Merritt, whom he knew as Robert Chandler, in 1970 and that Merritt did some informant work on street crime for him. Schoffler stated that Merritt was giving him information almost every day and did provide some good criminal investigation work. Schoffler noted that he once provided a notebook [redacted] and was accused of various rapes and that the notebook showed the addresses of various places where this individual had been accused of committing rapes. Schoffler stated that he saw Merritt every three or four days for almost two years. Concerning May Day, Schoffler stated that he occasionally supplied information on May Day and would phone the Intelligence office and give the information to whomever answered the phone. Schoffler stated that he had some contracts with ATF and with the FBI but none with regard to May Day. Schoffler also worked some on crowd control during May Day. Schoffler introduced Merritt to Scrapper, and Merritt worked with Scrapper and with Dixie Gildon. Schoffler noted that Acree, who headed much of the Intelligence work, did not like Schoffler. Schoffler was questioned concerning the incident involving [redacted]. Schoffler stated that at some time after the Watergate arrests, Schoffler and Leper 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] on 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 testified in the Watergate hearings, Schoffler met Merritt. Merritt stated that he made all sorts of calls to Senators concerning Watergate and the Caddy incident with Schoffler. Schoffler stated that he told Merritt that if he, Merritt, reported a crime then that was one thing, but that if he reported something that was only in his head it was going to come back to him. Schoffler said that he did not in any way threaten Merritt. Schoffler stated that he introduced Merritt to FBI Agents O’Connor and Tucker and that it took a week for them to find out 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. Schoffler stated that he had never worked with Ann Koelgo. cc: Chron File Akerman Horowitz Martin

Carl Shoffler used a method of wiretap triangulation that he had learned from his prior training at the National Security Agency’s Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia to set up the burglars for arrest. As to why, this is covered in our forthcoming book.

Robert Merritt has asked me to post selected information on the Education Forum before our book, Watergate Exposed, is published because he is terminally ill. He is mentally alert and has a phenomenal memory but time is running out for him. While the book provides a wealth of material, our belief is that postings on the Forum may cause historians and other interested parties at this time to initiate their own research and investigation based on the information so provided. I first heard of Robert Merritt when I read a lengthy two-part article about him in national gay publication, The Advocate, in its February 23 and March 9, 1977 issues. In the article, “Revelations of a Gay Informant,” Merritt describes in great detail his Confidential Informant (CI) work for the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), FBI and other government agencies. Carl Shoffler, who recruited him in1970, figures prominently in his revelations. It was upon reading this article when it was published that I first became aware that Shoffler and the MPD had targeted me in the days and months after the Watergate case broke. Previously, The Daily Rag of October 5-12, 1973, which had a circulation in Washington, D.C. of 35,000, carried an interview with Merritt titled, “FBI Informer Confesses.” Again, Merritt provided incredibly detailed information about his CI work under Shoffler. I was unaware of this article, which also mentioned me being targeted, until I came into possession of a copy last year. For obvious reasons, Merritt and I do not want undercut publication of the book by posting its entire contents on the Internet via our chosen venue, the Education Forum. However, to illustrate that Merritt knows whereof he speaks he asked me to state in answer to your second question in regard to the 70 men with whom Shoffler ordered him to have sex that he subsequently provided copies of his detailed report, prepared upon completion of his assignment, to his attorneys, Mitchell Rogovin of Arnold and Porter and David Isbell of Covington & Burling. In addition he provided a copy to the Institute for Policy Studies, which had been targeted by Shoffler and the FBI. A copy, along with other valuable material provided by Merritt to Jack Anderson, can be found in the archive files of the deceased nationally syndicated columnist in the library at George Washington University. Reports on the five MPD police officers that Shoffler ordered him to have sex with can be found in the files of MPD’s Internal Affairs Division that are stored in a warehouse in Maryland. Your other questions are answered in the book. Merritt and I believe that once the book is published a treasure trove of reports, files, recollections, and other information will begin flowing from sundry unknown sources that will support the book’s revelations.

The French Connection Revisited: The CIA, Irving Brown, and Drug Smuggling as Political Warfare by Douglas Valentine http://www.covertaction.org/content/view/99/75/

WHO IS ROBERT MERRITT? By Douglas Caddy Robert Merritt and I have completed our book manuscript titled, “Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How The Burglars Were Setup and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks, by Robert Merritt As Told To Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven.” Anyone reading it cannot escape the conclusion that but for Merritt, there would have been no Watergate scandal. The manuscript, portions of which have been posted in the Watergate and JFK Assassination topics of the Education Forum, is an accurate portrayal of Merritt’s unique and painful life, which is almost as mindboggling as the scandal itself. With our 18-month collaboration accomplished, I have decided to step back and attempt to view Merritt objectively and what he had to tell. In his affidavit of December 31, 2009, posted on the Education Forum on January 1, 2010, Merritt describes some of the cruel and vicious activities he enthusiastically engaged in as a Confidential Informant (CI). These began in 1970 under the direction of Detective Carl Shoffler of the Washington Metropolitan Police (MPD), who was to gain fame later as the officer that arrested the Watergate burglars. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15182 As graphic and shocking as these activities are, they are not inclusive. Many more illegal and dirty activities that Merritt willingly engaged in are described in greater detail in the book manuscript. To give only one example: At one point Shoffler gave Merritt a list of 30 persons who worked in corporations and U.S. Government agencies along with a telephone number next to their name. The phone number was that of the person’s employer, in most cases the agency’s security office. Over a period of several days, with Shoffler at his side, Merritt used a pay phone in Peoples Drug Store near Dupont Circle to call the numbers. In reference to the targeted individual he would say either “You should be aware that Mr. X is a homosexual” or “You should be aware that Mr. X is a national security risk.” That was all it took to get the innocent person fired from his job. In the case of one man who had merely crossed Shoffler’s path in some way, the individual lost his job, his home, his wife and his children. The man was vice president of the Hecht Department Store in Washington, D.C. In addition to stating falsely that he was gay, Shoffler ordered Merritt to assert the falsehood that the man was embezzling funds from the company. While my name was not on that particular list, I, too, was targeted. In his affidavit of July 29, 2009, posted on the Education Forum on July 30, 2009, Merritt recounts how Shoffler, FBI agents and CIA agents attempted to recruit him to compromise me and, in one instance, to have me killed. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14618 Merritt is not a late bloomer in telling his story about Watergate. All any researcher or investigator had to do was to follow up on his statements to the media while the scandal was evolving. For example, Merritt in an interview in the Daily Rag of October 5-12, 1973, an alternative newspaper then published in Washington, D.C., is quoted: “In June 1972, a few days after the Watergate break-in and arrests MPD Intelligence Shoffler and Leaper approached me to get me to do one last job. They said it was the most important thing that I had ever done and it was for my country… “They wanted me to get close to Douglas Caddy [the attorney for the burglars caught inside the Watergate], who was alleged to be 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 Leaper were among the arresting officers of the burglars inside Watergate, and one of the first witnesses before the Senate Watergate Committee, Leaper testified second, and Shoffler third, I think. “When Leaper 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.” In another interview, one that Merritt gave to The Advocate, a national gay newspaper, in its issue of March 9, 1977, he again discussed how Shoffler and Leaper attempted to enlist him to get close to me by offering him money and his response to them that even if I were gay, it would be nearly impossible for him to get to know me to seduce me. The Advocate reported that “Merritt refused the offer, but that police kept returning to him with the same request, as late as December 1972, months after the city’s police claimed to have ended their Watergate investigation.” While Merritt turned down the pleas by MPD Sgts. Shoffler, Leaper and certain FBI and CIA agents to get close to me, he quite willingly participated in their shadowy campaign to smear me and destroy my professional reputation. In 1973 Shoffler gave him a list of half a dozen senators and congressmen involved in investigating the Watergate scandal, along with their private telephone numbers. Again, using the same pay phone in Peoples Drug Store and with Shoffler at his side, Merritt dropped a dime on me, reaching each senator or congressman on his private line and telling him that I was a homosexual. After the Watergate cover-up broke open, Merritt met with the Watergate Special Prosecutor, the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee and even testified before an executive session of the Committee. He candidly told these investigations about how, under the direction of Shoffler, MPD and the FBI, he had engaged in illegal activities against hundreds of targeted persons and organizations starting in 1970. According to Merritt, Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, told him after his executive session testimony: “Mr. Merritt, I believe your testimony but I am not quite certain that the American people are prepared to hear the shocking revelations that you have made.” The very next day John Dean testified before the Committee about the cover-up and as a consequence the Committee’s primary agenda shifted to removing Nixon from office. However, the Committee continued to express interest in learning more information from Merritt. At this point, Merritt’s attorney, David Isbell of Covington and Burling, refused to let Merritt testify further unless his client was granted immunity from prosecution. Such grant was not forthcoming. The overriding reason that Merritt did not speak up was because Shoffler threatened him that if he publicly told what he knew of the origins of Watergate, he would be “publicly hung” for being a homosexual and prosecuted and incarcerated for the illegal acts he had committed as a CI, even though these were done under the direction of Shoffler, the MPD and the FBI. Merritt met with the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s staff for over a week and then with Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and reached the decision in his mind to defy Shoffler and tell that group about the origins of Watergate. But the day after he met with Cox and before he could tell what he knew, Cox was fired as Special Prosecutor in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre and the FBI seized the files from the office of the Special Prosecutor. These dramatic events caused Merritt to decide not to disclose what he knew. The rest is history. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency, never learning before his death that Shoffler had setup the Watergate burglars. Had Merritt spoken up, the Vietnam War might not have ended as it did, with tens of thousands of American soldiers killed and even a larger number injured physically and/or mentally. The course of world events would have been vastly different. As serious as Shoffler’s threats were, a courageous individual would have spoken out. Whatever might have befallen Merritt had he done so paled next to the fate of American soldiers and the inhabitants of Vietnam once the war was lost. All this being so, we should be grateful that Merritt in his twilight years has come forward to set the Watergate record straight. His story, as told in Watergate Exposed, will rewrite history. I feel privileged to have been able to participate with him in this endeavor. How often does a person get a chance to collaborate with an author on a book manuscript when that author on a prior occasion had been approached the join a conspiracy to kill the person? Douglas Caddy

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0708/S00242.htm

Russ Baker in his heavily documented book, Family of Secrets, writes: "Nixon and his old nemesis JFK had both angered the same people and both had been removed from the presidency." Carl Shoffler was the arresting officer of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972. He was a Military Intelligence Officer who had been assigned to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. Robert Merritt in his affidavit below describes his relationship with Shoffler: ------------------------------- WHO WAS CARL SHOFFLER? Affidavit of Robert Merritt regarding Carl Shoffler I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following information regarding Carl Shoffler, the Washington, D.C. police detective who arrested the burglars at Watergate on June 17, 1972. The information that I am providing is derived from personal knowledge as I knew Shoffler for over 20 years, from 1970 until 1994, two years before his death at age 51. There exists a great deal of information on the public record about Shoffler. I shall not repeat it here as it can easily be accessed merely by typing “Carl Shoffler” in the Google search engine. I first laid eyes on Shoffler in December 1969 when he became part of the freak scene of a large group of persons who regularly gathered around Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Dupont Circle was within walking distance of the White House, about eight blocks away. The group of diverse persons who regularly gathered there cut across all strata of American society. There were Nazis, Communists, conservatives, liberals, straights, gays, drug dealers, drug users – you name it, they were there. Shoffler blended into the mixture easily because he was young (25 years old), had a scruffy beard and was shabbily dressed. At the time I was the most popular guy in the Dupont Circle freak scene. Everybody liked “Butch,” which was my nickname. I had a job at a nearby drug store earning just enough above subsistence level. Early in January 1970, shortly after Shoffler had begun hanging around Dupont Circle, he showed up at the drug store. He did so twice, each time conferring privately with the store’s owner. To my dismay one day early in January the owner fired me, letting me go without explanation. I was crushed and retreated to my small apartment at 2122 P St, N.W., about two blocks from Dupont Circle. My monthly rent was $35 and I feared that I would be unable to pay it. On the evening of the same day that I was fired, as I sat in my apartment and attempted to gather my wits, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, there stood Shoffler. For some reason, and I don’t know why, I was not overly surprised at seeing him. Shoffler pushed his way into my apartment and started talking. The first thing he said was that he was responsible for my being fired from the job at the drug store. The next thing he said was to take an envelope from him and open it. When I did so, there was $1000 in cash. Shoffler then informed me that he was an undercover detective with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and that I had been the object of profiling by several law enforcement agencies. These agencies had concluded that I was an ideal candidate for being recruited as a Confidential Informant (CI). I met the criteria: young, good looking, non-political and hailed from the hills of West Virginia where I had grown up. The big plus was that I was popular with the crowd that hung out at Dupont Circle, which was the initial purpose of my being recruited. Law enforcement viewed the members of the crowd as being dangerous radicals who posed a serious threat to the American way of life. Shoffler explained to me that because I was gay, I could not serve in the U.S. military. He asserted, however, that I could best serve my country and help defeat its enemies by agreeing to become a Confidential Informant and report to him on everything that was going on with the Dupont Circle scene. I accepted without hesitation, taking at face value Shoffler’s enticement without questioning it in any way. With the CI agreement then being verbally concluded, Shoffler asked if he could move into my apartment. He said that living there would facilitate his police undercover work. I was 26 years old, a year older than him. I readily agreed and we sealed the arrangement by downing a few beers. When it became late, Shoffler lay down on the couch and I climbed into my bed. I had hardly closed my eyes before I felt Shoffler sliding into bed beside me. He lost no time in performing oral sex, thus initiating our homosexual relationship that lasted for several years. The next day, to give me cover, Shoffler arranged for two of his fellow officers to “arrest”, hand-cuff, and place me in a police vehicle right in front of the Dupont Circle crowd, which stood agape as what they were seeing. I was then taken to a nearby police substation where I signed the necessary papers, was photographed and assigned a CI number, which was SE3. My duties quickly expanded beyond informing on the Dupont Circle crowd. Shoffler arranged for me to do CI work for the FBI, working under the direction of FBI agents William Tucker and Terence O’Connor. After being taught CI techniques, I was assigned to target individuals and organizations that were considered politically Left. Pursuant to instructions, I planted illegal drugs on individuals, causing them to be arrested. I put wire-tap and eaves-dropping devices on the desks of “Leftist” lawyers and leaders and also on their vehicles. I broke into the offices of “Leftist” organizations and stole documents for MPD and the FBI. I attended rallies and cut the cords leading to the loud-speakers. On an occasion I stole 5000 addressed envelopes from the Hebrew Congregation in Washington as Shoffler and the FBI wanted the names and addresses on the envelopes as the recipients were deemed to be vocal opponents of the Vietnam War Another target was the Institute for Policy Studies, which I broke into and stole documents. Other targeted organizations included any considered to be active in protesting the Vietnam War and those that were Gay. When the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, Shoffler and other MPD officers ordered me to devise a means of targeting the association in retaliation. Shoffler also ordered me to engage in homosexual sex with about 70 targeted men, which I did. Once this was done their names were added to the government’s database. I also, upon Shoffler’s instructions, had homosexual sex with five MPD officers on different occasions whose names were provided to me. Later I identified each targeted individual through a two-mirror in MPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Shoffler acknowledged to me on two occasions that he was a Military Intelligence Agent and had been assigned to MPD to monitor radical groups. Shoffler and I were considered to be above the law. We could do no wrong. The above described events took place in the years and months leading up to the Watergate case breaking open. In an affidavit that I executed on July 29, 2009, I described my role in informing Shoffler on June 1, 1972 of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee scheduled for June 18, 1972. A highly unusual source provided me with this information. Rather than repeat this again, I incorporate my prior affidavit of July 29, 2009 into this affidavit. My forthcoming book, Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Setup, by Robert Merrit, as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven, provides further details of my CI work for Shoffler in Washington, D.C. in the years after the Watergate case to 1985 and my CI work for him in New York City, after I moved there in 1986 and until two years before Shoffler’s death in 1996. It is important to note that in 1973 I met with the Special Watergate Prosecutor, with the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee and even testified in Executive Session before the Committee. While I provided much information to these, I did not disclose what I knew about the origins of Watergate. I did not do so because I was threatened by Shoffler, who told me that I would be ‘hung publicly” for being a homosexual and would be prosecuted for the illegal acts that I had committed as a CI, even though these were done under the direction of the Shoffler, MPD and the FBI. There are many secrets yet to be told about Watergate. Once these are revealed, the perception of the public as to what actually occurred will be radically altered. To give only one example: Shoffler told me of a secret dinner he had with Chief Judge John Sirica at the latter’s invitation after the Watergate case broke. It was Judge Sirica who assigned the case to himself and presided over the grand jury investigation into the break-in and the trial of those arrested and later of those indicted for the cover-up. Judge Sircia’s longtime mentor was Edward Bennett Williams, who served as legal counsel to the Democratic National Committee during the Watergate case. This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury. /S/ROBERT MERRITT Subscribed and sworn before me on the December 31, 2009 to certify my hand and seal of office: Ricardo S. Castro Notary Public State of NY No. 01CA5041272 Qualified Bronx County Comm. Exp. 03/22/20011

WHO WAS CARL SHOFFLER? Affidavit of Robert Merritt regarding Carl Shoffler I, Robert Merritt, attest to the following information regarding Carl Shoffler, the Washington, D.C. police detective who arrested the burglars at Watergate on June 17, 1972. The information that I am providing is derived from personal knowledge as I knew Shoffler for over 20 years, from 1970 until 1994, two years before his death at age 51. There exists a great deal of information on the public record about Shoffler. I shall not repeat it here as it can easily be accessed merely by typing “Carl Shoffler” in the Google search engine. I first laid eyes on Shoffler in December 1969 when he became part of the freak scene of a large group of persons who regularly gathered around Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Dupont Circle was within walking distance of the White House, about eight blocks away. The group of diverse persons who regularly gathered there cut across all strata of American society. There were Nazis, Communists, conservatives, liberals, straights, gays, drug dealers, drug users – you name it, they were there. Shoffler blended into the mixture easily because he was young (25 years old), had a scruffy beard and was shabbily dressed. At the time I was the most popular guy in the Dupont Circle freak scene. Everybody liked “Butch,” which was my nickname. I had a job at a nearby drug store earning just enough above subsistence level. Early in January 1970, shortly after Shoffler had begun hanging around Dupont Circle, he showed up at the drug store. He did so twice, each time conferring privately with the store’s owner. To my dismay one day early in January the owner fired me, letting me go without explanation. I was crushed and retreated to my small apartment at 2122 P St, N.W., about two blocks from Dupont Circle. My monthly rent was $35 and I feared that I would be unable to pay it. On the evening of the same day that I was fired, as I sat in my apartment and attempted to gather my wits, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, there stood Shoffler. For some reason, and I don’t know why, I was not overly surprised at seeing him. Shoffler pushed his way into my apartment and started talking. The first thing he said was that he was responsible for my being fired from the job at the drug store. The next thing he said was to take an envelope from him and open it. When I did so, there was $1000 in cash. Shoffler then informed me that he was an undercover detective with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and that I had been the object of profiling by several law enforcement agencies. These agencies had concluded that I was an ideal candidate for being recruited as a Confidential Informant (CI). I met the criteria: young, good looking, non-political and hailed from the hills of West Virginia where I had grown up. The big plus was that I was popular with the crowd that hung out at Dupont Circle, which was the initial purpose of my being recruited. Law enforcement viewed the members of the crowd as being dangerous radicals who posed a serious threat to the American way of life. Shoffler explained to me that because I was gay, I could not serve in the U.S. military. He asserted, however, that I could best serve my country and help defeat its enemies by agreeing to become a Confidential Informant and report to him on everything that was going on with the Dupont Circle scene. I accepted without hesitation, taking at face value Shoffler’s enticement without questioning it in any way. With the CI agreement then being verbally concluded, Shoffler asked if he could move into my apartment. He said that living there would facilitate his police undercover work. I was 26 years old, a year older than him. I readily agreed and we sealed the arrangement by downing a few beers. When it became late, Shoffler lay down on the couch and I climbed into my bed. I had hardly closed my eyes before I felt Shoffler sliding into bed beside me. He lost no time in performing oral sex, thus initiating our homosexual relationship that lasted for several years. The next day, to give me cover, Shoffler arranged for two of his fellow officers to “arrest”, hand-cuff, and place me in a police vehicle right in front of the Dupont Circle crowd, which stood agape as what they were seeing. I was then taken to a nearby police substation where I signed the necessary papers, was photographed and assigned a CI number, which was SE3. My duties quickly expanded beyond informing on the Dupont Circle crowd. Shoffler arranged for me to do CI work for the FBI, working under the direction of FBI agents William Tucker and Terence O’Connor. After being taught CI techniques, I was assigned to target individuals and organizations that were considered politically Left. Pursuant to instructions, I planted illegal drugs on individuals, causing them to be arrested. I put wire-tap and eaves-dropping devices on the desks of “Leftist” lawyers and leaders and also on their vehicles. I broke into the offices of “Leftist” organizations and stole documents for MPD and the FBI. I attended rallies and cut the cords leading to the loud-speakers. On an occasion I stole 5000 addressed envelopes from the Hebrew Congregation in Washington as Shoffler and the FBI wanted the names and addresses on the envelopes as the recipients were deemed to be vocal opponents of the Vietnam War Another target was the Institute for Policy Studies, which I broke into and stole documents. Other targeted organizations included any considered to be active in protesting the Vietnam War and those that were Gay. When the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, Shoffler and other MPD officers ordered me to devise a means of targeting the association in retaliation. Shoffler also ordered me to engage in homosexual sex with about 70 targeted men, which I did. Once this was done their names were added to the government’s database. I also, upon Shoffler’s instructions, had homosexual sex with five MPD officers on different occasions whose names were provided to me. Later I identified each targeted individual through a two-mirror in MPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Shoffler acknowledged to me on two occasions that he was a Military Intelligence Agent and had been assigned to MPD to monitor radical groups. Shoffler and I were considered to be above the law. We could do no wrong. The above described events took place in the years and months leading up to the Watergate case breaking open. In an affidavit that I executed on July 29, 2009, I described my role in informing Shoffler on June 1, 1972 of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee scheduled for June 18, 1972. A highly unusual source provided me with this information. Rather than repeat this again, I incorporate my prior affidavit of July 29, 2009 into this affidavit. My forthcoming book, Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars Were Setup, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven, provides further details of my CI work for Shoffler in Washington, D.C. in the years after the Watergate case to 1985 and my CI work for him in New York City, after I moved there in 1986 and until two years before Shoffler’s death in 1996. It is important to note that in 1973 I met with the Special Watergate Prosecutor, with the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee and even testified in Executive Session before the Committee. While I provided much information to these, I did not disclose what I knew about the origins of Watergate. I did not do so because I was threatened by Shoffler, who told me that I would be ‘hung publicly” for being a homosexual and would be prosecuted for the illegal acts that I had committed as a CI, even though these were done under the direction of the Shoffler, MPD and the FBI. There are many secrets yet to be told about Watergate. Once these are revealed, the perception of the public as to what actually occurred will be radically altered. To give only one example: Shoffler told me of a secret dinner he had with Chief Judge John Sirica at the latter’s invitation after the Watergate case broke. It was Judge Sirica who assigned the case to himself and presided over the grand jury investigation into the break-in and the trial of those arrested and later of those indicted for the cover-up. Judge Sircia’s longtime mentor was Edward Bennett Williams, who served as legal counsel to the Democratic National Committee during the Watergate case. This sworn statement is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I, Robert Merritt, swear in this affidavit that the facts are true to the best of my knowledge under the penalty of perjury. /S/ROBERT MERRITT Subscribed and sworn before me on the December 31, 2009 to certify my hand and seal of office: Ricardo S. Castro Notary Public State of NY No. 01CA5041272 Qualified Bronx County Comm. Exp. 03/22/2011

You are right; Carl Shoffler was no random cop. As Jim Hougan wrote in his 1984 best-seller, Secret Agenda, “Adding to the suspicions surrounding Shoffler is the fact that he is no ordinary cop. Prior to joining the police department in Washington, he had served for years at the Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia. This is one of NSA’s most important domestic ‘listening posts.’ Staffed by personnel assigned to the Army Security Agency (ASA), Vint Hill Farm is thought to be responsible for intercepting communications traffic emanating from Washington’s Embassy Row. By itself, this proves nothing, but it is ironic that the police officer responsible for making the most important IOC (Interception of Communications) bust in American history should himself have worked in the same area only a few years earlier.” As Merritt writes in his forthcoming book, Watergate Exposed, within days of recruiting Merritt in January 1970 as a Confidential Informant, Shoffler confided in Merritt that he had been assigned by Military Intelligence to the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. Shoffler and Merritt became more than just a working team engaged in law enforcement activities. Merritt recounts that on the same day that he recruited him, Shoffler moved into Merritt’s apartment and on the first night there initiated their homosexual relationship that lasted for several years, even though Shoffler was married and had a family living in Pennsylvania. After Merritt told Shoffler on June 1, 1972, what he had learned from a highly unusual source about the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee scheduled for June 18, Shoffler the same day brought two men to his and Merritt’s apartment and had Merritt relate what he had learned. One of these two men produced a CIA employee card with his name on it that had holes punched in it. The other man took detailed notes on a notepad and on several occasions had Merritt repeat what he had just related to the three of them. Soon thereafter Shoffler boasted to Merritt that he was going to bring down the Nixon Presidency. Several years ago Merritt had occasion to talk to a member of the Shoffler family. The member told Merritt that she was unable to answer any questions regarding Carl Shoffler because shortly after his death in 1996, the U.S. Government had forced all the family members to sign a non-disclosure agreement forbidding them to engage in any public discussion about Carl Shoffler’s activities when he worked for the government. If Carl Shoffler had been merely an ordinary Washington, D.C. police detective, the U.S. Government would not have demanded that his family members sign the non-disclosure agreement, which is still in effect today.

Gore Vidal praises Family of Secrets as “one of the most important books of the past ten years.” There can be no doubt but that Russ Baker deserves the gratitude of all thoughtful Americans for having the courage to expose much that is unknown about one of the most powerful (and some would say, evil) families in the world. I cannot commend it highly enough to anyone who wants to learn more about “the Bush dynasty, America’s invisible government, and the hidden history of the last fifty years,” as the thoroughly documented volume is subtitled. For purposes of this brief review, however, my focus will be on the book’s chapters 10 and 11. These deal with Watergate, the first being titled, “Downing Nixon, Part 1: The Setup,” and the second, “Downing Nixon, Part II, The Execution.” I agree wholeheartedly with Baker’s declaration “That Nixon could actually have been the victim of Watergate, and not the perpetrator, will not sit well with many, especially those with a professional stake in Nixon’s guilt. Yet three of the most thoroughly reported books on Watergate from the past three decades have come to the same conclusion: that Nixon and/or his top aides were indeed set up. Each of these books takes a completely different approach, focuses on different aspects, and relies on essentially different sets of facts and sources. These are 1984’s Secret Agenda, by former Harper’s magazine Washington editor Jim Hougan; 1991’s Silent coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, and 2008’s The Strong Man, by James Rosen.” I also concur with Baker’s statement that “Nixon, of course, was no innocent. He played rough with his critics, and he liked intrigue. But the evidence indicates that, despite his documented penchant for dirty deeds, he wasn’t behind Watergate and the Watergate-related dirty deeds that ultimately brought him down.” Appropriately, Baker quotes Bob Woodward as saying, “The record is so voluminous on Watergate; there is nothing like it…It’s the most investigated event of all time; perhaps even more so than the Kennedy assassination.” Baker accurately observes that nevertheless “But like other epic events, Watergate turns out to be an entirely different story than the one we thought we knew.” It is this latter statement by Baker that highlights the weakness of the Watergate section. For nowhere in his well researched volume does Baker even mention the two principal persons who brought about the Watergate public scandal: Carl Shoffler, the Washington, D.C. police detective who arrested the burglars on June 17, 1972, and Robert “Butch” Merritt, the Confidential Informant who reported directly to Shoffler beginning in 1970 and who alerted him on June 1, 1972 of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee, two weeks prior to the arrests. Of the two, Merritt is the key person in the event. Had he not learned of the planned break-in from a highly unusual source and had he not relayed this information to Shoffler, there would have been no arrests on June 17, 1972 and no Watergate. Yet Merritt’s name is not mentioned in the books by Colodny/Gettlin, Rosen or Baker. Hougan’s Silent Agenda comes the closest to telling the real story behind the scandal when he describes somewhat the unique Shoffler-Merritt relationship in the appendixes of his work. In short, only when the new book, Watergate Expose: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars were Set-Up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven, is published will the epic scandal truly be revealed as “an entirely different story than the one we thought we knew.” For an abbreviated preview of Watergate Exposed your attention is directed to my posting on the Forum on July 30, 2009 of Merritt’s sworn affidavit regarding the “1972 Conspiracy to Assassinate Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven,” a link to which is below: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14618

Gore Vidal praises Family of Secrets as “one of the most important books of the past ten years.” There can be no doubt but that Russ Baker deserves the gratitude of all thoughtful Americans for having the courage to expose much that is unknown about one of the most powerful (and some would say, evil) families in the world. I cannot commend it highly enough to anyone who wants to learn more about “the Bush dynasty, America’s invisible government, and the hidden history of the last fifty years,” as the thoroughly documented volume is subtitled. For purposes of this brief review, however, my focus will be on the book’s chapters 10 and 11. These deal with Watergate, the first being titled, “Downing Nixon, Part 1: The Setup,” and the second, “Downing Nixon, Part II, The Execution.” I agree wholeheartedly with Baker’s declaration “That Nixon could actually have been the victim of Watergate, and not the perpetrator, will not sit well with many, especially those with a professional stake in Nixon’s guilt. Yet three of the most thoroughly reported books on Watergate from the past three decades have come to the same conclusion: that Nixon and/or his top aides were indeed set up. Each of these books takes a completely different approach, focuses on different aspects, and relies on essentially different sets of facts and sources. These are 1984’s Secret Agenda, by former Harper’s magazine Washington editor Jim Hougan; 1991’s Silent coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, and 2008’s The Strong Man, by James Rosen.” I also concur with Baker’s statement that “Nixon, of course, was no innocent. He played rough with his critics, and he liked intrigue. But the evidence indicates that, despite his documented penchant for dirty deeds, he wasn’t behind Watergate and the Watergate-related dirty deeds that ultimately brought him down.” Appropriately, Baker quotes Bob Woodward as saying, “The record is so voluminous on Watergate; there is nothing like it…It’s the most investigated event of all time; perhaps even more so than the Kennedy assassination.” Baker accurately observes that nevertheless “But like other epic events, Watergate turns out to be an entirely different story than the one we thought we knew.” It is this latter statement by Baker that highlights the weakness of the Watergate section. For nowhere in his well researched volume does Baker even mention the two principal persons who brought about the Watergate public scandal: Carl Shoffler, the Washington, D.C. police detective who arrested the burglars on June 17, 1972, and Robert “Butch” Merritt, the Confidential Informant who reported directly to Shoffler beginning in 1970 and who alerted him on June 1, 1972 of the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee, two weeks prior to the arrests. Of the two, Merritt is the key person in the event. Had he not learned of the planned break-in from a highly unusual source and had he not relayed this information to Shoffler, there would have been no arrests on June 17, 1972 and no Watergate. Yet Merritt’s name is not mentioned in the books by Colodny/Gettlin, Rosen or Baker. Hougan’s Silent Agenda comes the closest to telling the real story behind the scandal when he describes somewhat the unique Shoffler-Merritt relationship in the appendixes of his work. In short, only when the new book, Watergate Expose: A Confidential Informant Tells How the Watergate Burglars were Set-Up and Reveals Other Government Dirty Tricks, by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven, is published will the epic scandal truly be revealed as “an entirely different story than the one we thought we knew.” For an abbreviated preview of Watergate Exposed your attention is directed to my posting on the Forum on July 30, 2009 of Merritt’s sworn affidavit regarding the “1972 Conspiracy to Assassinate Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven,” a link to which is below: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14618

Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA? By RAY McGOVERN December 30, 2009 www.counterpunch.org http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern12302009.html In the past I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors — the ones who sent President Barack Obama a letter on Sept. 18 asking him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.” Panetta reportedly was also dead set against reopening the investigation—as he was against release of the Justice Department’s “torture memoranda” of 2002, as he has been against releasing pretty much anything at all—the President’s pledges of a new era of openness, notwithstanding. Panetta is even older than I, and I am aware that hearing is among the first faculties to fail. Perhaps he heard “error” when the President said “era.” As for the benighted seven, they are more to be pitied than scorned. No longer able to avail themselves of the services of clever Agency lawyers and wordsmiths, they put their names to a letter that reeked of self-interest—not to mention the inappropriateness of asking a President to interfere with an investigation already ordered by the Attorney General. Three of the seven—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning, conducting, or covering up all manner of illegal actions, including torture, assassination, and illegal eavesdropping. In this light, the most transparent part of the letter may be the sentence in which they worry: “There is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.” When asked about the letter on the Sunday TV talk shows on Sept. 20, Obama was careful always to respond first by expressing obligatory “respect” for the CIA and its directors. With Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation, though, Obama did allow himself a condescending quip. He commented, “I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look out for an institution that they helped to build.” That quip was, sadly, the exception to the rule. While Obama keeps repeating the mantra that “nobody is above the law,” there is no real sign that he intends to face down Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs—no sign that anyone has breathed new life into federal prosecutor John Durham, to whom Holder gave the mandate for further “preliminary investigation.” What is generally forgotten is that it was former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who picked Durham two years ago to investigate CIA’s destruction of 91 tapes of the interrogation of “high-value detainees.” Durham had scarcely been heard from when Holder added to Durham’s job-jar the task of conducting a preliminary investigation regarding the CIA torture specialists. These are the ones whose zeal led them to go beyond the already highly permissive Department of Justice guidelines for “harsh interrogation.” Durham, clearly, is proceeding with all deliberate speed (emphasis on “deliberate”). Someone has even suggested—I trust, in jest—that he has been diverted to the search for the money and other assets that Bernie Maddow stashed away. In any case, do not hold your breath for findings from Durham anytime soon. Holder appears in no hurry. And President Obama keeps giving off signals that he is afraid of getting crosswise with the CIA—that’s right, afraid. Not Just Paranoia In that fear, President Obama stands in the tradition of a dozen American presidents. Harry Truman and John Kennedy were the only ones to take on the CIA directly. Worst of all, evidence continues to build that the CIA was responsible, at least in part, for the assassination of President Kennedy. Evidence new to me came in response to things I included in my article of Dec. 22, “Break the CIA in Two.” What follows can be considered a sequel that is based on the kind of documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts positively lust. Unfortunately for the CIA operatives who were involved in the past activities outlined below, the temptation to ask Panetta to put a SECRET stamp on the documentary evidence will not work. Nothing short of torching the Truman Library might conceivably help. But even that would be a largely feckless “covert action,” copy machines having long since done their thing. In my article of Dec. 22, I referred to Harry Truman’s op-ed of exactly 46 years before, titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” in which the former President expressed dismay at what the Central Intelligence Agency had become just 16 years after he and Congress created it. The Washington Post published the op-ed on December 22, 1963 in its early edition, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA? Truman wrote that he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment” to keep the President promptly and fully informed and had become “an operational and at times policy-making arm of the government.” The Truman Papers Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.” In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles CIA Director. Dulles’ forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high in the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list. Accustomed to the carte blanche given him by Eisenhower, Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy came on the scene and had the temerity to ask questions about the Bay of Pigs adventure, which had been set in motion under Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles reacted with disdain and set out to mousetrap the new President. Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes Dulles explains that, “when the chips were down,” the new President would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” Additional detail came from a March 2001 conference on the Bay of Pigs, which included CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars, and journalists. Daniel Schorr told National Public Radio that he had gained one new perception as a result of the “many hours of talk and heaps of declassified secret documents: “It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Richard Bissell had their own plan on how to bring the United States into the conflict…What they expected was that the invaders would establish a beachhead…and appeal for aid from the United States… “The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead. “In fact, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed,” added Schorr. The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to what the Russians might do in reaction. Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak; fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion in April 1961; and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was mutual, and when Kennedy himself was assassinated on November 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman that the disgraced Dulles and his outraged associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism—and, incidentally, get even. In his op-ed of December 22, 1963 Truman warned: “The most important thing…was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” It is a safe bet that Truman had the Bay of Pigs fiasco uppermost in mind. Truman called outright for CIA’s operational duties [to] be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” (This is as good a recommendation now as it was then, in my view.) On December 27, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss” letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA “a different animal than I tried to set up for you.” Souers specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover.” Souers also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the globe,” and added: With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some.” Clearly, CIA’s operational tail was wagging the substantive dog—a serious problem that persists to this day. For example, CIA analysts are super-busy supporting operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan; no one seems to have told them that they need to hazard a guess as to where this is all leading and whether it makes any sense. That is traditionally done in a National Intelligence Estimate. Can you believe there at this late date there is still no such Estimate? Instead, the President has chosen to rely on he advice of Gen. David Petraeus, who many believe will be Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election. Fox Guarding Henhouse? In any case, the well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a targeted domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’ warnings about covert action. So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964 he spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman. No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.” No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case. A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964 letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.” Dulles and Dallas Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction. My guess is that in early 1964 he was feeling a good bit of heat from those suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, one or two not-yet-intimidated columnists were daring to ask how the truth could ever come out with Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission. Prescient. Dulles feared, rightly, that Truman’s limited-edition op-ed might yet get some ink, and perhaps even airtime, and raise serious questions about covert action. Dulles would have wanted to be in position to flash the Truman “retraction,” with the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud. The media had already shown how co-opted—er, I mean “cooperative”—it could be. As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to exculpate himself and any of his associates, were any commissioners or investigators—or journalists—tempted to question whether the killing in Dallas might have been a CIA covert action. Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in killing President Kennedy and then covering it up? The most up-to-date—and, in my view, the best—dissection of the assassination appeared last year in James Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes the answer is Yes. Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com A shorter version of this article appeared at Consortiumnews.com.

Break the CIA in Two By Ray McGovern Former CIA Agent December 22, 2009 Consortiumnews.com http://consortiumnews.com/2009/122209a.html Editor’s Note: Exactly 46 years ago, President Harry Truman looked back on the still-young CIA, which he had helped create, and was alarmed at how its original purpose – to provide unvarnished information to top policymakers – was being perverted by the agency’s growing role in covert operations. Nearly a half century since Truman’s warning, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern marvels at Truman’s prescience and suggests that the only answer today is to separate out – and protect – the agency’s core analytical function: After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many. Better is a Solomon solution; divide the CIA in two. That way we can throw out the bath water and keep the baby. Covert action and analysis do not belong together in the same agency — never have, never will. That these two very different tasks were thrown together is an accident of history, one that it is high time to acknowledge and to fix. The effects of this structural fault became clear to President Harry Truman as he watched the agency at work in its first decade and a half. He was aghast. Like oil on water, covert action fouls the wellspring of objective analysis — the main task for which Truman and the Congress established the CIA in 1947. The operational tail started wagging the substantive tail almost right away. It has done so ever since — with very unfortunate consequences. An accident of history? How so? Covert action practitioners, many of whom showed great courage and imagination in the European and Far Eastern theaters of World War II arrived home wondering whether there was still a call for their expertise. With the Soviet Union taking over large chunks of Europe and the KGB plying its covert-action wares worldwide, the question answered itself; a counter capability was needed. The big mistake was shoehorning it into an agency being created to fulfill an entirely different mission. As former CIA analyst Mel Goodman points out in Failure of Intelligence, there was uncertainty and confusion over where to place responsibility for this capability. The term “covert action” is a euphemism covering the broad genus of dirty tricks, from overthrowing governments (we now blithely call that particular species “regime change”) to open but nonattributable broadcasting into denied areas. Defense Secretary James Forrestal didn’t want the Pentagon to be responsible for covert action in peacetime. And, to their credit, neither did senior leaders of the fledgling CIA. They were no neophytes, and could see that covert operations might easily end up tainting the intelligence product if one Director were responsible for the two incompatible activities. The experience of the past 62 years has showed, time and time again, that their concern was well founded as the covert action side has not only polluted CIA analyses but also expanded into high-tech warfare. Predators Trying to overthrow governments via covert action is one thing. Flying Predator drones with Hellfire missiles is quite another. There would be real hellfire on that from Harry Truman, were he still with us. Even former CIA Director George Tenet of flexible conscience had second thoughts about the CIA assuming responsibility for flying the Predator and firing Hellfires. In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, he writes that there was a “legitimate question about whether aircraft firing missiles…should be the function of the military or CIA.” Resorting to the all-purpose catch-all (and excuse-all), Tenet adds, “But that was before 9/11.” Of equal importance is the kind of question to which Tenet normally paid little heed; namely, what would flying Predators do to CIA credibility. Think about it for a minute. You are ordered and given funding to conduct Predator attacks on “suspected al-Qaeda bases” in Pakistan. (U.S. armed forces cannot do it since the Pentagon is not supposed to be striking countries with whom we are not at war.) You salute, find some contractors to help, and conduct those attacks. The President then asks his CIA morning briefer about the effectiveness of the drone attacks, including the longer-term political as well as military effects. When the briefer checks with the substantive analysts watching Pakistan, he learns that the attacks are very effective — indeed, the very best recruitment tool Osama bin Laden and the Taliban could imagine. Jihadists are flocking to Pakistan and Afghanistan like moths to a light blub. Problem. Do you think mealy-mouthed CIA Director Leon Panetta will have the courage to whisper that unwelcome finding to the President? Suppose Gen. David Petraeus or Gen. Stanley McChrystal find out. No NIE on Af-Pak The proof is in the pudding. Were not Panetta a self-described “creature of the Congress” (be wise, compromise), he would have long since ordered up a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on prospects for Afghanistan AND — far more important — Pakistan. Would you believe that at this stage there is still no such NIE? And the reason Panetta and his managers are keeping their heads way down is the same reason former CIA Director George Tenet for years shied away from doing an NIE on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The findings would smell like skunks at a picnic. It was only after Sen. Bob Graham, then-Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the White House in September 2002, “No National Intelligence Estimate, no congressional vote on war with Iraq,” that Tenet was ordered by the White House to commission an NIE with pre-ordained conclusions. Tht NIE was to be completed in record time (less than three weeks), in order to emerge several weeks before the mid-term elections and it was to reflect the alarmist views expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney in a major speech on Aug. 26, 2002. In Tenet’s memoir he admits that Cheney “went well beyond what our analysis could support.” But never mind; Tenet and his lieutenants had become quite accomplished in cooking intelligence to order. And so they did. Like Cheney’s speech, the Estimate was wrong on every major count — deliberately so. At the conclusion of an exhaustive investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Chair from 2007 to 2009, bemoaned the fact that the Bush/Cheney administration “presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.” Non-existent? You mean fabricated or forged? With the advent of the George W. Bush administration we had learned about “faith-based intelligence,” but the mind boggles at the use of “non-existent” intelligence. What Harry Said For those of you who may have forgotten, Dec. 22 is the 46th anniversary of the most important op-ed of all the 381,659 written about the CIA since its founding. Do not feel bad if you missed it; the op-ed garnered little attention — either at the time or subsequently. The draft came from Independence, Missouri, and was published in the Washington Post early edition on Dec. 22, 1963. The first and the last two sentences of Harry Truman’s unusual contribution bear repeating: “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency…. “We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” Truman began by describing what he saw as CIA’s raison d’être, emphasizing that a President needs “the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots.” He stressed that he wanted to create a “special kind of an intelligence facility” charged with the collection of “all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have these reports reach me as President without “treatment or interpretations” by departments that have their own agendas. A Warning The “most important thing,” he said, “was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” It is a safe bet that Truman had uppermost in mind how senior CIA officials tried to mousetrap President John Kennedy into committing U.S. armed forces to attack Cuba, rather than to sit by and let Fidel Castro’s troops kill or capture the rag-tag band of CIA-trained invaders at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. The operation was a disaster, pure and simple. Truman was no doubt aware of how Kennedy initially gave the go-ahead to a CIA plan that had been approved by President Dwight Eisenhower; how the new President belatedly saw the trap; and how he had the courage to face down the tricksters and then take responsibility for the consequences that came of having trusted them. Still, Kennedy did not feel he could follow his instinct to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” Instead, he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, a quintessential Establishment figure — something one does at one’s peril. Allen Dulles later played a key role in selecting those who were allowed to testify before the Warren Commission on the JFK assassination, and in shaping its highly questionable findings. In JFK and the Unspeakable, published last year, author James Douglass adduces persuasive evidence that some of Dulles’s old buddies were involved in the murder of President Kennedy. It may be just coincidence that President Truman chose to publish his CIA op-ed exactly one month after Kennedy was killed, but it seems equally possible that he deliberately chose that first monthiversary. ‘Disturbed’ at CIA Operational Role In his Dec. 22, 1963, op-ed, Truman addresses the structural fault alluded to above: “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment [collection, analysis, and reporting]. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas…. “Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue…” “The last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.” Think Iran. In early 1963 when I began work at the CIA it had been almost a decade since the overthrow of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq in August 1953. The joint CIA and British intelligence “Operation Ajax” was cited proudly as a singularly successful covert action operation. Just before electing Mosaddeq in 1951, the Iranian Parliament had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, which until then had been controlled exclusively by the British government-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — Britain’s largest overseas investment at the time. Unfortunately for Britain, there were upstarts in Iran (“militants,” in today’s parlance) who made bold to think that Iranians should be able to profit from the vast oil reserves in Iran. Winston Churchill asked Truman to order the fledgling CIA to join the British service, MI-6, in arranging a coup. Truman said No. (I can imagine him saying, Hell, No!) Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, however, said Yes. And the coup that Eisenhower approved goes a long way toward explaining why the Iranians don’t much like us. After throwing out Mosaddeq and bringing in the Shah, the Iranian people suffered untold horrors at the hands of SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police. Every Iranian knew/knows that the CIA and MI-6 did what the British would call a “brilliant” job training SAVAK. Many students of Iran believe that it was SAVAK’s widespread and widely known torture, as much as Ayatollah Khomeini’s charisma, that brought revolution and dumped the Shah in 1979. And the Oil? And who got control of the oil? That seems always to be the question, doesn’t it? The Shah let the U.S. and U.K. split 80 percent of control, with the rest going to French and Dutch interests. The Shah got 50 percent of the revenues. When the Shah and SAVAK became history, the new Iranian government took control of its oil. Today, there is scant applause among thinking people for the “singularly successful” U.S.-U.K.-sponsored coup in Iran. The same goes for the CIA-run coup in Guatemala the following year. American media initially sold both operations as victories over leftist leaning governments vulnerable to Communist blandishments. But it was really about oil in Iran, as it was about land claimed by the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. But the kind of suffering in store for the people of both countries was the same. Having learned from the British how this kind of thing is done, CIA operatives were ready to try out their newly acquired skills and succeeded in overthrowing the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who had been elected President in 1950 with 65 percent of the vote. His offense was giving land to the peasants — unfarmed land that private corporations earlier had set aside for themselves. The United Fruit Company was allergic to real land reform in Guatemala and lobbied hard for Washington to remove Arbenz. The Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, who happened to be shareholders of the United Fruit Company, took the line that Arbenz’ actions smacked of “Communism.” Then-CIA Director Allen Dulles stoked fears by describing Guatemala as a “Soviet beachhead in the Western hemisphere.” The overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 made Guatemala safe for United Fruit, but not for democracy. The coup ended a hopeful decade-long experiment with representative democracy known as the “Ten Years of Spring.” The outcome’s implications for democracy in Central American were immense. Other examples could be adduced, but let us stop here with the two with which Harry Truman would have been most familiar — from a statecraft point of view. (I doubt that he held stock in either Big Oil or United Fruit.) At the end of his op-ed, Truman puts his conclusion right out there with characteristic straightforwardness: “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” Media Un-Reaction A blockbuster op-ed, no? Well, no. Investigator Raymond Marcus is among those struck by the curious lack of response — one might say embargo — regarding Truman’s Washington Post article. Marcus has written: “According to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, or mentioned in any national radio or TV broadcast.” What are we to make of this? Was/is it the case, as former CIA Director William Colby is quoted as saying in a different connection, that the CIA “owns everyone of any significance in the major media?” Or at least that it did in the Sixties? How much truth lies beneath Colby’s hyperbole? Did the CIA and its White House patrons put out the word to squelch a former President’s op-ed already published in an early edition of the Post? Or is there a simpler explanation. Do any of you readers perhaps know? The tradecraft term of art for a “cooperating” journalist, businessperson, or academic is “agent of influence.” Some housebroken journalists actually have previously worked for the CIA. Some take such scrupulous notes that they end up sounding dangerously close to their confidential government sources. Think back, for example, to those vengeful days in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and the macho approach being modeled by President Bush and aped down the line by CIA operatives and their “agents of influence.” CIA operative Gary Schroen told National Public Radio that, just days after 9/11, Counterterrorist chief Cofer Black sent him to Afghanistan with orders to “Capture bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice.” As for other al Qaeda leaders, Black reportedly said, “I want their heads up on pikes.” This quaint tone — and language — reverberated among Bush-friendly pundits. One consummate insider, Washington Post veteran Jim Hoagland went a bit overboard in publishing a letter to President Bush on Oct. 31, 2001. It was no Halloween prank. Rather, Hoagland strongly endorsed what he termed the “wish” for “Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike,” which he claimed was the objective of Bush’s “generals and diplomats.” At the same time, there are dangers in sharing too much information with pet insider/outsiders. In his open letter to Bush, Hoagland lifted the curtain on the actual neoconservative game plan by giving Bush the following ordering of priorities. “The need to deal with Iraq’s continuing accumulation of biological and chemical weapons and the technology to build a nuclear bomb can in no way be lessened by the demands of the Afghan campaign. You must conduct that campaign so that you can pivot quickly from it to end the threat Saddam Hussein’s regime poses.” Hoagland had the “pivot” idea three weeks before Donald Rumsfeld called Gen. Tommy Franks to tell him the President wanted him to shift focus to Iraq. Franks and his senior aides had been working on plans for attacks on Tora Bora where bin Laden was believed hiding but attention, planning, and resources were abruptly diverted toward Iraq. And Osama bin Laden walked out of Tora Bora through the mountain passes to Pakistan, according to a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report. The point here is that some media favorites are extremely well briefed partly because they are careful not to bite the hands that feed them by criticizing the CIA. Still less are they inclined to point out basic structural faults — not to mention the crimes of recent years. So it is up to those of us who know something of intelligence and how structural faults, above-the-law mentality, and flexible consciences can spell disaster. Split Up the Agency So, here’s what can be done: Expunge the one sentence in the National Security Act of 1947 that enables a President to direct the CIA to perform “other such functions and duties related to intelligence.” Make it crystal clear that the sense conveyed by that sentence, whether the sentence itself stays in or is deleted, cannot authorize activities that violate international or U.S. criminal law — crimes like kidnapping and torture. “Such other functions and duties?” What was meant by this wording were activities in addition to what President Truman describes in his op-ed as the “original assignment” of the CIA — a central place with access to all intelligence collection that enables analysts to advise the President with candor, without bureaucratic “treatment” or interpretations, and not sparing him “unpleasant facts” so as not to “upset” him. (Remember, the founding mission of the CIA was to ensure that a future President wasn’t blindsided by another Pearl Harbor attack, the way Truman’s predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt was.) As Truman himself suggests, terminate “such other functions and duties” or put those operations elsewhere. And imagine into existence different, effective ways to exercise oversight, not totally dependent on the highly politicized “overlook” committees of the Congress. That done, there will still be a baby NOT to be thrown out with the bath water. The good news is that there remains a core of analysts willing and able to seek truth and speak truth to power. This was shown in 2007, when Tom Fingar, a senior analyst with integrity and courage, led to conclusion a National Intelligence Estimate that helped prevent the attack that Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives, and Israel were planning on Iran. That NIE assessed with high confidence that Iran had ceased working on the warhead-related part of its nuclear program in the fall of 2003 — a judgment that holds to this day, however unpopular and unwelcome it may be among those who would have the President give Israel carte blanche to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. That is the capability Truman wanted — the baby that must be rescued and reared. But the baby is still in danger. With Tom Fingar now retired, the absence of an NIE on Afghanistan/Pakistan speaks volumes to the timidity that also remains inside the CIA’s hierarchy. It boggles the mind that, amid all the assessment and reassessment prior to the President’s decision to escalate by sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, no policymaker wanted to know what the 16 agencies of the intelligence community were thinking. Gloom Avoidance Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal are not interested in CIA analysis, just CIA drones (the aircraft). Sources inside the intelligence community tell us that the analysts assess the prospects for success of the generals’ “Af-Pak” approach as very low, but that this word does not seem to be getting to the President. It is not entirely clear whether it is a case of Panetta being reluctant to relay to Obama the kind of “unpleasant facts” or “bad news” that Truman wanted the CIA to give him in a straightforward way, or that Obama himself has discouraged such truth seeking/telling lest the abysmal prognosis of the analysts leak and complicate his Faustian bargain with the top brass — and cause even more political damage with his dissatisfied Democratic “base.” As things get still worse in “Af-Pak,” and they will, it will be important for Obama to have a group of analysts able to give him an objective read on the quagmire into which his benighted policies have led, and how he might attempt to pull himself and U.S. troops out. Perhaps then he will ask. So save that baby. Throw out the other one with the bathwater. Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career at the CIA, he worked for nine CIA directors, several of them at close remove. Primarily a substantive analyst and briefer, he nonetheless served in all four of CIA’s main directorates and, during one of his postings abroad, helped manage a large covert action project. He co-founded of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in January 2003.

Ian Punnett welcomed award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker, who discussed the connections between the Bush family and the intelligence community, as well as startling evidence that shed new light on the JFK assassination and Watergate. According to his research, George H.W. Bush's affiliation with the CIA began as far back as 1953, as opposed to Bush's "official" joining of the organization in 1976. Two elements that led him to this conclusion were that Bush was briefed on the JFK assassination by the CIA on the day after Kennedy's murder and he also appeared to be using his oil company to set up "fronts" for the intelligence agency around the world. However, Baker said, these CIA outlets were merely part of a larger agenda driven by wealthy elites who have designs on shaping the world to their end. Stressing that the Bush family are merely players in this group of power brokers, Baker said, "they're not the guys running the thing. They are just operatives." He dismissed the notion that it is an organized group, suggesting that it is more of a collection of like-minded, powerful people working together to consolidate their power. "It's not this absolute club or anything like that," Baker explained, "you're talking about a mindset." Ultimately, he expressed concern that this coterie continues to exert its power, "I think what we're looking at is a very sensitive and fragile situation that perpetuates to this day." He suggested that the Watergate scandal was one historic event that this faction, including George H.W. Bush (who was head of the RNC at the time), played a hand in orchestrating. Baker put forth the idea that Richard Nixon, previously put into power by these elites, had begun to move away from their influence. As such, the Watergate event was developed as a means to drive Nixon out of office in a "cleaner" fashion than they had eliminated JFK. According to Baker, this explains why the break-in seemed so poorly done, how the story ended up in the press, and why Nixon was so befuddled by what had happened. "It's almost like a rolling coup d'etat," he observed, "when you're in these permanent bureaucracies, you don't have a lot of use for these elected presidents. They're an annoyance and a problem for you."

This is a summary of Russ Baker's interview on coasttocoastam on Dec. 5: Ian Punnett welcomed award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker, who discussed the connections between the Bush family and the intelligence community, as well as startling evidence that shed new light on the JFK assassination and Watergate. According to his research, George H.W. Bush's affiliation with the CIA began as far back as 1953, as opposed to Bush's "official" joining of the organization in 1976. Two elements that led him to this conclusion were that Bush was briefed on the JFK assassination by the CIA on the day after Kennedy's murder and he also appeared to be using his oil company to set up "fronts" for the intelligence agency around the world. However, Baker said, these CIA outlets were merely part of a larger agenda driven by wealthy elites who have designs on shaping the world to their end. Stressing that the Bush family are merely players in this group of power brokers, Baker said, "they're not the guys running the thing. They are just operatives." He dismissed the notion that it is an organized group, suggesting that it is more of a collection of like-minded, powerful people working together to consolidate their power. "It's not this absolute club or anything like that," Baker explained, "you're talking about a mindset." Ultimately, he expressed concern that this coterie continues to exert its power, "I think what we're looking at is a very sensitive and fragile situation that perpetuates to this day." He suggested that the Watergate scandal was one historic event that this faction, including George H.W. Bush (who was head of the RNC at the time), played a hand in orchestrating. Baker put forth the idea that Richard Nixon, previously put into power by these elites, had begun to move away from their influence. As such, the Watergate event was developed as a means to drive Nixon out of office in a "cleaner" fashion than they had eliminated JFK. According to Baker, this explains why the break-in seemed so poorly done, how the story ended up in the press, and why Nixon was so befuddled by what had happened. "It's almost like a rolling coup d'etat," he observed, "when you're in these permanent bureaucracies, you don't have a lot of use for these elected presidents. They're an annoyance and a problem for you."

Russ Baker, author of the best-seller book, "Family of Secrets", will be the guest on the radio show coasttocoastam Saturday night, December 5. He spoke at the recent COPA conference in Dallas and in his informative remarks stressed that those assembled had not focused enough research upon the connection of George H.W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination. Bush was in Dallas on the day of the assassination but created a false trail of his whereabouts on that day by later making a long distance phone call from Tyler, Texas. After hearing Mr. Baker speak at COPA, I subsequently sent him an email about something that should have been included in his book. In 1986, I was informed by a contract agent under contract with the IRS Criminal Intelligence Division that the IRS had uncovered an illegal $10 million fund set up by George H.W. Bush as part of the presidential campaign to re-elect Reagan-Bush in 1984. The fund was administered by Bob Eckels, the County Judge of Harris County (Houston, Texas), who was close to Bush. After he retired, Eckels told the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post newspapers that he was writing a book about deep, dark secrets that he knew, which I interpreted as being a threat to tell about the secret $10 million illegal fund, among other things. I filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in the late 1980's, requesting the Commission to look into the illegal campaign fund. The Commission took my request seriously and launched an investigation. However, before it could complete its work Bob Eckels suddenly died. His unexpected death raised a question in my mind. So while the Commission was unable to complete its investigation, it did issue a formal opinion for the record that it had found "reason to believe" that the $10 million fund had existed. The FBI later interviewed me about the fund but the agents seemed only interested in finding out how I had had learned about the fund rather than investigating its illegality. As a postscript, the IRS District Director for Houston resigned the day after Clinton was elected President in 1992.

CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces www.wired.com By Noah Shachtman November 24, 2009 | 1:37 pm | http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/11/ci...nual-resurfaces At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.” This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II. Some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez Canal. But Mulholland’s contributions were far different, because they were part of a larger CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, to control people’s minds. Which lead to the Agency’s infatuation with LSD, as David Hambling recounted here a few weeks ago: In the infamous Operation Midnight Climax, unwitting clients at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted. They even killed an elephant with LSD. Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked. The Boston Globe has put together a great visual summary of some of Mulholland’s best tricks for the CIA: the shoelace pattern that means “follow me”; the hidden compartment to smuggle in an agent; the best ways to appear dumb and non-threatening. Because there’s no better misdirection than appearing to be a fool. [Neat trick: @earth_battalion]

According to the link in John's post above, National Geographic has scheduled the show again for this coming Sunday. I plan to watch it then.