Douglas Caddy

John, are you not aware that I covered this subject in this very thread on February 5, 2006? Why your sudden discovery of this information? I notice that your tag team partner, Ashton Gray, wasted no time, based on your posting, of spinning a new fantasy that I knew Washington police officer Carl Shoffler and Robert “Butch” Merritt. I knew neither of these of men. If you and he wish to delude yourselves otherwise, be my guest. I am beginning to be thoroughly amused of your and Ashton’s wide-of-the-mark postings. The more outlandish the accusations and insinuations, the greater the chance that the monetary advance on my new book will be increased as you and Ashton jointly transform me into a major “key player” in the Watergate scandal. However, don’t expect me to share my monetary advance with you both as a result of your adversarial public relations work in my behalf, especially since the Forum’s credibility is the ultimate victim of your tag team fantasy strategy. Almost all of your posting in question draws directly upon the writing of Jim Hougan in his book, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. I invite Forum members and readers of this thread to contrast pages 320 to 323 in Hougan’s book with what you have posted. In the past in your scholarly writings in the Forum you have been fastidious in citing source materials to support statements that you make, which is why they are so widely read with anticipation. Why then did you omit attribution to Hougan of what you wrote above? Below is the February 5, 2006 posting that I made in this thread on this subject, which somehow escaped your attention: Not only is Mark Felt's role as Deep Throat left out of the FBI memorandum of 5/23/1973 but also omitted is the evidence that Felt was the primary cause of the Watergate coverup. The evidence is as follows: I was retained by Hunt and Liddy on June 17, the day of the burglary. On June 28, 11 days later, while I was in the U.S. Court House working on my clients' case, I was served with a subpoena to appear Forthwith before the federal grand jury. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell physically pulled me by my arm into the grand jury room. Over the next three weeks I was to testify five times before the grand jury. I refused to answer a number of questions that I believed violated the attorney-client privilege but did so ultimately after being held in contempt of court by Judge Sirica and the contempt citation being affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals. All of these events so early in the case were reported by Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post. These events had the effect of convincing my clients that they could not receive a fair trial if I as their attorney were being so badly treated. So they embarked on the coverup. Operating behind the scenes and as an instigator of my being served with a subpoena on June 28, 1972, was Mark Felt. The role of the FBI towards me, under Felt's direction, is described in a two-part article in The Advocate of Feb. 23 and March 9, 1977 titled, Revelations of a Gay Informant: I Spied for the FBI. The article is part-interview with and part-reporting concerning the gay informant, Carl Robert 'Butch' Merritt. Merritt had been employed by the FBI, under Felt's direction, and by the Washington, D.C. police, to infiltrate and spy on the New Left, which was then engaged in vocal dissent against the Vietnam war. (Felt was subsequently indicted and convicted for some of his activities against the New Left. More on this later.) The following is excerpted from the 1977 Advocate article: Two days after the Watergate burglary, Carl Shoffler (one of Merritt's former police contacts) turned up with Sgt. Paul Leeper (these officers had been two of the three to have arrested the burglars) with what Merritt recalls as an offer of ˜the biggest, most important assignment" he'd ever had. The officers, Merritt said, asked if he knew one of the Watergate attorneys. ˜They said he was gay." Merritt did not. They asked if I could get to know him. I asked them why. We'd like you to get as close as possible, they said, to find out all you can about his private life, even what he eats. Merritt says he explained that even if the attorney was gay, it wouldn't be likely that he could arrange to meet him. They said I would be paid quite well, that they weren't talking about dimes and quarters, that they were talking about ˜really big money". Merritt says that he 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. Police, Merritt says, also tried to recruit him to inform on the gay community. He says he refused these offers as well. The police and the FBI, Merritt charges, began to harass him soon after he was dropped by the bureau. ˜They threatened my life, broke into my apartment at least three times, they tried to plant drugs on me, they tapped my phone," Merritt charges. Jim Hougan, in his 1984 book Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, wrote about Merritt's allegations: "If we are to believe the disaffected informant, [police officer] Shoffler told him to establish a homosexual relationship with Douglas Caddy, stating falsely that Caddy was gay and a supporter of Communist causes." Further information can be found on the following links: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...16/ai_n15396922 http://www.advocate.com/special_feature.asp?id=19186

John Simkin wrote in the final posting in the Kennedy Assassination topic of the thread titled “Ashton Gray: His repeated violations of Board Guidelines,” which thread he then closed down: “I have found Doug very helpful with my investigations into Lyndon Johnson. Hopefully he will continue to answer our questions. However, I do not expect hm to fully explain his relationship with the CIA during the Watergate scandal. Maybe he is saving this for his forthcoming book.” Anyone who has read the Forum’s thread “Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer” will find that I have previously answered all questions posed to me about the CIA: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7253 John Simkin, in his remarks above, apparently intends to leave with the reader a tantalizing smear that I have been somehow had a relationship with the CIA. One is reminded of the interrogation method of which Senator Joseph McCarthy was accused. It is said that he would pose the question to a witness “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Community Party?” When the witness denied that he had ever so been associated, it is said that Senator McCarthy would retort, “Are we merely to take you word on this?” in an attempt to harm the witness’s reputation. Substitute John Simkin for Senator McCarthy and we have him asking me, in essence: “Are you now or have you ever been employed by the CIA or knowingly participated in any of its activities?” When I state that I have not, he merely gratuitously retorts, “I do not expect [you] to fully explain [your] relationship with the CIA.” In the mid-1970's I employed the Freedom of Information Act in an attempt to obtain from the CIA any records that it had on me. I was stonewalled for a long period of time. I then appealed to Senator Barry Goldwater, whom I knew personally and who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to intervene with the CIA to release this information. He agreed to write the CIA in my behalf. A short time later I received from the CIA one document of several pages that was heavily redacted. It appeared to have been prepared as a summary of what the CIA knew about Watergate, before and after the break-in arrests on June 17, 1972. The only part that was not heavily redacted was one sentence that stated in essence “Michael Douglas Caddy has never been an employee of the CIA.” I cannot quote the exact sentence as the CIA document is in my personal and professional files in the Library Archives of the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon. This is some 2000 miles from where I reside. Even if I were to retrieve the CIA letter and quote exactly from it, most likely this would still not satisfy the John Simkin-Ashton Gray tag team. If the latter wish to engage in a fantasy that I was somehow had a relationship with the CIA, they are merely deluding themselves and adversely affecting the credibility of the Forum. The historical record rebuts their assertion. My own thought on the CIA’s involvement in Watergate is this: There is no doubt that the June 17, 1972 arrests stemmed from the discovery by Frank Wills, a security guard, of a piece of tape on a door in the Watergate complex building that housed the Democratic National Committee. Does this clear the CIA of any involvement in Watergate? I would answer in the negative. There is ample evidence posted by Forum members that the CIA knew something was afoot, which stemmed from the contacts made with it by White House personnel and by Hunt and Liddy prior to June 17, 1972. The CIA is in the information gathering business. Thus, sooner or later the CIA might have made the strategic decision to act somehow on whatever information it had of Hunt’s and Liddy’s activities, perhaps adversely to Nixon’s interest. Or it might have saved the information for purposes of blackmailing or threatening Nixon. However, it did not have to reach a decision. Frank Wills, the security guard at the Watergate complex, saved the CIA from having to do this by finding the piece of tape and sounding the alert, which led to the arrests of the five burglars and the subsequent unraveling of the Nixon administration.

Dear Jack: Your valued comments are most appreciated. My thanks go to you. Below is the posting that I just made in the Watergate thread on the subject of the violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. My posting was in reply to Mr. Pat Speer on the matter. Pat: I am indebted to you and Mr. J. Raymond Carroll for posting your incisive comments on Mr. Ashton Gray’s gratuitously insulting remarks directed towards his fellow members, Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. I can assure you that if persons who have direct knowledge of historical events come to believe that by participating in the Forum they will be subjected to character assassination, the Forum will become the “kiss of death” to be avoided at all costs. This will result in all of John Simkin’s skillful diplomacy over the years in getting persons with direct historical knowledge to join the Forum going down the drain, obviously through no fault of Mr. Simkin but as the result of one or more members with malevolent and destructive tendencies. I may be mistaken but it appears that Mr. Baldwin has already been driven from the Forum and from participating in the thread that bears his name as the direct result of the offensive actions of Mr. Ashton Gray. That Mr. Gray now belatedly is editing his past posted remarks of character assassination against Mr. Baldwin probably will do little to correct the situation. I can categorically state that the only reason I decided to join the Forum was when I saw that Mr. Baldwin had joined and through the well-meaning inquiries posed by Mr. Simkin and other members was providing new information. Mr. Baldwin’s role in Watergate had always piqued my interest and I found his replies of great interest. And by the way, I apologize for mistakenly labeling you as Mr. Pat Gray in your June 23 reply and will edit the posting to correct this. This mistake on my part will probably cause some question to be posed later on in the Forum as to whether I ever knew or had a conversation with Patrick Gray while he was FBI director, knowing as I do now how some members think. In regard to the matter of my telephone conversations with the wife of Bernard Barker in the early days of Watergate, I already covered this subject in my posting of Feb. 6, 2006, which can be found in the Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer thread. It is my intention to do no more posting, besides the immediate one, until John Simkin returns from Sicily next week when he will undertake an investigation of the Record that I filed with him and Administrator Walker of a large number of violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton. I may be old-fashioned but I believe that if the Board Guidelines are repeatedly violated by a member, then the appropriate disciplinary measure should be invoked. If not, of what purpose are the Board Guidelines and why should they be observed? For the historical record, to be placed in the Forum’s archives, I am posting below an article by me about my role in Watergate that was published by The Wall Street Journal in 1998. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

Pat: I am indebted to you and Mr. J. Raymond Carroll for posting your incisive comments on Mr. Ashton Gray’s gratuitously insulting remarks directed towards his fellow members, Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. I can assure you that if persons who have direct knowledge of historical events come to believe that by participating in the Forum they will be subjected to character assassination, the Forum will become the “kiss of death” to be avoided at all costs. This will result in all of John Simkin’s skillful diplomacy over the years in getting persons with direct historical knowledge to join the Forum going down the drain, obviously through no fault of Mr. Simkin but as the result of one or more members with malevolent and destructive tendencies. I may be mistaken but it appears that Mr. Baldwin has already been driven from the Forum and from participating in the thread that bears his name as the direct result of the offensive actions of Mr. Ashton Gray. That Mr. Gray now belatedly is editing his past posted remarks of character assassination against Mr. Baldwin probably will do little to correct the situation. I can categorically state that the only reason I decided to join the Forum was when I saw that Mr. Baldwin had placed membership and through the well-meaning inquiries posed by Mr. Simkin and other members was providing new information. Mr. Baldwin’s role in Watergate had always piqued my interest and I found his replies of great interest. And by the way, I apologize for mistakenly labeling you as Mr. Pat Gray in your June 23 reply and will edit the posting to correct this. This mistake on my part will undoubtedly cause some question to be posed later on in the Forum as to whether I ever knew or had a conversation with Patrick Gray while he was FBI director, knowing as I do now how some members think. [Hint: the answer is no.] In regard to the matter of my telephone conversations with the wife of Bernard Barker in the early days of Watergate, I already covered this subject in my posting of Feb. 6, 2006, which can be found in the Douglas Caddy: Question and Answer thread. It is my intention to do no more posting, besides the immediate one, until John Simkin returns from Sicily next week when he will undertake an investigation of the Record that I filed with him and Administrator Walker of a large number of violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton. I may be old-fashioned but I believe that if the Board Guidelines are repeatedly violated by a member, then the appropriate disciplinary measure should be invoked. If not, of what purpose are the Board Guidelines and why should they be observed? For the historical record, to be placed in the Forum’s archives, I am posting below an article by me about my role in Watergate that was published by The Wall Street Journal in 1998. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page March 24, 1998 WHAT IF JUDGE SIRICA WERE WITH US TODAY? By Douglas Caddy (Mr. Caddy is a Houston lawyer) The Clinton scandals, with all the claims of coverup and executive privilege, are certainly reminiscent of Watergate. But there is a crucial difference: This case lacks a John Sirica, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia who played such a crucial role in Watergate. The untold historical record reveals that the early actions of Sirica, who assigned the Watergate case to himself, helped spur the subsequent coverup and obstruction of justice that ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon and the criminal convictions of many Watergate figures. The Watergate scandal began at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, when Washington, D.C. police arrested five men on burglary charges at the Watergate office building. At 3:05 a.m. E. Howard Hunt phoned me from his White House office and asked if he could come immediately to my Washington residence. I had been Hunt’s personal attorney for several years. Hunt arrived half an hour later and informed me what had transpired earlier at the Watergate. He retained me to represent him in the case and then called G. Gordon Liddy, who also hired me. At that time, about two hours after the burglary, both Hunt and Liddy requested I also represent the five people arrested, four Cuban-Americans and James McCord, who were then incarcerated in the D.C. jail. On June 28 – 11 days later – while working on the case in the federal courthouse in Washington, I was served with a subpoena bearing the name of Chief Judge Sirica, to appear “forthwith” before the federal grand jury investigating the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Campbell grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the grand jury room. From June 28 until July 19 I was to appear before the grand jury on six occasions and answer hundreds of questions. I drew the line, however, on the advice of my own legal counsel, at answering 38 questions we felt invaded my clients’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege. A typical question: “Between the hours of Friday at midnight, June 16, and 8:30 a.m. Saturday, June 17, did you receive a visit from Mr. Everett Howard Hunt?” We believed answering such questions would incriminate Hunt and Liddy, who had not been arrested, and would violate their constitutional rights. Judge Sirica, rejecting such arguments out of hand, threatened to jail me for contempt of court. When I went before the grand jury on July 13, I refused to answer the 38 questions. Within an hour I was back before Judge Sircia, who immediately held me in contempt of court and ordered me to jail. Five days later, on July 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the contempt citation and ordered me to testify under threat of being jailed again. The opinion, which I found gratuitously insulting, declared: “Even if such a relationship does exist, certain communications, such as consultation in furtherance of a crime, are not within the privilege.” In his July 19, 1972, Oval Office tape, Nixon is recorded as expressing dismay to John Ehrlichman: “Do you mean the circuit court ordered an attorney to testify?” Ehrlichman replied, “It [unintelligible] me, except that this damn circuit that we’ve got here, with [Judge David] Bazelon and so on, it surprises me every time they do something.” Nixon then asked, “Why didn’t he appeal to the Supreme Court?” The answer is that my attorneys and I believe we had built a strong enough court record that if Hunt, Liddy and the five arrested individuals were found guilty, their convictions could be overturned on appeal because of Sirica’s and the appeals court’s abuse of me as their attorney. However, Judge Sirica’s actions had an unintended consequence. Hunt and Liddy, seeing their attorney falsely accused by Judge Sirica of being a participant in their crime, realized early on that they were not going to get a fair trail, so they embarked on a coverup involving “hush money.” As Hunt has written: “If Sirica was treating Caddy – an Officer of the Court – so summarily, and Caddy was completely uninvolved in Watergate – then those of us who were involved could expect neither fairness nor understanding from him. As events unfolded, this conclusion became tragically accurate.” Liddy appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals, claiming that my being forced to testify denied him his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The court upheld his conviction: “The evidence against appellant...was so overwhelming that even if there were constitutional error in the comment of the prosecutor and the instruction of the trial judge, there is no reasonable possibility it contributed to the conviction.” Neither Judge Sirica nor the appeals court acknowledged that their assault on the attorney-client privilege helped spur the ensuing coverup and obstruction of justice. I was never indicted, named an unindicted co-conspirator, disciplined by the Bar or even contacted by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee, whose staff included a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham. Now the issue of the attorney-client privilege is again being raised, this time by Monica Lewinsky’s first lawyer, Francis D. Carter, who has been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and bring the notes he took while representing Ms. Lewinsky. Mr. Carter got involved when Vernon Jordan referred Ms. Lewinsky to him in January. On March 4, Mr. Carter’s attorney, Charles Ogletree, argued before Chief Judge Norma Hollaway Johnson that the subpoena should be quashed: “Once you start to allow the government to intrude on the attorney-client relationship and allow them to pierce the attorney-client privilege, clients will no longer have a sense of confidence and respect that lawyers should have.” Coming days will reveal how Mr. Carter fares in his fight to protect Ms. Lewinsky’s constitutional rights and what effect this will have on the case’s ultimate outcome. To date, at least, Judge Johnson has shown a restraint that her predecessor Judge Sirica did not.

In accordance with the instructions of Administrator Andy Walker in his June 24, 2006 posting in the Kennedy Assassination thread under the topic of Infiltrators, Saboteurs and Fifth-Columnists, I have used the Report facility to file a number of violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. The Board Guidelines state: “You are responsible for what you post on this board. You will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law”. Mr. Gray, who only joined the Forum on May 26, 2006, has repeatedly violated the Board Guidelines by being abusive, hateful, and harassing in his postings against two Forum members: Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. Mr. Gray has also used vituperative and threatening language against other members who find his postings to be in violation of Board Guidelines. From the Alfred Baldwin thread on Watergate: Less than a month after his joined the Forum membership, Mr. Ashton in his posting in the Alfred Baldwin thread of Watergate wrote on June 21, 2006 at 05:04 AM: “Well, you’ve made your record. Just keep sticking to your story, Mr. Baldwin. I’m walking away for now. I’ve had all of your brand of truth I can take at the moment without puking on the keyboard.” That same day, on June 21, 2006 at 6:06 P.M., Mr. Ashton wrote in the Alfred Baldwin thread: “I’m done, Mr. Baldwin. You made your record. I’ve made mine. I’m done with you, with your soul-less, conscienceless, lying co-conspirators, and with the entire evil hoax.” In his posting on the Alfred Baldwin thread, Mr. Ashton wrote on June 22 at 11:51 P.M.: “ 1. Hunt and Liddy both lied. 2. You lied. 3. All three of you lied.” Member Pat Speer replied on June 21, 2006 at 10:40 PM by posting: “Mr. Gray, what is your purpose here? You came to this Forum for exactly what? You didn’t come here to gain information, that is for certain. I doubt that Mr. Caddy or Mr. Baldwin even respond to your insulting rants.” From the Douglas Caddy, Hunt, Liddy, Mullen and the CIA thread on Watergate: Mr. Ashton in his posting on June 16, 2006 at 10:46 AM, falsely accused me of having a conversation with my client that never took place. It is a complete fabrication by Mr. Ashton, who wrote: “Surely you'll recall that you couldn't hold a conversation after June 13, 1971 in Washington, D.C. that wasn't "almost entirely consumed with" talk about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. Right? “And surely, surely you'd recall if you, Barker, and Hunt discussed the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg just a couple of months before Hunt and Barker were involved in the Fielding op that gave Ellsberg his "get out of jail free" card. Right? I mean, Hunt was your client at the time.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 16, 2006 at 6:56 PM wrote of myself: “1) Hunt Lied, 2)You lied, 3)You both lied..” Mr. Pat Speer replied to Mr. Ashton on June 16, 2006 at 8:21 P.M.: “Ashton, might I request you tone down your questions? While you have done a good job of demonstrating that Mr. Caddy, in order to keep Hunt's involvement secret, probably lied to a newspaper about a phone call from Barker's wife--(geez, isn't that what lawyers do, protect their clients?)--the relevance is not immediately apparent to some of us on the outside, who value Mr. Caddy's contributions to this forum. Your desire to play "gotcha" with Caddy is understandable, but not altogether appropriate, as he has repeatedly tried to answer any and all questions on his role in history. Ask the questions in a nice manner and I suspect he'll provide you with a response. Point out an inconsistency and he'll offer an explanation if he has one. Ditto with Mr. Baldwin, who has been nothing but a gentleman. I do sympathize with your desire to play "gotcha" however...However long the list you have for Caddy about what appears to be inconsistencies in his statements, I guarantee you it positively PALES in comparison to the mental list of questions I have for Robert Maheu, should I ever be able to ask him a question. “Please play nice.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 22 at 3:50 PM, addressed to Mr. Pat Speer, appeared to borrow the malevolent lines of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs: “And you can take the rest of your non-sequitur, irrelevant, disruptive, off-topic, red-herring bag'o'crap message and shove it anywhere you want, as long as you don't try shoving it in my face again. “I might stop being so polite. You wouldn't want that.” Mr. Pat Speer on June 23, 2006 at 9:12 PM replied to Mr. Ashton’s latest threat against him: “As far as you reporting me to the authorities, give me a break. You come to this Forum, start insulting its members--yes, that's right, Mr. Caddy and Mr. Baldwin are members and not just visitors propped up here for your abuse--and even do a victory dance after insulting Mr. Baldwin off a thread bearing his name. And then you CRY like a child when I won't let you control the thread. Earth to Mr. Gray, this Forum was not created for your sole benefit. You decided to confront Mr. Baldwin on some possible holes in the record, and have accused him and others of being part of an ongoing conspiracy to hide the fact that the Watergate break-in was a CIA coup designed to put Gerald Ford in power. Never mind that this was many months before Ford was even in a position to reap the benefits of this coup. Never mind that Ford was not a friend of the CIA, but a friend of their political rival, the FBI, and that Ford's regime oversaw the most exhaustive investigation of the intelligence agencies in our history, spurred on in part by his own big mouth. While there is almost certainly more to the Watergate story than in the public record, your theory, frankly, appears a bit looney. Those coming to this Forum and wishing to read about Mr. Baldwin should not be subjected to reading your diatribes and ramblings without seeing that at least one member of this Forum found your distortions a bit looney, IMO. Sorry to rain on your hostility parade.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll in his posting on June 24, 2006 at 1:04 PM wrote: “Mr. Ashton Gray is accusing Mr. Douglas Caddy, directly or by implication, of being a xxxx. This is a clear violation of forum rules. Mr. Gray is clearly a truth-seeker, but throughout this thread he shows every evidence of falling into the fallacy of guilt by association. I do not have the slightest doubt that Mr. Caddy is an honest man. If he was not, then he would avoid this forum like the plague. “I gather it is true that Mr. Caddy had the misfortune to be retained to represent some unsavory characters connected to the Watergate break-in. I would guess that he now regrets that experience, and wishes he had confined himself to representing widows and orphans. It is no wonder that not everyone wants to be a lawyer, despite what they see on TV. “But it is a logical fallacy to assume, as Mr. Gray seems to do, that you can attribute the client's knowledge to his lawyer.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll, later that same day of June 24, 2005 at 5:24 PM wrote of Mr. Ashton’s repeated attacks on me: “In this case, I see no reason to suggest that a valued fellow forum member is lying. I suggest you take off that cowboy hat and replace it with your thinking cap.” The evidence would seem to indicate that Mr. Ashton Gray, who entered membership only recently on May 26, 2006, did so with a hidden agenda. No one can know what is in his mind, but his actions do meet the signs of an Infiltrator, Saboteur and Fifth-Columnist as denoted in my topic of the same title posted June 23. “Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called ‘information’ that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.” Mr. Ashton always closes his postings with his favorite motto: “Fiction doesn't leave a paper trail.” However, even in this assertion he is wrong. The fiction that he has posted since joining the Forum less than a month ago has left tell-tale paper trail, one which indicates that his actions are malevolent and destructive in their nature. My Reports of the violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray are now in the hands of the Administrator and Moderator. At stake is whether the Forum will continue to be a valuable and credible source of research information or whether it will be reduced to its lower common denominator, that of character assassination by one of its members. I am placing this topic on the Watergate and J.F. Kennedy Assassination threads of the Forum because of my past postings in each thread due to my involvement in both historical events in my capacity as an attorney.

In accordance with the instructions of Administrator Andy Walker in his June 24, 2006 posting in the Kennedy Assassination thread under the topic of Infiltrators, Saboteurs and Fifth-Columnists, I have used the Report facility to file a number of violations of Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray. The Board Guidelines state: “You are responsible for what you post on this board. You will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law”. Mr. Gray, who only joined the Forum on May 26, 2006, has repeatedly violated the Board Guidelines by being abusive, hateful, and harassing in his postings against two Forum members: Mr. Alfred Baldwin and myself. Mr. Gray has also used vituperative and threatening language against other members who find his postings to be in violation of Board Guidelines. From the Alfred Baldwin thread on Watergate: Less than a month after his joined the Forum membership, Mr. Ashton in his posting in the Alfred Baldwin thread of Watergate wrote on June 21, 2006 at 05:04 AM: “Well, you’ve made your record. Just keep sticking to your story, Mr. Baldwin. I’m walking away for now. I’ve had all of your brand of truth I can take at the moment without puking on the keyboard.” That same day, on June 21, 2006 at 6:06 P.M., Mr. Ashton wrote in the Alfred Baldwin thread: “I’m done, Mr. Baldwin. You made your record. I’ve made mine. I’m done with you, with your soul-less, conscienceless, lying co-conspirators, and with the entire evil hoax.” In his posting on the Alfred Baldwin thread, Mr. Ashton wrote on June 22 at 11:51 P.M.: “ 1. Hunt and Liddy both lied. 2. You lied. 3. All three of you lied.” Member Pat Speer replied on June 21, 2006 at 10:40 PM by posting: “Mr. Gray, what is your purpose here? You came to this Forum for exactly what? You didn’t come here to gain information, that is for certain. I doubt that Mr. Caddy or Mr. Baldwin even respond to your insulting rants.” From the Douglas Caddy, Hunt, Liddy, Mullen and the CIA thread on Watergate: Mr. Ashton in his posting on June 16, 2006 at 10:46 AM, falsely accused me of having a conversation with my client that never took place. It is a complete fabrication by Mr. Ashton, who wrote: “Surely you'll recall that you couldn't hold a conversation after June 13, 1971 in Washington, D.C. that wasn't "almost entirely consumed with" talk about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. Right? “And surely, surely you'd recall if you, Barker, and Hunt discussed the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg just a couple of months before Hunt and Barker were involved in the Fielding op that gave Ellsberg his "get out of jail free" card. Right? I mean, Hunt was your client at the time.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 16, 2006 at 6:56 PM wrote of myself: “1) Hunt Lied, 2)You lied, 3)You both lied..” Mr. Pat Speer replied to Mr. Ashton on June 16, 2006 at 8:21 P.M.: “Ashton, might I request you tone down your questions? While you have done a good job of demonstrating that Mr. Caddy, in order to keep Hunt's involvement secret, probably lied to a newspaper about a phone call from Barker's wife--(geez, isn't that what lawyers do, protect their clients?)--the relevance is not immediately apparent to some of us on the outside, who value Mr. Caddy's contributions to this forum. Your desire to play "gotcha" with Caddy is understandable, but not altogether appropriate, as he has repeatedly tried to answer any and all questions on his role in history. Ask the questions in a nice manner and I suspect he'll provide you with a response. Point out an inconsistency and he'll offer an explanation if he has one. Ditto with Mr. Baldwin, who has been nothing but a gentleman. I do sympathize with your desire to play "gotcha" however...However long the list you have for Caddy about what appears to be inconsistencies in his statements, I guarantee you it positively PALES in comparison to the mental list of questions I have for Robert Maheu, should I ever be able to ask him a question. “Please play nice.” Mr. Ashton in his posting of June 22 at 3:50 PM, addressed to Mr. Pat Speer, appeared to borrow the malevolent lines of Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs: “And you can take the rest of your non-sequitur, irrelevant, disruptive, off-topic, red-herring bag'o'crap message and shove it anywhere you want, as long as you don't try shoving it in my face again. “I might stop being so polite. You wouldn't want that.” Mr. Pat Speer on June 23, 2006 at 9:12 PM replied to Mr. Ashton’s latest threat against him: “As far as you reporting me to the authorities, give me a break. You come to this Forum, start insulting its members--yes, that's right, Mr. Caddy and Mr. Baldwin are members and not just visitors propped up here for your abuse--and even do a victory dance after insulting Mr. Baldwin off a thread bearing his name. And then you CRY like a child when I won't let you control the thread. Earth to Mr. Gray, this Forum was not created for your sole benefit. You decided to confront Mr. Baldwin on some possible holes in the record, and have accused him and others of being part of an ongoing conspiracy to hide the fact that the Watergate break-in was a CIA coup designed to put Gerald Ford in power. Never mind that this was many months before Ford was even in a position to reap the benefits of this coup. Never mind that Ford was not a friend of the CIA, but a friend of their political rival, the FBI, and that Ford's regime oversaw the most exhaustive investigation of the intelligence agencies in our history, spurred on in part by his own big mouth. While there is almost certainly more to the Watergate story than in the public record, your theory, frankly, appears a bit looney. Those coming to this Forum and wishing to read about Mr. Baldwin should not be subjected to reading your diatribes and ramblings without seeing that at least one member of this Forum found your distortions a bit looney, IMO. Sorry to rain on your hostility parade.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll in his posting on June 24, 2006 at 1:04 PM wrote: “Mr. Ashton Gray is accusing Mr. Douglas Caddy, directly or by implication, of being a xxxx. This is a clear violation of forum rules. Mr. Gray is clearly a truth-seeker, but throughout this thread he shows every evidence of falling into the fallacy of guilt by association. I do not have the slightest doubt that Mr. Caddy is an honest man. If he was not, then he would avoid this forum like the plague. “I gather it is true that Mr. Caddy had the misfortune to be retained to represent some unsavory characters connected to the Watergate break-in. I would guess that he now regrets that experience, and wishes he had confined himself to representing widows and orphans. It is no wonder that not everyone wants to be a lawyer, despite what they see on TV. “But it is a logical fallacy to assume, as Mr. Gray seems to do, that you can attribute the client's knowledge to his lawyer.” Mr. J. Raymond Carroll, later that same day of June 24, 2005 at 5:24 PM wrote of Mr. Ashton’s repeated attacks on me: “In this case, I see no reason to suggest that a valued fellow forum member is lying. I suggest you take off that cowboy hat and replace it with your thinking cap.” The evidence would seem to indicate that Mr. Ashton Gray, who entered membership only recently on May 26, 2006, did so with a hidden agenda. No one can know what is in his mind, but his actions do meet the signs of an Infiltrator, Saboteur and Fifth-Columnist as denoted in my topic of the same title posted June 23. “Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called ‘information’ that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.” Mr. Ashton always closes his postings with his favorite motto: “Fiction doesn't leave a paper trail.” However, even in this assertion he is wrong. The fiction that he has posted since joining the Forum less than a month ago has left tell-tale paper trail, one which indicates that his actions are malevolent and destructive in their nature. My Reports of the violations of the Board Guidelines by Mr. Ashton Gray are now in the hands of the Administrator and Moderator. At stake is whether the Forum will continue to be a valuable and credible source of research information or whether it will be reduced to its lower common denominator, that of character assassination by one of its members. I am placing this topic on the Watergate and J.F. Kennedy Assassination threads of the Forum because of my past postings in each thread due to my involvement in both historical events in my capacity as an attorney.

Pat: There has been some hostility, but it has been between both you and Ashton. Ashton's writing style employs sarcasam. Only after pointing out discrepancies in what Hunt says vs. what Atty Caddy says does Ashton say one of the "realities" cannot be true. Doug Caddy could just answer the questions and be done with all this....Perhaps he is too busy, but since he posted the thread on"inflitrators" in both Watergate and JFK assasination, that tells me he read the posts, thus the questions and has chosen not to answer. So we have to wonder why? This does not mean that his reply would reveal something sinister. Said reply could be perfectly innocent. We know that Mr. Hunt in all likelihood has a GREAT deal to hide.. I would like to see these questions answered as one who watched every second of the Watergate hearings, read every article and knew we were only getting a part of the truth. I wish we had others here TO ask questions of. Don't you think it would be terrific to have, for example Haldeman to ask him WHY- (what basis)- he told us in "The Ends OF Power" Nixon's use of the tern "whole Bay of Pigs thing" (6/23/72 tape) was a term Nixon employed when referring to the assassination of JFK? But he's dead and gone, so we cannot ask. I am sure there are many questions you would have of other participants as well. Ashton is merely asking questions of those participants in the event we call "Watergate" in an effort to arrive at a deeper knowledge. If you don't believe there was more to Watergate than we got, then you may not be interested in questioning anyone else. But from where I sit, I see the two events linked and have LOTS of questions. IN fact I shall ask one myself: My Caddy: How did Billie Sol come to ask you to represent him before the Grand Jury in 1984? Given that your law practice was not in criminal defense, this seems to be a legitimate question. Were you hired by Barr McClellan in May 1998 to attend a press conference in DC, re the fingerprint match? You did not go. IF you recall could you tell me why not? I realize that this was several years ago but I have been curious about these two questions since then. I appreciate your reply. (And I promise that I WON"T utilize sarcasm, regardless what your response may be.) Dawn You state, "In fact I shall ask one myself:" However, in fact you asked two questions. Why the imprecise language by you, an attorney? In answer to the two questions: (1) Billie Sol never asked me to represent him before the Grand Jury in 1984 in Robertson County. We never discussed his proposed appearance. He was represented by two attorneys, Mr. Alan Brown and Mr. Mark Stevens, both of San Antonio, Texas. On March 20, 1984 Mr. John Paschall, District-County Attorney for Robertson County, Texas wrote a letter to Messrs. Brown and Stevens. The letter's first paragraph states, "This letter is to confirm our previous oral agreement regarding transactional immunity for your client, Billie Sol Estes." Thus, your question is based on a false premise. I covered this topic previously in the Douglas Caddy: Questions and Answers topic in the Kennedy Assassination thread on Feb. 5, 2006 at 09:44 A.M. At that time I stated: "I talked to Billie Sol within a few days following his grand jury appearance in March 1984 in Robertson County, Texas. He had received transactional immunity from the prosecutor before testifying. The grand jury appearance had been arranged with Billie Sol's consent by U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples. It was my impression in talking to Billie Sol afterwards that he wanted his testimony before the grand jury to be made public and had so authorized public discussion by the prosecutor, U.S. Marshal Peoples, and his own attorney. There were a number of press reports at the time, so it would be impossible now to state which exact source of information about Billie Sol's testimony was used by the writer of a particular press report." (2) I was never hired by Barr McClellan to attend a press conference in Washington, D.C. in March 1998 on the fingerprint match issue. I wish I had been invited as I certainly would have attended. I am a strong supporter of Barr McClellan's on-going efforts to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination and the role played by a key figure in his former law firm. In fact, I am mentioned as a source in his book, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ killed JFK. Mr. McClellan states on p. 338, "Billie Sol Estes' attorney Doug Caddy was very helpful in his legal analysis and comments. I had many contacts with him in Houston and emailed him as needed." I previously answered this question in the Douglas Caddy: Questions and Answer topic in the Kennedy Assassination thread on Jan. 24, 2006 at 08:40 A.M. At that time I posted the following: "I was not asked to attend the press conference in May of 1998 regarding the fingerprint match by print expert Nathan Darby. Barr McClellan had informed me of Mr. Darby's conclusion about the fingerprint but I did not learn about the press conference until some time afterwards. "Based on Mr. Darby's superb professional credentials, I have every reason to believe his conclusion about the fingerprint is accurate." I don't mind answering questions posed by fellow forum members whose intent is to bring truth to light. However, answering questions again that have previously been answered by me wastes my time. I am in the midst of writing a new book, which will be my sixth published book, and do not have the time, energy or inclination to answer questions that pose an inaccurate premise or are abusive in nature.

These concerns are very valid, though how to fashion steps to deal with them is difficult. John Simkin has a very deep committment to free speech, but the forum will lose its value if any Tom, Dick or Harry can join and post any kind of nonsense, as Brendan Slattery does. All prospective members have to first submit a biography and an avatar photograph of themselves before they are allowed to post. Members are supposed to be either teachers, educators or researchers (hence the name of the forum), but we are pretty flexible about that. On signing up they tick the box to agree to our Board Guidelines. If they break these guidelines repeatedly we get rid of them. The chances of any "Tom Dick or Harry" or indeed "Sue, Trish or Mary" joining are fairly remote Dear Mr. Walker: This is request that you, as Administrator, review all the postings in the Watergate section from June 1, 2006 to the present date to ascertain whether there have been violations of the Board Guidelines by any member of the Forum. Sincerely yours, Douglas Caddy

Historians and the world’s citizenry in general owe a debt of gratitude to John Simkin for creating the J. F. Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections on Spartacus. The contributions of material and information by Forum members have created a treasure trove that will be mined for years to come. So valuable have the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate archives become in disseminating this information on a world-wide basis that the Forum’s members need to face the real possibility that the Forum may soon be targeted for some form of annihilation or destruction, if it is not already. On this past Monday I attended a special event in Houston sponsored by Pacifica radio station KPFT at which Greg Palast of the BBC and The Guardian newspaper spoke. Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse, which last week hit the New York Times Best-Seller list, and of a previous best-seller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. KPFT in Houston is one of five Pacifica non-commercial radio stations in the United States, situated in major cities, whose daily public affairs programming is a constant thorn in the side of the authoritarian Powers That Be who control all three branches of the government and most of the mass media in the U.S. today. At the reception preceding the Palast lecture to a packed auditorium audience, one of the KPFT directors recounted to me how over the years the Powers That Be have sent infiltrators, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists into the Pacifica community in an attempt to take it over or at a minimum neutralize its effectiveness. These Trojan horse efforts have been repulsed successfully by the mobilization of more than a million listeners, volunteers and financial contributors who make possible the on-going educational and non-profit work of Pacifica. A similar effort in my opinion is or soon will be mounted against the Forum. Members of the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections of the Forum should be on guard to spot those who join our ranks whose motivation is to end the effectiveness of the Forum as a group effort in gathering and posting valuable information. Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called “information” that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.

Historians and the world’s citizenry in general owe a debt of gratitude to John Simkin for creating the J. F. Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections on Spartacus. The contributions of material and information by Forum members have created a treasure trove that will be mined for years to come. So valuable have the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate archives become in disseminating this information on a world-wide basis that the Forum’s members need to face the real possibility that the Forum may soon be targeted for some form of annihilation or destruction, if it is not already. On this past Monday I attended a special event in Houston sponsored by Pacifica radio station KPFT at which Greg Palast of the BBC and The Guardian newspaper spoke. Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse, which last week hit the New York Times Best-Seller list, and of a previous best-seller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. KPFT in Houston is one of five Pacifica non-commercial radio stations in the United States, situated in major cities, whose daily public affairs programming is a constant thorn in the side of the authoritarian Powers That Be who control all three branches of the government and most of the mass media in the U.S. today. At the reception preceding the Palast lecture to a packed auditorium audience, one of the KPFT directors recounted to me how over the years the Powers That Be have sent infiltrators, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists into the Pacifica community in an attempt to take it over or at a minimum neutralize its effectiveness. These Trojan Horse efforts have been repulsed successfully by the mobilization of more than a million listeners, volunteers and financial contributors who make possible the on-going educational and non-profit work of Pacifica. A similar effort in my opinion is or soon will be mounted against the Forum. Members of the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate sections of the Forum should be on guard to spot those who join our ranks whose motivation is to end the effectiveness of the Forum as a group effort in gathering and posting valuable information. Among the tell-tale signs of these infiltrators, saboteurs and fifth-columnists are unbridled, unwarranted, unprovoked and vicious attacks on other forum members and the postings of so-called “information” that is essentially mis-information or trivia designed to affect adversely the Forum’s credibility.

I reiterate my previous statement about this matter, which indeed is trivial as to a specific date over 30 years ago about a meeting that was thoroughly examined at the time by the appropriate Watergate law enforcement authorities: I stand by my prior reply as to the circumstances under which I met Barnard Barker. This was the only occasion prior to June 17, 1972 that I met him. I testified before the Watergate grand jury under oath, with the penalty of perjury. My bank records were subpoenaed and thoroughly examined. The FBI conducted an investigation of me. I testified under oath at the first Watergate trial. I was interviewed by the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor on a number of occasions. The law enforcement authorities who investigated Watergate never disputed or contradicted the veracity of any statement that I made to them under oath or made to them otherwise in their official capacity. It is extremely likely that Barker was also questioned by the law enforcement authorities about the circumstances of our one and only meeting before June 17, 1972. Since the issue has never been raised as being significantly relevant, one can safely assume that what he told the law enforcement authorities did not conflict with my sworn testimony.

Ouch. I hate to interrupt you, but can we stop right there for just a moment? I had asked you about "the circumstances under which you had met Bernard Barker about a year before you ended up representing him." You've responded about an incident you characterize as being "some months prior to June 17, 1972." Sung: "You say 'to-may-to' and I say 'to-mah-to'..." (Wait; that's the wrong song. Gimme a sec. I'm getting it... I know!) Sung: "What a difference a day makes... ." Dinah Washington just tore that up, didn't she? And what a fitting name. And if a day can make such a big difference, just imagine what "some months" can mean. I realize that a year is made up of "some months," but I'm trying to verify what I understand to be your own testimony. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The cite I'm using for the "year" time period, in this exchange, is your own article: "Gay Bashing and Watergate." In it, you quote U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert in his closing argument, to wit: "Mr. Caddy told you, oh yes, he was going to be in the case. He was going to be in the case of those five. He never met them before except for Barker a year before. He was going to represent those five." I realize that lawyers feel and exercise a certain sense of latitude in their practice, but closing arguments, after all, are crafted with considerable care—I'm sure you'll agree—and are not a very strategic place to be attempting to make material alterations to the trial evidence. Mr. Silbert, in authoring his closing arguments in this world-watched case, represented that you had met Bernard Barker "a year before" you announced that you were going to represent him (Barker) and the others—which, as you point out, was on June 17, 1972. That would put the date of your Army-Navy Club lunchtime rendezvous with Mr. Hunt and Mr. Barker sometime in June 1971. Did Mr. Silbert misrepresent the facts in evidence during his closing argument? I ask that with the full understanding that you, at the time—as you characterized in your article—felt that your hands were "tied" by your attorney-client relationships. But surely no significant distortion of material fact regarding your attorney-client relationship with Mr. Barker, or the time and conditions of your first having met him in the company of Mr. Hunt, would have been allowed into the record without objection—especially with Hunt's own attorney, William O. Bittman, there during your role as a witness for the prosecution. And your hands certainly were not "tied" at the time you authored your article—electing, in doing so, to quote Mr. Silbert's representation that you had met Bernard Barker "a year before" your taking Barker on as a client. Therefore, I'm relying entirely on your own record to conclude and state that you in fact met Bernard Barker, in the company of E. Howard Hunt, at the Army-Navy Club in Washington, D.C. in or about the month of June, 1971. If that's not the case, if your own record is wrong, if Mr. Silbert misrepresented an important material fact without objection during his closing argument—which you repeated in your own article without objection or correction—right now would be a very timely time to emphatically and specifically correct the record as to date. And I don't mean with a vague, airy "some months before." Trust me on this one. Now I'm going to go find my Dinah Washington collection; my singing is scaring the cat. Ashton Gray When I testified before the Watergate grand jury and was asked if I had ever met Bernard Barker, I answered that I had and described the circumstances as outlined in my immediate prior reply. I previously answered this question Feb. 6, 2006 when it was posed to me by Chris Newton. His question and my answer can be found in the Forum section “Douglas Caddy: Questions and Answers.” My prior reply of June 15, 2006 and that of Feb. 6, 2006 are consistent. It is my recollection that the Washington Post, as part of its contemporary stories about my grand jury appearance, quoted me about this meeting with Barker. I was not asked by Prosecutor Silbert to provide the exact date of the meeting. I am not certain that even my personal and professional records, now in the Library Archives of the University of Oregon, provide the exact date. Prosecutor Silbert himself used the general phrase, “...a year before” and did not denote a specific date. I certainly shall not vouch for the veracity of all the statements Silbert made in closing argument. I attended his closing argument in court and found myself is sharp disagreement with some of his remarks. Closing argument in court is generally reserved for sweeping statements, designed to sway the jury with emotion. Clearly this was the purpose of Silbert’s closing argument, which highlighted my role and carefully and purposely omitted any mention that there was a larger conspiracy involving higher-ups. I stand by my prior reply as to the circumstances under which I met Barnard Barker. This was the only occasion prior to June 17, 1972 that I met him. I testified before the Watergate grand jury under oath, with the penalty of perjury. My bank records were subpoenaed and thoroughly examined. The FBI conducted an investigation of me. I testified under oath at the first Watergate trial. I was interviewed by the Office of the Watergate Special Prosecutor on a number of occasions. The law enforcement authorities who investigated Watergate never disputed or contradicted the veracity of any statement that I made to them under oath or made to them otherwise in their official capacity. It is extremely likely that Barker was also questioned by the law enforcement authorities about the circumstances of our one and only meeting before June 17, 1972. Since the issue has never been raised as being significantly relevant, one can safely assume that what he told the law enforcement authorities did not conflict with my sworn testimony.

It's I who must thank you, now, for your extraordinarily gracious and comprehensive reply, and also must beg your indulgence, in turn, while I give it all due and thorough consideration. Pending a more responsive response to your response, I'll say that on its face it clears up quite a lot in broad strokes. One thing it specifically did pique my curiosity about, though, is the circumstances under which you had met Bernard Barker about a year before you ended up representing him. Was that through association with Mr. Hunt, or just one of those "happy accidents" that make life endlessly entertaining? I know you're busy with your book, but if you get a chance. Meanwhile, I hope you'll also find an opportunity to visit an article I just posted here, There was no "first break-in" at the Watergate, which you may find of some interest in relation to your representation of the co-conspirators in the early going. Ashton Gray As to my meeting Bernard Barker on one occasion some months prior to June 17, 1972, this was the subject of a question posed to me when I testified before the Watergate grand jury. As I related at that time, Howard Hunt asked me to join him and an undisclosed guest at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C. for lunch. When I arrived Hunt was already there with his guest, Bernard Barker. Hunt made the introductions. The luncheon conversation was almost entirely consumed with Hunt and Barker recounting their involvement in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Of the five arrested individuals at Watergate on June 17, the only one that I knew was Bernard Barker, based on the above described meeting. I look forward to reading the article that you have just posted.

Hi, Mr. Caddy. I read your article with a great deal of interest, and while it and your posts that I've read in this forum seem to focus mainly on those dramatic events following the fateful night of 16-17 June 1972, I wonder if you would be able to shed some light on parts of the backstory that are intriguing, but--well, "sketchy." I'll try to be as specific as possible on some of the things I'm curious about, which the available literature doesn't seem to address in any measurable depth. When CIA veteran E. Howard Hunt was hired at the Mullen Company on 1 May 1970, pursuant to a recommendation from DCI Richard Helms, the Mullen company had been cooperating with CIA, including providing overseas cover for CIA agents, for at least seven years. The Stockholm, Sweden office of Mullen was "staffed, run, and paid for by CIA." According to the available record, at least eight people in the D.C. Mullen office, where you worked, had been "cleared and made witting of Agency ties."Were you cleared and witting of the Mullen company's involvement with CIA? If so, what was the nature and scope of your clearances? Who else at Mullen was "witting and cleared"? If you know, did Hunt, or you, or anyone at the Mullen company have any contact, directly or through an intermediary, with Daniel Ellsberg? From my understanding of the record, not many months after Hunt arrived at Mullen--in or around November 1970--you moved from Mullen to Gall, Lane, Powell and Kilcullen (hereinafter "Gall Lane"), and at about the same time, Hunt became a client a Gall Lane, and you were one of the attorneys working with Hunt. You've said you consulted with Hunt regarding probate and "other matters."What were the "other matters"? Did you have CIA clearances or other clearances from any intelligence branch or agency at any relevant time? If so, why? Did the probate matters include Dorothy Hunt's probate? What was Meade Emory's role? Were persons employed at or by Gall Lane "cleared and witting" of Mullen ties to CIA? If so, who? If you know, was Gall Lane in any sort of relationship with CIA that was similar to the relationship that the Mullen company enjoyed? Please bear with me in establishing a brief history for these next questions, but still focusing on November 1970 and your move to Gall Lane: Around the same time as your move to Gall Lane, Robert Mardian approached G. Gordon Liddy and asked Liddy to take an undescribed position that Liddy says was "super-confidential." Liddy had already been granted "special clearances" by CIA a year earlier, in December 1969. Carrying forward to 1971: Hunt (your client) and Liddy had secure lines in Room 16 for communicating directly to Langley. In July 1971, E. Howard Hunt (your client) met privately with CIA's Lucien Conein, CIA's Edward Landsdale, and Deputy Director of CIA Robert Cushman, and was supplied by CIA with phony ID and other items. In August 1971, Hunt (your client) and G. Gordon Liddy met at least twice with CIA psychiatrist Bernard Malloy. In August 1971 G. Gordon Liddy--working closely with your client, Hunt--was in regular communication "with State and the CIA," including direct conversations with DCI Richard Helms, and was briefed by CIA on "several additional sensitive programs in connection with his assignment to the White House staff." Liddy received similar phony ID from CIA as had been provided by CIA to your client, Hunt. In October 1971, your client, Hunt, was in telephone contact with CIA Chief European Division John Hart, had several telephone conversations with CIA Executive Officer European Division John Caswell, and met with CIA Director Richard Helms. Continuing into February 1972, Liddy and Hunt (your client) met with a "retired" CIA doctor to discuss indetectable means of assassination. Liddy met on 22 February 1972 with undisclosed CIA officials in relation to the "special clearances" he was carrying. Within only about a week of that meeting--on or around 1 March 1972--you started doing unspecified "legal tasks" for G. Gordon Liddy leading up to the Watergate activities, so were involved in a legal relationship with both "commanders" of everything Watergate: Liddy and Hunt. Therefore, in regard to the foregoing:What was the nature of the "legal tasks" you were doing for Liddy? Were you doing similar legal tasks for your client, Hunt? Did any of the "legal tasks" you performed for either party require any kind of clearances from CIA and/or any other intelligence branch, organization, or agency? Did any of your legal tasks for either Liddy or Hunt include arranging for possible overseas travel? Did you have any clearances, special or otherwise, from CIA or any other intelligence branch, organization, or agency at relevant times? If so, what was the nature and scope, and why? Taking you back now in time, if I may, to E. Howard Hunt's move, in May 1970, from CIA Central to the Mullen company, he hadn't been "retired" from CIA for more than a month before a special Covert Security Approval was requested through CIA for him under "Project QK/ENCHANT." You were still at the Mullen branch with him.Did you have a clearance for QK/ENCHANT at any relevant time? Do you know anything about why the "retired" Howard Hunt almost immediately needed this special clearance? I'm sorry for having had to include as much establishing information as I did, but it's scattered throughout so many different sources that I thought others here may not be entirely familiar with the context given above, and I didn't want you to have to spend the time explaining it. I'd rather you just be able to focus on the questions themselves, and any light you can shed would be of inexpressible value. Thanks so much for your time. Ashton Gray Thank you for your inquiries into Watergate that are concerned with the back history before the arrests of the five burglars on June 17, 1972. Here are my responses to the questions posed by you in four sections: First section: (1) No, I was not cleared and witting of the Mullen Company’s involvement with the CIA. I only learned for certain of such involvement when I read Senator Howard Baker’s supplemental lengthy statement that was released about the same time that the final Senate Watergate Committee report was promulgated. Senator Baker, as you know, was a member of that Committee. (2) Thus, at no time did I possess any clearance of any type as part of the Mullen Company’s involvement with the CIA. Second section: (1) As part of the grand jury investigation into Watergate and in my capacity as a subpoenaed witness before that jury, I was forced to disclose the legal work that I performed for Howard Hunt when I was employed as an associate with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Gall, Lane, Powell and Kilcullen. This work was performed in conjunction with a partner of that law firm, Robert Scott, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, who later became a judge. At Hunt’s request, we prepared a will for him, analyzed his proposed business relationship with the Mullen Company after Robert Bennett assumed its ownership (no mention was made then by Hunt of the CIA’s involvement with the Company), and contacted various book publishers to ascertain whether they would be interested in publishing a novel that Hunt, a prolific writer, had completed. None of this legal work involved probate matters. (2) I have at no time received a clearance from any branch of the U.S. government. (3) At no time was I involved in any probate matters dealing with Dorothy Hunt. After I was subpoenaed in late June 1972 to appear before the Watergate grand jury, under the law I could no longer legally represent Hunt or his wife. My role was transformed from being Hunt’s attorney to being an involuntary witness in the criminal case against him. Thus, in the Watergate case I was both an attorney for the defense and a witness for the prosecution. Dorothy Hunt died in late 1972, subsequently to the date that I was forced to withdraw from legal representation of the Hunts due to my grand jury subpoena. I do not know who handled the probate of Dorothy Hunt’s estate. (4) I do not recognize the name of Meade Emory, and for that reason am unaware of any role that he played in whatever matter you apparently have in mind. Third section: Your preface to the inquiries posed in this section contains information about which, on the whole, I was unaware. For example, I never heard of Room 16. Also, I had no knowledge that Liddy possessed a relationship with the CIA or that Hunt apparently had a continuing working relationship with the CIA after his retirement from that organization in 1970. (1) In March, 1972, George Webster, chairman of Lawyers for the Re-Election of Nixon-Agnew, contacted John Kilcullen, a partner of the law firm that employed me, and asked for a lawyer to do voluntary campaign work in John Dean’s office. I was “volunteered” by John Kilcullen. I did several legal research assignments given to me by Dean and one of his associates. Some weeks later Webster asked that I contact Gordon Liddy at the Finance Committee of the Nixon-Agnew campaign to do a legal research on campaign finance laws then in effect. At Liddy’s request, I undertook such research and subsequently presented Liddy with a written legal memorandum on the subject. This was the sole work that I performed for Liddy. (2) As stated above, I have at no time received a clearance from any branch of the U.S. government, which includes the CIA. Fourth section: (1) This is the first time that I have heard of Project QK/ENCHANT. As such, I obviously never received a clearance to work on this project. (2) I have no knowledge of Howard Hunt’s work on this project or why he needed a special clearance from the CIA to do so. I believe that above responses cover the inquiries posed by you. I wish to add the following observations. Had I ever applied for a clearance with the CIA or any branch of government in 1972 or in the years preceding, I most likely would have been denied such clearance. This is because of my sexual orientation, being a gay male. As Robert “Butch” Merritt disclosed publicly in 1977, within one day after the arrests of the burglars at Watergate on June 17, 1972 the FBI and the Washington, D.C. Police Department recruited him in his on-going undercover capacity to strike up a relationship with me because we both were gay males. The FBI and Police Department wanted to gather as much personal information about me that they could, even what food I ate. Merritt failed in this assignment. In 1972 and the years preceding, gay males were deemed potential security risks. The privilege/dishonor of betraying the United States was reserved exclusively for certified heterosexuals, some of whom managed to do great harm to the country in their treasonous endeavors in the cases that were publicly disclosed. Undoubtedly some treasonous heterosexuals were never discovered and probably have lived quite comfortably in their retirement on government pensions, courtesy of the unwitting American taxpayers, which include gays and lesbians. Even today, discrimination against gays and lesbians persists. For some unknown reason many gays and lesbians excel in linguistics and quickly master foreign languages, both oral and written. (Unfortunately, I am not among them.) Although there is a dearth of persons who can read and speak arabic languages, gays and lesbians who possess this rare ability continue to be drummed out of the U.S. military language school at Monterey, California. Some progress has been made since the days of Alan Turing, but much still remains to be done.

I have a complete salt block set aside for each of the co-conspirators. And speaking of blocks, I'm beginning to wonder now if the prolific Mr. Caddy has developed sudden writer's block over these few simple questions I've asked (now in their own thread). Ashton Gray I apologize for the delay in responding to various recent inquiries about Watergate that have been posted in the Forum. The fault is all mine. I am in the midst of writing a new book and have been caught up in the initial work involved. The book will contain a reference to the Forum to encourage its readers to consult the invaluable information that has been posted by Forum members about both the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. Since I am lagging at the present time in responding to a number of these inquiries in the Forum, please give me two or three days to read these thoroughly, which will be followed by my detailed replies. Again, my apologies. No slight was intended by my recent failure to respond.

Political Amnesia Is the Enemy By Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org Posted on May 27, 2006, Printed on May 28, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/36743/ We all know, all of us in America anyway, that Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer. It's about the downtime ahead, the vacation that's coming, the shutting down of the serious in anticipation of fun in the sun. Officially, it is also about honoring the dead, and there will be parades by veterans and flags flying on TV newscasts. Most of it is set in the present with little referencing of the past or memory itself. Memories work on us on every level, especially when they slip out of mind. A memory exhibit at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum touches on the usual: "You get to school and realize you forgot your lunch at home. You take a test, and you can't remember half the answers. You see the new kid who just joined your class, and you can't remember his name. Some days, it seems like your brain is taking a holiday -- you can't remember anything!" But memories are not just individual properties. Societies have memories, or should. And our news world and information technologies could or should have the capacity to keep us in touch with our collective memory, our recent history, the only context in which new facts find meaning. I like to joke about my own "senior moments," but cultures have them too -- and often, not always by accident. In our culture, it is often by design. The frequent references we hear to "political amnesia" is not just commentary but an allusion to a social pathology, a deliberate process of actually disconnecting us from our past and history. The blogger Billmon writes: "I don't know if it's a byproduct of decades of excessive exposure to television, the state of America's educational system, or something in the water, but the ability of the average journalist -- not to mention the average voter -- to remember things that happened just a few short months ago appears to be slipping into the abyss. "If this keeps up, we're going to end up like the villagers in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who all contracted a rare form of jungle amnesia, so virulent they were reduced to posting signs on various objects -- 'I AM A COW. MILK ME' or 'I AM A GATE. OPEN ME' -- just so they could get on with their daily lives." A 1991 science fiction film called Total Recall pictured political amnesia, in the words of Michael Rogin as "an essential aspect of the 'postmodern American empire.'" A book by Andreas Huyssen takes another tack, arguing, "Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, "Twilight Memories" argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions with cultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive, and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality." But whatever the causes, the consequences are truly frightening. When 63 percent of young people can't find Iraq on a map after three years of war and coverage, you know that the institutions that claim to be informing us are doing everything but. Our amnesia about recent developments seems to be induced and reinforced by the very fast-paced entertainment-oriented formats that we have become addicted to as sources of news and knowledge. They keep us in the present, in the now, disconnected from any larger ideas or analytical framework. No wonder some studies find that news viewers rapidly forget what they have just seen. That is what is intended to happen. No wonder, as Jay Leno shows when he contrasts a photo of a cultural icon with an elected official, that the public recognizes the former, not the latter. We recognize Mr. Peanut, not Jimmy Carter. More people vote for the best performer on American Idol than for our presidents. The architects of TV news know this from their market surveys and studies. It is this very media effect that they hype to lure advertisers to their real business: selling our eyeballs to sponsors, not deepening our awareness. Depoliticizing our culture is a media necessity in a society driven by consumerism. Every programmer knows the drill. It's a market logic called KISS: Keep It Simple and Stupid. A national curriculum, "Lessons From History," on the teaching of the past realizes that this phenomenon threatens democracy, warning, "Citizens without a common memory, based on common historical studies, may lapse into political amnesia, and be unable to protect freedom, justice, and self-government during times of national crisis. Citizens must understand that democracy is a process -- not a finished product -- and that controversy and conflict are essential to its success." So even as this dialectic is deplored, it is, sadly, quite functional. "We're forgetting the past," says historian Howard Zinn, "because neither our educational system nor our media inform us about the past. For instance, the history of the Vietnam War has been very much forgotten. I believe this amnesia is useful to those conducting our present foreign policy. It would be embarrassing if the story of the Vietnam War were told at a time when we are engaged in a war which has some of the same characteristics: government deception, the killing of civilians through bombing, scaring the American people (world communism in that case, terrorism in this one)." So on Memorial Day and in the season ahead, think of how to encourage remembering, not just about the dead but for the living. Our future depends on how we understand the past. Political amnesia is the enemy in our ADD culture. Please don't forget. Oh, too bad, you already have … Danny Schechter writes a blog for MediaChannel.org. He is the author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq" (Prometheus). View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/36743/

Inside Job: How Nixon Was Taken Down by Gary North June 8, 2005 http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north383.html INTRODUCTION People can be misled by deliberately distracting them. This fact is basic to all forms of "magic," meaning prestidigitation. The performer seeks to persuade members of the audience to focus their attention on something peripheral, when the real action lies elsewhere. A skilled performer can do this "as if by magic." The mainstream media use a very similar strategy in crucial events. The public is reminded of the official version of what is a turning-point event. Nothing is said of other aspects of the event. It is assumed that the public will forget. Prior to the Internet, this was a safe assumption. It no longer is. Let me give you an example. We have all heard the analogy of the elephant in the living room. Out of politeness to the host, no guest says anything. If no one says anything for a long enough period, people tend not to notice the beast any more. It becomes background noise (and odor). When they move on to another dinner party, they tend to forget that the elephant was ever there. I am now going to present three videos. They are videos of the largest documented elephant in the largest living room in human history. Nothing else matches it. Some of you may have seen video #3: it was on national TV. Yet after its broadcast, this elephant was dropped down the memory hole. Memory holes are designed to accept elephants. People have heard about this one, but they have long forgotten it. Only by deliberately ignoring it can those in charge of reminding people to think about certain details be confident that the official version of the event will be believed. The event took place eight hours after a more famous event. That event was 9/11. But this event was also part of 9/11. It is the event, more than any other event, that does not fit the official explanation. It fits a few of the unofficial explanations. Watch the video. On my computer, QuickTime is automatically activated. "Name that event!" What event was it? Do you remember? Can you identify it by name? Probably not. Don’t tell me Orwell was wrong in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The memory hole strategy works. Now watch a different video of the same event. Think about what you are watching. How can this be true? How can the sequence have taken place? What’s wrong with this picture? Then, for the capper, watch the third version. Listen to the verbal comments. The commentator is Dan Rather. Millions of people saw this video and heard what he said. He never said it again. Neither did any other national media commentator. Watch and listen. There is a movable right-left button at the bottom of the image’s screen if you have QuickTime installed. You can rerun the video by using your cursor to move the button to the left. Then click the play button again. All right, for those of you who are still confused at what this is, I’ll refresh your memory. This is the collapse of Building 7 of the World Towers complex. It took place at 5:20 p.m., over eight hours after the previous collapses. This is the third largest building in history to collapse, yet it is essentially forgotten by the public. Building 7 was a block away from the first two. As you have seen, the building collapsed from the bottom. It fell straight down – just as North and South towers did. This caught Rather’s attention. In a moment of extreme indiscretion, he said this: It’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before, when a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down. He only said it once. But, because of the Web, we can hear him say it over and over. Why did it collapse? Because it was deliberately demolished. Despite all the chaos of that day, there was time to "pull it." Evidence? Click this for a recording. In the midst of that day’s chaos, a team of highly skilled professionals was assembled in less than eight hours to demolish the building. How? This time frame in itself is remarkable: hours, not days. How? There were fires on the upper floors. The team clearly had the protection of the authorities. They blew out the foundations of an insured building. By common law, a fire department can legally destroy property to keep a fire from spreading. I ask: "To where?" For more details and an amazing video, click here. [You will probably not be able to turn off the first video if you watch the first five minutes. If you’re at work, you are now forewarned. The report is from Alex Jones, or as he is known by cognoscenti on the Left, "Rush Limbaugh’s Rush Limbaugh."] This is not the sort of thing that the American public wants to hear. So, they do not hear it in the mainstream media. Enough of this information was made public by mainstream media sources so that it’s not easy to call this a systematic cover-up. But because people have very short memories, it is not necessary to engineer a complete blackout to cover up something very big – in this case, 47 stories. It is only necessary to ignore certain evidence and refrain from asking certain questions. Like the dog that Sherlock Holmes observed in retrospect – the dog that did not bark – so is the question that never gets asked by investigators. Why doesn’t it get asked? I am making a simple point. An event seen by millions of people so recently can still be dropped down the memory hole. Embarrassing questions are not aired before the general public. No one asks: "What is that elephant doing here?" It is time to consider a far less visible elephant. Part 1 DEEP THROAT: THE SIDESHOW SOLVED! The identity of Deep Throat is modern journalism’s greatest unsolved mystery. It has been said that he may be the most famous anonymous person in U.S. history. This is the assessment of John O’Connor, author of the July, 2005 Vanity Fair article, "I’m the Guy they Called Deep Throat." If this really was modern journalism’s greatest unsolved mystery, then modern journalists have got way too much time on their hands. Deep Throat. For days after Vanity Fair’s story appeared (May 31), the media were filled with Deep Throat stories. "Washington’s oldest mystery is solved!" This shows that Washington is still as dumb as a post, and has a newspaper to prove it: The Washington Post. Deep Throat was a sideshow in 1973, and still is. Deep Throat never had what it took to unseat Richard Nixon. Neither did Woodward and Bernstein. One man did. He remains anonymous. In the initial contacts with Woodward, Deep Throat merely confirmed what W&B had dug up on their own. He was not a supplier of new information until much later. The real supplier of new information never talked with Woodward or Bernstein. They never knew he was the reason why all the President’s men sank with the Good Ship R. M. Nixon. He was buried so deeply in the bowels of the government that I call him Deep Sphincter. "FOLLOW THE MONEY" W. Mark Felt was on target when he told Woodward to follow the money. He did historians a great favor by getting this phrase into the English language – not that most salaried historians are willing to do this. But anyone who is trying to uncover the source of crucial decisions ought to begin with the trail of digits in our era that we call money. Nevertheless, this is only one avenue from the here and now back to square one. The other major trail is the loyalty trail. This procedure is what I have called "follow the oath." When we discover to whom or to what a man has sworn allegiance, we learn a great deal about him. We must also look carefully at the sanctions, both positive and negative, that is imposed to maintain his allegiance. When men keep their mouths shut about a really big secret, there has to be fear in the picture. Men love to brag about the big deals they have been a part of. Eventually, they feel compelled to take credit. W. Mark Felt held back for over three decades, but finally he went public. "Yes, I did it. I’m the one!" It is the cry of the four-year-old on the day care playground: "Look at me!" Call it a Felt need. The man who takes his biggest secret to the grave was a serious player, or at least a serious observer. He who exposes a damaging secret is hailed by the enemies of his victim and is vilified by the victim’s supporters. Mr. Felt is now experiencing both traditional responses, which come with the territory. His critics cry: "Disloyalty!" Nixon’s enemies cry: "Higher duty!" Different strokes from different folks. But the person who actually made the difference – the one who brought Nixon down – says nothing. The press says nothing. The greatest Watergate secret of all remains a secret. TRUNCATED CHAINS OF COMMAND Woodward and Bernstein kept writing stories about the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Nixon’s team was not very forward-looking when they chose this name for their organization. Its acronym later became CREEP. (The other possible acronym, CRP, also created PR problems.) I challenge readers to come up with a real-world organization with a negative acronym to match CREEP. CREEP crept on behalf of a man universally regarded by his enemies as a creep. CREEP was perfect for the newspapers. Nevertheless, tracing money into CREEP and back out to one of the burglars was not the same as tracing anything illegal to Nixon. Nixon could always say that he had nothing to do with the minions at CREEP. This is what every senior decision-maker says whenever some unsavory machination hits the headlines. It works most of the time. The minions are either loyal or afraid. When threatened with serious negative sanctions, they may reply: "I was just following orders!" But these unwritten orders always seem to have originated no higher than the rank of staff sergeant or its organizational equivalent. Somehow, with the exception of My Lai, such orders do not originate at the commissioned officer level, and never at the field-grade officer level. There is always a break in the chain of command, usually quite low on the chain. The only exception is when a nation loses a war. The Nuremburg trials followed the orders all the way up. But these post-World War II trials were unique in the history of peacetime. Nixon lost the Watergate war. Yet in the midst of that war, he was in a safe position with respect to CREEP’s flow of funds. Here, he knew what he was doing. He was out of the loop. The Democrats had almost succeeded in scuttling him on the payola issue in the 1952 Presidential campaign, and only his deservedly famous "Checkers" speech saved him. Overnight, Checkers became the most famous dog in American political history, the dog that saved Nixon’s career. Eisenhower had been prepared to drop Nixon from the ticket, but that speech went to the hearts of Republicans in the heartland. Nixon survived. Never again would he let himself be implicated in wrongdoing by this sign on his desk: "The bucks stop here." Yet in August, 1974, Nixon resigned. How did this happen? THE SMOKING TAPES Two events led to Nixon’s removal: one public, one private. The first event was the televised admission by Alexander Butterfield, under questioning by a Republican Senate staff lawyer, Fred Dalton Thompson (later to become an actor who often played a Senator, then a U.S. Senator, and now an actor who plays the New York City District Attorney on Law and Order), that Nixon had bugged the White House. The Secret Service had tape-recorded all of Nixon’s conversations, beginning in early 1971. By this public admission, he became the most important of all the public players. Butterfield had been Deputy Assistant to the President. He had been recommended by Haldeman. He worked with the Secret Service on security matters. He had been in charge of secretly taping the Cabinet meetings. In late 1972, he had been appointed the head of the Federal Aviation Administration. He remained the head of the FAA after Nixon resigned. The recording system went on and off automatically throughout the Executive Office Building (1) whenever it detected a voice, if (2) the system previously detected Nixon’s electronic locator, which the Secret Service made him wear. When he was in a room and someone started speaking, a tape recorder came on. Again, this is according to the official site. It is also what Butterfield told a conference in 2003. A transcript is posted on-line, and it is a fascinating document. This automated system was not the recording system used in the Cabinet Room. There, the system had to be activated manually. Butterfield had been in charge of the manual taping system until he went to the FAA. On July 13, 1973, he told Senate staff committee members about the tapes. He testified in public on July 16, 1973. He was of course asked about the tapes. He admitted everything. Chief of Staff Alexander Haig ordered the Secret Service to remove the system on July 18. Let me check my calendar: testimony on July 16; removal on July 18 . . . lighting-fast thinking by a retired 4-star general! Think about this chronology: The first bug was planted in the Democrats’ office on May 28, 1972. The bungled break-in took place on June 17. On August 1, the Washington Post reported a $25,000 check, earmarked for the Nixon campaign, that had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars. On October 10, the Post reported that the FBI had determined that the break-in was part of a campaign of spying conducted by the President’s re-election effort. The tape-recording system was removed on July 18, 1973, at Haig’s request, not Nixon’s, according to the government’s official site for the tapes. Somehow, it had not occurred to Nixon that the tapes might be incriminating. "Let the good tapes roll!" Men later went to jail because of what was on those tapes. Some of them knew that the tape machine was running when they spoke the words that sent them to jail. Haldeman knew. Others may have known. Yet we are supposed to believe that they never told Nixon, "Turn off the tape recorder." I have my choice of conclusions: (1) Nixon and his assistants simply forgot about the recorders; (2) they thought that no one would gain access to the tapes before the statute of limitations ran out for them, and they cared nothing about future historians’ assessments of their personal integrity; (3) Nixon did not have control over the recordings. Most commentators say #2 was the reason: Nixon’s desire for accurate records for writing his memoirs. It turns out that recorders had been installed by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. We have learned that Roosevelt had a primitive recording system installed. Johnson had advised Nixon to start recording his conversations. He told him that he was using tapes to write his memoirs, which were published in 1971. Nixon at first resisted the suggestion, but in early 1971, he asked Butterfield install the system. From the day he had the system installed, he lost control over his Presidency. He was leaving a record of everything he said. Butterfield and others have pointed out that Nixon was incapable of operating any mechanical device. This was why Butterfield had to turn on the recorder in the Cabinet room. This was also why Rose Mary Woods got blamed for the missing 18« minutes. No one close to the President believed that Nixon could have erased it by himself. This means that Nixon from the beginning knew that he would have to have the tapes transcribed by a third party. Whatever was on them, a third party would know. Also, he would have to listen to a staggering number of tapes before getting any section transcribed. In less than three years, there were 3,700 hours of tapes. There would have been over three more years of taping on the day Haig removed the system. In his post-Presidency writing, how could he identify the tape of a specific meeting? By coordinating his appointments calendar with the dates on the tapes. If he could do this, so could the person in charge of the tapes, if he had access to the appointments calendar. The Secret Service controlled the tapes, which were stored in a room under the Oval office. Nixon did not personally control the tapes. There was one simple way that he could get away with "I am not a crook": remove all the tape recorders and destroy all the tapes – assuming there was only one copy. Haig finally pulled the plug. Too late. At that point, destroying the tapes would have been obstruction of justice. On June 18, 1972, it would not have been. Someone was determined to keep those tapes rolling. Nixon did not remove the system; Haig did, on his own authority, the official version says. But, by then, it was legally too late to destroy the tapes. INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING Beginning no later than Nixon’s resignation, a competent reporter would have followed more than the money. He would have pursued these questions: Who had something to gain from the tapes? What did he have to gain? Who had the power to leave the tapes running? How did he gain this power? To whom was he loyal? Why? What sanctions were over him? Why did Nixon’s senior staff talk on tape? Why didn’t they say: "The tapes go or I do"? What sanctions did they face for quitting? To whom were they loyal? The tapes provided enormous leverage against Nixon. The question is: For whom? And this: Starting when? After Butterfield’s testimony, Nixon’s opponents had far more leverage than before, but it was still insufficient leverage. They had to get access to all of the tapes, but the courts refused to grant this. Congress was not allowed to go on a fishing expedition. In effect, the prosecutors had to have a warrant issued by the court, meaning Judge Sirica. They had to be able to identify specific discussions related to suspected crimes, not discussions in general. Nixon soon invoked "executive privilege." The courts were unwilling to give carte blanche to the two Watergate committees to turn their staffs loose on those tapes – not unless the Supreme Court authorized this. The Supreme Court did not do this until after the lower courts and Congress had access to the crucial segments of the tapes. FOLLOW THE NUMBERS We come now to the second event, which was a connected series of events: the heart of the Watergate investigation. This is not the heart of Watergate as such. We still do not know for sure why the Plumbers installed bugs in the office of the Democratic National Committee. We do not know why they came back weeks later. But the most important thing we do not know is the name of the inside man at the White House. There was an inside man. On him, the outcome of the investigation pivoted. Yet I know of only three people who have ever raised this issue in print. I am one of them: third in a row. I first wrote about this in 1987. That was 14 years after the event, or, more accurately, a related series of events. A copy of my brief discussion is on-line. It is a section from the bibliography of my book, Conspiracy: A Biblical View. I have never been contacted by any historian or any journalist regarding what you are about to read. I sent it to the professor whose journalism students did the famous investigation of Deep Throat a few years ago. They jointly concluded that he was Fred Fielding. The professor never replied. Here is the story that Woodward and Bernstein somehow missed, though it was the central fact – not Deep Throat’s revelations – in Nixon’s defeat and their subsequent fame. Here is what I wrote in the 1996 revised edition of my 1987 book. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Watergate investigation became a media extravaganza that seemed to elevate the reporter’s calling to national status. Yet some of the details of the Watergate investigation raise questions that only hard-core conspiracy buffs ever ask. For instance, we all know that Nixon was brought down because of the White House audiotapes. But he refused to give up these tapes in one fell swoop. In fact, not until 1996 were scholars given access to these tapes. Only under specific demands by government prosecutors did Nixon turn over limited sections of those tapes. Gary Allen in 1976 summarized the findings of Susan Huck’s February, 1975, article in American Opinion, the publication of the John Birch Society. Allen wrote in The Kissinger File (p. 179): Consider the fantastic detail involved in the requests. On August 14th, [1973] for example, Judge Sirica demanded the "entire segment of tape on the reel identified as ‘White House telephone start 5/25/72 (2:00 P.M.) (skipping 8 lines) 6/2:3/72 (2:50 P.M.) (832) complete.’" I don’t know what all the identifying numbers mean – but you have to agree that only somebody very familiar with the tapes would know. These boys knew precisely what to look for! Here is another sample request: January 8, 1973 from 4:05 to 5:34 P.M. (E.O.B.) at approximately 10 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a segment lasting 6 minutes and 31 seconds: at approximately 67 minutes into the conversation, a segment lasting 11 minutes; at approximately 82 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a segment lasting 5 minutes and 31 seconds. Only Susan Huck asked the obvious question: How did the prosecutors know precisely when these incriminating discussions took place? There are only two possible answers: (1) someone with access to the tapes inside the White House was leaking the information; (2) there was a secret back-up set of the tapes in the hands of someone who was leaking the information. Leaked information would have been illegal for prosecutors to use in court, yet this was how they brought Nixon down. To my knowledge, no reporter or professional historian has ever bothered to follow up on this remarkable oddity, or even mention it. Nobody ever asked: "What person was in charge of storing those tapes?" It took one of the least known and most diligent conspiracy historians (Ph.D. in geography) even to mention the problem. Strange? Not at all. Normal, in fact. Such is the nature of history and the writing of history whenever the events in question point to the operation of powerful people whose private interests are advanced by what appear to be honorable public activities that cost a lot of money. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the elephant in the West Wing. This is what no one discussed at the time, let alone now. More to come in my next article. June 8, 2005 Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.freebooks.com.He is also the author of a free multi-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible. Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north383.html The Hidden History of the Nixon Take Down by Gary North June 11, 2005 http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north384.html Part I: Inside Job Part II: Identifying the Mole There was a mole in the White House. This is the central fact of the Watergate investigation. Without him, Nixon would not have been threatened with impeachment, let alone conviction. This is the issue that no one mentions and no one pursues. It is the elephant in the living room. It has been there for over 30 years. The media’s response by now is universal: "What elephant? We don’t see any elephant." The Plumbers had broken into the Watergate complex to bug one office. They were called Plumbers because their original job was to plug leaks. Perhaps the greatest irony in American political history is this: the most damaging of all leakers in American history was inside the Nixon White House, and the most significant bugs in history were installed on Nixon’s orders. TIMING Notice that Judge Sirica’s request came in on August 14, less than a month after the recording system was shut down by Haig. Whoever was leaking the information identified the incriminating passages very fast. There were 3,700 hours of poorly recorded tapes. They were recorded at 15/16 inches per second: the lowest of low fidelity. Think of the mole’s task. Reviewing all of the tapes by himself from scratch in time to tip off one of the two committees or Sirica was impossible. He would have had to spend months listening to tapes unless he knew exactly where the passages were. If he did, then this was a long-term spying operation. It did not begin on July 16, 1973. If he had a photocopy of the President’s appointments calendar, he could have narrowed down the meetings with key advisors. This would have helped speed up the operation, but not enough to make possible the detailed identifications in less than a month. He would not have turned duplicates over to a Congressional staffer. What could the staffer have done with them, other than to parcel them out to low-level staffers for review? For them to have reviewed all of the tapes, it would have taken a team effort. This would have been risky: too many people in on the deal. Secrets are hard to keep personally, let alone in a group. Copies of the tapes were stolen goods and therefore inadmissible in a court, at least a court that was operating in full public view. The secret had to be maintained. How did he do it? I see only four possibilities: He had been monitoring the conversations and taking notes of what was being said, correlating this information with the tapes. He later reviewed his notes and retrieved the key tapes, identifying the key passages by using a stopwatch. He had been making duplicate copies of all the tapes for months, and then delivered them all at once to someone who had access to a team of oath-bound intelligence community reviewers. He made copies on a high-speed duplicator and delivered them to a team of oath-bound intelligence community reviewers. He knew approximately when the incriminating discussions had taken place, and he went back to the specific tapes to time exactly how far into each tape each discussion began and ended. He then turned these numbers over to a Congressional staffer or other intermediary. Option #1 makes this conclusion inescapable: the mole was a Secret Service agent whose full-time job was to record the tapes while listening to them. Options #1 and #2 assume the existence of a long-term strategy: use the tapes against Nixon when the opportunity arose. But what kind of opportunity? How could the mole have predicted Butterfield’s testimony to the Senate committee? Was there more to monitoring the tapes than a plan to cooperate with as-yet unassembled authorities? Options #2 and #3 assume the existence of a team of reviewers. As for option #4, who would have known which meetings had been crucial? Butterfield left the White House for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in late December, 1972. He had been in charge of taping Cabinet meetings, but Cabinet meetings were not where the Watergate cover-up was discussed. How could he have been the mole? Yet there is no doubt that he knew the mole. He may not have known that the mole had become a mole, but if he didn’t suspect what was happening after Sirica’s request, 1973, he was either remarkably unobservant or else completely out of the loop. No reporter today asks Butterfield about any of this. The elephant really is invisible to this generation of reporters. For anyone to have made duplicate copies of all the tapes prior to Butterfield’s testimony (option #2) would have been an immense undertaking for one man working part-time, i.e., not monitoring the discussions as they took place (option #1). It would have taken months. After Butterfield’s testimony, it would have been impossible for a mole to do this by himself. THE GATEKEEPER ISSUE It is possible that a second set of tapes had been made from the very beginning, or at least after the break-in. Whoever had such a set of tapes would have had leverage over the President. But the Secret Service controlled the machines. How did anyone gain access to the tapes without Nixon’s authorization? Why would Nixon have given it? Without a team to review the tapes, how could one man have done this on short notice, i.e., after July 16? He would have had to be one of the Secret Service agents who sat in the room to monitor the tapes, assuming that someone did this, even though the tape machines came on automatically. He took notes. But this would mean that he was self-consciously looking for ammunition to be used against Nixon. Why? The main problem with this theory is that other Secret Service agents did not know what was going on in the room where the machines were kept. If there was a full-time agent in that room all day long, there would have been suspicions. In 2003, Butterfield attended a conference on the tapes. He described where the tape machines were located. There was a little thing – they blasted a hole in the brick wall down underneath the White House and put all this machinery inside a brick wall and then put a cabinet door over it. And I said to [secret Service security agent Alfred] Wong, I – this was in the locker room of the protective security [unclear – microphone problem] Secret Service agents, so when they’d come to work, they had little lockers in there, and they’d change clothes and go home. They didn’t stay long in this little room, and I said, "Aren’t they going to think this great big panel – what you call it used to be a brick wall, they’re going to question that?" And he said, "No, they probably won’t, and if they do, I’ll just say, ‘We’ve got something in there,’ and they won’t ask any questions." And that’s true. The Secret Service wouldn’t pry or probe at something like that. But there was a hell of a big door in there, and we – [laughter] and it was a tiny little room anyway, pretty little. Here the equipment resided, and here boxes of tapes were stored. Nobody noticed. "Don’t ask. Don’t tell." So, there were only a few Secret Service technicians who knew what was inside that little room. These men served as the gatekeepers. Anyone wanting access to the tapes had to get through at least one of these gatekeepers . . . unless one of them was the mole. If the tape operator was the mole, he could not have been in that room full-time without creating scuttlebutt and suspicion. This does not rule out the possibility, but it does impose a special burden of proof on the person who chooses this option. This evidence would be difficult to obtain: pay receipts that say "for taping and personally monitoring Nixon’s conversations." Alternatively, Butterfield could affirm in writing that one agent was always present in the taping room when Nixon was in the White House. That person was almost certainly the mole. Is there any other possibility of a one-man operation? It is conceivable that someone very high in Nixon’s inner circle had access to the tapes after Butterfield’s testimony. Haig is one candidate. This is the man Gary Allen thought was the source of the leak. The hard evidence is not there, as far as I can see. But it is not beyond possibility. A mole operating alone had to know approximately when the incriminating discussions had taken place. Only a highly placed person on Nixon’s staff could have known this, presumably a participant. He somehow gained private access to these tapes, got out his stop watch, and listened to each tape until he found various smoking guns. Then he told a Congressional staffer what sections to ask for. If this was done by someone on Nixon’s staff, it would have been someone who did not incriminate himself on a tape. Some of the highest-placed staff members went to jail or were exposed to the threat of jail. Haldeman knew, yet he kept talking. He was the one senior staff member identified by Butterfield as having known about the tapes. He went to jail. It is unlikely that he was the mole. Let us assume for the sake of argument that no duplicate set of tapes existed prior to July 16. Someone who had detailed knowledge of the tapes was able to review the originals and then pass on this information within weeks. How did he get by the Secret Service? This is the central organizational issue of the Watergate story. I doubt that anyone will pursue this at this late date. But it needs to be pursued if we are ever to get the story even remotely straight. WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS? This is one of the oldest questions in political history. I see no alternative to this conclusion: someone who had the cooperation of the Secret Service had access to the tapes. The tapes were stored in a secret room under the Oval Office. Here is Butterfield’s account in 2003. Carlin: Outside of you, who knew the system was being used? Butterfield: Well, yeah, it was a deep dark secret, and I want to say no one knew, but the people who actually knew are the president, myself, Bob Haldeman and Larry Higby, Bob’s staff assistant – one of three staff assistants to Bob, Al Wong, who was the Technical Security Division Chief, Al Wong, W-O-N-G, and three technicians who, who put these tapes in: a fellow named Ray Zumwalt, Roy Schwalm, S-C-H-W-A-L-M, and Charles Bretts. They were the technicians, and one of those three changed the tapes when they had to be changed and that sort of thing. He did not indicate that someone was in the taping room full-time. If someone was, and if he was there every day, then he becomes the most likely candidate for the title of lone mole. Otherwise, this had to be a team effort: the mole, plus a team of reviewers. The shorter the time period between Butterfield’s testimony and Sirica’s first request, the larger the team had to be, or else the more sophisticated the tape-reviewing technology had to be. The team had to find where the key discussions were on the tapes. There were a lot of discussions. MOTIVE Follow the money. Also, follow the oath. Look for a motive. If it’s not money, sex, or power, then start looking for revenge. Had I been a reporter, after Nixon’s resignation I would have gone looking for a motive – a motive acknowledged as legitimate by one or more of the tapes’ gatekeepers. I would have gone looking for someone with (1) personal connections to the White House Secret Service unit that oversaw the taping and (2) a motive for revenge against Nixon and all the President’s men. No reporter did this. Now it is up to historians, who tend to be even more risk-aversive and peer-sensitive than reporters. Don’t hold your breath. Somebody got through the gates. He was working with a team. There was insufficient time for one man to review all of the tapes. The question has to be raised: Why would any of the technicians have cooperated with such a team? Why would he have handed over duplicate tapes, plus handed over a photocopy of the President’s schedule, to enable the third parties go snooping? There had to be a jointly shared motive. The motive presumably had to do with the oath: loyalty. There was a higher shared loyalty involved, a loyalty to something above Nixon. This could have been the Constitution. In intelligence circles, I don’t think this one is high on the list. Loyalties are more personal than Constitutional law. So are sanctions for violating the oath. The secret would remain a secret. There is loyalty owed to oath-bound brothers. There is also loyalty to "cousins" operating under a different but similar oath-bound structure. There is loyalty of professionals against amateurs, of lifetime bureaucrats against temporary politicians. "Loyalty to" always implies "potential disloyalty to." Where there is loyalty, there is always the opportunity for disloyalty. This is why secrecy is so powerful: it offers an opportunity to destroy. Where there is oath-bound loyalty, the temptation for disloyalty increases, especially against those bound by a rival oath. There must be serious sanctions against betrayal. (You do not have to read the century-old works of Georg Simmel to understand these issues, but it helps.) So, the question arises: What team supplied the reviewers? Answer: a group that perceived its corporate connection with the victims. The victims are easy to identify: the Plumbers. Their connection is easy to identify: the CIA. THE PLUMBERS Who were they? G. Gordon Liddy (ex-FBI) ran the show. Then there were the five burglars: Bernard Baker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James McCord, and Frank Sturgis. The name of E. Howard Hunt (ex-CIA) appeared in address books carried by two Plumbers. By the time Butterfield testified, all seven were in jail. McCord had been a CIA agent until 1970. Hunt had been a CIA agent until 1970. In March, 1973, McCord wrote to judge Sirica from his jail cell to say that he and the others had been pressured to plead guilty. He singled out John Dean and the former Attorney General, John Mitchell. This set the framework: Nixon vs. the brothers. Nixon left them all to cool their heels in jail. Here is how Hunt described it in a 2004 interview in Slate. Slate: I still don’t understand how you get involved in Watergate later. Through the CIA? Hunt: I had been a consultant to the White House. I greatly respected Nixon. When Chuck Colson [special counsel to Nixon] asked me to work for the administration, I said yes. Colson phoned one day and said, "I have a job you might be interested in." This was before Colson got religion. Slate: How long were you in prison for the Watergate break-in? Hunt: All told, 33 months. Slate: That’s a lot of time. Hunt: It’s a lot of time. And I’ve often said, what did I do? Slate: Did you get a pardon? Hunt: No. Never did. I’d applied for one, and there was no action taken, and I thought I’d just humiliate myself if I asked for a pardon. Laura Hunt: He was sort of numb because all of this happened to his wife and his family, his children went into drugs while he was still in prison. Slate: Wasn’t your first wife killed in a plane crash? Laura Hunt: She was killed when her plane crash-landed at Chicago’s Midway Airport. And there was all this speculation from conspiracy buffs that the FBI blew the plane up or something – so that she would never talk, all this ridiculous stuff. Ridiculous stuff? Strange stuff, yes, but in no way was it ridiculous. Dorothy Hunt had been an ex-CIA operative. She had met her husband in the CIA. Her plane went down on December 8, 1972: a United Airlines flight from Washington to Chicago. It crashed at Chicago’s Midway Airport. Most of the passengers and all of the crew members died. Within a few hours, a team of 50 FBI agents was at the scene, investigating everything. This is no rumor. It was confirmed in a June 11, 1973 letter from acting FBI Director William Ruckelshaus to the Director of the National Transportation Safety Board, who had sent a letter of complaint (six months after the event) to Ruckelshaus regarding the interference of the FBI. Getting a team of 50 FBI agents to a supposed crime scene within hours is so unheard of as to mark any such event as historically unique. Legendary. This was not done by the book. Mrs. Hunt had been carrying a little over $10,000 in cash – the equivalent of $50,000 today. In his book, A Piece of Tape, McCord writes that he heard Dorothy Hunt say that her husband had information that would impeach the President. (Note: I refer to this Web page to provide transcripts of the letters sent by the two Directors, plus the basic chronology of the crash. I do not trust several of the sources cited.) The Hunts had been "present at the creation," when the CIA was known as the OSS. The condition of Hunt would not have not escaped the notice of former colleagues. Nixon had let a team of former national security operatives go to jail for a burglary related to his re-election. It was clear by late 1972 that they were not going to be pardoned. The crash was followed by these peculiar events, which were long forgotten until the Web revived them. The day after the crash, Nixon nominated Egil Krogh, the head of CREEP, as Undersecretary of Transportation. The Department of Transportation is the agency that supervises the National Transportation Safety Board. (He was confirmed in February, resigned in May, and pleaded guilty to supervising Hunt and Liddy in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. He went to jail.) Two weeks after Krogh’s nomination, Nixon nominated Butterfield as head of the FAA. In January, 1973, Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, resigned. He immediately took a senior-level position with United Airlines in Chicago. (Chapin was convicted in 1974 for lying to the grand jury in 1973 and for offering me a job at the White House in 1971 – no, scratch that: he only said he MIGHT offer me a job. He never did. He did hire Bob Segretti, who later ran the dirty tricks operation. As a result, they both went to jail.) To imagine that the intelligence community was unaware of the rapid sequence of these aeronautical-related events is to have a vivid imagination. Members of an oath-bound fraternity who believe that several of its members have been taken down by outsiders is a force to be reckoned with. There is loyalty at stake. There is also the matter of self-preservation. There is a well-known strategy for dealing with such threats: tit for tat. Within the intelligence community, there is a degree of cooperation by professionals: those inside vs. those outsiders known as politicians. LONE MOLE OR TEAM EFFORT? The tapes were the Achilles heel of Nixon’s attempt to avoid public exposure. John Dean could talk, others could talk, but it was their word against Nixon’s . . . unless the prosecutors could use Nixon’s words against Nixon. The prosecutors received information regarding the precise location of these words. They received this information because someone inside the White House leaked to investigators working with or for Judge Sirica the IDs of tapes that would condemn Nixon. But the mole could not have obtained this information by himself, unless he had been working on this project almost from the beginning: taking notes and identifying tapes. This raises a key question. If the project began before July 16, how would he have known that Butterfield would tell the Committee about the tapes? Monitoring the information on the tapes made strategic sense if the courts or the committees knew about the existence of the tapes. Otherwise, there was nothing to subpoena. If he did assemble this information over many months while sitting in the taping room, pen in hand, taking notes, then he had another agenda. He was monitoring what was being said for purposes other than cooperating with Sirica, who was not yet in the picture. This raises two questions: (1) Who guards the guardians? (2) To whom do they report? Here is what we know for certain: the information was made available to Sirica within weeks of Butterfield’s testimony. To get access to the tapes, someone had to get by the Secret Service and into that room beneath the Oval office. Someone did. The Secret Service is pledged to save the President’s life. It is not pledged to save his career. Its agents live in every President’s household until he dies, and then they remain with his widow until she dies. We do not call this arrangement what it obviously is: a lifetime monitoring operation. Had I been a Washington reporter in 1974, and had I known of Sirica’s specific tape requests, which were a matter of public record, I would have gone looking for a connection between one of the Plumbers and one of the tapes’ gatekeepers. One analyst did: Mae Brussell. She was a legendary left-wing conspiracy theorist who saw mysterious connections everywhere. If ever there was a believer in a vast right-wing conspiracy, it was Mae Brussell. She immediately spotted a connection. She wrote in The Realist (July, 1973) that the Ervin committee had called the wrong witnesses. Her first example was Al Wong. Wrong witnesses called. Last July, 1972, it was obvious that Al Wong, the Secret Service man who hired James McCord, should be a major witness. When it was disclosed by Alexander Butterfield that the White House was bugged, Al Wong appeared to be holding the tapes. Wong and McCord were close associates. What was she referring to? What had Wong hired McCord to do? The previous August, also in The Realist, she had reported on the assignment. James McCord, Jr. held two important jobs at the time of his arrest. He was Chief of Security for the Committee to Re-elect Richard Nixon. With that appointment, McCord was issued his own radio frequency. And that employment was the smaller assignment of the two. The biggest contract a security agent could receive went to McCord Associates, selected by Secret Service agent Al Wong, to provide all security for the republican Convention in Miami. She offered no footnote to support this claim, but she surely was on top of this issue from the beginning. Indeed, she was the first journalist to suspect this connection: Wong, McCord, and the tapes. If I were going to write a book on Watergate, I would begin looking for evidence to support her second paragraph. Given McCord’s CIA background and his CREEP position, the connection sounds plausible. This does not mean that CIA agents necessarily constituted the reviewing team. It could have been a select group of Secret Service agents, acting on behalf of similarly oath-bound "cousins" or some other group. There is a unique piece of information, reported by Gary Allen in his book on Kissinger and also his book on Nelson Rockefeller. He quotes from Newsweek (September 23, 1974). While former white House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman awaits trial for his part in Watergate, the Secret Service chief he ousted from the White House last year has landed a plum job. Robert H. Taylor, 49, who tangled with Haldeman over Nixon security procedures, is now head of the private security forces for all the far-flung Rockefeller family enterprises. If the mole acted alone in note taking, then he began early. He was alone in that room, but he was not alone with respect to a hierarchy. Government bureaucrats on salaries do not do "extra credit." They get paid to follow orders. Who gave the order? When? Why? These are the kinds of questions that the mainstream media steadfastly refuse to ask. They find it easier to believe in the tape fairy. INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE Deep Throat confirmed to Woodward that CREEP was where the money flowed into and out of. This was a smoking gun, if modern gunpowder smoked. It was a .22 pistol: CREEP. The story would have come out anyway because of the $25,000 check. Following that money was easy. It was not worth a Pulitzer Prize and a movie. To take Nixon down, there had to be evidence that would stand up in court. This evidence had to have the appearance of being admissible, i.e., not illegally obtained. Yet it was unquestionably illegally obtained. The specificity of the location of the smoking guns on the tapes should have made it clear that the evidence was inadmissible. Yet Judge Sirica – "Maximum John" – pretended that it was admissible. He pretended that the tape fairy had delivered the IDs. Every reporter, then and now, has gone along with him. Once the statute of limitations ran out (1980), nobody could prosecute the accused, had there been an accused. There never was. I do not think there ever will be. It was not until July 27, 1974 that the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over all of the tapes. He refused and resigned on August 9. Until the Supreme Court ordered him to deliver all of the tapes, he may have thought he could successfully stonewall his prosecutors. He was wrong. From the day he refused to hand over the specific tapes demanded by Sirica, he was on the defensive. From the day that Sirica started using stolen evidence to hound Nixon, it was only a matter of time. Maximum John was willing to break the law to get him. Congress was willing to break the law to get him. Nixon was doomed. The federal system’s checks and balances by 1973 were managed by tax-funded "crooks": law-breakers all. Nixon’s resignation under fire created an immediate problem for Republican Congressman John Hammerschmidt of Arkansas, who had recommended that Nixon not resign, and said that Nixon’s offense might not be impeachable. He had stood almost alone. His opponent had gone for the jugular: [There is] no question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI and the CIA is an impeachable offense. His opponent was Bill Clinton. Clinton lost in November. Not many Democrats did, however. Nixon never did turn over all of the tapes. He died in 1994. Only then did the government get all the tapes. The government is still waiting to release to the public the final batch: November, 1972 through July, 1973. But don’t worry. They are on their way. They are being administered by the same experts who took over the administration of the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. UNANSWERED QUESTIONS It is now over three decades after these events. We still do not know why the burglars broke in a second time in June, 1972. We do not know how or why 50 FBI agents showed up at the plane crash site where the ex-CIA wife of the ex-CIA suspected Plumber died in December. We do not know why Nixon left the tape recorders running. We do not know for sure what Nixon did, or was planning to do, to persuade the mole or his oath-bound associates to supply the prosecutors with proof of the smoking guns. We do not know the transmission belt by which the prosecutors were able to identify the precise points on the tapes that sent Nixon’s senior staffers to prison and were about to get him impeached. Richard Nixon, in his complete self-confidence, had ordered the tape recorders installed. To use Haldeman’s phrase, he not only repeatedly let the toothpaste out of the tube, he left a record of every squeeze. Why? He installed the tape recorders when he did not need them. He, like his presidential predecessors, believed he was going to retain the upper hand, the final say, when it came time for him to write his memoirs. He let famous men speak in his presence, unaware of the tapes. They would speak their minds, he thought, but he would remain clever. As the English say, he was too clever by half. The following exchange took place in 2003: Carlin: Mr. Butterfield, why do you think President Nixon sort of let the machine run? I mean, do you think he sometimes even forgot about the fact that he was taping? Butterfield: Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. We, we marveled at his ability to, uh, seemingly be oblivious to the tapes. I mean, even I was sitting there uncomfortably sometimes saying, "He’s not really going say this, is he?" [laughter] But . . . but he did. . . . Nixon was paranoid as no President ever was, either before or after. He was convinced that "they" were out to get him: the liberals, the Jews, the media, the Eastern elite. And he was right. There was a widespread visceral hatred of Nixon that has been matched only by hatred for Hillary Clinton. But in circling the wagons against enemies outside, he forgot Jesus’ warning: And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household (Matthew 10:36). Nixon received a pardon for crimes never presented in a court of law. He received it from the only President ever chosen by his predecessor rather than by a vote, who in turn appointed as his Vice President a man who had publicly insisted, "I never wanted to be vice president of anything" – Nelson Rockefeller. This was the man who had hired Nixon after his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962, bringing him to New York City to live for free in a condominium owned by Rockefeller, and putting him under the authority of bond lawyer John Mitchell, who later went to jail over Watergate. This was the man who had became Henry Kissinger’s patron, who in turn hired Col. Al Haig in 1969, who was a 4-star general just four years later – skipping the third star altogether. He became Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 1974, soon after Nixon quit. There were winners and losers in Rockefeller’s orbit. The pardon ended the legal issue for Nixon. But, until the day he died, he refused to turn over all of the tapes. His estate finally surrendered the last 201 hours worth of tapes in November, 1996. CONCLUSION From the day that the first highly detailed request came from Sirica, Nixon must have known the truth: he was going to become the victim of the biggest leak in American history. From that point on, Nixon knew he had been betrayed from the inside. He knew he was trapped. He was a lawyer. He had made his political career in 1948 based on rolls of film that had been buried in a hollowed-out pumpkin: evidence that Whittaker Chambers had actually forgotten he had regarding Alger Hiss’s spying. What Nixon must have known, no salaried reporter has figured out. Susan Huck did. Gary Allen did. I did. But none of us was ever a full-time reporter. The man who supplied the prosecutors with the technically inadmissible evidence of Nixon’s smoking guns may still be alive. He has not broken silence. He has maintained his loyalty. He has kept the oath. If he was watching the evening news in the first week of June, 2005, he must have had a good chuckle. For over three decades, the press played hide-and-seek with the shadow known as Deep Throat. Reporters and authors expended time, energy, and money on tracking him down. At long last, they have found him, senile and unable to tell his story. "Mystery solved! Case closed!" Meanwhile, I hear unerasable voices in my mind. "Good night, David." "Good night, Chet." "And that’s the way it was." June 11, 2005 Gary North is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.freebooks.com.He is also the author of a free multi-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible. Find this article at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north384.html

Investigating journalists are focused on breaking news, contemporary events, etc. Good investigating journalists (like Seymour Hersh and the late Izzy Stone) do rely on history for context and, in return, historians who are studying a topic by going back to the roots of the matter and carrying it forward can and do at times cite the works of a Hersh or a Stone. Sources for the Hersh's of this world in most cases are live and associated in some way with the object of his study. For historians most of their sources are from those who have passed on or from records and documents. I came to political consciousness during the 1960s. I believed then as I do now that the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X were defining events of that decade. That the beginning of the decline of the US to the current "Dark Ages" we find ourselves today had its roots in that decade. So I had an abiding interest in the Kennedy and King assassiantions and their impact on American politics. National Security Department: Listening In By Seymour M. Hersh The New Yorker 29 May 2006 Issue A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public's right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. "When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that 'we'll never be able to collect intelligence again,'" the former official said. "They'd whine, 'Why do we have to report to oversight committees?' " But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. "We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal." After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.'s carefully constructed rules were set aside. Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier's network core - the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records," the consultant said. "They're providing total access to all the data." "This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order," a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration's goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. "The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence," the former official said. The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person-for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"-if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in. FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. "We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. "We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others." Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because "there's no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed." But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect's name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program. Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later. The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out. "There's a lot that needs to be looked at," he said. "We are in a technology age. We need to tweak fisa, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues." Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA "it would have got them." He told me, "The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this." General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional staff aide said, "The concern is that the Administration says, 'We're going to do this,' and he does it - even if he knows better." Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion, after the Times exposŽ, that the N.S.A.'s wiretap program could have prevented the attacks of 9/11. "That's patently false and an indication that he's willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President," Kerrey said. Hayden's public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive," a Pentagon consultant told me. "It's intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you're looking and what you're after." On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, "If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying." That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. "Nobody disputes the value of the tool," the former senior intelligence official told me. "It's the unresolved tension between the operators saying, 'Here's what we can build,' and the legal people saying, 'Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can use it.' " It's a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.

An Interview with John Dean By Matthew Rothschild May 20, 2006 The Progressive Magazine http://progressive.org/mag_wx052006 Here is a transcript of an interview with John Dean of Watergate fame. Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel for three years and then testified again him. He is the author, most recently, of “Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.” On March 31, Dean testified in favor of Senator Russ Feingold’s censure bill. The interview was conducted on April 28 by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine. You can listen to the interview at http://progressive.org/radio_dean06. Q: Tell me what you’re lasting impressions are of Richard Nixon. Dean: In a way, he’s a comic figure. In other ways, he’s a tragic figure. I have a memory of a very complex man locked in my synapses. Q: How long did you work for him? Dean: A thousand days. When you listen to him on the tapes, he would be one person with his chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, he’d be somebody else with Henry Kissinger, he’d be somebody else with me. He had these different personae. I don’t think he ever had great administrative skills for the Presidency. He was slow to interact with his staff. He was very stiff. It was kind of like walking onto a set of an Oval Office when I used to first go into see him. But later on I’d walk in and he’d have his feet on the desk and he’d be talking to me around his shoes. He was uneasy. In fact, one of the interesting things about Nixon is that we had to prepare something called talking papers for him. Anytime we brought someone in the office to meet the President, because he had a zero gift of gab, you literally had to have a few sentences, buzzwords, thoughts, so he could start a conversation with this person. Alex Butterfield, who ushered more people into the office than anybody else, told me that occasionally if Nixon didn’t have this he was literally speechless. Q: And Butterfield was the guy who surfaced the tapes. Dean: He’s the one who, indeed, corroborated the fact that there were tapes. I had speculated in my testimony that I thought I was taped. It was the only speculation I put in that testimony back in 1973, and thank god I did. Because when they were trying to discredit my testimony, they had a system where they fanned out and interviewed all sorts of people, and so they called Butterfield in, and said, “Dean made this amazing statement that he thought he was recorded. Now isn’t that impossible?” And Butterfield said, “No, I think he’s right.” What made me aware of the fact that I was being taped was Nixon’s behavior late in the game when he literally goes to the corner of his hideaway office and starts whispering around the potted palm, “I was foolish to do this” or, “I made a mistake when I did that.” Q: Did you ever speak with Nixon after he resigned? Dean: Never did. I think it would have been very difficult for him. I’m not the only one who never spoke to him. John Erlichman, his chief domestic adviser, never talked to him. Bob Haldeman and he had sort of parted ways. They did patch up before they both passed away. Nixon actually was very flattering in one sense in his memoirs about me. When he started dealing with me, he’d written in his diary that I’ve got this bright young guy. But then he said I was obviously a traitor for breaking rank. Q: How have you dealt with that accusation? Dean: It doesn’t bother me at all because everybody for whom I had any respect I told what I was going to do before I did it. I said, “Listen, I’m not going to lie for anybody. So plan your life around that.” I said I was going to go to the prosecutors after I had told the President he was in deep trouble with the so-called cancer on the Presidency conversation. After that, people knew where I stood, and I actually had the support of some of my colleagues who said, “Do it.” What my plan was, I thought my colleagues would do the right thing, that they would stand up and tell the truth and that would end it, and that Nixon might save himself by coming forward and saying, “Yeah, I made some bad mistakes. Here’s what I did.” But instead he just escalated the cover-up to the point where he had no choice but to resign or be impeached. Q: Some people think he could have saved his Presidency by apologizing even at the eleventh hour? Dean: Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It’s a natural tendency. Q: I’m very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush. Dean: Both men learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don’t feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David—he just didn’t like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It’s like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House. And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there’s no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It’s almost as if we’d left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, “This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try.” As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixon’s wildest dreams. The reason I wrote a book with the title “Worse than Watergate,” and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon’s Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush’s abuses, and Cheney’s—to me, it’s a Bush/ Cheney Presidency—and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That’s much more serious. Q: Dying in Iraq? Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they’re dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we can torture during interrogations—I can’t even get their mentally. And when you read their briefs, they didn’t get there mentally. Q: The amazing thing about your book is that it was written before Cheney went up to lobby for torture, before the NSA scandal broke, and before the Valerie Plame thing. Dean: They just keep walking into my title and adding additional chapters. Q: Talk a little bit more about Dick Cheney. You call him “co-President” in your book. Dean: I do. It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win at the Supreme Court. I’ve got some friends who were in there and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Cheney’s setting things up the way he wants. He’s designing a National Security Council that’s more powerful than the statutory National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. And it was, and it is. She was the perfect foil for him because he can roll over her anytime he wants, and he does. Putting her over at State is even better: Keep her out on the road. The Cheney-Rumsfeld connection has really been driving the foreign policy since day one. Q: Why do you think Bush divested so much of his power to Cheney? Dean: Bush had expertise in one thing: How to run a Presidential campaign. He understands campaigns and Presidential politics. He has no interest or disposition or I think probably—he’s not stupid, but he’s not bright, he’s not a rocket scientist—he isn’t interested in policy. Cheney is the opposite. He loves this stuff. He’s a wonk. He gets into it, and he’s had very strong feelings about issues that he’s held for a long time. He has been determined to expand Presidential power. I can’t find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers. Q: Tell me about the Feingold hearing on censure. Dean: I’ve been invited several times over the last decade or more to testify before Congress, and I’ve always found a polite way not to do it. Q: Why is that? Dean: I knew it would make a certain sensation, my first return since the Watergate hearings. I thought it should be an issue that’s important. It should be an issue I felt strongly about. So when Senator Feingold invited me to appear on his censure resolution, I thought, this is a very good issue. I appeared not as a partisan. My partisan days are really long behind me. Q: How do you identify yourself politically? Dean: I’m registered as an independent. And I vote for as many Democrats as I do Republicans. I’m really a centrist in many ways. I don’t fly on either wing. I explained to the Senate committee that there was a lot of baggage connected with censure. But I said how important it was that the Senate do something since Feingold’s bill was addressing a blatant violation of law, the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he went to Congress to seek permission after the fact. We have a President who says, “Screw that, I’m just going to do it.” It’s an in-your-face attitude. And he’s rolling over the prerogatives of Congress. Q: You made a comment that should be famous: When Bush said he was bypassing the FISA requirements, you remarked that it was “the first time a President has actually confessed to an impeachable offense.” Dean:That’s exactly what he did. One of the provisions in Nixon’s bill of impeachment was his warrantless surveillance of media people, which is now covered directly by the FISA law. Warrantless wiretapping is an impeachable offense. It couldn’t be any clearer. Q: In your book, you also talk about the possibility—I would say the likelihood—that Bush lied this country into war. Can Bush be impeached for that, too? Dean: When I deconstructed his State of the Union just before the Iraq War and looked at the available information even then, it was clear that the representations he was making as fact were not fact. Is that lying? It certainly is a form of distortion. This is the highest point in a Presidency in his relationship to Congress when he reports for the State of the Union. It is a crime to lie to Congress. The founders thought that misrepresentation to Congress was to be an impeachable offense. And the way Bush did it in the follow up procedures he actually belittled Congress in sending them bogus material. It was really quite stunning when one peels it all apart. And I said, “Is there any question in my mind that this is an impeachable offense?” No. Q: How do you respond to people who say impeachment is never going to happen? Dean: There’s a political reality about impeachment. It’s purely a political process. The interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” can reach a long way, all the way to sex in the Oval Office, which was an absurd use of the impeachment clause. Impeachment is the big cannon. As long as the same party that controls Congress controls the White House it just isn’t going to happen. I’m not sure that even if a President murdered his wife, they would impeach him. But those who are focusing on this issue are raising important questions. And one of the reasons I thought a censure resolution was appropriate was because if somebody had censured Nixon or even if a resolution of either house had passed, saying what you’re doing is unacceptable to Congress, that shot across the bow might have straightened him up. I wish Feingold’s resolution could get more traction. It might provide us all some safety because there’s two more years left of this Presidency. And I must say there’s a good possibility in November that the House or Senate or both is going to go Democratic, and it’s going to be hell for this Presidency for the last two years, and they’ve earned it. And that’s when impeachment could become a true reality. I’d settle for oversight, but impeachment’s not out of the question. Q: I’d think, if things get hotter, and the Democrats get control of the House, that censure might be attractive to Bush, if he’s got any sense, so he could put a lid on this cauldron. Dean: It’s not a bad idea because they have supplied a steady diet of material. It’s going to be two years of executive privilege fights. The subpoena will change the complexion of the oversight. Q: In your testimony at the Feingold censure hearing, you said that this is the first time you’ve actually feared our government. Why is that? Dean: Now I don’t frighten easily, but I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works behind closed doors. And I know, from little tidbits I’m picking up from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that there’s more probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-called war on terror. Q: Do you fear for our democratic system? Dean: I fear for the system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties.

An Interview with John Dean By Matthew Rothschild May 20, 2006 The Progressive Magazine http://progressive.org/mag_wx052006 Here is a transcript of an interview with John Dean of Watergate fame. Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel for three years and then testified again him. He is the author, most recently, of “Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush.” On March 31, Dean testified in favor of Senator Russ Feingold’s censure bill. The interview was conducted on April 28 by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine. You can listen to the interview at http://progressive.org/radio_dean06. Q: Tell me what you’re lasting impressions are of Richard Nixon. Dean: In a way, he’s a comic figure. In other ways, he’s a tragic figure. I have a memory of a very complex man locked in my synapses. Q: How long did you work for him? Dean: A thousand days. When you listen to him on the tapes, he would be one person with his chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, he’d be somebody else with Henry Kissinger, he’d be somebody else with me. He had these different personae. I don’t think he ever had great administrative skills for the Presidency. He was slow to interact with his staff. He was very stiff. It was kind of like walking onto a set of an Oval Office when I used to first go into see him. But later on I’d walk in and he’d have his feet on the desk and he’d be talking to me around his shoes. He was uneasy. In fact, one of the interesting things about Nixon is that we had to prepare something called talking papers for him. Anytime we brought someone in the office to meet the President, because he had a zero gift of gab, you literally had to have a few sentences, buzzwords, thoughts, so he could start a conversation with this person. Alex Butterfield, who ushered more people into the office than anybody else, told me that occasionally if Nixon didn’t have this he was literally speechless. Q: And Butterfield was the guy who surfaced the tapes. Dean: He’s the one who, indeed, corroborated the fact that there were tapes. I had speculated in my testimony that I thought I was taped. It was the only speculation I put in that testimony back in 1973, and thank god I did. Because when they were trying to discredit my testimony, they had a system where they fanned out and interviewed all sorts of people, and so they called Butterfield in, and said, “Dean made this amazing statement that he thought he was recorded. Now isn’t that impossible?” And Butterfield said, “No, I think he’s right.” What made me aware of the fact that I was being taped was Nixon’s behavior late in the game when he literally goes to the corner of his hideaway office and starts whispering around the potted palm, “I was foolish to do this” or, “I made a mistake when I did that.” Q: Did you ever speak with Nixon after he resigned? Dean: Never did. I think it would have been very difficult for him. I’m not the only one who never spoke to him. John Erlichman, his chief domestic adviser, never talked to him. Bob Haldeman and he had sort of parted ways. They did patch up before they both passed away. Nixon actually was very flattering in one sense in his memoirs about me. When he started dealing with me, he’d written in his diary that I’ve got this bright young guy. But then he said I was obviously a traitor for breaking rank. Q: How have you dealt with that accusation? Dean: It doesn’t bother me at all because everybody for whom I had any respect I told what I was going to do before I did it. I said, “Listen, I’m not going to lie for anybody. So plan your life around that.” I said I was going to go to the prosecutors after I had told the President he was in deep trouble with the so-called cancer on the Presidency conversation. After that, people knew where I stood, and I actually had the support of some of my colleagues who said, “Do it.” What my plan was, I thought my colleagues would do the right thing, that they would stand up and tell the truth and that would end it, and that Nixon might save himself by coming forward and saying, “Yeah, I made some bad mistakes. Here’s what I did.” But instead he just escalated the cover-up to the point where he had no choice but to resign or be impeached. Q: Some people think he could have saved his Presidency by apologizing even at the eleventh hour? Dean: Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It’s a natural tendency. Q: I’m very interested in the comparisons you make between Nixon and Bush. Dean: Both mean learned about the Presidency from men they greatly respected: Richard Nixon from Dwight Eisenhower, George Bush from his father. When both men became President, you got the very distinct impression that they don’t feel that they quite fit in the shoes of the person from whom they learned about the Presidency. Nixon would constantly be going down to Key Biscayne, San Clemente, or Camp David—he just didn’t like being in the Oval Office. I saw this same thing with George Bush, who is constantly away. The other striking similarity is that both men talk in the third person about the office of the President. It’s like the royal we. You look at other Presidents, like Reagan and Clinton, who clearly filled that office. You almost had to pry Clinton out at the end of his term. And Reagan, despite whatever weaknesses he had intellectually, filled the role of President and played it to the hilt. So Bush has a Nixonian distance from the White House. And I was stunned at the secrecy of this Administration. I knew that there’s no good that can come out of secrecy. So I began looking closely at Bush and finding the striking Nixonian features of this Presidency: It’s almost as if we’d left an old playbook in the basement, they found it, dusted it off, and said, “This stuff looks pretty good, we ought to give it a try.” As I dug in, and still had some pretty good sources within that Presidency, I found the principal mover and shaker of this Presidency is clearly Dick Cheney, who is not only reviving the Imperial Presidency but expanding it beyond Nixon’s wildest dreams. The reason I wrote a book with the title “Worse than Watergate,” and I was very cautious in using that title, is because there was a real difference: Nobody died as a result of the so-called abuses of power during Nixon’s Presidency. You might make the exception of, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia, but that never got into the Watergate litany per se. You look at Bush’s abuses, and Cheney’s—to me, it’s a Bush/ Cheney Presidency—and today, people are dying as a result of abuse of power. That’s much more serious. Q: Dying in Iraq? Dean: Dying in Iraq. God knows where they’re dying. In secret prisons. To me the fact that a Vice President can go to Capitol Hill and lobby for torture is just unbelievable. Just unbelievable! The fact that a small clique of attorneys in the Department of Justice can write how can we get around the Geneva Conventions so that we can torture during interrogations—I can’t even get their mentally. And when you read their briefs, they didn’t get there mentally. Q: The amazing thing about your book is that it was written before Cheney went up to lobby for torture, before the NSA scandal broke, and before the Valerie Plame thing. Dean: They just keep walking into my title and adding additional chapters. Q: Talk a little bit more about Dick Cheney. You call him “co-President” in your book. Dean: I do. It was evident, even at the beginning, when Cheney was very confident they were going to win at the Supreme Court. I’ve got some friends who were in there and they were telling me what was happening, and they said Bush doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. Cheney’s setting things up the way he wants. He’s designing a National Security Council that’s more powerful than the statutory National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. And it was, and it is. She was the perfect foil for him because he can roll over her anytime he wants, and he does. Putting her over at State is even better: Keep her out on the road. The Cheney-Rumsfeld connection has really been driving the foreign policy since day one. Q: Why do you think Bush divested so much of his power to Cheney? Dean: Bush had expertise in one thing: How to run a Presidential campaign. He understands campaigns and Presidential politics. He has no interest or disposition or I think probably—he’s not stupid, but he’s not bright, he’s not a rocket scientist—he isn’t interested in policy. Cheney is the opposite. He loves this stuff. He’s a wonk. He gets into it, and he’s had very strong feelings about issues that he’s held for a long time. He has been determined to expand Presidential power. I can’t find in history any other Presidency that has made it a matter of policy to expand Presidential powers. Q: Tell me about the Feingold hearing on censure. Dean: I’ve been invited several times over the last decade or more to testify before Congress, and I’ve always found a polite way not to do it. Q: Why is that? Dean: I knew it would make a certain sensation, my first return since the Watergate hearings. I thought it should be an issue that’s important. It should be an issue I felt strongly about. So when Senator Feingold invited me to appear on his censure resolution, I thought, this is a very good issue. I appeared not as a partisan. My partisan days are really long behind me. Q: How do you identify yourself politically? Dean: I’m registered as an independent. And I vote for as many Democrats as I do Republicans. I’m really a centrist in many ways. I don’t fly on either wing. I explained to the Senate committee that there was a lot of baggage connected with censure. But I said how important it was that the Senate do something since Feingold’s bill was addressing a blatant violation of law, the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. When Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he went to Congress to seek permission after the fact. We have a President who says, “Screw that, I’m just going to do it.” It’s an in-your-face attitude. And he’s rolling over the prerogatives of Congress. Q: You made a comment that should be famous: When Bush said he was bypassing the FISA requirements, you remarked that it was “the first time a President has actually confessed to an impeachable offense.” Dean:That’s exactly what he did. One of the provisions in Nixon’s bill of impeachment was his warrantless surveillance of media people, which is now covered directly by the FISA law. Warrantless wiretapping is an impeachable offense. It couldn’t be any clearer. Q: In your book, you also talk about the possibility—I would say the likelihood—that Bush lied this country into war. Can Bush be impeached for that, too? Dean: When I deconstructed his State of the Union just before the Iraq War and looked at the available information even then, it was clear that the representations he was making as fact were not fact. Is that lying? It certainly is a form of distortion. This is the highest point in a Presidency in his relationship to Congress when he reports for the State of the Union. It is a crime to lie to Congress. The founders thought that misrepresentation to Congress was to be an impeachable offense. And the way Bush did it in the follow up procedures he actually belittled Congress in sending them bogus material. It was really quite stunning when one peels it all apart. And I said, “Is there any question in my mind that this is an impeachable offense?” No. Q: How do you respond to people who say impeachment is never going to happen? Dean: There’s a political reality about impeachment. It’s purely a political process. The interpretation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” can reach a long way, all the way to sex in the Oval Office, which was an absurd use of the impeachment clause. Impeachment is the big cannon. As long as the same party that controls Congress controls the White House it just isn’t going to happen. I’m not sure that even if a President murdered his wife, they would impeach him. But those who are focusing on this issue are raising important questions. And one of the reasons I thought a censure resolution was appropriate was because if somebody had censured Nixon or even if a resolution of either house had passed, saying what you’re doing is unacceptable to Congress, that shot across the bow might have straightened him up. I wish Feingold’s resolution could get more traction. It might provide us all some safety because there’s two more years left of this Presidency. And I must say there’s a good possibility in November that the House or Senate or both is going to go Democratic, and it’s going to be hell for this Presidency for the last two years, and they’ve earned it. And that’s when impeachment could become a true reality. I’d settle for oversight, but impeachment’s not out of the question. Q: I’d think, if things get hotter, and the Democrats get control of the House, that censure might be attractive to Bush, if he’s got any sense, so he could put a lid on this cauldron. Dean: It’s not a bad idea because they have supplied a steady diet of material. It’s going to be two years of executive privilege fights. The subpoena will change the complexion of the oversight. Q: In your testimony at the Feingold censure hearing, you said that this is the first time you’ve actually feared our government. Why is that? Dean: Now I don’t frighten easily, but I find it frightening because Dick Cheney knows no limits. The only person he reports to is George Bush. He works behind closed doors. And I know, from little tidbits I’m picking up from friends who have to be careful not to speak out of school, that there’s more probably more covert activity going on, both abroad and maybe here in the United States, than in decades because of this so-called war on terror. Q: Do you fear for our democratic system? Dean: I fear for the system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties.

The Rebel Journalist The Memoirs of Wilfred Burchett By CHRISTOPHER REED http://www.counterpunch.org/reed05132006.html May 13/14, 2006 I had to wait for my review copy of this book for a few weeks. The publisher in Sydney explained that the copy scheduled for me had been diverted to an interloper who had urgently demanded a copy. The interloper turned out to be none other than General Giap, the military genius of the 20th century, vanquisher of the French at Dien Bien Phu, mangler of the world's mightiest battle machine. That Vietnam's supreme hero was eager to have his copy of Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett (University of New South Wales Press, distributed in the US by the University of Washington Press) is not surprising. Burchett knew Giap personally, and mentions him numerous times in the volume's 756 pages. He also knew and was a valued friend of Chou En-lai, Ho Chi Minh, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Fidel Castro, Major Charles Orde Wingate, and a host of senior ministers, diplomats and politicians, mainly from China and Vietnam. This does not mean Burchett (1911- 1983) was one of those journalists who love power and hang around with its purveyors and practitioners in the belief they, and only they, will provide the important news. On the contrary, Burchett came from the opposite school - and was the better reporter for it. He believed in being on the spot, but also in talking to ordinary people and above all in observing and probing events. The book is co-edited by artist George Burchett, Wilfred's younger son, and Dr Nick Shimmin, an Anglo-Australian author and editor, who describes Wilfred as "the greatest journalist Australia has ever produced, and one of the best foreign correspondents the world has ever seen". I worked with Burchett, liked him a lot, agree with Shimmin's definition, and sadly his second point, that people exist "who have sustained decades-long, vitriolic attacks on him and his legacy." The reason: Burchett reported from "the other side" and made no secret of his Communist sympathies. To a post-Cold War generation the intensity of this hatred may seem odd. Even to those of us who remember those days, the nastiness of the period's ideological divisions and the extremes to which the right would go in its hysteria and paranoia, stays as the sourest of memories . Among those in power that Burchett met, brash American bravado and ignorance remain unmatched in his account of four decades of making war and seeking peace, but for sheer oafishness his own hick Australians go unequalled. The British excel in racist snobbery and incompetence, backed by ghastly "old boy" camaraderie piled on uninvited, and which Burchett masterfully captures and pins. The wise Chinese, valiant Vietnamese and forbearing Russians mostly maintain a gallant composure, but as noted, the author is pro-Communist. Yet was he a capital-c Communist, or a "Red" to use the old color scheme? This has been a recurring theme in evaluations of Burchett's work, and it returns with this book. As he made his beat unique, reporting the Vietnamese war literally from Vietcong underground tunnels, and from it scooped his journalist colleagues regularly, Burchett often featured in the news himself. On such occasions, the word "Communist" was simply an adjective placed in front of his name. Did it invalidate his findings? He always denied being a Communist and does so several times in the book. Nobody has ever produced a piece of paper belonging to a Communist party with Burchett's name and signature upon it. Does it matter if Wilfred Burchett joined the Communist Party of Australia in the Depression as a young man seeking work as a construction carpenter amid mass unemployment, and supporting the downtrodden against big bosses and rapacious landlords? Or did he join later somewhere else, or never? My plea is to give the Burchett/CP membership charge an overdue and much deserved rest. It remains after all these years only a Cold War cudgel to beat one of the greatest providers of news from the left that journalism has produced, and who therefore mightily pissed off the authoritarian right because his scoops were so telling. This is the man who in 1967 when preparing one of his 31 books, called it upon publication in 1968, Vietnam Will Win. The US was then claiming imminent victory, but was defeated eight years later. Burchett saw the issues he discusses up close. Employed in penury in his native Gippsland, Victoria, he discovers the power of workers who organize when they help him combat a ruthless boss. Later in 1938 as a travel courier in Germany - he was a self-taught multi-linguist - he helps many of his agency's Jewish customers to escape Nazi persecution. One he visits in Berlin is too distraught to speak. He later tells Burchett that literally two minutes before he rang the door bell, his brother had shot himself dead rather than face a concentration camp. Burchettt did not become a reporter until almost 30. It was in Australia, where the war now raging that nobody thought would happen reminded editors of one reader's letters they consistently declined to publish. They came from a young man who seemed to know a lot about Germany and he was invited to write articles. This experience formed Burchett's opinion of the woeful laziness and lack of guts in the mainstream press that guided the rest of his life's journalism. He worked mainly for small left publications, after some glorious war reporting in Burma, India, and China - and scooping the world on Hiroshima - with the Daily Express of London, then one of the world's best papers for foreign coverage despite its eccentric Toryism. He lived in Indo-China, Moscow, East Europe and Peking, but was always away on stories. His weary months with cease- fire talks at Panmunjom during the Korean war demonstrate in detail the duplicity of American negotiators, who wanted the war to continue, and expose a dreadful truth: that military men and diplomats care more about scoring points off each other than the fact that their delays cause mass deaths each day they prevaricate. He makes a strong circumstantial case that Americans did use germ warfare in Korea - another subject that dogged his career and inflamed opponents. His repeated spells of months living with National Liberation Front guerrillas, dressed in a black pajama-style outfit with a conical straw hat, riding a bicycle, crouching in tunnels, sleeping in hammocks, and moving mostly at night in areas "controlled" by American forces and their South Vietnam allies, often inside Saigon, showed him that no matter what military monster roared forth, the country was already lost to the foreign invaders and their puppets. He knew then he would publish these truths. No wonder he was hated. In Greece in 1946 when his dispatches exposed the fake election and forecast civil war, the British consul-general who earlier called him "old boy," now told him he was expelled. An American journalist  George Polk -- was murdered. The civil war lasted more than three years. "I had merely reported what I observed", he writes, "drawing upon the natural and logical deductions from these observations. But the period in which what becomes obvious truth catches up with that perceived and published by a diligent journalist, can be very uncomfortable, as I have discovered many times in my career. And the process keeps repeating, with no credit from the critics of past bull's eyes when they are disputing the accuracy of the latest shot." He makes it sound simple, and in fact it is not that complicated. Mainstream media are festooned with lies every day, especially in the US, where a major reason is American insistence on "objective" quotations. This means you print the lies officials tell you. These "officials" are selected with blatant bias. Months pass without hearing from one trade union leader. Left-of-liberal opinions are never sought. Known mountebanks mouth on unchallenged. And in wars, as we know, truth is the first casualty. Yet here is another important question raised by Burchett's book, which is an enlargement of his 1981 recollections, At the Barricades. Why is it considered wrong, even treacherous, for someone to report a war on the side fighting the nation in which he or she is a citizen? There is no law against it - although in Burchett's case his government wanted to pass one, while refusing for 17 years to replace his stolen passport. As he points out, the New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury (quoted in the front as a Burchett admirer), and the leftish British journalist James Cameron, both visited north Vietnam during the war. They were not labelled "Communist agent" as Burchett was by Tom Lambert in the Los Angeles Times. Lambert's shoddy lies offer direct evidence that these are his customary currency. "With the inception of Communism, and its deliberate subjection of journalism to ideology, a new type of reporter came into being...the journalist political agent," Lambert fibs. Never, of course, has capitalism required ideological fealty from the journalists it employs... In another respect, Burchett readily admits to acting as an agent in the sense of participating in the historical events he finds himself reporting, to try to bring about something useful. It is the simple duty of a member of society, he argues. He became a key source for fellow journalists at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam and at Panmunjom; he conveyed constructive messages between warring sides; and he intervened to help an Australian prisoner of war in Korea (and was castigated by other ex-prisoners as a KGB agent for his trouble). If there is criticism of this large work it is the final chapter and its ending. Burchett, as edited, concludes with an outraged account of the biased conduct of a court case for defamation he brought in Sydney in 1974. A miserable right-wing ex-senator, John Kane, wrote an article accusing Burchett of taking money from the KGB to act on its behalf while his own nation was at war with enemies the KGB supported. In other words he was a traitor. The main witness against him was a Soviet defector of notorious dishonesty, who claimed to have recruited him in Moscow where Burchett lived in luxury. By bringing the $1m action, Burchett gave the Australian conservative dingbats who had always hated him a superb opportunity to air every foul slander and slur they could imagine. They exploited this fully. Adultery and blackmail were dragged in. He was said to bring down governments just by visiting their countries, as he had in Greece and Portugal. None of it was true but little real evidence for him was permitted, except an old Moscow acquaintance who recalled his apartment as modest. His case was unnecessary as Labor had won the recent election, in which Kane was ousted. It immediately restored Burchett's passport, whereupon the newspapers headlined him "Citizen Burchett". Months later, headlines screamed about wild courtroom allegations. He should have dropped the case and let Kane wallow in his inadequacies. Instead, Burchett won a pyrrhic victory. The jury found he had been defamed, but that Kane had parliamentary privilege for his previously-spoken allegations - something a cub reporter could have spotted. Burchett was stuck with six-figure costs he could not pay, restoring the exile caused by his formerly missing passport. Never having learned libel as a trainee reporter, Burchett may not have known enough about parliamentary privilege; his lawyer should have warned him. The book ends there, on a sad note not fully explained. Missing too for space reasons are his mid-1970s exploits in Portugal and its former African colonies, and elsewhere. The solution would be Volume 2 of Burchett's memoirs: his last travels and thoughts, the final fitting climax to a life magnificently lived by a good man doing a good job the best way he could. Christopher Reed is a British freelance journalist in Japan. His email is christopherreed@earthlink.net.

From "A G-Man's Life" A G-MAN'S LIFE The FBI, Being "Deep Throat," and the Struggle for Honor in Washington. By Mark Felt and John O'Connor. Illustrated. 319 pp. PublicAffairs. $26.95. Reviewed by John Dean May 7, 2006 The New York Times Book Review MARK FELT'S book "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington" was assembled by a California lawyer, John O'Connor. Assisted by the Felt family, O'Connor first resolved the mystery of Deep Throat's identity in an article for Vanity Fair last year. Unfortunately, the book they have now produced adds absolutely nothing to our understanding about Felt's role as Bob Woodward's source during Watergate. All we know about Deep Throat is what Woodward has told us, and he reports in "The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat" that given Felt's current dementia (he's 92), unless he had "some secret record he had kept or had told to someone unknown," "the answers to the main questions" are "unavailable." Woodward cannot explain, for example, how Felt observed the flowerpot on Woodward's apartment balcony, indicating he wanted to meet; or how Felt marked home-delivered copies of Woodward's New York Times, indicating that Felt wanted to meet with him. Nor can he answer "the all-important question of his motive." "A G-Man's Life" suggests that Felt never kept such a record or confided such information. If one compares what Felt supposedly told Woodward, as set forth in "All the President's Men," with the historical record — as I once did on a long flight (the results can be seen at writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20050603.appendix.html) — almost half of Felt's reported information is wrong. Obviously, only Felt himself could explain why he got so much wrong, but he is no longer able to do so. O'Connor writes in the introduction that because Felt's memory has "faded," he has combined two earlier writings by Felt: his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside," and "a subsequent manuscript." Felt was under indictment for authorizing illegal break-ins of friends and relatives of Weather Underground members when he wrote "The FBI Pyramid." (The copyright page suggests that Felt wrote it with the conservative writer Ralph de Toledano, who must be a bit peeved that Felt lied to him about being Deep Throat.) After Felt's conviction and subsequent pardon by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O'Connor says, Felt prepared a manuscript in which he "recounted happier times as a counterspy and crime-busting G-man (including stories that had been left out of his published book)." In this vaguely described later material, O'Connor writes, Felt "edged closer to his Deep Throat identity." O'Connor used these two works to construct a chronicle of "the events and influences that helped shape Felt's hidden identity, from his days tracking Nazi and Soviet spies to his battles against the Kansas City mob to his role as protector of Hoover's ideals at the F.B.I." Years ago, as a Throat sleuth, I purchased a copy of "The FBI Pyramid" in a used-book store for $1. Today, "The FBI Pyramid" sells online for up to $1,100 or so — because it is so rare, not because of anything valuable it contains. In his review for this publication, David Wise said that practically the only thing he had learned from the book about the F.B.I. was that its director, J. Edgar Hoover, mainlined vitamins: "Every morning, Valerie Stewart, the chief nurse of the F.B.I. Health Service, gave him an injection of multiple vitamins." If the "subsequent manuscript" has added anything important to "The FBI Pyramid," it escaped this reader's attention. "A G-Man's Life," like "The FBI Pyramid," views the Federal Bureau of Investigation through rose-colored glasses. Felt virtually ignores the F.B.I. that was described in the 1976 reports of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), and he completely ignores the bureau that was more recently found to have let several men serve 30 years in prison for a murder it knew one of its informants had committed. If Felt's account were even close to accurate, some Republicans and Democrats would not be pursuing legislation to remove Hoover's name from the F.B.I. headquarters building. As Laurence Silberman, a senior federal judge, has nicely summed it up, "it is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr." The Watergate narrative in "A G-Man's Life" (a slightly expanded version of the one in "The FBI Pyramid") suggests why Deep Throat provided so much bad information to Woodward. Felt's account is given to speculation, not hard evidence. His Watergate material is riddled with errors, some minor, others major. For instance, Felt seems unaware that the White House followed the F.B.I.'s Watergate investigation through Henry Petersen, chief of the criminal division, not through the acting director, L. Patrick Gray. Felt, who was passed over for the director's job, claims that in the period after Gray's departure from the F.B.I., he "knew that as long as John Dean and John Ehrlichman were in the White House," he "would have less chance of receiving the appointment than the man in the moon." But Ehrlichman and I were out of the White House at that time. At one point he even claims that Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, "had certainly been briefed" on the fact that he had been wiretapped at the White House's behest, an absurd assertion. O'Connor's addendum to Felt's Watergate material adds only conjecture to speculation about Felt's motives as Deep Throat; he addresses what Felt "could" have done, and shows a remarkable ability to enter the mind and memory of a man who is unable to do so himself. With genuine disappointment, I must report that "A G-Man's Life" is weak biography or autobiography (for it is a bit of both), but it is even worse history. To borrow old Watergate vernacular, it isn't even a good "modified limited hangout." ---------------- John W. Dean is a former Nixon White House counsel. His seventh nonfiction book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," will be published in July.

Deep Throat's Other Secret Watergate Source's New Book Reveals His Wife Committed Suicide By Lynne Duke Washington Post Saturday, April 22, 2006 W. Mark Felt, who for nearly 33 years denied that he was Deep Throat, also held a tragic secret from his family: It was suicide, not a heart attack, that felled his wife after years of strain from Felt's FBI career and ensuing legal troubles. In his new book, "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, 'Deep Throat' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington," Felt reveals for the first time that Audrey Robinson Felt, his wife of 46 years, shot herself in 1984 with his .38 service revolver after a long emotional and physical decline. Co-authored with John O'Connor, the lawyer whose Vanity Fair article last year revealed Felt as Deep Throat, the book also reveals Felt's discomfort with the famous moniker given him by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story and brought down President Richard Nixon. And the book tells of Felt's deep anger at what he believed was Woodward's violation of their source-reporter relationship. Felt did not want to be described in any way in print, but Woodward both described him and called him "Deep Throat" in 1974 in "All the President's Men." "Mark has never seen himself as a chatterbox who gave up secrets," writes O'Connor in a lengthy introduction. "If this book does nothing else, let it destroy that caricature. Deep Throat was a journalistic joke; the name never described Mark Felt. After Woodward revealed that he had a senior source in the executive branch, thereby breaking his agreement with Mark Felt, and after the journalist identified his confidant as 'Deep Throat,' the retired FBI man was furious -- slamming down the phone when Woodward called for his reaction" to the 1974 book. In "The Secret Man," Woodward's 2005 book on Felt's outing as Deep Throat, Woodward also describes Felt's anger at "All the President's Men." Felt had wanted their agreement to be "inviolate," Woodward wrote. But Woodward wrote that he thought he had "some leeway" because Felt had not previously objected to Woodward's other published references to the secret source. Though the Felt book appears well after Woodward's, it provides the unique perspective of "Watergate in the words of the person most responsible along with Woodward for exposing these massive crimes," O'Connor said in an interview. Felt, now 92, suffers from dementia. He was hospitalized with a fever even as his book was about to go on sale. He had been reluctant to publish a book on his secret identity. But his daughter, Joan Felt, convinced him by saying a book could potentially make enough money to pay off some of his grandsons' school bills. Shortly after Felt publicly revealed his identity last year, he laughingly told the press staked out at his Santa Rosa, Calif., home that he planned to "write a book or something and get all the money I can." The book is based on his 1979 memoir, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside," as well as a manuscript he prepared in the 1980s with his son, W. Mark Felt Jr., -- before he publicly revealed himself as Deep Throat. It also is based on FBI memos, recollections and interviews conducted by his family. O'Connor, a former U.S. attorney in San Francisco who now is in private practice there, adds to Felt's own writings and recollections. In an introduction and epilogue, O'Connor puts into context Felt's many secrets and how he kept them, against the backdrop of Watergate and the malfeasance for which Felt himself was responsible. "In the FBI, agents learned to keep secrets and compartmentalize, and nobody built more compartments than Mark Felt," O'Connor writes. "He isolated his family life from his Bureau life, hid aspects of his personal life and aspects of his professional life, and of course walled off his secret identity from his public identity." Scandal engulfed him and his family when, after Watergate, he was prosecuted for ordering "black bag jobs," or secret, warrantless break-ins that in 1972 and 1973 targeted friends and relatives of Weather Underground members. His wife could not bear the trial. She attended only its first day. Even after Felt's 1980 conviction and his subsequent pardon by President Ronald Reagan, her health and stability continued to decline. She had endured years of stress: moving the two Felt children from city to city to keep up with their father's career, being estranged from her daughter, Joan, who lived a countercultural lifestyle under the sway of a Northern California guru. Alcohol also played a role in Audrey Felt's decline, the book says. Upon finding his wife's body in the guest bath of their Washington-area apartment, Felt phoned his son. But as he had done for most of his life as an FBI man and a secret source on Watergate, O'Connor writes, Felt "immediately compartmentalized the family tragedy. Sitting with his son at a table for hours, the father decreed that the suicide would be kept a strict secret, even from Joan. Mark did not want to burden the family or the family history with the record of the suicide. The cover story would be that Audrey died of a sudden heart attack." Though Felt portrays the strain his wife suffered as an FBI wife, he ultimately blamed the government, O'Connor writes, "charging it with killing his wife."

Next month, May 2006, will see the release of "A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being 'Deep Throat,' and the Struggle for Honor in Washington". The book's authors are Mark Felt, John D. O'Connor and W. Mark Felt. Amazon.com is accepting pre-publication orders for the book.

In 1984, in accordance with Billie Sol Estes’ desire to have his book published on his relationship with LBJ/Mac Wallace, I arranged for Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent New York literary agent whom I knew, to travel to Texas to meet with Billie Sol. I picked Lucianne up at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and we drove to Abilene to meet with Billie Sol. In the midst of our discussion with Billie Sol, Lucianne interjected the topic of the death of John Connally’s daughter. She said that when she read the small item about it in a newspaper at the time it occurred she remarked to herself that “this was the start of something big.” But for some reason the story never had legs, to use journalistic lingo. Billie Sol responded to Lucianne’s observation by stating that when Connally’s daughter died under mysterious circumstances, Connally immediately went to where Robert Hale was and where the death had occurred and attempted to toss Hale over the balcony, which would have resulted in Hale’s death. Billie Sol always maintained that the only person LBJ feared was John Connally, who would stop at nothing to achieve what he wanted. When I told related this comment by Billie Sol to Shearn Moody soon after Lucianne Goldberg’s visit in 1984, Moody told me that in recent days the wife of a Galveston County public official had told him that a person close to Connally had called the official’s wife, who was a friend, in alarm and said that John Connally was “in a killing mood.” Lucianne would later became famous as the key person who exposed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal using information that she obtained from Linda Tripp. She has her own web site, www.lucianne.com, where die-hard right-wingers daily post their news articles.