Douglas Caddy: Profile on Spartacus-Educational.Com

[Douglas Caddy]

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcaddyD.htm

 

 

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/being-there-douglas-caddy/1126059870

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

In Gore Vidal's interview of Barry Goldwater in the June 9, 1961 issue of LIFE magazine the Senator was kind enough to praise me for the work I had done in founding the modern conservative movement.

 

https://2neat.com/product/life-magazine-june-9-1961-jfk-in-paris/

[Douglas Caddy]

I was profiled in the September 1961 issue of The New Leader

https://search.opinionarchives.com/TNL_Web/DigitalArchive.aspx?panes=2

Click on cover to see the cover

The article in the table of contents was written by Marvin Kitman. It was about the new wave of conservatism

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by Douglas Caddy

[David Andrews]

Doug, congratulations on your book publication.  I hope it's widely read.

I have questions about Howard Hunt.

Hunt is said to have retired from CIA and gone to work at Mullen because of his need to attend his daughter's medical requirements.  (Whether that's the whole or partial truth, you can comment if you like.)  However, I'm assuming from known relations between CIA-Mullen that the Mullen job would have been a NOC (non-official cover) for Hunt's continuing association with CIA.

My questions:

• While at Mullen, would Hunt have been assigned a CIA case officer to report to and take instructions and advice from?
• If so, would Hunt have been able to contact this case officer directly by phone, scheduling meetings and such, or would Hunt have had to call a cut-out to arrange a call-back or a meet with his case officer?
• Would these relations have continued during Hunt's term at the White House?

How exactly did the old-boy network operate in those days?

Is it possible that you could query St. John Hunt on this?

Thanks

Edited January 6, 2021 by David Andrews

[David Andrews]

Duplicate post, please delete.

Edited January 6, 2021 by David Andrews

[Douglas Caddy]

David: 

I do not think the idea that Hunt had a CIA case officer was the way it worked. Hunt was one of the original employees of the CIA after it was formed in 1947. He came there from years as an agent in the OSS. He knew everyone at the top. Helms placed him in  the Mullen Company and kept novels/books that Howard had written on display in his office when he was CIA director. Hunt invited me to join him and CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston in April 1972 for a meeting outside the CIA building at which they approached me to become a CIA agent to build a hotel in Nicaragua to lure the Sandinista leaders there to compromise them. In other words, Hunt could meet or talk on the phone at any time with Helms and Houston and others at the CIA's top level. He was too high up to deal with a mere case officer.

Hunt  may have been assigned to the Mullen Company, after being "separated: from the CIA, so that from there he could skillfully leverage his personal friendship with  Charles (Chuck) Colson, a fellow alumnus of  Brown University, to land a position inside the White House. This could not have happened if he were still an "active" CIA agent. He accomplished this goal, asking me to write a letter of recommendation for him to the White House on my law firm letterhead for that position. Once inside the White House he regularly sent reports directly back to Helms at to what he observed and learned while working there. He was the CIA's eyes-and-ears inside the White House for two years until Watergate broke. There was someone who physically took his written reports on White House activities directly to Helms but that guy's role was only as a courier.

Thank you for asking this question. I plan to use this topic to make short posts about people and events I know personally about that have historical significance. Soon I shall write about how the modern conservative movement was born and when it went awry so that decades later the country ended up with Trump as president/traitor. I turn 83 in March and there is little sand left n my hourglass to pass along what I know first hand.

 

Edited January 6, 2021 by Douglas Caddy

[David Andrews]

Thank you Doug.

Would you say that the Helms-Hunt relationship soured after the burglary arrest, and Hunt's attempts to secure defense funds and living expenses for the burglars from Nixon through Colson?

One reason I ask is that in this famous Firing Line appearance, Hunt's protest that an intelligence service would have handled his expenses better than the White House feels like an indictment of the CIA's neglect of him as well.  (Beginning about 4:15 in the video.)

I'm unsure of the timing of this interview: the taping date is claimed to have been May 10, 1974, but that seems like it was 16 months into Hunt's 33-month prison sentence.

I'm sure you know best, but it's struck me that Hunt's star began to wane at CIA as soon as Dulles died.

 

Edited January 7, 2021 by David Andrews

[Douglas Caddy]

David: Within a few hours of the arrests of the burglars at Watergate, Hunt was identified as being a part of the break-in operation. At this point in time Director Helms and the rest of the CIA cut off future contact with Hunt. Not only had Hunt been sending confidential reports to Helms from the White House for two years, the CIA had provided material assistance to Hunt in the Plumbers Operation. Also a CIA medical specialist had met with Hunt and Gordon Liddy about means that could be used to assassinate columnist Jack Anderson.

Hunt always considered the Plumbers Operation and Watergate specifically as akin to a normal CIA intelligence operation. This meant that if anything went wrong, money was the cheapest commodity to clear it up. He could never accept that the Watergate break-in was a political operation where money could not be used to clear it up because the operation violated U.S. criminal laws. This is apparent in his interview with Buckley that you posted above.

Another revealing video is Hunt's telephone call to Charles Colson two weeks after the November 1972 election. Hunt's blackmail demands in the call led to the December 1972 killing of his wife, Dorothy,in a plane crash. This was meant as a message to Hunt that he should cease his blackmail threat to publicly tell what he knew. Hunt got the message and pleaded guilty at the start of the first Watergate trial the next month, in January 1973. He told his children that if he did not so plead, they might be the next targets.

 

[David Andrews]

Thank you again, Doug.

Apropos of your remark,

I turn 83 in March and there is little sand left in my hourglass to pass along what I know first hand.

It strikes me that what Hunt needs at this point is a legitimate, scholarly biography published by a high-profile company.  Perhaps using grant-funded research, but written by someone unafraid to explore the CIA connection to Watergate.  This would be something you could contribute to greatly.

I could not even begin to take this on at my stage of life and fortune, but you might consider who else is equipped to approach this, and perhaps yourself tape some interviews on Hunt that could be incorporated at a later date.

[W. Niederhut]

Mr. Caddy,

    Can you comment on the subject of why Hunt, Helms, and the Company wanted to sabotage Richard Nixon?  I never understood the whys and wherefores of that aspect of the Watergate op.

 

[Joe Bauer]

D C... I hope that at some point you relate to me what Marina Oswald told you that you could not reveal in her lifetime? Something extraordinary?

I cannot identify with your ideology in the ultra conservative movement realm starting in your youth. However, it seems to me that in your later years you have placed truth, justice and dark secrecy exposing ahead of everything else and your huge time and effort commitment writing, speaking and posting efforts to do such.

Truths about JFK's murder, LBJ's involvement and over-all corruption, the corruption of so many other highest position government persons, the ET story, Nixon, etc. 

I hope this view of mine of your older age moral and common good motivated commitment sincerity in this way is not wrong.

What was your take again as to the contradiction of Hunt confessing the "Big Event" JFK removal story with LBJ and Cord Meyer behind it versus Hunt telling you that JFK was taken out over the "Alien Presence" secrecy exposing threat?

 

 

[Douglas Caddy]

Joe: The Conservative Movement that I was instrumental in founding in 1958-1960 was vastly different from what was passes as Conservatism today. In another posting in this topic i shall tell the exact date it was taken over by those who control it today for whom I have utter contempt.

Here is The Sharon Statement that was adopted at the founding conference of Young Americans for Freedom in September 1961. Please read it and see where you disagree. I was YAF's first National Director.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/young-americans-freedom-sharon-statement-1960/

 

 

Edited January 7, 2021 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

On 1/7/2021 at 11:51 AM, W. Niederhut said:

Mr. Caddy,

    Can you comment on the subject of why Hunt, Helms, and the Company wanted to sabotage Richard Nixon?  I never understood the whys and wherefores of that aspect of the Watergate op.

 

Mr. Niederhut:

     The answer to your question is complex because there were two government agencies that decided to destroy Nixon. This stemmed from Nixon creating the still secret Huston Plan that was designed to bypass these and some other agencies because Nixon thought they were ineffectual in protecting the nation’s security. The two agencies, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, were resentful that their powers were being diminished. Both also opposed Nixon’s opening to China, afraid that doing so would awaken a sleeping giant that in time would threaten America. They were right about this.

 

     Inside the CIA James Angleton led a faction that was determined to undermine Nixon even if it meant sacrificing Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA agent in doing so. Angleton from was chief of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975. Hunt’s reports from inside the white House on Nixon pushing the Huston Plan alarmed Helms and Angleton.

 

                                       The Pentagon’s Operation inside the White House

 

       Fox News published an article on December 15, 2008, by James Rosen titled, “The Men Who Spied on Nixon: New Details Reveal Extent of ‘Moorer-Radford Affair.’” Here are key excerpts from it:

 

A Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council during the Nixon administration "stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," according to newly declassified White House documents. 

 

The two-dozen pages of memoranda, transcripts and notes -- once among the most sensitive and privileged documents in the Executive Branch -- shed important new details on a unique crisis in American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, using the stenographer as their agent, actively spied on the civilian command during the Vietnam War. 

 

The episode became known as "the Moorer-Radford affair," after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, the late Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, and the stenographer involved, Navy Yeoman Charles Radford. The details first surfaced in early 1974 as part of the Watergate revelations, but remained obscure until historians in the 1990s and this decade began fleshing out the episode. 

 

The affair represented an important instance in which President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 amid wide-ranging allegations that he and his subordinates abused the powers of the presidency, was himself the victim of internal espionage. In adding to what has already become known about the episode, the latest documents show how the president and his aides struggled to "get a handle on" the young Navy man at the center of the intrigue and contain the damage caused by the scandal

A trained stenographer, Radford was in his late twenties when he was assigned to the NSC staff of Henry Kissinger during Nixon's first term. The yeoman worked out of the Executive Office Building under two admirals, Rembrandt Robinson and Robert O. Welander, who served as formal liaison between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the NSC. As Radford later described his work -- in polygraph tests, sworn testimony, and interviews with historians and journalists -- he spent 13 months illegally obtaining NSC documents and turning them over to his superiors, with the understanding that the two admirals were, in turn, funneling the materials to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and other top uniformed commanders. Radford's espionage took many forms: making extra photocopies of documents entrusted to him as courier; retrieving crumpled drafts from "burn bags"; even brazenly rifling through Kissinger's briefcase while the national security adviser slept on an overseas flight….. 

 

Under intensive polygraph testing in late 1971, Radford denied having leaked the India-Pakistan documents to the columnist. (Columnist Jack Anderson died in 2005 without ever disclosing who had been his source, but he told author Len Colodny in November 1986: "You don't get those kinds of secrets from enlisted men. You only get them from generals and admirals.") However, the young stenographer did eventually break down and tearfully admit to Nixon's investigators that he had been stealing NSC [National Security Council] documents and routing them to his Pentagon superiors. Radford later estimated he had stolen 5,000 documents within a 13-month period.....

 

He [John Ehrlichman’s aide, David Young] encouraged Ehrlichman to mention to Admiral Robinson that the young stenographer-spy had already told investigators that he believed the material he had been stealing was destined to go to "your superiors," meaning the Joint Chiefs. Young also urged Ehrlichman to determine the extent to which Kissinger's top NSC deputy -- Alexander Haig, who had personally selected Radford to accompany Kissinger on his overseas trips, and who later went on to become secretary of state in the Reagan administration -- was "aware of Radford's activities." 

 

Nixon and his men eventually concluded that Haig had been complicit in the Pentagon spying, but opted not to take any action against him. [Note: Haig later become Nixon’s chief of staff.]

 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/12/15/men-spied-nixon-new-details-reveal-extent-moorer-radford-affair.html

 

     Washington Metro Police Sergeant Carl Shoffler, who was actually a military intelligence agent assigned to the police by the Pentagon, learned from confidential information Robert Merritt of the burglars’ plan to break into the Democratic National Committee in Watergate two weeks before the actual burglary took place. He used this information to set up the burglars and then was parked a block away from Watergate on the night of the break-in. When he received word from police headquarters that the burglary was underway, he entered the building and arrested James McCord and the four Cuban-Americans. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy who were in the Watergate Hotel fled the scene. With the arrests of the burglars, the fuse was lit for the eventual destruction of Nixon.

 

                                                         The Huston Plan

 

 

     Tom Huston, the co-author with President Nixon of the Huston Plan, was one of the founders of Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, which was when I first got to know him. He is now one of my Facebook friends. During the time he was employed by the Nixon Administration he was kind enough on one occasion to give me a tour of the White House and to introduce me to Pat Buchanan, the president’s speech writer. What I remember most about Buchanan’s office were the large number of television sets that were being played simultaneously to monitor breaking news.

 

     Robert Merritt was one of two employees of the Huston Plan, being paid by cash funds provided by John Dean from the White House to Sergeant Dixie Gildon of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department who disbursed the money to Merritt. Merritt maintained that Gildon had a fairly detailed knowledge of the Huston Plan.

 

     The Huston Plan is best described in a CNN article by Professor Douglas Brinkley, CNN’s Presidential Historian, and Professor Luke A. Nichter, published on June 17, 2015. Here are some excerpts from their article, “Great Mystery of the 1970s: Nixon, Watergate and the Huston Plan”:

 

Chaired by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, ICI [Interagency Committee on Intelligence] membership included the major intelligence agencies, including Richard Helms of the CIA, Donald Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency, William Sullivan of the FBI, and Noel Gayler of the National Security Agency. The White House liaison was Tom Charles Huston, a conservative-minded attorney and former intelligence official, whose name will be forever associated with the mysterious report.

 

The Huston Plan gave new domestic and international powers to the intelligence community, including break-ins, domestic surveillance, and surreptitious entries. It remains classified "Top Secret" today. Ironically, we know more about illicit domestic surveillance performed by the intelligence community in recent years, due to hackers, than we do about such activities from more than four decades ago. Some scholars have even floated the idea that the Huston Plan was a forerunner to the authorities granted to the intelligence community in section of 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the bulk metadata collection program.

 

 On May 16, 1973, White House special counsel J. Fred Buzhardt reported to Nixon that top NSA officials, including Deputy Director Louis Tordella, had told him the Huston Plan had been put into effect, according to a tape released in August 2013 by the National Archives.

 

When the existence of the Huston Plan first became public during Watergate, we were led to believe that it was never implemented. Nixon ordered the plan and then recalled it, so the story went.

 

However, the reason the Huston Plan remains classified today is likely because at least portions of it were indeed implemented after all. The basis for its continued classification is to protect secrets that were operational…..

 

Our chance to learn about the Huston Plan and whether it was the authority upon which the Watergate burglary took place slipped away when former White House counsel John W. Dean III turned over the White House copy to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on May 14, 1973.

 

Dean took the plan with him when he was fired on April 30. As a result of his giving the document to the courts, it became out of the reach of congressional subpoena and out of the reach of the Freedom of Information Act, even though it was a document created by the executive branch and should have been reviewable under the FOIA. The document and associated records have been in the custody of the court ever since. (Incidentally, we have a petition backed by the American Historical Foundation to review and hopefully release these records. In addition, there are still 700 hours of Nixon White House tapes that have not been released by the Archives.)

 

When word reached the intelligence community that the Huston Plan was no longer in the custody of the White House, panic swept across the FBI, CIA, and NSA on May 17. The FBI feared it could end up in the hands of congressional investigators then looking into Watergate, with the result being that "inference is likely to be drawn by Congressional committees that this committee (the ICI) was a prelude to the Watergate affair and the Ellsberg psychiatrist burglary.".....

 

There was indeed a "cancer on the presidency," as Dean said to Nixon on March 21, and the apparent answer of the national security establishment was to cut it out -- to cut Nixon out. The President had to resign, and he had to be pardoned to ensure that inquiries into broader U.S. government wrongdoing could not continue indefinitely.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/17/opinions/brinkley-nichter-nixon-watergate-huston-plan/index.html

 

[Pete Mellor]

Fascinating post Mr Caddy!

Reminds me of Robert Graves' quote from 'I Claudius' 

“Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.”

[Joe Bauer]

Much to ponder. It's all about power and control.