Watergate: Part Four

The C.I.A. and Watergate
If the C.I.A. had anything to do with exposing the break-in it could be that it was somehow involved with the sex ring, using it to get information on politicians. After all, this would not have been the only time this actually happened. As will be demonstrated, the C.I.A. was operating another honey trap at the time.

It is often forgotten that the C.I.A. had turned over to the F.B.I. photographs of the White House plumbers in front of Dr. Fielding’s office . The agency refused White House requests to retrieve those pictures.
Martha Mitchell told a journalist that McCord was a double agent who lured the other burglars into a trap to hurt the Nixon White House, and she claimed that Director Richard Helms knew all about it. There is no way to verify her claims, but many others have shared her suspicious. She also said her husband was concerned because Charles Colson had been in touch with Arthur Bremer five days before he shot George Wallace. The problem is that Mrs. Mitchell drank heavily and we cannot be sure what she thought she heard. She feared that her husband was being set up for taking the blame in the Watergate break-in. she was medicated and taken off to a hospital.
Former agent Miles Copeland said Helms knew about the break-in beforehand. He has also written that the GOP sought to obtain mind-altering drugs that could be slipped into the drinks or food of Democratic orators. He hypothesized that this is what happened to Edmund Muskie, when he seemed incoherent in New Hampshire.

Haldeman thought that the C.I.A. was concerned that Nixon would move to reign in the agency after the election of 1972. Nixon considered firing Richard Helms in 1970 but settled for an eventual thorough house-cleaning and large personnel cuts. Nixon was said to distrust Helms because of his liberal, Ivy-league background. The implication is that agency men wanted the second break-in to be discovered to discredit Nixon. By his own account, we know that as soon as the burglars were caught. Helms called Acting Director Patrick Gray to suggest that the F.B.I. look at their ties to John Ehrlichman. Helms wanted to interest the bureau in the activities of the plumbers’ unit.
Those who claim the desire of the C.I.A. to implicatre the White House note that newspaper stories pursued White House ties rather than the C.I.A. link. The burglars also had sequential money that could be traced through Mexico to campaign fund raising. Haldeman speculated that the Howard Hughes faction of the C.I.A. was unhappy with Nixon. The president was allied with the Bush/DuPont cohort in the defense industry.


Some speculate that “ Deep Throat, ” the long unnamed insider who fed reporters Woodward and Bernstein information, had to be a C.I.A. man, but it turned out to be Mark Felt, a disgreuntled deputy director of the F.B.I.. His job was to compile information gathered by the bureau, but the odd thing was that most of what he revealed came from the C.I.A.. Playing a double game, Felt gave Nixon evidence about C.I.A. involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy. Then Nixon used that information to try to pressure the C.I.A. to help in the cover-up. Felt gave Woodward much information that did not reflect well on the C.I.A.. Some believe that “Deep Throat” was a name for at least three separate sources of information.

It is not likely that Felt was a double agent. He was an honest agent who must have resented all the drugs brought into the country. He also shared an animus against Richard Nixon who disliked the F.B.I. and abused it by requiring illegal operations. Like Hoover, Felt wanted to end the illegal operations required by the White House. Woodward recently told the San Francisco Chronicle said that Felt told him about an “incredible” and “ fantastic” black scientific operation that the intelligence people wanted to cover up at all costs. He may have been referencing a break-through in anti-gravity flight in 1971, which was probably funded by drug funds. This was Project Pounce at Nelis Air Force Base under Lt. Col. John Williams. Behind the scenes, there was a great struggle between two coalitions one led by Hughes and the other by the DuPonts and Rockefellers to setle who would exploit the technology. Supposedly, Robert Vesco abscounded with over $200,000,000 in C.I.A./Hughes funds that were intended for the project.

Bob Woodward, a young Washington Post reporter, was a key figure in exposing the extent of Nixon’s abuses of power. A Katherine Graham biographer suggested that Woodward was assigned to work with Bernestein on the Watergate story because there was a suspicion he was an intelligence agent.Woodward was raised a conservative Republican and had worked with the Office of Navy Intelligence, even briefing the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs, and Genereal Alexander Haig. Woodward had no journalistic experience when the Post hired him. Some information he ran came from Robert Bennett of the Mullen Company, a C.I.A. front. Bennett would report to his C.I.A. handler what information he gave Woodward, whom he reported was’suitably grateful .

The president was particularly angry over low C.I.A. estimates of Soviet strength, and his aides pressured the agency to revise their estimates upward. He alsdo objected to the C.I.A. finding, through Operation Chaos, that domestic anti-war groups were not connected with external enemies. He was convinced that they were part of a great, foreign led conspiracy. Nixon was using the BNDD , the drug agency then, as a rival intelligence service. The US was running a very secret assassinations program that paralleled Condor under the Nixon Administration that used the BNDD, forerunner of the DEA, as a cover. Lucien Conei legendary C.I.A. operative, was packed off to the anti-drug agency after the Watergate break-in. He had worked closely with E. Howard Hunt, but there is no evidence he was involved in Watergate. A number of former C.I.A. agents and Cuban exiles joined him in the BNDD ranks. They killed Omar Torrijos ostensibly because he was protecting drug traffickers. Mexico was running its own version of Condor, and some BNN agents cooperated with it.

The established story is that the men who were caught on June 17, 1972 had been removing a easedropping device, but it is assumed they were looking for something else as well. We also know that they photographed many documents. A.T. and T. had swept the premises for devices before the second break-in and found none. The F.B.I. found no listening device there after the second break-in, so those who contend the break-in was to replace a broken one might be be wrong. There is also evidence that Lou Russell worked with Nick Beltrante to sweep the DNC before the A.T. and T. people did. Some speculate that he removed whatever bugs that were there because neither AT& T nor the F.B.I. found bugs in the suite. Months later, according to McCord, a bug was found.