Security guard Frank Wills found a lock taped open. He removed the tape and went about his business. When he found the door retaped, he knew there was a problem and called the police. James McCord, one of the burglars, was intensely loyal to the C.I.A., and many think it was he who left a door taped at the Watergate. Either he understood the struggle between Nixon and the agency over drugs or someone instructed him to expose the Watergate burglary. Carl Shoffler, policeman who made the arrest, was close to someone in the C.I.A., voluntarily was doing another shift nearby while skipping his own birthday party. Later, two other men E. Howard Hunt, former C.I.A., and G. Gordon Liddy, former F.B.I., were indicted along with them. Liddy did have certain’special clearances from the C.I.A..” These two men, shared a White House office with a decrambled line to Langley. Kathleen Chenow, who shared the office with them left for a London vacation the next day.
Nixon angered the C.I.A. when he demanded that they play a significant role in the cover-up. He had John Dean call in General Vernon Walters, deputy director of the C.I.A., to induce the C.I.A. to seek to shut down some avenues of investigation. Dean told the general that the F.B.I. theorized that the C.I.A. was behind the bugging and said some of the prisoners might implicate the agency. Some of them were working for a C.I.A. front, the Mullen Company. Dean and Walters met twice more, with Dean trying to get the C.I.A. to provide untraceable money for the Cubans. Eventually, Hunt, who had done black ops at least since the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, was found with $200,000 hush money, but he had not given any to the Cubans. There is a C.I.A. memorandum expressing concern that Hunt was in Dallas the day John F. Kennedy was murdered. Hunt, like Nixon, had several stories about where he was that day.
Vernon Walters, on behalf of Nixon, asked Director Helms ask the C.I.A. to oprovide funds for the cover-up and to warn the F.B.I. that the break-in was a matter of national security. Director Richard Helms reported that he refused. In fact the agency asked the F.B.I. to back off looking at a Mexican source of money for the burgulars, saying it could endanger C.I.A. operations there. According to Walters, Helms told him to suggest to Gray that the investigation not go beyond the five burglars. Helms later denied this, but Walters is not known for dissembling.
Then the agency gave the F.B.I. a green light to go ahead with its investigations. Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman was sure that the president thought that the break-in was somehow tied to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He raised the matter with Helms: “The President asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." . . . “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.”
Acting F.B.I. Director L. Patrick Gray called Helms to ask about the agency’s involvement, and Helms responded, "there is no C.I.A. involvement." Yet Helms asked Gray not to inverview two unnamed individuals, and Gray told his agents to proceed gingerly with regard to the C.I.A.. He also told the agents nmot to interview the Mexican lawyer who moved some of the hush money to the White House.
How all of this connected to the death of John F. Kennedy is unclear. H.R. Haldeman was certain there was a close tie and he thought that that Nixon meant this when he said the whole problem went back to the Bay of Pigs. Nixon kept bringing up the Bay of Pigs in connection with Watergate and mentioned it in relation to E. Howard Hunt.
The C.I.A. had many reasons to dislike Nixon and damage him. At that time, the C.I.A. was infuriated because Richard Nixon demanded all of its intelligence about its drug operations. Nixon was running what became the DEA by remote control, and for some reason wanted to use the drug agency as the nuceeus of his own intelligence agency. Ten days after the Watergate burglars were arrested, Barry Seal and some others were seized at Shreveport Regional Airport. They had a plane full of explosives ready to go to Cubans in Mexico. This temporarily shut down the major Drugs/Weapons connection with Mexico. James Miller, Seal's co-pilot, said they were completely surprised because they thought they were protected. Miller also said that Seal had been working with Carols Gambino in these transactions
The bust at Shreveport was engineered by the Customs Service, whose head, Myles Ambrose, a Nixon friend and appointee, had criminal connections particularly the Carlos Marcello family. Ambrose somehow made a deal with Tip O'Neill to facilitate the creation of the DEA. He first headed the Drug Enforcement Office, and that became the DEA. From the beginning, some C.I.A. agents were planted in the new agency. One of them was Cesario Diosdado, who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs and had worked both sides in Miami/Cuba matters. Mafioso Sam Giancana said one of the JFK shooters had been a Customs agent, and this led some to believe this was Diosdado. At any rate, Diosdado played a big role in the Shreveport action. The new DEA was known for thugish tactics, specializing in brutality, no-knock entries, and pointless beating of in innocent individuals. Nixon wanted it to become a new domestic intelligence operation. According to Brigadier General Russell S. Bowen, there were at least 100 C.I.A. people hidden in the DEA and they were used as a “White House goon squad....” After the Watergate break-in, legendary agent Lucien Conein, “Black Luigi,” moved over to the DEA and was to head its Special Operations Group, which was said to be a hit squad. Chuck Coleson later admitted that the DEA/Special Operations Group was involved in assassinations and kidnapping. Colson told Senator Lowell Weicker to look into the death of Lucien Sarti, an Italian drug trafficker in Mexico, to understand what the Special Operations Group does. This involved eliminating the Fench Connection in Mexico, which might have aided communists, with a drug operation run by Cubans tied to the C.I.A.. Many murders followed and the DEA succeeded in eliminating the Marseilles dealers and replacing them with what is roughly called the Cali Cartel. Conein once foolishly boasted of his membership in the Corsican Brotherhood, a large drug ring. He ran secret operations there from 1973 to 1984, laying the groundwork for the great increase in the drug trade in the US in the 1980s. In a sense, the drug trade in the United States was being nationalized. The justification was that some leftists were involved in the trade in Latin Ameerica, and that meant that some of the proceeds might go to Communists. That had to be prevented.
The DEA seized far fewer drugs than the Customs Bureau had and Colonel Thomas Fox, former head of counterintelligence for the DIA, noted that they did not seem to have very much information about the narcotics trade. Soon Senator Henry Jackson opened an investigation of the DEA. He found one former C.I.A. agent, now DEA, setting up a gambling haven on the Island of Abaco and other agents hanging around with Robert Vesco. Barry Seal, who was then with the C.I.A. but’sheep dipped” in DEA kept a file on Vesco, but his widow says it somehow disappeared. Some were involved with Vesco in manufacturing a machine pistol. Of course it was Nixon who got Vesco sprung from a Swiss jail, and Vesco who then hired Donald Nixon. When Frank Peroff said Vesco was moving heroin, Peroff was imprisoned. Vesco continued at his businesses.
It seems that the planes first just brought “weed” into the US. Cocaine might have been aboard, but it would be dropped off in the Bahamas, or other foreign location aqnd for the benefit of US drug dealers.
The drug running became such a large operation that Gerry Patrick Hemming and Barry Seal ran a school for smugglers in Texas. They also taught pilots how to carry out rescue operations. For the most part, they were teaching men to fly heavy twin engine planes.
When Jimmy Carter and Admiral Stanfield Turner began firing C.I.A. agents who were thought to be reckless, these people found the drug trade a good way to make a living. C.I.A. people caught moving drugs might be charged, but the cases rarely went anywhere. Their defense was that they were involved in some deep, dark intelligence missions. It was during the Carter years, that pilots like Seal began bringing in heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Prior to US involvement in Afghanistan, the country only produced opium for a few limited markets. When the US became involved, the Pakistani ISI began encouraging peasants to grow opium, and tribal leaders began opening heroin laboratories.
The Carter Administration set up a Council on Drug Abuse and tried to deal with the influx of drugs, but the C.I.A., despite Admiral Turner, stonewalled the administration and would not share information with the council.
Customs people, later DEA, were post likely involved in moving money through Mexico for Richard Nixon. Leland Briggs, then a special agent in Mexico City, once saw Myles Ambrose, Assistant Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, and John Caulfield fly into Mexico City. Caulfield, a former New York policeman, was Nixon's bagman and money launderer. This was when an untraceable $50 million was flowing from Mexico to Nixon's campaign. What else could they have been arranging? Later, George H.W. Bush arranged for $700,000 to pay off some of the Watergate people. The money passed through some Bush Texas friends, but many investigators think it ultimately came through the Mexican Connection which was temporarily shut down by the Seal arrest. In 1974, the case against Seal and the other six fell apart.
Showing posts with label Nixon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nixon. Show all posts
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Watergate: Part Five
Five men were arrested immediately, all had C.I.A. connections. One ,James McCord, was also a Nixon campaign official . C.I.A. fingerprints were all over this operation, and McCord even told an officer at the police station that these men were all good fellows and had worked for the agency. The next day, the others admitted to being tied to the C.I.A., something agents usually do not do. Yet, the first reports of the story did not put the C.I.A. in a bad light. The telephone number of E. Howard Hunt was found in their address books, and this discovery led the investigation to the White House.
James McCord was a veteran C.I.A. agent and friend of former director Allen Dulles, who introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel as the agency’s best agent. In 1969 he ran the physical security and technical divisions of the Office of Security, which reported directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. McCord had no use for Nixon and told another agent that Nixon was not” one of us.” In A Piece of Tape, he claimed that E. Howard Hunt had information that could bring about the impeacnment of Nixon, but we have no idea what that was. Mc Cord lived with his family in Baltimore, but rented a basement apartment in the District. He testified that he had not met E. Howard Hunt until 1972, but his landlady said Hunt often visited the apartment well before that. She finally ousted McCord because he was visited by women she thought were prostitutes. He claimed he had no bugging equipment until April, 1972, but the landlady said he had all sorts of electrical gear. One wonders why he did not use a hotel room rather than an apartment. It is more likely that the apartment was a safehouse for an intelligence operation run through prostitutes. Some think the bug on Oliver’s phone was placed there after the burgulars were caught because it only turned up long after the arrest and many searches. It was clumsily installed and not the kind that would operate on the frequency McCord was supposed to be using. Former F.B.I. agent said he monitored calls to a Columbia Apartments prostitution ring that serviced politicians and diplomats.
Severeal theorize that McCord found it necessary to expose the burgulary to put to an end a White House investigation that could have led to the C.I.A. prostitution intelligence ring. Some who take this view are not sure that Mark Felt was the only “Deep Throat.” The name could have been a compolsite for intelligence people giving former Naval intelligence man Bob Woodward information to steer the probe away from their intelligence operations.
McCord turned out to be a right-wing propagandist. After his arrest, he started cranking out newsletters saying that the liberal Rockefellers were ruling through Nixon. Oddly, Charles Radford, who was involved in the naval spy ring, had similar notions. He thought the Rockefellers and Nixon had plans to control the international money supply to their benefit.
Nixon seemed astonished by the break-in and came to believe that it was part of a plot to make him look bad. He, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman also believed it was part of some sort of C.I.A. operation and they tried unsuccessfully to get the C.I.A. to clean up its own mess. Seeing the involvement of Hunt and the Cubans, the president thought it could be linked to “the Bay of Pigs thing,” and Haldeman and Ehrlichman thought that those words were Nixon’s way of referencing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
We also know from a report released in 1975 that the C.I.A. had planted a number of observers in the Nixon White House. Alexander Butterfield, whom Rose Woods thought was C.I.A., eventually revealed Nixon’s elaborate taping system. John Arthur Paisley, a ranking C.I.A. officer, was there helping to find leaks and serve as C.I.A. laison with the “plumbers unit.” He was most likely Hunt’s control officer. At the time, he was involved in a sex partner’s swapping ring that was attended by reporter Carl Bernstein. Some think Paisley gave Nixon information about the agency’s involvement in the death of Kennedy. Paisley was considered an expert on that subject. His 1978 death was ruled a suicide even though the right-handed Paisley was shot behind the left ear and his body weighted down in the Chesapeake Bay.
Nixon had been poking around for information on this subject since 1969, when he sent John Ehrlichman to ask Richard Helms for all the C.I.A.’s information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Helms refused to provide any information and got away with it. Senator Howard Baker once remarked, “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.” Ehrlichman later told Haldeman that Nixon’s references to the Bay of Pigs was code fcor the Kennedy assassination. Nixon knew immediately after the break-in that the Cubans who were with McCord at the Watergate were tied to the Bay of Pigs, and he told Haldeman this was a fact. Paisley was considered an expert on that subject. His 1978 death was ruled a suicide even though the right-handed Paisley was shot behind the left ear and his body weighted down in the Chesapeake Bay.
Richard Ober, a James Jesus Arrington protégé, had an office in the White House. He developed a very close relationship to Nixon and had unrestricted access to Nixon. Some have theorized that it was then that Ober learned that Nixon was determined to damage the C.I.A.. We have no idea what his role was but must assume that his first loyalty was to the agency. Ober graduated with Ben Bradlee in the Harvard Class of 1943. Obere went into the OSS and Bradlee went to Naval Intelligence. However, at the time of Watergate, Bradlee stated that he had never met Ober. He was also in charge of Operation Chaos, the effort to spy on anti-war people and Nixon’s opponents. The C.I.A. wanted to scale this dangerous operation back. Alexander Butterfield, a former C.I.A. agent working in the White House, told the Senate Investigating Committee that Nixon was having all of his conversations recorded, and General Vernon Walters of the C.I.A. pointed out the smoking gun tape to the committee. Ambassador George H.W. Bush, then head of the RNC and a former C.I.A. man, established the reputation as a strong Nixon loyalist, but he had a way of giving bad advice to Nixon on how to handle the scandal. He also set Lowell Weicher, a Republican on the Watergate committee, on the warpath against the White House when he tried to blackmail the Connecticut Senator with information that Weicher had received some Townhouse money.
We know that McCord was the teams electronics guy and that he earlier planted a bug in Chairman Lawrence O Brien’s telephone that did not work. There is some evidence that he also left a door lock to the parking garage taped so a security man could find it. Oddly, the tape was horizontal rather than vertical, making it easier for security people to spor it. Eugenio Martinez , one of the burgulars, later said they were joined there by someone who had infiltrated the DNC and that they were lookling for proof that Castro donated to the George McGovern campaign. Martinez remained on the C.I.A. payroll until June 17, 1972 and some speculate that he could have told his handler about the break-in before it occurred.
James McCord was a veteran C.I.A. agent and friend of former director Allen Dulles, who introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel as the agency’s best agent. In 1969 he ran the physical security and technical divisions of the Office of Security, which reported directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. McCord had no use for Nixon and told another agent that Nixon was not” one of us.” In A Piece of Tape, he claimed that E. Howard Hunt had information that could bring about the impeacnment of Nixon, but we have no idea what that was. Mc Cord lived with his family in Baltimore, but rented a basement apartment in the District. He testified that he had not met E. Howard Hunt until 1972, but his landlady said Hunt often visited the apartment well before that. She finally ousted McCord because he was visited by women she thought were prostitutes. He claimed he had no bugging equipment until April, 1972, but the landlady said he had all sorts of electrical gear. One wonders why he did not use a hotel room rather than an apartment. It is more likely that the apartment was a safehouse for an intelligence operation run through prostitutes. Some think the bug on Oliver’s phone was placed there after the burgulars were caught because it only turned up long after the arrest and many searches. It was clumsily installed and not the kind that would operate on the frequency McCord was supposed to be using. Former F.B.I. agent said he monitored calls to a Columbia Apartments prostitution ring that serviced politicians and diplomats.
Severeal theorize that McCord found it necessary to expose the burgulary to put to an end a White House investigation that could have led to the C.I.A. prostitution intelligence ring. Some who take this view are not sure that Mark Felt was the only “Deep Throat.” The name could have been a compolsite for intelligence people giving former Naval intelligence man Bob Woodward information to steer the probe away from their intelligence operations.
McCord turned out to be a right-wing propagandist. After his arrest, he started cranking out newsletters saying that the liberal Rockefellers were ruling through Nixon. Oddly, Charles Radford, who was involved in the naval spy ring, had similar notions. He thought the Rockefellers and Nixon had plans to control the international money supply to their benefit.
Nixon seemed astonished by the break-in and came to believe that it was part of a plot to make him look bad. He, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman also believed it was part of some sort of C.I.A. operation and they tried unsuccessfully to get the C.I.A. to clean up its own mess. Seeing the involvement of Hunt and the Cubans, the president thought it could be linked to “the Bay of Pigs thing,” and Haldeman and Ehrlichman thought that those words were Nixon’s way of referencing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
We also know from a report released in 1975 that the C.I.A. had planted a number of observers in the Nixon White House. Alexander Butterfield, whom Rose Woods thought was C.I.A., eventually revealed Nixon’s elaborate taping system. John Arthur Paisley, a ranking C.I.A. officer, was there helping to find leaks and serve as C.I.A. laison with the “plumbers unit.” He was most likely Hunt’s control officer. At the time, he was involved in a sex partner’s swapping ring that was attended by reporter Carl Bernstein. Some think Paisley gave Nixon information about the agency’s involvement in the death of Kennedy. Paisley was considered an expert on that subject. His 1978 death was ruled a suicide even though the right-handed Paisley was shot behind the left ear and his body weighted down in the Chesapeake Bay.
Nixon had been poking around for information on this subject since 1969, when he sent John Ehrlichman to ask Richard Helms for all the C.I.A.’s information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Helms refused to provide any information and got away with it. Senator Howard Baker once remarked, “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.” Ehrlichman later told Haldeman that Nixon’s references to the Bay of Pigs was code fcor the Kennedy assassination. Nixon knew immediately after the break-in that the Cubans who were with McCord at the Watergate were tied to the Bay of Pigs, and he told Haldeman this was a fact. Paisley was considered an expert on that subject. His 1978 death was ruled a suicide even though the right-handed Paisley was shot behind the left ear and his body weighted down in the Chesapeake Bay.
Richard Ober, a James Jesus Arrington protégé, had an office in the White House. He developed a very close relationship to Nixon and had unrestricted access to Nixon. Some have theorized that it was then that Ober learned that Nixon was determined to damage the C.I.A.. We have no idea what his role was but must assume that his first loyalty was to the agency. Ober graduated with Ben Bradlee in the Harvard Class of 1943. Obere went into the OSS and Bradlee went to Naval Intelligence. However, at the time of Watergate, Bradlee stated that he had never met Ober. He was also in charge of Operation Chaos, the effort to spy on anti-war people and Nixon’s opponents. The C.I.A. wanted to scale this dangerous operation back. Alexander Butterfield, a former C.I.A. agent working in the White House, told the Senate Investigating Committee that Nixon was having all of his conversations recorded, and General Vernon Walters of the C.I.A. pointed out the smoking gun tape to the committee. Ambassador George H.W. Bush, then head of the RNC and a former C.I.A. man, established the reputation as a strong Nixon loyalist, but he had a way of giving bad advice to Nixon on how to handle the scandal. He also set Lowell Weicher, a Republican on the Watergate committee, on the warpath against the White House when he tried to blackmail the Connecticut Senator with information that Weicher had received some Townhouse money.
We know that McCord was the teams electronics guy and that he earlier planted a bug in Chairman Lawrence O Brien’s telephone that did not work. There is some evidence that he also left a door lock to the parking garage taped so a security man could find it. Oddly, the tape was horizontal rather than vertical, making it easier for security people to spor it. Eugenio Martinez , one of the burgulars, later said they were joined there by someone who had infiltrated the DNC and that they were lookling for proof that Castro donated to the George McGovern campaign. Martinez remained on the C.I.A. payroll until June 17, 1972 and some speculate that he could have told his handler about the break-in before it occurred.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Watergate: Part Three
The burglars used the nearby Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge as a base. Lou Russell was eating in the motel’s restaurant from 8:30 to 10:30, but he told F.B.I. investigators he did not talk to McCord at that time. He said he left at 10:30 and drove to his daughter’s house in Bennett, Maryland. She said her father told her he had to return to Washington to do “some work for McCord” that night. What he did, we do not know. He told the F.B.I. that he was in his room in a rooming house during the break-in.
Writer Jim Hougan thought Russell was helping McCord sabotage the break-in. Soon after the break-in, Russell was contacted by his old friend Bellino, then working for Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate Administrative Practices Committee. Russell went to stay with Bellino’s friend William Birley on the top floor of the Twin Towers Complex in Silver Spring, Maryland. Eventually, Birley put Lou in a safe house, and one of the prostitutes moved in with Russell. Republican staffers on the Erwin Committed learned of Russell’s involvement with the bordello and thought that investigasting him might help them clear Nixon. On May 9, 1973, the Committee subpoenaed Russell’s bank and telephone records. They learned Russell never had a bank account. The only long distance calls were made to his daughter, and he kept no job diaries. On May 18, Russell suffered a massive heart attack and remained in the hospital until June 20. He told his daughter that he thought someone “switched pills on me,” causing the heart attack. Russell suffered a fatal heart attack on July 2, 1973 and was buried the next day. Reporter Bob Woodward knew about Russell but concluded he was just an “old drunk.”
Bernard Fensterwald was Russell and Mc Cord’s lawyer. He also helped some of the minor figures in the Watergate scandal. This Harvard-educated lawyer defended some of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s victims. Fensterwald was a close student of the Kennedy assassination and later worked with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. He served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator Estes Kefauver and worled for the State Department and Senator Thomas C. Hennings. At one point, he would represent James Earl Ray. In 1979, he represented the family of John Arthur Paisley, a former C.I.A. official .
There are still many questions about the role of John Dean. Some say he may have leaked information about the Townhouse Plan in 1970. It involved a secret campaign financing program operating out of the basement of a townhouse. It was intended to route money to some candidates without the knowledge of the Republican National Committee. Lawyer Jack Gleason was also to make small ( $,000) cash deliveries to candidates and say the money was from “Pat and Dick.” This appeared to be an effort to set these people up for blackmail, as it was unlikely they all would report the payments as campaign contributions. There is no evidence that Nixon had any part in that aspect of the operation. When Dean was given the files on Townhouse, leaks began about it. Critics of Dean also note that he was more interested in prosecuting the plumbers for the break-in at Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office. Dean was behind the Watergate break-in, master-minded the cover-up, and was the first to raise the subject of bribing Hunt and the Cubans. Dean believed that he would become a power in the White House by coordinating all political intelligence. After he had cemented a light prison sentence, he admitted that he had destroyed E. Howard Hunt’s diaries, which had contained detailed accounts of how Gemstone, the Watergate operation, had been planned and executed. With Magruder, he developed an inaccurate sequence of events, and he consistgently placed the blame on John Mitchell, often by saying he was acting in Mitchell’s name.
After he turned on Nixon, he was asked why he did not warn Nixon about the full extent of the cover-up. His answer was that he had been denied access to Nixon simply does not hold up when one reads the White House transcripts. Mitchell made a fatal error in not going early to Nixon with what he knew. He knew Nixon had a paranoic cast of mind and thought things could be resolved without the president. Later, Nixon had been convinced that his old friend and law partner was at the heart of the problems.
Writer Jim Hougan thought Russell was helping McCord sabotage the break-in. Soon after the break-in, Russell was contacted by his old friend Bellino, then working for Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate Administrative Practices Committee. Russell went to stay with Bellino’s friend William Birley on the top floor of the Twin Towers Complex in Silver Spring, Maryland. Eventually, Birley put Lou in a safe house, and one of the prostitutes moved in with Russell. Republican staffers on the Erwin Committed learned of Russell’s involvement with the bordello and thought that investigasting him might help them clear Nixon. On May 9, 1973, the Committee subpoenaed Russell’s bank and telephone records. They learned Russell never had a bank account. The only long distance calls were made to his daughter, and he kept no job diaries. On May 18, Russell suffered a massive heart attack and remained in the hospital until June 20. He told his daughter that he thought someone “switched pills on me,” causing the heart attack. Russell suffered a fatal heart attack on July 2, 1973 and was buried the next day. Reporter Bob Woodward knew about Russell but concluded he was just an “old drunk.”
Bernard Fensterwald was Russell and Mc Cord’s lawyer. He also helped some of the minor figures in the Watergate scandal. This Harvard-educated lawyer defended some of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s victims. Fensterwald was a close student of the Kennedy assassination and later worked with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. He served as a foreign policy advisor to Senator Estes Kefauver and worled for the State Department and Senator Thomas C. Hennings. At one point, he would represent James Earl Ray. In 1979, he represented the family of John Arthur Paisley, a former C.I.A. official .
There are still many questions about the role of John Dean. Some say he may have leaked information about the Townhouse Plan in 1970. It involved a secret campaign financing program operating out of the basement of a townhouse. It was intended to route money to some candidates without the knowledge of the Republican National Committee. Lawyer Jack Gleason was also to make small ( $,000) cash deliveries to candidates and say the money was from “Pat and Dick.” This appeared to be an effort to set these people up for blackmail, as it was unlikely they all would report the payments as campaign contributions. There is no evidence that Nixon had any part in that aspect of the operation. When Dean was given the files on Townhouse, leaks began about it. Critics of Dean also note that he was more interested in prosecuting the plumbers for the break-in at Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office. Dean was behind the Watergate break-in, master-minded the cover-up, and was the first to raise the subject of bribing Hunt and the Cubans. Dean believed that he would become a power in the White House by coordinating all political intelligence. After he had cemented a light prison sentence, he admitted that he had destroyed E. Howard Hunt’s diaries, which had contained detailed accounts of how Gemstone, the Watergate operation, had been planned and executed. With Magruder, he developed an inaccurate sequence of events, and he consistgently placed the blame on John Mitchell, often by saying he was acting in Mitchell’s name.
After he turned on Nixon, he was asked why he did not warn Nixon about the full extent of the cover-up. His answer was that he had been denied access to Nixon simply does not hold up when one reads the White House transcripts. Mitchell made a fatal error in not going early to Nixon with what he knew. He knew Nixon had a paranoic cast of mind and thought things could be resolved without the president. Later, Nixon had been convinced that his old friend and law partner was at the heart of the problems.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Watergate: Part Two
Robert T. Crowley, a longtime top C.I.A. covert action planner, thought that Hunt had convinced Nixon that George Mc Govern was getting money and information from the Cuban government. This he thought set off Nixon. Hunt later was required to fall on his sword by going to prison, but he did not go easily. Crowley said the C.I.A. was behind the plane crash that killed Hunt’s wife at Chicago Midway. This convinced Hunt to take the fall. Of Nixon, Crowley said:
We could read Tricky Dick like a dime novel. True to form, he believed he was an imperial figure and acted that way right up to the end. Hunt played his part and I’m sure you watched the thing unfold, right on the five o’clock news every night. For a smart man, Nixon was very stupid and played right into our hands.
Some claim White House Counsel John Dean ordered the second break-in because he believed that the Democrats had records on a call girl ring was operating out Columbia Plaza Apartments because he wanted to obtain certain documents that could damage the reputation of a friend connected to the ring. Phillip Bailley, a young lawyer accused of having a role in the operation of the service, claimed the Democratic party was arranging sexual liasons for politicians. Bailley represented many prostitutes and seemed to have a business relationship with Heidi Rikan, aka “Erika” or “Cathy” Dieter, who ran the call girl ring as well as Columbia Plaza. She had previously been a stripper at the Blue Mirror. The service eventually had many Democrat clients and serviced one astronaut, South Korean and US intelligence people, and a Saudi prince, who came from the nearby Saudi Arabian embassy.
Alfred C. Baldwin, who was to work for James McCord during the Watergate break-in, seems to have been tape recording the call girl ring’s telephones. He was using equipment puirchased by one Louis James Russell, who initially used McCord funds to buy equipment to spy on columnist Jack Anderson. He had once worked as a stringer for Anderson. Russell hung out at Columbia Plaza, acting as a customer, bouncer, and friend to the girls, who often crashed at his apartment and shared sad stories with him. Russell had been bounced out of the F.B.I. due to drunking problems and spent years as an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee. For a time, he was a watchman for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. After the scandal broke, he went on the payroll of Security Associates, a detective agency owned by McCord. In that capacity, he did some work in George McGovern’s headquarters. Russell also worked for another firm that was doing some work for George H.W. Bush. He was a good friend of man who would later head of Senator Sam Erwin’s investigative staff, Carmione Bellino.
Cathy/Heidi’s roommate was Mo Biner, known by t he codename “Clout.” We do not know what role “Clout” played, but her name and code name turned up in Bailley’s address book along with the names of Heidi’s employees. Mo Biner was dating John Wesley Dean at the time. In 1972, Bailley visited the DNC headquarters and succeeded in soliciting some business for the prostitution ring. The arrangement was attractive to the DNC because the Watergate was not far from Columbia Plaza. Bailley, an active Democrat, thought communications between the DNC and the prostitution operation were made on Oliver’s telephone line. Oliver travelled frequently, so so his office could be used for private telephone conversations. Bailley later claimed that Maxine Wells showed photographs of female sex workers to people who were interested in entertainment. In a 1996 deposition, Robert Strauss said he had been told that some state party chairmen used Oliver’s phone to make dates. After the DNC started using the Columbia Plaza bordello, former F.B.I. agent told lawyer Bernard Fensterwald and two of his employees that he was recording conversations between Democrats and the girls; he added that the ladies did not mind. Russell sometimes worked for Fensterwald, who also served as his attorney. Republicans, including White House people, also frequented the brothel near the DNC.
Sometime near when Bailley was making visits to the DNC, John W. Dean became interested in the layout of those offices and sent Tony Ulasewicz to visit the offices and diagram the layout. This was probably a few months before Bailley began his visits. There are three different dates for the Ulasewicz visits, but late 1971 is probably most accurate. Dean wanted to get information on Democratic sexual activities, and must have suspected the Democrats were using services other than those provided by Heidi.
On April 6, 1972, Bailley was arrested for a a Mann Act violation, but it had no connection to Heidi’s ring. The case was given to prosecutor John Rudy, who was soon visited by Louis James Russell, who tried to steer Rudy away from the Columbia Plaza operation and toward another brothel frequented by judges and local politicians. The problem involved in the Bailley case was that the F.B.I. obtained his two address books. At the apartment they obtained films, photographs, a whip, and other sexual apparatus. The Washington Star erventually ran a story stating that Bailley was involved in a sex ring that could involve a White House lawyer and that that ring’s activities were not mentioned in Bailley’s indictment. Dean acted quickly and summoned Rudy and his superior to his office on Friday, June 9, 1972. Dean demanded to keep the notebooks over the weekend, but the prosecutors only permitted him to photocopy them. On Monday, Jeb Magruder told G. Gordon Liddy to break in to the DNC for the second time to repair the O’Brien bug. Recently, Magruder, now a clergyman, admitted that Dean – not Mitchell—had ordered the break-in.
Bailley’s case went to Judge Charles R. Richey, a Nixon appointee, who sent Bailley to St. Eliozabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital, where he spent 15 days and only receivecd 45 minutes with an analyst. He was committed on the basis of sexual photographs the prosecution showed Richey.
In Bailley’s second hearing, The Judge then instructed both sides to dispose of the case. Bailley, now completely demoralized, accepted a plea bargain that resulted in getting him 5 years in federal prison. He was now thoroughly disgraced. For some reason, the paperwork on his two hearings was sealed and subsequently lost. By settling the case without a hearing, the judge made it impossible to bring up the material on the sex ring. But all of this took some time, and it was not certain how much evidence needed to be buried.
The second break-in occurred on the night of June 16-17, two days after Dean talked to the prosecutors. It was ostensibly being done to change the bugs placed on Larry O’Brien’s telephones. However, hust before that, AT&T had swept the offices and found no bugs. James McCord, on the pretext of delivering a typewriter, stuffed and taped a lock on door accessing the building. The team knew that the tape had been found and removed, but Gordon Liddy thought it was still safe to go ahead with the operation. He reasoned that a maintenance man might have removed the stuffing and simply gone home. After all, there were no police on the scene. This time Gonzales probably taped the door again and the operation went ahead at 1:30 AM. It was McCord’s job to remove the tape once they were in, but he did not do so.
Subsequently, James McCord and five Cubans were arrested in the DNC headquarters. Also arrested were Liddy and Hunt, who were monitoring what the break-in at a distance. The F.B.I. arrested Alfred E. Baldwin at his listening post. Baldwin was supposed to be listening to DNC phone calls for about twenty days. He recorded nothing, but supposedly took some notes. Some now think there were no bugs in the DNC. If that was the case, it is likely he was only listening to phone calls and bugs in the bordello down the street from the DNC.
We could read Tricky Dick like a dime novel. True to form, he believed he was an imperial figure and acted that way right up to the end. Hunt played his part and I’m sure you watched the thing unfold, right on the five o’clock news every night. For a smart man, Nixon was very stupid and played right into our hands.
Some claim White House Counsel John Dean ordered the second break-in because he believed that the Democrats had records on a call girl ring was operating out Columbia Plaza Apartments because he wanted to obtain certain documents that could damage the reputation of a friend connected to the ring. Phillip Bailley, a young lawyer accused of having a role in the operation of the service, claimed the Democratic party was arranging sexual liasons for politicians. Bailley represented many prostitutes and seemed to have a business relationship with Heidi Rikan, aka “Erika” or “Cathy” Dieter, who ran the call girl ring as well as Columbia Plaza. She had previously been a stripper at the Blue Mirror. The service eventually had many Democrat clients and serviced one astronaut, South Korean and US intelligence people, and a Saudi prince, who came from the nearby Saudi Arabian embassy.
Alfred C. Baldwin, who was to work for James McCord during the Watergate break-in, seems to have been tape recording the call girl ring’s telephones. He was using equipment puirchased by one Louis James Russell, who initially used McCord funds to buy equipment to spy on columnist Jack Anderson. He had once worked as a stringer for Anderson. Russell hung out at Columbia Plaza, acting as a customer, bouncer, and friend to the girls, who often crashed at his apartment and shared sad stories with him. Russell had been bounced out of the F.B.I. due to drunking problems and spent years as an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee. For a time, he was a watchman for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. After the scandal broke, he went on the payroll of Security Associates, a detective agency owned by McCord. In that capacity, he did some work in George McGovern’s headquarters. Russell also worked for another firm that was doing some work for George H.W. Bush. He was a good friend of man who would later head of Senator Sam Erwin’s investigative staff, Carmione Bellino.
Cathy/Heidi’s roommate was Mo Biner, known by t he codename “Clout.” We do not know what role “Clout” played, but her name and code name turned up in Bailley’s address book along with the names of Heidi’s employees. Mo Biner was dating John Wesley Dean at the time. In 1972, Bailley visited the DNC headquarters and succeeded in soliciting some business for the prostitution ring. The arrangement was attractive to the DNC because the Watergate was not far from Columbia Plaza. Bailley, an active Democrat, thought communications between the DNC and the prostitution operation were made on Oliver’s telephone line. Oliver travelled frequently, so so his office could be used for private telephone conversations. Bailley later claimed that Maxine Wells showed photographs of female sex workers to people who were interested in entertainment. In a 1996 deposition, Robert Strauss said he had been told that some state party chairmen used Oliver’s phone to make dates. After the DNC started using the Columbia Plaza bordello, former F.B.I. agent told lawyer Bernard Fensterwald and two of his employees that he was recording conversations between Democrats and the girls; he added that the ladies did not mind. Russell sometimes worked for Fensterwald, who also served as his attorney. Republicans, including White House people, also frequented the brothel near the DNC.
Sometime near when Bailley was making visits to the DNC, John W. Dean became interested in the layout of those offices and sent Tony Ulasewicz to visit the offices and diagram the layout. This was probably a few months before Bailley began his visits. There are three different dates for the Ulasewicz visits, but late 1971 is probably most accurate. Dean wanted to get information on Democratic sexual activities, and must have suspected the Democrats were using services other than those provided by Heidi.
On April 6, 1972, Bailley was arrested for a a Mann Act violation, but it had no connection to Heidi’s ring. The case was given to prosecutor John Rudy, who was soon visited by Louis James Russell, who tried to steer Rudy away from the Columbia Plaza operation and toward another brothel frequented by judges and local politicians. The problem involved in the Bailley case was that the F.B.I. obtained his two address books. At the apartment they obtained films, photographs, a whip, and other sexual apparatus. The Washington Star erventually ran a story stating that Bailley was involved in a sex ring that could involve a White House lawyer and that that ring’s activities were not mentioned in Bailley’s indictment. Dean acted quickly and summoned Rudy and his superior to his office on Friday, June 9, 1972. Dean demanded to keep the notebooks over the weekend, but the prosecutors only permitted him to photocopy them. On Monday, Jeb Magruder told G. Gordon Liddy to break in to the DNC for the second time to repair the O’Brien bug. Recently, Magruder, now a clergyman, admitted that Dean – not Mitchell—had ordered the break-in.
Bailley’s case went to Judge Charles R. Richey, a Nixon appointee, who sent Bailley to St. Eliozabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital, where he spent 15 days and only receivecd 45 minutes with an analyst. He was committed on the basis of sexual photographs the prosecution showed Richey.
In Bailley’s second hearing, The Judge then instructed both sides to dispose of the case. Bailley, now completely demoralized, accepted a plea bargain that resulted in getting him 5 years in federal prison. He was now thoroughly disgraced. For some reason, the paperwork on his two hearings was sealed and subsequently lost. By settling the case without a hearing, the judge made it impossible to bring up the material on the sex ring. But all of this took some time, and it was not certain how much evidence needed to be buried.
The second break-in occurred on the night of June 16-17, two days after Dean talked to the prosecutors. It was ostensibly being done to change the bugs placed on Larry O’Brien’s telephones. However, hust before that, AT&T had swept the offices and found no bugs. James McCord, on the pretext of delivering a typewriter, stuffed and taped a lock on door accessing the building. The team knew that the tape had been found and removed, but Gordon Liddy thought it was still safe to go ahead with the operation. He reasoned that a maintenance man might have removed the stuffing and simply gone home. After all, there were no police on the scene. This time Gonzales probably taped the door again and the operation went ahead at 1:30 AM. It was McCord’s job to remove the tape once they were in, but he did not do so.
Subsequently, James McCord and five Cubans were arrested in the DNC headquarters. Also arrested were Liddy and Hunt, who were monitoring what the break-in at a distance. The F.B.I. arrested Alfred E. Baldwin at his listening post. Baldwin was supposed to be listening to DNC phone calls for about twenty days. He recorded nothing, but supposedly took some notes. Some now think there were no bugs in the DNC. If that was the case, it is likely he was only listening to phone calls and bugs in the bordello down the street from the DNC.
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