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.
Showing posts with label Richard Helms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Helms. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
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.
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.
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