American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (11 page)

That's a terrible thing to realize. The things I'm learning about, I come home at night and wonder, why do I need to know this? I was better off being ignorant. Meeting with a man who considers himself a “Manchurian Candidate”—what we talked about scares you, whether you believe it or not. It scared me. And I don't scare easily.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

—George Orwell

At this point in my life, I guess the word “astounding” should not be used, because I've been astounded by so many other things. But it was astounding to realize that Richard Nixon could actually have been set up by some of the Watergate burglars, whose loyalty was really to the CIA. When you look at some of the data, you realize this possibility exists. Watergate was an attempt to get him
out
of the White House, because he was going where other powerful people didn't want him to tread.
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The official history, of course, is that the break-in on the night of June 17, 1972, into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, was simply the latest in a long line of “dirty tricks” authorized by President Nixon. It just happened to be the time that his henchmen got caught. Ultimately, Watergate came to refer to the many illicit activities and the cover-up that led to Nixon's resignation in August 1974. That's the basic storyline of Woodward and Bernstein in
All the President's Men
, and most other accounts. Nixon was the bad-guy who got carried away with his thirst for power, and that's that. But maybe it's as Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy once said: “The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.”
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Let's start with the fact that Nixon had been haunted by the specter of the Kennedys ever since losing the election to JFK in 1960. He even happened to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, for a Pepsi-Cola Bottler's Convention! If Robert Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, he'd have been the likely Democratic contender against Nixon in 1968, and quite likely Nixon would have lost. So what if, after his election, his obsession resulted in the beginning of a carefully orchestrated plan to get rid of Nixon?

What if it all tracked back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy almost a decade earlier? What if the Watergate backstory is really about what Nixon knew, or wanted to know, about who killed JFK?

Maybe Nixon was determined to find out what the CIA possessed about the assassination, out of curiosity and for his own purposes. He could then use that knowledge against the powerful Agency, if he had to. Or maybe Nixon himself knew something about the assassination, and was paranoid that the CIA might have the same secret knowledge. This knowledge could lead back to him, or people he knew. I'm not sure which it was, but I'll bet it was one or the other. And the CIA was determined to stop his quest.

Let's start with a story that H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, related in his memoirs. Soon after taking office in 1969, the president called him into the Oval Office and officially asked Haldeman to get hold of any and all documents from the CIA that pertained to the Bay of Pigs. This was the first of many occasions that Nixon referred to that historical event, when the CIA sent an invasion force of Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro in April 1961. This plan had been in the works before JFK took office and, when it failed, Kennedy threatened to “scatter the CIA to the four winds.” Now that Nixon was president, why should he desire to learn everything he could about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as he put it during one of his taped Oval Office conversations. Haldeman makes the startling assertion in his book that “in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”
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Around the middle of '69, Haldeman remembers Nixon domestic adviser John Ehrlichman dropping by to talk about Nixon's demand for CIA records. “Those bastards in Langley are holding back something,” Ehrlichman said. “They just dig in their heels and say the President can't have it. Period. Imagine that! The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document relating to a military operation, and the spooks say he can't have it.... From the way they're protecting it, it must be pure dynamite.”
⁴
At that same time, CIA Director Richard Helms—who'd been in charge of clandestine ops when JFK was in power—was on his way over to the White House. Ehrlichman believed that “the president is going to give him [Helms] a direct order.”

But after a long private conversation between Helms and Nixon, Ehrlichman said the president instructed him “to forget all about that CIA document. In fact, I am to cease and desist from trying to obtain it.”
⁵

That little story is a volume-getter to me. First, it makes me wonder how much stonewalling takes place at the highest levels of government by subordinates? The CIA is supposedly the president's intelligence-gathering arm and answerable to him. What's gone wrong with our country when his guys are now keeping information from the boss? What gives them the right to make that kind of command decision? I can understand, in certain instances, giving the boss plausible denial if you're doing something underhanded. But by the same token, people are going to question who's actually running the show.

During these same early months of Nixon's presidency, the Howard Hughes empire was imploding in Las Vegas. Hughes had gotten billions in secret contracts from the CIA over the years, and let his Medical Institute serve as one of their front companies. Hughes also gave Nixon, among other politicians, plenty of under-the-table funds. At the end of 1970, suddenly Hughes disappears. His top aide, Robert Maheu, thinks the billionaire has been kidnapped. Maheu gets forced off the Hughes Tool Company board, and he stashes a bunch of documents and tapes in the safe of his pal Hank Greenspun, the editor of the
Las Vegas Sun
.

What might have been in those documents and tapes? One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, later said he'd been part of a plot to steal some stuff from Greenspun's safe. When the Senate Watergate Committee demanded that Greenspun show them those documents, the publisher got a court order to stop it. We still don't know what they contained, but one clue emerged in a column by Jack Anderson early in 1971 that tracked right back to the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
⁶

“Locked in the darkest recesses of the CIA is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba's Fidel Castro,” the article began. It went on to detail how Hughes's man Maheu had teamed up with mobster Johnny Rosselli to work with the CIA on a “hush-hush murder mission.” Anderson speculated that, after the CIA-Mob plots supposedly stopped in the spring of 1963, Castro had sought revenge on JFK. This was the first time any details such as these had hit the news.

Hughes had brought Rosselli into his own organization when he moved into the Mob's Las Vegas territory. Rosselli was tight with Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante Jr., a couple of the gangsters who have since been linked to JFK's assassination. And a friend of Rosselli's, Jimmy Starr, later told the mobster's biographers: “What I heard about the Kennedy assassination was that Johnny was the guy who got the team together to do the hit.” We know today that certain people in the CIA wanted to pin the blame for JFK's murder on Castro, to take the heat off themselves. We also know today that Nixon, while he was Vice President under Eisenhower, was the liaison to the CIA in the first assassination attempt against Castro. But that secret, like the others, was still way below the radar when Nixon was in office.

So, on the very day that column by Jack Anderson came out, Haldeman asked John Dean (the White House counsel) to make an inquiry into the relationship between Maheu, Hughes, and a guy named Lawrence O'Brien. Remember that name? It was O'Brien's office that the burglars broke into at the Watergate. At the time, he headed the Democratic National Committee, so people presumed Nixon's team were looking for dirt on the dems. But O'Brien was not only a former staff assistant to the Kennedy brothers, but also an old friend of Robert Maheu's. Two weeks after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Maheu had arranged for O'Brien to hire on as a consultant to the Hughes organization. Then when Hughes vanished and Maheu got purged, O'Brien went with him. As a White House aide wrote to John Dean on February 1, 1971: “Mayhew's [sic] controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggest the possibility that forced embarrassment of O'Brien ... might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.”
⁷
What kind of skeletons? Could the interest in O'Brien, all the way to the Watergate break-in, have concerned what he might know about Maheu, Rosselli, and the intrigue around “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”?

In February 1971 came another Jack Anderson column about Rosselli.
⁸
The story was sketchy, but tantalizing. It said: “Confidential FBI files identify him as ‘a top Mafia figure' who watched over ‘the concealed interests in Las Vegas casinos of the Chicago underworld.'” Also that he'd been recruited by Maheu and “had handled undercover assignments for the CIA.” The story concluded: “Rosselli's lawyers are now trying to get clemency for their client, citing our stories about his secret CIA service.”

Sure looks like
somebody
was putting out a message through Anderson, doesn't it. Rosselli was facing time, and hinting he might squawk if he got convicted. So what happens next? Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, phoned Maheu, who caught the next flight to D.C. and told Mitchell everything he knew about the CIA-Mob plots. Mitchell was “shaking” by the time Maheu ended his story, and after that helped Maheu avoid a grand jury.
⁹

What happens to Anderson after he does these stories? He's targeted by Nixon's infamous Plumbers Unit, the guys who liked to “plug leaks” by breaking into various places. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt Jr. later admitted during the Watergate hearings that they met with a CIA operative in 1972 to talk about slipping the columnist LSD, or putting poison in his aspirin bottle, or concocting a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the Watergate break-in occurred.

Howard Hunt had supposedly retired from the CIA in April 1970, but he'd immediately landed a job with a CIA front outfit called the Mullen Company. They'd been instrumental in setting up the CIA's “Cuban Freedom Committee” that helped disseminate the Castro-did-it rumors after the Kennedy assassination. Their cover specialty was PR, and now they were representing the Hughes Tool Company. “I am sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes' affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend,” Nixon's hatchet man, Charles Colson, wrote in a memo.

On the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs in 1971, Hunt flew to Miami and got back in touch with two Cuban exiles he'd worked with during the anti-Castro battles of the early Sixties. The exiles knew Hunt as “Eduardo.” Their names were Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez. Hunt took them along when he did a little “private investigation” visiting a woman who “claimed to have been in the Castro household with one of Fidel's sisters at the time that John Kennedy was assassinated.” The woman said the “reaction was one of moroseness because he [JFK] was dead.”
¹⁰
That may not have been what Hunt wanted to hear, but he said he sent reports to both the CIA and to the White House, although each denied ever getting such. Hunt said that, after he went to work as a White House “consultant” in June 1971 (he also kept his job with the Mullen Company), he kept a copy of his report in his safe there, only to see it destroyed after the Watergate break-in by the FBI. So, I guess we'll never know what was really in it. Meantime, Hunt became chief operative of the Plumbers. As John Ehrlichman later described it, “The Unit as originally conceived was to stimulate the various departments and agencies to do a better job of controlling leaks and the theft or other exposure of national security secrets from within their departments.” National security secrets like who killed JFK, maybe?

Early that same summer of '71, columnist Anderson met with Bernard Barker and another of Hunt's recruits, Frank Sturgis, in Miami. Anderson and Sturgis went back to 1960, when they “collaborated on magazine articles about plans to overthrow Fidel Castro.” Sturgis also knew a lot of secrets, including the CIA's formation of an assassination squad of Cuban exiles called Operation 40, just before the Bay of Pigs. After the Kennedy assassination, Sturgis had played a key role in spreading the rumors that Castro was behind it. Now Anderson was told the old crew was “back in business” with the legendary “Eduardo,” E. Howard Hunt. But for whatever reason, the columnist wrote nothing about it.

Things were happening thick and fast. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media, secret policy documents about the Vietnam War build-up, and Nixon went ballistic. That's what first spawned the Plumbers, who mounted a covert “op” to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, with assistance from the CIA's Office of Security. Except, it wasn't only the Pentagon Papers that worried the CIA. “Their concern—indeed what seems to have been their panic,” focused around Ellsberg's friendship with Frances FitzGerald, “the talented author of
Fire in the Lake
[who] was the daughter of the late Desmond FitzGerald, a former deputy director of the CIA. ... The CIA saw his liberal daughter's friendship with Ellsberg as a threat, and worried that it might lead to the exposure of operations that the CIA hoped would remain state secrets.”
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