Enemies: A History of the FBI (52 page)

“
They will kidnap somebody. They may shoot somebody,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 21, citing “this soothsayer, Jeane Dixon” as a source of his fears. “We have got to have a plan. Suppose they kidnap Rabin, Henry, and demand that we release all blacks who are prisoners around the United States, and we didn’t and they shoot him … What the Christ do we do?” Nixon wondered. “We have got to have contingency plans for hijacking, for kidnapping, for all sorts of things.”

On September 25, Nixon issued a secret presidential directive commanding an all-out counterterrorism campaign. The result was the President’s Cabinet Committee on Terrorism—the first full-scale effort by the American government to address the threat. The full committee met once, and only once.

“Everybody at that meeting washed their hands like Pontius Pilate and said, ‘You do it, FBI,’ ” Gray recounted. Nobody else wanted to take the responsibility.

Gray told Mark Felt and Ed Miller, his intelligence chief, that “
he had decided to reauthorize surreptitious entries,” Miller said. “Well, I thought that was really good.”

The first targets of the break-ins were hit in October 1972. The Bureau raided Palestinian American groups across the United States. FBI agents
burglarized the files of an organization called the Arab Education League in Dallas, stole a membership list from the league’s office safe, identified the group’s leaders, knocked on their doors, and ran them out of the country. Gray wrote years later that the break-ins and burglaries were “clearly illegal.” But he believed that he was following the president’s orders.

FBI black-bag jobs against friends and families of twenty-six Weather Underground fugitives started later that month. Gray was appalled to learn that not one of the fugitives had been caught, despite a nationwide search that had gone on for nearly three years.

He ordered them “
hunted to exhaustion,” a submariner’s command. “No holds barred,” he wrote to Felt. At least seven of the burglaries were carried out by Squad 47, the secret unit based in the FBI’s New York office. Under the command of John Kearney, the squad had conducted at least eight hundred black-bag jobs since the 1950s.

None of the break-ins ever produced any evidence leading to the arrest of a Weather Underground fugitive. But in time they led to federal grand jury investigations against the commanders of the FBI.

“I
KNEW SOMEBODY WOULD BREAK
”

The FBI veterans Liddy and McCord had been indicted on September 15, 1972, along with the five other Watergate burglars, for the bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters. But the charges ended there. The Watergate case had hit a stone wall.

Felt and his inner circle at the FBI made a decision to fight the obstruction of justice. They had personal as well as professional motives. They acted on their instincts to dismantle the roadblocks in the path of the FBI’s investigation. They knew that the conspiracy and the cover-up had been orchestrated at the White House. They deeply resented the fact that the president had placed Pat Gray, a man they considered a political stooge, in charge of the FBI.

“
It hurt all of us deeply,” said Charles Bolz, the chief of the FBI’s accounting and fraud division. Felt was Hoover’s rightful heir. “Felt was the one that would have been the Director’s first pick. But the Director died. And Mark Felt should have moved up right there and then. And that’s what got him into the act. He was going to find out what was going on in there. And, boy, he really did.”

Felt and his allies began leaking the secrets of Watergate a few weeks before the November 1972 election. Felt became famous thirty-three years later when he confessed that he was the man known as “Deep Throat,” the FBI source who helped
The Washington Post
confirm the facts for its ground-breaking reports on the Watergate investigation. But he was not the only one.

The notes of Felt’s first documented interview with Bob Woodward of the
Post
are now public records. “
There is a way to untie the Watergate knot,” he said to Woodward on October 9, 1972. “Things got out of hand.” A political warfare operation against the president’s enemies had gone out of control. Gray knew. The attorney general/CREEP chief, John Mitchell, knew. If Mitchell knew, the president knew. And if the facts came out, they would “ruin … I mean ruin” Richard Nixon.

Felt made sure that the facts were revealed by sharing information with four trusted fellow FBI men. Bob Kunkel and Charles Bates stood with Felt at the top of the FBI’s chain of command in the Watergate investigation. Kunkel was in charge of the Washington field office and he briefed Felt daily. Bates kept the running chronology that served as the FBI’s institutional memory of the case. Dick Long and Charles Nuzum, respectively chief and lead agent in the FBI’s white-collar crime section, were masters of Watergate’s paper trail. Bates and Long told a few trusted fellow agents about what they had done, and why. The word started to spread.

“
They would meet at the end of the day and discuss what happened, what they knew, in the investigation,” said the FBI’s Paul Daly, an agent in the intelligence division. “They would make a decision, a conscious decision, to leak to the newspapers. They did that because of the White House obstructing the investigation. And they leaked it because it furnished the impetus to continue.”

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost.
The Washington Post
and
Time
magazine were the first to suggest that there were wheels within wheels in the Watergate case.
The New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
soon joined in. Not all of their stories were accurate. But the facts within them, taken together, sketched out a series of White House conspiracies to subvert the president’s political enemies with espionage and sabotage.

Richard Nixon, his re-election imminent, took note. “I knew somebody would break,” Nixon said bitterly after the first piercing stories appeared in the press. Ten days after the first big leak, he was certain about the main source.

“
We know what’s leaked and we know who leaked it,” Haldeman told the president on October 19.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON
: Is it somebody in the FBI?

H
ALDEMAN:
Yes, sir … And it’s very high up.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
Somebody next to Gray?

H
ALDEMAN:
Mark Felt.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
Now why the hell would he do that?

H
ALDEMAN:
It’s hard to figure. Then again, you can’t say anything about this, because we’ll screw up our source … Mitchell is the only one that knows this. And he feels very strongly that we should—we’d better not do anything because—

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
Do anything? Never!

H
ALDEMAN:
If we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI.

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
Sure.

H
ALDEMAN:
He has access to absolutely everything … Gray’s scared to death. We’ve got to give him a warning …

P
RESIDENT
N
IXON:
What would you do with Felt? … Christ! You know what I’d do with him? Bastard!

The president and the FBI were now engaged in an undeclared war. Attorney General Kleindienst, following orders from the White House, told Gray five times to fire Felt. The acting director could not find the will to do it. For Felt was the more powerful man. He might not have known “everything that’s to be known in the FBI,” but he and his chief investigators knew more than anyone else outside the White House. Their knowledge would give them the power to go after the president himself.

“T
REASONABLE PEOPLE
”

Gray fell seriously ill shortly after Nixon was re-elected in a landslide on November 7, 1972. He went into the hospital near his home in Stonington, Connecticut, for abdominal surgery. His doctor released him on December 3 but ordered him to rest at home until the New Year. Mark Felt ran the FBI during Gray’s two-month absence from headquarters.

Gray, still the acting director, did not know if Nixon planned to ask the Senate to confirm him, as the law required. He did not know if Nixon trusted him. He would soon have cause to wonder why he had ever trusted Nixon.

Led by John Ehrlichman, he entered the Oval Office for the second time in his life at 9:09
A.M.
on February 16, 1973. Nixon got right to the point: the Senate hearings on his nomination posed a potential confrontation over the president’s power to conduct secret intelligence operations.

“
They would probably ask you about such things as: Do you know about any other things that the Bureau’s done? Have you gotten into this domestic wiretapping?” Nixon began. “I’d say, ‘Yes, we have to do it … What do you want us to do about this? Do you want to let people get shot?’ ”

Gray’s mind went blank.

“Terrorism,” the president said. “Hijacking is another thing. And you’ve got to get into that. Some of that requires wiretapping … We must not be denied the right to use the weapon. The idea that we’re wiretapping a lot of political groups is bullshit.” Gray remained speechless.

The president immediately turned to Watergate. “Would it hurt or help for you to go up there and be mashed about that?” Nixon asked.

Gray now gathered his wits. “Mr. President, I’m the man that’s in the best position to handle that thing,” he said confidently. “I’ve consistently handled it from the outset … I think the Administration has done a hell of a fine job in going after this thing.” This was bluster, and Nixon knew it.

“You haven’t been able to do anything—or have you?—up to this point, about the leaks,” Nixon said. “The whole story, we’ve found, is coming out of the Bureau.”

“Well, I’m not completely ready to buy that, Mr. President,” Gray said.

What about Felt? Nixon asked pointedly.

“It would be very, very difficult to have Felt in that position without having that charge cleared up,” Nixon said. “This stuff didn’t leak when Hoover
was there. I’ve never known of a leak when Hoover was there. I could talk to him in this office about everything. And the reason is that—it wasn’t because they loved him, but they
feared
him. And they’ve got to
fear
the man at the top … You’ve got to play it exactly that way. You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected … I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, then the whole damn place ought to be fired.”

Nixon was now sputtering and fuming. “You’ve got to do it like they did in the war,” the president said. “In World War II, the Germans, if they went through these towns and then one of their soldiers, a sniper hit one of them, they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say until you talk you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.”

“I haven’t been,” Gray protested. “These guys know they can’t lie to me like they used to lie to Hoover.”

Nixon became imperious. “Frankly, I am referring to discipline of the highest sensitivity involving what may be political matters. Partisan political matters,” he said. “Let us suppose there’s a leak to a certain member of the press. I’ve got to have a relationship here where you go out and do something and deny on a stack of Bibles.”

“Right,” said Gray. “I understand.”

“I don’t have anybody else,” Nixon said. “I can’t hire some asshole from the outside.”

“There were times,” he said, his anger boiling over, “and, and, and, Lyndon Johnson told me this same thing—when I felt that the only person in this goddamned government who was standing with me was Edgar Hoover … He would break his ass if he saw something that was wrong being done, if somebody was pissing on us … What you’ve got to do is to
do like Hoover
.”

By Gray’s account, the president turned to Erhlichman, who nodded slightly, as if to say: go ahead. Nixon seemed to unwind, and he came back to his script.

“I think it’s going to be a bloody confirmation,” he said. “You’ve got to be prepared to take the heat and get bloodied up. But if you do go through a bloody one, let’s remember that you’re probably going to be in for just four years. And then they’re gonna throw you out. So let’s get in there and do some good for the country.”

“As you know, I would never ask the Director of the Bureau to do anything
that was wrong,” the president said. “But I am certainly going to have to ask the Director of the Bureau at times to do things that are going to protect the security of this country.”

“No problem,” Gray said.

“This country,” Nixon said, “this bureaucracy—Pat, you know this—it’s crawling with, Pat, at best, at best, unloyal people and at worst treasonable people.”

“Treasonable people,” Gray repeated, dutiful and dull.

“We have got to get them, break them,” Nixon said.

“Right,” Gray said. “I know that.”

“The way to get them is through you. See?”

“I agree. I have no problems with that.”