The Wars of Watergate (22 page)

Haldeman and Colson heard the President’s rage against leaks. John Ehrlichman also knew what the President wanted: “If we can’t get anyone in this damn government to do something about the problem that may be the most serious one we have, then, by God, we’ll do it ourselves,” Nixon said. In 1969, he ordered Ehrlichman to establish “a little group right here in the White House. Have them get off their tails and find out what’s going on and figure out how to stop it.”

And thus the President of the United States called into being the Plumbers, a group specifically created to do what J. Edgar Hoover would not do without the validation of Nixon himself. According to Harry Dent, Lyndon Johnson told Nixon to rely on Hoover to cope with enemies within; but Hoover had failed his longtime friend Nixon. Five men connected to this group would go to jail for a specific crime committed in fulfillment of the President’s wishes. One of them, Egil Krogh, later recalled being told by Ehrlichman (another of those convicted) that the President suggested he read the Hiss chapter in Nixon’s book
Six Crises.
Dutifully carrying out the assignment, Krogh concluded that the President wanted him to proceed “with a zeal comparable to that he [Nixon] exercised … in investigating Alger Hiss.” The President’s wish, he added, “fired up and overshadowed every aspect of the unit’s work.” Krogh later said that Ehrlichman repeatedly instructed him that the President considered the unit’s work “a matter of the highest national security and that I was under no circumstances to discuss it.”
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Before his eventual recantation, Krogh publicly took a benign view of his task. The
Washington Post
first revealed the existence of the Plumbers in December 1972. A month later, Egil Krogh appeared before a Senate committee
considering his nomination as Undersecretary of Transportation. The Plumbers, he said, had been organized merely to prevent unauthorized disclosures of classified information. His job consisted of developing “relationships” with other departments “to define the objectives of our work.” The senators were passive and cordial; no one asked Krogh about methods and results. Ehrlichman, who served as the link between the President and the Plumbers, testified that the unit was established “to stimulate” the various executive departments to better control leaks and to “bring to account” the various security offices in sensitive agencies and get them to do a better job.
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There is no evidence, however, that the Plumbers either attempted or accomplished such goals; instead, their tasks centered on covert activities. Working under Ehrlichman, Krogh and David Young supervised the unit’s operations, with an office in Room 16 of the basement of the Executive Office Building. Krogh, a lawyer and an Ehrlichman protégé from Seattle (he viewed Ehrlichman as a “father-figure”), had served in the White House in a variety of posts, chiefly centering on the Administration’s antidrug measures and on District of Columbia affairs. Young had served with Kissinger as a Rockefeller retainer, and the two worked together on the National Security Council before Ehrlichman peremptorily recruited Krogh for his own needs.

Besides Krogh and Young, the unit’s experienced operatives were E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who had served intermittently in the CIA and the FBI respectively. Both were right-wing ideologues who had neither political nor moral qualms over using illegal methods against those they regarded as enemies of the state. Colson thought Liddy “excellent” and Hunt “very useful.” He told Ehrlichman that Krogh had “a good investigative mechanism.”

The Plumbers’ most notorious venture involved Ehrlichman’s verbal instructions to Krogh in mid-July 1971 to determine the causes, sources, and ramifications of the Pentagon Papers leaks. (The group’s quaint name was coined when one member, David Young, told his mother-in-law that he was plugging leaks of sensitive information. She thought it was nice to have a plumber in the family.) The White House did not trust Hoover for the investigation because of his close relationship with Daniel Ellsberg’s father-in-law; Young later confirmed the White House’s belief that the “regular investigative agencies” were not completely reliable. Ehrlichman also told Krogh that the Administration would not use the CIA, because its jurisdiction was legally limited to operations abroad, and this was a domestic matter. (A somewhat exceptional adherence to scruples given the President’s entanglement of the CIA with the Huston Plan and the collection of domestic intelligence. In fact, the CIA did get involved in the Plumbers’ operations, by aiding its notorious alumnus Howard Hunt.) Krogh subsequently testified
that his group had information that Ellsberg had accomplices in leaking the Pentagon Papers and that the Soviet Embassy had a copy of the papers prior to their publication. Ellsberg thoroughly commanded the Plumbers’ attention, even to the point where their task became one of discrediting him as an antiwar spokesman rather than developing effective measures to protect national security.

Charles Colson had also been meeting with the President, Krogh, and Ehrlichman regarding Ellsberg. Colson saw Ellsberg as a target of opportunity to accomplish numerous goals. “To paint Ellsberg black is probably a good thing; to link him into a conspiracy which suggests treasonous conduct is also a good thing, but the real political payoff will come only if we establish that there is … a ‘counter government’ which is deliberately trying to undermine U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. position in the world and that it is the President who stands against this ‘counter government,’ ” Colson told Ehrlichman. Colson could not resist the opportunity to link Ellsberg to the political opposition—“the enemy camp.” Beyond that, Colson wanted to exploit the Pentagon Papers to discredit Kennedy and Johnson. He reported to Ehrlichman that Hunt was gathering “facts” regarding the “key targets,” just as he had earlier done in an attempt to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.
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Krogh meanwhile had received information that the FBI had interviewed Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. The CIA had provided its own psychological profile of Ellsberg—much to the later regret of Richard Helms, who thought it necessary at that time to appease the President—but someone in the White House group decided that there might be more to learn about Ellsberg’s behavior if Fielding’s office could be raided to secure information. Young later told investigators that if they could get more data on Ellsberg’s conduct, they could “discredit him as a nut.” After much “soul-searching,” Young joined Krogh in recommending action. Permission was granted to “engage in covert activity”—in other words, to burglarize Fielding’s office and obtain his notes on Ellsberg. Ehrlichman signed off—with the President’s knowledge, he later insisted. When Nixon and Ehrlichman had their last official meeting on May 2, 1973, the President asked if he, Ehrlichman, had known about the Fielding break-in earlier. Ehrlichman noted that he silently nodded, and Nixon replied: “If so, it made no impression.” Colson indirectly supported Ehrlichman’s claim that Nixon knew. Colson assumed, he testified, “that John Ehrlichman wouldn’t take something like that upon his own shoulders.”

In his memoirs, Nixon said he could not recall giving authorization for the Fielding break-in, but he acknowledged that “I cannot rule it out.” He added that the break-in was not as wrong or as excessive as what Ellsberg did in copying and releasing the Pentagon Papers in the first place. Krogh, for his part, denied that he had any specific instructions from the President
but acknowledged that Ehrlichman relayed the President’s wishes—drawing a distinction that is anything but distinct. Krogh met with the President and Ehrlichman on July 24, 1971, a day after the
New York Times
revealed the Administration’s “fallback” position in the pending Helsinki Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) talks. Nixon was “deeply troubled,” Krogh recalled, and demanded extensive polygraph tests throughout the government. He told Krogh that further leaks would not be allowed and made Krogh “feel personally responsible” for carrying out this assignment.
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In any event, the Fielding operation yielded nothing, leaving only destruction in the doctor’s office to cover the burglary. Liddy and Hunt wanted to raid Fielding’s apartment, but Krogh recommended against it. Ehrlichman agreed and ordered all such covert activity ended. After the incident became public in early 1973, the White House insisted repeatedly that the break-in was required by considerations of “national security.” But Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski later scoffed at the notion and demanded that the White House produce proof, not slogans. Ehrlichman desperately tried to persuade incoming Attorney General Elliot Richardson in April 1973 (as Ehrlichman himself was leaving the White House) that the President did not want Richardson to intrude into the “national-security” area. “I am confident,” Ehrlichman told Richardson, “that this will seem to be an ephemeral thing.”

David Young thought he was doing right for the President and the country, but he later feared that his action had prejudiced “national security beyond recognition.” For his part, Krogh sadly acknowledged that the Fielding break-in “represented official Government action” and “struck at the heart” of government’s responsibility to protect individual rights. In later years, after serving a jail sentence for his role in the event, Ehrlichman called this break-in the “seminal Watergate episode”; Krogh considered it far more significant than the Watergate break-in for demonstrating the Administration’s commitment to illegal activities. Before that, however, Krogh recommended Liddy for a salary increase, and in December 1971 successfully supported him for the position of Legal Counsel to the Committee to Re-elect the President.

At his trial for his part in the Fielding break-in, Ehrlichman testified that he considered the operation was an appropriate, “legal, conventional investigation”; the notion of an illegal break-in, he said, “didn’t enter my thought process.” He thought the act conventional because it was what the FBI regularly did. At the time of the break-in, however, Ehrlichman was not so distant and removed. Writing to Colson on August 27, 1971 regarding the “Hunt/Liddy Special Project #1,” Ehrlichman said: “On the assumption that the proposed undertaking by Hunt and Liddy would be carried [out] and would be successful, I would appreciate receiving from you by next Wednesday a game plan as to how and when you believe the materials should be used.” That “game plan” had nothing to do with national security;
instead, it was designed simply to discredit Daniel Ellsberg and the antiwar movement.

When Attorney General Richardson reviewed the Fielding operation in May 1973, he immediately recognized that it would be impossible to make any public distinction between it and the Watergate break-in. Both events, he realized, involved Hunt and Liddy, both were illegal, and both could be traced to the White House. He favored prompt disclosure if “the trail” led no further than Krogh and Young. Richardson had good reason for making that qualification. Charles Colson, who had consulted with the President on the project, pressed Richardson for an immediate dismissal of Ellsberg’s court case. The presiding judge had requested affidavits from Hunt and Colson, and Colson feared they “would disclose [the] White House role and RMN[’]s role.” No wonder, then, that Richardson considered the “likelihood that [the] trial would lead further.”
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The information had already been relayed to the presiding judge in Daniel Ellsberg’s criminal trial in April 1973, and the next month he declared a mistrial. The trail of “White House horrors” began to unfold. The Plumbers offered a vital link to Watergate, perhaps even a fatal one.

In one of the most shadowy episodes of the Nixon presidency, the art and practice of surveillance was turned against the Administration itself, a development that only heightened its sense of isolation and confirmed its belief in the strength of its enemies within. The episode centered on Yeoman Charles Radford’s dual role—spying on the Administration for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and allegedly leaking secrets to a journalist. The affair was uncovered in December 1971, but it remained sealed from public view until 1974.
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In December 1971, newspaper columnist Jack Anderson published language from several secret National Security Council memoranda regarding the Indo-Pakistani War and a possible American tilt toward Pakistan. Anderson subsequently received the Pulitzer Prize for his revelations. Several days later, Admiral Robert O. Welander, a Joint Chiefs liaison officer with the NSC, identified his assistant, Yeoman Radford, as the source of Anderson’s material. Welander claimed that only he and Radford had access to the same documents. Both men often accompanied Kissinger and his deputy Alexander Haig on trips abroad (Radford was in the entourage during Kissinger’s first secret trip to China) and worked near their offices in the White House. The White House ordered the FBI to tap Radford’s telephone, hoping to uncover his ties to Anderson. Instead, the wiretap disclosed that Radford had been pilfering documents from Kissinger and the NSC files and turning them over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Radford eventually confessed that he had stolen perhaps a thousand documents from NSC files and burn bags and
then delivered them to Welander, who served as middleman for Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Radford steadfastly denied he had leaked to Anderson.

The Radford revelations did not point to vague, shadowy “enemies” without—that is, the usual suspects: liberals, antiwar activists, media. Now, the enemy was within, an enemy thought to be an ally. Egil Krogh undoubtedly reflected insider thinking. He saw Radford’s revelations as “an extremely serious matter.” The
Seven Days in May
scenario of a military coup crossed his mind. “It was a question whether there was an actual move by the military into the deliberations of the duly-elected and appointed civilians to carry out foreign policy.” Ehrlichman, David Young, and others, Krogh remembered, regarded the matter “extremely seriously at the time.” Krogh also noted that the incident had never been disclosed in its entirety. One of his reasons for hesitating to reveal the Plumbers’ role when that operation was uncovered in 1973 was that he feared it would inevitably lead to the unraveling of the Moorer-Radford affair.
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