The Wars of Watergate (23 page)

Military dissatisfaction with foreign and military policies obviously had been festering throughout the Vietnam war. Moorer bitterly remembered what he regarded as foolish and soft policies toward North Vietnam. His successor as Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., came close to accusing Nixon and Kissinger of treason and Kissinger of being a Soviet sympathizer. He thought that Nixon’s foreign-policy aide was eager to make any deal with the Soviets. Zumwalt flatly accused “the President, Henry Kissinger,” and a few subordinates of deliberate deceit and concealment of policies—regarding détente, SALT, the Vietnam war, military strength levels—that were “inimical to the security of the United States.”
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Moorer later testified at public hearings in 1974 and in interviews that he had no need of Radford’s materials, claiming he regularly saw all top-secret NSC memoranda. He thought that Radford had conjured up the spying allegations as a smoke screen to divert attention from the fact that he had leaked to Anderson. He also believed that the affair fueled the White House’s “paranoia.” To be sure, someone—the President? Ehrlichman?—had ordered a Department of Defense investigation of Radford and one within the White House carried out by the Plumbers. Those reports remain buried.

The only public discussion of the Radford affair came in a desultory Senate Armed Services inquiry in 1974, artfully managed by Senator John Stennis (D-MS) to produce the least possible information. None of the principal investigators testified. Senator Stuart Symington (D-MO) wanted Ehrlichman called as a witness, but Stennis dodged on this. Defense Department Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt filed a report on the affair, but none of it was discussed. The hearing, in sum, dealt with few substantive issues, although several interesting tidbits filtered out. For example, Admiral Welander testified
that Haig had arranged his meeting with David Young, indicating Haig had knowledge of the Plumbers. (Curiously, according to Ehrlichman, Young thought Haig was behind the whole spying effort.) At one point, Ehrlichman prepared a confession for Welander to sign, but the admiral refused.

In the end, Welander was transferred to sea duty, and Radford was sent to a coastal station in Oregon. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird implemented these decisions, claiming to be following Buzhardt’s recommendations. The President certainly had an interest in the outcome of the affair. He thought it “too dangerous to prosecute Radford,” seeing the yeoman as “a potential time bomb that might be triggered by prosecution.” Nixon knew that Radford had been transferred and kept under surveillance which included the use of wiretaps. “It worked,” Nixon said; “there were no further leaks from him.” Moorer received no punishment; in fact, the next year, Nixon reappointed him to another term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. When knowledge of the Radford affair became public in 1974, some thought that Nixon had blackmailed Moorer into supporting his arms-control agreements. The reappointment, it was said, amounted to Nixon’s taming of the military. The President also was anxious to keep the Joint Chiefs from being too closely allied with Defense Secretary Laird, long an object of suspicion among Nixon’s aides.
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Curiously, Nixon in retrospect thought that Radford’s leaks to Anderson constituted the most important single element of the affair. That was also the aspect that he stressed at the time. Bizarrely, in 1975, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force considered the possibility that Colson had ordered Howard Hunt to assassinate Anderson. At the time of the Radford affair, David Young ordered a Defense Department investigator to prove that Jack Anderson had had a homosexual affair with another Nixon enemy. The investigator refused, and Young became furious. “Damn it, damn it, the president is jumping up and down and he wants everything and we’re always telling him everything can’t be done,” Young reportedly said. (Eighteen months later, that same investigator, who knew a great deal about internal spying within the Administration, demanded consideration for the position of FBI Director, raising concerns in the White House that it was being subjected to blackmail.) Nixon himself was strangely silent about the military’s role in the Radford affair.

Altogether, this lurid affair remains shrouded in mystery. Senator Symington thought it had more to do with “national embarrassment” than with national security. Its significance and links to other events tantalize. John Mitchell interviewed Moorer for the President. The admiral insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, and Mitchell believed him. In later years, however, Mitchell took a more sinister view of events. He was convinced, for example, that Moorer had deceived him and that Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, “was involved in it.” In a conversation with Ehrlichman
on December 23, 1971, the President instructed his aide: “Don’t let K[issinger] blame Haig.” Nixon emphatically wanted Kissinger kept out of the affair, and while he talked about prosecuting Radford and Welander, he apparently said nothing about reprisals against the military chiefs. Mitchell also thought that Nixon “knew a lot more about it at the time than I knew, and he decided to roll with it.” Why did the military spy on the NSC? Mitchell surmised that the Joint Chiefs were concerned about the President’s defense policies, his attempts to get Pentagon spending under control, the SALT negotiations, and the China opening which was about to take place. David Young thought the Radford affair important in understanding Watergate. Did he fear that the military, if implicated, would reveal the existence of the Plumbers? Why did the President and his aides fear that Laird would use the Radford material to gain power over the Joint Chiefs?
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A curious, shadowy business, this was. Most of the White House principals acknowledged the dismay it engendered in the Oval Office and among the President’s aides. Now, they truly were victims; again, however, the enemy remained elusive.

As Daniel Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles came to an end in March 1973, the Department of Justice disclosed that the FBI had overheard Ellsberg in telephone conversations originating in the house of Morton Halperin, then a Kissinger consultant in the National Security Council. Acting FBI director William Ruckelshaus further revealed that Halperin’s phones had been tapped between 1969 and 1971, but he confessed that the Bureau’s records of the taps had been missing since mid-1971. At that point, Judge Matthew Byrne suspended the trial. In fact surveillance had extended far beyond the Halperin tap: twelve other NSC aides plus four reporters—for CBS, for the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and the
London Sunday Times
—also had been bugged as part of an operation designed to plug leaks from the National Security Council.

On May 9, 1969, the
New York Times
exposed the “secret” bombing war in Cambodia. Nixon and Kissinger were furious. The President considered the leak to the
Times
part of the organized conspiracy to destroy his presidency. Years later, Kissinger concurred and recalled that few administrations “faced a more bitter assault on their purposes, a more systematic attempt to thwart their policies by civil disobedience, or a more widely encouraged effort to sabotage legitimate and considered policies by tendentious leaks of classified information in the middle of a war.”
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After the latest leak, Mitchell, following a request from Nixon and Kissinger, quickly authorized the FBI to carry out electronic surveillance on reporters and some NSC staffers. J. Edgar Hoover apparently voiced some concern from the outset, realizing the potentially harmful fallout if it were
revealed that the FBI had eavesdropped on newsmen. He insisted on written authorization and ordered all records kept out of regular FBI files. Meanwhile, Kissinger aide Colonel Alexander Haig served as liaison between the NSC and the FBI. Kissinger and Haig together went to FBI offices to read the wiretap logs.

Kissinger complained to Assistant FBI Director William Sullivan that he felt besieged by the leakers in the NSC. “It is clear,” he complained, seemingly without irony or guile, “that I don’t have anybody in my office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.” (Kissinger meanwhile had other aides auditing Haig’s actions.) He also said that the hard-line policy on Vietnam favored by the President and himself was being undermined by others “high in the administration.” Kissinger then added the names of several other newsmen to be wiretapped and expressed his gratitude for the FBI’s help.
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The Nixon Administration eventually found itself in a civil war, one vitally affected by the brewing War of the FBI Succession. The wiretap logs and records soon became hostage to bureaucratic ambitions. In 1971, Hoover and Mitchell disagreed over who had authorized the taps. After Justice officials threatened a congressional investigation, Hoover reportedly countered with a threat to expose the operation. Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian then secured the wiretap logs and summaries from Sullivan. Mardian met with Nixon in the President’s retreat at San Clemente, California, on July 12, 1971, and explained the problem. The President ordered him to give the logs and records to Ehrlichman for safekeeping. Mardian kept them in the Justice Department for a while, but the President’s decision was reaffirmed at a White House meeting on October 8 between Nixon, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman, and the records were delivered to Ehrlichman.

Sullivan, as he had before in the Huston Plan proceedings, had labored to cultivate his White House relationship in order to nurse his ambitions as Hoover’s successor. But Sullivan’s action in cooperating with Mardian was the final straw for Hoover, and the Director demanded and received his resignation a few weeks later. Sullivan had supported the Administration’s widening interests in using the FBI for secret political purposes; curiously, Hoover, an old hand at this sort of thing, sensed the shifting political winds and seemed to realize it was time to solidify the FBI’s public image. The President, for his part, was sad that the surveillance had been fruitless: “Unfortunately,” he lamented, “none of these wiretaps turned up any proof linking anyone in the government to a specific national security leak.” Clarence Kelley, Hoover’s successor, similarly acknowledged that the wiretaps never uncovered anyone who had leaked secrets. Unhappily for Nixon, after admitting he approved the tap on Morton Halperin, a Kissinger aide, he became the first president ordered to pay damages—a $5 award, meant to be symbolic—to a private citizen for acts committed by the Chief Executive while in office.
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In his inaugural address, Nixon had promised that the government would listen to the people. The promise had been kept, but in a very different sense.

The taps of National Security Council aides and journalists were designed to ensure the Administration’s control over the flow of news and the formation of policies. But wiretapping was also a basic tool of the plan to maintain surveillance over potentially subversive domestic elements, particularly antiwar and civil rights activists. The efforts were extensive and violated both the letter and spirit of the law.

White House surveillance proceeded on many fronts. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty encouraged the President to believe that Communists were behind the prevalent campus unrest. Nixon arranged for Yorty to meet with Attorney General Mitchell to discuss intelligence gained by Los Angeles Police Department undercover agents. Ehrlichman’s investigator, John Caulfield, proposed in early 1969 that new military inductees be used as undercover campus agents. As part of some undefined “larger game plan,” Alexander Butterfield, operating from the Oval Office, instructed Egil Krogh to have the FBI determine the precise connections between antiwar groups and the North Vietnamese and international organizations.
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The Nixon Administration had inherited an Army Intelligence operation that since 1965 had collected information on domestic civil disturbances. Using more than a thousand plainclothes officers, the Army aimed to be better informed on political conditions as preparation for riot duty. The preparedness principle acquired its own imperatives, including compiling dossiers on thousands of politically active Americans whether in antiwar, civil rights, white supremacist, black power, or liberal organizations. The Army’s agents gathered newspaper clippings, attended public meetings, and took notes and photographs. Other agents were infiltrated into groups in covert attempts to disrupt their activities. Officers inevitably assembled lists of prominent activists in a variety of movements, but the lists also included congressmen and senators. Army Intelligence fed the information into computer banks at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and then disseminated it to Army posts at home and abroad. On one level, the intelligence reports were a gossipy newsletter, but there was, of course, a more pernicious side to them.

When the Nixon Administration took office in 1969, the Army’s civilian leadership attempted to curb the intelligence program and favored transferring its duties and records to the FBI. Someone in the Pentagon had not received the proper signals from the White House, however. Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and the FBI urged the Army to continue its intelligence activities. Some intelligence officers had their doubts about the wisdom and validity of the program, but most enthusiastically supported
it. In January 1970, Army Intelligence Captain Christopher Pyle exposed the operation as part of the Nixon Administration’s widening attempt to counter domestic political dissent.
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A year later, Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigated the use of federal data banks and found itself drawn into questions about the Army’s program. Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist boldly defended the program as part of the President’s authority to use the Army to enforce the laws and suppress rebellion. The basic, broad question of the legitimacy of a government’s surveillance of its own people really was at issue between Ervin and Rehnquist. The Senator thought that such activity had a chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights. Rehnquist disagreed: “I do not believe it violates the particular constitutional rights of the individuals who are surveyed.” He conceded that there was a great deal of waste of taxpayers’ money in such projects, but he refused to raise the issue to the level of a constitutional violation. Surveillance itself was no vice, Rehnquist argued. He cited
Tatum v. Laird
, a case challenging the Army’s program, which was then pending in the Court of Appeals. Rehnquist thought that the plaintiffs had wrongly sought an injunction to prevent the executive branch from gathering intelligence. He spoke of a 1949 “Delimitation Agreement” which, he argued, gave the Army authority to act as it had. That document has not surfaced, but a 1969 agreement clearly prevented the Army from surveillance of persons other than its officers and civilian employees.
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