Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (78 page)

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General Alexander Haig, military aid to Henry Kissinger and later Nixon’s chief of staff.
Haig has strongly denied that he was Deep Throat, particularly during his unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Uncharacteristically, Woodward confirmed that Haig was not Deep Throat. Denials aside, Haig remains, in the opinion of many, a leading contender because of his access to White House secrets.

•
Leonard Garment, special counsel to Richard Nixon.
Garment was known to be friendly with the press, and before joining the Nixon team he had been a liberal Democrat. Garment not only denies he was Deep Throat, but in a recent book,
In Search of Deep Throat
, he names his pick—John Sears.

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John Sears, deputy counsel to President Nixon.
Leonard Garment says he favors Sears because he fits the partial description Woodward has given of Deep Throat as being a cigarette-smoking Scotch drinker who was fascinated by the rumors and scheming of the Nixon White House. Sears claims he didn’t know Woodward until after Watergate and has threatened to sue Garment.

•
L. Patrick Gray, FBI Director.
Gray has been cited as a prime suspect because of his access to information about both the FBI and the White House. A 1992 CBS documentary said Gray was in Washington on all the dates Woodward gives for his clandestine meetings with the informant. Gray lived just four blocks from Woodward in a building with an underground parking garage. He was an early morning jogger and could have easily marked Wood-ward’s copy of the
New York Times
and seen the flower pot with the red flag on Woodward’s balcony.

The Greek temple of Aphrodite, goddess of love, was discovered by archeologist Iris Love.

Gray reportedly became disillusioned with the Nixon White House as the Watergate scandal unfolded. In spite of being a Nixon appointee, Gray provided testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that was instrumental in pointing to White House involvement in the break-in.

•
Mark Felt, FBI Deputy Associate Director.
In July 1999, the
Hartford Courant
ran a story that quoted a 19-year-old named Chase Culeman-Beckman, who claimed that Carl Bernstein’s son Jacob had told him at summer camp in 1988 that Felt was Deep Throat. Bernstein says he and Woodward never told their family members Deep Throat’s identity.

Agents in the FBI also thought Felt was Deep Throat, according to former
Washington Post
investigative reporter Ronald Kessler in a recent book,
The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI
. Felt clearly had reason to try to influence the course of the investigation. He had protested White House interference and may have resented not being appointed FBI director after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. But in a 1979 book,
The FBI Pyramid: Inside the FBI
, he denied that he had ever leaked information to Woodward.

STILL A MYSTERY

In spite of the long list of suspects, we may never know Deep Throat’s identity. Many believe Deep Throat was a composite of several sources, or a fabrication. Bob Woodward insists that Deep Throat was real, and just one person. After Deep Throat dies, Woodward says, he will be released from his promise of secrecy and will reveal all. Will he? Perhaps...but one of the lessons of Watergate is that truth sometimes falls victim to other motives.

“The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody’s out to get you. Nobody cares whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?”

—Dennis Miller

Eyelashes are typically the darkest hairs on the body.

Years ago, Uncle John owned a toy store. One day a customer tried to pay him with a photocopy of a $20 bill. Did Uncle John fall for it? Well, let’s just say he doesn’t think these stories are funny
.

T
RUST ME—IT’S REAL MONEY

In 2004, 35-year-old Alice Pike tried to pay for $1,671.55 worth of merchandise at a Covington, Georgia, Wal-Mart with a $1 million bill. The clerk sensibly refused it ($1 million bills don’t exist). Unfazed, Pike offered to pay with a Wal-Mart gift card worth $2.32...
plus
the $1 million bill. The clerk then pretended to take it, and while Pike was waiting for her $998,331.17 change, Wal-Mart called the cops. When they arrested her on forgery charges, they found two more $1 million bills on her.

TRUST ME—IT’S REAL MONEY. REALLY.

Police in Saitama, Japan, discovered more than 400 phony 1,000-yen bills in vending machines, but they don’t know who made them—or why. Real 1,000-yen bills have three colored strips. On the fake bills, one strip is a photocopy, but the other two are real, lifted from real currency. In other words, the counterfeiter cut up real 1,000-yen bills to make fake ones. Police can’t figure out why someone would make counterfeit money that cost more to produce than it was worth.

TRUST ME—IT’S REALLY REAL MONEY. REALLY.

During World War II, the German government recruited prisoners with experience in typography, printing, and forgery for a special assignment: to make counterfeit British money. The Nazis planned to flood the world market with it, hoping to devalue the pound and cripple the British economy. They made £134 million ($377 million) in phony £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes and then dropped them over London. But they didn’t count on one thing: the honesty of the Brits. Most people picked the cash up off the street...and turned it over to the police. The Bank of England quickly changed the design of its bills, and an economic crisis was averted. (All’s fair: At the same time, the United States and England were counterfeiting German currency.)

Most commonly used languages on the Internet: English, Japanese, and Spanish.

Uncle John may never see...a thing as splendid as a tree—except for this article full of tree facts
.

•
In 2002 Luis H. Carrasco of Santiago, Chile, produced the world’s only five-fruited tree after grafting different species onto a single tree. The fruits: apricots, cherries, nectarines, plums, and peaches.

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In memory of his wife Rachel, President Andrew Jackson planted a sapling on the White House lawn, grown from a seed from her favorite magnolia tree. Look on the back of an old $20 bill: It’s the tree covering the left side of the White House.

•
The slowest-growing tree in the world: a white cedar in the Canadian Great Lakes region. It grew to a height of four inches and weighed only 17 grams (0.6 oz.) after 155 years.

•
Studies have shown that viewing scenery of trees can speed up the recovery time of hospital patients, reduce stress levels in the workplace, and increase employee productivity.

•
More than a million acres of land worldwide (and 100,000 people) are used for growing Christmas trees.

•
Native to Malaysia, the cauliflorous jackfruit yields the largest fruit grown on a tree—almost three feet long and 75 pounds (and it’s edible).

•
In a single day a tree can transpire 100 gallons of water through its leaves, creating a cooling process equivalent to five window air conditioners running 20 hours a day.

•
The desert baobab tree can store up to 35,000 gallons of water in its trunk.

•
Have you ever come across an old pecan tree that bends down to the ground and then turns upward? The Comanche were nomadic Plains Indians who marked their campsites by bending a pecan sapling and tying it to the ground. The last known specimen died in 2003, but there may be more, undiscovered.

•
Because they constantly produce new wood to thwart decay, yew trees can live to be 4,000 years old. With such an amazing regenerative ability, scientists theorize that there is no reason for yew to die.

A large tree can have as many as 400,000 leaves.

Here’s the third and final installment of the story of the 1953 coup in Iran. (Part II is on
page 303
.)

I
F AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED...

Where was CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt when all of this was happening? When the coup fell apart, he met with General Zahedi at his hiding place north of Tehran. Comparing notes, they realized that they still might have a chance to pull it off. They still had the shah’s signed decrees firing Mossadegh and appointing Zahedi prime minister. If they could go public with the document and get the shah to broadcast an address to the country, they could paint Mossadegh as the usurper and possibly drive him from power.

Roosevelt returned to the CIA station in Tehran and arranged for Iranian newspapers to publish the details of the decree. CIA headquarters cabled Roosevelt and told him to get out of the country, but Roosevelt cabled back, telling them that he wanted to stay a little longer, because there was “a slight remaining chance of success.”

Roosevelt staged a mob drama on the streets of Tehran over the next few days. While his contacts in the Iranian military went from barracks to barracks recruiting pro-shah officers to participate in a second coup attempt, other Iranian agents worked the slums of Tehran, hiring thugs to form the nucleus of a pro-Mossadegh mob that would take to the streets on Monday, August 17, and again on Tuesday. This mob was instructed to riot—Roosevelt wanted them to smash storefronts, overturn cars, topple statues of the shah and his father, and even attack innocent bystanders. They were to do all of this, Roosevelt instructed, while shouting slogans praising Mossadegh and Communism.

ACT 1

The pro-Mossadegh mob hit the streets on Monday. As they marched through Tehran, many sincere Mossadegh supporters joined the crowd to show their support, swelling the ranks until tens of thousands of people were on the march. After two days of rioting, the American ambassador, who was in on the plot, paid a visit to Mossadegh to complain (falsely) that the protesters were targeting Americans—especially embassy staff—with violence, threats, and abuse. Mossadegh, who believed in freedom of assembly and had been inclined to let the demonstrations continue, fell for the ruse and ordered the police to start cracking down. He also issued a decree banning any further public demonstrations, and phoned his political allies and told them to keep their people home.

The name originally considered for the TV show
Friends
was
Insomnia Café
.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Iranian agents were out on the streets of Tehran passing out thousands of copies of the shah’s decrees. The CIA also planted fake stories in Iranian newspapers claiming that Mossadegh was behind the first coup, and had attempted to kick the shah off the throne and seize it for himself. This, combined with two days of rioting by supposed Mossadegh supporters, cast doubt on Mossadegh’s legitimacy and made him, in the eyes of many, a symbol of chaos.

ACT 2

On Wednesday, Roosevelt called out his second group of paid demonstrators. This time he instructed the crowd to support the shah and to behave peaceably. Instead of engaging in random violence, they were only supposed to vandalize the newspapers and offices that supported Mossadegh. The ban on public demonstrations was still in place, but because this crowd was seen as being the public’s nonviolent response to two days of rioting by an angry mob, the police did not disperse it.

Just as the first mob had, this one attracted many thousands of sincere Iranians who either supported the shah or were just outraged by the anarchy of the previous two days. Mossadegh’s supporters honored his request to stay home, so few were in the streets to support him. No one, probably not even the paid demonstrators, realized they were being manipulated by the CIA.

ACT 3

As these demonstrators were marching in Tehran, Roosevelt sent his pro-shah Army officers and troops into action. They seized the main squares and other key points in the city, including the radio station, which began announcing that Mossadegh had already been deposed and arrested, even as troops were still marching on his house to do just that.

Most successful year ever at U.S. movie theaters: 1947.

The battle at Mossadegh’s house lasted for more than nine hours, ending only when his forces ran out of ammunition and Mossadegh himself escaped over the back wall of his garden. He surrendered the next evening and was taken into custody.

FINALE

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Mossadegh spent 10 weeks in a military prison and then was hauled before a military tribunal and tried for treason. He was found guilty and served three years in prison. He lived the rest of his life under house arrest, with only family and close friends allowed to visit him. He died from throat cancer in March 1967.