**New** (Larry) Big week ahead for P.J. Hall
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 24 Replies
TigerIllustrated - Big week ahead for P.J. Hall
P.J. Hall was initially considered an extreme long shot to leave for the NBA. Then last week happened.
clemson.rivals.com
Interesting Rumor from Amelia Island
- By PawsFan_
- The West Zone
- 3 Replies
Hopefully Larry, Paul or Cris can confirm.
I heard Clemson and FSU paid for a Jim Morrison look alike to do a one song set for the AD’s after dinner on Monday night.
8 of the ADs clapped when it was over. Video below.
I heard Clemson and FSU paid for a Jim Morrison look alike to do a one song set for the AD’s after dinner on Monday night.
8 of the ADs clapped when it was over. Video below.
**New** (Larry) Resounding message
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 71 Replies
Resounding message
Traditionally, most Clemson fans have at best tolerated the ACC. But we believe times are changing.
**New** (Paul) Tuesday Insider Notes
- By Cris_Ard
- The West Zone
- 31 Replies
TigerIllustrated - Tuesday Insider Notes
The ripple effect on Clemson's QB pursuits following Dylan Raiola-to-UGA, Clemson coaching stops and ...
clemson.rivals.com
How the Deep State Took Down Nixon
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
- 10 Replies
The deep state has been in control for a long time. It took the America First Movement led by Trump to force them to show themselves and what they can do.
April 6, 2023
PHOTO: AP
In conventional histories, Richard Nixon’s impeachment is remembered as a triumph of good government. Nixon is viewed as a corrupt politician whose unconstitutional schemes threatened the republic, while his opponents are seen as defenders of the Constitution. This narrative, written by journalists, has persisted for nearly five decades—despite the slow accumulation of evidence that tells a very different tale.
In the early 1980s, Harper’s editor Jim Hougan obtained 30,000 documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The result was Secret Agenda, one of the most important yet curiously neglected books of the late 20th century. While some of its conclusions are incorrect—Hougan didn’t believe that FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat—his factual claims have been vindicated as more and more Watergate-related documents have been released.
“Nixon had to go.”
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas. Sometime in the mid-to-late-’60s, he had become a heretical anti-Communist. While Nixon wanted the United States to remain vigilant against the spread of Communism, in a series of 1967 articles, he recognized the limits of American power and wanted to avoid conflicts that weren’t in the national interest. Rejecting Manichean assumptions in foreign policy as a recipe for escalation and war, Nixon called for stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union and China and a legitimate acknowledgement of their interests as the preconditions for hard-nosed but effective diplomacy. Moreover, he opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy. Nixon had grown skeptical of their conformism, their inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch. To that end, he planned a grand course-correction to the way the US government operated.
To assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy and enact his contrarian foreign policy, Nixon first turned his attention to the National Security Council. Like his ex-boss Dwight Eisenhower, he believed that this relatively new addition to the American regime provided the best immediately available institution for the president to direct policy. Under Eisenhower, however, Nixon had witnessed how the Dulles brothers (one as secretary of state, the other as CIA director) played an oversized role in the NSC, at the expense of the president’s own power. The issue, Nixon believed, went deeper than the force of the Dulles’ personalities. A shrewd observer of the nature of bureaucracies, Nixon believed that department heads—even the political appointees meant to serve the president—tended to get captured by their agencies, becoming advocates for their interests, rather than advocates for the policies set by the president.
The solution, Nixon thought, was to marginalize the influence of the most dangerous agencies. He reorganized the NSC around his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, personally accountable to the president. As Kissinger later observed, Nixon refused to have the NSC operate in the usual manner, as an organization that provided the president with a menu of predetermined options concocted in the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, he turned the NSC against the bureaucracy, using it “for the intelligence it supplied him about the views of a bureaucracy he distrusted and for the opportunity to camouflage his own aims.” He thus sought to preempt a repeat of Eisenhower’s presidency.
He offered State to an old friend, William Rogers, unlikely to defy him. Nixon then isolated Rogers and ordered the State Department to cease coordinating interdepartmental policy at the NSC (Kissinger took over that task). This neutered the State Department’s influence on policy. And while many were surprised to see that Nixon left Richard Helms, an LBJ appointee, in charge of the CIA, Nixon strove to limit the agency’s influence. At first he considered removing Helms’s seat at the NSC, but then settled on restricted attendance. The director would provide intelligence briefings, but then leave. For the director, it was an awkward arrangement, yet the point was to make it clear that the CIA’s role was restricted to providing information. It didn’t shape policy.
Nixon set up clandestine backchannels that bypassed the usual interdepartmental processes, allowing him to open negotiations with the upper echelons of the Soviet and Chinese governments in almost complete secrecy. Even the military was kept out of the loop. One month after taking office, Nixon was encouraging the military to believe that he favored escalation in Vietnam by arranging a secret backchannel with them, in order to authorize strategic bombing raids in Cambodia. But on another backchannel, he was letting the Kremlin know that in his negotiations, he would countenance complete US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon’s secretive strategy paid off and led to his landslide re-election in 1972. A decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he negotiated a nuclear-arms treaty with the Kremlin, so that the superpower rivals could practice diplomacy without the pressure created by runaway arms spending and massive nuclear arsenals. And while he pursued détente with the Soviets, he also sought to weaken their influence. He peeled off Soviet allies in the Middle East, bringing them closer to the American camp. He restored relations with Western Europe, at a nadir during the Vietnam era. NATO was revitalized, but not unconditionally—Nixon told the Europeans that they needed to pay more for their own defense. And most spectacularly of all for the conventional anti-Communist, he ended the Vietnam War while normalizing US relations with mainland China.
As one astute writer and critic of Nixon has put it, Nixon’s strategy was a massive gamble. It relied on deceit and outright defiance of Washington’s permanent bureaucracies. It “put Nixon in a race against powerful institutions that often bowed to no one, not even a president.”
There were early signs Nixon couldn’t keep up. By 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had grown squeamish about authorizing the same kind of surveillance operations he had approved under previous presidents and wouldn’t authorize them for Nixon. Hoover, however, continued to spy on the administration—one of Attorney General and Nixon adviser John Mitchell’s bodyguards was an FBI informer. And he created the impression that he knew more than he did. He told Nixon that the FBI had bugged his ’68 campaign plane, when it had probably just collected his telephone records.
Nixon also came to regret keeping Helms. He tried to press Helms on key policy mysteries of the 1960s: the role Kennedy played in the assassination of South Vietnam’s devoutly Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem; the origins and resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson’s October 1968 bombing halt; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Helms demurred, indicating that what the CIA did for other presidents wasn’t up for reexamination by the present one. When Helms finally presented Nixon with a dossier on the Bay of Pigs, Nixon believed it was heavily redacted. Helms guarded the CIA’s secrets, leaving Nixon helpless. This and the CIA’s repeated errors confirmed Nixon’s skepticism of the agency. When the agency failed to predict the 1970 coup in Cambodia, he asked, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?”
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president.”
The most disturbing dynamic emerged with the military. Memoranda that discussed de-escalation or troop withdrawals from Vietnam—opposed by the Joint Chiefs—had a way of appearing in The New York Times. In December 1971, the White House discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president. The full details of what was later called the Moorer-Radford Affair only emerged in October 2000, when the relevant tapes were declassified.
An aide-de-camp at the NSC, Yeoman Jack Radford, copied or took about 5,000 classified communiqués and memos from the president and his advisers and passed them on to his superiors: first Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, then Adm. Welander. Both Robinson and Welander passed them on to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Thomas Moorer. Alexander Haig, who later became Nixon’s chief of staff, might have been involved. This had been going since at least November 1970, though a different version had begun under Johnson. Wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer. But Mitchell convinced him that a public humiliation of the military would harm his foreign policy and allow too many state secrets into the light. Nixon never confronted the Joint Chiefs directly and kept Moorer in place. While the solution spared the military a humiliation during a delicate time, it also allowed men who Nixon distrusted and who distrusted him to remain in powerful positions. Leaks continued.
It was this atmosphere that led officials in the White House to set up their own unit, The Plumbers, to plug leaks and investigate their sources. G. Gordon Liddy became the unit’s operational chief. Yet from at least the morning of Jan. 27, 1972, when Liddy presented “Gemstone”—the codename for elaborate surveillance and dirty-tricks operations—to his superiors, The Plumbers were dependent on the CIA for material support.
For assistance, Liddy had turned to E. Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer only recently retired. With the help of his friend Bernard Barker, Hunt assembled a team of Cubans. All four Cubans had connections to the CIA and to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Most of the espionage equipment and technical support the burglars needed, down to their fake IDs, were supplied by the CIA. And the Gemstone charts Liddy used for his first presentation were prepared by the CIA.
The CIA’s involvement extended beyond material assistance to outright infiltration.
As Hougan first reported, Hunt’s retirement was a ruse. He was still working for the CIA and reporting to the agency. In its own investigation of the Watergate break-in, the FBI concluded that Hunt was reporting to the CIA while working at the White House. A CIA employee statement of Jan. 17, 1974, raised concerns that Hunt was making secret reports to the agency and passing along items of interest directly to Helms. Another member of The Plumbers, James McCord, also had worked extensively for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs. As unsealed testimony from the Senate Watergate Committee from June 1973 corroborates, he had brought some of his old colleagues into his unit. McCord also had a dubious CIA retirement story. A noted surveillance expert, he had been described by Allen Dulles as “the best man we have.” McCord had become chief of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, but he said to FBI colleagues that he wanted to move beyond this rather boring position. An FBI internal memorandum said that he wanted to angle himself into a position of “intelligence”, that he ultimately wanted to “become more and more involved” in political activities. CIA documents released in 2017—part of the JFK Files—confirm that while Hunt and McCord pretended not to know each other, they had, in fact, worked together before. At the CIA, McCord had supervised two investigations of Hunt for security breaches. And one member of the break-in team, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was actively on the CIA payroll and reporting not to Hunt and McCord, but directly to Langley.
Finally, there is good evidence to indicate that The Plumbers’ operations were sabotaged. The first two break-ins that they performed were at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation and Pentagon analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The camera’s film could only be developed by the CIA; it was sent away with an uncertain fate. Then, over Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, The Plumbers attempted three break-ins at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building, succeeding on the night of May 27-28. On the successful break-in, dozens of photos were taken and given to McCord to develop. After a delay, McCord handed them off to Hunt. But as the later FBI investigation ascertained, McCord had switched them: The developed photos couldn’t have been taken at the DNC.
The most important witness to a secret agenda is Alfred C. Baldwin III, whom McCord hired to oversee the listening devices. Baldwin later revealed that on the morning of May 25, McCord told him that “bugs had been installed on two phones” at the DNC, and his job was to monitor them. That date is significant because it predates the successful entry of the Watergate. If what Baldwin says is true, McCord had already planted the bugs and deceived his other colleagues about it.
In any case, McCord—despite his experience—oversaw a supremely sloppy surveillance operation. Only one person, Baldwin, was assigned to listen, meaning that if he ever stepped out of the room, took weekend breaks, or performed other tasks for McCord (which he did), no one would record the calls. Baldwin ostensibly scribbled notes as he listened; he and McCord claimed no tape recorders were used (though two were present in the room). When Liddy questioned McCord about this, McCord said those tape recorders were incompatible. What seems likely is that this setup was a ruse, enabling McCord to pass on doctored intelligence to Liddy while keeping the genuine product for Langley. Magruder claimed the information Liddy gave to him was worthless, which was part of his reason—but only part—for ordering the final, June 17, break-in, at which The Plumbers were caught.
Over the years, we have learned that the genuine product probably pertains not to political intelligence, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein claimed, but to a prostitution ring arranging liaisons over a phone line at the DNC, with an address book naming clients and friends, likely kept in the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. When he was arrested, Martinez was carrying a key that opened this desk, which he tried but failed to dispose of. The definitive proof would have to come from unsealing further documents, and Baldwin telling what he heard. A court-enforced gag order from January 1973 prevented him from speaking about it, but in a 1995 interview, he said he monitored “a lot of conversations of a sexual nature.”
We have to acknowledge where the facts end, and interpretation of facts begins. The Moorer-Radford Affair is well-documented. From it, we can conclude that the military, spying on the president, was trying to undermine his foreign policy. The curiosities of the Fielding and Watergate break-ins are well-documented. But from this alone, we can’t make assumptions about how malign the CIA’s motivations for getting involved were.
Yet a modest and reasonable conclusion is that the CIA’s infiltration of The Plumbers is best understood as the agency’s counterpart to the military’s espionage on Nixon’s covert diplomacy. As James Rosen puts it in The Strong Man:
The report was “brilliant,” Nixon stated in a December 1972 memo. Schlesinger’s objective would be to oversee the reorganization of the intelligence agencies, at long last. “I have been bugging him [Kissinger] and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized, with no success whatever,” Nixon exclaimed. However, while the president wanted a leaner, crisper intelligence budget, he believed that the personnel needed a drastic overhaul:
Yet no further reforms would take place under Nixon’s watch. McCord was cracking under pressure. “He was dismayed,” writes Rosen, that the Cubans were considering the “CIA defense” strategy, where they would plead not guilty on the grounds that they believed they were carrying out a CIA mission. “So fierce was his determination to protect Langley” that he quarreled with his defense team, objecting to their plan to subpoena Helms. Finally, McCord wrote a letter to the trial judge, John Sirica, contending that the proceedings were damaged by political pressure and perjury. When the judge read it publicly, this set off the scramble for plea bargains and revised testimony from compromised mid-level officials, which created new investigations that a priori focused on the White House and on Nixon himself.
During these investigations, occasional hints emerged implicating the CIA in the break-ins. In summer 1973, Helms revealed before Congress that Martinez was on the CIA payroll. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force, or WSPF, looked further. But when on Oct. 12, 1973, the WSPF asked for two reports that discussed Martinez, the agency refused outright. Meanwhile, the president’s own men didn’t grasp what had happened during the break-in, allowing their opponents to run rings around them. Already in late 1973, one writer concluded in Harper’s that “they underestimated both the bitterness and the subtlety of the CIA hierarchs, and it is conceivable that the CIA arranged for a trap at the Watergate.”
Congress didn’t show much interest in learning more. Speaking before a secret meeting of the Senate Armed Forces Committee in November 1973, the Harper’s writer was asked to reveal how he got this information. While he could corroborate his claims about Martinez, he had also said something for which he couldn’t provide evidence: that Helms was told of the burglary on 7 a.m. the next day. The committee excoriated him for making this uncorroborated claim. Nevertheless, the affair raised the question of how much Helms knew and when he knew it. Thanks to recently published documents, we now know that Helms was well informed and tried to hide it at first. On June 19, 1972, Helms was briefed on the “biographic details” for each of the men arrested on June 17. However, three days later, Helms told the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the [CIA] in the past two years.”
Even after Helms had resigned, he remained involved. He was startled to learn of a conversation between Kissinger and Haig, where Haig suggested that the CIA knew beforehand about the burglary. On Dec. 3, 1973, he sent a classified cable to Langley to warn the agency, asking whether Haig was “basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what.”
“It was unclear whether false information affected their policy-making.”
In the media environment of the 1970s, it wasn’t possible to generate sufficient public interest in the CIA’s role in Watergate. Small details, like Martinez’s first case officer failing to appear before Congress, went unnoticed. The White House was the juicier target. As Geoff Shepard has meticulously documented through his own FOIA requests, the WSPF was staffed with Kennedy loyalists looking to take down Nixon. Through several secret ex parte meetings with Judge Sirica and violations of grand-jury rules, the WSPF passed material on to select members of the House Judiciary Committee, with the goal of removing Nixon from office and preparing the way for later criminal trials. This coordinated effort between officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to take out the head of the executive branch was, to put it mildly, an act of constitutional vandalism. By adopting these means, the architects of Watergate set the precedent for future attempts to topple presidents.
Thanks to Shepard’s research, the abuses of the WSPF, the House Judiciary Committee, and Judge Sirica are clear. The CIA’s abuses are much harder to pin down. Yet the CIA didn’t emerge from the period untouched. As one critic of Nixon acknowledges, after the first phase of the Nixon reform, the agency was now “vulnerable to future investigations.” This would set the stage for the partially successful Church Committee, although the result was (nominally) more legislative oversight, not more executive oversight. The issues raised by the absence of the latter were exposed in the 1990s, when it was revealed that the CIA had provided Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton with tainted intelligence reports, prepared with information from known Soviet agents. Mid-level CIA management reserved unto itself the prerogative to sort out which information the Soviet agents provided was true or false. The presidents weren’t notified, so it was unclear whether false information affected their policymaking. One might say that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was channeling Nixon’s more radical side when he proposed bills to abolish the CIA during these years.
The legend of Watergate that ignores CIA involvement is a feel-good ideological story, in which noble liberal constitutionalists bring down a conservative, authoritarian president. That’s what the public still thinks. Yet both Nixon and his institutional opponents in the intelligence community were conservatives and dedicated anti-Communists. Even Mark Felt fell into this camp—he was a Hoover loyalist. The real disagreement was a regime-level dispute about the arrangement of the administrative state.
“Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies.”
Nixon’s actions against the CIA in 1972 weren’t petty revenge against an uncooperative director and agency. The 1971 report and his memo demonstrate a more substantive project. Nixon saw that the technological advances of the 1960s had allowed the intelligence community to entrench and institutionalize itself to its own benefit, with no gain for the nation. The people were losing control of their own government. As Nixon put it in his diary just after his re-election: “It is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that is submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
Determined not to give the establishment the benefit of a “timid opposition party,” Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies through the most important office the voters elected: the presidency. He sought to align the unelected bureaucracies with the chief elected official, making it easier for the president to direct the CIA and easier for the CIA to be held accountable.
Hoover, the Joint Chiefs, Helms, and Felt weren’t defending the Constitution or fighting to limit “the imperial presidency.” They were guarding their institutional autonomy, the idea of an apolitical bureaucracy serving the public good. Like the agents passing on compromised reports to the White House, they believed their judgements didn’t need to be assessed by political partisans. In the tumultuous years of the Nixon era, career intelligence men like Hoover, Helms, and Felt were defending the interests of their own institutions against a White House that didn’t want to conform to what later officials have called the “interagency consensus.”
Nixon was audacious enough to challenge and defeat that consensus, winning stunning victories. The price he paid, however, was his own downfall. Mindful of Nixon’s fate, most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus.
Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, is a contributing editor of Compact.
Nathan Pinkoski
April 6, 2023
PHOTO: AP
In conventional histories, Richard Nixon’s impeachment is remembered as a triumph of good government. Nixon is viewed as a corrupt politician whose unconstitutional schemes threatened the republic, while his opponents are seen as defenders of the Constitution. This narrative, written by journalists, has persisted for nearly five decades—despite the slow accumulation of evidence that tells a very different tale.
In the early 1980s, Harper’s editor Jim Hougan obtained 30,000 documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The result was Secret Agenda, one of the most important yet curiously neglected books of the late 20th century. While some of its conclusions are incorrect—Hougan didn’t believe that FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat—his factual claims have been vindicated as more and more Watergate-related documents have been released.
“Nixon had to go.”
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas. Sometime in the mid-to-late-’60s, he had become a heretical anti-Communist. While Nixon wanted the United States to remain vigilant against the spread of Communism, in a series of 1967 articles, he recognized the limits of American power and wanted to avoid conflicts that weren’t in the national interest. Rejecting Manichean assumptions in foreign policy as a recipe for escalation and war, Nixon called for stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union and China and a legitimate acknowledgement of their interests as the preconditions for hard-nosed but effective diplomacy. Moreover, he opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy. Nixon had grown skeptical of their conformism, their inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch. To that end, he planned a grand course-correction to the way the US government operated.
To assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy and enact his contrarian foreign policy, Nixon first turned his attention to the National Security Council. Like his ex-boss Dwight Eisenhower, he believed that this relatively new addition to the American regime provided the best immediately available institution for the president to direct policy. Under Eisenhower, however, Nixon had witnessed how the Dulles brothers (one as secretary of state, the other as CIA director) played an oversized role in the NSC, at the expense of the president’s own power. The issue, Nixon believed, went deeper than the force of the Dulles’ personalities. A shrewd observer of the nature of bureaucracies, Nixon believed that department heads—even the political appointees meant to serve the president—tended to get captured by their agencies, becoming advocates for their interests, rather than advocates for the policies set by the president.
The solution, Nixon thought, was to marginalize the influence of the most dangerous agencies. He reorganized the NSC around his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, personally accountable to the president. As Kissinger later observed, Nixon refused to have the NSC operate in the usual manner, as an organization that provided the president with a menu of predetermined options concocted in the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, he turned the NSC against the bureaucracy, using it “for the intelligence it supplied him about the views of a bureaucracy he distrusted and for the opportunity to camouflage his own aims.” He thus sought to preempt a repeat of Eisenhower’s presidency.
He offered State to an old friend, William Rogers, unlikely to defy him. Nixon then isolated Rogers and ordered the State Department to cease coordinating interdepartmental policy at the NSC (Kissinger took over that task). This neutered the State Department’s influence on policy. And while many were surprised to see that Nixon left Richard Helms, an LBJ appointee, in charge of the CIA, Nixon strove to limit the agency’s influence. At first he considered removing Helms’s seat at the NSC, but then settled on restricted attendance. The director would provide intelligence briefings, but then leave. For the director, it was an awkward arrangement, yet the point was to make it clear that the CIA’s role was restricted to providing information. It didn’t shape policy.
Nixon set up clandestine backchannels that bypassed the usual interdepartmental processes, allowing him to open negotiations with the upper echelons of the Soviet and Chinese governments in almost complete secrecy. Even the military was kept out of the loop. One month after taking office, Nixon was encouraging the military to believe that he favored escalation in Vietnam by arranging a secret backchannel with them, in order to authorize strategic bombing raids in Cambodia. But on another backchannel, he was letting the Kremlin know that in his negotiations, he would countenance complete US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon’s secretive strategy paid off and led to his landslide re-election in 1972. A decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he negotiated a nuclear-arms treaty with the Kremlin, so that the superpower rivals could practice diplomacy without the pressure created by runaway arms spending and massive nuclear arsenals. And while he pursued détente with the Soviets, he also sought to weaken their influence. He peeled off Soviet allies in the Middle East, bringing them closer to the American camp. He restored relations with Western Europe, at a nadir during the Vietnam era. NATO was revitalized, but not unconditionally—Nixon told the Europeans that they needed to pay more for their own defense. And most spectacularly of all for the conventional anti-Communist, he ended the Vietnam War while normalizing US relations with mainland China.
As one astute writer and critic of Nixon has put it, Nixon’s strategy was a massive gamble. It relied on deceit and outright defiance of Washington’s permanent bureaucracies. It “put Nixon in a race against powerful institutions that often bowed to no one, not even a president.”
There were early signs Nixon couldn’t keep up. By 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had grown squeamish about authorizing the same kind of surveillance operations he had approved under previous presidents and wouldn’t authorize them for Nixon. Hoover, however, continued to spy on the administration—one of Attorney General and Nixon adviser John Mitchell’s bodyguards was an FBI informer. And he created the impression that he knew more than he did. He told Nixon that the FBI had bugged his ’68 campaign plane, when it had probably just collected his telephone records.
Nixon also came to regret keeping Helms. He tried to press Helms on key policy mysteries of the 1960s: the role Kennedy played in the assassination of South Vietnam’s devoutly Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem; the origins and resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson’s October 1968 bombing halt; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Helms demurred, indicating that what the CIA did for other presidents wasn’t up for reexamination by the present one. When Helms finally presented Nixon with a dossier on the Bay of Pigs, Nixon believed it was heavily redacted. Helms guarded the CIA’s secrets, leaving Nixon helpless. This and the CIA’s repeated errors confirmed Nixon’s skepticism of the agency. When the agency failed to predict the 1970 coup in Cambodia, he asked, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?”
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president.”
The most disturbing dynamic emerged with the military. Memoranda that discussed de-escalation or troop withdrawals from Vietnam—opposed by the Joint Chiefs—had a way of appearing in The New York Times. In December 1971, the White House discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president. The full details of what was later called the Moorer-Radford Affair only emerged in October 2000, when the relevant tapes were declassified.
An aide-de-camp at the NSC, Yeoman Jack Radford, copied or took about 5,000 classified communiqués and memos from the president and his advisers and passed them on to his superiors: first Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, then Adm. Welander. Both Robinson and Welander passed them on to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Thomas Moorer. Alexander Haig, who later became Nixon’s chief of staff, might have been involved. This had been going since at least November 1970, though a different version had begun under Johnson. Wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer. But Mitchell convinced him that a public humiliation of the military would harm his foreign policy and allow too many state secrets into the light. Nixon never confronted the Joint Chiefs directly and kept Moorer in place. While the solution spared the military a humiliation during a delicate time, it also allowed men who Nixon distrusted and who distrusted him to remain in powerful positions. Leaks continued.
It was this atmosphere that led officials in the White House to set up their own unit, The Plumbers, to plug leaks and investigate their sources. G. Gordon Liddy became the unit’s operational chief. Yet from at least the morning of Jan. 27, 1972, when Liddy presented “Gemstone”—the codename for elaborate surveillance and dirty-tricks operations—to his superiors, The Plumbers were dependent on the CIA for material support.
For assistance, Liddy had turned to E. Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer only recently retired. With the help of his friend Bernard Barker, Hunt assembled a team of Cubans. All four Cubans had connections to the CIA and to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Most of the espionage equipment and technical support the burglars needed, down to their fake IDs, were supplied by the CIA. And the Gemstone charts Liddy used for his first presentation were prepared by the CIA.
The CIA’s involvement extended beyond material assistance to outright infiltration.
As Hougan first reported, Hunt’s retirement was a ruse. He was still working for the CIA and reporting to the agency. In its own investigation of the Watergate break-in, the FBI concluded that Hunt was reporting to the CIA while working at the White House. A CIA employee statement of Jan. 17, 1974, raised concerns that Hunt was making secret reports to the agency and passing along items of interest directly to Helms. Another member of The Plumbers, James McCord, also had worked extensively for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs. As unsealed testimony from the Senate Watergate Committee from June 1973 corroborates, he had brought some of his old colleagues into his unit. McCord also had a dubious CIA retirement story. A noted surveillance expert, he had been described by Allen Dulles as “the best man we have.” McCord had become chief of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, but he said to FBI colleagues that he wanted to move beyond this rather boring position. An FBI internal memorandum said that he wanted to angle himself into a position of “intelligence”, that he ultimately wanted to “become more and more involved” in political activities. CIA documents released in 2017—part of the JFK Files—confirm that while Hunt and McCord pretended not to know each other, they had, in fact, worked together before. At the CIA, McCord had supervised two investigations of Hunt for security breaches. And one member of the break-in team, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was actively on the CIA payroll and reporting not to Hunt and McCord, but directly to Langley.
Finally, there is good evidence to indicate that The Plumbers’ operations were sabotaged. The first two break-ins that they performed were at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation and Pentagon analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The camera’s film could only be developed by the CIA; it was sent away with an uncertain fate. Then, over Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, The Plumbers attempted three break-ins at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building, succeeding on the night of May 27-28. On the successful break-in, dozens of photos were taken and given to McCord to develop. After a delay, McCord handed them off to Hunt. But as the later FBI investigation ascertained, McCord had switched them: The developed photos couldn’t have been taken at the DNC.
The most important witness to a secret agenda is Alfred C. Baldwin III, whom McCord hired to oversee the listening devices. Baldwin later revealed that on the morning of May 25, McCord told him that “bugs had been installed on two phones” at the DNC, and his job was to monitor them. That date is significant because it predates the successful entry of the Watergate. If what Baldwin says is true, McCord had already planted the bugs and deceived his other colleagues about it.
In any case, McCord—despite his experience—oversaw a supremely sloppy surveillance operation. Only one person, Baldwin, was assigned to listen, meaning that if he ever stepped out of the room, took weekend breaks, or performed other tasks for McCord (which he did), no one would record the calls. Baldwin ostensibly scribbled notes as he listened; he and McCord claimed no tape recorders were used (though two were present in the room). When Liddy questioned McCord about this, McCord said those tape recorders were incompatible. What seems likely is that this setup was a ruse, enabling McCord to pass on doctored intelligence to Liddy while keeping the genuine product for Langley. Magruder claimed the information Liddy gave to him was worthless, which was part of his reason—but only part—for ordering the final, June 17, break-in, at which The Plumbers were caught.
Over the years, we have learned that the genuine product probably pertains not to political intelligence, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein claimed, but to a prostitution ring arranging liaisons over a phone line at the DNC, with an address book naming clients and friends, likely kept in the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. When he was arrested, Martinez was carrying a key that opened this desk, which he tried but failed to dispose of. The definitive proof would have to come from unsealing further documents, and Baldwin telling what he heard. A court-enforced gag order from January 1973 prevented him from speaking about it, but in a 1995 interview, he said he monitored “a lot of conversations of a sexual nature.”
We have to acknowledge where the facts end, and interpretation of facts begins. The Moorer-Radford Affair is well-documented. From it, we can conclude that the military, spying on the president, was trying to undermine his foreign policy. The curiosities of the Fielding and Watergate break-ins are well-documented. But from this alone, we can’t make assumptions about how malign the CIA’s motivations for getting involved were.
Yet a modest and reasonable conclusion is that the CIA’s infiltration of The Plumbers is best understood as the agency’s counterpart to the military’s espionage on Nixon’s covert diplomacy. As James Rosen puts it in The Strong Man:
Oblivious to all of this, Nixon turned his attention after his re-election to the comprehensive reorganization of government that he had planned. As he himself put it, his goal was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government.” It was, as he admitted in his diary, “going to be quite a shock to the establishment.” In an action that caused considerable turmoil and resentment throughout the federal government, Nixon asked all political appointees to send in letters of resignation; he indicated many would be accepted. One of the key institutions he had in his sights was the CIA. While Nixon at times toyed with the idea of abolishing the agency entirely, he settled on a plan to reform it. Helms was sent off to be ambassador to Iran and replaced with James Schlesinger. Schlesinger interested Nixon because he had written a 1971 study on how to reorganize the intelligence agencies. Costs had exploded, the study observed, along with “spectacular increases in collection activities,” as technological advances turned the agencies from an invisible police force into an empire. But there had been a failure to see “a commensurate improvement in the scope and overall quantity of intelligence products.” Because of the intelligence community’s failures, “a fundamental reform of [its] decision-making bodies and procedures” was required.
The report was “brilliant,” Nixon stated in a December 1972 memo. Schlesinger’s objective would be to oversee the reorganization of the intelligence agencies, at long last. “I have been bugging him [Kissinger] and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized, with no success whatever,” Nixon exclaimed. However, while the president wanted a leaner, crisper intelligence budget, he believed that the personnel needed a drastic overhaul:
In early 1973, Schlesinger initiated the first phase of Nixon’s plan. Beyond introducing more upper-level control over the CIA budget, he would fire more than 1,000 agents and incite senior leadership, the guardians of the status quo, to head toward the exit.
Yet no further reforms would take place under Nixon’s watch. McCord was cracking under pressure. “He was dismayed,” writes Rosen, that the Cubans were considering the “CIA defense” strategy, where they would plead not guilty on the grounds that they believed they were carrying out a CIA mission. “So fierce was his determination to protect Langley” that he quarreled with his defense team, objecting to their plan to subpoena Helms. Finally, McCord wrote a letter to the trial judge, John Sirica, contending that the proceedings were damaged by political pressure and perjury. When the judge read it publicly, this set off the scramble for plea bargains and revised testimony from compromised mid-level officials, which created new investigations that a priori focused on the White House and on Nixon himself.
During these investigations, occasional hints emerged implicating the CIA in the break-ins. In summer 1973, Helms revealed before Congress that Martinez was on the CIA payroll. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force, or WSPF, looked further. But when on Oct. 12, 1973, the WSPF asked for two reports that discussed Martinez, the agency refused outright. Meanwhile, the president’s own men didn’t grasp what had happened during the break-in, allowing their opponents to run rings around them. Already in late 1973, one writer concluded in Harper’s that “they underestimated both the bitterness and the subtlety of the CIA hierarchs, and it is conceivable that the CIA arranged for a trap at the Watergate.”
Congress didn’t show much interest in learning more. Speaking before a secret meeting of the Senate Armed Forces Committee in November 1973, the Harper’s writer was asked to reveal how he got this information. While he could corroborate his claims about Martinez, he had also said something for which he couldn’t provide evidence: that Helms was told of the burglary on 7 a.m. the next day. The committee excoriated him for making this uncorroborated claim. Nevertheless, the affair raised the question of how much Helms knew and when he knew it. Thanks to recently published documents, we now know that Helms was well informed and tried to hide it at first. On June 19, 1972, Helms was briefed on the “biographic details” for each of the men arrested on June 17. However, three days later, Helms told the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the [CIA] in the past two years.”
Even after Helms had resigned, he remained involved. He was startled to learn of a conversation between Kissinger and Haig, where Haig suggested that the CIA knew beforehand about the burglary. On Dec. 3, 1973, he sent a classified cable to Langley to warn the agency, asking whether Haig was “basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what.”
“It was unclear whether false information affected their policy-making.”
In the media environment of the 1970s, it wasn’t possible to generate sufficient public interest in the CIA’s role in Watergate. Small details, like Martinez’s first case officer failing to appear before Congress, went unnoticed. The White House was the juicier target. As Geoff Shepard has meticulously documented through his own FOIA requests, the WSPF was staffed with Kennedy loyalists looking to take down Nixon. Through several secret ex parte meetings with Judge Sirica and violations of grand-jury rules, the WSPF passed material on to select members of the House Judiciary Committee, with the goal of removing Nixon from office and preparing the way for later criminal trials. This coordinated effort between officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to take out the head of the executive branch was, to put it mildly, an act of constitutional vandalism. By adopting these means, the architects of Watergate set the precedent for future attempts to topple presidents.
Thanks to Shepard’s research, the abuses of the WSPF, the House Judiciary Committee, and Judge Sirica are clear. The CIA’s abuses are much harder to pin down. Yet the CIA didn’t emerge from the period untouched. As one critic of Nixon acknowledges, after the first phase of the Nixon reform, the agency was now “vulnerable to future investigations.” This would set the stage for the partially successful Church Committee, although the result was (nominally) more legislative oversight, not more executive oversight. The issues raised by the absence of the latter were exposed in the 1990s, when it was revealed that the CIA had provided Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton with tainted intelligence reports, prepared with information from known Soviet agents. Mid-level CIA management reserved unto itself the prerogative to sort out which information the Soviet agents provided was true or false. The presidents weren’t notified, so it was unclear whether false information affected their policymaking. One might say that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was channeling Nixon’s more radical side when he proposed bills to abolish the CIA during these years.
The legend of Watergate that ignores CIA involvement is a feel-good ideological story, in which noble liberal constitutionalists bring down a conservative, authoritarian president. That’s what the public still thinks. Yet both Nixon and his institutional opponents in the intelligence community were conservatives and dedicated anti-Communists. Even Mark Felt fell into this camp—he was a Hoover loyalist. The real disagreement was a regime-level dispute about the arrangement of the administrative state.
“Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies.”
Nixon’s actions against the CIA in 1972 weren’t petty revenge against an uncooperative director and agency. The 1971 report and his memo demonstrate a more substantive project. Nixon saw that the technological advances of the 1960s had allowed the intelligence community to entrench and institutionalize itself to its own benefit, with no gain for the nation. The people were losing control of their own government. As Nixon put it in his diary just after his re-election: “It is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that is submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
Determined not to give the establishment the benefit of a “timid opposition party,” Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies through the most important office the voters elected: the presidency. He sought to align the unelected bureaucracies with the chief elected official, making it easier for the president to direct the CIA and easier for the CIA to be held accountable.
Hoover, the Joint Chiefs, Helms, and Felt weren’t defending the Constitution or fighting to limit “the imperial presidency.” They were guarding their institutional autonomy, the idea of an apolitical bureaucracy serving the public good. Like the agents passing on compromised reports to the White House, they believed their judgements didn’t need to be assessed by political partisans. In the tumultuous years of the Nixon era, career intelligence men like Hoover, Helms, and Felt were defending the interests of their own institutions against a White House that didn’t want to conform to what later officials have called the “interagency consensus.”
Nixon was audacious enough to challenge and defeat that consensus, winning stunning victories. The price he paid, however, was his own downfall. Mindful of Nixon’s fate, most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus.
Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, is a contributing editor of Compact.