My Kindle Clippings/2014

2014

January

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2370-74  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:32 AM

In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2374-79  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:33 AM

Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2452-53  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:56 AM

Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2468-71  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:58 AM

The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2477-80  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:59 AM

Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2491-93  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:02 AM

Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2518-20  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2500-2503  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2618-21  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:19 AM

Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2640-44  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:21 AM

With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2692-94  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:27 AM

Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2701-4  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:35 AM

Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2725-26  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:38 AM

As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2739-41  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:39 AM

Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2774-77  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:45 AM

Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2777  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:46 AM

and because the exile community is based in FL... they have disproportionate influence over national politics
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2786-89  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:48 AM

Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2864-67  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:23 AM

the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2876-77  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:26 AM

If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2908-9  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:35 AM

With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2943-47  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2951-52  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2956-58  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2958-60  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2981-85  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:36 AM

they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3061-64  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:08 PM

In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Bookmark on Page 187 | Loc. 3079  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM


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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3078-83  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM

The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3086-88  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:11 PM

As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3107-10  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:14 PM

Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3133-35  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:16 PM

Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3205-6  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:35 PM

After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3246-48  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:42 PM

Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3249-51  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:43 PM

these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3265-68  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3270-71  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3293-97  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:49 PM

When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3319  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3321-24  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization,
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3330-32  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:53 PM

Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3364-65  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:57 PM

With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3501-2  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 08:13 PM

Though some in the Bush administration dismissed these changes as simply “cosmetic,” other reforms are far less susceptible to this charge.
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February

Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 566 | Loc. 11753  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:02 AM

antiwar emonstrations
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 565 | Loc. 11726  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

hoovers deathand his files
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 564 | Loc. 11710  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

espionage and anti narcotics plans
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11693  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms nixon reationship warms
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11677  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

hels pursues spy movies for hunt and cia pr
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 562 | Loc. 11660  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms and hunt
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11628  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:05 AM

mccord security cia exiles involve.emt bay of pigs
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 559 | Loc. 11613  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

fiorini sturgis knew hunt from bay of pigs well before wqatergate
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11619  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

sturgis met hunt during cia almeida assassination plot
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 561 | Loc. 11647  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:07 AM

martinez cia reorting on hunt white house connections activities
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 569 | Loc. 11803  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:08 AM

fall and rise o jimmy hoffa book
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 571 | Loc. 11857  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:09 AM

chilean embassy plumbers burglary numero uno
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 573 | Loc. 11898  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:10 AM

mccrd still oyal to cia. said wh was bugging embassy. knewwhen to burgle and whre.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 575 | Loc. 11931  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:11 AM

fiorini and rosselli both say chilean embassy burglary was abt cuban dosier
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 576 | Loc. 11960  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:12 AM

dossier mid 1960-71
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12000-12003  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

All Helms would have needed to do initially was to communicate to Nixon that he needed to see him about “the Bay of Pigs thing”—meaning the CIA-Mafia plots—and that would have gotten the President’s immediate attention. That also helps to explain why that term came up on Nixon’s tapes when Hunt’s name surfaced in the Watergate affair, and the term was then thrown back at Helms, to get him to force the FBI to back off on the Watergate investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12007-10  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

It’s not hard to imagine Hunt’s reaction when he heard about the Cuban Dossier, since he’d been involved in attempts to kill Fidel from 1960 to 1965. The same is true for his assistant, Bernard Barker—and for Barker’s longtime boss, Santo Trafficante. The godfather would not only have no objection to Barker and Fiorini’s involvement in trying to get a copy of the Dossier, but would probably have encouraged their participation as a way to know what was going on.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12019-22  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:15 AM

Nixon would still privately be insisting that legitimate “national security” concerns were behind the Watergate break-ins and the cover-up. Nixon was specifically talking about the highly incriminating “Smoking Gun” tape, in which the President talked about the Watergate cover-up and the “Bay of Pigs thing,” and the fact that “Hunt, ah, he knows too damn much, and he was involved.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12029-33  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:16 AM

Nixon never explained—to his aides or in public—just what those “national security reasons” were, and how they related to Hunt and the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Ongoing CIA operations are exempt from some disclosure requirements to Congress, an important consideration since both houses were controlled by the Democratic Party. (Ongoing operations only have to be disclosed to four members, two leaders from each party in each house of Congress, and the CIA’s descriptions can be so vague and general as to be virtually meaningless.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12035-43  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:17 AM

But there was an important, ongoing CIA operation that could have been endangered if it were listed in the Cuban Dossier, or if it were uncovered because public exposure of the Dossier led to more investigations. That ongoing operation had involved Richard Helms since its inception, and had also involved E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or, rather, what was left of the operation, which was the CIA’s ongoing support for Commander Juan Almeida’s wife and at least two children outside of Cuba. Plus the fact that Commander Almeida—in some ways the No. 3 official in Cuba—could still be favorably disposed to helping the United States if anything should happen to Fidel Castro (who had already ruled longer than most Latin American dictators). There was also the fact that Almeida could always be blackmailed into helping the United States (because of his work for JFK), even if he didn’t want to do so willingly. Hunt and Barker had even handled the $50,000 payment to Almeida in 1963, when they had helped arrange for his wife and two children to first leave Cuba under a seemingly innocent pretext.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12068-70  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:22 AM

The search for the Cuban Dossier explains why the burglars at the Chilean embassy and the Watergate were all former CIA agents, officers, or assets experienced in anti-Castro operations. The only exception was G. Gordon Liddy, who helped Hunt supervise the Watergate break-ins from across the street.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12077-78  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Memos concerning Rosselli’s 1974 Watergate Committee staff interview about the CIA-Mafia plots were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret for decades, and are published in this book for the first time.57
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12079-86  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Richard Nixon’s national security rationale/excuse for the Chilean embassy and Watergate break-ins would initially be effective in forcing CIA Director Richard Helms to ask the FBI not to fully investigate the final Watergate break-in. It also kept Nixon’s taped admission about his knowledge of the Chilean Embassy break-in secret until 1999. That was good for Nixon, since in 1976, he provided a written answer to the Senate Church Committee denying any such knowledge, saying that     I do not remember being informed while President, that at any time during my Administration an agency or employee of the United States Government, acting without a warrant, engaged in a surreptitious or otherwise unauthorized entry into the Chilean Embassy in the United States.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12112-15  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:27 AM

in May 1972, just prior to the initial unsuccessful Watergate break-in, Hunt and Barker’s team cased and made plans to bug “the offices of McGovern’s two top aides, Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.” (Five years earlier, Mankiewicz had secretly investigated JFK’s assassination for Robert Kennedy, while Hart would soon be part of the Senate Church Committee that first exposed the CIA-Mafia plots.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12115-19  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

Mankiewicz’s and Hart’s offices on Memorial Day 1972 and told him that photographing documents would be part of the mission. Lukas also pointed out that Barker and the other Watergate burglars were “mentioned in connection with a May 16 burglary of a prominent Democratic law firm in the Watergate, whose members included . . . Sargent Shriver, [Senator Edward] Kennedy’s brother-in-law.” That burglary was discovered when an early-arriving employee “noticed the entry door was . . . taped so the door would not lock,” similar to what happened on the final two Watergate burglaries.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 12123-29  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

After the Plumbers failed to obtain a complete copy of the Cuban Dossier at the Chilean embassy, there would be a significant change in mission for the upcoming burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. No longer would it be primarily a small bugging operation; now, having a larger crew photographing documents would become its primary goal. One can only imagine the reaction of Nixon, or Helms, if they heard that the Cuban Dossier started in 1960 with a CIA plot to kill Fidel involving a “gangster,” or that the Dossier continued until the December 1971 attempt to kill Fidel in Chile. Hunt had told Fiorini the Dossier was approximately one hundred pages long, yet they only had a piece of it, so they had no way of knowing what was on the other pages that could harm the CIA’s reputation or Nixon’s reelection campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 586 | Loc. 12143-46  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:29 AM

Some writers have speculated that Watergate was all about the $100,000 cash contribution from Howard Hughes to Nixon, via Bebe Rebozo, and what DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien might have known about the payment. But there had already been two Jack Anderson articles about the $100,000, and it would have been hard—if not impossible—for Larry O’Brien to use that issue against Nixon without opening himself up to charges about his own lucrative work for Hughes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 12186-90  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:31 AM

The fact that Nixon, Helms, and Hunt were willing to risk several break-ins in the span of just a few weeks shows a level of desperation missing from most Watergate accounts. However, the possibility of the CIA-Mafia plots becoming public during the campaign was simply too great to ignore. Ultimately, in trying to obtain a full copy of the Dossier and learn what the Democrats knew, Nixon would cost himself the Presidency, Helms would end his career, and Hunt would go to prison.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 12222-27  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:34 AM

There were several reasons for targeting Spencer Oliver’s Watergate office and phone. Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry pointed out that Oliver’s father “worked with Robert R. Mullen, whose Washington-based public relations firm [still officially] employed Hunt,” even as most of Hunt’s time was consumed by his work for Nixon. The Mullen firm, and new owner Robert Bennett, worked extensively for Howard Hughes, and “Oliver’s father had represented Hughes.” That meant in addition to the secret Cuban Dossier, Oliver could have information damaging to Nixon that his father could have gotten from Hughes or his representatives.8
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 12298-305  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:23 PM

The first break-in wasn’t scheduled until May 26—so why did Hunt have the men fly into Washington on May 22? It’s possible the extra time was needed to get their cover stories straight, and to make sure the men knew what additional information to look for at the Watergate and McGovern headquarters. As Fiorini told St. George, in addition to their main goal of looking for the Cuban Dossier, they were also keeping their eyes open for other material to photograph, some related to the Dossier and some not: “any document with money on it . . . anything that had to do with Howard Hughes . . . damaging rumors about Republican leaders [and] everything that could be leaked to the press with a damaging effect to the McGovern people.” Those items would be icing on the cake, but they weren’t the kinds of things for which Nixon would have risked his Presidency.15
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 12315-18  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:24 PM

The “cover” for the burglary was going to be a supposed “board meeting” banquet and film screening for Ameritas, a real estate company affiliated with Barker. The small banquet would be held in the basement of the Watergate Hotel, which had access—via a corridor and a courtyard—to a garage and stairwell in the Watergate office building where the DNC headquarters was located.17
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 595 | Loc. 12340-49  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:27 PM

The next night, the Plumbers tried a different approach: going in through the main Watergate office building entrance, signing the register (using aliases) indicating they were going to the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, then walking down two flights of stairs to the DNC offices. McCord was with Fiorini and the exiles, while Hunt and Liddy waited with Baldwin across the street. Eugenio Martinez thought the plan strained credibility—what were so many men doing going to the Federal Reserve office at midnight, on Saturday, during the Memorial Day weekend? Still, all went according to plan, until Virgilio Gonzalez was unable to open the doors to the DNC offices with the lock-picking tools he had brought.21 Hunt was furious when he learned of the failure, and he demanded that Gonzalez fly back to Miami, get his tools, and return by Sunday night, for a third attempt. Martinez thought that Hunt was being too hard on Gonzalez, but when he complained, Barker relayed a blunt message from Hunt: “You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 12359-64  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:28 PM

On Sunday night, May 28, 1972, the burglars tried a different route into the Watergate, and they finally were successful. While Hunt, Liddy, and Baldwin waited in the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street, this time the burglars entered the Watergate office building through the garage, with McCord taping open “the basement stairwell door.” Emery wrote that “once on the sixth floor, Gonzalez . . . used a pressure wrench to twist the lock on the rear door to the DNC and they were in.” As McCord placed the bugs, “Barker and Martinez started photographing documents, while . . . Pico and De Diego served as corridor lookouts.”24
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 12382-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

either McCord’s sense of caution or the former CIA security officer’s possible growing reluctance to be part of such clearly illegal political spying. The break-in at the Chilean embassy was standard CIA fare; in some ways it was a typical CIA security operation to ensure that Agency secrets weren’t in the wrong hands. But the DNC break-in was something else, a grossly illegal political operation with a thin national security cover of protecting CIA secrets and Agency assets like Commander Almeida. After the successful May 28 break-in, Liddy planned for McCord to develop the two rolls of film. But after a week, McCord had made no progress, which could be another sign of his unease about the whole project. Liddy then gave the film to Hunt and asked if Barker could get it developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 598 | Loc. 12388-91  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

The fact that McCord was supposed to use his contact to develop the Watergate film raises interesting questions. Who developed the film from the Chilean embassy break-in? The CIA? And who was McCord’s contact who was supposed to develop the Watergate film? Someone with Agency contacts? Those questions would only deepen after Barker had the film developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 599 | Loc. 12406-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:32 PM

While making those plans, and dealing with Artime in Miami on the narcotics operation, Hunt gave the DNC film from the third Watergate burglary attempt to Barker to get developed. Hunt later said that somehow Barker didn’t understand the film was from the Watergate job, so Barker took it to a local camera shop to have the film developed and enlargements made. Why Barker wouldn’t realize—or even assume—the two rolls were from the Watergate mission has never been clear. As Hunt and Barker later told the story, once Barker realized it was the Watergate film, he became frantic. To the Hunt/Barker account, Martinez added a scene where an anxious Barker came to his real estate office, where Martinez just happened to be talking to two other Watergate burglars, Fiorini and De Diego. The three supposedly rushed to Rich’s Camera Shop, where the other two covered “each door to the shop” while Barker tipped the owner “$20 or $30” when the owner said about the photos: “It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff, isn’t it?”29
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12425-30  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The Watergate burglars could have stolen some documents and photographed them later in the Howard Johnson’s motel room. But few papers—and none of importance—could have been taken, since the DNC staff didn’t realize anything had been taken from the office. Some authors, like Hougan, think that McCord could have switched the film canisters and had the real photos developed by the CIA, while giving Liddy and Hunt innocuous files photographed at the Howard Johnson’s. Given McCord and Hunt’s relationship and mutual CIA background, that seems unlikely. Hougan also thinks it’s possible that Hunt himself switched the film, perhaps sending the real film to Richard Helms in “the packages that Hunt was sending to CIA headquarters.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12431-32  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The bottom line for the whole affair is that the photos Hunt gave to Liddy, which Liddy gave to Nixon’s aides, were not the photos Barker had taken at the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12441-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:34 PM

The faked photos, given by Liddy to Nixon’s aides, were destroyed after the Watergate arrests, leaving the camera shop owner’s consistent testimony—about an unusual task and photos that stood out among his usual work—as the only definitive account.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 601 | Loc. 12461-68  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:36 PM

In June 1972, Richard Helms was all too aware of press reports about the drug trafficking activities of so many of his former—and some said current—agents and assets. The negative publicity for the Agency was the opposite of the positive spin Helms had tried to achieve just a month earlier, when pitching the TV show based on Hunt’s spy novels. More drug activities by CIA personnel were going to be exposed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a soon-to-be-published book by Alfred McCoy, who had just testified to Congress about the heroin problem. Helms had turned to Nixon to help stop Victor Marchetti’s CIA exposé, but to stop McCoy’s book, Helms unleashed high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer in June 1972. Meyer tried to prevail upon the head of McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, to halt publication of the book because it was “a threat to national security.” Over the protests of McCoy, Harper & Row actually submitted the thoroughly documented book to the CIA for a pre-publication review.35
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 603 | Loc. 12493-502  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:40 PM

Liddy gave Baldwin’s typed summaries to Nixon aide Jeb Magruder, and they eventually covered two hundred calls. Information gets murky after that, in part because of “the federal wiretap statute,” which criminalizes not just listening to a bugged conversation or reading a transcript, but even looking at a summary of the conversation or a memo written about that summary. Because any of those activities is a felony, many Nixon aides, officials, and their assistants have given conflicting accounts about who saw or read the DNC call summaries. Magruder says he passed them on to John Mitchell, and Liddy says he gave some to Mitchell, but Mitchell denies ever seeing them, or knowing about any bugging. Yet Mitchell made what Emery considers a “damning” remark about bugging in general on June 14, when Mitchell was talking to Charles Colson about a Democratic strategy meeting. Mitchell said, “tell me what room they are in and I will tell you everything that is said in that room.” Other Nixon aides who logically should have seen the summaries denied having done so. For example, H.R. Haldeman hedged when he testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that “to the best of my knowledge I did not see any material produced by the bugging,” but when questioned about it in court, “he refused to reply ‘on advice of counsel.’”39
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12542-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:47 PM

Nixon seemed to want as much intelligence on his opponents as possible. For example, “the Nixon tapes show that the President urged Colson at this time to get the Secret Service to spy on McGovern. Confidential information was subsequently picked up by an agent on the Senator’s detail and passed to the White House.”43
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12560-65  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:49 PM

Hunt says Liddy told him his superiors “wanted the McGovern office operation completed, too,” either “the same night” or “the night after Watergate.” When Hunt remarked that hitting both the Watergate and McGovern’s office sounded like a lot of work in a short amount of time for his crew, Liddy replied that “The Big Man [Mitchell] says he wants the operation.” Given everything that’s known about the relationship between Nixon and Mitchell, it’s hard to imagine Mitchell would order two risky operations, potentially in one night, without at least the tacit approval of Nixon. Even the usually circumspect Hunt wrote that “Watergate . . . was a political intelligence-gathering operation from start to finish, possibly personally ordered by the president himself.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12590-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

If Hunt’s accounts about his worries and doubts about the operation are true, why didn’t he just refuse, or quit his White House position, since he was still receiving a full-time salary from the Mullen Company? If the pressure for the final mission was coming from Nixon or Helms—or both—the answer is clear. Hunt couldn’t say no; he only had his salary at the Mullen Company because of Helms, who would have also wanted Hunt to stay in the White House. As with the previous Watergate mission, there is no way Hunt—or Martinez—would have participated if Helms hadn’t wanted him to.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12594-95  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

Helms and Nixon stood to lose far more than Hunt if the CIA-Mafia plots were exposed, and Nixon would lose more than Helms. Hence, the operation had to go forward, and quickly, despite the risks and doubts.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 609 | Loc. 12617-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:53 PM

Martinez was getting ready to write a letter of resignation when Barker told him about the new Watergate mission, saying they were to leave for Washington on June 16. Even though Martinez said he “had just gotten my divorce that day,” he complied with Barker’s request and went to Washington with the others.2
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 610 | Loc. 12638-45  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:55 PM

The DNC break-in was originally scheduled to begin at 10 pm on Friday night, June 16, to allow enough time for the break-in at McGovern campaign headquarters a few hours after midnight. However, by 11:30 pm, a light was still burning at the sixth-floor offices of the DNC, so the decision was made to wait until after the midnight guard inspection before beginning the break-in attempt. McCord had already taped open a stairwell door in the garage, by using the same ruse as in the previous successful attempt in May: He’d signed in (using an alias) at the main entrance of the Watergate building as if going to the Federal Reserve office on the eighth floor, and, once there, he had walked down the stairwell to the parking garage, where he’d taped the door. In contrast to latter accounts, Jim Hougan’s research showed that McCord didn’t tape the door locks horizontally, so the tape was obvious, but vertically, so it was almost impossible to see.6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 611 | Loc. 12646-57  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:56 PM

the various accounts by all of the participants in the break-in, and the cover-up, multiply by almost exponential proportions. As Fred Emery points out, many accounts about the various events are often “totally at odds.” Often, a single participant told different stories about a single event at different times, first as part of the cover-up, then a different version to investigators or at hearings, followed by yet another version in later books or articles, and still another version years or decades later in lawsuits or interviews. The reasons participants gave these different versions include avoiding prosecution, diverting blame, or simply presenting themselves in the best possible light. In addition, the burglars were probably given cover stories by Hunt at the very start of the operation, to use in case any problem arose. After the arrests, all of the participants—the burglars and those in the White House—had months to coordinate further cover stories with each other, and to update those stories to match evidence as it emerged.7 Attempts by journalists and historians to reconcile all of those varying stories with the actual evidence and documentation consumed much of the first two decades of Watergate research, and they continue today. However, as Emery pointed out in his 1994 book and BBC documentary series, many of those discrepancies are “impossible to reconcile” and in any event “are not, in the end, very important.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 612 | Loc. 12670-81  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:59 PM

Once the men had climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, locksmith Virgilio Gonzalez had problems opening the locked rear door to the DNC offices. Fiorini decided they should remove the entire door, a drastic step that again shows a sense of urgency or desperation. (Fiorini had not only been told by Hunt about the secret Cuban Dossier, but as a participant in the CIA-Mafia plots, Fiorini might have worried he might be named in the Dossier.) When McCord joined the men at 1:40 AM, he was worried that by removing the door they were making too much noise. But the door was finally dislodged, and they were able to enter the DNC offices.9 In the Watergate building’s garage, guard Frank Wills checked the doors again as ordered by his supervisor and was surprised to find the locks had been re-taped. Realizing it couldn’t be the work of a maintenance man at that hour, he called the Washington, D.C., police at 1:47 AM. A police call went out at 1:52 AM, and a squad car with three plainclothes officers responded. Officer Carl Shoffler, who had almost shoulder-length hair as part of his undercover work, told the dispatcher they were only a block and a half away, and they were soon at the Watergate, talking to Frank Wills. At that moment, the burglars had likely not yet even finished removing the door to the DNC offices.10
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 613 | Loc. 12688-703  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:00 PM

Hunt and Liddy tried to radio a warning to Barker, but there was a problem. Frank Fiorini later told Andrew St. George that Barker’s     job was to keep his ear to that goddamn walkie-talkie, listening to our lookout across from the Watergate in case there was any outside problem . . . But Barker [was] too cheap to install a fresh battery in the thing before an operation; no, he keeps the old battery going week after week by never turning up the volume . . . the night we got arrested, the minute we get safely inside the [Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate,] Macho turns the volume of his walkie-talkie all the way down . . . saving the battery. He also kept us from picking up the first warning calls from the lookout across the street [who] saw the unmarked police car arrive, saw the cops begin turning up the lights on one floor after another . . . we suspected nothing until finally Barker heard the footsteps of the cops pounding outside our door and [he finally] turned up his walkie-talkie. Hunt was stationed in another section of the Watergate complex and his voice came in, squeaky with tension, “Alert! Alert! Do you read me? Clear out immediately” . . . but by then it was too late: the cops were in the corridor. Barker saved his damn walkie-talkie battery and blew our team.* 12 At approximately 2:30 AM on June 17, 1972, Shoffler and the other officers entered the Watergate offices, finding the burglars hiding “behind a desk in the secretarial cubicle adjacent to Larry O’Brien’s office.” McCord radioed to Baldwin, “They got us.”13
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 615 | Loc. 12743-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:04 PM

With Hoover no longer running the FBI, cooperation had started to resume between the Agency and the Bureau, which might help to explain the missing evidence.19 For example, Hougan points out that on June 17, 1972, “[James] McCord would be arrested and booked under a Hunt alias, ‘Edward Martin,’ producing a phony ID on which the birth date was identical with Howard Hunt’s own.” What’s also interesting is “that the identification papers in McCord’s possession at the time of his arrest . . . disappeared from police and prosecution files. The false ID was issued by the CIA to Howard Hunt, and vanished immediately after McCord’s fingerprinting by Washington police.”20 The disappearance of the CIA-supplied McCord/Hunt ID was no accident. Hougan found that “a file on Hunt’s activities” using the Edward Martin alias and “maintained ‘outside the normal CIA filing system,’ was [later] requested from the CIA by the [Senate Watergate] committee.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 619 | Loc. 12815-26  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:10 PM

There, Woodward happened to encounter one of the two attorneys that E. Howard Hunt had arranged for his crew. When Judge James A. Belson asked the defendants “what they did for a living,” one said they are “‘anti-Communists’ . . . and the others nodded in agreement.” James McCord was the first to be questioned by the Judge, who asked for his occupation. McCord replied, “Security consultant.” Woodward wrote that “in a low voice, McCord said that the was recently retired from government service . . . sending a strong message that he wanted this to be between the judge and him.” However, since “it was an open courtroom,” Woodward said that he “moved to the front row and leaned as far into the conversation as possible without joining in.”28 Woodward wrote that the Judge asked, “Where in government?”     McCord’s “barely audible” reply was “CIA.”         The judge flinched.         Holy shit, I said half aloud. It was like a 10,000-volt jolt of electricity. I was amazed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12835-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:11 PM

Bob Woodward then called “the White House—and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer but the operator said helpfully he might be in the office of Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel. Colson’s secretary said Hunt was not there but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer.”     I called the firm, reached Hunt, and asked why his name was in the address books of two of the Watergate burglars.         “Good God!” Hunt shouted, [then] said he had no comment and slammed down the phone.30 The next call Woodward made was to “the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12845-46  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:12 PM

“‘I guess it’s no secret that Howard was with the CIA,’ Bennett said blandly.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12849-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:13 PM

Woodward went to work on his next story, which would reveal Hunt’s CIA past and his connection to the Watergate break-in. But after that article, despite the dramatic revelations of the Agency connections of McCord and Hunt, the CIA side of Watergate would soon fade into the background of Woodward’s Watergate reporting, and his subsequent books.32
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 621 | Loc. 12865-72  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:14 PM

It wasn’t just the Post—and the Star and also Newsweek—that Bennett was feeding stories and information to in order to protect his CIA proprietary firm. In the first CIA memo quoted above, from three weeks after the Watergate arrests, his case officer said that “Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a ‘back door entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party . . . to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm.” At that time, Edward Bennett Williams was working with his partner Joseph Califano on the DNC’s lawsuit against CREEP for the break-in.35 Robert Bennett was probably just one of many CIA assets that Richard Helms had the Agency use to move the news media away from a focus on the CIA.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 622 | Loc. 12891-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:16 PM

Later that day, still on June 17, Liddy used “his White House pass” to get into “the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.” There, Liddy “placed a scrambler call through the White House switchboard to [Jeb] Magruder,” who was in California.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 624 | Loc. 12923-28  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:19 PM

John Dean and a colleague, wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, picked over the contents of [Hunt’s] White House safe . . . papers they found . . . would eventually be burned by Nixon’s compliant acting FBI Director, Pat Gray.” John Mitchell told Jeb Magruder “maybe you ought to have a little fire at your home,” and Magruder complied. Even Mitchell destroyed “his campaign correspondence with Nixon and Haldeman,” which could have included information on a wide range of illegal matters. After Haldeman told his aide to “make sure our files are clean,” more files were shredded. It’s impossible to know what paper trails, or evidence of other crimes, literally went up in smoke or through the shredder.42
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 625 | Loc. 12956-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:21 PM

Monday, June 19, 1972, was the first in a series of increasingly important days in the Watergate cover-up. That morning, Nixon’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, proclaimed that the Watergate break-in was nothing more than “a third rate burglary,” a term some still use today. Ziegler also cautioned the press, saying that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is,” and much of the press corps took his caution seriously.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 626 | Loc. 12977-82  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:23 PM

“bugging of U.S. citizens in internal security cases must be first authorized by a court-ordered warrant.” Basically, Nixon and Mitchell had argued that if the President wanted someone bugged, the President had the “inherent power” to do so, which the Supreme Court rejected. Hence any contact with the bugging results was now even more clearly a felony, which helps to explain why so many White House aides and officials who probably saw bugging transcripts later denied doing so. The Supreme Court’s ruling also meant that any “national security” justification Nixon felt he could use to ultimately cover his political bugging was no longer valid, a concept that Nixon would still be struggling to accept until his resignation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 628 | Loc. 13015-21  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:26 PM

In Watergate lore, however, June 20, 1972, is mainly remembered as the date of the infamous “eighteen-and-a-half-minute” gap in one of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, which later investigations proved was a deliberate erasure. Many authors have speculated as to why that portion of that particular tape, a conversation between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, was erased when other very incriminating tapes were not, such as the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape, whose release forced Nixon’s resignation. A close look at all of Nixon’s activities that day, and what he would have been talking about to aides, helps to show why that tape was probably erased—and why it isn’t the only record of Nixon’s talks that day that is missing.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 629 | Loc. 13037-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:28 PM

Nixon may have decided to tell John Ehrlichman a little about the CIA-Mafia plots, because after his time alone, Nixon met with him. Nixon later wrote that Watergate wasn’t talked about at the meeting, but Ehrlichman says it was briefly discussed, along with wiretapping. As Summers points out, “no tape of that meeting has ever been produced. The tape of the President’s next meeting that morning, with Haldeman,” contains the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Prosecution and White House experts “would later conclude that the tape’s long stretch of buzzing, clicks, and pops reflected a series of overlapping erasures. Someone had manually set the machine to erase at least five times, suggesting that tape was intentionally wiped.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 630 | Loc. 13053-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:29 PM

In a matter that has never been explained, Dan Moldea found that just “fifty-three minutes” after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, “Nixon placed a long-distance call to . . . an associate of Anthony Provenzano . . . that lasted only one minute.” Provenzano had been part of both Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, for Jimmy Hoffa’s December 1971 release and also in September 1960 (at the same time the CIA-Mafia plots with Johnny Rosselli were beginning).56 Nixon and Haldeman had another conversation four hours after the one with the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, which Nixon started by asking, “Have you gotten any further on that Mitchell operation?” That remark demonstrates that Nixon felt John Mitchell was really running, at a high level, the Plumbers operation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 631 | Loc. 13068-78  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:31 PM

That evening, “Nixon spoke on the telephone with John Mitchell,” the first officially documented “contact between the two since the Watergate arrests.” Nixon said they discussed Watergate, and Mitchell essentially apologized, saying that he was “terribly chagrined that the activities of anybody attached to his committee should have been handled in such a manner and that he only regretted that he had not policed all of the people more effectively.” However, no recording was made of the call, supposedly “because the call had been placed on a line from the president’s private quarters, one that was not hooked into the recording system”—at least, that was what Nixon later told one of his attorneys. Eventually, it was discovered “that Nixon had made a note of the [unrecorded Mitchell] conversation on the Dictabelt machine on which he recorded his daily diary.” Even in Nixon’s own summary of his conversation with Mitchell, “there is a forty-two-second break in the dictation,” and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force stated that Nixon’s “Dictabelt appears to have been tampered with” at the time of the break. The tampering was likely because Mitchell’s apology—or Nixon’s comment about it on the Dictabelt—might have included a reference to the fact Nixon had ordered a reluctant Mitchell to approve the whole political espionage plan in the first place.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 13092-97  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:32 PM

Nixon’s evening call to Haldeman then veered into “the Bay of Pigs thing” again, in a way that left Haldeman perplexed. The President ordered Haldeman to “tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.” A confused Haldeman asked, “The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to do with this?” Nixon simply said, “Ehrlichman will know what I mean.” This might help to explain Nixon’s unrecorded call to Ehrlichman earlier that day. Recall that Ehrlichman had taken the lead in trying to get Helms to give Nixon the Bay of Pigs material starting in 1969, soon after Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General had checked out the Justice Department’s file on the CIA-Mafia plots involving Johnny Rosselli.61
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 633 | Loc. 13112-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:59 PM

A review of all of Nixon’s known comments and meetings yields clues about what might have been talked about during the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on June 20. The press’s naming of Hunt, particularly his leading role in the Bay of Pigs operation, seems to have been a concern for Nixon that day. In addition, two of the unrecorded calls from that day involved Mitchell, who knew about the CIA-Mafia plots, and Ehrlichman, who apparently knew more about the Bay of Pigs matter—a euphemism for the CIA-Mafia plots—than Haldeman. The call to the Provenzano associate less than an hour after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap also raises the possibility that the gap concerned one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, which were known by John Mitchell. So, it appears likely that the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap—like other conversations that day—involved some discussion about Hunt and something about the Bay of Pigs (which to Nixon meant the CIA-Mafia plots); it could have also included a reference or allusion to one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 636 | Loc. 13177-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:05 PM

On June 23, 1972, in three meetings, Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman discussed the Watergate cover-up extensively on what has come to be known as the “Smoking Gun” tape. Nixon was very receptive to using the CIA to block the FBI investigation because he knew secrets about the CIA, Hunt, and Richard Helms that his aides like Haldeman and Dean didn’t know or only suspected. In a way, we’re lucky that the “Smoking Gun” tape exists at all, and that it involved a conversation with Haldeman—as opposed to the more-informed Mitchell, who already knew about the CIA-Mafia plots. Nixon, not wanting to spread the knowledge of those plots further than it already had been disseminated, kept having to repeatedly imply things about Helms, Hunt, and the plots to Haldeman, leaving a revealing audio trail. Dean and Gray’s suggestion was to use the protection of a possible Mexican CIA operation as the excuse to have the CIA limit the FBI investigation, but Nixon quickly went in a very different and telling direction. Nixon’s comments on the tape about the CIA weren’t fully appreciated when it was finally made public on August 5, 1974, because just the fact that it showed Nixon was actively involved in the cover-up forced the President to resign three days later, on August 8. In addition, the CIA-Mafia plots wouldn’t become widely known and documented until the year after the tape’s release, and the CIA would continue to withhold important information about the plots for decades after that.70
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 637 | Loc. 13194-211  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

    PRESIDENT NIXON: All right, fine . . . you call him in, I mean you just—well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.     PRESIDENT NIXON: Of course, this Hunt will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.     PRESIDENT NIXON: When you get these people [Helms and Walters] say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing and the President just feels that . . . The President’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the good of the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period . . .     PRESIDENT NIXON: Hunt . . . knows too damn much and he was involved, we have to know that. And that it gets out . . . this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it’s a fiasco, and it’s going to make the FB—ah CIA—look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and its likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy and he’s [Helms] just gotta tell ’em “lay off.”     PRESIDENT NIXON: I would just say, “Look it’s because of the Hunt involvement.”72 Clearly, Nixon has his own agenda here, one to pressure Helms by using Hunt’s involvement in “the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 638 | Loc. 13211-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

Of course, Hunt’s leading role in the actual Bay of Pigs invasion and even his cover identity as “Eduardo” had already been announced in The New York Times three days earlier, so that wasn’t a secret any more. What was left to “blow” about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” that involved Helms (and Nixon) except the CIA-Mafia plots?
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 639 | Loc. 13226-31  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:09 PM

Nixon apparently wanted Helms to help him solve two problems. First, to use the CIA to limit the FBI’s investigation. The second problem was that Nixon no longer had a way to find out more about—or stop the leak of—the Cuban Dossier and anything it might say about Nixon’s role in the CIA-Mafia plots. That could still be devastating if it came out before the election, especially if it caused journalists and investigators to look for other ties between Nixon and the mob. Nixon seemed to want Helms to take responsibility for the Cuban Dossier matter as well, and appears to be trying to convey that through Haldeman.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 640 | Loc. 13237-41  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:10 PM

As for Nixon’s comment that “we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon later said he was referring to his help for Helms regarding suppressing parts of Victor Marchetti’s book. But Nixon didn’t say “one thing” on the tape, he said “one hell of a lot of things,” which led investigators to wonder what else Nixon could have been referring to. Helms’s Chilean and domestic spying operations had all been done for Nixon, so those hardly seem like instances in which Nixon “protected” Helms. Congressional investigator Michael Ewing looked at the matter in a report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 642 | Loc. 13283-88  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:14 PM

Helms went along with Nixon’s request, writing a memo to Walters saying that the CIA was requesting the FBI to “confine themselves to the personalities already arrested . . . and that they desist from expanding the investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” In later years, Richard Helms would make a point of telling journalists that he had never succumbed to pressure to get the FBI to back off from its Watergate investigation, something repeated by many journalists and several historians. But the record clearly shows Helms did call off the FBI, at least for a time.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13343-48  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:34 PM

In a June 30, 1972, meeting, the President told Haldeman “About this fellow [Hunt]—I mean, after all, the gun [found in Hunt’s White House office safe] and the wiretapping doesn’t bother me a bit with this fellow. He’s in the Cuban thing, the whole Cuban business.” In transcripts of Nixon’s taped conversations days after the Plumbers’ arrests, when Colson told Nixon on July 1, 1972, that Hunt had “certainly done a lot of hot stuff . . . Oh, Jesus. He pulled a lot of very fancy stuff in the sixties,” that was followed by a notice from the National Archives: “[Withdrawn item. National security.]” After the censored portion, Nixon then said, “If anything ever happens to him, be sure that he blows the whistle, [on] the whole Bay of Pigs.”4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13349-54  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:35 PM

In addition to the hush money flowing to Hunt and the others from Kalmbach and White House operatives, there was also another channel of money. Nixon had wanted Bebe Rebozo to set up a fund for “the boys,” but it had to be done in a deniable way that could not be traced to the President. That task fell to Manuel Artime, an office tenant in Rebozo’s mob-built shopping center. Lukas wrote that Artime “formed an informal committee to aide the Miami defendants.” He pointed out since Artime was “a leader of the Cuban exile community and the godfather of Hunt’s youngest son, he was an ideal man to assume the role” of a hush money paymaster without arousing suspicion.5
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13359-63  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Artime’s assistant at the time, Milian Rodriguez, said that the amounts Artime distributed to Barker and the others were much larger than most investigators realized. As documented by PBS, Milian Rodriguez later used the skills he first learned with Artime by handling the Watergate hush money to become one of Miami’s largest drug traffickers. Artime would have to testify to the Watergate grand jury, but he would never be charged for his Watergate involvement or for his drug trafficking (documented in earlier chapters).6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13364-67  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

It was initially difficult to get the Watergate defendants’ attorneys to take the envelopes stuffed with cash. Finally, after two weeks, Hunt’s second attorney—William Bittman—“accepted a bizarre delivery of $25,000 in an envelope left on a ledge in the downstairs lobby of” his law firm. Bittman had been a Mafia prosecutor for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department before leaving in 1967 to enter private practice.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13367-68  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Liddy had no qualms about accepting the hush money, and a money drop for him was arranged “at National Airport, where the cash was in a luggage locker.”7
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13369-71  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, gave the White House money courier “a five-month ‘budget’ for all seven men involved [that] totaled $450,000,” while Hunt sent Colson a personal note saying that “re-electing the President” was of “overwhelming importance [and] you may be confident that I will do all that is required of me toward that end.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 650 | Loc. 13446-49  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:43 PM

British researcher John Simkin compiled a list of the mistakes committed by each of those involved with the burglaries, which showed that while McCord committed seven critical errors, so had G. Gordon Liddy, who had no connection to the CIA. Simkin listed Barker as committing six critical errors, along with eight by Hunt. Fiorini himself committed several key errors, including the final taping of the garage stairwell door and insisting the burglary go forward even if it required the time-consuming step of removing the rear door to the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 652 | Loc. 13483-84  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:45 PM

In that same conservation with Dean, Nixon revealed his own thinking that played a role in the Watergate scandal, when he said that “Espionage and sabotage is illegal only if against the government.”19
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13548-50  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:49 PM

However, Walter Sheridan didn’t release or leak any of the Hoffa information during the campaign, and it’s not known why. In addition, Walter Sheridan was spectacularly unsuccessful in bringing media attention to the Watergate story.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13554-55  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:50 PM

Regardless of the reason, a huge opportunity was lost for Watergate and the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa relationship to become issues in the final months of the 1972 campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 663 | Loc. 13709-10  | Added on Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 04:40 PM

Now that Nixon had won reelection and faced no more campaigns, his fears about whatever Helms could release about his past were greatly diminished.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13729-31  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:13 AM

his firing of CIA Director Richard Helms meant that the dark undercurrent of crime and corruption just below the surface of Nixon’s carefully crafted public image would soon start to become exposed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13733-38  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

His approval rating in a Gallup poll was 68 percent, and three days after he took his second oath of office, his peace deal for Vietnam became final. The settlement was reached after a massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam that Nixon had begun in December, along with intense pressure from Nixon on President Thieu, still the U.S.-backed dictator of South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson had died the day before the peace deal took effect, and Nixon could claim public credit for ending what he liked to depict as Johnson’s war. Henry Kissinger was awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts (with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho), an honor Nixon might have shared had he not withdrawn his name from consideration.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13743-44  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

Alexander Haig returned to the Pentagon, as the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, where he was said to have been “catapulted by Nixon over the heads of two hundred senior officers.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13745-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:15 AM

As a result of all those shifts, John Dean became a “central figure” in Nixon’s second-term White House. After only having three meetings with Nixon in the first eight months of 1972, Dean would soon have “31 meetings and telephone calls with Nixon” in less than a one-month span, starting in late February.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 666 | Loc. 13767-72  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:17 AM

In a bizarre scenario that brought together Watergate and Nixon’s Hoffa bribes, “on February 10-11, 1973 . . . two meetings were held simultaneously on the grounds” of the La Costa Country Club in Southern California: one for Nixon’s aides plotting their Watergate cover-up strategy and the other between Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons and several Mafia leaders. One of the owners of the 5,600-acre posh La Costa resort was mobster Moe Dalitz, who had sold Howard Hughes his first Las Vegas casino in the deal brokered by Johnny Rosselli (see Chapter 19).
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13782-87  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:20 AM

Moldea interviewed “two former Nixon aides” who “confirm[ed] that the La Costa meetings were regarded as ‘very strange’ even by other members of the Nixon staff.” One aide explained that “the meetings were going on in a setting which obviously had the Secret Service, FBI, and Justice people climbing the wall . . . I say it was no secret. What I still don’t know is if it was no accident.” Another aide said that “Word came down from Haldeman to the Secret Service to make sure the agents for that trip kept their mouths shut—about the appearance of impropriety of these [meetings] being held in the midst of Fitzsimmons’s Apalachin affair”—a reference to the historic mob conference described in Chapter 4.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13800-13803  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:21 AM

However, the Fitzsimmons-Mafia meeting, followed by the Nixon-Fitzsimmons Air Force One meeting and Nixon’s Attorney General ending the surveillance on the company involved in the new multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, raises the possibility that Nixon’s January 1973 $500,000 payment was also part of a new deal between Nixon, Fitzsimmons, and the Mafia.9
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13806-14  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:23 AM

Frank Fitzsimmons then pressured the Teamsters’ current attorney—Edward Bennett Williams, Califano’s partner—to drop the DNC lawsuit against CREEP. When Williams refused, Fitzsimmons “fired Williams and gave the $100,000-a-year business to Colson” and his law partner.10 Was Nixon being arrogant in continuing his illegal dealings with Fitzsimmons and the Mafia in his new term, since he would not have to face another election? Was the relatively young President simply interested in accumulating as much money as possible, looking ahead to his post-Presidency years? According to the Time article, Nixon might have just been being practical. It pointed out the “crucial timing” that just three days before Colson received the $500,000 authorized by Fitzsimmons, Dorfman, and Provenzano, there had been a meeting between [E. Howard] Hunt’s lawyer and Colson” regarding “demands for payoffs by [the] Watergate” figure.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13817-22  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:24 AM

Though Helms had been of little help to Hunt since the burglaries, the possibility of help had remained as long as Helms was Director, plus Hunt knew enough about Helms that he could always force the issue, if need be. Now, that possibility no longer existed. Hunt had been trying to exert pressure on the White House and Charles Colson since November, in an attempt to have them live up to their promises of hush money, expense money, and lawyers’ fees for himself and the other defendants. His wife, Dorothy Hunt, played a major role in helping to solicit and distribute funds, often giving money to Manuel Artime so he could disburse it to the Cuban exile defendants and Frank Fiorini.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13822-26  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:25 AM

On December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had flown to Chicago, carrying $10,000 in cash in $100 bills, the same type of money she’d been distributing to the other defendants “for more than four months.” On its approach to “Chicago’s Midway Airport through drizzle and fog . . . the plane suddenly nose-dived into a neighborhood . . . a mile and a half short of [the] runway . . . Forty-three of the fifty-five people on board were killed, including Mrs. Hunt.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13836-40  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:26 AM

Some have thought it suspicious that Egil Krogh moved to the Department of Transportation as an Undersecretary a month after the crash. The same might apply to Alexander Butterfield’s appointment in March 1973 to become Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, where The New York Times reported that Butterfield “read all the accident reports himself.” However, Nixon probably just wanted his people in place so he could know immediately if information about his hush money surfaced in the FAA’s crash investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13856-59  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

According to Dean, “on January 5 Colson met with him and Ehrlichman . . . and reported that the had indeed given Bittman a ‘general assurance’ that Hunt would get clemency” from Nixon. The next day, according to the FBI, Colson got the Mafia-Teamsters bribe of $500,000 for Nixon.16 The
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13862-68  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

It’s interesting that Hunt received special treatment from Nixon over the other defendants, with the President saying in a conversation with Colson on January 8, 1973, that when it came to clemency, “I would have difficulty with some of the others.” Nixon agreed with Colson’s line of reasoning that the others “can’t hurt us [but] Hunt and Liddy [had] direct meetings, discussions [that] are very incriminating to us.”17 Colson was wrong when he said the other Watergate defendants “can’t hurt us,” because the firing of CIA Director Richard Helms had apparently been the last straw for Agency veteran James McCord. Unlike Hunt, McCord was strongly resisting the White House pressure to plead guilty to avoid a trial.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 672 | Loc. 13889-92  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:31 AM

Along with Liddy, McCord stood trial in front of Judge John Sirica—a conservative Republican judge known for his harsh sentences—who seemed determined to get to the bottom of the Watergate morass. “At a pretrial hearing [Judge Sirica] put the prosecutors on notice that they had to get to the bottom of who had hired the men to go into the Watergate. ‘The jury is going to want to know: . . . What did these men go into that headquarters for?’”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13906-10  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:32 AM

Helms didn’t destroy the only copy of the IG Report because it had left out so much crucial information, and all of its supporting files had already been destroyed in 1967. When coupled with that earlier file destruction, Helms’s 1973 housecleaning put some details about the CIA-Mafia plots permanently beyond the reach of easily documented history. However, some top secret operations that involved Helms—like AMWORLD—were so large that many related files probably still exist.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13917-20  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

It was perhaps poetic justice for Richard Helms that on February 7, 1973—five days after he finished destroying files and had stepped down as CIA Director—Helms found himself testifying to Congress when the subject of Chile came up. Helms lied when asked if the CIA had provided help to those who opposed Allende in Chile. Helms had lied to Congress before, about Chile and other matters, but it would be that particular false statement that would eventually bring him a criminal conviction.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13923-24  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

Helms’s testimony about Barker’s mob ties would not be released for more than a year, after All the President’s Men had been completed, which kept Barker’s criminal connections from becoming part of the conventional story of Watergate.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 674 | Loc. 13945-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:35 AM

as the scandal unfolded, only one largely ignored article mentioned an important part of Hunt’s back-ground that Helms had withheld from investigators: Hunt’s work on the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in the mid-1960s. Tad Szulc’s February 1973 Esquire magazine article—on the stands in January, before Helms began his housecleaning—briefly described those operations.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 675 | Loc. 13959-64  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:43 AM

In the interview, Haynes told Sprague that “A meeting was held on Nov. 22, 1963 in Wash[ington] D.C. to discuss plans for Cuban operation . . . it was the most important meeting they had . . . at [the] meeting were [CIA Executive Director Lyman] Kirkpatrick, Helms, Hunt, and Williams. Word of [JFK’s] assassination came in [during the] meeting.” Haynes knew something had been about to happen with Cuba, but he hadn’t been told about Almeida or the coup plan. If any of Haynes’s information involving Hunt and Helms had become widely known at that time, it would have radically changed the Watergate investigations. Instead, when some of the interview was finally published in a small newsletter in 1975—after Watergate had faded from the headlines—it passed without notice.30
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 676 | Loc. 13975-79  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:44 AM

In the ten years since JFK’s murder, Williams had learned about Barker’s ties to godfather Santo Trafficante and had come to believe that Barker had sold out the coup plan to Trafficante, and that both men had played a role in JFK’s assassination. Now, Williams saw that Barker was involved with Hunt, James McCord, and other notable Cuban exiles in Watergate. Williams also heard in Miami’s Cuban exile community about the efforts of his former friend and rival, Manuel Artime, to provide financial assistance to the burglars. Hunt, McCord, Barker, Artime, and Watergate—it seemed beyond coincidence.
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- Highlight on Page 678 | Loc. 14010-15  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:47 AM

In addition to Joseph Califano’s DNC lawsuit against CREEP being overseen by Judge Richey, Califano also had to represent The Washington Post when Nixon had CREEP try to subpoena Woodward, Bernstein, Post editor Howard Simons, and Post owner Katherine Graham. CREEP also demanded all of “their notes, internal memoranda, and phone logs,” since “CREEP wanted to uncover the identity of the reporters’ anonymous source or sources.” Nixon and Haldeman already knew that Mark Felt was providing information to the Post, but they couldn’t be sure of how much or if other officials might be doing the same.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 679 | Loc. 14042-53  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:50 AM

McCord might have felt free to act because of Richard Helms’s firing from the CIA. Helms was preparing to assume his post as Ambassador to Iran, and an outsider, loyal to Nixon, now ran McCord’s beloved Agency. There were still many CIA secrets McCord would protect, but McCord viewed Watergate as a Nixon White House operation, “not a CIA operation.” As McCord would later testify, he “believed that President Nixon gave the final approval, and set the Watergate operation in motion.”42 It’s not known what other Nixon crimes McCord may have become aware of or suspected, or heard about from Hunt. McCord wrote in his book that Hunt had “information which would impeach the President.” In his Watergate book, McCord did go out of his way to decry “the volume of heroin illegally entering the U.S.,” but there is no indication if he ever learned about or suspected the Trafficante-linked money that Al Haig’s Army investigation would uncover the following year. McCord saw himself as different from his fellow ex-CIA officer Hunt, and certainly from Fiorini and Barker, and seems to have resented having to work with—and being lumped in with—the latter. In his letter to Sirica, McCord was careful to stress that “my motivations were different than those of the others involved, but were not limited to . . . those offered in my defense during the trial.” In his book, McCord doesn’t make clear exactly what those motivations were, or why he got involved in a seemingly purely political operation.43
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 681 | Loc. 14070-75  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:52 AM

However, Nixon’s main focus the following day was on E. Howard Hunt, and making sure Hunt had enough hush money to remain silent even after he was sentenced. On March 21, 1973, Nixon talked with John Dean about the matter, in the famous conversation that began with Dean telling Nixon, “We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing.” As mentioned earlier, this is the conversation where Nixon told Dean that “Your major guy to keep under control is Hunt. Because he knows . . . about a lot of other things.” The two discussed the fact that some of the money had gone through “the cover of a Cuban Committee,” the one Nixon had planned to use Rebozo for but that had actually been implemented by Cuban exile Manuel Artime.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Dean told Nixon that keeping Hunt and the others quiet will “cost money. It’s dangerous. Nobody, nothing—people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that . . . we just don’t know about those things . . . we are not criminals.” The irony of the last statement is lost on Nixon and Dean, who then told the President, “these people are gong to cost, huh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”47 After a pause, President Nixon told Dean: We could get that . . . if you need the money . . . you could get the money . . . What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten . . . I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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McCord’s revelations invigorated the recently created Senate Watergate Committee investigation and gave the Committee its first star witness. Suddenly, the entire American press corps was putting the Watergate story on its front pages, and the drumbeat of pressure on Nixon would continue to mount over the coming months. Now that McCord had made it clear that higher-ups were involved, some of Nixon’s aides began reassessing their own positions. On April 12, 1972, there was another breakthrough when former Nixon aide Jeb Magruder confessed to U.S. Attorneys that he had committed perjury in his earlier testimony. Just four days prior to that, John Dean had begun talking to Watergate prosecutors. The day after Dean met with the prosecutors, Nixon told Haldeman they ought to get rid of the White House tapes, but nothing was done and Nixon continued his recording. However, Nixon greatly increased his use of the tapes to try to spin or simply lie about past events to new and old aides.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To divert blame and responsibility from himself, Nixon had to use the strategy of essentially blaming Watergate on his staff, implying they might not have supervised their underlings properly. To make that approach work, he would have to take dramatic action by shaking up his staff and top officials. After much soul-searching and emotion, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman they would have to go. On April 30, 1973, in a dramatic speech, Nixon announced their resignations, while calling them “two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.” That same day, Nixon also announced the resignations of John Dean and Attorney General Kleindienst. L. Patrick Gray had resigned three days earlier, so William Ruckelshaus left the Environmental Protection Agency (the creation of which was one of Nixon’s most notable domestic achievements) to become the new FBI Director.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Haig would play a crucial role in essentially running the country in Nixon’s last months in office, before helping to engineer the President’s resignation.1
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Hunt was still torn between wanting a reduced sentence from Sirica and wanting his promised clemency from President Nixon, so in his testimony he only implicated Nixon aides, not the President.3
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The same day as McCord’s explosive testimony, Archibald Cox was chosen by acting Attorney General Eliot Richardson to be the Watergate Special Prosecutor; both Cox and Richardson were sworn in the following week. Cox had been the Solicitor General during John F. Kennedy’s administration, and the tapes show that Nixon soon regarded Cox as “an adversary,” and the President had no intention of cooperating with Cox’s investigation.4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Bernard Barker testified to Ervin’s Watergate Committee on May 24, 1973, but he was not asked anything about his Mafia ties. The Senate and House Watergate Committees only had access to some FBI information, not the Bureau’s full file, so the subject of his organized crime ties wasn’t raised to Barker, and the same was true when the Committee questioned Frank Fiorini. That meant that organized crime was completely missing from the public Watergate hearings, which was ironic, since the chief investigator for Ervin’s Watergate Committee was Carmine Bellino, who had worked on organized crime cases for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. Before that, Bellino had been an investigator for the Senate crime hearings in the late 1950s that had propelled John F. Kennedy to prominence (Senator Sam Ervin had been on that committee with JFK). In the mid-1950s, Bellino had also been partners for a time with Robert Maheu, which would put him in an unusual and potentially awkward position the following year, once Maheu—and the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli—became a quiet subject of investigation by the Watergate Committee.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The day before Butterfield’s testimony, Thompson admitted in his own autobiographical Watergate book that “‘Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home’ to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system. ‘I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action.’” In contrast to that questionable act, Thompson would later take the lead in investigating the CIA’s withholding of important information from the Committee, which raised important unanswered questions about the CIA,
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The battle for the tapes that pitted the Senate Watergate Committee and Special Prosecutor Cox against the White House intensified, and would last for another year. In response, Nixon tried to counterattack in various ways. Haldeman, still apparently hoping for clemency from Nixon in the future, was still not being honest in his testimony and claimed “that the tapes he had listened to proved that Nixon was telling the truth” about his lack of involvement in Watergate and the cover-up.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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In a matter that didn’t involve Watergate, Nixon had been told six months earlier that Agnew was under investigation by the Justice Department. In August, “The Wall Street Journal [had] reported that Agnew was suspected of extortion, bribery, and tax evasion [involving] kickbacks paid by contractors architects and engineers” to Baltimore and Maryland officials. As noted earlier, when Nixon had chosen the racially divisive Agnew as his running mate, he knew “that his running mate was corrupt,” so the news of Agnew’s crimes should have been no surprise. On October 9, 1973, Vice President Agnew told Nixon that he was resigning, after striking a “deal with the Justice Department [to plead] nolo contendere to one count of having knowingly failed to report income for tax purposes.” Agnew would get “three years probation and a $10,000 fine [and] no further prosecution.”21 On October 12, 1973, Nixon chose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford as his new Vice President.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To Nixon’s way of thinking, Agnew’s resignation somehow gave him an excuse to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, so the President said, “Now that we’ve taken care of Agnew, we can get rid of Cox.” The Special Prosecutor had been pressing for the tapes for several months, and he was reported to be investigating Nixon’s financial affairs with Bebe Rebozo, so Nixon felt he had to be removed.22 On Saturday, October 20, 1973, a critical part of the Watergate saga began. Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Cox. However, Richardson resigned rather than obey Nixon’s orders. Richardson’s deputy, former FBI Director William Ruckelshaus, also resigned. That left “Solicitor General Robert Bork . . . temporarily promoted to acting Attorney General, [to] obediently [send] the letter of dismissal” to Cox. The dramatic resignations and the firing of Cox became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.”23
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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However, because Jaworski emerged with more power than Cox, his appointment marked another milestone. Nixon had lost control of the Watergate investigation, which was now centered on the tapes. If he lost control of the tapes, Nixon knew his Presidency was over. That process began three days after the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon agreed to comply with an appeals court ruling to turn over seven tapes that had been subpoenaed by Sirica’s court, for the grand jury.26
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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There are several reasons why the Nixon-Rebozo financial entanglements didn’t become a huge scandal in the following months. An investigative report in Rolling Stone reported that “Bebe Rebozo escaped indictment in Watergate despite strong circumstantial evidence of tax evasion and bribe taking. One reason, according to CIA sources, is that CIA officials sanctioned his plea of ‘national security’ when the Special Prosecutor’s office began investigating Rebozo’s” business affairs. (Rebozo’s only real “national security” activity had been money laundering for the Bay of Pigs.) In addition, Rebozo sued The Washington Post for “ten million dollars in damages” for its stock story, and he then dragged the case out for a decade, until a settlement was reached (in which the Post paid Rebozo no damages). Rebozo’s suit eventually had a chilling effect on other news outlets, so his financial crimes and Mafia ties were soon rarely mentioned in the press. In short, Rebozo and Nixon had enough money to make reporting the Nixon-Rebozo story very expensive for media outlets—at a time when there was plenty of other Watergate news to cover.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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A new Watergate scandal erupted on December 7, 1973, when the public learned about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on Nixon’s June 20, 1972, tape. Though Nixon had turned over the seven subpoenaed tapes, only three had been sent to the grand jury, since he was claiming executive privilege on four, which remained with Sirica. Nixon knew that other tapes would be subpoenaed, so he was having them transcribed for his own use and reference. As part of that process, Nixon’s lawyers had first learned about the mysterious gap on November 14, and they waited a week before telling Judge Sirica.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The Committee investigators concluded their memo by saying that “the obsession of the Administration . . . on Larry O’Brien in 1971 and 1972 . . . was in part motivated by a fear that Maheu would impart some of this sensitive information about the plot to O’Brien . . . and these concerns could have been a possible motivation for the break-in to the office of the DNC and Larry O’Brien . . . especially since their directions were to photograph any documents relating to Cuban contributions or Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” Clearly, the investigators were getting very close to uncovering the Plumbers’ goal of the Cuban Dossier, which could easily fall into the category of “Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” They end the memo by saying “it is for these reasons that we wish to question John Rosselli about the nature and scope of his activities with Robert Maheu in the early 1960s.”38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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As a result, the fact that Rosselli had been interviewed by Watergate investigators at all—let alone the fact that he was viewed as key to the Watergate burglar’s motivation—remained largely unknown. Woodward and Bernstein had finished the manuscript for All the President’s Men the previous month, so it contained nothing about Rosselli or the Mafia.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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By the spring of 1974, the battle over Watergate had become a battle for the tapes that would decide Nixon’s fate, since impeachment was now a very real possibility. Earlier in the year, Special Prosecutor Jaworski had “requested twenty-two more tapes,” but Nixon had turned him down. (Unknown to Nixon, on February 25, after the President had refused to talk to the Watergate grand jury, it had named Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” though that wouldn’t become public for almost four months.) Jaworski soon subpoenaed “sixty-four more tapes,” and he included in his request the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape. Naturally, Nixon didn’t comply.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To deal with legal, Congressional, press, and public pressure, Nixon decided to release edited transcripts of forty-six of his White House tapes. The effort became an intense, mad dash by Nixon and his aides to release enough to make it look like a good faith effort, without revealing anything criminal. Worried about the outcome, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler “assigned his two personal assistants—Diane Sawyer and Frank Gannon, to review the editing and report back to him.” Diane Sawyer was “dismayed at the sloppy presentation [where] lines spoken by the President were mistakenly divided and attributed in part to Ehrlichman.” Much worse was the fact that “certain passages referred back to matters that had been excised [and] could not fail to convey the impression that the really damaging parts had been eliminated.” Sawyer and Gannon “pleaded for more time” to prepare things more properly.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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When Nixon revealed the tape transcripts to the nation in a televised address on April 29, 1974, they were in neat, uniform, nicely bound volumes that belied the problems within. Criminal references had been removed, and some tapes—like the June 23 “Smoking Gun” tape—were withheld entirely. So the tape battles continued, and pressure continued to mount on Nixon to release more.
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As the House Judiciary Committee began to consider impeachment more seriously, it hired additional staff. One of those added was twenty-six-year-old Hillary Rodham, thanks to a recommendation by one of her professors, Burke Marshall, who had served in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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she was responsible for drawing up highly restrictive rules of procedure that were to govern the impeachment process.” In addition, she helped “to oversee the preparation of a confidential history of Presidential abuse of power.” The thinking was “that Nixon would mount a defense to the effect that actions in the Watergate affair were not inconsistent with those of many previous administrations.”
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