202. Watergate: The CIA Conspiracy (Ep 1)

0:00for exclusive interviews bonus episodes ad-free listening early access to series first look at live show tickets a weekly newsletter and discounted books join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com Was the CIA behind the Watergate break-in and cover-up? And why did CIA technicians hand one of the burglars a wig, a driving licence and a camera hidden in a tobacco pouch? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And David, today we begin a four-part series on the CIA and Watergate. Most of us know the outlines of the story, the break in the cover-up, and the resignation of a president of the United States. But what people may not realise is that this is a spy story.

1:00And we're going to be exploring some of the big questions around it, some of which are still debated and resonate today. How involved was the CIA? Did the CIA have a direct role in the break-in and what role did it play in the cover-up? Was it a participant or was it used and manipulated? What does that tell us about the relationship between presidents and spymasters? I think there are some very interesting parallels to today and some of those questions and debates about the deep state and what presidents can get spies to do. To set up this story, we're going to begin with the man who's occupying the White House at the time, Richard Nixon. But first, a word from our sponsors, HP. where information leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle

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4:26President Nixon. No one calls him Tricky Dicky. Is that a British way to describe Richard Nixon? It might be. President Nixon. We should give him his full title. We should ask Dominic Sandbrook what he refers to him by. Any spy story that starts with Richard Nixon, we know is going to have a happy ending. It's going to be good. All right. So Nixon, important to set up who he is and his personality because I think so much of, as we'll see, the illegality and the paranoia and the chaos, I think, come out of his personality. So Nixon comes from nothing. He's born in 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon's a Quaker. Doesn't give off Quaker vibes. He comes from a Quaker family. He is whip smart.

5:06He is ambitious. He gets into Harvard and then famously cannot afford to go. Goes to Whittier College instead. Not quite Harvard. Then he goes to Duke Law. He applies to a whole bunch of New York law firms. He's rejected. He's got a chip on his shoulder. He's got a big chip. A big chip on his shoulder. Also applies to be an FBI special agent. Wow. Also rejected. Wow. By the Pheebs. He's one of these guys who is kind of part of the establishment, but always feels like he's knocking on the door. He's just outside. And they're not letting him in. Right. Yeah. Nixon's elected to Congress in 1946, makes his name famously by being an anti-communist crusader. He's part of the House Un-American Activities Committee. One of the best

5:51House Committee names, I think, of all the various committees. Which is the McCarthyites investigating the Reds and the communists under the bed. Now, that makes him nationally known. He's elected to the Senate in 1950. Eisenhower makes him vice president in 1952. Nixon's only 39 when that happens. Now, in 1960, after his run as VP, he narrowly loses the election to JFK. Very narrowly. Very narrowly. And I think this is where a very practical grievance against the Central Intelligence Agency comes in, because Nixon suspects that there has been essentially election fraud in Illinois, and also that the CIA has helped Kennedy win. And of course, Kennedy is this kind of golden boy, been to Harvard, military service,

6:41and the CIA is full of those kind of people. So I think he sees them both as kind of the enemy already, doesn't he? Or at least part of the problem that he's against. I think there's definitely a cultural gap because at this point in time, a huge number of the people who comprise the CIA are Ivy educated, Northeastern kind of waspy, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And here's Nixon, who's this kind of semi-outsider Quaker background, got into an Ivy, but then couldn't go. Gets rejected by all these New York law firms that were feeders into the CIA back in this era. So culturally, he's outside. We also have, you know, I think this interesting issue during the 1960 election where Nixon thinks that CIA briefings to Kennedy in advance of the

7:29election have given Kennedy ammunition that he can use against him. So there's a very cultural, I think, gap between Nixon and the CIA. And there's also a practical one in that he feels like, I mean, he doesn't call it the deep state, but he feels like there's sort of enemies within the CIA against him. Nixon, he loses, obviously, the 1960 election, and then essentially wanders the political wilderness. It looks like he's done, but he comes back. He makes an improbable comeback and wins the 1968 election on the back of some chaos in the Republican field, the assassination of a very popular presumed Democratic nominee, RFK. And then Nixon also promises on the foreign policy kind of spectrum that he is going to finally be the one to deliver

8:16a peace deal in Vietnam. Interesting. First, maybe a few little parallels. Someone who loses a presidential election and comes back a few years later and wins one, maybe a little bit reminiscent of a current president of the United States, just saying. Who may have some interesting thoughts about the Central Intelligence Agency, the people who work inside of it. Just drawing a small parallel there. So he comes back slightly different, doesn't he? He comes back a slightly angrier, more determined figure, but he's also quite odd, isn't he? Yeah, he's kind of an odd guy. I love getting into this because the details of Nixon's life in the White House give you a sense of the man. Nixon eats the same lunch nearly every day of his presidency, which I guess

9:03it's very similar to your lunch. It is. It's identical. A ring of tinned pineapple, cottage cheese, crackers, and a glass of milk. Yeah. I tend to have sherry. Right. Yeah. Nearly. The cottage cheese is flown to Washington every week from a dairy in California that he prefers. And Nixon also, he can't really hold his booze. Two drinks totally tip him over. He's probably depressed throughout his life. He took Dilantin. He takes sleeping pills. He's very alone. Yeah. He bowls alone. He walks alone. He takes vacations alone. Human connection is not something that Richard Milhouse Nixon excels at. He seems to have had only two real friends throughout his life. As one does, it's a Florida laundromat owner turned banker and the guy who invented the aerosol valve.

9:50So he is keeping interesting company. Great story. When Nixon goes on a fishing trip for the first time, he comes aboard the boat with his briefcase and works in silence throughout the fishing trip. He doesn't know how to spell the name of one of his aides, a guy who's going to feature prominently in the story, Ehrlichman. He's a Nixon guy and Nixon doesn't know how to spell his name and just writes it E. His chief of staff will later say that he doesn't think Nixon knew how many kids he had. So he's a loner, but he's also getting quite paranoid, isn't he? I mean, I think there's always an element of paranoia in him, but that's going to intensify, I think, after the loss in 1960 and as he comes back in 68 as president.

10:39Running theme of this four-part series, spoiler alert, will be that Nixon and the White House around him believe they are besieged, that there are enemies everywhere. I think the style carries over into his foreign policy as well. For example, during his term very early on, he authorizes this secret bombing of Cambodia right next door to Vietnam. This is concealed from the public. It's concealed from Congress. It's even concealed from the air crews on the bombing runs. Only the pilots and the navigators know what country they're bombing. And then in May of 1969, about four months into his presidency, the New York Times covers the story. They break the story. And by this time, the administration

11:20is also keeping close tabs on the number of leaks. They think there have been 21 serious leaks at this point. Nixon, in his very charming way, says, what is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it and fire him. So Nixon's language is quite fruity, I think it's fair to say. Yes, it's fruity. We'll do our best to be- It's quite colorful. Paranoia, paranoia about leaks. Again, we might have seen some echoes of that recently. I think there was a little bit of a leak about Air Force One a few months ago, which caused a current investigation into the New York Times, I think, for leaks. So there's this paranoia that everyone's out to get him and people are leaking from inside his administration.

12:00And so immediately, the Nixon White House brings an action. They call up J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and they say, find out who did this, who leaked it, and destroy them. It's also very similar to what happened recently. I think the FBI director was called in to the White House to sit there and spend a day looking at who leaked the stuff about Air Force One. So anyway, back to Nixon. Wiretaps are running by the end of the day. The suspect list starts at four, grows to 17. They're looking at people specifically on the NSC, the National Security Council, and a few others inside the White House. The wiretaps wind up rolling in a lot of other people, journalists. Nixon's senior staff says, don't keep any records of this.

12:41And the FBI says, well, look, we need technicians and typists involved. It's not just like one guy in a room running the wiretap. There's sort of an element of a machine here. So this is going to be hard to keep secret. Also, it may not be so legal to do this. And this will be a really important part of the story is that Nixon's expectations for what the FBI can do are very coloured by his time in Congress and also in the vice presidency a decade before. J. Edgar Hoover, who's been this FBI director for decades and is associated with using the FBI pretty aggressively, is still the director at this time. In my head, I'd have thought, well, you know, the FBI are going to kind of play ball with the president's requests to do all this spying on

13:29his enemies and going after them. But Hoover actually pushes back, partly because he's been burnt by some recent publicity about what the FBI have done in recent years. Yeah. Because in 1965, when Nixon is wandering the political wilderness, Hoover is getting absolutely raked over the coals by Congress, by the Senate, who hold hearings on FBI wiretapping. And in response, Hoover has a guy named Mark Felt, who will later on become Deep Throat, the source of so much of the Watergate leaks, look at the wiretapping procedure inside the Bureau. And Felt fines nearly 80 wiretaps that he thinks are of dubious legality and recommends cutting the number in half. The following year, so 1966, Hoover basically ends

14:15what had been a very common fee practice, which are called black bag jobs. So essentially a break in where you're using lock picking, burglary tools to go into an office or whatever and steal documents or install wiretaps. So the FBI that Nixon has inherited in 1968 is a different animal from what it had been in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It is wild to think Hoover's FBI won't do this stuff for him. But he really wants it done. But he really wants it done. And he sees his enemies everywhere, doesn't he, Nixon? So he's convinced that there are enemies, including within the state, you could say the deep state, who are probably leaking. And he wants to find them. After digging into this, I felt some measure of sympathy for Nixon.

14:59I have to say, seeing from the Nixon White House, you not only have all these issues with, as you've said, the deep state, but you have a kind of low-level domestic insurgency that's going on. I mean, there's an American kind of Marxist militant organization called the Weather Underground. Three Weather Underground members blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March of 1969. Did they mean to blow themselves up? I'm not sure. I don't. I think it was an accident. Four students were shot dead at Kent State University, famously on the 4th of May. Two more at Jackson State on the 14th of May. The Weathermen, members of the Weather Underground, issued a declaration of war, promising more

15:40attacks. Nixon's own memoirs, now that could be a self-serving aspect to this, we must say, Nixon's own memoirs count more than 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats in the first two years of his presidency. That is an average of 80 a day. In this period, 43 people are killed in domestic violence and terrorism. Yeah. It's worth saying, isn't it, that the backdrop to this is, you've had 1968, where you've had the assassination of Martin Luther King. You've had the assassination of Robert Kennedy. You've got this upsurge in quite extreme violence. You've got student protests over Vietnam, which are starting to grow. So there's a kind of pretty febrile atmosphere in the United States at that time, isn't there?

16:21There's kind of a sense of unrest and militancy. One man's revolution is another man's domestic conspiracy. Yeah. And I think for Nixon, I think he has a tendency to take this information in and say, I am both the center of attention, the narcissism, and also the victim, right? So there's this kind of tension between those two poles of his personality throughout. And Nixon doesn't have the same FBI. He doesn't have an FBI that's willing to get really dirty domestically. And so he turns to White House staff, to loyalists inside the White House. This first staffer who Nixon turns to for help is a very intense and slightly cadaverous 29-year-old former Army intelligence officer who had been in the White

17:05House helping put together morning news summaries and who had kind of drifted into a domestic security portfolio. Now, he had already been involved in helping push the IRS to target left-wing groups. Also an analog we see today where this sort of IRS is a political football going after people and their tax returns. So on the 5th of June, 1970, this aide helps arrange a very important meeting. Nixon's there. He's got his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. John Ehrlichman, who's one of his chief aides, kind of a domestic policy advisor, is also there. The Stephen Miller of the Nixon White House, you could say. And then four intelligence chiefs. Hoover at the FBI, Helms, Richard Helms at the CIA, will be an important character in the story,

17:49and the chiefs of the National Security Agency, and our friends at the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. God bless them. Now, Nixon starts off by telling this assembled group that the country is in the middle of a crisis. And it's radicals on campus, it's this domestic terrorism. It's as dangerous as anything, Nixon says, that might come from Cuba or China. And that Americans broadly, sort of middle-aged, older Americans are unwilling to face the fact that their children might want to destroy the country. Nixon and his aides set up a working group, as one does, to deal with this problem. And out of it comes a 43-page document that's drafted by that staffer and one of Hoover's deputies at FBI.

18:35And the essence of this is to turn foreign intelligence agencies inward to run domestic operations. So looking at things like mail opening, the document itself actually concedes that this is illegal, but that the advantages to be derived outweigh the risks. Fair enough then. Burglary under the heading surreptitious entry says, look, present restrictions on this should be modified so that we can do this selectively against really high priority internal security targets. Again, admits that it's illegal, it's burglary, it's highly risky, but it's nonetheless the best way to produce the intelligence that they want. And by the way, the FBI had done this decades before and is only recently out of this game. It also proposes expanded electronic surveillance and recruiting informants on campus to help spy on the radicals.

19:29Very interestingly enough, Hoover at the FBI appends a dissenting footnote to every major point. And the other three directors, I think, kind of go along with it or at least don't voice. So Hoover is the only one who actually dissents. Well, I think it's because he has the domestic security portfolio at the FBI. Yeah, he doesn't want to do it. He would be the one, presumably, whose people would be most engaged in this. And he says, no way. So the staffer then puts together a directive for Nixon's signature that will formally terminate restrictions on mail opening and the black bag jobs. Nixon approves it. Hoover objects again. And then within days, it's rescinded. It's important to bring this up, though, because Garrett Graff, who's written this

20:12great book on Watergate, I think it's called Watergate, A New History, wrote that the plan was dead, but it would have nine lives. And the essence here is that the structure of what this staffer is proposing and what Nixon has signed off on, which essentially is a White House-directed political intelligence slash bur to do it he's going to find other ways to do it less formally in a way through his aides but also and this is what's so interesting to some extent through maybe slightly indirectly the cia as well so it is worth just saying why is the cia even in these meetings and the cia david i would suggest is a foreign intelligence agency whose job it is to spy outside the United States. Why is it in the meetings?

21:10You just don't have the creative mindset, Gordon, to think about how you might use the CIA domestically. No. In the 1960s and 1970s. But yes, worth setting up this CIA. And I think in particular, the spy chief that's in those meetings, because this is Richard Helms. Nixon has kept Helms at the CIA. Helms is actually a holdover from the Johnson years. Kind of surprising at the time. Now, this is an era where it was more common to just keep the CIA director on for continuity. But again, Helms was very much not seen as a Nixon man. So it's a bit of a surprising decision to keep him on. Although I was reading somewhere that part of it was that Helms has got a deep career inside American intelligence.

21:55Nixon has been vice president in the 50s when Helms was doing some pretty spicy operations. And the suggestion was they basically both have so much dirt on each other that they're bound together. And I think there is a bit of that, isn't there, where they both know each other almost so well, they don't want to fall out with each other. I think there is an aspect to that. And actually, one of the sources that we're drawing on pretty heavily for the series is a great book written by a guy named Jefferson Morley called Scorpion's Dance. And it's all about the Nixon and Helms dynamic. And his overall thesis is exactly your point, which is these two guys had so much on each other that it was mutually assured destruction.

22:36And so they kind of had to tolerate each other, even if they didn't particularly like each other. I think aspects of that are true. I think it is slightly overplayed. My sense is that Kissinger saw Helms as a professional and wanted him kept on. And that that's probably the main reason why Nixon keeps Helms knew about some of his secret contacts with the North Vietnamese during the campaign. And so there is an interesting dynamic. Now, set up Helms a bit. So he is a consummate career CIA man. He's 6'2", he's lanky, he speaks French and German. He'd been in the Navy and then recruited into the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA during World War II. He comes up through the clandestine service. He survives the bloodletting after the Bay of Pigs fiasco,

23:32rises to become the deputy director for plans, which is then the equivalent of being the director of operations. He is named director of central intelligence DCI in 1966. And he's the first kind of fully career intel guy to hold the job. Helms, immaculately dressed. He's an exceptional ballroom dancer, pretty good tennis player, relentless networker and flatterer. He's a core member of what was then called the Georgetown set, which is this group of Washington elites who were largely Ivy educated, who like to have martinis and socialize in better parts of D.C. And this is a group of people that Nixon absolutely despises. He is a kind of deep state of the time, the establishment, the Georgetown establishment, where they would kind of meet and hang out and have martinis, wasn't he? He's kind of an aristocrat inside the spy business, and yet almost entirely unknown

24:29outside of DC. The Grey Ghost. I love that title. As he's described. The CIA that he's running is not the modern CIA. This is a very different CIA, and that is going to be a very important part of this story because the things it's going to be in a very important part of this story because the things it's going to get on with are slightly illegal and against its charter. But we're setting up what it is. So it is an organization that has an annual budget of around a billion dollars. It has at least 15,000 staff. It has an absolutely global reach. It is covering 80 countries at this point, probably has stations in 80 countries, extensive history at this time of covert action. And we've covered some of these, haven't we? We've

25:10covered everything from Guatemala to Iran, Bay of Pigs. They've got a taste for overthrowing governments, for assassination plots, for all kinds of things. And it's fair to say with very little oversight. This period, we have a little bit of oversight on the appropriation side in the Senate and the House, a little bit. There are not formal intelligence oversight committees in this era. And the arrangement between Helms and the White House and senior members of Congress is kind of a gentleman's agreement, where if Helms feels that he needs to, if he needs to approve a particularly large budget outlay, or if there's a particularly spicy piece of covert action that they're running, he will raise it with the White House and with a few members of Congress. It's not particularly formal.

26:07Yeah. It is very much an arrangement in which the CIA more or less does what it's asked or told by the White House, and it basically promises not to embarrass anybody. As we said, it's got into some pretty spicy actions. I mean, assassinations, coups, things like that, but also some things with a domestic edge already. And it's got involved not just in assassinations and coups abroad, but also domestic activities already. So spying on the anti-war movement. I mean, this is a classic thing, isn't it? To look for whether there might be a foreign hand behind domestic subversive movements. I mean, it's something you see in the UK in the 80s, with MI5 again. Are the communists backing some of these anti-war movements? They're doing surveillance there.

26:50We've talked previously in episodes about MKUltra, which is this famous work on mind control and LSD in which it's testing it on people within the United States, including brothels and things like that. Prisoners, brothels. It's already got its hand inside the US in a way which now seems pretty unusual. My favorite sub-project under MKUltra and a sign of how out of control some of this had gotten was when an agency contractor injected a gigantic bull elephant named Tusco at the Oklahoma City Zoo with I think 350,000 micrograms of LSD to see what would happen. And the elephant died. And the only reason we know about this is because the agency had to compensate through cutouts the Oklahoma City Zoo for the loss of Tusco. All of the stuff though that we're talking about,

27:42it's important to say, is not public in this period. Really, nobody outside of CIA knows much of any of this. I mean, there have been some rumors about Castro assassination plots. And obviously, the Bay of Pigs is very public. But what specifically the CIA got up to in Iran, what it did in Guatemala, all of the mind control and LSD experiments. It's secret. It's totally secret. I mean, this is the culture of secrecy around the agency at this point is almost total. There's no press office. There's no gift shop yet, Gordon, right? There's no former analysts running their mouths on podcasts constantly every week talking about what's going on at CIA. Those were the days. There aren't really memoirs published by former CIA officers until the mid-1970s.

28:28And as we'll see in this story, officers who wanted to write spy novels had tremendous hurdles to overcome to do so. So the agency is charter explicitly restricts it to operations abroad and prohibits it from conducting domestic security functions. And this has been knowingly violated on a number of occasions up to this point in time. There was, as you mentioned, the spying on the anti-war movement. There was a case in which Helms actually puts together a CIA study called Restless Youth. And when he sends it to the Johnson White House, he says, look, this has a section, unsurprisingly from the title, on American students. This is an area that is not within the charter of the agency. And he needed to emphasize how absolutely sensitive it made the paper, and that if anyone

29:26learned of its existence, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned. So you have a CIA in this period. Again, it's very secretive. It doesn't really have a whole lot of oversight. And it has, on a couple instances, violated its charter. So there, I think, with the Nixon White House under siege, filled with paranoia, and a secretive CIA primed to help the president. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how a new batch of leaks sends us down the long road to the CIA's involvement in the biggest political scandal in American history. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter. involvement in the biggest political scandal in American history. active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them in liver problems

30:30may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trampaya and visit trampayaradio.com. Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply.

31:17See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com. The holidays are busy enough. Getting your home ready shouldn't be. From the perfect tree and twinkling lights to festive decor for inside and out, Wayfair has everything you need to get your home holiday ready. Find furniture, hosting essentials, festive serveware, and more all in one place. So you can spend less time getting ready and more time enjoying the season with the people who make it special. Shop Wayfair.com today to make holiday magic at home. Welcome back. It's 1971. Richard Nixon, increasingly paranoid inside the White House, believes he's battling a domestic insurgency, enemies within leaks. And Vietnam is also causing problems for him, isn't he?

32:10Well, it is because even though these numbers are down from the Johnson years, about 250 Americans are still being killed every month. And that is creating political problems for him because he had campaigned on a promise of bringing the war to a halt. The Cambodia bombing that we had talked about before the break hasn't really relieved pressure on the South Vietnamese. It's simply opened up another front that Nixon is now fighting. And senior Republican lawmakers, Nixon's own party, are starting to think- Maybe we can't win. Maybe we can't win. CIA assessments in this period also agree. I mean, Helms has been warning since probably 68, since the Tet Offensive, that South Vietnam can't be bucked up enough to win. So this is a toxic brew for the Nixon White House. Foreign policy issues

33:01in Vietnam, domestic problems at home. The economy is also not doing well in this period. Nixon is feeling like this is not going well. Dropped into this is what has become known as the Pentagon Papers. Now, this is in actuality, a classified year-long 7,000-page study that had been commissioned by President Kennedy's defense secretary. It's a kind of internal history, isn't it, of US involvement in Vietnam, of decision-making, but it shows the mistakes and what's gone wrong. It shows a tremendous gap between the way the White House, successive White Houses, have spoken about the war and how it's going and how it's actually going. And the New York Times is going to publish this 13th of June, 1971, the first

33:49installment with the headline tracing all these mistakes in Vietnam. Now, this is going to wind Nixon up, isn't it? Here are some leaks that have come from within the states. More leaks. More leaks, but about the most sensitive subject. Although it is interesting on the day of, when it drops on the 13th of June, Nixon is initially more annoyed about the Washington Post coverage of his daughter's wedding than he is about the Pentagon Papers because the Pentagon Papers were drafted before his presidency. Yeah, it's the Kennedy and Johnson. So a slightly more open-minded, less paranoid president might have said, this kind of thing is exactly why I'm trying to end the war. But Nixon, again, paranoid. There's all these leaks at this point that we've already spoken

34:38about. And they really play into, I think this plays into his antipathy toward the press in general. He doesn't like the Washington Post. He doesn't like the New York Times. It focuses on a government cover-up, which you journalists love. Don't you, Gordon? Love you a government cover-up. And they stem from leaking, which is the thing that Nixon hates the most. It also focuses attention on Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, and Nixon doesn't like that either. Pretty much immediately clear that the leaker is a researcher at RAND. Big think tank. Linked to the Pentagon, yeah. Right. Named Daniel Ellsberg. And Ellsberg has done this because he wants these secrets out, talks about wanting them out of safes and into homes of ordinary Americans so they

35:25can debate it. And he comes out pretty quickly as the source. I believe he gives an interview to Walter Cronkite on CBS, where he, I guess, sort of Snowden-esque in a way, says, I'm the one who brought this information out. So he becomes kind of a symbol, I think, to many Americans of, of truth and transparency and patriotism. To Nixon, this is a man who worked with, I think, people in the Pentagon, worked with Kissinger. He'd been a Kissinger guy. Kissinger aide. And he is now leaking. And so you can see for Nixon, this is going to drive him nuts. And he is going to want the FBI to really go after Ellsberg. The CIA damage assessment of the Pentagon Papers is also scathing because the papers name

36:10CIA proprietary relationships. There's agency officers who are identified by name. There's repeated references to what had been covert paramilitary operations. It's seen inside CIA as a windfall for hostile intelligence services. And eventually the CIA will get information that the full scope of the papers, the actual papers themselves, make their way to foreign embassies. And so seen from the Nixon White House, I mean, I think even a little bit seen from CIA, Ellsberg is an enemy of the state. He's a traitor who has given up sensitive information and made the entire government look foolish in the process. And Nixon writes later in his memoirs that he's basically determined not to sit back and, in his view, let all the democratic architects of the war, Johnson and Kennedy, make him pay for it politically. And he wants a good political operative who can go through the state and defense files, get everything on the Bay of Pigs, everything on Johnson's 1968 bombing halt. He wants to go into essentially the archive and find information that will

37:26then be embarrassing to the Democrats. Which he can weaponize. But this is the key thing, because if that's all he was doing, that would be one thing. But he goes a step further. He says, I also want you to get information from think tanks, which he thinks contain some of this historical and useful information and might have been working with leakers and others to push a particular agenda. Particularly the Brookings Institution, which is still around, a kind of center-left think tank. A hotbed of radicalism. This is what I find crazy. It's one thing to go through your own files and say stuff, but it's like, I want you to get stuff from other places, which immediately raises the question of, how are you going

38:04to get it? Well, how are you going to get it? And Nixon, because again, yeah, Brookings, it's not the files at the State Department. It's not the executive branch. And Nixon raises this idea to a larger group in the Oval Office. H.R. Haldeman is there, his chief of staff. Kissinger's there. The attorney general is there, the defense secretary. And Nixon basically says, well, why don't we have someone go in, break into Brookings and just take the information out? Because he thinks Brookings has information on Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 that would be of use. And Haldeman, the chief of staff says, that's a good idea, but we need to have somebody who can do that. Because remember, the FBI- Hoover said no.

38:48Doesn't want to play this game. It's kind of out of this game. So who are you going to get to break into a think tank? Who do you get? Well, some former CIA men might be interesting choices. So on July 1st of 1971, so just a few weeks after the Pentagon Papers have come out, a guy named Charles Coulson, who is special counsel to the president, he's an ex-Marine, he's a guy who reportedly said he'd walk over his grandmother to re-elect Nixon, calls a friend to ask what he makes of the Pentagon Papers. This friend is a man named E. Howard Hunt, a very important character in the story. We should say for club members, we've got a whole two-part miniseries on the life and times of Howard Hunt because it is such a wild story. So do join up at therestisclassified.com

39:36if you want to hear about that. He's a recently retired CIA guy. He's just left in spring of 1970, and he's had a very interesting CIA career. You might even remember him from some previous... Yeah. ... from brief. He's come up before in our episode. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod. Guatemala and other places. Right. But yeah, let's explain a little bit about who he is. Hunt comes from upstate New York. He goes to university at Brown. So it's a prestigious Ivy University, but he's not from kind of old Eastern money. So he's a little bit outside of the kind of Georgetown set. Very similar path into Espionage's helms. He joins the Navy, then he joins the OSS during the war, where he gets

40:19sort of full chaotic schooling and lockpicking and hand-to-hand combat and blowing stuff up. And he's actually sent to China, where he later talked about how he dynamited bridges and convoys. He's running agents. He's recovering downed Allied pilots. But like all good CIA men, Gordon, his ambition was always to write. To be a novelist. When World War II ends, he doesn't immediately go into what becomes the CIA. And in fact, he turns his back on intelligence for the writing life. And in 1948, he wins a Guggenheim Fellowship in a year when the applications submitted by Gore Vidal and Truman Capote were both turned down. So he gets picked ahead of Truman Capote to be one of these fellows. Okay.

41:09So he wins at Guggenheim. Then he decides to go out to Hollywood. Of course you do. And try to make his way as a screenwriter. It doesn't work. He cannot make a living as a screenwriter. He ends up going to Paris to help administer the Marshall Plan. And then decides after this very strange interlude to go back to the spy business. So he joins the CIA in 1950. He's involved in opening up the first station, really the station in Mexico City, where he does all kinds of colorful things. He funds anti-communist fronts. He recruits journalists. He's involved in burgling the Guatemalan embassy in Mexico City and running agents inside the Mexican Communist Party. But the next detail is the one I find truly bizarre. He acquires the film rights to George

41:55Orwell's Animal Farm. Yes. I mean, that's not something I was expecting. No. One running theme with Hunt is whatever beat you think is coming next, it's going to be something entirely different, right? So he acquires the rights to Animal Farm and has an animated version made and then tweaks the message to make it more sharply anti-communist. It's a critical and commercial success. Almost nobody knows that the CIA had a role in it. So you have this kind of literary and storytelling ambition that's always there. And interestingly, his daughter will say later that he wrote for four to eight hours a day during the week, presumably while he was working at the CIA, and all day on the weekends. It's more than you.

42:39It is more than me. And I'm not even working at the CIA anymore. I don't know how he's managing this. He has multiple pen names throughout his career. One of them, my favorite, is David St. John. And he creates a character called Peter Ward, who is this kind of like natty, pipe-smoking, world-weary, but also very charismatic person who's just, women love him, and he's at war with international communism. And Hunt crafts him essentially to be America's answer to James Bond. But it never quite takes off. There's a book, though, that he writes where Peter Ward is the protagonist called On Hazardous Duty, and it opens with a black bag job. Breaking in. Breaking in entry. And he's then involved in the Guatemala operation,

43:26which we covered in a couple of episodes earlier in the year. PB success, as it was known. And it was a success. It was a success, which involves, we should say, kind of recruiting exiles. This is the world of exiles in Miami, which are going to be part of this story, working with exiles to try and do dodgy operations. Definitely a theme which runs through as we know Bay of Pigs, but then into these years as well. So he's a colorful character. He was deeply involved in Bay of Pigs and has really never forgiven Kennedy for what he sees as not supporting the operation when it came under threat, not providing the air power, is very vocal about this. And he uses that lens, essentially, to publicly, after he retires

44:17from CIA, ingratiate himself with the Nixon people because he has carried forward. I mean, we're 10 years after the Bay of Pigs and he's still deeply resentful and very loud about how Kennedy and the Democrats- Have betrayed the CIA and its agents. Left the CIA and its agents to die on the beach. It's a big theme, isn't it? So Hunt though, he leaves CIA, he needs a job. Yep. And he finds one at a firm called the Robert R. Mullen Company. And this is a Washington public relations firm. Now, the ins and outs of how Hunt came to find this job are much debated in the source material. But it seems that what happened was that Hunt leaves the CIA and he actually has a letter of recommendation from Richard Helms. He uses that letter of recommendation with Mullen and he gets the job. Now, Mullen is not a normal firm. It has actually been collaborating with the CIA for years to supply cover for NOx, non-official cover officers overseas in Europe and Asia. And again, there's murkiness here. I think Hunt probably knew when he applied that Mullen had a relationship with the CIA. It also seems,

45:34as there's a whole bunch of conspiracy literature on this, it seems like CIA was actually not so thrilled about Hunt's employment there because it could draw attention to the fact that Mullen was providing cover to the case officers overseas. But in any case, once Hunt is there, he's read into the cover arrangement and his security clearance is actually extended so that he can manage those cover relationships for Mullen. So he's connected with the CIA through this Mullen company. But what is the relationship with the White House that leads Nixon's guy, Chuck Colson, to call him? Because that's the interesting bit, I think, isn't it? They're friends. They're social friends. They both went to Brown, knew each other there. In DC,

46:23they're both part of the Brown University Club. In fact, they're president and vice president. Hunt has actually gone to the White House to have lunch with Coulson. And I think they both share a kind of collective outrage about what's going on in the country. And interestingly, there'd been an incident at Brown in which Henry Kissinger was getting an honorary degree and a whole bunch of Brown University students actually turned their backs to him as he was receiving this degree on stage. That made Colson obviously very upset. Left-wing university students. Right, left-wing university students. It's a bit like we've had recently at Columbia, in other battles, where people are like, we've got to deal with these lefties.

47:01Yeah. You can imagine Hunt and Colson kind of moaning at each other. They don't like hippies. No, they don't these lefties. You can imagine Hunt and Coulson moaning at each other. They don't like hippies. No, they don't like hippies. It's fair to say. And hence, you get this phone call from Coulson to Hunt. And Hunt has written a memoir called American Spy, which I would highly recommend to listeners. It is an incredibly self-serving memoir, but it's very revealing. He writes an incredible detail about his life and in particular about Watergate. So Hunt talks about this call with Coulson and he get on the phone and Coulson kind of works his way to the key question, which is, you know, this Ellsberg guy who leaked the

47:38Pentagon Papers, this is turning into a big problem for us. Could we do something about Ellsberg? Could we kind of turn the tables on him if we had the right resources employed? Resources. And Hunt says yes. Within days, Hunt is on the rolls as a White House consultant. And on the 7th of July, John Ehrlichman, again, Nixon's chief domestic policy advisor, the Stephen Miller of the Nixon White House, calls up General Robert Cushman, who's the deputy director of the CIA. Now, Cushman, unlike Helms, is a Nixon man. He'd been Nixon's chief national security aide when Nixon had been VP. He is very much Nixon's guy at Langley, and he's probably there in part to spy on Helms, to be quite honest. Ehrlichman says,

48:31look, to Cushman, this guy Hunt, we've asked him to do some consulting work on security, and he's going to be in touch. Could you help him? Could you help him? And Jefferson Morley, in his book, Scorpion's Dance, has the line that ends the call, which is, you should consider he Could you help him? some requests. Help him out. Help him out. And as we've discussed, the CIA of this era is not making tremendously stark distinctions between former officers and current officers, and it's very inclined when the White House asks for something to do it, right? So Cushman says, of course, and he tells the agency's director of security, which is a kind of interesting role in this period. They've been involved in

49:23dealings with the mafia in the Castro assassination plots. So Cushman, the deputy director, says, yeah, we'll help him out. And he calls the agency's director of security and says, Hunt's coming out. He's kind of working with a new group and you should help him. Now, this group at the White House that Hunt is involved in, they will become known as the plumbers. Reason being, their job is to stop leaks. And one of them is a Kissinger staffer, is actually the accidental origin story behind the name because his grandmother had been asking him what he did at the White House. And he said, my job is to help the president stop some leaks. And she says quite proudly, oh, you're a plumber. They're known colloquially as the plumbers.

50:13It's actually formally called the White House Special Investigations Unit. Anytime you're doing investigations, you want them to be special. I've always supported that idea. They're based in room 16 of the old executive office building. They report up to John Ehrlichman, the chief domestic aid. It is made up of a couple of guys from Kissinger's NSC staff. There's also a guy from Ehrlichman's old law firm. Hunt is on board. He's kind of not formally part of it. He's a consultant, but he's really embedded into its operations. And there's also a guy named G. Gordon Liddy. Ah, anyone called Gordon, but this guy- Maybe not this guy. Maybe not this Gordon. He's a pretty crazy character. If we thought Hunt was crazy,

50:53G. Gordon Liddy is another level up, I think, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, partly he's ex-FBI though. He is. I mean, so, you know, think kind of serious. He's an ex-Fib. He's an ex-Fib, ex-prosecutor, been at the treasury. But he's also got a thing about Nazis, hasn't he? He's got a thing about the Nazis. He is one of those guys who, as I think we would agree, there's a lot of interest in Nazis. People on The Rest is History, they do an episode or they do a series every year on Nazis. There's tremendous interest in Nazis. That's okay. But there is a point in the journey where you start to wonder if the interest bleeds into sympathy. And G. Gordon Liddy, I think has sort of- Crossed that line. Crossed that line. So he and Hunt get on pretty well. And he plays a recording of Hitler giving a speech while he's at Hunt's house. He

51:48actually calls Hunt and says, look, I have an important record you should listen to. He comes over and it's a Hitler speech. He, allegedly, arranges a private screening of Triumph of the Will. Which is the Nazi propaganda. The Lenin-style propaganda film Which is the Nazi propaganda. The Lenin-Riffenstahl propaganda film. At the White House. So all of the documents that come out of the plumbers, the Special Investigations Unit, are stamped Odessa, which is the post-war network that had been used to smuggle SS officers out of Germany. And also a very good novel and film, the Odessa Bar. Yeah. So there's this weird fascination slash obsession. So Hunt and Liddy hit it off. And actually the two families will spend some time together.

52:33In one case, when the Liddy's are over dining with the Hunts, Liddy sits down at the grand piano in the Hunt's home and starts belting out a Nazi song. And it's enough that Hunt's wife, Dorothy, who actually worked at Treasury after the war, tracking down looted Nazi assets, basically says- Enough. Enough. And goes into the kitchen to do something else. So they're close and Liddy is- Nazi adjacent. Sort of Nazi adjacent. Back to the operational side though. The plumbers in this period, I think, don't have a tremendous amount of direction from above about exactly who their target should be. So Hunt goes out to see the deputy director at Langley and he says, look, I need flash alias documentation, right?

53:25So flash meaning it's not going to... It's not deep cover. Langley and he says look I need flash alias documentation right so flash meaning it's not gonna it's not deep it's not deep cover but I need some documents in alias and I need a physical disguise hence the wig that's the wig for what he describes as a one-time operation in and out Cushman the deputy director says okay why don't you work with the technical services division which is the crew that is doing all the spy tech yeah the gadgets the gadgets Bushman, the deputy director says, okay, why don't you work with the technical services division, which is the crew that is doing all of the spy tech. Yeah. The gadgets. The gadgets. And also- Gadgets, disguises, all that.

53:51And also the LSD experimentation. Different sort of departments. There's some interesting details about Hunt's visit to Langley that are odd when you look back at them. The first one is there's no record that Hunt was ever there. Normally, a visitor would sign in and issued a visitor badge and there'd be a record of came and, you know, who came and when and the kind of login data that doesn't exist. There's no actual record at all that he was ever there. Also odd, Cushman, the deputy director, records the meeting apparently explicitly because Hunt said not to. Whenever someone says, this must be entirely off the record, he immediately- He hits the button under his desk to record the meeting.

54:35Because it's going to be bad. But so Hunt, he goes and meets with the technical services people, and he gets the alias documents, he gets the disguise materials, he gets a wig, glasses, and a speech alteration device. So the first tasking that Hunt seems to have gotten for the plumbers was pinning an assassination in Vietnam on the Kennedy administration. So it's back to the Nixon desire to say, all the bad stuff that happened linked to Vietnam, it's all those Kennedy and Johnson guys. Yeah. And this is an assassination of the president of South Vietnam. So kind of a big deal. But again, he wants to dig up some dirt that makes this look like it's the Democrats' fault. So what Hunt does is he goes and finds an old CIA colleague who had

55:22been involved in the coup in Saigon in 1963, and who also knew Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. And they have an interview in Ehrlichman's office, which is secretly recorded. And there you have a bottle of scotch, as one does during an interview. It really produces nothing usable because the recording fails. And apparently the technician had hidden the recorder under the couch cushions and Hunt's old CIA colleagues sat on it and crushed it. Hunt in his memoir merely says that it was improperly installed. And he also says that he had had so much scotch that the tapes would have been useless anyway. So you can kind of, you get a sense that the plumbers in this period are kind of looking for something that's going to stick.

56:06What can we do? By late July, Hunt puts together a written proposal to Chuck Colson, his buddy, for a series of operations to assemble a file on Ellsberg that would destroy his image and his credibility. Because at this point, he's kind of being lauded as... The great whistleblower. The great whistleblower. The great whistleblower. Exactly. For having leaked the Pentagon Papers. Yeah. Hunt makes two important points or suggestions. He says, look, we should have the CIA prepare a covert psychological assessment of Ellsberg, and we should get Ellsberg's file from his psychiatrist, because they knew that he had been seeing a psychiatrist in LA. One of the plumbers calls the agency's director of security and asks that this profile be put together. And he says, you know, look, we saw this psychological profile you guys did on Castro,

56:57and that had really impressed us. And remember, Daniel Ellsberg is not the communist dictator of Cuba. He's an American citizen. And so the director of security says, that is something that only the director can decide to do. And Helms resists at first. He's uncomfortable with this. Even for the CIA in those days, it's a bit too far. Well, he was uncomfortable. Even if you go back to the Johnson years, when Johnson had asked Helms to essentially do work on the domestic anti-war movement, Helms didn't want to. And it had actually protested. And the records of that meeting are that he protests, and then Johnson kind of looks at him and says, so here's what you're going to do. You're going to do that

57:41thing for me. So there is a history here of when the White House asks, even if it violates the agency's charter, the agency is going to do it. But Helms at first resists, but then they get a report at CIA, part of this damage assessment for the Pentagon Papers, saying that some of the Pentagon Papers might have reached a foreign embassy. And again, it's that as long as you can make some kind of link to a foreign state, you've got a bit of a kind of locus, a hold, which allows the CIA to get embassy. Again, as long as you can make some kind of link to a foreign state, you've got a bit of a locus of hold which allows the CIA to get involved. At that point, Helms changes his mind basically and goes,

58:12yeah, okay, we're going to get involved in this. So Helms says, yes, we'll have the agency do it. The task goes to the chief of medical services, then to the chief of the psychiatric staff, then to a staff psychiatrist to put the report together. Everybody in that chain says, wait a minute, this falls outside the agency's charter. This is an American citizen. They're also very uneasy that the order has come from the director of security, which again, in this period, this is an office that had been involved in some of the dealings with the mafia around Castro assassination plot. So it's kind of this, I think even inside the CIA, it's seen as this kind of murky, slightly below board outfit. When they come and knock on your door, you're a bit wary.

58:58Maybe not, especially if you're on the psychiatric staff. But they do it anyway. So they put this profile, which again, another theme of this series is going to be some reservations, but we'll do it anyway. So they do it. But it's not good enough. Yeah, Hunt and Ladew out, and they complain. They're like, this sucks. I don't like this profile. And the psychiatrist who put it together said, I don't have enough information to put together a good profile, probably thinking that that might end it right there. But Liddy remembers, of course, that Ellsberg has been seeing this psychiatrist, a Dr. Fielding, out in Los Angeles, and says, well, look, there's probably more information that Dr. Fielding has. And so if we can go and

59:45get that information, we can take it to the CIA psychiatrist, and then we can use that profile to basically try Ellsberg in public, presumably as some kind of psychologically unstable individual. So you've now got to the point where you want to get the psychiatrist's notes and reports on one of the people who are seeing them. What are you going to do about it? You're going to break into the psychiatrist's? That's what's crazy, isn't it? This leap. How quickly they get to that point. By the 11th of August, the plumbers send Ehrlichman a status report on this Ellsberg Pentagon Papers project. And they recommend in this briefing that a covert operation be undertaken to look at the medical files still held by Ellsberg's psychiatrist out in California.

1:00:40Because I guess he'd been in analysis for a couple of years, so they think there's probably a lot of material out there. And Ehrlichman, Chief White House domestic aid, initials the approval line on this memo, E, which remember, that's how he signs everything because Nixon can't spell his name. And then he adds a condition, if done under your assurance that it is not traceable. Well, let's stop there. And next time we'll see how the break-ins that eventually lead to this series and all series to come and experience the bonus interviews that we do with some really amazing guests. That's right. So do join at therestisclassified.com. The holidays are busy enough. Getting your home ready shouldn't be.

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