In this season of fury, Chuck Colson called Hunt once again. “With the right resources,” he asked his fellow Brown alumnus, could he make “a major public case against Ellsberg and his co-conspirators?” Colson was intent on “nailing any son of a bitch who would steal a secret document of the government and publish it.” The Ellsberg case, he said, channeling Nixon, “won’t be tried in court. It will be tried in the newspapers.”
Hunt welcomed the job. He believed the country was endangered by a “counterculture government” that was supported by journalists, clergymen, scientists, and lawyers and aided by “moles such as Ellsberg who were deeply entrenched in the government.” In some ways, Hunt said, “this was a mirror image of the events … that the CIA had perpetuated in other countries such as Guatemala to effect regime change. Perhaps that’s why it seemed so frightening…”1
Hunt was hired as a White House security consultant2 and installed in an office with David Young, a former Kissinger aide on the NSC staff, and Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent detailed from the Treasury Department. They worked out of Room 16 in the Executive Office Building. As their job was plugging leaks in the press, they put a sign on the door calling themselves “The Plumbers.”
Hunt and Liddy bonded at first sight. “Liddy was a wired, wisecracking extrovert who seemed as if he might be a candidate for decaffeinated coffee,” Hunt said.3 Liddy effused that Hunt “was knowledgeable in the area of intelligence operations and had a command of the English language one associates with brains and a first-class education.”4 They were buddies, at least for a while.
Hunt went to work. Introduced to Ehrlichman, he said he needed help with identification and disguises. Ehrlichman called deputy director Bob Cushman and told him to expect a call from Hunt. “You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche,” he said. Cushman promised “full cooperation.” He then notified Howard Osborn, chief of the Office of Security, who knew of Hunt’s penchant for trouble. Osborn said his reaction was “one of wonderment, since, to my knowledge, [Hunt] knew nothing about security.”5 Osborn kept his opinion to himself.
Nixon himself wanted Hunt. “I wanted someone to light a fire under the FBI in its investigation of Ellsberg,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “If the FBI was not going to pursue the case, then we were going to ourselves.… I urged that we find out everything we could about his background, his motives, and his co-conspirators, if they existed. I was also determined not to sit back while the Democratic architects of our involvement tried to make me pay for the war politically. I wanted a good political operative who could sift through State and Defense files and get us all the facts on the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination, and Johnson’s 1968 bombing halt.” Nixon had found his “good political operative.”6
Hunt, alas, bungled his first assignment. He knew Nixon wanted to blame JFK for Diem’s murder in 1963, the better to wrongfoot Ted Kennedy, who he expected would be his opponent in the 1972 presidential campaign. Hunt arranged an interview with Lou Conein, a veteran of the CIA station in Saigon who was deeply involved in the 1963 coup that deposed Diem. Conein also knew Ellsberg from Saigon. Seeking dirt on Ellsberg and the details of how Kennedy abandoned a U.S. ally, Hunt invited Conein to talk in Ehrlichman’s office. He arranged to have the room “wired” to capture the story on tape. Conein arrived, plopped down on the couch, and proceeded to tell stories as he and Hunt drank whiskey until late in the evening. When Hunt asked for the tape, the technician said he had concealed it under the cushions of the couch. He extracted the machine, which had been crushed when Conein sat on it. Hunt, Langley’s answer to Inspector Clouseau, had no recording of the conversation and no memory of what Conein had said.7
Hunt visited Cushman a few days later, feeling full of himself.
“I’ve been charged with quite a highly sensitive mission by the White House,” he whispered, “to visit and elicit information from an individual whose ideology we aren’t entirely sure of.… [F]or that purpose they asked me to come over here and see if you could give me two things: flash alias documentation … and some degree of physical disguise, for a one-time op a. In and out.” He was talking about black-bag jobs, an unauthorized entry.8
“I don’t see why we can’t,” Cushman shrugged.9 He asked his executive assistant, Karl Wagner, to contact the Technical Services Division and “tell them they were to furnish Mr. Hunt with the necessary papers to indicate an alias.”10 Wagner instructed the acting chief of TSD to “furnish a physical disguise and alias documentation to an individual who didn’t want his identity known to TSD officers … the matter was extremely sensitive and being done for the White House.” Wagner cleared the request with Sam Halpern, assistant to Tom Karamessines.11
This ready servicing of Hunt’s demands would later require some explaining. Helms’s defense, offered later in multiple Capitol Hill appearances, was subtle and multilayered. Helms swore he knew and approved of Cushman’s provision of credentials and wig—but did not ask for any details about what use they would be put to. As for Hunt’s request for a CIA profile of Ellsberg: David Young had called Howard Osborn and told him Kissinger and Ehrlichman had been very impressed with a paper prepared by the Office of Medical Services on Fidel Castro. Young asked for a similar profile on Ellsberg. Osborn told him only the director could make the decision.
“We didn’t know Mr. Ellsberg,” Helms told Young. “We didn’t have any information on him, why were we being asked to make a study of this kind?” Young pleaded with Helms, stressing the study had been given “highest priority” by Ehrlichman and Kissinger and that the CIA was the only agency with such a capability.”12
“All right,” sighed Helms, “let’s go ahead and give it a try.”13
With May Day mobs rampaging and the nation’s secrets at risk, Nixon wanted action and Hunt supplied it. Helms was just doing his job by facilitating. If Helms didn’t know that Hunt had proposed a blackmail operation to Colson, it was because he didn’t micromanage. With his leftist politics and prolific love life, Ellsberg embodied the counterculture the CIA men feared. Hunt proposed that he and Liddy would break into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, in Beverly Hills, California, in search of information to discredit the new hero of the left. Hunt secured White House approval and solicited still more support from the CIA, asking for false credentials for Liddy and a camera suitable for indoor photography. Cushman approved and informed Helms, who didn’t ask any questions.14 He had deniability, even if it wasn’t entirely plausible.
Hunt and Liddy flew to Los Angeles. They surveyed Fielding’s office in preparation for a burglary. They took a series of photos showing the building, inside and out. They snapped a photo of Dr. Fielding’s white Volvo with its visible California license plates. When Hunt returned to Washington, he gave the film to a CIA technician who developed the photos. The technician gave the originals to Hunt and made copies for the files of the Technical Services Division.15 He was working for the White House and sharing the take with his former employer. That was the spymaster’s modus operandi.
The same day the photographs of Dr. Fielding’s office were reviewed at CIA headquarters, Helms decided Hunt’s mounting demands for help had become intolerable. While the CIA official history would claim the two events were not connected, Senator Howard Baker concluded, “it was only after these photographs were developed and examined that the CIA technician dealing with Hunt was ordered to cut off all support.”
Helms had an explanation, of course. He told Ehrlichman that Hunt was “bad news,” confiding that the Agency “had kept Mr. Hunt on a little longer than they should have.” Several years before, Hunt had been separated “from more operational tasks because he was overly romantic,” Helms explained, “… [but] we had continued him because he had some serious financial problems relating to a sick child and we did not want to have a disgruntled ex-employee.”16
In fact, Hunt was not disgruntled. He was reporting to Helms all the while. Rob Roy Ratliff was a career CIA officer who served as the Agency’s representative on the National Security Agency in 1971. Peter Jessup, former station chief in Tel Aviv and aide to counterintelligence chief Angleton, had held the job before Ratliff. Both were career officials in good standing. Both said they received packages from Hunt for delivery to the director’s office in 1971 and 1972.
“I was aware that Hunt had frequently transmitted sealed envelopes via our office to the Agency,” Ratliff said in a statement given to Senate investigators. “We had receipts for those envelopes but were unaware of their contents.” Ratliff said Jessup “told me that he had opened one of the packages,” which appeared to contain “gossip” information about an unknown person. Jessup, he said, “assumed it had something to do with a psychological profile of that person.” Ratliff said he had no knowledge of “whether Hunt had arranged with Mr. Helms or whether Hunt had prevailed on another Agency official because of some past connection.” Ratliff “found it hard to believe an individual of the Agency would become involved in something like that without some approval from higher authority within the Agency.”
Ratliff added that his secretary reported that Hunt had once visited his predecessor for a visit behind closed doors. When they emerged, his predecessor said he was “amazed, shocked and bewildered by the things Hunt had told him that he was doing.”17
Helms said he “didn’t recall any such thing.” Hunt admitted to sending “occasional things over to the CIA” in sealed envelopes but said they only concerned a problem he had with his retirement annuity.18
Hunt had carte blanche. Helms had plausible deniability. It still wasn’t enough. Nixon was demanding more. It was Bay of Pigs time again.
With South Vietnamese president Thieu running for reelection unopposed in October 1971, Nixon was on the defensive. Some senators were talking about cutting off aid unless Thieu allowed his opponents to run. Nixon seized the moment to highlight JFK’s perfidy. “I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem and the complicity in the murder of Diem,” Nixon said at a press conference.19 With Republican opposition to his war policy mounting, Nixon wanted to make the issue partisan, to contrast his Vietnam policy to Kennedy’s. This would lay the groundwork for his 1972 campaign and give the press something to chew on besides coups and casualties.
The next day he and his advisers discussed how to impugn the Democrats with historical documents. Ehrlichman recommended the Plumbers in Room 16. “We have a couple of fellows under Krogh—Liddy and Hunt—who know what they’re doing.”20
In their next meeting Nixon articulated his new 1972 campaign strategy: keep the origins of the Vietnam War “front and center” so that the Democrats would squabble about it. Haldeman and Ehrlichman agreed that the murder of Diem was the best line of attack. Like Hunt, Nixon had heard Lou Conein’s account of the November 1963 coup and thought it was damning to the memory of JFK. Nixon suggested selected Republican senators might demand that Conein be released from the silence required by his Agency oath. “Let the CIA take a whipping on this one,” Nixon said.21
Hunt took charge. With a phone call from the White House, he was cleared for access to the State Department archives. He read all the cables between the Department and the Saigon Embassy in late 1963. “What kind of material have you dug up in the files that would indicate Kennedy complicity in Diem’s death?” Colson asked. Hunt said no single cable would prove it. “You’d have to take a sequence of three or four cables, be aware of their contents and speculate on what was missing from the sequence,” he explained.
“Do you think you can improve on them?” Colson asked.
Hunt went to work forging two cables that would damn JFK by making it look like he refused to give asylum to Diem and Nhu. (In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge, acting on JFK’s orders, had told Diem “if I can do anything for your physical safety, please telephone me.”)22 It was, for all intents and purposes, a CIA-sponsored psychological warfare operation aimed at Ted Kennedy and the Democratic party. Colson then passed photocopies of the forged cables to a reporter from Life magazine who expressed interest but wanted to see the originals.23
Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to go to Langley. Over breakfast with the ever disdainful Helms, Ehrlichman asked for Agency files on a host of controversial events: the 1958 landing of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the death of Diem in 1963.24 Helms said he would look into it.25 When Ehrlichman followed up with a phone call, the silky director lamented that even he did not have access to one of the Bay of Pigs reports. He expressed concern about who might see the files that the president wanted. He mentioned Hunt by name, suggesting he could not be trusted with the Agency’s “soiled linen.”26 Helms knew his friend’s animus against JFK and his penchant for putting his politics ahead of the Agency’s interests. Ehrlichman returned to the White House with little to show for his errand, save more excuses.
The impatient Nixon summoned Helms for a late morning meeting. Ehrlichman briefed him shortly before the director was scheduled to arrive.
“He would not give me any of the Diem stuff until he had an opportunity to talk with you,” Ehrlichman complained. “… I said ‘Well, nobody’s going to see this stuff except the president, me and…’ He said, ‘Well, this is incredibly dirty linen.’ He said, ‘I just wouldn’t feel comfortable about it without talking to the president first.’”
“Now on the other stuff,” Ehrlichman went on, referring to the Bay of Pigs files, “I asked for a lot of background material, a lot of nuts and bolts, cables, cable traffic and internal memos. He didn’t give me any of that. He gave me only summaries and post-mortems. What he gave me is useful stuff but we’ve really got to have the internal stuff.”
“What the hell, do you mean?” Nixon griped. “Kennedy didn’t know these things? Johnson didn’t know these things?”
“The thing he wants to say to you,” Ehrlichman replied, “is that, in all fairness to Kennedy, this stuff shouldn’t be spread all over the newspapers.”
“Maybe we should just get rid of Helms,” Nixon groused. “It will have to come to that pretty soon.”
“I was kind of mysterious with him about why you were doing all this,” Ehrlichman said.
“Why do we want the Kennedy stuff?” Nixon interjected. “He murdered Diem.”
That was the message Nixon was honing. He knew all about Hunt’s handiwork with the forged cables, and he was pleased. “Life magazine has their tongue out a mile,” he bragged. “To do a special issue on the cover about the assassination of Diem.”
“Helms is scared to death of this guy Hunt we got working for us,” Ehrlichman added, “because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried.”
Ehrlichman offered a plan.
“Supposing we get all the Diem stuff and supposing there’s something we can really hang Teddy and the Kennedy clan with. I’m going to want to put that in Colson’s hands and we’re going to want to run with it,” he said. “I think what you will say to him [Helms] is that you have to make the decision [to declassify]. And you have a perfect right.”
“That’s right,” Nixon harrumphed. “I’m the president. The CIA is not.”
At that moment, Dick Helms was ushered into the Oval Office.
“Let me come to this delicate point that you’ve been talking to John about,” Nixon started, as Helms took a seat. “John’s been talking to me about it, and I know he talked to you about it. Maybe I can perhaps put it in a different perspective than John. You probably wondered what the hell this was all about.”
Helms probably had some idea.
It was a matter of diplomacy, Nixon said. “I just want to be sure that I am fully aware of everything that we’ve ever dealt with Russians in the past. What they did, and what we did. What was politics, what was not politics.… For the purposes of my information I need to know all that.”
With the niceties out of the way, Nixon was ready to level.
“Now to get to the dirty tricks part of it,” he growled. “I know what happened in Iran. I also know what happened in Guatemala, and I totally approve both. I also know what happened with the planning of the Bay of Pigs under Eisenhower and totally approved of it.
“The problem was not the CIA,” Nixon went on. “The problem was that your plan was not carried out. It was a goddamn good plan. If it had been backed up at the proper time. If he’d just flown a couple of planes over that damn place…”
He was talking about John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs.
“My interest there is not the internal situation, the fight in the CIA,” Nixon confided. “My interest there is solely to know the facts, and, in the event, things heat up … this becomes an issue.”
What issue? He was talking about the politics of the presidency.
“The problem with the whole Pentagon Papers issue … it impaired the whole security system of the United States…, it whetted the appetite on every goddam scandal monger in town,” he ranted. “… Did he lie or want to know the truth, about everything else that happened?… What Johnson’s thoughts were and why he bombed. Did he lie?”
He was referrring to the business of assassination.
“We should have never lost the Chilean elections…” he said, cold and clear and furious. “Once we got to the point we did, we should have done something more effective than what we did do.”
It was a blood oath between two men of power. Nixon would take responsibility for Schneider, but Helms had to do his part: give up the intelligence on Diem and the Bay of Pigs.
“What I want, what I want, Dick,” Nixon rasped, “regarding any understanding, regarding any information, I do not want any information, that comes in from you on these delicate and sensitive subjects, to go to anybody outside…”
Helms said nothing.
“This is my information, me and you,” Nixon said. “Ehrlichman will be my ears.”
Helms, the butler of espionage, spoke for the first time. He limited himself to one word.
“Exactly.”
“I need it for a defensive reason,” Nixon explained. “For a negotiation.”
“I quite understand,” Helms said, not understanding a bit.
“The ‘Who shot John?’ angle,” Nixon began, launching into a stream of consciousness monologue about the secrets he sought and the pressures he faced. This was Nixon’s id running rampant in the annals of history.
“Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame?” he ranted. “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It may become, not by me, but it may become a very, very vigorous issue. If it does…”
Nixon raved but with reason. In the context of a demand for secret records of the Kennedy presidency, his invocation of the “‘Who shot John’ angle?” can only refer to one thing, the JFK assassination. The angle was the press coverage of the continuing controversy about Dallas. Nixon wanted to assure Helms he would not raise the “Who shot John” question, but if the JFK story again became a “vigorous issue” in the press—as it did after Drew Pearson’s column in March 1967, after Clay Shaw’s trial in February 1969, and after Jack Anderson’s column in January 1971—Nixon would protect the Agency.
“I need to know what is necessary to protect, frankly, the intelligence gathering and the Dirty Tricks Department, and I will protect it,” Nixon avowed. “Hey, listen, I have done more than my share of lying to protect you, and I believe it’s totally right to do it.”
The tape of Nixon and Helms’s tête-à-tête confirms Haldeman’s belief that when Nixon spoke of “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” he was making a coded allusion to the assassination of JFK. When he asked for files on the Bay of Pigs Nixon had the “Who shot John?” angle in mind. It was, Haldeman wrote, “the president’s way of reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro, a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.”27
Nixon had read Anderson’s column about Bob Maheu and Johnny Rosselli and the Castro plots. Nixon knew Maheu from the 1950s, knew how he operated. He almost certainly knew Mitchell had cut a deal with Maheu, though he might not have known the Agency was protecting Johnny Rosselli from deportation. Nixon didn’t have a problem with the Agency’s dirty tricks around Kennedy. I have done more than my share of lying to protect you, and I believe it’s totally right to do it.
Nixon just wanted to know how the Mafia plots related to Kennedy’s assassination. “If I don’t know then, then what do you have?”
The CIA had shared the Mafia plots with President Johnson. Maheu told his version to Mitchell. Nixon wanted the whole story, including the “Who shot John?” angle.
“I don’t believe that you can say, well,… the director of the CIA … is the only one who is to know what happened in certain circumstances. The president is to know, and that the president’s successor is not to know?”
Nixon rapped the desk with his knuckles.
“I am not [thump] going to embarrass [thump] the CIA because it served … I believe in Dirty Tricks,” he yelled.
Ready to deal, Helms said nothing.
“I think the way we ought to do it,” the president said, “is to set up a method of communication. Whereby you and I and John, you can trust him. I have him in the domestic council but as my lawyer. He handles all the … sensitive [stuff].… You can rely on the fact that John is the contact. But also, you can rely on the fact that you and I will talk if something hits the fan.”
“You’ve got to tell us what we did,” Nixon suddenly implored.
“We did the Chilean thing,” replied Helms, the chilly spymaster. “And we did a few other things.” He might have been thinking of secret operations he ran for the White House. LINGUAL (mail opening). AMLASH (assassination). CHAOS (undermining the antiwar movement. “By God we can do some more.” He was ready do Nixon’s bidding. “Sir,” he explained, “we only have one president at a time.”
Helms showed his fealty by offering up files on Diem’s assassination.
“As a matter of fact, sir, the reason I want to speak to you,” he began, extracting a sheaf of papers. “Various documents I didn’t even know existed. I was not told about it at the time. It was a review that John McCone asked to have made about the Diem period. He was the director. I was down the line…”
Suddenly, the director was earnest, helpful, ingenuous.
“So, when I saw this document,” Helms went on. “I thought this was the kind of document that it would be irresponsible if I didn’t go to the president and tell him what this document was, before I handed it over, why it’s so sensitive … I’ve got a copy right here.”
He handed over a 1963 memo about Diem, written by McCone, along with reports on his meetings with the president and secretary of state. It was the sort of raw intelligence that Nixon demanded.
“Sir, I’m working entirely for you,” Helms said. “Anything I’ve got is yours.”
Helms had appeased Nixon with the Diem material and surrendered nothing on JFK.
“That’s really the case,” Nixon beamed, gift in hand. “That’s really the case.”28
The president was starting to trust the son of a bitch.