It took twenty hours for anyone on Dick Helms’s staff to notify him about the arrest of his friend Jim McCord and four Cuban associates in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Or so Helms said. It was plausible, as most of Helms’s stories were. But was it actually true? That was harder to ascertain.
McCord, Martínez, Sturgis, Barker, and González were intercepted at two thirty in the morning by three undercover officers of the Washington, D.C., police department.1 Tipped off by a security guard, the cops entered the offices, guns drawn. Hunt and Liddy, watching through binoculars from their command post in Room 712 of the Howard Johnson’s hotel, saw cops detaining Martínez and Barker in Maxie Wells’s office. They were setting up a camera to photograph documents in her desk. Martínez had a key to the desk, which he tried to hide. The cops seized the key and took a picture of it. Forty years later, Martínez, while sitting for an oral history for the Nixon presidential library, deflected all questions about that key. Half of his oral history remains classified a half century after the break-in, proof positive that the burglars’ target and intentions that night remains a sensitive matter for the CIA.
The five men were taken to the precinct house on M Street to be photographed and fingerprinted. Contemplating their disastrous predicament, they gave aliases and said little. Barker identified himself as “Frank Carter.” Martínez called himself “Gene Valdez.” González called himself “Raoul Godoy.” Sturgis gave his birth name, “Frank Fiorini.” McCord identified himself “Edward Martin,” the name on Hunt’s CIA-forged driver’s license. Hunt had given the fake card to McCord right before the break-in.
Hunt and Liddy fled the crime scene. After seeing the cops collar McCord and the Cubans, they cleaned out their hotel room and fled in near panic. Hunt gave Liddy a ride to Virginia and then returned to the Howard Johnson’s to evacuate a second room used by Alfred Baldwin to monitor the intercepted conversations. Baldwin hauled away McCord’s eavesdropping equipment. Hunt hurried to his office in the Executive Office Building to retrieve his incriminating notebooks. Then he went across the street to his office at the Mullen Company to call his lawyer and Barker’s wife in Miami. He drove home to Potomac and roused his son St. John. He wanted to get rid of his typewriter. It was a poignant moment, the aspiring spy novelist needed to toss the tool of his trade.
“He woke me up in the wee hours,” recalled St. John Hunt. There was “a pond across the street on General Griffith’s property. He was the owner of this huge mansion up on the hill. I used to go there fishing with my brother. We dumped the typewriter in there.”2
The next morning McCord’s wife, Ruth, called Penny Gleason, a security officer who worked at McCord Associates. She asked Gleason for help finding a lawyer, evidently relaying a request from her husband. She also asked Gleason to take down the autographed photo of Helms hanging in McCord’s office. After June 17 McCord sought to erase his connection to Helms.
In Miami, station chief Jake Esterline heard about the arrests from a friend in the Secret Service at three in the afternoon. The burglars, arraigned in court around that same time, were asked their names and professions. McCord, still posing as Edward Martin, said he was a security consultant who had worked for the CIA. “Holy shit,” murmured Bob Woodward, a twenty-eight-year-old Metro reporter for the Washington Post, who was in the room. Woodward hustled back to the Post newsroom.3 Around five o’clock, someone at the Post called the CIA’s Public Affairs Office for comment on an “Edward Martin” arrested at the Watergate.4
Yet it wasn’t until five hours later, ten o’clock that night, that Helms received a call from Howard Osborn, chief of the Office of Security, notifying him of the arrest of McCord and company. Or so the Agency’s story went. Cynthia Helms recalled her husband receiving a call late at night.5 But fourteen months later, under oath before the Senate Watergate Committee, Helms had a good forgettery about when exactly he learned of the Watergate arrests.
“It is my impression that I heard about it, read about it in the newspapers and heard it on the radio,” he frowned as he groped for the details of a momentous event in his life, “but this is not any lapse of memory. This is just one of those things that this far back it is hard to know just exactly who might have told me or how I might have heard it.”
Helms later agreed that he received a call from Osborn in the evening of June 17 but that didn’t mean that the director hadn’t already heard the news from someone else, perhaps his old friend Hunt. On the witness stand Helms would not be pinned down. “Certainly it was big news from the moment it happened,” he said.6
Nixon was more forthright. The president read about the break-in in the Sunday morning edition of the Miami Herald. The headline read “Miamians Held in D.C. Try to Bug Demo Headquarters.” His professed unconcern sounded a little forced. “I scanned the opening paragraphs…” Nixon recalled. “It sounded preposterous. Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC!”7
Nixon called Haldeman, who was in California. Haldeman checked with Jeb Magruder at the Committee to Re-elect the President. “It was Liddy and McCord,” Magruder squeaked, which Haldeman found evasive. Hunt was working for Liddy, Magruder added, which worried Haldeman, who knew of Liddy’s eccentricities. “It has to be some crazies over at CRP, Bob,” Nixon said. “That’s what it was. And what does it matter? The American people will see it for what it was: a political prank. Hell, they can’t take a break-in at the DNC seriously. I’ve got some real business to go over with you.”8
Early the next day, Liddy showed up at McCord’s office, which he had visited before. Stephen Anderson, a newly hired security officer at the firm, recalled a colleague telling him that Liddy asked for the keys to all the cabinets and desks. “He apparently spent hours going through the desks and pulling stuff out and taking it over to a shredding machine,” Anderson said in an interview. “That was the first indication to me that something was not kosher.”9
The arrests were certainly real business for Helms. Naturally, Watergate was the primary topic at the director’s Monday morning staff meeting. The response to any inquiries about the burglars, Helms said, should be “limited to a statement that they are former employees who retired.”10 Bill Colby, the former Far East division chief serving as one of Helms’s top deputies, recalled his boss’s injunction: “Stay cool, volunteer nothing, because it will only be used to involve us.” Unconcern was Helms’s mantra. “Mr. Osborn’s call to me was a perfectly routine matter,” he said. He was to be notified if any Agency employee got in trouble, which in a large organization, happened regularly. It was all perfectly routine.
Except it wasn’t. That day Helms received a visit from Colby and Karl Wagner, executive assistant to General Cushman. They felt obliged to tell the director about the camera and disguises they had provided to Hunt the summer before in connection with the burglary of Dr. Fielding’s office. Helms said the Ellsberg business had nothing to do with the break-in, so it wasn’t an issue. And from that moment on, Helms sought to obfuscate the fact that the CIA had been helping Hunt on orders from the White House.11
As always, Helms controlled the intelligence. Wagner gave Helms his memos on the Technical Service Division’s assistance to Hunt. The deputy TSD chief handed over his notes and copies of the photographs of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Sidney Gottlieb, a senior official in TSD, gave copies of the photos to Colby. If Helms did not know of Hunt’s role in the burglary at Dr. Fielding’s in the summer of 1971, he certainly knew by the evening of June 19, 1972, although he would indignantly insist otherwise.12
Helms had an elegant explanation, of course. He didn’t know what the casing photographs showed, he explained to Watergate investigators. “Even though Dr. Fielding’s name was discernible on a wall that was photographed,” he said with utmost sincerity, “no one in the Agency who had seen the picture had identified Dr. Fielding or was aware that his office had been broken into.”
The explanation was hard to credit. Helms was shown the photos by his staff because Hunt was involved in the Watergate burglary. Hunt and Liddy took the photographs in preparation for a burglary. Helms was mystified but not curious enough to ask a single question about the photos.13 Cynthia Helms spoke of her husband’s “amazing powers of observation which his years in intelligence had honed to an extraordinary degree.”14 Helms’s story—and he stuck to it—was that those powers simply failed him.
Helms’s biggest problem was Hunt, whose name was found in Barker’s and Martínez’s address books, seized by the police, and leaked to reporters. On Tuesday, June 20, a front-page Washington Post headline exposed Hunt’s connection to the burglars: “White House Consultant Tied to Suspect in Bugging Case.” Helms’s pal was now a fugitive. The situation was far from routine even for a CIA director.
Hunt, pacing the floor at Witches Island, ducked phone calls from the irritating Bob Woodward. He phoned Dorothy, still on vacation in England, to tell her his name and picture were in the Post. “The important thing is for you not to cut short your vacation,” he said. “I’m sure this whole thing will blow away just as soon as the right people do what they’re supposed to do.”
The right people. That meant Howard’s friends on the seventh floor, Dick Helms and Tom Karamessines. Hunt hoped to be rescued, yet again, by the boss. Dorothy decided to stay on vacation. Howard flew to Los Angeles that night.
The next morning, Nixon spoke with Haldeman for more than an hour in the Oval Office. Haldeman, taking notes, said Nixon was sounding paranoid in the wake of the burglars’ arrests. He asked that the Executive Office Building be checked “to make sure I was not being bugged.”15 That conversation, recorded by the White House taping system, would become notorious when it was revealed that eighteen minutes of talk had been erased.
Haldeman told Nixon that McCord was going to say that he was working for the Cubans, who had been planting the bugs for their own reasons. Hunt had either disappeared or was about to, he said, adding that one of the burglars, Barker, had been Hunt’s deputy during the Bay of Pigs. Haldeman also mentioned that Hunt had been involved in the “Diem thing.”
“I recalled that Colson had alluded to Hunt’s intelligence background,” Nixon said later. “I asked Haldeman how Hunt was involved in the Watergate incident. He said on the night of the break-in Hunt had been waiting across the street in the motel room from which the bugs would be monitored.”
Nixon conceived of a cover story. “Whatever the case, the involvement of Cubans, McCord and Hunt made it appear to be a Cuban operation,” he reasoned. “It would protect us from the political impact of the disclosure of the CRP’s involvement and it would undercut the Democrats by calling attention to the fact that the Cuban community in the United States feared McGovern’s naive policy toward Castro.”16
Nixon called Haldeman that evening. He was feeling better. “This thing may be under control because of the Cubans who went in there,” he said. “A lot of people think the break-in was done by anti-Castro Cubans.”
“Well, I’ve never understood, myself, what the Cubans were doing there,” Haldeman said.
“Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs,” Nixon said.
“The Bay of Pigs?” wondered Haldeman. “What does that have to do with this?”
“Ehrlichman will know what I mean,” he said.17 Ehrlichman was in the room when Nixon brought up the “who shot John angle” with Helms.
When Haldeman asked Ehrlichman, he said, “I’m staying out of this one.” Between Nixon and Helms was suddenly a dangerous place to be.
Helms went up to Capitol Hill for a closed-door meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting about the proposed Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In passing, Helms was asked if he wanted to volunteer any information on the former CIA employee, James McCord, who had been arrested at the Watergate.
“I will volunteer anything you would like,” Helms said agreeably, a reliable indicator that he would do anything but. “I just want to distance myself from my alumnus,” adding, “I don’t have—I can’t conceive of what this caper was all about. I really can’t conceive it.”18 Because the senators knew nothing of Helms’s “deep appreciation” for McCord, or the CIA all-star team that was working out of McCord Associates, the former director felt no need to disabuse them of their innocence.
The next night a suspicious fire broke out at McCord’s house in Rockville, Maryland. Another connection between the burglars and the Agency was cauterized.
In his odd Watergate memoir, A Piece of Tape, James McCord said the real story of the Watergate affair was the “illegal misuse” of the CIA by the Nixon administration. The fire at his house had nothing to do with it. That’s not what Senator Baker and staff found. They concluded that McCord’s wife and friends destroyed evidence that linked McCord to the Agency.
McCord’s version of the story was frightening. The fire came in the aftermath of a bomb threat on June 19, McCord wrote. A male caller, he said, had told his wife Ruth that a bomb would go off in their house within twenty-four hours. Ruth took the children and went to stay with a friend. McCord, still in jail, instructed her to go back to the house and clear out “newspapers, magazines and other fire hazards which a spark might set off.” He also told her to burn a folder of his CIA retirement papers. “It contained nothing related to Watergate,” McCord claimed. “I simply wanted none of our personal papers to be spread over the front yard in case a bomb did go off.”19
McCord speculated that the bomb threat came from the Nixon White House, which he said wanted to get into his house and remove evidence of his work for Mitchell, Dean, and Magruder. In his account, McCord did not mention the name of his friend Lee Pennington, who joined Ruth McCord in destroying his papers.20
McCord’s boss, Paul Gaynor, told a more verifiable version of the same story. Gaynor liked McCord and was not one to impugn a colleague. He told Edward Sayle, a subordinate in the Security Research Staff, that Lee Pennington, a former FBI agent and close friend of McCord’s, had gone to the McCord home on June 22. Gaynor knew Pennington because he was a longtime confidential SRS informant, paid $250 a month by sterile check untraceable to the U.S. government.21
Pennington knew a thing or two about sensitive material. He was the executive secretary of the American Security Council, a right-wing group that maintained an extensive archive on communists, socialists, liberals, civil rights activists, homosexuals, and others they suspected of subverting the U.S. government. McCord had been tapping Pennington for information since he joined the Agency in the early 1950s. Pennington’s relationship to McCord, said one CIA employee, was “like father and son.”22
Since McCord’s retirement Pennington supplied information to the CIA via his new case officer, a man named Lou Vasaly. Pennington also mentioned the incident at McCord’s house to Vasaly, explaining he searched for documents “that might link the Agency with Mr. McCord.” He said he joined Ruth McCord in tossing such material into the blazing living room fireplace.
As the amateur arsonists fed the blaze, they forgot to open the flue in the fireplace. The house soon filled with smoke, driving Pennington and Ruth McCord outside coughing and gagging. So while McCord acknowledged there was a fire at his house, his account left out a detail that his former colleagues found relevant: that his wife and Pennington had destroyed evidence linking him to the Agency.
McCord didn’t say anything about Liddy’s shredding paper at his office the day after the burglary but he admitted that he kept a wealth of incriminating evidence on his property at the time. His car, returned by Alfred Baldwin on the night of the arrest, contained two tape recorders, two electric typewriters belonging to Hunt, and other electronic equipment removed from the Howard Johnson’s motel. All of the gear, McCord said, was “rapidly traceable to their original source of purchase,” the CIA contractor in Chicago.
McCord said he also had $18,000 in cash, a copy of a letter signed by John Mitchell authorizing McCord to obtain information from the Internal Security Division of the Department of Justice about possible violent protests at the Republican National Convention, and some notes from early 1972 mentioning not only Mitchell’s name but also the names of John Dean and Jeb Magruder. McCord said he destroyed all of this evidence on his own, including “carbon copies of recent wiretap logs.”23 That was a telling detail. McCord wasn’t just a technician. He was a collector. He kept the take from the wiretaps at the Watergate and elsewhere for the Agency’s use.
Helms was truthful when he said the CIA was not involved in organizing the Watergate break-in. No CIA official told the burglars where to enter surreptitiously—those orders emanated from the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President and the intelligence collected by the burglars went back to their sponsors. But the Agency harvested the fruit of Hunt and McCord’s work. McCord kept copies of the wiretap logs at his home; Hunt passed material to Helms through the Agency’s office at the NSC. The burglars worked for the White House and the Agency shared in the take. It wasn’t a CIA conspiracy. It was opportunistic intelligence collection, which was Helms’s métier.
What was in the wiretap logs that the burglars obtained McCord never said, but Jeb Magruder did. Two days after the break-in, Mitchell ordered him to get rid of the transcripts the burglars had delivered. The file was about “four or five inches thick,” Magruder recalled in his memoir. The stack of papers consisted of photographs and transcripts of telephone conversations. In his Connecticut summer house, he skimmed the file as he sat by his fireplace tossing the paper into the flames, all the while “chuckling at the graphic details of the social lives of [DNC staff].”24
The CIA “had information as early as June 1972 that one of their paid operatives, Lee R. Pennington, Jr. had entered the James McCord residence shortly after the Watergate break-in and destroyed documents which might show a link between McCord and the CIA,” Senator Baker later concluded.25
Howard Osborn, chief of the Office of Security, didn’t share the information with the FBI, which likely saved Helms’s job.26 If Osborn didn’t know about the bonfire at the McCords’, Helms could plausibly deny that he knew. The story stayed within the Office of Security. Investigators would not learn about the blaze at the McCords’ home until twenty months later, by which time Dick Helms was thousands of miles from the scene of the crime.
It was a routinely hectic day in the life of the president. He had an 8:30 breakfast in the Family Dining Room of the White House with leaders of the House of Representatives who were going to travel to China as part of the opening up of relations he had orchestrated with Kissinger. From there Nixon went to the Oval Office.
“Now, on the investigation,” Haldeman said almost before they sat down. The chief of staff was a man of disciplined routine, now taxed by the undisciplined antics of Liddy and Hunt. “You know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area because the FBI is not under control.”
J. Edgar Hoover had died in May and Acting Director L. Patrick Gray could not control his own agency. “Their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money [found in the burglars’ possession],” he said. “And it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go.”
Nixon brooded as Haldeman rambled on about the new facts and new names filtering in. He had spoken with White House counsel John Dean and heard from John Mitchell, and he had come up with a plan. “The way to handle this now,” Haldeman said, “is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this … this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.’”
That was plausible. The FBI agents working the Watergate case assumed that Cuban burglars in suits with sophisticated gear and stacks of hundred-dollar bills had to be CIA operatives. “They’ll stop, if we take this other step…” Haldeman promised. “It’s got to be Helms and, ah, what’s his name … Walters,” the new deputy director.
Haldeman said he would call them in.
“All right, fine…,” Nixon said, warming to the idea. “We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.”27
That was true. The Justice Department suppressed the book of renegade agent Victor Marchetti and cut a deal to ensure the silence of Bob Maheu and Johnny Rosselli. Nixon had rejected Haldeman’s suggestion that they reopen the investigation of JFK’s assassination.28
“You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said, rehearsing the threat once more, “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.”
Hanky-panky like the Bay of Pigs and the question of Who shot John?
“You call them in,” Nixon growled. “Play it tough. That’s the way they play it and that’s the way we are going to play it.”
The meeting was breaking up when the president added more detail to his message for Helms and Walters, who were due any minute.
“When you … get these people in,” Nixon started, “Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are playing for keeps … they should call the FBI in and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case. Period!”
Nixon excused himself for a meeting with his economic team, from Treasury Secretary George Shultz on down. He took a break for a photo session. Mr. and Mrs. Carlos Dixon, dairy farmers from Arkansas, smiled proudly for the cameras with their two children, unaware they had interrupted the president’s efforts to obstruct justice. The Dixons departed, and Haldeman returned to receive a set of refined instructions for the CIA director.
“This fellow Hunt,” he resumed, “you know, he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. And [if] it gets out that … this is all involved in the Cuban thing, it’s a fiasco, and it’s going to make the FBI and the CIA look bad. It’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy, and he just better tough it and lay it on them…”
Haldeman had his orders. He headed for Ehrlichman’s conference room on the second floor of the West Wing where Dick Helms and Dick Walters waited expectantly.
“I am tall,” Helms recalled. “Even in those day Dick Walters had a certain bulk and Ehrlichman’s mere presence took up some space,” which is to say Helms still detested the man. They had scarcely wedged themselves into straight-backed chairs around the conference table in the small room when Haldeman marched in.
Four tense men sat face-to-face. Haldeman asked Helms what connection the CIA might have with the Watergate break-in. “The CIA had no connection with Watergate,” Helms said. From the start he spoke broadly, not just of the burglary at the DNC but all of “Watergate.” There was no connection, he insisted. “Elegantly put,” Haldeman sniffed in his memoir, “with just the right tone of injured innocence.”29
Haldeman explained the president’s plan. “It has been decided that General Walters go see Pat Gray and tell him that further investigations … could lead to the exposure of certain Agency assets and channels for handling money,” he said.30 “The president asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown.”
Those few words threw the tiny room into turmoil.
“The Bay of Pigs hasn’t got a damned thing to do with this!” Helms shouted.
Silence. The four men stared at each other. Helms’s sudden rage subsided. Ehrlichman’s dark, intense eyes roamed under his thick brows. He never trusted Helms, thought he was a blackmailer. The upright Haldeman, shocked by Helms’s violent reaction, wondered what was so explosive about the Bay of Pigs story. Helms regained his composure. “I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs,” he said. He always denied he shouted. He recalled saying, “There’s nothing about the Bay of Pigs that’s not in the public domain.”
In later years, Helms acknowledged that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was a Nixonian threat with a “devious, hard-nosed smell.” It conveyed, said one CIA historian, “a desire to touch a sore spot, to apply pressure.”31 Helms called the threat “incoherent,” which didn’t explain why the phrase had caused him, a master of self-control, to lose his temper.32
“The whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as Haldeman correctly intuited, was Nixon’s way of referring to a sinister nexus that could end Helms’s career if disclosed. Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson had published the broad outlines of the story in 1967 and 1971. The Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro had somehow backfired leaving too many people, including Nixon, to wonder who shot John. While the Mafia men blamed Castro, others—like Howard Hunt in retirement—said CIA personnel might have been involved in the Dallas ambush. Helms himself had said Make sure we had no one in Dallas on that day. The director lost his temper in the June 23 meeting because Nixon had found the sorest of spots and squeezed hard.
Walters went along as a convincing messenger. He had served as an interpreter for Eisenhower and Nixon. He spoke at least five languages fluently and had served as military attaché in three European capitals. Helms told Walters to go see the FBI director. “You must remind Mr. Gray of the agreement between the CIA and the FBI that if they run into or expose one another’s assets they will not interfere with the other,” he said.
Walters took the message straight to Gray at FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. In the director’s office suite, he passed a young military officer, Colin Powell, who was waiting for an appointment. Per Helms’s instructions, Walters reminded Gray of the working agreement between the CIA and the FBI on such matters.33 After investigating the five suspects, Walters said, “It would be better to taper off the matter.”34
Haldeman went back to the Oval Office and told Nixon the threat had worked. After telling Helms the Watergate investigation “tracks back to the Bay of Pigs,… he said we’ll be very happy to be helpful.”35
And, in the moment, Helms was helpful. He would later insist that he resisted Nixon’s cover-up plans from the start. Not in that first week, he didn’t. In the June 23 meeting, the director acquiesced to the White House order to tell the FBI to limit the Watergate investigation. Walters delivered his message: Better to taper off the matter.