Nixon was cruising to reelection in the fall of 1972 as his well-laid plans paid off. The antiwar movement never did disrupt the Republican convention in Miami, where he was nominated virtually by acclaim for a second term. He played statesman over the summer, hosting Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev for a state visit of a Russian leader to Washington. The disorganized Democrats, hobbled by the divisions generated by the war, nominated Senator George McGovern, the most liberal candidate in the field. While Hunt and Liddy never got the chance to mount schemes of surveillance and blackmail against the Democrats, they were hardly needed. By Labor Day, Nixon was ahead thirty points in the polls.
In the White House, Watergate was a concern, not a worry. On September 15, the five burglars were indicted, along with Hunt and Liddy, on charges of conspiracy, burglary, and violation of wiretapping laws. The indictment noted that the telephone bugged was “used primarily … by Spencer Oliver and Ida M. Wells.” Curiously, the burglars had not focused on Larry O’Brien, the Democratic party chief who was supposedly the prime target. They were more interested in the Democrats’ private lives.
The president, following developments closely, asked John Dean to come to the Oval Office. Besides the seven defendants, the president crowed, there was no evidence that anyone else was involved. Dean agreed the damage had been controlled, although he privately thought otherwise. On Capitol Hill Congressman Wright Patman, a Texas populist, sought to open a an investigation and was rebuffed thanks to Democratic defections. The press was losing interest in the story. Nixon wanted to turn the table on his critics by revealing how President Johnson had spied on him during the 1968 campaign. He wanted the world to know he was the victim, not the perpetrator, of illicit wiretapping.1
Nixon wanted “peace with honor” in Vietnam and thought it within reach. He believed his first term had demonstrated to Moscow and Beijing that the United States would not cut and run on its ally in Vietnam. Now dealing from a position of strength, he believed he would get the terms he wanted from Hanoi. (The North Vietnamese felt they had the upper hand because the Americans finally seemed serious about signing a withdrawal agreement.2) Nixon had to sell the agreement, which included allowing North Vietnam to keep its forces in South Vietnam, to President Nguyen Van Thieu, who balked at a provision calling for the creation of a coalition government, including the National Liberation Front. Hanoi charged the Americans had reneged and refused to sign. On the brink of a peace agreement, Nixon decided to escalate bombing of the North to force the communists to sign an agreement that the South Vietnamese could accept.
Helms was not a party to Nixon and Kissinger’s decisions. His skepticism about the effectiveness of bombing was known. He did contribute finished papers from the Intelligence Directorate, which didn’t please Nixon at all. “We’re having some trouble in finding out even now how effective [bombing] is,” Helms told CIA staffers in June.3
The director was looking forward to retirement. Helms had served Nixon for four years, for the most part loyally. He backed him on the toughest calls: Cambodia and Chile. He used CHAOS and LINGUAL to support his internal security policy. He handed over the Diem file and kept the Ellsberg matter under wraps. His men, Hunt and McCord, came well recommended to the Committee to Re-elect the President. It wasn’t Helms’s fault they screwed up on June 17. As Helms liked to say, the Agency’s “skirts were clean.” He wanted to stay in his position for perhaps one more year and then retire.
Helms had become an admirer of the president, however strange and mercurial he could be. Nixon was the best prepared president, Helms insisted, better than Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson. Each of those men had their strengths, he said, but Nixon had the best overall grasp of foreign affairs and domestic politics.4 And for all of his class resentment, Nixon still wanted Helms to like him. It was almost poignant. In October 1972 Nixon invited the director to an exclusive dinner at the White House for four high-ranking visitors from London. These were the top men at the British Home Office and the Exchequer, men of power and money who epitomized the enduring Anglo-American alliance. Nixon wanted to impress Helms, and he did. Afterward, Helms penned another little note.
“My dear Mr. President: May I thank you most warmly for including me in one of the most pleasant dinners I have ever attended at the White House. You were in such good form Friday evening that, even if we had not had the delicious dinner in the Blue Room, it still would have been a memorable occasion.… Respectfully, Richard Helms.”5
In the Watergate affair, Helms played consigliere to Nixon’s godfather. When law enforcement pressed for explanations, the director supplied answers crafted with care. In late October, Earl Silbert submitted a series of questions to the Agency. He wanted to clarify three factual issues: Hunt’s knowledge of the cover operations at the Mullen Company; the forged identification and disguises supplied to Hunt in the summer of 1971; and the Agency’s contacts with Rolando Martínez.6
The answers were as modulated as Helms himself. Yes, Hunt was knowledgeable about the assets acting under Agency control at Mullen—but he wasn’t one of them. Yes, the credentials and wigs were provided—but Helms didn’t know why. Yes, Martínez was on the payroll—but not for surreptitious entries. Helms asked his staff to write up the details on blank memoranda with no identification of the CIA as the source. Helms took the package of answers to a meeting at the attorney general’s office in the Justice Department. He was accompanied by Larry Houston, his general counsel.
In handing over the package to Nixon’s new attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, Helms stressed that the enclosed information was “irrelevant” to the Watergate investigation, because all contact with Hunt terminated in August 1971. He put the point delicately but firmly. The package need not be conveyed to the prosecutors unless, in the unlikely event, it was needed for rebuttal at trial.
Silbert wanted to see the package and Kleindienst was in no position to object. The prosecutor came away with more questions.7 The CIA said that Hunt was retired and they’d had no dealings with him for two years, which wasn’t true. Silbert had trouble understanding why Hunt would supervise a break-in if he wasn’t working for the CIA. Who else did that sort of thing? And why did the burglars target the unimportant Spencer Oliver, not his well-connected boss Larry O’Brien?
“We were never able to determine the precise motivation for the burglary and wiretapping,” Silbert told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “particularly on the phone of a relative unknown Spencer Oliver.”
Silbert believed McCord was responsible.
“Baldwin had told us that McCord wanted all telephone calls recorded, including personal calls.…” Silbert wrote. “Many of them [were] extremely personal, intimate and potentially embarrassing. We also learned that Hunt had at some time previously met Spencer Oliver at Robert R. Mullen and Company and opposed his joining the firm because he was a liberal Democrat. Therefore, one motive we thought possible was an attempt to compromise Oliver and others … for political reasons … [but] we never had any direct proof of this since neither Hunt or Liddy … would talk to us.”
Hunt would later scoff at Silbert’s speculation but there was no doubt that McCord’s wiretaps had captured “personal, intimate and potentially embarrassing” material on Democratic politicians and party workers. Hunt could not deny that. Al Baldwin and Jeb Magruder both received and read such material.
In the fall of 1972 Hunt did not want to explain his actions to anyone. He wanted money for his legal fees, his family, and his Cuban friends, and he wanted it yesterday.
On November 5, 1972, Nixon won reelection in a landslide, prevailing with voters in every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. More than forty-seven million Americans had voted for him. “The support was wide and deep,” Nixon exulted. He won a majority of votes from manual workers, Catholics, union families, and people with only a grade-school education. No Republican president had ever done that.
Nixon had wound down the war in Vietnam, at least for Americans. Only twenty-one American men died in combat that month, the lowest number of monthly fatalities since 1964.8 Nixon could credibly claim his Vietnamization policy had succeeded.
Yet a melancholy settled over Nixon in the White House on the evening of his triumph. He had a toothache. He was still brooding about Watergate, a political toothache. The Republicans had failed to win Congress. Kissinger had yet to pin down the Vietnamese on the exact language of a peace treaty. “Whatever the reasons, I allowed myself only a few minutes to reflect on the past,” the restless Nixon said. “I was confident that a new era was about to begin, and I was eager to begin it.”9
The next morning, the senior staff of the White House were called for a meeting in the Roosevelt Room. Expecting a celebration of the president’s victory, they were told to hand in their resignations. Nixon left and Haldeman spelled it out. The president wanted to make some changes. The same message went out to the Cabinet: hand in your resignations.
Helms was lunching at CIA headquarters that day with Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy. He told Haig of his desire to serve one more year as director and then retire.10 When Helms got back to his office, Walters informed him of Nixon’s order. He was writing his letter of resignation. Helms advised him not to.
“Unlike other presidential appointees, it had become customary for the DCI and the director of the FBI to remain in place during a change of administration,” Helms explained in his reasonable way. He was not a political appointee, so he didn’t have to resign. Nor did Walters. “In keeping with this practice I did not submit my resignation to Nixon,” Helms recalled.11
A lesser man might have resorted to ambiguity, or the path of least resistance. Helms wanted to keep his job, as long as possible. He wanted control over when and why he left the government service. He wanted to see the president face-to-face.
The burglars, released on bail until trial, had ample time to contemplate their predicament.
Hunt was angry and so was Dorothy. She complained about the unreliable “Mr. Rivers” who delivered money on behalf of the White House. When Rivers didn’t provide the sums promised, she was the one who had to call the families of the Cubans and tell them. She thought Rivers was ignoring her because she was a woman. When he arranged for her to meet another intermediary, Dorothy sensed that the president’s men, having won the election, were going to abandon them.12
McCord paced. “Jimmy came to me during the Watergate trials and asked me to turn state’s evidence,” Macho Barker recalled. “He said he was not going to be a scapegoat … I told him that not only would I not do this, but that he shouldn’t either. I said, ‘Look, Jimmy, you’re going to have to shave every morning and look in the mirror. This is too big for someone like me. When something like this is big, leave it alone; it will take care of itself.’”
Barker and the Cubans were more fatalistic than their American associates. Exiled from their own country, they had lost to Castro and learned to live with defeat. Not McCord and Hunt. McCord mentioned “one or two or three things he was involved in that he was going to expose if they didn’t give him immunity,” Barker recalled.13
“I said, ‘No, Jimmy. There is nothing behind this, except we are caught, and we have got to take our punishment,” Barker said. “Mentally, Jimmy was not prepared for things to go wrong. The appearance of power caused these people to think they had connections and would not have problems, so they broke down.”
That was McCord and Hunt. Their friendship with Helms gave them the appearance of power. When the director didn’t do what Hunt called “the Company thing”—rescue them—the two former CIA men felt stranded. While McCord and Hunt were tormented by their dangling fate, the Cubans didn’t complain. Sturgis, Barker, Martínez, and González said little beyond that they believed the break-in was government-approved business.
The Cubans were taken care of by Manuel Artime. He launched a Watergate defense fund to raise money to support the burglars and their families with an enticing twist for donors. All they had to do was write a check. Artime gave them cash for the amount of the check.
In other words, the burglars’ defense fund was a money-laundering operation. Whose money was laundered was never disclosed. To reporters covering the Watergate events, Artime was merely a Bay of Pigs veteran and friend of Hunt’s.14 None knew of his long service to the Agency as AMBIDDY-1, much less his role in passing a gun to Rolando Cubela in the AMLASH conspiracy. Artime was another connection between the burglars and the Agency hidden in plain sight.
While Hunt stewed in his feelings of abandonment, McCord actually thought like a spy.15 In a bid to get the charges against him dropped, he called the Israeli Embassy. He knew their phone lines were tapped by the FBI. He asked to speak to a consular official, explaining that he was involved in the Watergate scandal. Without giving his name, he inquired about obtaining a visa to travel to Israel. McCord was counting on U.S. intelligence intercepting the call and passing the information to the Justice Department. When the prosecutors used his apparent intention to flee the country against him, he would threaten to reveal that his conversation had been overheard. The prosecutors would then face the embarrassing prospect of admitting in open court that the United States wiretapped a friendly nation. McCord calculated that the government would drop the case against him rather than jeopardize U.S. foreign relations.16 The gambit overestimated the efficiency of U.S. intelligence. Earl Silbert and his prosecutors were never told that McCord was preparing to flee. McCord called the Chilean Embassy and tried the same trick. It didn’t work.
Hunt felt abandoned. He called Colson at the White House.
“Commitments that were made to all of us at the outset have not been kept,” Hunt barked, “and there is a great deal of unease and concern on the party of the seven defendants.… What we’ve been getting has been coming in very minor dribs and drabs.… This is a long haul and the stakes are very, very high.… This thing must not break apart for foolish reasons.”
Hunt was ready to talk about numerous high-level conspiracies he had undertaken for the U.S. government if his demands were not met. That could have been a reference to the plots to kill Castro (which he wrote about in the unpublished “Give Us This Day”), or the possible involvement of CIA personnel in the JFK assassination (which he would write about in his autobiography), or the burglary at Dr. Fielding’s office or any number of dirty tricks he had played in his career.
“We think now is the time when a move should be made,” Hunt warned, “and surely the cheapest commodity available is money.”17
Helms received notice he was to meet with President Nixon at Camp David. Taking off from the White House, he endured the noisy thirty-minute helicopter ride to the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin mountains. He was thinking, optimistically, that he would stay on as director, and they could talk about next year’s budget.
At the Aspen Lounge, the main building of the compound, the ever-unfriendly Haldeman ushered Helms in to meet the president. Nixon and Haldeman perched on the couch. Helms took a chair. After Nixon made small talk—“several rambling disjointed observations,” said Helms—the president came to the point. Nixon said how much he appreciated the fine job Helms had done as director. Helms heard Nixon say he wanted some changes at the top of his administration. People get tired, find themselves trapped in old positions, falter, give in. Nixon wanted a new DCI. Ever gracious, Helms said he understood perfectly, he served at the president’s pleasure, and he deftly inserted his demand into the conversation. Perhaps a good time for a changeover, he suggested, would be the following March when he turned sixty years old, the Agency’s mandatory retirement age.
Nixon was taken aback. He expressed surprise that the CIA had such a policy. Helms sensed Nixon shifting gears mentally, as if he wanted to make a deal. The president suddenly asked if he would like to be an ambassador. Since the thought had never occurred to Helms (or so he said), he asked the president for time to think about it. They measured each other anew, circled some more, all of their mutual history filling the time between awkward bursts of conversation, memories going back to that briefing on Hungary in the vice president’s office around the time Frank Wisner went mad. They didn’t have to speak words that had already been spoken, only weigh memories for intentions.
Dear Mr. President … I like the dirty tricks.… a goddamn good plan.… the black world..…. lacked the will.… martyrs of tomorrow … warm birthday greetings.… our involvement should not be revealed … We never should have gone … the Chile thing.… the who shot John angle..…. knows too damn much.….… You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things.…
“What about Moscow?” Nixon blurted.
Helms said the Russians might not appreciate the presence of a spymaster in their capital. Nixon asked if there was any place he might like to be an ambassador. Helms proposed Iran, which made a certain amount of sense. He knew the country’s supreme leader, the shah, who was an alumnus of La Rosey. He and Cynthia shared an interest in Persian culture, and he would leave government on a high note. Nixon said he was amenable. Helms said he would think about it.18
Haldeman was glad to see him let go. “It was basically a friendly meeting,” the chief of staff wrote in his diary, “although Helms was a little surprised and obviously disappointed to be moving out after 25 years.”19 Haldeman called back a few days later to ask if Helms had accepted the ambassador position. Helms temporized for a few more days—it was hard to leave the director’s chair—and realized his time was up. He finally said yes.20
It was Watergate, Helms concluded. Nixon and Haldeman were firing him because he didn’t quash the Watergate investigation.21 He had done what he could but, as always, they wanted more. At the Langley headquarters, Dave Phillips said most people thought Helms had been kicked downstairs by a vindictive Nixon.22 Elsewhere, the suspicion arose, unbidden, that Helms had secured his soft landing in the court of the Peacock Throne by implicitly threatening to reveal what he knew of Watergate and other events. John Ehrlichman wrote as much in a thinly disguised roman à clef about Nixon’s presidency that culminates with newly married CIA director Bill Martin blackmailing President Richard Monckton at Camp David.23
Helms would be forever sensitive on the subject. Twenty-two years later in retirement, he somehow obtained a pre-production script of Oliver Stone’s forthcoming biopic about Nixon. One tense scene depicted Helms (played by a chilly Sam Waterston) alluding to the Bay of Pigs and, implicitly, the assassination of JFK, when talking to Nixon (played by the gloomy Anthony Hopkins). Helms was indignant at the prospect of seeing such dialogue on the big screen. His attorney sent a letter to Stone threatening to sue over a “false and defamatory” scene depicting “an invented exchange between Ambassador Helms and President Nixon in which Ambassador Helms is depicted as threatening the President with incriminating documents.”24
Stone cut the offending scene from the theatrical release, for reasons of length, he said. He included it in the director’s cut for commercial release on disc and cable. Helms took no action.
“I never blackmailed Nixon in any form, manner or kind,” Helms said with affable steel, “and nobody can prove anything to the contrary because nothing to the contrary ever happened. I worked for the President of the United States. I would have been disloyal, treasonable, anything you want to call it if I had tried such a trick…”25
As cagey responses go, it was revealing. Helms seem to recognize that, under the circumstances, such a “trick” was conceivable. What he knew could harm Nixon. That he did not need to say.
Dorothy and Howard escalated their demands.
“We are protecting the guys who are really responsible,” Howard bitched to Colson. “And of course that is a continuing requirement, but at the same time, it is a two way street.”26 He dashed off a letter to Kenneth Parkinson, a senior official at the Committee to Re-elect the President, threatening to “blow the White House out of the water.”27 Hunt’s warnings were heeded. On December 1, John Mitchell authorized use of $350,000 from the Committee to Re-elect the President to pay off Hunt and the Cubans.28
The anxious McCord felt cornered. He was convinced Silbert and the prosecutors were out to blame the CIA for a White House operation. When the Washington Star carried a story reporting that “reliable prosecution sources” were saying McCord recruited the four Cubans and that they believed they were working for the president on an extremely sensitive mission, McCord suspected a plot, as he often did.
“This was laying the groundwork for the false claim that I was the ‘ringleader of the Watergate plot,’” he later wrote, “which would draw attention away from Hunt and Liddy.” McCord suspected the story came from Hunt. He sent telegrams to Hunt and Barker asserting the story was untrue. He said if Hunt didn’t correct it, he would.29 Hunt, who had nothing to do with the Star story, thought McCord was “unstable.” Dorothy felt uneasy around McCord. There was just “something wrong” about him, she said.30
And so the burglars awaited their trial, scheduled for early January. To ease his financial worries, Hunt was trying to finish another spy novel. Dorothy told him she didn’t like the ending. “The way you have it,” she said, “the good guys win. But Howard, you know it isn’t always that way in real life. More often than not, the good guys lose—so why not end it that way?”
Like how? Hunt wanted to know.
“Well, the girl for one thing,” Dorothy said. “The hero doesn’t get the girl and the villain, well, he gets away. That’s how I’d end it if I were you. Besides,” she added, “if you don’t do it that way I won’t type it for you.”31
On the morning of December 8, Dorothy caught a flight to see her cousin in Chicago. Hunt returned to his typewriter to rewrite his ending.
“The aircraft was in a nearly wings level, nose-high attitude when it first penetrated the uppermost branches of a 20-foot tree,” said the accident report of the National Transportation Safety Board. “After this contact, the aircraft impacted trees, houses, utility pole cables, and garages before it came to rest across the foundation of one of the destroyed houses.” The trail of destruction left by the crash of United Flight 553 in the neighborhood west of Chicago’s Midway Airport ran for more than six hundred feet. “Portions of both wings and the fuselage from just aft of the cockpit to the rear galley door were consumed by the post-crash fire,” said the report.32
Dorothy Hunt, sitting in seat 1A in the first-class section of the cabin, was killed instantly. Of the fifty-five passengers on board, forty died in the crash. The pathologist who examined the bodies of the victims said those in first class suffered violent trauma, described as “disruption of head, torso, upper and lower extremities by burns and apparently some explosive force.” The pathologist corrected his “bad choice of adjectives.” Explosive force was not a reference to the presence or the effects of a bomb, he said. He was describing “injuries caused by high-energy impact.”33 While St. John Hunt and others would later argue United 553 was sabotaged, the NTSB found no evidence that anything other than pilot error was responsible.
Hunt’s children heard news of the plane crash in Chicago on the radio and rushed to tell him. They wondered, hope against hope, if their mother was among the survivors. Howard sought to comfort his nine-year-old son David and broke down crying himself. “Unquenchable tears fell from my eyes,” he later wrote, and the boy comforted the man, patting his arm. That night Hunt flew to Chicago, not knowing if Dorothy was still alive. The next day he was called to the Cook County morgue. A clerk emerged to dump some jewelry from a plastic bag onto a table.
“I stared at the blackened pieces with bile surging in my throat and tears clawing my eyes,” Hunt recalled. There was Dorothy’s wedding ring. He picked it up. “Ashes dropped from it leaving black smudges on my hand.… Her chapter bracelet had been half melted.”
“Can you identify these Mr. Hunt?”34
Pity the poor spy. Hunt was a scoundrel, a would-be assassin, a burglar, a liar, a racist, and a cheat. He was also a loving father of four, facing jail time, and he had just lost his best friend and companion of twenty-two years. He was, in his own description, “a pinata in the shape of a man, someone who had been battered until his insides spilled out leaving only a sorrowful and empty shell.”35
He scrawled a note to Bill Buckley.
“Dear Bill, If you hadn’t heard Dorothy was killed in yesterday’s Chicago plane crash. I am absolutely desolate. Howard.”36
Rescue workers sifting the wreckage found $10,000 in cash in Dorothy’s Hunt’s purse. Hunt said the money was for an investment in a Holiday Inn, which sounded contrived. The FBI interviewed Michael Stevens, the man who had supplied electronic equipment to McCord back in May. He said that the money was intended for him, as final payment for the eavesdropping gear.37 Hunt’s version was perhaps easier on his conscience. If Dorothy was paying off McCord’s debt, she had died as a direct consequence of his work, just as he had imagined in the David St. John novels, where Peter Ward felt guilty that his wife Su-Li had been killed because of his profession. If he told the world that the stack of hundred-dollar bills in Dorothy’s purse was for an investment, then she was taking care of her family, not his business. He couldn’t bear to think otherwise.
A broken man, Hunt could fight no more. He passed $21,000 in cash from the White House to Manolo Artime for distribution to Barker and his men.38 He told his lawyer he was going to plead guilty, say nothing, and take his chances on getting a presidential pardon within a year.
Jim McCord did not like the way the lawyers were talking. Just before Christmas he met with his attorney, Gerald Alch, at the Monocle restaurant on Capitol Hill. Alch said he had just come from meeting with Bill Bittman, Hunt’s lawyer.
“Alch suggested that I use as my defense that the Watergate operation was a CIA operation,” McCord recalled. “I heard him out on the suggestion, which included questions as to whether I could ostensibly have been recalled from retirement to participate in the operation.” Alch mentioned the possibility of calling former CIA officer Victor Marchetti as a witness “to describe CIA training in which its employees were trained to deny CIA sponsorship of an operation if anything went wrong.39 Alch even raised the possibility of calling Helms as a witness.
McCord had heard enough. To even consider calling the outgoing director to the witness stand was intolerable to McCord. He wanted a new lawyer, and he made his views clear to the Agency by sending another letter to Paul Gaynor, his former boss in the Security Research Staff.
“Dear Paul,” he wrote, “there is tremendous pressure to put the operation off on the company [i.e., the CIA]. Don’t worry about me no matter what you hear.”
McCord didn’t just want to defend himself. He had a media strategy to defend the Agency. “The way to head this off is to flood the newspapers with leaks or anonymous letters that the plan is to place the blame on the company for the operation,” he told Gaynor. “This is of immediate [and he underlined the word] importance because the plans are in the formative stage and, can be pre-empted now, the story is leaked so the press is alerted.”40
McCord sent three more letters to Gaynor in the coming weeks, each complaining about his legal defense team and constructing his own defense.
Asked why he received the letters, Gaynor said, “I imagine McCord was assuming I was still in the same position I had when he left, and that he knew I would have direct channels of communications directly with the director of security, I would report to him, I would see these letters would get somebody’s attention.”41 Gaynor did just that. He passed the letters to his boss, Howard Osborn, chief of the Office of Security and confidante of Helms.
Alch rejected McCord’s charge that he wanted to concoct a CIA defense using falsified evidence. He said he raised the possibility of Agency involvement because all the Cuban defendants believed, on Hunt’s assurances, that they were on an officially approved mission. It was a logical avenue to pursue in McCord’s defense.
Alch knew nothing about McCord’s back-channel communications with the Agency. About his intentions, Alch could only speculate.
“Let’s just suppose that Mr. McCord was in contact during the trial and before the trial with some representative of the CIA, a former colleague,” he told congressional investigators. “And let’s just suppose he was accepting discreetly, unbeknownst to me, counsel from whoever this CIA contact was, and acting at the advice of this contact to protect the CIA but still keeping me above the surface as far as these activities are going and just wanting me to give him the best trial and the best record for appeal purposes.”
Thus McCord’s own lawyer did not dismiss the possibility that McCord coordinated his legal strategy with the Agency—and perhaps with Helms himself. “He was obviously doing a lot of things I didn’t know about,” Alch said, “and that could have been one of them.”42
In his memoir, McCord denounced Earl Silbert and his fellow prosecutors for pursuing the question of blackmail, as if they had any choice. Their only cooperating witness, the former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin, testified the calls he monitored for McCord involved sex as much as politics. That indicated the burglars might have been seeking blackmail material. McCord indignantly denied the suggestion, but Silbert believed Baldwin. The witness, he said, was a frustrated single man who recalled the conversations in all their salacious detail. And Silbert knew nothing of Lee Pennington’s work for the Security Research Staff, which indicated McCord’s long-standing interest in collecting intelligence on the personal lives of “disloyal” people—an elastic category that often included liberals and Democrats—another possible motive for seeking blackmail material.43
McCord regarded any talk of calling current or former CIA employees as a plot against the Agency. It certainly constituted a threat to Helms. Any cross-examination of Agency personnel in court might reveal facts the Agency had taken pains to conceal: that Hunt was a friend of Helms and had been reporting to Tom Karamessines for years; that Hunt and Barker plotted to kill Castro in 1961; that Hunt and Liddy had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; that the Mullen Company was a front for CIA operations; that the “retirement” of Hunt and McCord was a façade for continuing reporting relationships; and that McCord ordered his wife and friends to burn evidence of his connections to the CIA after his arrest. Helms had a great deal to lose if CIA witnesses were called to testify.
With the burglars’ trial scheduled to open in early January 1973, McCord’s self-appointed mission was to protect Helms. McCord believed that Nixon had fired Helms at the Camp David meeting as preparation for laying the blame for the burglary on the CIA. He was sure the Nixon White House, the Justice Department, and the press were about to go after Helms.
He wanted to get his message to the White House too.
“I am sorry I have to write this letter,” McCord wrote to his friend Jack Caulfield, a former New York cop working at the White House.44 “If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at the feet of the CIA where it does not belong,” he said, “every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice now. Pass the message if they want it to blow they are on exactly the right course.”45