James McCord had a new lawyer and a new strategy. As the March 23 sentencing hearing for the burglars approached, his attorney, Bernard Fensterwald, urged him to talk.
Bud Fensterwald, as he was known, was an improbable choice of counsel for McCord. A native of Nashville, he came from a wealthy Jewish family, went to Harvard and Harvard Law School, and made a career on Capitol Hill. He was a liberal and a Democrat, and McCord was neither. While McCord was a proud CIA man, Fensterwald had built a career challenging governmental secrecy and abuses of power.1 His reputation lent credibility to McCord’s new strategy of blaming the White House.
According to Fensterwald’s son, McCord hired his father on the recommendation of McCord’s friend Lou Russell, a down-on-his-luck private investigator who hung around the Howard Johnson’s hotel across from the Watergate complex and supplied information to cops, lawyers, and his friend McCord. (Russell told the FBI that he had dinner with McCord two nights before the break-in.2) Fensterwald later boasted to a Democratic politico that he had convinced McCord to talk.3 His son said the same: “My understanding was that Bud wrote the letter that went to John Sirica and offered to help raise one hundred thousand dollars for bail, of which he was forty thousand short,” said Bernard Fensterwald Jr. “And so he put the forty thousand in himself there.”4
On March 20, 1973, Fensterwald accompanied McCord to Judge Sirica’s chambers where he delivered a letter setting forth what he called “the facts of perjury, suppression of evidence and political pressure” coming from the White House. In his memoir, McCord said he wrote the letter himself and did not show it to his attorney.5
Three days later, at the sentencing hearing, a poker-faced Judge Sirica read McCord’s letter aloud in court. “The air was electrified. It was almost as though no one was breathing for fear of missing a comma or phrase,” McCord recalled. The judge deferred sentencing McCord, pending his cooperation with the newly established Senate Watergate Committee.6
When Hunt’s turn came, he chose not to talk about who was behind the burglary. Instead he begged for mercy.
“Your honor, I stand before you, a man convicted first by the press and then by my own admission, freely made even before the beginning of the trial,” Hunt said. “Since the seventeenth of June I lost my employment, then my beloved wife in consequence of my involvement in the Watergate. Today I stand before the bar of justice, alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.” What he did, Hunt said, “was unquestionably wrong,” but they were first offenses in “a life of blameless and honorable conduct.… My fate—and that of my family—my children—it is in your hands.”
Sirica responded without pity. He sentenced Hunt to forty years in jail. He sentenced Sturgis, Barker, Martínez, and González to thirty-five years. “I sat in stunned, nauseated silence,” Hunt recalled.7
McCord’s letter and the harsh sentences were a sensation. After nine months, one of the burglars was finally ready to talk, and the rest would pay for their silence. McCord issued a statement reiterating what he said in his letter to Sirica. “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.” And: “Watergate was not a CIA operation.… The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact it was not.”8
McCord got a lenient sentence while the others faced the possibility of decades behind bars. McCord would be sentenced to one to five years in prison and would serve only four months.9
The Watergate case was breaking open. Suddenly, news reporters following the lead of the Washington Post were everywhere, “swarming over officials’ lawns and back porches, sticking microphones in faces which had barely swallowed their morning eggs,” wrote New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas. “And the more resourceful reporters managed to dig out secret testimony, naming big names, high places, and titillating machinations.”10
Dick Helms could not escape the furor. He returned from Iran for a closed-door hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Knowing his testimony would immediately leak in the media feeding frenzy, Helms asked for a public hearing. He got it.
The first question concerned the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, which had just been revealed.
“I would like to say right now that the first time I ever heard that Daniel Ellsberg had a psychiatrist was when I was in Shiraz, Iran, a week ago,” Helms said facing twelve senators in front of a standing-room-only crowd in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Helms’s recollection about that moment in Shiraz was probably untrue—he had seen the casing photographs of Dr. Fielding’s eleven months before. Yet as one cover story unraveled, Helms had seamlessly stitched a new one into place. Ever since the arrest of the burglars the Agency insisted it had no dealings with Hunt and McCord after their retirement in 1970. That was Helms’s first cover story, which he had retailed to the committee back in February. “About this Watergate business, you have asked the relevant questions,” he shrugged at that time. “I have no more information to convey and I know nothing about it. Honestly, I don’t.”
It turns out he did have more information. He just didn’t convey it. Too many people knew too much and were starting to talk. John Dean, fearing his own legal culpability in meeting Hunt’s demands for hush money, had turned state’s witness. He told prosecutors about the White House campaign against Ellsberg, including the burglary at his psychiatrist’s office. Hunt, testifying before a federal grand jury, disclosed the Agency’s help with the preparations for the entry at Dr. Fielding’s office.
On April 25, the Justice Department shared the information with Judge Matthew Byrne, who was presiding over Ellsberg’s trial in Los Angeles. Having failed to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon’s Justice Department had charged Ellsberg with conspiracy and violation of the Espionage Act. The next day Judge Byrne declared a mistrial and cited the Fielding break-in as the reason. Around the same time, investigators learned of McCord’s undisclosed back-channel communications with Helms for the first time.
The former director had some explaining to do. The now-defunct cover story of “no dealings” metamorphosed into a more plaintive tale: Helms said he had reluctantly surrendered to pressure to do a personality profile of Ellsberg in 1971 but knew nothing about the burglary of his psychiatrist’s office.
“The Agency was not aware that Hunt and Liddy were preparing to commit a crime?” asked an incredulous Senator Fulbright.
“They were not, to the best of my knowledge,” Helms avowed. “I never heard anybody in the Agency mention any such thing. As a matter of fact, in the context of that time, no crimes have been committed.… no crimes were contemplated, nobody had given us the slightest indication that anything underhanded was afoot.” Helms admitted he had seen “photographs of an unidentified building and I did not know what it was.”
In the face of Fulbright’s skepticism, Helms essentially pleaded his innocence of the profession he had mastered. The most accomplished spy in America just couldn’t discern the meaning of those ten photos in the file of his friend Hunt, a career undercover officer seeking to discredit Ellsberg. Nobody had given us the slightest indication.
Helms’s sinuous actions had shaped the larger Watergate narrative to his advantage. The Agency adopted a familiar trope. When it came to Hunt, “the Agency’s right hand didn’t know what [its] left hand was doing and vice versa.”11 For the most part, it worked. For the press corps and the Democratic Congress, the Watergate story was the abuse of power by the Nixon White House. The nature of the CIA involvement remained off the public record. The reason for the break-in and scope of the Watergate burglars’ other activities—the intrusions at the Chilean Embassy and the offices of Chilean officials—were not investigated by the Senate Watergate Committee.
As Helms massaged his story, his successors at the Agency had to deal with the consequences, setting in motion the events that would lead Helms to be condemned in a court of law. His mastery set the stage for his undoing.
Nixon’s choice to succeed Helms as director of Central Intelligence was James R. Schlesinger, a brusque economist. “Schlesinger’s forte was management, his only knowledge of intelligence was that gleaned from work in defense analysis,” wrote historian John Prados. “He was really an economist with a Harvard PhD.”12 He came to the Agency with a reputation as a troubleshooter and a mandate from Nixon to shake things up.
Schlesinger had barely started in his new job when he himself was shaken up. The Agency, he was told, had previously helped Hunt and Liddy as they prepared to break into Dr. Fielding’s office to search for information that could be used to discredit Ellsberg. “What else have you people been hiding from me?” Schlesinger snarled.
The answer came within a few days. The Agency had received and not disclosed four letters from McCord, one of them personally addressed to Helms. With this revelation, Schlesinger erupted.
“His anger over this had to be experienced to be believed,” recalled Bill Colby, the target of his wrath, “and I experienced it both barrels.”13
On the spot, Schlesinger made a fateful decision. He directed, in writing, that all Agency employees were to report immediately on any current or past practices that might fall outside CIA authority.
Rob Roy Ratliff, a career officer, formerly the Agency’s representative on the National Security Council, paid a visit to Schlesinger’s office. Hunt, he said, had “frequently transmitted sealed envelopes via our office to the Agency.” He thought that “Mr. Helms was probably aware of some of Hunt’s activities” but did not know for sure. Schlesinger was “surprised and unaware of such a link,” he said.14 Ratliff provided the names of Peter Jessup and another officer who saw transmission of Hunt’s packages.
Ratliff was not the only employee to come forward. By late May the CIA inspector general had a summary of the dubious activities running to more than twenty pages. The full collection of reported complaints would run to close to seven hundred pages.15 A wag dubbed the collection “the Family Jewels,” slang for testicles. In other words, valuable and vulnerable. (Helms, rarely vulgar, insisted “family jewels” was an OSS term for closely held intelligence.16) Helms thought that Schlesinger’s intent was clear: “to make sure nothing like this”—namely, CIA support for Hunt and the back channel to McCord—“ever happens again.”
“Less clear,” Helms complained, “was the standard to be used in judging the activities which might fall legally beyond the agency’s legislative charter. The National Security Act of 1947 was deliberately cast in terms vague enough not to offend the elements of Congress and the public who might be shocked at the thought of the United States admitting that it was arming itself with a national intelligence service.”17
Contrary to Helms’s implication, the Family Jewels were not composed of complaints from the naive or uninitiated. They came from the Agency’s managers and rank-and-file employees. Most of the incidents they deemed problematic had been approved by Helms, including Angleton’s mail-opening program (LINGUAL); infiltration of the antiwar movement (CHAOS); mind-control experiments (MKULTRA); the use of Mafia bosses in the Castro assassination plots; the surveillance of dissidents and the proposed centralization of domestic intelligence collection in the White House (the Huston Plan).
The CIA was flailing. Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI, told the Post’s Bob Woodward on background that Hunt was blackmailing the White House, that McCord’s life had been threatened, and the CIA might be spying on the Post. His message: “The cover-up had little to do with Watergate but was mainly to protect the covert operations.”18
Helms was relieved when the manic Nixon suddenly moved Schlesinger to head the Defense Department. In his four months as director, Schlesinger had orchestrated the dismissal of some one thousand employees, a significant number of whom came from the Directorate of Operations, the new, more candid name for the old Directorate of Plans. “The bond between management and personnel,” Helms lamented, “was seriously damaged.”
Helms’s longtime friend Bill Colby took over as director. Like most CIA people, Helms was glad to see a career officer in the director’s chair. Keen to shore up the Agency’s diminished credibility on Capitol Hill, Colby briefed congressional leaders on the tenor of complaints from Agency personnel. The chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee agreed that if the Agency was addressing the issues, Congress need not investigate.19
Helms was unhappy that Colby had shared the internal complaints outside the Agency, but the gambit worked, at least initially. The stories in the Family Jewels stayed secret. Helms’s defenses were holding, thanks to the gentlemanly agreements that prevailed between the Agency’s leadership and the barons of Capitol Hill. In retrospect, Helms found it “astonishing” that the existence of the Family Jewels did not leak for another fifteen months.20
One sensitive matter that leaked right away was the short-lived Huston Plan. John Dean still had a copy, which he turned over to Judge Sirica, saying it contained national security material not related to Watergate. With the sentencing of the burglars and the revelation about Ellsberg, the short-lived plan was politically radioactive. Senator Ervin obtained a copy and told reporters it was “an operation to spy on the American people,” an indicator of the administration’s “Gestapo mentality.” The fear of the CIA as a secret police organization, first voiced when the Agency came into being in 1947, had returned. Nixon issued a statement defending the plan as necessary and legitimate in the face of an increasingly violent antiwar movement. The CIA, he noted, supported the Huston Plan.
The cascading revelations of wrongdoing forced Attorney General Elliot Richardson to appoint a Special Prosecutor to take over the Watergate investigation. Earl Silbert handed off his investigation to Archibald Cox, a former Solicitor General under President Kennedy, with a memo summarizing the case and what he had learned, especially about Helms.
Silbert showed no deference to the once untouchable director.
“The CIA record of disclosure in this case is a sorry one,” Silbert wrote. “Mr. Helms never disclosed to anyone the June 23rd meeting at the White House with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He knew of General Walters’ meetings with Dean and did not disclose them. When this office pressed for CIA information re Hunt and Liddy, he approached Mr. Kleindienst to give him the file. CIA did not want this office to see it, unless needed on rebuttal at trial.
“Eventually, upon our insistence, we did see it,” Silbert went on. “CIA maintained a continuous objection to using any CIA information in the Government case-in-chief, probably because of obvious potential embarrassment to CIA over the technical assistance to Hunt and Liddy in July/August of 1971.” Helms’s failure to disclose the letters from McCord, he added, was “inexcusable.”21
Richard Ben-Veniste, one of Cox’s prosecutors, explained how Helms had deflected the law and compromised its reputation in service of Nixon’s White House.
“Disclosure of the White House approaches [to the CIA] could have had a radical impact on the direction of the original Watergate investigation,” Ben-Veniste wrote in his Watergate book Stonewall. “Disclosure of McCord’s letter would at the least have aroused prosecutors’ suspicion. There was no question the CIA was impudently protective of the Nixon administration in its handling of the Watergate matter and that it unnecessarily weakened its position in the eyes of the public.”22
Later that summer Helms returned to Washington to answer questions. “A charming and informal man, Helms put on an impressive display of apparent candor and sympathy,” Ben-Veniste recalled. “He explained frankly the tradition of protecting the agency from political entanglement and cited that motive as the reason he had been reluctant to cough up information about Watergate.”
As for the pressure from the White House, “Helms admitted that he knew perfectly well that the agency was being importuned but said that he felt well out of it to extract the agency from these pressures and retire gracefully to the sidelines, where the agency could get on about its own business.” Helms assured the prosecutors that “it was obvious to him at the time that this was a political gambit by the Nixon palace guard.”
The prosecutors were satisfied, and Helms returned to Tehran. Not long after, said Ben-Veniste, “a new batch of documents from old CIA files brought with it a nasty surprise. For the first time, the prosecutors saw Helms’s memorandum of June 28, 1972, about his phone conversation with Pat Gray. This was the memo in which Helms stated that he had asked Gray “to desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.…”
“The memo,” Ben-Veniste noted, “expressed an opinion that was one hundred and eighty degrees around from the opinion Helms had told us he actually held at the time. What made the memo even more peculiar,” said the prosecutor, “was that General Walters claimed he never received it. [Emphasis in original]”
Helms was recalled from Iran for another interview. Ben-Veniste quizzed him about the memo, pointing out to him that it seemed to say just the opposite of what he said about the June 23 meeting at the White House.
“Helms was sorry, but he just couldn’t explain it,” Ben-Veniste recalled. “The memo was unfortunately phrased. True it was hard to reconcile what he wrote with his state of mind: What could he say? Helms was sure that the memo was delivered to Walters.”
Ben-Veniste wondered if Helms had recently created the document and backdated it a year “for the specific purpose of corroboration of the White House line” that the Watergate investigation threatened to uncover confidential CIA operations.
“It seemed far-fetched to suppose that Helms might be blackmailed by the White House,” Ben-Veniste wrote. But when he later heard the White House conversation in which Nixon said, “We protected Helms from a hell of a lot of things,” he realized it was possible. “Not till later disclosures about the intelligence community’s abuses in other fields did the full import of the President’s statement fit into place,” Ben Veniste said.23 Behind Helms’s cover story lay a host of CIA practices he didn’t care to defend publicly.
Ben-Veniste never resolved in his own mind whether Helms obstructed justice or not. “Richard Helms,” he said in an interview, “was very good at making you see things the way he wanted you to see them.”24