The ways of Washington had changed in just a few years. The war and Watergate taught Congress that the president and the CIA could no longer be trusted. The civil rights movement elected black representatives to Congress and legitimized the idea that human rights should be part of U.S. foreign policy. Feminism swept a wave of women into politics and the professions. Congress modified the seniority system that stifled legislative initiative. Junior members investigated matters once ignored: multinational corporations in Chile, drug trafficking in Panama, prisons in South Vietnam. The antiwar movement faded and the militant left self-destructed while Nixon’s “silent majority” absorbed the countercultural changes that emboldened reformers and distressed conservatives. A new moralism took hold in Washington, liberal in spirit and intolerant of hypocrisy. Nixon’s presidency was under siege from without and eroding from within.
The self-made Nixon, so astute in his rise to power, could not comprehend the new realities. He imagined that the White House tapes, now sought by Special Prosecutor Jaworski, might exculpate him. Daughter Tricia, by contrast, felt hopeless. Her father, she wrote in her diary, “has repeatedly stated that the tapes can be taken either way. He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes.” But, she added, “he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content.” Knowing her father, “the latter is the way he really feels.” Nixon cited Tricia’s observation in his memoirs, noting that “sometimes people around you understand things better than you understand them yourself.”1
On April 30, Nixon sought to preempt impeachment by releasing a compilation of the transcripts of fifty White House conversations.
“I am confident the American people will see these transcripts for what they are,” Nixon said in a televised address, “fragmentary records from a time more than a year ago that now seems very distant, the records of a president and a man suddenly being confronted and having to cope with information which, if true, would have the most far-reaching consequences not only for his personal reputation but, more important, for his hopes, his plans, his goals for the people who had elected him as their leader. In giving these records—blemishes and all—I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people.”2
The American people were mostly impressed with the prolific profanity of White House chatter, excised from the transcripts with the instantly immortal phrase “expletive deleted.” The White House had censored its obscenities, but many still found the dialogue offensive. The editors of the Wall Street Journal saw nothing in the transcripts to justify impeachment. “Still there is such a thing as moral leadership … the ‘bully pulpit,” they wrote. “This is what Mr. Nixon has sacrificed once and for all.” The Chicago Tribune, long supportive of Nixon’s presidency, called for his resignation, as did other traditionally Republican newspapers like the Omaha World-Herald, Kansas City Times, Miami Herald, and Providence Journal.3
Jaworski filed suit for sixty-four White House tapes that he said were relevant to his investigation. Nixon sat down to listen to the tapes, including the June 23 conversation where he and Haldeman schemed to head off the Watergate investigation by ordering Helms to restrain the FBI. “I didn’t recognize the tape then as the ‘smoking gun’ it turned out to be,” Nixon rued in his memoir.
The currents of Watergate were converging. In May, the House Judiciary Committee opened its impeachment hearings. The following month the Senate Watergate Committee issued its final report, a devastating summary of a wide range of illicit activities, from the cover-up of the Watergate burglary to the Republican (and Democratic) violation of campaign contribution laws to Nixon’s personal finances, including the allegation, never proven, that Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo gave $50,000 to Rose Mary Woods.
In introducing the twelve-hundred-page report, the committee called attention to the larger pattern and identified what it said were the root causes of the scandal.
“The Watergate break-in cannot be understood unless viewed in the context of similar White House activities,” the report declared. “[F]rom the early days of the present administration the power of the President was viewed by some in the White House as almost without limit, especially when national or internal security was invoked, even criminal laws were considered subordinate to Presidential decision or strategy.”4
The adoption of the Huston Plan in July 1970, the committee declared, was a key step on the road to the Watergate. “The President approved the use of illegal wiretapping, illegal break-ins and illegal mail covers for domestic intelligence purposes,” the report stated, adding that the CIA, NSA, and the military services supported the Huston recommendations.5 The justification for the policy became justification for the Watergate crimes.
Baker could not convince the majority to include his findings about the CIA in the report, so he filed a forty-three-page appendix with his views. Baker did not take issue with the committee’s report. He just said there was more to investigate. He described the role of the Mullen Company in covert activities. He detailed the support given to Hunt by the Agency’s Technical Services Division, which, he said, raised the question of “whether the CIA had advance knowledge of the Fielding break-in.” He recounted the Pennington ruse, and noted Helms’s destruction of his office tapes.6
Perhaps most importantly, Baker concluded that “congressional committee oversight did not function effectively as a deterrent to those who may have sought to utilize governmental intelligence and investigative agencies for unlawful or unauthorized purposes.” The traditional arrangement, in effect since 1947, in which the CIA director reported to exactly one senator had failed to protect the democratic process from those who might abuse it in the name of national security. Baker called for “closer supervision of Central Intelligence Agency activities by the appropriate congressional oversight committees,” an increasingly popular idea that Helms had always resisted.7
The end for Nixon came suddenly and unmercifully and it implicitly involved Helms. On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tapes must be turned over, and the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Nixon reluctantly made the tapes public on August 5, including the June 23, 1972, conversation in which his enigmatic threats about the “whole Bay of Pigs thing” indicated his intention to enlist the CIA in his obstruction of justice.
“President Nixon personally ordered a cover-up of the facts of Watergate within six days after the illegal entry into the Democrats’ national headquarters on June 17, according to three new transcripts,” wrote Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the front page of the Washington Post, under the headline “The Plan: Use CIA to Block Probe.”8
Nixon’s supporters on the House Judiciary Committee called for him to resign.9 The next day, a trio of Republican leaders visited the White House. They were Barry Goldwater, the former standard-bearer and now a patriarch of the party, Hugh Scott, the Senate Republican leader, and John Rhodes, the House Republican leader.
Nixon asked how many senators would vote against the three articles of impeachment. Goldwater said sixteen, perhaps eighteen. He said he was prepared to vote for Article 1, the obstruction of justice count. Nixon knew his presidency was over. In the agonizing moment where he contemplated his ruin, he could not bring himself to face his family. He turned to his most loyal friend, Rose Woods. She had been there at the start, for the Checkers speech and the ordeal in Caracas, the defeats and the triumphs. Now she was the only person in the world he could face.
“After the meeting,” Nixon said, “I called Rose and asked her to tell the family that a final check of my dwindling support in Congress had confirmed that I had to resign.… My decision was irrevocable and I asked her to suggest that we not talk about it anymore when I went over for dinner.”10
That night Nixon asked Kissinger to join him in the Lincoln Sitting Room, one of his favorite places in the White House, where he relaxed in an overstuffed brown leather armchair with a stereo system and his record collection. Nixon was drinking when Kissinger arrived.
“Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” he asked, tears in his eyes. Certainly, Kissinger told him. Nixon asked him to get down on his knees with him to pray. “The President prayed out loud, asking for help, rest, peace and love,” Woodward and Bernstein reported.
“How could a President and a country be torn apart by such small things?” Nixon wept. Later he asked Kissinger, “Henry, please don’t tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong.”11
In Tehran, Dick and Cynthia Helms got a call from their friend Hugh Sidey, Time magazine correspondent, who alerted them to the fact that Nixon was going to speak on television that night.
“Dick, as usual, was unperturbed and went to bed at his normal time,” Cynthia recalled. “I arranged for the young marine who stood guard throughout the night to wake me at 4:15 a.m. The president was scheduled to speak at 9 p.m. in Washington, which would be 4:30 a.m. our time. Wearing my dressing gown, I grabbed a large shortwave radio, took it into the garden to find a spot where the radio reception was best, and found a station in Sweden that was carrying the broadcast live. Sitting in that fragrant garden beneath a starry sky more than six thousand miles from Washington I listened to Nixon announce his resignation. The suspense finally got to Dick, who threw open the upstairs bedroom window with a clatter during the speech to lean out and ask me what had happened.”
She relayed the news.
“Nixon had no love for my husband,” she recalled, “so we were glad he was gone.”12
The next morning, Nixon boarded a helicopter to leave the White House for the last time.
“The memory of that scene for me is like a film frame forever frozen at that moment,” Nixon wrote in his memoir. “The red carpet, the green lawn, the White House, the leaden sky. The starched uniforms and palace shoes of the honor guard. The new President and his First Lady. Julie. David. Rose. So many friends. The crowd, covering the lawn, spilling out into the balconies, leaning out of the windows silent, waving, crying.… The flag on top of the house, hanging limp in the windless, cheerless morning. I raised my arms in a final salute. I smiled. I waved good-bye. I turned into the helicopter, the door was closed, the red carpet was rolled up. The engines started. The blades began to turn. The noise grew until it almost drowned out all thought.”13
Nixon retreated to his home in San Clemente, California. Gerald Ford, former congressman from Michigan, took over as president. At the Pentagon, the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a decision about their own tapes. The meetings of the Joint Chiefs had been recorded and transcribed ever since the creation of the JCS in 1947. The day after Nixon was driven from office by the revelations on the White House tapes, the generals ordered the destruction of all the transcripts. The records, the chiefs decided, did not constitute official minutes but rather the reporter’s version of events and thus did not have to be preserved under federal records laws. All transcripts of the generals’ conversations about every major issue of the Cold War from the Korean conflict, the nuclear arms race, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Northwoods, JFK’s assassination, the Six-Day War, the Tet Offensive, the arms control talks, and the opening to China were all shredded. Like Helms, the generals made sure they would not suffer the same fate as Nixon.14
Helms emerged from the Watergate scandal as an éminence grise of Washington, a wise man above the fray of politics and polemics. In the fall of 1974, actor and director Robert Redford invited Helms to serve as a consultant on the set of his CIA thriller, Three Days of the Condor, which he was filming in New York City. Helms had never lost his interest in books and movies about his profession.
Helms was seen as a compelling, slightly mysterious man of power who commanded respect even from afar. Redford was the brainy star with a social conscience. “I was desperate to get a shot of the two of them together,” said photographer Terry O’Neill, “but everyone was very tight-lipped about his visits to the set” in New York’s Central Park. “I first saw them sitting together from a distance. It was perfect, both having coffee in Styrofoam cups, an eerie and foggy city in the background and two very powerful men sitting in their coats on director’s chairs. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew I couldn’t move a muscle because I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. I quietly put on a long lens and snapped.”15
The black-and-white photo captured Helms at his most untouchable, and that aura vanished just as quickly as it was captured on film.
On September 8, 1974, President Ford pardoned Nixon, ensuring that the former president would not face criminal trial and provoking charges that the Watergate cover-up continued. Congress was asking more questions about the CIA in Chile. President Allende had been overthrown in September 1973 by a military coup that established a brutal pro-American dictatorship. The question of CIA involvement led back to Nixon and Kissinger’s Track II policy that culminated in the ambush of General Schneider. Details of the payments to General Viaux leaked from Capitol Hill and were reported in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Amid this bad publicity, the CIA’s general counsel set up a panel of officers to review whether Helms had testified truthfully about Chile—he had not, they said. Director Bill Colby was prepared to sit on the finding, but his lawyers said he had no choice but to refer the matter to the Justice Department. Attempting to hide Helms’s misleading testimony would only explode later. On December 21, 1974, Colby disclosed the Agency’s qualms about Helms’s testimony to the Justice Department, which took the issue under advisement. That single decision would end the two men’s friendship and land Helms in a court of law.16
The same day that Colby met with the Justice Department, Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for the New York Times, was putting the finishing touches on his latest scoop. He had learned from CIA sources about the problematic operations cited in the Family Jewels, especially the surveillance of the antiwar movement (CHAOS) and Angleton’s mail intercept program (LINGUAL). When Hersh called Colby for comment, the director invited him to his office in the Langley headquarters. Hersh said his sources told him that the Agency had engaged in “massive” operations against the antiwar movement involving wiretaps, break-ins, mail intercepts, and surveillance. The Times was going to publish the story soon, he said.
“Colby sought to set him straight,” said historian John Prados. “CHAOS was limited to figuring out if the antiwar movement was under foreign control,” Colby said. He insisted Hersh had nothing more than “a few incidents of the Agency straying from the straight and narrow.” Whatever had happened under his predecessors was over. Colby had discontinued CHAOS, fired Howard Osborn, disbanded the Security Research Staff, and was hoping to force Angleton’s retirement. Colby wanted credit for cleaning up after Helms. “There is certainly nothing like that going on now,” he insisted.17
Hersh sent word to Helms in Tehran seeking comment. Helms refused. With neither Colby nor Helms denying the details in the story, Hersh’s editors played it up with a triple-decker headline in the Sunday edition of December 22, 1974.
HUGE CIA OPERATION REPORTED
IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES,
OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS
“Helms Reportedly Got Surveillance Data in Charter Violation” declared the subhead. The ambassador thought he had escaped Watergate. In fact, his nightmare was just beginning.
Helms was furious about the Times story. Colby was defensive. He demanded Angleton’s resignation and sent a report to President Ford. In a six-page single-spaced letter with nine classified appendices, Colby summarized the most troublesome stories in the Family Jewels: the CIA held files on fourteen past and present members of Congress, had surveilled thousands of Americans, and had been involved in operations involving organized crime and mind-control experiments.18
Colby believed the Agency could only regain credibility by repudiating the abuses of the past. Helms’s friend Cord Meyer blamed Colby for “atrociously bad judgment and appalling naivete.”19 But was Helms’s judgment that was called into question. The former director bore “direct and substantial responsibility for the CIA abuse in Project Lingual,” wrote historian Prados. “Helms not only approved James Angleton’s proposals for the mail-opening, he rode shotgun thereafter—backing expansions, turning aside complaints, keeping an eye for outside challenges, intervening with Cabinet officers when the project came under fire, and ordering measures to reduce visibility—and flap potential—all the while pushing for action. And all of this in service of something CIA acknowledged as illegal from the start.”20
And contrary to Helms’s claims that the CIA only acted at the behest of the president, Nixon had never been told about CHAOS or LINGUAL. “In more than four thousand hours of unguarded conversation recorded on the White House tapes, the president never once referred to CIA surveillance or mail-opening,” Prados noted.21
Coming four months after Nixon’s resignation and three months after Ford’s pardon, the Times story stoked the fears of an out-of-control CIA voiced by Senator Baker and others. Ford named Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to head a commission charged with evaluating CIA activities within the United States that “give rise to questions of compliance” with the National Security Act of 1947.
For the first time, the Agency was going to be investigated by outsiders. Skeptical of the independence of the Rockefeller Commission, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate announced the creation of separate investigative committees to also probe the CIA’s alleged abuses.
“These stories are the tip of the iceberg,” Helms warned Kissinger, who passed the story to Ford. “If they come out, blood will flow. For example,” he said. “Bobby Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”22
The claim was not implausible—RFK was hawkish on Cuba up until the day his brother was murdered—but there is also reason to doubt Kennedy knew about the AMLASH operation. If the attorney general managed the Castro plot, why did Helms tell Desmond Fitzgerald not to inform RFK about his meeting with Rolando Cubela in October 1963? Helms was in a tight spot, facing questions he had always managed to avoid. He had never been a partisan, but if Democrats wanted to score points off his Agency, he could play that game.
Helms went to the White House.
“Frankly, we are in a mess,” Ford told him. “I want you to tell me whatever you want. I believe the CIA is essential to the country. It has existed to perform a function.… The CIA needs to remain a strong and viable agency. It would be a shame if the public uproar forced us to go beyond and question the integrity of the CIA. I automatically assume what you did was right, unless proved otherwise.”
“I’ve been in service 32 years,” replied Helms. “At the end, all one has is a small pension and a reputation—if any. I testified in Watergate. I didn’t dump on President Nixon, and I stuck to the truth. I intend to fight this matter.… The CIA is the President’s creature.… If allegations have been made to Justice, a lot of dead cats will come out.” (He was referring to a pastime of nineteenth-century American politics: hurling feline corpses at the opposition candidate.) “I intend to defend myself,” Helms raged. “I don’t know everything which went on in the Agency; maybe no one really does. But I know enough to say if the dead cats come out, I will participate.”
“I have no doubt about your total integrity,” Ford replied. “I plan no witch hunt, but in this environment I don’t know if I can control it.”23
He couldn’t. After Helms returned to Tehran, Ford had a meeting with the editors of the New York Times where he expressed concern that the impending investigations might delve into matters the U.S. government simply could not discuss. Like what, a Times editor asked? “Like assassination,” blurted out Ford, before hastily taking his answer “off the record.”24
CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr picked up word of the conversation and confirmed it with his sources. On February 28 he broadcast a two-minute story on the evening news, leading with a sensational revelation: “President Ford had reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials involving the CIA.”25
The story was soon confirmed. The Agency had sought unsuccessfully to assassinate three foreign leaders, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. (Other parties killed Lumumba and Trujillo, according to the Agency.) “While I have been mistaken in suggesting actual murders,” Schorr later wrote, “my report opened up one of the darkest secrets in the CIA’s history.” As Ray Cline, the former deputy director for intelligence, put it, “the fig leaf had fallen off and we were out of the Garden of Eden.”
The Rockefeller Commission, originally charged with investigating the domestic spying allegations, added the assassination of foreign leaders to its portfolio after Schorr’s report. “This was the post-Watergate Congress,” Colby observed. “The old power structure of the Congress could no longer control their junior colleagues and hold off their curiosity about the secret world of intelligence. In this new era, CIA was going to have to fend for itself without that longtime special Congressional protection.”26
The state of the country was “ghastly,” in Helms’s view, and it only got ghastlier. A week later, Geraldo Rivera, host of ABC’s Good Night America program, broadcast Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination on national TV. Millions of Americans witnessed JFK’s violent death for the first time.