Nixon's Secret (61 page)

Bob Woodward later claimed there was “nothing to the story” of Russell and his connections to Watergate, brushing Russell off as an “old drunk.”
94

If Russell
did
tip off the authorities, it is likely the man he reached out to was Carl Shoffler, one of the arresting officers. Shoffler and two other
off-duty
officers had completed their shifts at midnight. Post shift, they imbibed at an after-hours spot and were parked close to the DNC offices, dressed in casual clothes when they received the call of an incident at the Watergate.
95

At 1:10 a.m., when McCord and the burglars found that the tape had been removed which indicated that the unlatched door had been discovered, it was McCord, against the advice of Hunt and Liddy, who decided to press on. The burglars once again jimmied the doors and re-taped the latches. They made their way up to the sixth floor without McCord, who had once again disappeared. “McCord did not come in [to the office building] with us,” recalled Eugenio Martinez. “He said he had to go someplace. We never knew where he was going [when we left the command post].”
96

At approximately 1:30 a.m. Frank Wills again discovered that the doors had been tampered with, again removed the tape, and this time called the authorities. Shoffler and crew, waiting less than two blocks away, went into action. At 1:40 a.m. McCord returned to the Watergate and made his way up to the sixth floor (Wills had not removed the tape this time). When McCord arrived on the sixth floor he assured Martinez that he had removed the tape on the way up, so they could not be detected. McCord, in reality, had not removed the tape.

Shortly after 2 a.m., Shoffler and the two other off-duty, plain-clothes officer caught the burglars in the DNC offices on the sixth floor near the desk of Maxie Wells. When the officers had the burglars against the wall, Shoffler could see Martinez fumbling for something.

“He made a motion with his hand toward the chest area,” Shoffler said. “I glanced at him, noticed it, put his hand back on the wall in a forceful way and told him to keep his hands on the wall . . . Martinez was not complying with the directive he had been given and again was going into that chest area and in a very forceful way was put back against the wall. There was a brief struggle with him over him trying to do something in that chest area. Keep in mind we had already patted him for weapons. It was at that particular time, the second time, when I thought
maybe somehow we missed something
. So, I reached into the area he was going to and pulled out a notebook with a key on it.”
97

The key was later determined by the FBI to fit the desk of Maxie Wells.

“I really do believe, as simple as this may sound, we wouldn’t be sitting around with all the puzzles and all the mysteries, had we taken the time to find out exactly what that key would lead us to,” Shoffler said later. “Obviously it was overlooked.”
98

When Nixon heard about the break-in and the subsequent arrests while on vacation in Key Biscayne, he was dumbfounded:

“It sounded preposterous. Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank,” Nixon said. “The whole thing made so little sense. Why, I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way . . . Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup.”
99

Years later, Haldeman echoed that suspicion:

I believe that in years to come historians will find themselves actually laughing at the DNC Headquarters break-in when they study the facts.
Never before has a crime been so well advertised and widely known ahead of time.
The CIA knew about it because Eugenio Martinez, one of their agents, was on the Watergate team and was reporting regularly to his CIA case officer. That wasn’t bad enough. Larry O’Brien, the actual target, was specifically told that the break-in at his DNC Headquarters was going to occur.
100

Haldeman said, “This series of clear, unmistakable errors appears to be deliberate sabotage and if so the CIA, or a CIA agent acting alone, may have interfered in an historic way which was eventually to bring down the government.”
101

The White House tapes demonstrate that Nixon knew the Watergate break-in was a CIA setup. Nixon opponents cited the June 23, 1972 “smoking gun tape” and a specific exchange between Haldeman and Nixon:

Bob Haldeman
On the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area because the FBI is not under control because [L. Patrick] Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them. And they have—their investigation is now leading into some productive areas because they’ve been able to trace the money, not through the money itself, but through the bank, you know, sources—the banker himself. And it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go. Also, there have been some things, like an informant came in off the street to the FBI in Miami with—who is a photographer or has a friend who’s a photographer, who developed some films through this guy [Bernard] Barker and the films had pictures of Democratic National Committee letterhead documents and things. So he’s got . . . there’s things like that that are going to, that are filtering in. [John] Mitchell came up with yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and concludes—concurs now with Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to solve this—and we’re set up beautifully to do it, in that the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC, who did a massive story on the Cuban—

President Nixon:
—that’s right.

Haldeman:
. . . thing. But the way to handle this now is for us to have [Vernon] Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this. There’s some business here we don’t want you going any further on.” That’s not an unusual development.

President Nixon:
Mm-hmm.

Haldeman:
And that would take care of it.

President Nixon:
What’s the matter with Pat Gray? You mean he doesn’t want to?

Haldeman:
Pat does want to. He doesn’t know how to, and he doesn’t have any basis for doing it. Given this, he will then have the basis. He’ll call Mark Felt in and the two of them want to cooperate because he’s ambitious.

President Nixon:
Yeah. Yeah.

Haldeman:
He’ll call them in and say, “We’ve gotten a signal from across the river to put the hold on this.” And that’ll fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is: [that] this is CIA.
102

This exchange has been taken out of context. On an earlier tape, Haldeman said, “the FBI agents who are working this case, at this point, feel that’s what this is. This is CIA . . .”
103
Haldeman also told Nixon that Pat Gray, the acting FBI director, would call Richard Helms and tell him. “I think we’ve run right in the middle of a CIA covert operation.”
104
Interestingly, Dean told Haldeman that using the CIA to limit the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in was John Mitchell’s idea. It wasn’t.

“Of course, this is a Hunt [operation, and exposure of it] will uncover a lot of things,” Nixon replied. “You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things 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 . . . This will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing . . .”
105

Andrew St. George, a reporter with multiple ties to the intelligence community, alleged in
Harper’s Magazine
that he visited CIA headquarters after the break-ins and received confidential information that Watergate burglar Eugenio Martinez for one had been informing the agency about the break-ins before they occurred.

Helms’s response to the Andrew St. George article is a classic example of CIA spin. “That fellow is a discredited individual. The Senate Armed Services Committee went into his background and so forth, and if you take Andrew St. George as a witness, you can believe anything.”
106

Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, Vice Chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, said the CIA, and the agency’s function in Watergate, was like “animals crashing around in the forest—you can hear them but you can’t see them.”
107

Following public testimony, Baker requested that a summary of the CIA’s role in Watergate be drafted for the perusal of the Committee. What Baker’s report revealed was incredible:

•   The Mullen Company maintained a relationship with the CIA since the company’s incorporation in 1959. Hunt had gotten the Mullen Company job with Richard Helms’ blessing and “Hunt’s covert security clearance was extended by the CIA; he was witting of the Mullen cover; and, on occasion he undertook negotiations with the Agency with respect to that cover—
even after becoming employed at the White House.”
108
It was also revealed that Mullen Company President Robert Bennett became the liaison between Liddy and Hunt in the weeks following the Watergate arrests and that R. Spencer Oliver, whose office was bugged, was the son of Hughes’s personal Mullen account executive, Robert Oliver. The Mullen Company/CIA relationship was so complex that the Agency paid half of Bennett’s attorney fee for his Grand Jury appearance.

•   A CIA memorandum dated March 1, 1973, noted that “Bennett felt he could handle the Ervin Committee if the Agency could handle Hunt.” The memorandum also suggested, in the words of the report, that “Bennett took relish in implicating Colson in Hunt’s activities in the press while protecting the Agency at the same time.”
109
Bennett was feeding stories to
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward, in exchange Woodward would not reveal Bennett as his source and “was protecting Bennett and Mullen and Company.”
110

•   CIA operative Lee R. Pennington Jr. helped Jim McCord destroy documents following the Watergate break-in. When the FBI, in their investigation, asked for information about Pennington, they were purposely misled, furnished with files pertaining to a former employee with a similar name. The director of security of the CIA ordered the removal of information pertaining to the real Pennington from the CIA Watergate files and this information was not made available to the committee until February 1974.

•   An in-house investigation of the Watergate break-in started almost “immediately” after the arrests and at the time the CIA was in a state of “panic.” The “very secretive investigation” was assigned to Executive Director of the CIA William Colby and was “instructed to keep no copies of his findings and to make no records.”

•   Senator Majority Leader Mike Mansfield sent out a letter to every federal agency asking to retain materials evidentiary to the Watergate scandal. One week later, CIA Director Richard Helms destroyed tape-recorded telephone conversations between himself and Haldeman, Ehrilchman, and President Nixon, as well as room tapes that recorded conversations (at Helms’s desk) concerning Watergate. Logs of the room conversations were made available to the Senate Watergate Committee, but contained “gaps.”
111

•   Throughout Howard Hunt’s employment at the White House, he was given use of CIA materials and the assistance of CIA personnel. CIA testimony that the agency “had no contact whatsoever with Mr. Hunt subsequent to 31 August, 1971,” was erroneous.

•   Eugenio Martinez, still working with the CIA throughout his involvement with the White House operation, kept his CIA case officer in the know. The agency subsequently withheld the case officer’s contact information, and when the officer was requested by the committee for inquiry, they were told by the agency, he was “on an African safari.” In testimony, a second CIA case officer, contradictory to the CIA statement, said the former was in Miami at the time he was requested. The first case officer was subsequently transferred to Indochina and not made available to the Senate committee.

Howard Baker believed the CIA had a large influence on the break-ins, the arrests, and the cover-up of Watergate. He was not a man who could be easily discredited. Baker would run for president in 1980 and emerge as President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff in the Gipper’s second term. Then Director of the CIA William Colby, possibly fearing the report would leak or reopen inquiries concerning Watergate, quickly sent a letter to Baker. Colby requested that certain material in the report be deleted “on security grounds,” and stated that the report was faulty. “It appears we have come to differing views on this subject,” Colby wrote. “If the report is made available to the public in the form proposed, I am concerned that the Agency can be the subject of what I deem to be unjustifiable conclusions that Agency officers or employees were knowingly involved in the break-ins in the Watergate or Dr. Fielding’s office or subsequent cover-ups.”
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“I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a CIA setup,” said Frank Sturgis. “We were just pawns.”
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The Watergate break-ins did not begin as a CIA operation, but men still employed by and more loyal to the agency than the president carried them out. Intelligence men had been placed in key positions throughout the White House, and the Watergate break-ins, as we shall see, became a threat to an ongoing CIA operation. The break-ins were sabotaged. Nixon’s suspicions led to the axing of Director Helms, who was reassigned as US ambassador to Iran. Helms did not take the dismissal lightly, and it was later speculated that Helms blackmailed Nixon into the post, lest he release more knowledge about Watergate.