The Family Jewels (38 page)

Efforts to enlist Langley in the Watergate cover-up collapsed on July 6 over the FBI's demand for a document that would insist it stand down. General Walters met Patrick Gray, instead handing him a memorandum that summarized the CIA links of all the Watergate burglars plus its lack of connection with two Mexicans whom the FBI suspected of laundering drug money. Walters repeated that no CIA operations were involved and added the agency was not willing to affirm any endangerment of national security.
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Despite this record President Nixon made a public effort to pull the CIA cloak around himself. In a speech on May 22, 1973, he referred obliquely to the “smoking gun” conversation, maintained that worries of compromise of CIA operations had led him to act, and, within that context, confirmed he had told Haldeman and Ehrlichman to have Walters and Gray ensure that the Watergate investigation not uncover either CIA or White House activities. In June 1976 George Herbert Walker Bush, at that time the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, proposed that the highest honor existing in the intelligence field, the National Security Medal, be
awarded to Vernon A. Walters. One of the four grounds given for that award was “his key role in 1972 just after becoming Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in preventing CIA from being improperly used in a domestic policy matter.”
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So far this record shows a president intent on hiding behind CIA secrecy, plus an agency that—save for Walters's momentary lapse—had refused to be drawn into the cover-up. There might have been nothing more said of the CIA and Watergate except that this story had layers. The agency was on top of Watergate from the beginning. The burglars had been arrested on a Saturday. First thing Monday morning, Director Helms mentioned the burglary to his barons, discussing both Howard Hunt and James W. McCord. By his account and that of Cord Meyer, attending that day in place of Tom Karamessines, Helms asked each man whether they had anything to do with Hunt's cabal. All replied in the negative. Helms instructed them as to what would be said and who could say it. The director himself noted the FBI inquiries, saying, “We have no responsibility with respect to an investigation except to be responsive to the . . . request for name traces.”
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Next day, security chief Howard Osborn briefed on the CIA's relations with Bay of Pigs veteran and agency operative Bernard L. Barker. Helms asked that “future inquiries be met with a response confined to the fact that, now that we have acknowledged that both McCord and Hunt are former Agency employees, we know nothing more about the case.”
¹⁰

Actually the CIA's knowledge went deeper than that, and suspicions that Langley's role was more ominous made the agency a target for any number of politicians on the make or conspiracists determined to prove their case. Howard Hunt had been a subject at Helms's staff meetings before—almost a year before—when Hunt's White House outfit had drawn the
CIA into illegal domestic activities yet again. The immediate rationale was the old bugaboo of leaks. In June 1971 there was a huge leak in the form of Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers. In the wake of abject failure to suppress that Vietnam material by court order, the Nixon White House formed a special unit to counter disclosures. Hunt, whose day job was with the public relations firm Mullen & Company, had been hired as a consultant for that unit, soon known as the “Plumbers.” Walters's predecessor, marine General Robert Cushman, informed the CIA barons at their morning meeting of July 8, 1971, that Hunt had become a White House security consultant.
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Nixon officials wanted CIA cooperation with the unit, which Helms approved.

The agency assembled a study of Nixon-era leaks for the Plumbers, and CIA officials met with Hunt and his White House colleague, David Young, seconded from the NSC staff, on leaks and on administration schemes both to protect information and arrange provisions for declassification of documents. Nixon aide John Ehrlichman asked the agency to help Hunt. Two weeks after his name had come up at Helms's meeting, Hunt was at Langley to see Deputy Director Cushman. Howard Hunt requested disguise material and “pocket litter”—cover identity items—to conduct certain meetings anonymously. The request typified Nixon White House duplicity; one of those missions concerned checking the plausibility of doctored “official” documents that would have more directly linked President Kennedy—and the CIA—to the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. That was a Nixon political project to gain advantage against Democrats for the 1972 election.

On July 28 Hunt suggested to Nixon political operative Chuck Colson that the CIA be tasked to assemble a psychological profile of American citizen Daniel Ellsberg. It could be used to identify weak points to discredit the leaker. Langley had previously done profiles only of foreign leaders. More
illegal domestic activity. Nevertheless, the next day, having discussed the request with Helms, Howard Osborn asked Dr. John R. Tietjen, chief of CIA medical services, for the paper. The profile was completed in early August and handed over in David Young's office on August 12. It is not clear what advance word the Plumbers had of the Ellsberg profile, but they were not at all happy with it. Hunt later recounted that he had seen much better products on such people as Cuban Fidel Castro or Iranian Mohammed Mossadegh, based on even less data than available here. In any case, on August 11,
before
the CIA turned in its paper, Ehrlichman approved a covert break-in at the workplace of psychiatrist Dr. Lewis J. Fielding in order to copy Ellsberg's private medical records.

Meanwhile, pocket litter led to other Plumber demands. Hunt's colleague G. Gordon Liddy wanted a false identity of his own, and that was provided at a CIA safe house on August 20. The agency also furnished two miniature cameras and a tape recorder concealed in a briefcase. Director Helms was furious when he learned that his people had given pocket litter to a non-CIA employee. Hunt went over the top when he asked that his former agency secretary, now assigned to the Paris station, be brought back to work for him. According to CIA records, on August 25 Helms ordered cooperation with Howard Hunt to cease. But it was the next day that Hunt and Liddy scouted Dr. Fielding's office, and the photos from that California trip were then developed at Langley. The actual burglary took place on September 3. In addition to Hunt and Liddy standing outside, it involved Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, either former or current CIA agents and both future Watergate defendants.

Despite Mr. Helms's purported orders, more help for Hunt's Plumbers followed. On October 12 Hunt met with Tom Karamessines regarding concerns about Mullen & Company, which the agency used for disguising some of its operatives and as an intermediary with Howard Hughes,
and for which Hunt still formally worked. Langley put Hunt in touch with a proprietary that could furnish him physical security and telephone monitoring services in a Las Vegas operation connected with Mullen. There were more discussions with Hunt that October regarding the White House's pursuit of Vietnam documents. Any doubts this remained a key Nixon concern must have evaporated after November 16, when John Ehrlichman had CIA's number three man, William E. Colby, to the White House. He pressed Colby for the agency to declassify the Diem assassination documents. Colby refused. Helms backed him up. Meanwhile, Hunt again approached an agency officer in connection with a break-in plan that seems to have fallen through. In December 1971 the CIA performed a name trace at Howard Hunt's request.

If not exactly an agency domestic operation, the CIA's support to the Fielding break-in made it complicit in the commission of a crime. The other contacts at a minimum contradict CIA's position that it knew nothing about Hunt's activities. Worse, Langley actually did a fresh version of the Ellsberg psychological profile based on the private medical records. It was finished early in November—
and
Dr. Teitjen, with his lead analyst, wrote explicitly of their concern the CIA role might become known. They put this to Helms in a November 9 memo. The profile
was
an illegal activity. Later, when Hunt and Liddy moved over to the Nixon campaign staff and crafted its plan to gather political intelligence, the briefing boards illustrating the scheme were produced at Langley. As late as the spring of 1972, when Hunt wanted the help of an expert lock picker, the CIA put him in touch with an agency retiree. In short, there were multiple instances, some involving crimes, in which any standing order to refuse cooperation was honored in the breach.

Later it became apparent that Langley had even more foreknowledge of Hunt-Liddy political sabotage activity. Senator Howard Baker, who made the CIA his special portfolio
as vice-chairman of the congressional panel investigating Watergate, developed this evidence. It came from the agency and through Cuban exile channels. Hunt's request for a lock picker was a dead giveaway. Meanwhile, he recruited operatives for nefarious schemes, among them the same Cubans who had helped with the Fielding break-in. One, Eugenio Martinez,
was still on the CIA payroll
(at $550 a month [in 2012 dollars] for his information about the Miami Cubans). Martinez told his CIA case officer, as well as Jake Esterline, the agency's Miami station chief, of his connection to Hunt not long after the Fielding break-in. In March 1972 Hunt recruited Martinez again, and the latter informed a new case officer. Martinez worried whether the Hunt operation had CIA clearance. He approached Esterline to ask whether the station chief was, in fact, aware of all agency activities in the Miami area. Esterline checked with Langley. On March 27 Cord Meyer, Karamessines's assistant, sent Esterline word to “cool it” and pay no attention. Hunt, Meyer informed Esterline, was on unknown White House business.
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Meyer wanted no information about Hunt from the CIA operative: “It seemed clear to me that it was outside the Agency's charter and a violation of our legal authority to use one of our part-time paid informants to report secretly to us on what the White House might be doing in the field of domestic politics.”
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Eugenio Martinez's most recent meeting with his CIA case officer had occurred in Miami ten days before the Watergate break-in.

The assertion that the CIA knew nothing of Nixon administration dirty tricks could only be sustained by drawing the narrowest possible definition of what constituted “knowledge.” It is clear that Langley knew of the special equipment it had itself provided the Plumbers—and it had to be aware of the typical uses for those items. Howard Hunt's various demands for help further illuminated the direction in which the Plumbers were headed. The Ellsberg psychological
profiles crossed the line—and Director Helms had personally been made aware of subordinates' concern. Langley certainly knew enough that when Eugenio Martinez queried his CIA chain of command, Cord Meyer surmised the agency should keep its distance.

Once it came to the actual investigation of Watergate, there were instances of apparent foot-dragging at Langley, as Senator Baker also documented. Martinez's case officer was ordered to Washington but directed to go slow—drive, not take a plane. Another Miami source told Esterline that Martinez's car had been left parked at the airport and contained compromising materials. The CIA held on to this information for two days before informing the FBI. It is not clear if the time was used to get rid of evidence. In Washington that
did
happen—a colleague of former officer James McCord entered the suspect's home and did the deed. This officer's identity was withheld until February 1974. Meanwhile, Robert Bennett, the president of the Mullen company and a CIA source, fed Langley a diet of inside information on Watergate and served as a conduit to incarcerated former officers Hunt and McCord. Senator Baker established that Richard Helms was apprised of Bennett's information.

Information about these matters emerged piecemeal over many months. The net effect was to keep the CIA under the microscope despite Langley showing it had resisted the cover-up. Director Helms quickly decided he needed a point man to handle Watergate. For that he selected agency executive director William Colby. The marching orders, as Colby recounted them, were to “stay cool, volunteer nothing, because it will only be used to involve us, just stay away from the whole damn thing!”
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That proved difficult to do. Colby's first task was to liaise with the FBI's Alexandria field office, which led its Watergate investigation. At first this was a matter of name checks, but that soon evolved. The discovery of the Martinez car at the
Miami airport led the Bureau to wonder what else Langley was holding back. The Howard Hunt contacts were another case in point. The southern California locale of the Fielding office photographs and their purpose for planning a burglary were recognized only inadvertently by Cord Meyer. Handing them over became somewhat delicate. Once congressional investigators got involved, the situation became even more complicated. Colby defended the CIA, and he later maintained the agency had given Congress more than seven hundred documents and permitted two dozen of its officers to testify. By its count the agency had as many as 160 objections to Howard Baker's report—it must have grated not to have the authority to censor Watergate materials.

But Langley's unhappiness at how it came out in Watergate reporting had plenty to do with Colby and Helms and their reticence. Investigators repeatedly asked for all the 1971–1972 papers documenting Eugenio Martinez's contacts with agency personnel, but CIA provided only excerpts of the early ones. Colby refused to give up the debriefing record covering Martinez's CIA case officer. Documents regarding Mullen & Company, requested in February 1974, were still pending when the Watergate committee went out of existence. The records of technical support for Hunt were denied. As for materials concerning the Ellsberg profiles, Colby only offered to show them to the (friendly) congressional committees that usually dealt with CIA matters. Similarly, only the House Armed Services Committee got to see records related to Lee Pennington, the agency officer who had entered the McCord home after James McCord's arrest. There was a lengthy list of other evidence which Bill Colby never produced to the investigators.