Watergate, page 11
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On his way west that day, Dean had been surprised to see Robert Mardian, the Justice Department’s head of internal security, on board the same courier flight; unbeknownst to both men, the Nixon administration’s subterfuges were already beginning to conflict with each other. Mardian was on his own mission to the Western White House to disentangle how the government’s prosecution of Ellsberg was colliding with the brewing, hidden civil war inside the FBI between Sullivan and Hoover.
Mardian, a navy veteran, former corporate lawyer, and son of an Armenian immigrant, had come into Republican politics with Goldwater and grown close to Mitchell on the Nixon campaign. The men became frequent golfing partners, and Mardian had started with the administration as general counsel to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before being promoted to assistant attorney general in 1970, in charge of what was known as the Internal Security Division—the unit formed in the 1950s to fight Communism, espionage, and subversion. There, in short order, he’d become one of the most visible—and passionate—defenders of the administration’s “law and order” mission. (“You talk about wearing flags in lapels—this guy would have sewn a flag on his back if they’d let him,” one of his Justice Department colleagues would later say.) At the start of his tenure, he had cleaned out many division lawyers and brought in aggressive new—usually crew-cut—attorneys who picked up thousands of draft-dodging cases from the Vietnam War; the balding Mardian liked to say that he could tell a man’s political affiliations by the length of his hair.
His aggression instantly impressed his equally hard-line FBI counterpart, William Sullivan, who had continued—fruitlessly—to press the bureau to be more aggressive following the collapse of the Huston Plan. “Mardian,” Sullivan later reported, “was a real fireball.” His relationship with Hoover, though, soured fast. “Mardian is a goddamned Armenian Jew and I won’t cooperate with any such person,” Hoover steamed—but the director’s increasing isolation meant his opinion mattered less than ever.
In fact, what had started as Nixon’s mere annoyance and frustration with Hoover had tipped by 1971 into something more tense. The president had begun talking early that year about how to replace the director and ease him from the reins of the bureau; by February, Nixon’s resolution had stiffened and he had told Mitchell and Haldeman that Hoover should be gone by the end of the first term. Not long after, when an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, was burglarized in March 1971, an opportunity seemed to present itself sooner than they might have imagined.
The files stolen from the Media Resident Agency had been turned over to the Washington Post, where reporters Betty Medsger and Ken Clawson were amazed to grasp for the first time the sweep of the bureau’s widespread surveillance programs targeting New Left activists and radicals—their resulting exposé, drawn from the bureau’s own documents, illustrated a sweeping program far more invasive and expansive than anything the public had imagined. As more than a thousand stolen documents trickled into public view, people recoiled at the bureau’s targeting of Black activists, antiwar groups, and college students—including how it was recruiting informants as young as eighteen. Even the Quakers fell under the bureau’s suspicious gaze. It was one of the first real, unvarnished glimpses into the FBI’s work in American history, and many didn’t like what they saw. “[The FBI] is the nearest thing America has to a police state,” the New Republic editorialized. The leaked memos also made J. Edgar Hoover appear odd, dictatorial, and thin-skinned. Adding to the embarrassment was the fact that the bureau couldn’t figure out the identity of the burglars, who had dubbed themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI.
In April, as the burglary fallout spread, White House aide Pat Buchanan asked John Dean to work through how the FBI director could be replaced, by whom, and how long a Hoover successor might serve. The U.S. had never changed FBI directors before, so the procedures were unclear, and removing a man of Hoover’s influence, regardless of the controversy, would not be easy. A LIFE magazine cover that month dubbed him the “Emperor of the FBI,” portraying his visage in a marble bust, and during a party for Martha Mitchell, he joked to the crowd about how they might not recognize him in a tuxedo. “We emperors have our problems,” he said. “My Roman toga was not returned from the cleaners.” Martha, who playfully called him “Jedgar,” joked, “When you have seen one FBI director, you have seen them all.”
But behind the scenes, there was little humor to be found as the director’s feud with Sullivan over the bureau’s direction continued through the spring. In June, the two clashed over the Ellsberg investigation—Hoover wanted nothing to do with such a politically sensitive case, whereas Sullivan wanted it pursued tenaciously—and as of July 1, Hoover had effectively demoted Sullivan, creating a new number three post above his assistant director and installing an agent named W. Mark Felt in the role, as deputy associate director to assist Hoover’s longtime number two, associate deputy Clyde Tolson, who was ailing himself and increasingly unable to fulfill his own duties.V
Mark Felt had spent six years heading the FBI’s internal inspection division and was deeply loyal to Hoover, a respect that would last long past the man’s death. He had consistently sided with the director over Sullivan in the ongoing feuds about the bureau’s investigative posture, cautioning his colleague once, “Bill, the bureau can have only one boss.”
Becoming Tolson’s “deputy” meant, in most respects, serving as the bureau’s actual operational leader and positioned Felt—at least in his own mind—as the heir apparent to be director of the FBI when and if Hoover ever left office. The list of possible Hoover successors had long been short—just three names, really: Felt, Sullivan, and former Hoover aide Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, but DeLoach had been largely removed from speculation during the Nixon years because of his close association with Lyndon Johnson, and he had retired from the bureau in June 1970 for a second career with Pepsi-Cola. Now, with Sullivan falling from favor, Felt stood all but unchallenged atop the bureau’s hierarchy.
Hoover’s demotion and reshuffling panicked Sullivan; he feared he might be fired outright and spotted an opportunity amid the Pentagon Papers case to ingratiate himself with Mardian and the Nixon White House and remind them of the secrets he kept. In early July, Mardian’s prosecutors made a routine request that the FBI turn over documents pertaining to any “electronic surveillance information” about Ellsberg and others, like Mort Halperin, who were part of the Pentagon Papers dragnet, as they prepared their case against the leaker. The bureau checked its official files and responded that it had no relevant wiretaps or surveillance on Ellsberg or Halperin—which was true officially, but the file clerks didn’t know about the special, illegal White House wiretaps ordered by Kissinger.
The Kissinger wiretaps, begun amid such presidential pique, had been no flight of fancy or momentary lapse in judgment; with an oft-rotating set of targets, the presidential wiretapping program had actually continued for nearly two years, only ending on February 10, 1971. At that point, the FBI liaison at the White House collected all the wiretap summaries secreted away by Haig, Kissinger, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the president and returned them to Sullivan, who had hidden them away in his own safe. Now, all of a sudden, they seemed explosive.
Unofficially, Sullivan contacted Mardian to ask how he should handle the situation; the truth was there were at least fifteen separate monitored conversations that involved Ellsberg—some of which stemmed from a period when Ellsberg was Halperin’s houseguest—all forgotten and hidden in Sullivan’s office safe. Sullivan told Mardian that he was now concerned that Hoover might try to blackmail the president with the wiretap files if he mentioned the files to the director. Mardian reported the situation to his boss, Mitchell, and soon found himself sharing the courier flight with Dean.
Even before his arrival, the Nixon team in California had been debating how to handle the illegal wiretap files and whether they would have to be disclosed to the grand jury investigating Ellsberg. Ultimately, they assured themselves the taping program could remain hidden; after the meeting, Ehrlichman jotted down in his notes, “Re: grand jury—dont worry re tapes on discovery—re WHs.”
In his own forty-minute meeting with Nixon and Ehrlichman on July 12, Mardian reviewed the status of the Ellsberg case and discussed the sensitive nature of the wiretap summaries, while Nixon and Ehrlichman underscored how unhappy they were with the Justice Department’s progress on the Pentagon Papers case. “He was very upset,” Mardian recalled later, and he’d tried to reassure the president: “I told him I was doing everything I could, within my legal powers, to nail him.” As the head of domestic security left the meeting, Haldeman told him, coldly, “Mardian, you never come up with the right answers.”VI
Nixon ordered Mardian to get his hands on the files, deliver them to the White House, and verify that the FBI’s files matched the White House’s own logs of the wiretap summaries to ensure none was missing and vulnerable to possible blackmail. In their thinking, if the files existed at the White House, the Nixon administration could claim executive privilege and withhold the wiretaps if asked. Once back in Washington, Mardian met an agent from Sullivan’s office, who handed the assistant attorney general a bulging, beat-up, olive-drab satchel, embossed with the initials “W.C.S.,” which Mardian then took to the White House. There, Kissinger and Haig had their staff cross-check its contents before Mardian delivered it personally to the Oval Office. (He declined later, in interviews with FBI agents, to answer whether he had handed the satchel to Nixon directly.) Nixon had Ehrlichman take custody of the files, and he placed them in a special safe in his own office.
The entire episode underscored to the White House the possible treachery of Hoover and how poorly he was serving his commander in chief. Within hours of Mardian’s departure from California, Ehrlichman began to build a team to do what the Justice Department seemed incapable of doing: stopping the leaks.
I. This conversation wasn’t released until 1996, at which point Kissinger denied that he’d been present for the president ordering a break-in at one of the capital’s most respected institutions. “I have no such recollection,” he told a San Francisco Examiner reporter after having Nixon’s recorded words read to him. “Nixon often said exalted things that people didn’t think would have to be done.”
II. Until the formation of the CIA, the U.S. had never had a meaningful intelligence capability—and certainly not in peacetime—and largely split such tasks between the FBI, the army, and the navy.
III. Hunt’s uncertain ongoing status with the CIA postretirement stands as one of the many nebulous and enormously strange CIA connections that permeate the Watergate story, leading some to wonder if Hunt was still reporting to the agency what he was doing for the White House. The numerous investigations after and years of further revelations have never shown this to be true—but they’ve also never produced clear evidence that Hunt wasn’t feeding information to his old employer.
IV. Notably, there’s a slightly different version of this story that Dean told Nixon on March 21, 1973, as Watergate prepared to tumble down around them; Dean did not know that the conversation in the Oval Office was being recorded and proceeded to tell the president a version that more directly involved both Ehrlichman and Dean himself: “I flew to California because I was told that John had instructed [the Brookings burglary] and he said, ‘I really hadn’t. It’s a misimpression—for Christ’s sake, turn it off.’ And I did. I came back and turned it off.”
V. Inside the FBI, the reshuffling hit with the power of an earthquake. Sullivan had long existed in exalted air inside the bureau. Hoover typically referred to all of his aides by last name; Sullivan and Tolson were the bureau’s only two leaders Hoover called by first name: Bill and Clyde.
VI. Mardian attributes this quote to Haldeman, although White House records don’t show that the White House chief of staff was present for his meeting with Nixon; it’s thus unclear whether Mardian was misremembering the speaker, who was actually Ehrlichman, whom he did meet with, or whether he spoke separately afterward to Haldeman, who was also in San Clemente at the time.
Chapter 6 The Plumbers
On a clear day, Richard Nixon could see sixty miles out into the Pacific, all the way out to San Clemente Island, from his perch at the vacation estate he had dubbed “La Casa Pacifica.” At the start of his presidency, Nixon had sold his portfolio of stocks and bonds, to avoid any accusations of impropriety, as well as his New York apartment and invested the money instead in real estate, purchasing two vacation getaways, in Florida and California, to serve as his escapes from Washington.
He’d wanted a place near where he’d grown up and lived in California to serve as his presidential retreat, so after his election, a young Ehrlichman aide had driven up and down the Pacific coast scouting locations and eventually settled on a thirty-acre, Spanish mission–style estate, owned by the daughter of a Democratic Party finance chair. The fourteen-room tile-roofed hacienda opened into a courtyard with a central fountain, decorated with a statue of frogs and Cupid. Perched on a bluff adjacent to the Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton, the location was ideal too for security. Nixon purchased it using a series of Kalmbach-enabled questionable financial transactions with his wealthy friend Robert Abplanalp, and the U.S. government transformed it into a true presidential estate, installing advanced security and communications gear and converting outbuildings for staff and Secret Service quarters. Nixon stocked the house itself with books on presidents and politics, the only meaningful hobby interest he ever had, while friends paid for the construction of a three-hole golf course.
Thanks to presidential perks, the lush oceanfront property was a breeze to visit: a quick Air Force One flight to the El Toro marine base, then a marine or army helicopter to a nearby Coast Guard base and a short golf cart ride to the red tile roofs of the estate. Nixon spent nearly 200 days in San Clemente during his first term, another 150 in Key Biscayne—a full year away from the confines and structure of the White House.
It was from California on Thursday, July 15, 1971, that Nixon announced one of the foreign policy “monuments” he hoped would change the world: At 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, speaking from the NBC studios in Burbank, he read a statement released simultaneously in the U.S. and in Peking, explaining that Henry Kissinger had held secret talks with Chinese premier Chou En-lai, and that he intended to visit China within the next year. It was a diplomatic triumph—a high point not just of his presidency but of a century of U.S. diplomacy. “We seek friendly relations with all nations,” Nixon told Americans that night. “Any nation can be our friend without being any other nation’s enemy.”
Late that evening, after a celebratory dinner with the president at an L.A. restaurant, the White House staff helicoptered back to San Clemente from Burbank; shouting over the clattering rotors, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Kissinger turned back to the topic of leaks.
Ehrlichman insisted, over Kissinger’s protest, that the national security advisor’s aide-de-camp, David Young, help lead a new team dedicated to identifying and countering leakers. Young was Kissinger’s boy wonder of the moment, in a high-pressure job that dealt with everything from the bachelor national security advisor’s laundry to note-taking in high-level meetings with foreign leaders—the average tenure in the role was measured in just months. Haldeman smiled listening to Ehrlichman and Kissinger bicker—sticking a Kissinger man on the team was “bureaucratic genius,” he thought, knowing “all too well how Henry would happily ignite a fuse, then stand off swearing that he knew nothing about it or had even been against it.”
On Saturday morning, Nixon hosted a meeting to review his administration’s plan to combat heroin in Vietnam—an increasingly complex military and domestic problem as drugs from Southeast Asia were funneled back to the streets of the U.S., sometimes even smuggled aboard air force planes—and Egil “Bud” Krogh, Jr., who headed the White House’s narcotics portfolio, briefed the president on his just-completed two-week trip through the region. After, Ehrlichman, a longtime family friend, summoned the thirty-one-year-old Krogh to his office, closed the door, and handed over a bulky file.
Krogh had worked at Ehrlichman’s law firm—even babysat for his children—and was part of the team the domestic policy advisor recruited to come to Washington to work in the White House. His friendly nickname, “Evil Krogh,” a play on his actual name, was meant to be ironic and tongue in cheek—he was in fact straitlaced, having been imbued growing up with a strong sense of Christian Midwestern values, and had first come into the Nixon orbit working on a transition team focused on identifying, avoiding, and mitigating both real and perceived conflicts of interest with new administration appointees. He jogged five miles a day, usually on his White House lunch hour, wearing a gray sweatsuit. Once, in introducing Krogh at a party in D.C., the sardonic and self-aware Ehrlichman compared him to the beleaguered, overworked, and abused clerk in A Christmas Carol, saying, “He serves as my Bob Cratchit.”
Ehrlichman now informed Krogh that he’d be in charge of the special team tasked with uncovering the conspiracy that surely lay behind the Pentagon Papers leak—so far, investigators hadn’t found any links between Ellsberg’s leaks and other New Left radicals or known Communists, but the president maintained there were surely bigger nefarious forces at work. “Nixon was sure that Ellsberg had not functioned alone,” Krogh recalled. The president saw the battle against Ellsberg as akin to the one he’d fought early in his career against Hiss—another golden boy intellectual and card-carrying member of the foreign policy elite who had betrayed his country. As a starting point, Ehrlichman said the president wanted Krogh to read the Hiss chapter in Nixon’s memoir Six Crises. Later, as Krogh read, a line on the book’s page 40 leapt out: “[This case] involved the security of the whole nation and the cause of free men everywhere.” The Ellsberg stakes could not be higher, the aide thought.
