Watergate, page 12
Krogh would be paired with Young, from Kissinger’s National Security Council, and a third representative from Colson’s team: Howard Hunt. In their first meeting, Krogh recognized why Hunt likely worked well at the agency; he was unassuming and able to blend into any group. He all but disappeared even as you were speaking to him. “Hunt was presented to me as a crackerjack CIA operative who knew his way around. I didn’t know he was a clown. I didn’t even know he was writing spy novels. They told me he could practice some good spycraft,” Krogh told journalist Evan Thomas decades later. “What did I know?” The trio perfectly balanced the fiefdoms of the White House, giving everyone a stake in their success; the team’s reports would go to Ehrlichman, who would pass them along to the president directly.I
They set up shop in Room 16 of the Executive Office Building, in the far southwest corner of the building next to the White House that housed most of the president’s staff. The so-called Special Investigations Unit had its own secretary, Kathy Chenow, and Hunt had a special nongovernment phone line installed, with the bills sent to Chenow’s home so they could make calls without any sign of government ties. Everything about their work seemed important and sensitive: Everyone on the team received a high-level security clearance; Krogh had a secure scrambler phone installed to communicate with military and intelligence offices, and the Secret Service secured the office suite with motion detectors; a large safe appeared to hold the secrets they collected. They kept track of their assignments and projects on a cork bulletin board, adding new leaks as they occurred, such as a summer New York Times article by Tad Szulc about tensions between India and Pakistan that the CIA feared would lead to the outing of one of its most senior sources in the Indian government.
Soon, they welcomed a new member: G. Gordon Liddy, whom journalist Fred Emery would later describe as “an exceptionally articulate man with rambunctious right-wing views.” When they first met and shook hands, Liddy crushed Krogh’s hand with his viselike grip.
In recalling his childhood in Hoboken, Liddy, a self-styled tough guy, emphasized the bad—from beatings by his grandfather by day to dreams of ravenous giant moths out to get him while he slept by night—but he was hardly a hard-luck case; he came from a wealthy family who even amid the Depression employed a maid, and he grew up with fencing lessons and Latin tutors. He had long sought to prove himself tough and worthy on life’s fields of honor—fourteen-year-old George had been disconsolate for a month following Japan’s surrender in 1945 because World War II came to an end before he was old enough to fight—and he later found his dreams of combat glory similarly frustrated by a Korean War assignment to an army antiaircraft gun unit in New York City, where action came in the form of ogling passing women using the high-powered gun sights meant to track incoming Soviet bombers.
He’d eventually pursued law school and followed into the FBI his uncle, a distinguished federal agent who according to family lore was present at the shooting of John Dillinger (there’s no sign in FBI records that he actually was). He’d loved the work, but not the pay, which stretched his large family—he and his wife had five children under the age of five before they reconsidered the rhythm method—and he left to work for a New York district attorney. Later, he tried politics, unsuccessfully running for Congress, and ended up at Nixon’s Treasury Department working on law enforcement issues after serving loyally on the presidential campaign.
That first chapter of his D.C. career had demonstrated his unique willingness to fudge ethical lines: Upon starting as a political appointee, he used a special set of department badges—intended for use by CIA officers working undercover—to mock up his own “Treasury agent” credentials and grant himself permission to carry a gun. With an outsized ego and sense of his own capabilities, he tried for numerous senior law enforcement roles before finally winning a transfer to the White House in the summer of 1971 to work on a portfolio of “narcotics, bombings, and guns.” Arriving at the White House the day after the Pentagon Papers broke, he soon found himself working with Krogh’s SIU as well. “He projected a warrior-type charisma and seemed to possess a great deal of physical courage,” Krogh recalled later. It didn’t take long for outlandish stories about the new colleague to start circulating, like the time Liddy as a prosecutor fired a pistol in a courtroom to emphasize a point. He liked to boast to White House secretaries about how to kill someone with a pencil.
Hunt and Liddy hit it off immediately; Liddy appeared to have wandered right off the pages of one of Hunt’s novels. “He seemed decisive and action-oriented, impatient with paperwork and the lucubrations of bureaucracy,” Hunt recalled. They lunched together in the White House cafeteria and drank together after work at one of Hunt’s two social clubs, the Army and Navy Club, just north of the White House, or the City Tavern Club in Georgetown. “They were narcissists in love with the romance of espionage,” one Watergate chronicler said. Hunt especially loved his new role and hardly tried to hide it; he updated his own entry in the 1972–1973 edition of Who’s Who to list the White House as his office address.
Liddy later recalled the unit’s mission in grandiose terms for something where most of the staff were part-time: “Our organization had been directed to eliminate subversion of the secrets of the administration.” He nicknamed their team the “Organisation Der Emerlingen Schutz Staffel Angehöerigen”—ODESSA, for short, a confounding moniker that pleased Liddy greatly despite (or perhaps because) it was the name of a long-rumored secret network of German SS officers after World War II. Even while Liddy marked the group’s papers with the ODESSA name, the group would be known to history by a label given offhand by David Young’s grandmother: When she asked him what he was doing in the White House, he explained, simply, “I am helping the president stop some leaks.” She replied, proudly, “Oh, you’re a plumber!”
The name stuck.
* * *
On July 23, the now five-member Plumbers had their first meeting. “A mood of manic resolve to carry out our duties drove us forward,” Krogh recalled. The men were supposed to be concentrating on Ellsberg, but from the start, there were side projects: Nixon’s circle had long suspected that John F. Kennedy was more culpable in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s president than anyone admitted, and Hunt was tasked with a ham-handed debriefing of a top CIA officer, who had overseen operations in Vietnam, to pry loose the full story of JFK’s involvement in the coup that toppled and killed Diem. He came up empty.
Krogh and Young, meanwhile, began tracking what the White House considered to be a concerning leak printed in the New York Times, a July 23 article at the top of the front page. William Beecher had written a story about the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that enumerated the U.S.’s main proposals and its acceptable fallback positions—precisely the type of information that Kissinger thought could hurt the United States in its negotiations with closed regimes.
With the help of Al Haig, the Special Investigations Unit identified two potential leakers—a Pentagon staffer, William Van Cleave, and a Hill staffer, Richard Perle. When they showed Nixon the evidence that it was likely Van Cleave, the president grew angry; punching his right fist into his open left hand, he told Krogh and Ehrlichman that he couldn’t stand for these leaks to continue. The encounter had a deep impact on Krogh, who increasingly saw his work as central to the nation’s security; as he explained later, “The SIU was now operating with a whole new sense of mission.”
That afternoon, fired up, Krogh convened another meeting in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room with Hunt, Mark Felt, Robert Mardian, and Pentagon general counsel Fred Buzhardt to discuss how best to tackle the next steps of the SALT leak investigation. The others were all in their weekend clothes; Mardian had been called off a tennis court. In their first outing as elite leak-fighters, the Plumbers found themselves stymied immediately by the bureaucracy; neither the CIA nor the FBI would cooperate and provide enough polygraph examiners to probe the leaks.
Krogh and Hunt walked out of the room with an important lesson in mind: The only people they could trust with their sensitive, vital work were themselves.
Days later, Krogh’s team was back on the Ellsberg case—sifting through the FBI’s Pentagon Papers reports, which included a notation that Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, Dr. Lewis Fielding, had turned down two FBI requests for interviews. They suspected the doctor was trying to withhold relevant or sensitive information about his patient—perhaps exactly the kind of derogatory details they were looking for. Hunt and Liddy had a brainstorm and proposed a backup plan: They could break into Fielding’s office and steal the doctor’s records themselves; they’d done such “black bag jobs” in numerous cities both overseas and at home, they assured Krogh. “We felt a covert operation would be necessary and defensible,” Krogh recalled. Krogh, in turn, went to Ehrlichman for permission and, through Ehrlichman, got an enthusiastic response from the president: “Tell Krogh he should do whatever he considers necessary to get to the bottom of the matter—to learn what Ellsberg’s motives and potential further harmful action might be.”II
* * *
On August 11, 1971, Krogh and Young drafted a two-page status memo on White House stationery about their “Pentagon Papers Project,” outlining the status of the Justice Department’s official grand jury investigation and their contacts with the FBI, as well as their less official probe of Ellsberg and all their other related targets, from his mother-in-law to a Princeton professor. “We have received the CIA preliminary psychological study [on Ellsberg], which I must say I am disappointed in and consider very superficial,” they wrote. “We will meet tomorrow with the head psychiatrist Mr Bernard Malloy to impress upon him the detail and depth that we expect. We will also make available to him here some of the other information we have received from the FBI on Ellsberg. In this connection we would recommend that a covert operation be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst covering the two-year period in which he was undergoing analysis.”
Underneath, they provided a standard “Approve/Disapprove” box; Ehrlichman initialed a large “E” on the “Approve” line, then scribbled underneath “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.”
Later in the memo, they noted that Howard Hunt wanted the FBI to ask British intelligence to double-check its telephone taps from the two years where Ellsberg was a graduate student at Cambridge University to see if it had evidence that during that time he’d been in contact with the Soviets. Underneath, again, Ehrlichman scribbled an “E” for “Approve.”
As the leak probe he’d demanded churned along and entered a dangerous (and criminal) new phase, tipping over from a routine bureaucratic exercise into a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of an American citizen, Nixon focused his attention elsewhere, on history-making events: an exchange of secret letters with his Soviet counterparts that set the stage for a summit in Moscow with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, a dialogue he and Kissinger worked by excluding the State Department and never informing Secretary of State William Rogers. Then that weekend, Nixon assembled a dozen top officials at Camp David in complete secrecy to plot upending the monetary system that had undergirded Western markets since World War II.
Sunday night, in a surprise national television address, Nixon announced that the U.S. was abandoning the “gold standard” that tied the U.S. dollar to gold reserves, and imposing a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices to arrest inflation, a step the administration believed would prevent a looming economic crisis. “We must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world,” he told the nation.
Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its largest gain ever, and the New York Times—that awful New York Times—praised him, writing at the top of its editorial page: “We unhesitatingly applaud the boldness with which the President has moved on all economic fronts.”
This was the stuff he could do, the history he could make, the great leader Nixon could be when he was able to do things quietly and secretly, when there wasn’t some son of a bitch out there spilling his strategy to the press. Statesmanlike victories on the global stage like these would power Nixon’s reelection campaign. Secrecy and subterfuge were good for the country geopolitically—and good for the president politically.
I. Unbeknownst to Krogh, he was hardly the top choice to lead such a sensitive assignment; speechwriter and Nixon muse Pat Buchanan had turned down the role, purportedly believing it to be too operational for his taste, and the internal rivalry meant that Nixon’s supposed first choice, Colson, wasn’t to be trusted by Ehrlichman and Haldeman. Meanwhile, Dean’s role in shutting down the summer attack on Brookings left Ehrlichman doubting he had the stomach for such messiness. Ironically, as later events would show, Ehrlichman had it exactly backwards: In the months and years of messiness ahead, Krogh’s conscience would act up long before Dean’s did.
II. In fact, if anything, Nixon was still worried that Krogh’s Plumbers weren’t going to be aggressive enough. On August 9, after a relaxing weekend on Maine’s Minot Island, Nixon returned still fired up about the Pentagon Papers; the Democrats, he felt, were trying to bury the story of their party’s shame. In his diary, Haldeman recorded, “The P’s afraid that Krogh and our crew are too addicted to the law and are worrying about the legalisms rather than taking on the publicizing of the papers. His point here is not getting the New York Times; it’s getting the Democrats.”
Chapter 7 The Enemies List
While the Plumbers toiled away that August in Room 16, White House Counsel John Dean saw an opportunity to bring some order to the president’s chaotic habits of documenting his political foes. Nixon compiled enemies lists like other people compiled grocery lists—frequently, numerously, and repetitively. “I’m sure he must have forgotten some of the people who did him wrong—because there were so many of them and he couldn’t possibly remember all of them. He did have a remarkable ability, though, to keep most of them pretty well-catalogued,” Haldeman said later. The efforts had begun at the White House in the first months of his presidency, as aides researched and delivered a comprehensive twenty-six-page catalog of the nation’s press corps with biographies, editorial comments, and friendliness rankings. The list of “Those We Can Count On” was short, but “Those We Can Never Count On” ran on for nearly three full pages.
From that starting point, what aides called the “Political Enemies Project” eventually grew so expansive that they couldn’t make sense of the various lists. Ultimately, more than two hundred people would populate the administration’s constellation of foes, from political adversaries like Kennedy, Muskie, and Howard Hughes, to the Hollywood actors Gregory Peck and Steve McQueen, to sports star Joe Namath, to the leaders of national companies and organizations like the World Bank, Philip Morris, and—oddly—the National Cleaning Contractors, as well as all manner of establishment titans (the presidents of Yale, MIT, and Harvard Law) and media figures. “Am I wrong to assume that the ‘Freeze List’ is something over and above the ‘Opponent’ list’?” Alexander Butterfield wrote in a memo to Haldeman at one point. “If you will straighten me out on this matter, I will pass the word to Colson, Bell, Rose Mary Woods… and others who have a need to know.” The vetting process was haphazard—the German-American international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau was included, evidently after being confused with former New York U.S. attorney Robert Morgenthau—and arbitrary—the worst offense of many of the “enemies” was a routine donation to a Democratic candidate.
In June, just days after the Pentagon Papers broke, aide George Bell compiled a seemingly definitive list of the administration’s top “opponents,” passing it along to other aides like Dean with a routine cover note that read, “Attached is a list of opponents which we have compiled. I thought it would be useful to you from time to time.”I
On August 16, 1971, Dean tried to bring focus to the system, laying out “how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available machinery to screw our political enemies.” There was no need, in Dean’s thinking, for any “elaborate mechanism or game plan,” the Political Enemies Project just needed a solid way to collect said enemies and then act. Dean proposed as a starting point that “key members of the staff (e.g., Colson, Dent, Flanigan, Buchanan) should be requested to inform us as to who they feel we should be giving a hard time.” Then, a project coordinator should be assigned to “determine what sorts of dealings these individuals have with the federal government and how we can best screw them (e.g., grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.).” Through much of the first term, the Nixon team had tried, with mixed success, to sic the Internal Revenue Service on various enemies—but the White House believed it could do much more. Dean recommended starting with a pilot project: Choose a small handful of names, “ ‘do a job’ on them,” and see what the Nixon administration could stir up.
The very next day, CBS reporter Daniel Schorr, number 17 on George Bell’s “opponents list,” earned the specific enmity of the Nixon administration after reporting on the CBS Evening News that Nixon’s promise to help Catholic schools was falling short. Schorr was summoned to the White House, and Haldeman told Higby to order the FBI to dig up dirt on him. Hoover misinterpreted the orders—to him, a White House request for a “background” investigation meant that the target was being considered for a possible political appointment, and bright and early the next morning, an FBI agent contacted Schorr while other agents fanned out across the country interviewing two dozen of his associates, relatives, and friends. Schorr grew alarmed; he reported the odd inquiry to his CBS bosses, who in turn contacted the FBI. By mid-afternoon, the whole exercise had been abandoned. The White House, embarrassed to be caught in its own muckraking, announced—implausibly—that Schorr was being vetted for a position on the Environmental Quality Council. Nixon was hardly chagrined, dismissing the whole episode in an Oval Office meeting later: “We just ran a name check on the son-of-a-bitch.”
