Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA, and the FBI were spying on American citizens. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were using electronic eavesdropping and espionage to keep tabs on Kissinger. Nixon, improving on the work of Kennedy and Johnson, had bugged the White House and Camp David with state-of-the-art voice-activated microphones. Nixon and Kissinger wiretapped their own close aides and Washington reporters, trying to stop leaks to the press.
But leaks were a spring that never failed. In June, The New York Times began publishing long excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, the secret Vietnam history commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara four years before. The source was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon whiz kid whom Kissinger had hired as a consultant to the National Security Council and invited into Nixon's California compound at San Clemente. Kissinger raged at the release, sending Nixon into a greater fury. The president turned to his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, to stop the leaks. He assembled a team called the Plumbers, led by a very recently retired CIA officer who had played prominent roles in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs.
Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., was "a unique character," said Ambassador Sam Hart, who met him when Hunt was chief of station in Uruguay in the late 1950s--"totally self-absorbed, totally amoral, and a danger to himself and anybody around him. As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another, rising higher and higher, everything floating just right behind him." Hunt had been a romantic young cold warrior when he signed up with the CIA in 1950. He had become a fantasist who funneled his talent into writing halfway decent spy novels. He had been retired from the CIA for less than a year when a casual acquaintance, Nixon's aide Chuck Colson, offered him an exciting new assignment running secret operations for the White House.
Hunt flew down to Miami to see his old Cuban American companion Bernard Barker, who was selling real estate, and they talked beside a monument to the dead of the Bay of Pigs. "He described the mission as national security," Barker said. "I asked Howard who he represented, and the answer he gave me was really something for the books. He said he was in a group at the White House level, under direct order of the President of the United States." Together they recruited four more Miami Cubans, including Eugenio Martinez, who had run some three hundred seagoing missions into Cuba for the CIA and remained on a $100-a-month retainer from headquarters.
On July 7, 1971, Ehrlichman telephoned Nixon's spy inside the CIA, the deputy director, General Cushman. The president's aide told him that Howard Hunt would be calling him directly and asking for assistance. "I wanted you to know that he was in fact doing some things for the President," Ehrlichman said. "You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche." Hunt's demands escalated--he wanted his old secretary back, he wanted an office with a secure telephone in New York, he wanted state-of-the-art tape recorders, he wanted a CIA camera to stake out a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills, and he wanted the CIA to develop the film. Cushman belatedly informed Helms that the agency had given Hunt a set of disguises: a red wig, a voice-altering device, fake personal identification. Then the White House demanded that the agency produce a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg, a direct violation of the CIA's charter against spying on Americans. But Helms complied.
Helms pushed Cushman out of the agency in November 1971. Months went by before Nixon found the perfect candidate: Lieutenant General Vernon Walters.
General Walters had been conducting secret missions for presidents for the better part of twenty years. But Helms had never met him before he arrived as the new deputy director of central intelligence on May 2, 1972. "I had just come from running an operation which the CIA knew nothing about," General Walters recounted. "Helms, who had wanted someone else, said, 'I've heard about you; what do you know about intelligence?' I said, 'Well, I've been negotiating with the Chinese and the Vietnamese for three years, and I smuggled Henry Kissinger into Paris fifteen times without you or anybody else in the Agency knowing anything about it.'" Helms was duly impressed. But he soon had cause to wonder about his new deputy's loyalties.
"EVERY TREE IN THE FOREST WILL FALL"
Late on Saturday night, June 17, 1972, Howard Osborn, the chief of the CIA's Office of Security, called Helms at home. The director knew it could not be good news. This is how he remembered the conversation:
"Dick, are you still up?"
"Yes, Howard."
"I've just learned that the District police have picked up five men in a break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters at the Watergate.... Four Cubans and Jim McCord."
"McCord? Retired out of your shop?"
"Two years ago."
"What about the Cubans--Miami or Havana?"
"Miami...in this country for some time now."
"Do we know them?"
"As of now, I can't say."
"Get hold of the operations people, first thing.... Have them get onto Miami. Check every record here and in Miami.... Is that all of it?"
"No, not half," Osborn said heavily. "Howard Hunt also seems to be involved."
Hearing Hunt's name, Helms drew a deep breath. "What the hell were they doing?" he asked. He had a fair idea: McCord was an expert in electronic eavesdropping, Hunt was working for Nixon, and the charge was wiretapping, a federal crime.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Helms tracked down the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, at a hotel in Los Angeles. J. Edgar Hoover had died six weeks before, after forty-eight years in power. Helms told Gray very carefully that the Watergate burglars had been hired by the White House and the CIA had nothing to do with it. Got that? Okay, good night then.
Helms convened the daily 9 a.m. meeting of senior CIA officers at headquarters on Monday, June 19. Bill Colby, now the CIA's executive director, the number-three man, remembered Helms saying: "We are going to catch a lot of hell, because these are formers"--that is, former CIA men--and "we knew they were working in the White House." The next morning, The Washington Post placed the responsibility for Watergate at the door of the Oval Office--although, to this day, no one really knows if Richard Nixon authorized the break-in.
On Friday, June 23, Nixon told his brutally efficient chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to call Helms and Walters into the White House and order them to wave off the FBI in the name of national security. They agreed to play ball at first--a very dangerous business. Walters called Gray and told him to stand down. But a line was crossed on Monday, June 26, when Nixon's counsel, John Dean, ordered Walters to come up with a large sum of untraceable hush money for the six jailed CIA veterans. On Tuesday, Dean repeated the demand. He later told the president that the price of silence would be $1 million over two years. Only Helms--or Walters, when Helms was outside the United States--could authorize a secret payment from the CIA's black budget. They were the only officials in the American government who could legally deliver a suitcase with a million dollars in secret cash to the White House, and Nixon knew it.
"We could get money anyplace in the world," Helms reflected. "We ran a whole arbitrage operation. We didn't need to launder money--ever." But if the CIA delivered the cash, "the end result would have been the end of the Agency," he said. "Not only would I have gone to jail if I had gone along with what the White House wanted us to do, but the agency's credibility would have been ruined forever."
Helms refused. Then, on June 28, he fled Washington for a three-week tour of intelligence outposts in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, leaving Walters as the acting director. A week went by. Impatient FBI agents started to rebel against their orders to stand down. Gray told Walters he would need an order in writing from the CIA calling off the investigation on national-security grounds. Both men now understood the risks of a paper trail. They spoke on July 6, and shortly thereafter Gray called the president at his retreat in San Clemente. "People on your staff are trying to mortally wound you" by manipulating the CIA, he told Nixon. An awful silence followed--and then the president told Gray to go ahead with the investigation.
Shortly after Helms returned from his trip in late July, Jim McCord, awaiting trial and facing five years in prison, sent a message through his lawyer to the CIA. He said the president's men wanted him to testify that the Watergate break-in was an agency operation. Let the CIA take the rap, a White House aide told him, and a presidential pardon would follow. McCord responded in a letter: "If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at CIA's feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice right now. Pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course."
"EVERYONE KNEW WE WERE IN FOR A BAD TIME"
On November 7, 1972, President Nixon was re-elected in one of the great landslides of American history. He vowed that day to run the CIA and the State Department with an iron hand in his second term, to destroy them and rebuild them in his image.
On November 9, Kissinger proposed replacing Helms with James Schlesinger, then the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. "Very good idea," Nixon responded.
On November 13, he told Kissinger that he intended "to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it--the old Foreign Service--and to build a new one. I'm going to do it." He settled on an inside man to do the job: the OSS veteran and champion Republican fund-raiser William J. Casey. In 1968, Casey had importuned President-elect Nixon to make him director of central intelligence, but Nixon handed him the chair at the Securities and Exchange Commission instead, a cunning decision that cheered corporate boardrooms across America. Now, in Nixon's second term, Casey would be named undersecretary of state for economic affairs. But his real assignment was to serve as Nixon's saboteur--"to tear up the Department," Nixon said.
On November 20, Nixon fired Richard Helms in a short, awkward meeting at Camp David. He offered him the post of ambassador to the Soviet Union. There was an uncomfortable pause as Helms considered the ramifications. "Look, Mr. President, I don't think that would be a very good idea, to send me to Moscow," Helms said. "Well, maybe not," Nixon replied. Helms proposed Iran instead, and Nixon urged him to take it. They also reached an understanding that Helms would stay on until March 1973, his sixtieth birthday, the formal retirement age at the CIA. Nixon broke that pledge, a pointless act of cruelty. "The man was a shit," Helms said, faintly shaking with rage as he told the story.
Helms believed to his dying day that Nixon fired him because he wouldn't take a dive on Watergate. But the record shows that Nixon resolved long before the break-in to jettison Helms and gut the CIA. The president actually believed that Helms was out to gethim.
"Do you think there was, or could have been, a CIA conspiracy to remove you from office?" Nixon's friend and former aide Frank Gannon asked him a decade later.
"Many people think so," Nixon responded. "The CIA had motive. It was no secret that I was dissatisfied with the CIA, with its reports and particularly with their appraisals of Soviet strength and our other problems around the world.... I wanted to get rid of some of the deadwood and so forth. And they knew it. So they had a motive."
"Do you think they feared you?" Gannon asked.
"No question about it," Nixon replied. "And they had reason to."
On November 21, Nixon offered the CIA to James Schlesinger, who accepted the president's offer with pleasure. Nixon was gratified "to put his own man in--I mean one that really had R.N. tattooed on him--which was Schlesinger," Helms said. Schlesinger's orders--like Casey's at State--were to turn the place inside out. "Get rid of the clowns," the president kept commanding. "What use are they? They've got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers."
On December 27, the president dictated a memo laying out the mission. Though Kissinger wanted dominion over American intelligence, "Schlesinger must be the man in charge," Nixon said. If Congress ever "got the impression that the President has turned all intelligence activities over to Kissinger all hell will break loose. If on the other hand I name the new Director of CIA Schlesinger as my top assistant for intelligence activities, we can get it by the Congress. Henry simply doesn't have the time.... I have been bugging him and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized with no success whatever." It was a strong echo of Eisenhower's final burst of anger at the end of his presidency, his fuming at his "eight-year defeat" in his battle to whip American intelligence into shape.
In his last days in office, Helms feared that Nixon and his loyalists would ransack the CIA's files. He did everything in his power to destroy two sets of secret documents that could have ruined the agency. One was the paper trail of the mind-control experiments with LSD and many other drugs that he and Allen Dulles had personally approved two decades before. Very few of those records survived.
The second was his own set of secret tapes. Helms had recorded hundreds of conversations in his executive office on the seventh floor during the six years and seven months that he had served as the director of central intelligence. By the date of his official departure on February 2, 1973, every one had been destroyed.
"When Helms left the building, all the troops jammed the headquarters entrance for his departure," said Sam Halpern, then the top aide at the clandestine service. "There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Everyone knew we were in for a bad time after that."