Ep. 02: Infiltrating the White House

How do Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, George Washington’s crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion, and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation explain the mysterious motives behind the burglary of the DNC Headquarters?  Be among the first to understand this little-understood Mystery of Watergate.
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Transcript

The Mysteries of Watergate with John O'Connor
Ep. 02: Infiltrating the White House

We have raised the strong possibility in Episode 1 that the Oval Office may not have had an interest in burglarizing the DNC headquarters in June 1972, as all have historically believed.  It certainly, we have noted, would not have any curiosity about the calls on the phone of Spencer Oliver, Jr., a minor and unimportant official, not even an employee of the DNC, having nothing to do with the 1972 campaign.  Isn’t it, therefore, a logical conclusion this likely would not, emphasize not, have been a White House operation?  We have also pointed out the strange presence of CIA connections among the burglars.

We've talked of the employment by Mullen and Company of parttime White House consultant, Howard Hunt.  We’ve pointed out the Mullen-associated Attorney Douglas Caddy hired a lawyer for the burglars and attended the arraignment.  So, was Hunt a CIA operative working undercover? 

If Hunt was working as an undercover operator for Mullen, why would he wish to also work for the White House, as he was doing parttime? What good would this do for the Agency, presumably his sponsor, if indeed Mullen was a cover company?  Put differently, why would the CIA wish to be involved in the Watergate burglary ostensibly on behalf of the Nixon Administration? Why would the CIA want to participate in gaining campaign strategy if that is what the burglary was after?  In response, it seems reasonable to say that the CIA would have no interest at all in a domestic political campaign.  

So, are we asking the wrong questions here? Maybe the question we should pose is that if the CIA had in fact infiltrated the Nixon White House through Hunt, what would the Agency stand to gain by that?  And how would that purpose be furthered by breaking into the DNC? 

To answer, we need an understanding of the history of our country's exercise of National Security Powers and the limitations on the exercise of them.   These powers are seemingly intentioned with the individual freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.  One example, Fourth Amendment prohibitions disallow searches without probable cause.  Yet, national security often demands warrantless entries, warrantless searches, of hostile foreign powers.  

Basic institutional imperatives must be understood in order to understand how these two clashing motives reconciled themselves in Watergate.  We begin a brief tour through our country's political history because it will shed light on the seeds of what is viewed by history as both the cataclysmically impactful scandal and one as well-shrouded in mystery and intrigue.  To understand Watergate, we must first learn how and when can Executive Branch National Security Powers under our constitution be exercised, when doing so would conflict with the Bill of Rights.

1787 saw the beginning of the Constitutional Convention which ultimately resulted in our present Constitution signed and 1789.  The Bill of Rights anticipated that the time of the ratification of the Constitution was intended to follow shortly.  It was ratified in 1791 when ten out of twelve proposed amendments were approved by a sufficient number of States.  In determining the structure and the government under the Constitution, one of the large factors was the glaring weakness of the Executive’s National Security Powers under the Articles of Confederation.  

1787 saw what was known as Shays's Rebellion, a violent tax protest centered in Western Massachusetts. A rebellion also occurring throughout the country west of the Appalachians.  Shays’s Rebellion protested a variety of excise taxes primarily on frontiersman with little hard currency who as well felt the lack of political representation in the taxing legislation.  They were very much disfavored in relation to distillers on the East Coast who had plenty of access to hard currency. 

What Shays’s Rebellion dramatized was the weakness of the Articles of Confederation and national defense, where there was no provision of a national militia or Commander-in-Chief of that militia.  The Federalist Party sought a new Constitution to remedy this weakness.  Some anti-Federalists, otherwise opposed to central concentrations of federal power, were persuaded by Shays’s Rebellion to agree to a new constitution with more robust centralized National Security Powers exercisable by the chief executive, the Commander-in-Chief under the Constitution. 

These considerations are spelled out in the famous Federalist Papers, provocative treatises written by anonymous patriots John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, published in newspapers under pseudonyms.  So, in 1789, following the Federalist Papers, the new Constitution recognized the President to be the Commander-in-Chief of federal forces, an improvement, it was thought, on the prior arrangement where every state controlled its own militia. 

While the Constitution required that war could only be declared with the consent of the Senate, no such consent was necessary for any national security actions of the President as Commander-in-Chief short of a Declaration of War.  The lack of necessity for Congressional consent for military actions approximating war, but without formal declaration of war, is certainly in a gray area of the Constitution, and subject even today to continual debate between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch.

But for our present purposes, it can't be doubted that there is some area of Presidential National Security Powers that needs no Congressional authorization.  After all, when the Constitution was ratified it was the practice for Congress to be in session only for several months a year.  It took some members of Congress weeks to travel to the Capitol, originally in Philadelphia, and it only made sense that the president would not need the concurrence of Congress in the event he felt the need to take appropriate national security action short of war.  Shays’s Rebellion was just one example. 

The argument has been made the National Security Power should not in any way violate the Bill of Rights, a reading which would somewhat narrow the Executive’s powers.  Luckily, however, for posterity, George Washington resolved that question when the ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights. 

In 1792, in Western Pennsylvania, a tax rebellion very much like Shays's Rebellion took hold.  Commonly call the “Whiskey Rebellion” because the prominent source of objection was an excise tax on distilled spirits.  Westerners often used whiskey as a form of currency because of the lack of circulation of sufficient hard currency, especially in outlying territories.  These territories were rich in corn, rye and other crops that could be distilled into hard liquor, which in any case often became necessary when raw crops could not be completely sold.  Because the tax, in addition, was a flat per gallon tax to be paid in currency, it impacted more adversely the modest economies of the western states, with their low prices and parttime distillers. 

Distillers on the eastern seaboard, on the other hand, were usually fulltime, large volume operations with easy access to hard currency.  When Washington's emissaries could not subdue the rebellion, George Washington himself took a force of several thousand troops and rode into western Pennsylvania.  By the time he arrived, many of the rebels had melted away. But Washington did arrest and bring to trial thirty rebels.  What was noteworthy about his actions were that he did not resort to formal arrest or search warrants in putting down the rebellion, normally required by the Bill of Rights. Washington's actions during the Whiskey Rebellion had solidified the concept that the exercise of National Security Powers does not require adherence to the Bill of Rights. That is an important concept that we need to keep in mind in discussing Watergate.  That principle has been affirmed by subsequent Presidents. 

For example, in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in belligerent states on the basis of national security.  That is, slaves were aiding the war effort.  When coming into office, Lincoln felt he had no power to free the slaves upon his own executive order because that would violate the Constitution, and more specifically the Fifth Amendment which abjured any taking of property without just compensation.  Slaves were considered property.  However, once the Civil War erupted, Lincoln cleverly resorted to his National Security Powers to free the slaves without providing any compensation.  The National Security basis was that the slaves helped the Southern war effort. 

Now it is notable that Lincoln did not free the slaves in the four non-belligerent states – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri – precisely because he had no national security justification.  So, the Emancipation Proclamation itself stands as an affirmation that the National Security Powers inherent in the Constitution trump the Bill of Rights. 

We then fast forward to 1942 when war with Japan had broken out after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt made the decision that recently immigrated Japanese families should be interned for the duration of the war.  This decision has been criticized, and rightly so, as mainly xenophobic, excessively reactive and simply unnecessary, and therefore a very sad chapter in our history.  But be that as it may, the Supreme Court upheld the Presidential action in Korematsu case, holding that the President's National Security Powers allowed this extraordinary deprivation of civil rights, otherwise forbidden by the Bill of Rights. 

Earlier, Roosevelt had formally delegated National Security Intelligence Powers to the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.  Hoover and Roosevelt interpreted these powers as allowing the FBI to conduct operations in the name of national security, which otherwise would not be compliant with the protections of the Bill of Rights.  For example, both Roosevelt and Hoover understood that the FBI was authorized to engage in warrantless searches, sometimes called “surreptitious entries,” or more colloquially, “black bag jobs.” Now these were called “black bag jobs” because the FBI agents who conducted them often had their lockpicking tools in a little black bag of the type carried by doctors, and that's why they were known as black bag jobs. These activities also included wiretapping in order to identify our countries enemies - at the time, Communists and Nazis.  Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the FBI regularly employed these tactics to identify Nazis and Communists.  Members of Congress were regularly informed about the FBI's techniques, without any objection. 

The infamous McCarthy Era was in part stoked by information gained by the FBI on the presence of Communists in government, most of which information was procured through surreptitious entries. While many objected to McCarthy’s inflammatory public rhetoric, there was no visible opposition to the FBI's methods for surreptitiously identifying Communists.  

There would appear to be no doubt but that first the President had National Security Powers as described, and, separately, that he may delegate them, and in fact did delegate them to the FBI.  So, World War II saw the domestic exercise of presidential National Security Powers both regarding the Japanese internment and their delegation to the FBI to search for Nazis and Communists. 

The war, of course, also required intelligence capability against foreign governments.  The Office of Special Services, or “OSS,” was formed during World War II which worked alongside the FBI and foreign intelligence.  My father, himself, was an FBI undercover agent in Brazil during the war.  In 1947, the OSS,  now being disbanded, was reformed, as it were, into a more modern bureaucratic organization called the Central Intelligence Agency, or “CIA.” 

Under its charter, the CIA was forbidden from performing domestic operations.  That is, if the CIA, in this exercise of intelligence powers, sought to wiretap or surreptitiously enter the office or a boat of a subject in the United States, it could not conduct that operation itself, as it could in foreign countries. Rather, it would need to prevail upon the offices of the FBI which did have those powers domestically, granted by Roosevelt to Hoover originally, and could exercise them on behalf of the CIA.  

While the FBI sought to cooperate with the CIA, especially given the two agencies needed to work together in foreign countries, the straight-laced, cautiously bureaucratic J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, was mindful that any abuses of these powers, even if on behalf of the CIA, would be blamed on the FBI. 

The arrangement between the FBI and CIA held steady through 1966.  At this point, the winds of the Civil Rights movement were blowing fiercely. Hoover was becoming very concerned about the number of National Security wiretaps that the FBI had placed.  More importantly, he was skittish about what he thought with the cowboyish ventures of the CIA which the FBI was carrying out on its behalf.  Those, one would suspect, dealt much with foreign governments and their representatives in the United States, such as Al Fatah, but also included spying on foreign embassies and, more sensitively, may have included sexual manipulation or blackmail targets. 

At Mark Felt’s trial in 1980, he was tried for violating the civil rights of the Weather Underground supporters.  He noted that Hoover had forbidden so-called “black bag jobs” or “surreptitious entries” for the entire Bureau.  But Felt added that the reason for this halt was primarily the CIA's unreasonable demands on the FBI.  According to Felt, Hoover determined that if he banned these capabilities across the Bureau, he could with straight face tell the CIA he was no longer going to perform them for the CIA.  As you can imagine, this ban caused great upset within the CIA. 

What concerned Hoover so much about the Agency's activities was what?  We know the CIA's activities in the 1950s and 1960s were clearly egregious abuses of intelligence powers.  For example, during this time, the CIA was administering psychogenic drugs to unwitting subjects, often with disastrous results, including a suicide by the CIA's Dr. Olson. 

I personally had a case when an Assistant United States Attorney in which a tennis pro in the late 1950s checked into a VA hospital in New York for depression.  He was given massive doses of LSD.  I read the nursing notes, which are chilling, depicting horrendous pain in which the patient noted that his skull was exploding.  After several days of agony, the patient died.  The cause was hidden from his widow. Letters were passed among the Attorney General of New York, the Attorney General of the United States and the head of the VA, congratulating each other for keeping this sordid matter under wraps. 

The CIA programs of which we know today were MK Ultra, Operation Bluebird and Operation Artichoke. There may well have been others, but these are bad enough.  On top of the cutoff of intelligence capability, Hoover ceased formal communication with the CIA over their refusal of the CIA to tell over the name of an FBI agent that had wrongly passed on information to the CIA.  There were some continued informal communications and in fact Hoover's Director of Intelligence, William Sullivan, was likely and continuing close and supportive contact was CIA officials. In short, the CIA had lost its domestic operational capabilities exercised for them by the FBI, and desperately wanted them back. 

In May of 1969, during the height of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon had been in office but two months when the newspapers became ablaze with headlines that the Nixon administration had begun a bombing campaign in Cambodia, designed to hit the Viet Kong supply lines.  A furor erupted, causing great political damage to Nixon for ostensibly widening the war.  

Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser, was livid about the leak.  He called up the FBI.  He eventually talked with William Sullivan who was an advocate of exercise of the FBI's robust extraconstitutional powers discussed here.  Sullivan agreed, as ultimately did Hoover somewhat reluctantly, to wiretap members of officials of Kissinger's National Security staff.  Eventually, they also wiretapped prominent newsmen, two with the New York Times and one with the CBS News division, Marvin Kalb. 

These taps, which were known as the “Kissinger Wiretaps” were considered extremely sensitive within the FBI.  They were so explosive politically that the FBI would not even file the records in its normal register.  The taps were put on in 1969 and continued through February 1971.  However, the cautious Hoover let it earlier be known that this is the last time that the FBI would engage in these activities on behalf of the White House. So, at least by the summer of 1970, the White House knew that it needed improved intelligence capability against the new left terrorism that was now increasingly bedeviling the country.  It also realized that the FBI would be of no direct assistance to the White House on its requests. 

William Sullivan, Hoover’s Chief of the Bureau’s Intelligence Division also chafed under Hoover's restrictions, and was friends with many in the CIA.  In consultation with the CIA, Sullivan hoped both to regain this operational capability and to use Hoover's reluctance to help the CIA as a means actually to overthrow Hoover and become Director himself, using the CIA and White House support.  In short, America had a White House that had the power to order these procedures, but which had no capability, it also had a CIA which had the capability but had no legal authority to order these procedures, and an FBI with authority and capabilities but which was cautious in implementation of these powers for either of these two entities, the CIA and the White House. 

Sullivan’s first attempt to regain the capability of for the CIA was to use the White House Lieutenant Tom Huston, a conserve, young, former Army officer. Sullivan importuned Huston to name an interagency group on intelligence to devise new capabilities for Presidential approval.  His purpose was to try to figure out some backdoor way that the CIA could get back these powers.  The FBI, the White House, the CIA, the DIA (that's the Defense Intelligence Agency) and the NSA were all represented on this committee.  The group drew up an outline, likely authored by Sullivan, and began drafting the final Huston Plan, so called, in June 1970.  Its ultimate work product gave the broadest powers to these agencies, ostensibly through the committee nominally headed by Hoover, but in reality was headed by Sullivan.  This plan, if approved by the President, would be in effect an end around the FBI and its limitations, and give the CIA a form of direct domestic operational capability.  A nifty way to overcome the limitations on the Agency's charter which, as we talked about, forbad domestic operations. 

Hoover, however, wily bureaucrat that he was, as was his deputy Mark Felt, knew that once the CIA had been given an inch, it would take a mile. The FBI, which ostensibly would chair the committee overseeing all these activities, would be held responsible for any of the inevitable abuses of the powers. 

In any case, on July 14, 1970, H.R. Haldeman, Chief of Staff to President Nixon, announced to the affected agencies that the President approved the plan.  Hoover had noted on the planned his dissent and Sullivan acted as if he agreed with the dissent, while privately opposing it.  But as Sullivan expected, the President ignored Hoover's dissent and enacted the Huston Plan.  Again, this would give the CIA certain domestic operational powers, nominally under the supervision of the FBI, but without, it appeared, requiring the FBI to exercise the powers for the CIA. 

Then Hoover, assisted by Felt, enlisted Attorney General John Mitchell to fight the now implemented Huston Plan. Mitchell, very much respected by Nixon, pushed the President to rescind.  Both Michell and Hoover opposed the Plan so Nixon withdrew support for it after it being in operation but for nine days. 

So, as of late July 1970, where did this leave the White House and the CIA?  The White House still needed its own intelligence resources since it could not obtain them from the FBI.   The CIA needed approval for its own, perhaps questionable, domestic operations.  With the FBI not cooperating, it could not get that approval but through one place: the White House. 

All the forces which led the White House and the CIA not only to Watergate, but to other problematic operations including, for example, the burglary of Dr. Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, had now been set in motion.  These forces, as we will see, should have brought down both the White House and the CIA, but destroyed only one.  With this background in mind, we can see that abuses were inevitable.  But who, if anyone, they would bring down was unclear.  

In summary, the CIA's quandary forced it to seek some way to obtain Presidential approval for domestic operations. After all, we talked about this under the Constitution the President had the power to authorize National Security Powers domestically, that the President had the power to give the CIA Authority for domestic operation, and the White House itself sensing the need for more robust investigative techniques would be an easy target for CIA infiltration. This is the most lucid explanation of how Watergate began.

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