Ep. 03: Mullen and Company

Mullen and Company was a worldwide public relations firm specializing in clients who grew fruit in banana republics.  Why would the firm hire “retired” CIA agent Howard Hunt as a copywriter?   Was it to pen the praises of United Fruit bananas, or some other purpose?  And why would it want this full-time employee to work part-time at the White House?  The Washington Post in its 3000 articles never explained this oddity,  but we'll tackle it in this episode of The Mysteries of Watergate.

________________________________________
Thank you for listening! For more information such as a hyperlinked Cast of Characters, visit themysteriesofwatergate.com.  And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcast and pick up a copy of the new book, "The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened" on Amazon.

Transcript

The Mysteries of Watergate with John O'Connor
Ep. 03: Mullen and Company

 In Episode One, we elucidated the broad questions that arose from an initial view of the Watergate burglary arrests and their immediate aftermath.  For example, we know that there was nothing of the DNC to be gained in campaign information, which at the time the DNC totally lacked.  DNC Director Larry O'Brien may have known of much gossip, but he had not been in D.C. for weeks and was not soon expected back.  

Also, following the first and prior burglary, the wiretap monitor was listening to the phone of one minor official only loosely connected to the DNC, a person known as Spencer Oliver, Jr.  If the burglars were not after campaign information, the question arises, why would Nixon or his Oval Office insiders care? The obvious answer is that they wouldn't. 

So, what was the purpose of a burglary that was the basis for perhaps the world history's most impactful scandal?  In the second episode, we explored the motives of both the CIA and the White House to enhance their covert domestic operational capabilities in the wake of the FBI's withdrawal from servicing both of these institutions.  

So, we should now examine what the White House and CIA did to fill their symbiotic needs; an investigation that necessarily will delve into much that is deeply mystifying. 

What is known as Watergate began with the arrests on June 17, 1972, at 2:30 AM of five burglars who had broken into the headquarters of the DNC located in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.  None of the five arrested men had made a telephone call from jail that night, yet when they arrived for their arraignment later that day, they had retained a private lawyer by the name of Joseph Rafferty. Woodward knew that the burglars had not made any call.  He learned that from his jailhouse sources.  So, he was highly curious as to how and by whom Rafferty had been retained. 

Woodward also alertly noticed as present at the arraignment a stylishly dressed gentleman, clearly a fish-out-of-water in the sleazy confines of the local criminal courts.  He was soon identified as one Douglas Caddy, a lawyer associated with Mullen and Company.  Mullen was a worldwide public relations firm with headquarters in Washington, immediately across from the White House.  

So, the first area of mystery we encounter in the Watergate arrests is the intriguing Mullen and Company.  If you will recall, it was Mullen that was Howard Hunt’s fulltime employer, even before he became a parttime contractor for the White House.  Mullen was also the former employer of, and still closely connected with, lawyer Douglas Caddy who showed up at the arraignment after having hired Raffery as criminal counsel for the burglars. 

So, one question that immediately should leap to mind is why a PR firm would hire a retired CIA operative.  Hunt’s job with Mullen was listed as “a copywriter,” a person who pens prose for ads, brochures, and marketing materials.  The job is not as absurd as it may seem for an ex-CIA man since Hunt had some noteworthy prose writing experience, publishing approximately seventy potboiler spy novels.  One, the 1949 book, Bimini Run, was made into a movie.  Hunt was an experienced writer. 

In addition to being one of the chief architects of the Bay of Pigs, the attempt to overthrow Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro's communist government, Hunt had also been involved in other similar capers including a successful 1954 coup to oust Jacobo Árbenz, the President of Guatemala.  So, much of his experience was in high level political manipulation and intrigue. 

But while Hunt was an accomplished spy thriller novelist, the idea of a dashing undercover spy and international operator penning the praises of United Fruit bananas was a bit too much to swallow. Moreover, it would seem that there were thousands of literate English and communications majors graduating itching from college and plenty of talented freelance copywriters.  So, why would Mullen wish to hire a 50-ish ex-spy to churn out copy?  The question answers itself and raises the very rational possibility that Hunt was hired for purposes other than that of a copywriter.  But what would those be?

Perhaps a better question is why the CIA would want to place Hunt with Mullen.  The CIA's Director, Richard Helms, had personally interceded with Robert Mullen on Hunt’s behalf in order to get Hunt a job with Mullen.  It is, of course, a beneficial aspect of Agency employment that the CIA would often help an ex-agent get employment post-retirement.  But what was so exceptional about Hunt that would cause the intercession of the Director himself, the question arises? 

What was so exceptional about Hunt that would cause the intercession of Director Helms himself personally, as opposed to the department routinely handling these placements?  Does Helms’ personal engagement tell us something about Hunt's continuing role with the Agency, and its central importance? Helms’ involvement certainly suggests that whatever Hunt would be doing with Mullen would yield substantial benefit to the CIA.  That is only common sense.  

What else do we know about Mullen?  The incoming President and owner of Mullen, as Hunt was about to take employment, was Robert Bennett.  If this name sounds familiar, we first note that Bennett’s father was an influential Senator from Utah, Wallace Bennett.  Years later, Robert Bennett himself was elected Senator from Utah. 

The Bennetts were quite influential, not only politically but also within the Mormon community in which Wallace Bennett was an influential elder. Would these forms of influence be helpful to a PR firm? Certainly, they would help with Congressional lobbying efforts and perhaps with the Mormon-assisted reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, a Mullen client a businessman always desirous of help from Washington.  But what skills, if any, would Hunt lend to Bennett's and Mullen’s lobbying efforts?  Likely none.  But Mullen’s relation with Hughes, who we now know to have been a valuable CIA asset, may provide a clue.

 A little bit more about Mullen: they represented United Fruit and General Foods, companies with continual political issues in Banana Republics like Guatemala, and even in larger countries like Chile, where CIA loomed large.  Communist-inspired land reform constantly threatened the business interests of multinational property owners. 

Another client of Mullen, as we've noted, was Howard Hughes and his company, Hughes Aircraft.  Recall that Hughes worked closely with the CIA on the covert raising of the Glomar Explorer, a sunken Soviet spy ship.  So, was Mullen a CIA front or asset, like Hughes, of the CIA?  Mullen’s international reach and its clients with their existential need to work with the CIA and avoid Communist land expropriation would raise questions about whether Mullen might be some form of cover company for the CIA. 

Following the burglary arrests, Caddy had fought government grand jury subpoenas and then resisted answering questions posed by prosecutors in the grand jury on the grounds of attorney-client privilege.  He did so likely that he would avoid identify CRP General Counsel Gordon Liddy, one of his clients, as a burglary supervisor with Hunt.  In a public court hearing over these disputes, the government prosecutor told the Court that Caddy had revealed in his partial testimony that he had “intimations” that Mullen was connected to the CIA.   Caddy was forced to testify in full eventually.  But because grand jury proceedings are confidential, the public never learned what intimations he had about the CIA's connections to Mullen.  

But in the wake of these court proceedings, in order to explain the curious statements about the CIA, the Post quoted Bennett as saying that Caddy must have been referring to the work Mullen did for Radio Free Cuba in the 1960s.  Most observers knew that Radio Free Cuba was a CIA-sponsored venture, certainly a publicly well-known program as opposed to a covert one.  So, the assertion that Mullen, a public relations firm, may have worked on the Radio Free Cuba account certainly made sense and could explain the company's relationship with the Agency, as understood by Caddy.  But it did not answer the larger question of whether Mullen had other deeper and continuing CIA ties. 

Was its Radio Free Cuba account the only contact with the CIA?  Did it supply cover for covert CIA agents? The public was not told but the Post reporting suggested that Mullen’s roll was solely connected to the Agency as regards this limited worked with Radio Free Cuba.  The Post never followed up again on this suggestion, and we further note that the allusion to Radio Free Cuba was Bennett's, not Caddy’s, and not under oath. 

What if Mullen was in fact a CIA front company? That is, one that gave cover as seeming Mullen employees to CIA undercover operatives.   You may recall the recent 2003 case of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent posted overseas under different names posing as a le jeune employee of various companies.  Was Mullen one of these cover companies shielding Hunt’s role as a CIA agent? If Mullen was such a cover company, it would be logical to question whether Hunt was acting as a CIA agent when he was a parttime White House contractor on loan from Mullen, his fulltime employer.  If so, what inferences flow from that?

All five burglars had CIA connections of some sort and James McCord, at the time of the arrests, was Director of Security of the CRP.  He, himself, was recently retired from the Agency.  The White House had claimed that it had not authorized the burglary, that is, that it was a rogue operation by out-of-control campaign operatives. 

Is it possible that Watergate was indeed a rogue operation, in the sense that it should be more appropriately termed a CIA operation than it would be a White House initiative?  But, we may ask, how could this have been a CIA operation if campaign cash was used?  And how would it be if Gordon Liddy was involved, working for the CRP as General Counsel but never, it seems, for the CIA? 

Soon after the burglary, Mark Felt (many years later to be unveiled as Bob Woodward's anonymous high-level source, Deep Throat) was the No. 2 man in the FBI, in charge of the Watergate investigation.  What did Mark Felt, a/k/a Deep Throat, think about the CIA's role in this affair?  When he first met with his boss, Patrick Gray, several days after the arrests, he informed Gray of his initial opinion that the burglary was, “a White House operation, a CIA operation, or both.”  

Was Mullen in fact a CIA contract? We now know it was. At the request of the FBI, the CIA provided a highly confidential memo to the Bureau on June 21, 1972, just days after the arrests, admitting to having a cover arrangement with Mullen.  However, throughout 1973, the Senate had been stonewalled by the CIA in the Senate requests for relevant documents.  Finally, in early 1974, the Senate finally received a cache of documents from the CIA, a disclosure forced by honest CIA security agents who informed their post-Helms leadership of significant materials which had been wrongfully withheld from the Senate.  They showed, among other things, this cover contract.  This disclosure to the Senate, however, occurred long after the televised, widely viewed Ervin Committee Watergate hearings had concluded.  So, the public was kept in the dark about the cover contract.  

One belatedly revealed CIA document was striking. It was an internal Agency report of a contact in February 1973 from Time Magazine reporter, Sandy Smith, who had numerous FBI sources.  He asked Bennett about whether Mullen had a cover relationship with the CIA.  Clearly, the internal CIA memo of this inquiry noted Smith had been told of Mullen's cover contract, which the Agency had revealed to the FBI following the burglary.  Bennett denied all to Smith.  But the internal CIA report unmistakably proved Mullen’s cover status and CIA deception about it. 

This arrangement means that it would not be irrational to see Watergate as having been in some manner a CIA operation, carried out under cover through Hunt and Mullen.  If so, what would be the purpose of the CIA operation?  Wouldn’t the DNC be only of political campaign importance. however weak, to the White House as opposed to being intelligence value to the CIA?  Also, since the FBI had known of the Mullen cover contract by June 21, 1972, wouldn’t Mark Felt, a/k/a Deep Throat, have also known?  Of course.  And if Deep Throat knew, wouldn’t he have confirmed the CIA's cover relationship with Mullen to his friend, Post reporter Bob Woodward? 

Yet, we know that in more than two years after the burglary arrest, through Richard Nixon's resignation, the CIA had not been reported by the Post as having been involved at the time of the burglary with Hunt or Mullen.  Quite the contrary.  Numerous editorials and punditry in the Post concluded that any suggestion of CIA involvement was a ploy by the Nixon Administration to divert attention from its own guilt. 

Let's explore for a moment the lack of reporting by the Washington Post of Mullen’s CIA status.  Did the Post fail to report it because it had concluded that the CIA was not involved in the burglary?  Or did the Post have reason to so suspect, and failed to report it?  If the Post had some basis to believe that the CIA was involved in the Watergate burglary, why wouldn’t it report this stunning possibility?  We’ll discuss this topic in later episodes. 

Let's now reflect on the inferences, if in fact Mullen was a CIA cover company at the time of Watergate, having hired Hunt as an undercover CIA agent.  If in fact Mullen was a CIA cover contractor, Caddy likely hired lawyers for the burglars precisely because Mullen recognized that the burglary was a CIA venture. 

We know now that the FBI knew about Mullen’s status at least as of June 21, 1972, shortly after the burglary, and likely that eventually someone in the FBI had leaked this to Sandy Smith of Time Magazine.   Thus, causing the contact by Smith with Bennett in February 1973. 

But June 1972 was around the same time that Deep Throat gave Woodward the tip that Hunt was employed by the White House, which provided one of the first sensational headlines of Watergate. Wouldn’t Deep Throat at the same time have told Woodward of the possibility that Hunt was also working for the CIA through Mullen?  in fact, wouldn’t it have been perhaps an even more sensational headline if it turned out that the head of the burglary team was also a CIA undercover operative?  In that case, it would appear that, yes, he was ostensibly a White House employee, but his true employer at the time may have been the CIA.  Wouldn’t that revelation have put an entirely different spin on the Watergate story? 

It's an axiom of criminal prosecutions that one who creates a false exculpatory story is likely covering up for his own guilt.  By concealing Hunt’s association with the Agency, was the CIA covering up its participation in the burglary?  And was the Post covering up for the CIA? 

It is therefore noteworthy that CIA records show that Mullen President Bennett made a deal with the Post’s Bob Woodward shortly after the burglary that in supposed exchange of the stories that Bennett would “feed” Woodward, a “suitably grateful” Woodward would “protect” Mullen, presumably keeping him quiet about the CIA's cover arrangement.  Of course, at the time of this conversation with Woodward, which was in early summer 1972 shortly after the burglaries, Bennett had no stories to feed Woodward who, with Deep Throat’s help, hardly needed Bennett. So, if Woodward kept quiet, and intentionally so, about Mullen, it was for the Post’s purposes, not the CIA's.  

It appears that over the course of the Watergate investigation, Bennett may have been responsible in later months for at least two very lame pieces appearing in the Post.  Hardly worthy of an intentional cover-up of a major player in Washington.  So, while it is crystal clear that the CIA was covering up for its cover contractor, perhaps understandable given the Agency secretiveness. Why would the Post cover-up for Mullen and the CIA?  

In any case, as we now leave this episode, we can conclude that at least one of the burglary team, its operational supervisor Howard Hunt, was an undercover CIA agent at the time of the burglary.  If so, was the burglary performed for CIA purposes?  And if it was for the CIA, what could the target possibly have been?  If in fact Hunt was a CIA undercover operative, why would Hunt need to ply his trade under the auspices as a White House contractor?  In other words, why would Hunt need to be in the White House, and why would he need to be undercover? This is a key question, the answer to which leads to the ultimate unlocking of the Mysteries of Watergate, and we will continue in later episodes to explore this question.

Thank you for listening. If you like you've heard, please give me a five-star review on iTunes and share this podcast with your friends.  I truly enjoy being here and solving the Mysteries of Watergate with you.  If you have any questions about what we've discussed, please email me through the contact page of postgatebook.com or send me at tweet at @TheJohnDOConnor. We’ll meet back here during the next episode of The Mysteries of Watergate.