Review of Jim Hougan's important Watergate book "Secret Agenda" and subsequent developments:
Watergate at 50: Revelations From Newly Declassified Evidence
By James Rosen
realclearpolitics.com
Highlights:
Watergate breakin team members E. Howard Hunt and James McCord (both CIA) pretended not to know each other when G. Gordon Liddy introduced them. In fact, they knew each other quite well. This points to Liddy being a dupe rather than the ringleader of the operation. And that the CIA was in charge.
The CIA was spying on Nixon:
CIA had detailed employees from the Office of Security to the Secret Service unit that maintained the White House taping system. This revelation carried with it the implication that the CIA had enjoyed “unrivaled access to the president’s private conversations and thoughts” for the two years (1971-73) the taping system was operational. Eugenio Martinez was the only member of the breakin team who was actively on the CIA payroll. The CIA refused to turn over Martinez' file to Watergate prosecutors despite extreme pressure.
Alexander Haig said that the CIA knew about the Watergate burglary 30 minutes before it occurred.
"Why was the tradecraft employed, despite the presence of so many highly-experienced operators, was so poor, so consistently – to the point of being suspicious in its own right?" [getting caught was the goal]
The Dems planted a fake bug and the FBI knew it:
the official correspondence between Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert and the FBI laboratory. With painstaking methodology, the bureau’s lab technicians presented unassailable evidence to buttress their conclusion that the Democrats themselves had planted the crude and inoperative bugging device they “discovered” on Oliver’s telephone, and announced to the press, in September 1972 – three months after the arrests. John Dean is garbage:
Across 8 days of grinding deposition testimony in 1995, John Dean disavowed his own Watergate memoir as an unreliable account, woven in part from “whole cloth.” In court testimony, DNC secretary Ida Wells let slip that she kept phone books involving a prostitution ring locked in her desk. And the CIA had a key to her desk!
Wells locked her desk with a key not to protect scissors, hand lotion, or personal notes but – phone books! And not just any phone books but ones that contained – as Wells put it – dirt! And that was why Eugenio Martinez, the CIA’s “agent” on the Plumbers team, possessed a copy of that key. The CIA had bugged the phone of Wells and her boss Spencer Oliver, but they managed to retrieve the bug a few days before the breakin.
Tom |
