Introduction
No apologies for returning to Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. As Steve Dorril said in Lobster 8, this is a major event.
This essay is in two parts. In the first I make some critical remarks about Secret Agenda’s central theses; In the second I speculate about other items on the ‘secret agenda’ of Watergate.
Part 1
Hougan’s first book about parapolitics, Spooks (London 1979), was very interesting but very irritating. A shower of wonderful fragments, little of it was sufficiently well documented to be of much use to other people. With this second book Hougan has crossed over into the more formal, documented territory of the academic. Spooks is rarely cited by other writers: this one will be, I suspect.
But it is irritating in its own way. Hougan’s research is badly organised and he footles around with trivia – a whole chapter on the identity of ‘Deep Throat’, a question of little significance even if it could be proved that ‘Throat’ was, indeed, a single individual and not a dramatic device used by Wood/stein. If Hougan had an editor (and none seems to be credited) he/she did a rotten job.
All of which is a pity because this is close to being one of the great books about American politics as well as being one of the greatest pieces of research in recent time.
Brutally summarised, Hougan’s central thesis is this. The CIA infiltrated the White House ‘Plumbers’ through Hunt and McCord (and, possibly, lower down through Cubans like Martinez). The ‘Plumbers’ ended up trying to get information on a call-girl ring being run from a building next to the Watergate complex, a ring whose clients included workers from the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate. (They were using a phone in the DNC offices to set up the dates – hence the ‘Plumbers’ bugging attempts in them). But this call-girl ring was being run by the CIA, and to protect it, Hunt and McCord repeatedly ‘blew’ the various attempts to get information on the DNC-call-girl ring connection sought by their Republican masters.
“In effect, the snake swallowed its tail: CIA agents working under cover of the Committee to Re-elect the President came to be targeted against their own operation by the very organisation that unwittingly provided them with cover.” (p309)
With this thesis Hougan answers the perplexing question of why the ‘Plumbers’ tried so hard to bug the DNC when most of its politically sensitive operations had been moved elsewhere. The Republicans were after the sexual dirt on the Democrats in the DNC.
This thesis, though the core of Secret Agenda, is a small percentage of a text which is overflowing with fascinating bits and pieces. And perhaps its the superfluity of new information which has obscured one or two simple points which effectively wreck this central thesis.
In the first place Hougan has no evidence, not a shred, that the call-girl ring was, in fact, a CIA operation. The best he can offer is a series of claims which (to him) make it probable.
“That the surveillance of the Columbia Plaza (site of the call-girl ring – RR) and the DNC was an intelligence operation mounted by the CIA is demonstrated by a long chain of evidence. That chain includes McCord’s secret relationship to Hunt, the clandestine relationship of both men to the Office of Security, the Office of Security’s use of prostitutes in the past, the CIA’s continued assistance to Hunt long after the August 17 “cutoff”, the circumstances of Hunt’s “retirement”, his reports to the Agency while working at the White House, the precedent or parallel established in the Furbershaw operation – and more to be related subsequently. The conclusion is inescapable that McCord sabotaged the June 16 break-in to protect an ongoing CIA operation.”(p212)
Unfortunately merely asserting that X is “demonstrated” and a conclusion is “inescapable” doesn’t make them so. (And the ‘evidence’ marshalled subsequently is no more compelling. Indeed, in the second section (p309) in the space of a single paragraph Hougan is unclear whether the call-girl ring was a CIA operation per se, or merely the target of one.)
The second point is this. If the call-girl ring was a CIA operation, why would the CIA risk blowing the cover of their people inside the ‘Plumbers’ to preserve it? In effect Hougan’s thesis hinges on this proposition being true: it was more important to the CIA to maintain this call-girl ring than it was to keep their agents in place in the Nixon White House’s most secret operation. And isn’t this wholly implausible? If the call-girl ring was that important, why not just shut it down, or move it elsewhere? Hougan is actually claiming that the CIA left a totally illegal, potentially very embarrassing blown operation in place, relying on its agents inside the ‘Plumbers’ to (somehow) screw up the investigation of it. But from everything I’ve read about intelligence operations this just would not have happened. At the first sign of exposure the whole thing would have been shut down. The scale of the ‘flap’ the exposure of a CIA call-girl ring inside the US would have generated in 1971 is hard to underestimate. It is inconceivable to me that the CIA would have left such an operation in place when it knew – via Hunt and McCord – that it had become an object of interest to the ‘Plumbers’: inconceivable, that is, unless the CIA wanted the operation to be investigated by the ‘Plumbers’.
Hougan, it seems to me, has two choices. Either there is no evidence that the call-girl ring was CIA. This wrecks his thesis because protection of a CIA operation is what Hougan offers to explain the manifest but inexplicable incompetence of Hunt and McCord in their attempts to bug the DNC. Or, if the call-girl ring was, indeed, CIA, then whatever happened, it wasn’t that Hunt and McCord were trying to protect it.
Hougan believes, as others do, that whatever else is uncertain about the whole affair, Hunt and McCord fouled up the various break-ins on purpose. What is striking about Hougan is that having accepted this – a commonplace – he then rejects the idea that it was done to embarrass the Nixon administration. His reasons for this rejection are extremely thin.
“McCord could not have predicted that the arrests would cause a scandal of such dimension that the Nixon administration would collapse …. Indeed, all that could have been foreseen at the time was that sabotage (of the break-in) would lead to the temporary embarrassment of the administration, and, just as certainly that it put an end to any further assaults on the DNC. Clearly it was this second goal that McCord pursued.” (p211)
“Clearly” nothing. Although he is right to warn against arguing backwards from effect (Nixon’s downfall) to cause (blowing the break-ins), his statement that McCord (and, presumably, the Agency) could only have predicted temporary embarrassment is resistible. Given such material the CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” – its network of assets and allies within the US mass media – not to mention its network of friends and allies within the East Coast liberal establishment – could have reasonably predicted to be capable of doing a great deal more than generating “temporary embarrassment”.
Hougan, in effect, fails to draw the obvious conclusions from his own research. Given a CIA call-girl ring (plausible, if not proven); given the deliberate blowing of the ‘Plumbers’ attempts to get access to it by two CIA agents within the unit, leading to the embarrassment of the Nixon White House; the simplest inference would be that either the call-girl ring was set up to entice and entrap the ‘Plumbers’, or when the ‘Plumbers’ stumbled across it, it was left in place to entrap and embarrass the White House. Quite why Hougan goes to the lengths he does to avoid this ‘CIA trap’ theory is unclear to me. Perhaps it is just the simple desire to present something entirely original rather than an elaboration – albeit a spectacular elaboration – of the widely-held ‘CIA trap’ theory.
Part 2
Believing he has falsified the ‘CIA trap’ theory of Watergate, Hougan doesn’t attempt to explain why the CIA should want to embarrass the Nixon administration. Most of the accounts which do focus on the so-called Houston Plan, the Nixon White House’s half-hearted attempt to get some measure of control over all the intelligence agencies. But that was seen off before the Watergate events began. (1)
But there was another threat to the CIA. Nixon/Kissinger were trying to reduce the Agency’s role within the bureaucratic struggle over American foreign policy: specifically they were trying to loosen CIA control over the NIE’S (National Intelligence Estimates) – the official definition of geo-political reality in general and the Soviet ‘threat’ in particular. If there are secret agenda to Watergate, this fairly obscure bureaucratic struggle should be on them.
To describe the conflict over the NIE’S as ‘secret’, however, would be an exaggeration. Jim McCord, who triggered the whole mess, effectively copped the lot in a memo to the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee on May 17 1973. H.R. Haldeman spotted the significance of this and quotes it at length in his book on Watergate, The Ends of Power (London 1978, p44) (2) The core of the memo is this:
“… it appeared to me that for some time the White House had been trying to get political control over the CIA assessments and estimates, in order to make them conform to ‘White House policy’. One of the things this meant to me was that this could mean that CIA assessments and estimates could then be forced to accord with Department of Defence estimates of future US weaponry and hardware needs …. this also smacked of the situation which Hitler’s intelligence chiefs found themselves in during the 1930s and 1940s….”
A number of things are worth noting here. The first is that Hougan is aware of this. He notes (p63):
“Kissinger’s diminution of the CIA’s influence on the NSC, and his embarrassing disregard for the Agency’s raison d’etre: the NIE’S, whose importance Kissinger had drastically reduced.”
Hougan, however, merely drops that into a long catalogue of other things, most of which are the more exciting material of covert action, moles and defections then current among the US intelligence community (or, at any rate, among the journalists who were writing about it).
It is more important than that. Lawrence Freedman (as he then was, now Professor Freedman, Professor of War Studies), in his study US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat (London 1977) states quite simply that by December 1972, when Richard Helms had been removed as DCIA, “The definitions of intelligence issue and the production of final judgements were being taken out of the intelligence community…. and being placed in the NSC.”
A little further on he adds:
“The intelligence community, at the start of Nixon’s second term, was being transformed into a carefully constructed instrument tuned to the particular needs of Kissinger”….. But “Almost as soon as everything was in place, the Watergate affair blew up….” (p56)
Now Freedman is an academic expert on strategic theories, weaponry and international relations, and he would never do anything as rash as go into print with something as mushy and speculative as a theory about Watergate. Yet it is hard to read this section of his account of the wars over the intelligence estimates without coming to the conclusion that Freedman suspects, and is willing to allow the careful reader to know that he suspects, that the two events are connected. He says, a little further on that
“It was the impact of the Watergate affair which weakened Kissinger’s control over all intelligence resources.” (p60)
Freedman not only offers McCord’s memo as evidence in this but also the similar opinions of two disgruntled senior CIA people, John Huisinga, Director of the Agency’s Office of Strategic Research, and Ray Cline. (p60)
Most interesting of all, however, Freedman tells that in this Kissinger/Nixon – CIA struggle “the first specific moves came in April 1971.” The CIA knew then that the ‘estimates war’ which had been rumbling away inside Washington had really begun. But – and this may just be a coincidence – it was in that April that Howard Hunt (at this stage not a member of the ‘Plumbers’) went down to Miami to make contact with some of the Cubans who were later to join him in the ‘Plumbers’ unit. Hougan quotes Coulson on this:
“Hunt’s visit to Barker (in April 1971) was, pure and simple, a get-ready-for-action call. You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise … But there wasn’t any action anticipated. Not then. The Pentagon Papers hadn’t been published. The Plumbers were months away. So, you tell me, how did Hunt know (in April) that he’d need the Cubans?” (p29) Might the ‘get ready’ call and the formal opening shot of the estimates wars be connected?
The final thing worth noting about the McCord memo is his reference to the parallels between the situation in the US and that in Nazi Germany. His meaning is quite specific; yet Hougan, quoting a very similar letter from McCord to General Paul Gaynor, asks “Nazi Germany? What is McCord talking about?”, and answers his own question thus:
“The best evidence on the matter is contained in McCord’s autobiographical account of the affair, A Piece of Tape. In it he tells us, “I believed that the whole future of the nation was at stake. If the administration could get away with this massive crime of Watergate and its cover up, it certainly would stop at nothing thereafter”.
This is disingenuous. It is quite clear both from the memo quoted above and the letter to Gaynor which Hougan quotes that the ‘Nazi’ parallels referred specifically to the Nixon/Kissinger attempts to get their hands on the intelligence estimates. In defence of his thesis Hougan has misinterpreted the McCord memo.
The process McCord feared, begun in earnest in April 1971, came to fruition in 1976 with the so-called Team B exercise, when a group of hawks were given the task of preparing an alternative set of estimates of the Soviet ‘threat’ to those prepared by the CIA (3). To no-one’s surprise they came to the conclusion that said ‘threat’ was much greater than that perceived by the CIA and a new ‘cold war’ was begun in earnest. Freedman comments that ” This shift, it should be emphasised, was a consequence of the politics of the estimating process rather than any new information concerning Soviet forces.” (p197)
This argument rumbles on to this day. McCord’s fear of Pentagon dominance has proved to be justified.(4) But it would be a mistake to think any of this is simple. McCord, by all accounts, was a right-winger, a super-patriot. Like others on the right he seems to have feared that Nixon/Kissinger would damage US interests in their search for detente with the Soviet Union. (The public view of the Soviet Union has always been that Watergate was, at root, an attack on detente.) But the attacks on the estimating process of the CIA were also coming from the political right, including (Republican) conservatives who defended Nixon throughout the protracted Watergate drama. Whatever it says, the fact that Nixon was ousted by a ‘liberal’ mass media, egged on by a deluge of leaks from the Washington bureaucracies, does not speak of a simple conservative-liberal split.
Part of the difficulty here lies in perceptions of the CIA itself. Although for most of the world the CIA is perceived simply as a right-wing body, the tool of US imperialism, for many on the political right in America the CIA was, at the time of Watergate, and always had been, a nest of liberals. (5)
As far as I can tell simply from reading books about the Agency, there is no clear-cut right/left split within it, although it does appear that the ‘wild men’ of the right have tended to gravitate towards the covert end of the Agency’s activities. But the fact that the covert side of the agency had the lion’s share of the budget at the time of Watergate, and has had most of the publicity since then need not be a reliable indicator of the political importance of the Agency’s various activities.
However fascinating the games in the geo-political gutter are, the really significant – globally significant – events take place elsewhere. It remains true today, as it was in 1971/2 that these events are dominated by the US-Soviet global competition. From that almost everything else flows. Control of the definition of the Soviet ‘threat’ was then, and remains the single most important piece in the geo-political game.
The real consequence of Nixon’s demise was Ronald Reagan fronting for the resurgent cold war warriors. Nixon’s regime may have been totalitarian in inclination on domestic issues, but in foreign policy, with Kissinger at the helm, by US standards it was liberal. The CIA and its allies in the mass media toppled Nixon only to lose the estimates war in the long run anyway.
Watergate wasn’t really a coup d’etat as some, notably Coulson, have suggested. Hougan’s point that the CIA could hardly have predicted the fall of Nixon has to be considered, but there is a way of looking at these events which reduces some of its force. It is argued – Hougan argues – that it was the Nixon regime’s attempt to cover-up which led to their downfall, not the ‘third rate burglary’. But they had no choice but to cover it up even though the attempt to do so was doomed from the outset by the presence of CIA agents within the ‘Plumbers’.
Through Hunt and/or McCord the Agency knew from day one what had happened, and they knew that, no matter how long it might take, no matter how many ‘deep throats’ it took to steer the journalists towards the story, it was all going to come out. What is more, as soon as the Nixon people knew that the CIA knew, they (the White House) must have known that it was all going to come out. With this in mind we should perhaps not so readily accept Hougan’s assertion that the Agency couldn’t have foreseen the outcome. Indeed, we need not assume – as Hougan does in rejecting it as the ‘bottom line’ – that the real aim was to topple Nixon. It is certainly arguable that the real target was Kissinger and his rapidly expanding empire at the NSC. Kissinger’s authority came from the President’s support. Nixon crippled by Watergate meant, in effect, Kissinger crippled by Watergate.
RR
NOTES
- The ‘Houston Plan’ was June 1970, and dead in the water by July 28.
- Having quoted the memo Haldeman rejects it – and the CIA trap theory – as the basic explanation.
- On Team B see Peddlers of Crisis, Jerry Sanders (Pluto/South End Press 1983) especially pp 197-206
- Perhaps ‘dominance’ is, too. What seems to have happened with the undermining of the NIE’S is a ludicrous sort of ‘free market’ in estimates. At present the Pentagon’s get acted on. This will change as the size of the US budget deficit eventually forces the US government to reduce spending on arms. If old Raygun dies of cancer, and Bush takes over, that process will happen pretty quickly. It was Bush who described Reagan’s economic thinking as ‘voodoo economics’ during the campaign for the Republican nomination.
On the conflict over the estimates see, recently, Sunday Times 31 March 1985.
- Appropriately, General Daniel Graham, Team B member: “There are more liberals per square foot in the CIA than any other part of government.” (Peddlars .. see above, p198)
General Vernon Walters Biography
In a previous Lobster we remarked on the missing years in the official biography of the new US Ambassador to the United Nations, General Vernon Walters. Here’s The Times (13 June ’85) version of his life. Extraordinary, it is not, that they just blandly print a biography with the whole 1960-67 period completely blank.
Biography
1917: Born in New York 1928-34: Attended Stonyhurst College, England 1941: Enlisted in US Army 1942-45: Served in North Africa and Italy 1945-48: Military attaché in Brazil 1950: Accompanied Averell Harriman to Korea 1951: Assisted Harriman in US mediation attempts between Britain and Iran 1951-56: Assistant to the deputy Chief of Staff at Shape, Paris 1956-60 Staff Assistant to President Eisenhower 1967: Served in Vietnam 1967-72: US Military attaché in Paris 1972-76: Deputy Director of the CIA 1976-80: Established private consultancy 1980-85: President Reagan’s “Ambassador at large” 1985: Appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations