Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin
Gollancz, London 1991
Pat Nixon, wife of Richard Nixon, died in June. The obituarist in the Independent of 23 June 1993, commented that ‘she stood by him loyaly, convinced that he was the victim of an international plot involving double agents and the CIA.’ Well, something like that. Mrs Nixon’s death was announced only a week after Channel 4 TV’s Dispatches series broadcast a Barbara Newman documentary, ‘The Key to Watergate’ (June 16), a light gloss on this book. When the programme finished I went to the back issues of Lobster to re-read the review of Silent Coup, and discovered that there wasn’t one.
I now can’t remember why this impressive and important book didn’t get any attention in Lobster: I read it for the publisher months before it was published in the U.K.. Although largely based on Jim Hougan’s 1984 Secret Agenda (reviewed in Lobster 8), Colodny and Gettlin have done an impressive research job which results in these central claims:
- As Hougan argued, the break-in which started the whole episode was actually aimed at getting dirt on Democratic Party officials who were using a call-girl ring based near the Watergate building where the Democratic Party National Committee had its office.
- A friend and flat-mate of one of the call-girls was Maureen ‘Mo’ Biner, later Mrs John Dean, who presumably informed her then boy-friend, John Dean, ambitious presidential counsel.
- Dean then pointed the ‘plumbers’ — Liddy and co. — at the Democrats. When they got caught, to save his skin Dean co-ordinated the ensuing cover-up. John Dean, according to Colodny and Gettlin, was a central player, not the low-level functionary portrayed in his famous televised confession.
- Before becoming a journalist, Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein, had been a U.S. Navy ‘briefer’ with considerable intelligence connections, among them Alexander Haig.
- ‘Deep Throat’ was a device to conceal the fact that Haig was leaking to Woodward. (Or: Haig was ‘Deep Throat’.)’
- One of Haig’s primary interests had been to keep the lid on the scandal of a spying operation run for the Joint Chiefs of Staff against the Kissinger/Nixon/NSC foreign policy axis — the so-called Moorer-Radford affair which remains, still unexplored in depth, at the heart of the entire business.
I think the authors convincingly make points 1, 3, 4 and 6. Point 2 hinges entirely on the heavily prompted memory of one of the team who prosecuted the prostitution ring (p. 133) and thus, while highly likely, remains unproven; and I don’t buy 5.
The authors certainly show that Alexander Haig leaked to Woodward and Bernstein. But so did other people. The problem with Haig as ‘Deep Throat’ is that if you list all the information ‘Deep Throat’ is supposed to have given W and B, especially in the early days, when the story was breaking, it just isn’t plausible that it came from Haig who was Kissinger’s assistant at the NSC at the time. From whom would he have got the information? Nor, in my view, is it plausible that someone as visible as Haig would go creeping around Washington doing amateurish clandestine meetings with a journalist. Alexander Haig was a skilled bureaucratic operator and there were other options open to him.
Finally, and rather importantly, Colodny and Gettlin omit discussion of Hougan’s central concerns about the CIA involvement in ‘the Plumbers’. This weakens the book but nonetheless it is a major piece of work — and a fascinating read.
Barbara Newman and Dispatches recycled the main points of this in their TV film, differing from Colody and Gettlin only in their candidate for ‘Deep Throat’. Instead of Haig, Newman suggested the late Bob Kunkle (my phonetic spelling) who had been Special Agent in Washington in charge of the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. Kunkle — not named in Colodny and Gettlin, or in Hougan — is a plausible candidate in my view. The FBI were getting dumped on and obstructed by the White House over Watergate — Hoover had just seen off the so-called Houston Plan, perceived by the Bureau as a White House attempt to get a grip on the FBI — and leaking to the media is routine bureaucratic politics and something the FBI at higher levels was adept at. Although Newman offered no evidence for the nomination of Kunkle as ‘Deep Throat’ on the programme, it is a very plausible hypothesis.