Reply #33: Jim Hougan's - Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA

[MinM]

http://www.counterpunch.org/hougan06082005.html

One of the most lasting consequences of the Watergate affair has been its corrosive effect upon investigative reporting. Through its unquestioning embrace of Deep Throat, Hollywood and the press have romanticized the anonymous source and, in doing so, legitimized him. The results are there to be seen in your daily newspaper: story after story, attributed to no one in particular. "Speaking on condition of anonymity, " "White House sources denied," "A Pentagon official said."

As sources disappear, the news becomes more propagandistic. Ambitious and calculating pols drop innuendos and send up trial-balloons, without ever having to take responsibility for what they've said. Or not said. In the playground of anonymous sources, the public is increasingly informed by creative writers like Jason Blair (formerly of the New York Times), Stephen Glass (ex-New Republic), Jack Kelly (gone from USA Today), and, ironically, Woodward's former protégé at the Post, Janet Cooke. Not surprisingly, the public becomes increasingly skeptical.

The problem with anonymous sources is not just that they might be "composite" characters, or that they might not exist at all, but rather that the source's motives remain beyond scrutiny. So the story is necessarily incomplete.

Our view of the Watergate affair may now be changed by the certain knowledge of Throat's identity. Until recently, his motives could only be inferred. And the inference was that he must be a government official who was so outraged by the Nixon Administration's hubris and patent disregard for the law that he risked all to alert the public. A real Good Guy, in other words.

That's what Hollywood and the Post have led us to believe over the years, and it is what Mark Felt's grandchildren believe. But inasmuch as Grandpa was himself convicted for "conspiring to injure and oppress citizens of the United States," having authorized numerous black-bag jobs and warrantless searches at the Bureau, he seems an unlikely person to be so deeply shocked by the break-in at the Watergate.

So perhaps Throat's concern was as much political as civic.

In his June 2 article in the Post, outing his source, Woodward tells us that Felt regarded the Nixon White House as "corrupt...sinister...(a) cabal." And, as the Post reporter makes clear, this was before Watergate. Indeed, Woodward says, "Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis."

As it happens, this is exactly what I thought at the time, as did nearly every other liberal that I knew. Strange, then, to learn that this same point of view was shared by Mark Felt, a professional Red-hunter so highly placed in the FBI that only the Director, J. Edgar Hoover, outranked him.

Or maybe it's not so strange.

A similar view of the Nixon Administration was held by James McCord, the rightwing evangelist and former CIA Security chief who led the break-in team at the Watergate. In a series of queer "newsletters" written after he had been arrested, McCord put forward a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Rockefeller family was lunging for control of the government's critical national security functions, using the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as its means to an end.

At the Pentagon, the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, went even further. To Zumwalt, the Nixon Administration was "inimical to the security of the United States." (1) Indeed, as the admiral later explained, he eventually left the Administration (this was in 1974) because "its own officials and experts reflected Henry Kissinger's world view: that the dynamics of history are on the side of the Soviet Union; that before long the USSR will be the only superpower on earth andthat the duty of policy-makers, therefore, is at all costs to conceal from the people their probable fate..." (2)

Zumwalt, Felt and McCord were by no means alone in their deep mistrust of the Nixon White House. Within the Pentagon, a military spy-ring was pillaging Kissinger's secrets on behalf of Adm. Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 1970.

Within the offices of the National Security Council, and on secret missions to China, Kissinger's briefcases were rifled and his burn-bags ransacked. In all, perhaps a thousand top-secret documents were stolen and transmitted to Moorer's office (if not elsewhere, as well) by Yeoman Charles Radford, a young Mormon acting on orders of Adm. Robert Welander.

Here, matters become a bit incestuous.

Admiral Welander was an aide to Moorer. But he was also a mentor of Lt. Bob Woodward, whose commander Welander had been aboard the USS Fox. Reportedly, it was at the urging of Welander---who had yet to be implicated in "the Moorer-Radford affair"---that Woodward extended his tour of duty in 1969, going to the Pentagon to serve as Communications Duty Officer to then-CNO Tom Moorer.

In that capacity, Woodward presided over the CNO's code-room, reading every communication that went in and out, while acting, also, as a briefer and a courier. This, he tells us, is how he met Deep Throat, while cooling his heels outside the Situation Room in the White House. It was 1970 and, according to Woodward, Mark Felt was sitting in the next chair.

The Moorer-Radford affair is not usually considered a part of the Watergate story, though it deserves to be. The Nixon Administration learned of the Pentagon spy-ring in late 1971, but the affair did not become public until almost three years later. By then, the Watergate story was almost played out.

While president, Nixon was determined to keep the affair secret, telling Kissinger aide David Young, "If you love your country, you'll never mention it." But the Pentagon's chief investigator, W. Donald Stewart, was more forthcoming. Asked how seriously the affair should have been taken, Stewart replied with a rhetorical question: "Did you see that film, Seven Days in May? That's what we were dealing with..."

The film is about a military conspiracy to topple the president. A coup d'etat, in other words.

So it is interesting to learn that Mark Felt placed Yeoman Radford under electronic surveillance long after the White House learned of his activities, and even after Radford had been transferred to a dead-end military post 3000 miles from Washington. This suggests that Felt may have been more concerned with counterintelligence issues than he was with prosecutorial ones. (Radford was never charged with a crime.)

So why did Radford do it?

According to the yeoman himself, his "superiors" were of the opinion that Kissinger's foreign policy was "catastrophic" by design. His own espionage activities, he said, were intended to defeat a conspiracy conceived by "the Rockefeller family" and orchestrated by the Council on Foreign Relations. The purpose of this supposed conspiracy, Radford said, was to win the Soviets' cooperation in guaranteeing the Rockefellers' "continued domination" over the world's currencies. In return for this, Nixon and Kissinger were to construct a foreign policy that would ensure eventual Soviet hegemony and a one-world government. (3)

Yikes! It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for Nixon. But not quite.

It wasn't just Donald Stewart who was worried about a Seven Days in May scenario. The CIA, which was also spying on the White House, as well. In this connection, another of Woodward's sources is relevant. This was Robert Bennett.

Until Woodward identified Mark Felt as Deep Throat, I was of the firm opinion that the honor belonged to Bennett. This was so because it seemed to me that, at a minimum, for someone to be taken seriously as a candidate for Deep Throat, there should be some evidence that he met secretly with Woodward and fed him stories about Watergate.

Until Woodward outed Felt, the only candidate who fit the bill was Bennett.

In 1972, when Mark Felt was reading transcripts of Yeoman Radford's conversations, Bennett was the new owner of the Robert R. Mullen Company. This was a CIA front with offices in Washington and abroad. Among Bennett's employees was the seemingly retired CIA officer, E. Howard Hunt. Politically hyper-active during the Nixon Administration, Bennett was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization (which was just entering negotiations with the CIA over plans to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean's floor). It was Bennett who suggested that Hunt might want to interview ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, and it was Bennett who volunteered his own nephew to work as an infiltrator at the DNC. One might go on, but the point is made: Bennett was a very well-placed source, if not a co-conspirator.

Today, Senator Bennett is a Mormon elder and one of the richest men in Congress. That he was also a key source of Bob Woodward's during the Watergate affair is memorialized in a Memorandum to the Record written by Martin J. Lukoskie, Bennett's CIA case-officer in 1972. (4) According to Lukoskie, Bennett "established a 'backdoor entry' to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party (and the Washington Post...)" Bennett's job was to "kill off any revelation" about the Mullen Company's relationship to the CIA. But he was also responsible for dissuading reporters from the Washington Post from pursuing a 'Seven Days in May' scenario" that would have implicated the CIA in a conspiracy to "take over the country."...

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MinM/134

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