posted May 31, 2005 01:11 PM              

NEW YORK (AP) - A former FBI official says he was the source called "Deep Throat" who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, Vanity Fair reported Tuesday.

W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward' s source, the magazine said.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," he told lawyer John D. O'Connor, the author of the Vanity Fair article, the magazine said in a press release.

Felt was initially adamant about remaining silent on the subject, thinking disclosures about his past somehow dishonorable.

"I don't think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of," Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., at one point, according to the article. "You (should) not leak information to anyone."

Felt is a retiree living in Santa Rosa, Calif., with his daughter, Joan, the magazine said. He could not immediately be reached for comment by The Associated Press.

posted May 31, 2005 06:24 PM              

i just saw him on tv.....

he's an honest-to-goodness looking old man....
he and his family at the door waving had big ear-to-ear smiles

good job Mr Felt

posted June 01, 2005 05:57 PM            

I think that many people only know the slanted version of Watergate. They think it was all about busting Nixon, but they don't realize the history behind the order - just as you said.

posted June 01, 2005 06:01 PM              

so what?

posted June 01, 2005 06:06 PM              

The report was based on White House tapes transcribed for the first time by Newsweek and The Washington Post.

In its November 3 issue, Newsweek reports the tapes show Nixon wanted to smear past Democratic presidents and try to find documents that would make President Franklin D. Roosevelt look responsible for the success of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

"We're gonna expose, God, Pearl Harbor," Nixon said.

The magazine reports Nixon wanted government files ransacked to find anything that could be leaked to smear Democrats.

Nixon was certain there were untold stories about the Bay of Pigs incident and the Kennedy administration's 1962 Cuban missile crisis and brushes with nuclear war over Berlin in 1961.

To get those documents, Nixon would have to break into the National Archives. The magazine reports that the tapes show Nixon aide John Ehrlichman proposing to send "the archivist out of town for awhile," then photographing the documents and resealing them.

"There are ways to do that?" asked Nixon. "Yes," replied Ehrlichman, "and nobody can tell we've been in there."

The tapes were recorded in the White House in June and July of 1971, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times.

Nixon wanted to use the media to "destroy" the leaker of the papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department official. Nixon believed that an Ellsberg conspiracy was being run out of the Brookings Institute.

"I want a break-in," ordered Nixon on June 30, according to the tapes transcribed by the magazine. "Get it done. ... I want the Brookings safe cleaned out. And have it cleaned out in a way that makes somebody else look bad."

Other excerpts from the tapes reported by Newsweek:

Nixon wanted the Internal Revenue Service to "go after a couple of media people ... Dan Schorr (then of CBS, later with CNN and now NPR), Mary McGrory (then of the Washington Star)."

The Los Angeles Times publisher back then, Otis Chandler, was mentioned too. "I want him checked out with regard to his gardener, I understand he's a wetback."

On September 13, 1971, Nixon ordered aide H.R. Haldeman to have the tax men go after prominent Democratic campaign donors.

posted June 01, 2005 06:18 PM              

The burglary that brought down a president
By HARRY F. ROSENTHAL
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -- In all of U.S. history there never was a political scandal like it. All the elements were there, from penny-ante dirty tricks -- charging $200 worth of pizza to political opponents -- to corruption at the highest level of the government, a president committing impeachable crimes.

Associated Press
Putting a brave face on things, Richard Nixon says goodbye outside the White House as he boards a helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base after resigning the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.

The scandal known as Watergate, after the building in which it began, launched a trend in the tagging of far lesser official misdeeds: Koreagate, Travelgate, Irangate and Filegate.

Watergate started on June 17, 1972, as a Keystone Kops caper. Five men dressed in suits and ties surprised in the act of rifling the office of the Democratic National Committee, their hands sheathed in surgical gloves and their pockets stuffed with sequentially numbered $100 bills.

It climaxed with the Aug. 9, 1974, resignation in disgrace of Republican Richard M. Nixon from the highest office in the land, prison terms for 25 men, and a distrust of government that never dissipated.

A mysterious motive
Strangely, 25 years later nobody is sure what the burglars were looking for. What is known is they were attempting to repair a telephone bug they had installed three weeks before, and they were rifling through files, photographing some.

Watergate had many faces but at the core it was a subversion of the Constitution by the president who had sworn to protect it. The lawbreaking oozed through the White House to functionaries inside and outside the administration. Men who entered government with a zeal to serve the people ended up serving prison time instead. This was a men's scandal; women were largely absent.

Watergate began with money, but that wasn't its evil. "No man or no woman came into this administration and left it with more of this world's goods than when he came in," said Nixon just before he boarded the helicopter that started his journey to exile.

He was right. Underlying Watergate was the arrogance of power and the desire to hang on to it at all costs. The surprise was that so many were willing to sacrifice principle on that altar.

If it meant breaking the law or "stonewalling" -- one of the terms popularized during Watergate -- it was done. If it meant lies or bribery or coercion, so be it. If it meant turning on a friend to fashion a sacrificial lamb, too bad.

Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, was deemed by a grand jury to be a co-conspirator. But he escaped impeachment by resigning and avoided indictment through a pardon. His successor, Gerald Ford, felt the country had endured enough.

Life imitates fiction
The burglars could have been assembled by a novelist.

They worked under the direction of G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI man and White House operative who by then was finance counsel at Nixon's Committee for the Re-election of the President, commonly known as CREEP. Liddy had grandiose schemes for an espionage operation, including use of prostitutes, bugging telephones, mugging opponents and kidnappings. He wanted $1 million for it; he got $250,000.

His top aide was E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA spy who had participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and who had already written 42 spy novels.

Four of the burglars were part of Miami's Cuban exile community and veterans of that invasion. They became known collectively as "the Cubans," although one of them -- Frank Sturgis -- was not Cuban. The fifth burglar, James W. McCord, a 20-year CIA technician, was in charge of CREEP's security.

Investigators quickly established their connection to the president's re-election committee. The FBI traced the $100 bills to $89,000 in CREEP money deposited in one burglar's bank account via a Mexican connection.

Throughout all of this, there were official denials of involvement from the White House and from former Attorney General John Mitchell, who headed the re-election committee.

"I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in," Nixon told the nation in a speech Aug. 15, 1973. "I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities; I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics. That was and is the simple truth."

Liddy's 'Gemstone'
But it wasn't simple, and it wasn't truth.

Only six days after the break-in, on June 23, 1972, Nixon had assented to a plan suggested by chief of staff H.R. Haldeman to derail the FBI's investigation by claiming it would interfere with a CIA operation. This conversation, when it became public, was the final straw in persuading Nixon to resign two years later.

The cover-up was brought on -- indirectly, if not directly -- by Nixon's paranoia that he could lose his re-election effort to Democratic Sen. George McGovern. Nixon could not foresee his landslide victory; only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia went for McGovern.

From that flowed CREEP's dirty tricks department, which included such activities as circulating "endorsements" of McGovern by blacks in predominantly white neighborhoods; ordering $300 worth of booze and $200 worth of pizzas sent to a Democratic fund-raiser and sticking the Democrats with the bill; stationing hecklers at McGovern rallies.

Then came the Watergate burglary, part of an intelligence plan that spy buff Liddy called "Gemstone."

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was there when the burglars appeared in court the day of the break-in. He heard McCord whisper "CIA" when the men were asked to identify themselves. That started him and colleague Carl Bernstein on an investigation that won them a Pulitzer prize.

The election came and went. Watergate was not a factor in the outcome.

That winter, the cover-up went into high gear.

On the January 1973 morning when their trial was to start, Hunt and the Cubans pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. Liddy and McCord chose to stand trial and were convicted of the same charges.

Hunt demanded clemency and money to buy his henchmen's continued silence. It finally got to the point where White House counsel John Dean went to Nixon on March 21, 1973, to tell him: "We have a cancer within -- close to the presidency -- that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding. ... We're being blackmailed; people are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly."

Dean implicated numerous high-level White House staffers: Haldeman had wanted a political intelligence operation; Liddy was picked to run it and devised a plan; Jeb Magruder pushed for it; Charles Colson knew about it; Mitchell approved it.

The cost to buy silence, Dean said, might be $1 million over two years.

"You could get the money," Nixon replied. "You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten."

'Stonewall it'
By that time, the Senate had already started one investigation, and the U.S. attorney's office was interviewing White House and CREEP staff members. The plot began to unravel. First Magruder, then Dean told the story to investigators.

As the pressure mounted, Nixon summoned Haldeman and domestic counsel John Ehrlichman to the presidential cabin at Camp David, Md., and told them they would have to resign. The next day, he fired Dean, and accepted the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.

Dean went on to tell his story to the Senate as a rapt nation watched the proceedings on television. Haldeman, Ehrlichman and McCord testified.

Then came a startling revelation that sealed Nixon's fate. Nixon's schedule keeper, Alexander Butterfield, told Senate Watergate investigators of a secret, automatic system that tape-recorded every conversation Nixon had in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Lincoln Bedroom sitting room, and the Camp David presidential cabin.

Now, prosecutors would have what they needed -- the fly on the wall of the Oval Office that could prove or disprove allegations against the president and his men.

Nixon aides put into play a strategy that they described variously as "a modified limited hangout," and "circling the wagons around the White House" to thwart release of the tapes.

Nixon himself was caught on tape saying, "I don't give a **** what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else."

But U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica ordered that the tapes be produced for the trial of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell, who were charged with the cover-up.

The fight was carried to the Supreme Court, which ruled -- the same day the House Judiciary Committee was considering an impeachment resolution against Nixon -- that he would have to give up the tapes.

Among them was a June 23, 1972, recording of Nixon agreeing to Haldeman's plan to derail the FBI investigation. Nixon issued a statement admitting the tape showed he had approved the start of the cover-up and knew it would limit the FBI investigation.

"I recognize that this additional material I am now furnishing may further damage my case," he conceded in that Aug. 5 statement.

The reaction in Washington and throughout the country was explosive. Three key Republicans went to brief Nixon in the White House and said afterward that the situation looked "gloomy," that Nixon could not count on winning in a Senate impeachment trial.

On Aug. 8, the president ended the waiting. "I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body," he told the nation. "But as president, I must put the interests of America first. ... Therefore, I shall resign the presidency at noon tomorrow."

Nixon performed his last official act the next morning, signing his name to a single sentence: "I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States."

Still ahead were trials and sentences for others involved in Watergate. For the only president ever to resign, there was only shame, a pardon and an uphill struggle for rehabilitation. It ended with his death on April 22, 1994.

posted June 01, 2005 06:25 PM              

11/25/84

WASHINGTON POST (WP), PAGE 05: BOOK WORLD

SECRET AGENDA
Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA
By Jim Hougan Random House. 347 pp. $19.95
By Anthony Marro

MORE THAN 150 books already have been written about Watergate, and to understand the new dimension Jim Hougan hopes to add to this record with Secret Agenda, it is necessary to understand the official, or at least the widely accepted, version of events. Boiled to its essence, it goes something like this:

In May and June 1972, a group of men working for the Nixon reelection campaign staged two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices at Watergate. The group included G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, and E. Howard Hunt. Liddy was a former FBI agent. Hunt and McCord were retired CIA officers. With the aid of some hirelings from Miami's Cuban exile community, McCord installed two wiretaps on the night of May 27-28, one of them on the phone of Lawrence O'Brien, the DNC chairman, and a second on the phone of R. Spencer Oliver, another party official.

For about two weeks, in a motel room across the street, yet another former FBI agent, Alfred C. Baldwin III, eavesdropped on the wiretapped phone conversations, and typed up summaries for McCord. These were passed along to Liddy, * who had them retyped under the heading "GEMSTONE," the code name for the operation, and then gave them to Jeb Stuart Magruder and other campaign officials. Because of a technical problem, the tap on O'Brien's phone never worked. The information from the tap on Oliver's phone proved to be far more personal than political, much of it from women describing sexual escapades, performed or anticipated. Baldwin assumed he was eavesdropping on DNC secretaries, but so many of the conversations were so spicy that they gave rise, as J. Anthony Lukas wrote in Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, to "unconfirmed reports that the telephone was being used for some sort of call-girl service catering to Congressmen and other prominent Washingtonians."

In order to repair the wiretap on O'Brien's telephone, and also to photograph his files, a second break-in was attempted on the night of June 16-17. While inside the DNC office, surgical gloves on their hands, cameras and listening devices in their possession, McCord and the men from Miami were discovered and arrested. The trail quickly led from them to Liddy and Hunt and then to the White House.

NOTHING in Hougan's book suggests that Nixon's political apparatus was not to blame for the break- in, or that Nixon himself didn't deserve to be run out of town on a rail. The break-ins were planned in the office of then attorney general John Mitchell, funded with money from the reelection campaign, and executed by the president's men.

But this, Hougan argues, is only part of the story. His account goes well beyond, to include a prostitution ring, heavy CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats, and plots within plots, with McCord scheming at the end to sabotage his own break-in. What he offers up is not so much a totally revisionist history as a history with a significant new dimension and perspective. It likely will take some time for Hougan's reporting to be absorbed, cross-checked, challenged and tested, and whether this proves to be an important book or simply a controversial one will depend on how well it survives the scrutiny that it is sure to receive. For what Hougan is doing here is attacking the version of Watergate that has been constructed and reinforced by journalists, prosecutors, congressional investigators and academics over more than a decade -- a version which he now labels a "counterfeit history."

At bottom, his contention is this: Hunt and McCord never left the CIA. They remained under the control of the agency, with Hunt spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats.

There never was a tap placed on the telephones in the DNC offices. Instead, the conversations that were monitored by Baldwin were from the wiretap of a prostitution ring located in the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments, some of whose customers were being steered there by a secretary in the DNC. This tap most likely had been planted by a private detective named Louis Russell, who died of a heart attack in 1973. Russell was a former FBI agent, a friend of one of the prostitutes, an employe of McCord's private security firm, and, in Hougan's view, a CIA operative tapping the calls for the agency. The connection between the prostitutes and the DNC had been arranged by a Washington attorney, Phillip Bailley, who had persuaded a secretary at the DNC to steer clients to a prostitute identified only as "Tess." Since he traveled frequently and his office was empty, the secretary and the clients had used Spencer Oliver's phone to arrange meetings with "Tess."

This secret CIA operation involving the prostitutes was so sensitive that McCord and Russell set out to sabotage the break-in at Watergate to insure that the other Watergate burglars wouldn't stumble across it. "In effect," Hougan writes, "the snake had swallowed its tail: CIA agents working under cover of Nixon's re-election committee came to be targeted against their own operation....All that the agents could do was to stand tall and, when all else failed, blow their own cover." By doing this, Hougan says, the information from the wiretaps on the prostitutes would be preserved for the exclusive use of the CIA, which presumably would use it to blackmail important people, or to create psychiatric profiles of them.

A secondary theme of the book is that the press in general and The Washington Post in particular was so blinded by its hatred of Nixon that it focused almost entirely on the White House, ignoring leads that might have shown that Hunt and McCord wre being controlled by the CIA, and that Watergate was as much a sex scandal and an intelligence agency scandal as a political one.

AS THIS summary suggests, there are different levels of reporting and an uneven quality of evidence presented in this book. Hougan has attacked the official record of Watergate with persistence and considerable skill, pointing up scores of questions, flaws, contradictions and holes. At the same time, much of the new evidence he assembles, and the way in which he weaves it together, is likely to itself come under challenge. His case that the phone conversations overheard by Baldwin really were those of a prostitution ring, for example, centers in large part around a disbarred lawyer(Bailley), a dead man who Hougan describes as a drunk (Russell), a prostitute identified only by a pseudoymn ("Tess") and a DNC secretary (who is not named but whose identity is clearly hinted at), who appears not to have been questioned by Hougan about any of this. Indeed, of all these key people only one -- Bailley -- appears to have been interviewed by Hougan; neither McCord, who Hougan says refused to be interviewed, nor Baldwin seems to have been confronted with this new information.

Because Hunt and McCord and the men from Miami, all of them Bay of Pigs veterans, had been on CIA payrolls, there were attempts right from the start to link the agency to the break-in. While reporters and congressional investigators found many contacts between the burglars and the agency, however, no one was able to show conclusively that they were operating under agency control. Hougan cites the technical help that the CIA provided Hunt for his White House missions (wigs, cameras and various spying devices), the many contacts between Hunt and CIA officials in this period (Hunt describes them as social lunches and tennis dates; Hougan calls them "clandestine meetings"), the reports that Hunt was feeding the CIA "gossip" about White House officials, and then argues that, when added together, "the evidence is overwhelming that the retirements of Hunt and McCord had been fabricated," and that Hunt was "spying on the White House."

Nearly all of his evidence is circumstantial, of course, and while it is plausible, some readers won't see it as being as "overwhelming" as he does. His reporting on the possible lack of a wiretap at the DNC seems more impressive, the key evidence coming from FBI reports that he says he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They indicate that the FBI was convinced that an inspection of the DNC phones and offices immediately after the break-in showed no signs of wiretaps or bugs, and that the devices later uncovered (they were not found until September 13, after a DNC secretary complained of noise on the phone line) probably could not have transmitted to the receiving equipment Baldwin had been using to monitor calls.

Hougan's theory is that the devices found on the DNC phones had been planted, probably by Russell, in such a way as to insure that the FBI would find them. They were so big and clunky that no one could miss them. Both the bureau and the media would then assume that a tap actually had been placed on Spencer Oliver's phone, as Baldwin had been telling reporters, and thus would be steered away from the taps on the prostitutes.

Hougan's reporting on this seems, from a distance, solid enough to be taken seriously. But one obvious question is why, if the FBI reports are as clear as Hougan makes them to be, they didn't surface long before now, either leaked by the FBI to the White House to help defuse the scandal, or provided to defense lawyers whose clients would seem to have been entitled to them for use in their trials. And this is only one of the many new questions raised by the evidence that Hougan offers up in posing answers to old ones, among them his contention that the prostitution ring was really a CIA operation, and such an important one that McCord would get himself arrested to protect it.

HOUGAN cites no sources and produces no documents showing that the CIA had launched such a project, received information from it, or even knew about it. Using a journalism of juxtaposition he builds a case that goes something like this: McCord and Hunt were still working for the CIA. McCord and Russell were working as a team. Russell probably was wiretapping the prostitutes. The CIA often gathered information on the sex lives of people. Hunt was sending 'gossip' to the CIA. McCord did so many things to compromise the break-in -- putting tape back over a lock after it had been removed by a guard, for example -- that it's clear he was trying to sabotage it, and the only reason would be to protect an even more important operation. Conclusion: Russell and McCord were wiretapping the prostitutes for the CIA, and this was the operation McCord wanted to protect.

One of the disconcerting things about this book is the frequency with which Hougan mixes diligent information gathering with questionable, even reckless, assumptions about motive and purpose. At times his piecing together of information and events resembles not the careful mosaic he insists he is creating but a hodgepodge of fact, innuendo, untested hypotheses and conjecture.

Even if Hougan is right about the wiretaps on the call girls, there are other, more benign (or at least different) explanations for what might have been taking place. It is possible that Russell was tapping the calls simply because his friends, the prostitutes, had asked him to. It is possible that he was himself hoping to blackmail the clients. It is possible he was doing it for his own amusement, as a sort of electronic voyeur. And it is possible that McCord, having failed to plant a working device during the first break-in, plugged into the wiretaps he knew Russell had placed on the prostitutes, using the material to pacify Liddy and Magruder until a second break-in could get his own wiretaps at the DNC working properly.

Indeed, if McCord was so concerned with preserving the secrecy of the call girl operation that he would torpedo the Watergate break-in to protect it, one has to ask why he would have let Baldwin eavesdrop on the phone calls in the first place. And if the purpose of the second break-in was to get information about the prostitutes and their clients, which Hougan insists that it was, it seems strange that none of the plotters, including Magruder in his testimony and Liddy in his book, has ever cited it as one of their goals.

THE SUBTITLE of this book is "Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA," and there are suggestions that the true identity of "Deep Throat," the name Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave to one of Woodward's most important sources, might be a key to understanding how the Watergate scandal unraveled in the way that it did. The chapter on "Throat," however, begins with the disclaimer that "any conclusion must be speculative," and then quickly degenerates into a sort of journalistic parlor game, the bottom line of which seems to be that it might have been Al Haig (like Deep Throat, he smoked and drank scotch whiskey) but then again it might not have been.

Hougan also suggests that "Deep Throat" might have been a member of the intelligence community, perhaps someone Woodward had gotten to know while serving as a Navy officer in a Pentagon communications unit. And in this, too, he seems to be searching for yet more conspiracy, for evidence that The Post and its reporters allowed themselves to be steered away from possible CIA involvement because of nudgings from people, presumably CIA operatives or friends, who would prefer they investigate links to the Nixon White House rather than links to the agency.

What is one to make of all this?

posted June 01, 2005 06:34 PM              

Was Watergate Just About Sex?
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 5, 2001

“IT’S JUST ABOUT SEX. And lies about sex."
Remember those words? Remember all those months we spent listening to Lanny Davis, Alan Dershowitz, Eleanor Clift and all the rest explaining why it didn’t matter if Clinton lied under oath or obstructed justice?

He was just lying about sex, they said. And everyone lies about sex.

Watergate, on the other hand, was a real scandal, said the spinmeisters. That was a serious abuse of power. That had nothing to do with sex.

Or did it?

A sensational court case that concluded last Thursday may suggest otherwise. In it, G. Gordon Liddy - the man who masterminded the 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters - testified under oath for the first time regarding his role in the Watergate break-in.
Liddy claims that the real purpose of the caper was to cover up a sex scandal.

He says that former White House counsel John Dean ordered the break-in to retrieve a brochure containing pictures of half-naked call-girls - one of whom was Dean’s then-girlfriend and present wife Maureen Biner.

Liddy says she was involved in a high-class prostitution ring serving Democratic bigwigs. And Dean was trying to hush it up.

Now a popular radio talk-show host, Liddy first made the charge four years ago. He was subsequently hit with a $5.1 million defamation suit from former DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. Liddy claimed that the compromising photos Dean wanted were kept in Wells’ desk - raising the question of whether Wells herself might have been mixed up in the call-girl ring.

The case went to trial last month. On February 1, District Chief Judge J. Frederick Motz declared a mistrial, after jurors failed to reach a verdict.

When Liddy refused to testify in the original Watergate investigation, angry prosecutors slapped him with a harsh sentence of more than 20 years, of which he served almost five.

Dean, on the other hand, sang like a canary and got off with a four-month sentence.

But Dean’s testimony was false, says Liddy. In the defamation trial, he called Dean “a serial perjurer.”

At the time of the break-in, says Liddy, Dean told him its purpose was “political espionage” against Nixon foes. But Dean was lying, according to Liddy. Only years later did Liddy begin piecing together the truth - or at least what he now claims is the truth.

Some of the evidence came from the book Silent Coup, a 1991 Watergate exposé which alleges that pictures of call-girls were kept in a “”safe place” at DNC headquarters.

Liddy also interviewed a disbarred Washington attorney named Philip Mackin Bailley, who swears that that “safe place” was Wells’ desk.

At the time of the Watergate break-in, Bailley was being investigated by DC prosecutor Jack Rudy for using compromising photos of women to blackmail them into becoming prostitutes.

Rudy testified in a videotaped deposition that he received a call from the White House on June 9, 1972, telling him to bring the Phillip Bailley file to Dean’s office. His superiors in the U.S. Attorney’s office subsequently told Rudy to “ice” the case, because it was a “political time bomb.”

Lawyers for Maxie Wells have tried to discredit Bailley by bringing up his history of mental illness.

However, a Washington cop named Carl Shoffler has partly corroborated his story. Shoffler is now deceased, but jurors watched a 1995 videotape in which Shoffler claimed that one of the Watergate burglars was found with a key to Wells’ desk.

Watergate conspirator Charles W. Colson has called Liddy’s theory "one of the most plausible explanations" of the break-in that he has heard.

If true, it means that Liddy went to jail to cover for Dean’s sex scandal.

At the trial, Wells’ lawyer David M. Dorsen asked Liddy whether he wanted to kill Dean.

"I wouldn't waste the 25 cents to buy the cartridge that would propel the bullet. . . .” Liddy replied. “I despise him."

Apparently, Liddy made an impression. The Associated Press reports that the jury was split 7-2 in his favor.

One juror told the Washington Post that the call-girl theory “is possible.” Another said, “We’ll never know.”

“The danger of such outcomes as this one is that this sort of thinking spreads,” worried the Post in a February 4 editorial. “… we do know what happened at Watergate -- and it had nothing to do with prostitutes.”

They seem pretty sure about it. And hey, maybe they’re right.

posted June 01, 2005 07:37 PM            

The 70's were very liberal (we even abolished the death sentence) and I think he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He really wasn't a crook in the sense that he stole or profitted off selling this country short but timing made him a target when a link could be made to him. We were still stinging from the whole Viet Nam fiasco. We were basically looking for a scapegoat and someone to make an example of to show the world how up to date and liberal we could be. (American Dream)

The other thing was his Saturn in the 10th house which shows a possibility of a fall from grace. He was a Capricorn Sun. These people rise through merit and not luck. Underneath the surface I think there were people who coveted what he had and took it.

At the time transiting Saturn was opposing his Sun. He didn't really have to be guilty of anything just being close enough to get tied into it. Anyway would you want a president in that was clueless to the covert operations of its country? (all countries have covert operations)

posted June 01, 2005 09:02 PM              

speaking of which, agnew must be jwhops hero...he sure paraphrases him alot....

quote:

---

If the press now has their panties in a bunch, that's their own problem. They were not elected to any office; they have appointed and anointed themselves as the 4th branch of government but they are in reality a bunch of brain dead leftist morons.

Lies of the Lying Left.--jwhop

---

quote:

---

"(The media) are an effete corps of impudent snobs, a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government. They are nattering nabobs of negativism."- Spiro Agnew

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English—it is a problem for the Department of Justice…. - Spiro Agnew

---

just another crook......if he were alive today he'd be on foxnews alongside oliver north...lol

posted June 02, 2005 09:42 AM            

Only 21% of readers believe what they read in the NY Times, flagship of the left. Dan Rather wrecked the credibility of CBS News and their ratings are close to being off the chart...at the bottom.

This keeps up Petron, you won't have any place to go to find out what the outrage for the day is in left threaded wingnut land, except perhaps common dreams.

posted June 02, 2005 11:35 AM            

With the identity of Deep Throat now revealed, the race is on by the protagonists of the story to cash in.

On Wednesday, W. Mark Felt told a reporter he was happy about the revelation.

"It's doing me good," Mr. Felt told the press as he left his Santa Rosa, Calif., home. "I'll arrange to write a book or something, and collect all the money I can."

Already the Vanity Fair article has brought in a trickle of money.

Vanity Fair took the unusual step of allowing the Felt family attorney, John D. O'Connor, to write its article that broke the story.

Vaity Fair editor Graydon Carter told the New York Times that O'Connor "was not paid much more than $10,000 for it."

It is not known if O'Connor shared that money with the Felts. But what is clear is that the family has been on the hunt for a big payday for months now.

The Times reported that Felt's family "had sought payment in vain for his story after failing to reach a collaborative agreement with Mr. Woodward - not only from Vanity Fair, but also from People magazine and HarperCollins Books. They are apparently still determined to claim their share of the story that helped make Mr. Woodward a famous millionaire."

Apparently complicating the situation is that the elderly Felt is said to be suffering from dementia and may not remember key elements of the story - making Woodward's involvement in a book with Felt critical.

And critics of Woodward, who claim that Felt's role may have been embellished in his book "All the President's Men," may now have a clear slate to tell Deep Throat's story without anyone to question the facts.

O'Connor, the Felts' attorney, told ABC's "Nightline" on Tuesday that his client "had no memory of the elaborate signals - a red flag in a flowerpot, a clock's hands scrawled on Page 20 of Mr. Woodward's home-delivered copy of The New York Times - that Mr. Woodward said were used to arrange meetings with Deep Throat," the Times noted.

With dollar signs appearing on the horizon, Woodward and Carl Bernstein, his partner during the Watergate story, are said to be rushing out a book on Deep Throat to be published by Simon & Schuster.

Though the Felt family made its revelation to finally cash in on Mark Felt's involvement in the Watergate story, it appears Woodward will once again make the windfall off of Felt's information.

Asked about how Felt's revelations had helped Woodward, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee told the Times with a chuckle, "It helps him on the way to the bank, I'm sure!"

posted June 03, 2005 03:54 PM              

http://www.rotten.com/library/religion/secret-archives-vatican/

posted June 03, 2005 07:16 PM            

"To get those documents, Nixon would have to break into the National Archives. The magazine reports that the tapes show Nixon aide John Ehrlichman proposing to send "the archivist out of town for awhile," then photographing the documents and resealing them. "

"A mysterious motive
Strangely, 25 years later nobody is sure what the burglars were looking for. What is known is they were attempting to repair a telephone bug they had installed three weeks before, and they were rifling through files, photographing some."

"At the time of the break-in, says Liddy, Dean told him its purpose was “political espionage” against Nixon foes. But Dean was lying, according to Liddy. Only years later did Liddy begin piecing together the truth - or at least what he now claims is the truth."

In an interview the other day, Liddy said O'brien's office was never bugged and that the target was a secretary. He also said a camera was set up focused on her desk. The purpose of the break-in was to secure proof the DNC was using a hooker ring to service democrat big wigs and blow the democrat party out of the water before the election. They hoped to get the list and also which hookers were assigned to which prominent democrat. Cancelled checks, ledgers or other proof of payment for hookers by the DNC would have been nice too. They were in fact going through the files, looking for the lists of names.

1972 was an election year and the break-in occurred on June 17th, 1972. Liddy goes on to say Nixon knew nothing about the planned break-in and only found out about it after the fact.

That's the story Liddy tells now. Liddy refused to testify at the hearings and spent about 5 years in prison. He has nothing to lie about or cover up now...Nixon is dead and Liddy served his time. Further, this is exactly the kinds of what is considered dirty tricks played by the politicos. There would have been nothing more embarrassing to the democrats than to be tied to a hooker ring and doling out sexual favors to prominent democrats...not in 1972 at least. To think there was something more crucial or incriminating stored in the headquarters of the DNC they were after is I would think fantasy. The story makes sense and it also makes sense that that's what Liddy was told by Dean. I can't imagine Liddy mounting an operation to retrieve pictures of Dean's prostitute girlfriend...if he had known that was the purpose.

Petron, what was your purpose in posting a story about Nixon planning or approving a break-in of the National Archives? This thread is about the Watergate break-in.

Lalalinda
I agree with you about Nixon...in general. Everyone thinks of Nixon as an arch conservative. Wrong Nixon imposed wage and price controls, opened relations with Communist China and effectively devalued the American dollar by taking the country totally off the gold standard and removing any linkage between gold and the value of the dollar. The value of the dollar declined in value against other currencies.

posted June 03, 2005 08:06 PM              

*********
G. Gordon Liddy: listening to Hitler "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before"
Radio host and former Nixon administration official G. Gordon Liddy discussed environmentalism; how Adolf Hitler inspired Liddy in his youth; the Vietnam War; child-rearing; Watergate; and his 1994 advice to his listeners to shoot agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in an interview with columnist Johann Hari, published November 22 in the British newspaper The Independent. According to Hari, Liddy called environmentalists "fanatics" like Al Qaeda, claimed that the "official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet," and said that if U.S. policy during the Vietnam War was up to him he would have "drowned half the country and starved the other half." In discussing Hitler's personal influence upon him, Liddy said that "at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm." http://mediamatters.org/items/200411230004

posted June 05, 2005 08:43 AM            

quote:

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Did you know Richard M. Nixon was a Capricorn? Tricky Dick. How does that square with your statement that being a Capricorn, lying is against your nature?

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Does the version of truth you decide upon depend upon the circumstance? Oh, and, yes, I did know Nixon was a Capricorn, and if you look at his history he definitely shows himself to be one.

Unfortunately, he was like me, eh jwhop? Ever distrustful of the other side. Couldn't believe the opposing political party was on-the-level. That's what Watergate was about, right?

You share something with ol' Dick, too::

quote:

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During a debate with Voorhis he held up members of a Political Action Committee (PAC) that Vooris received substantial campaign donations from. Then he held up a list of members from a Left-Wing PAC with Communist affiliations, and said that, there were a few people who were in both Committees. Nixon said "they're basically the same, if their members are the same..." Although Nixon's allegations were untrue, they succeeded and Voorhis was booed by the crowd.

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This would even seem to suggest that even in 1946 the, "hard, radical left (The Commies and Socialists)," were working behind the scenes in the Democratic party thereby negating your argument that the left has been co-opted by communists in recent times.

posted June 06, 2005 12:30 AM              

"they all had kurds in their whey.....!!!"

In 1975, Saddam agreed to settle a border dispute with Iran if the Shah of Iran would cut off his support for the Kurdish fighters. The Nixon administration, which had seen the Kurds as a buffer to both the Iraqis and the Soviets, also withdrew its aid. Saddam's army regained control of northern Iraq, continuing its campaign of ethnic cleansing and massive human rights abuses.

A congressional report later concluded that the United States and the Shah had not wanted the Kurds to succeed. The Kurds were never aware that they were being used as pawns in a geopolitical game. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq203/crossroads02.html
*******

obviously g gordon liddy got his line about drowning vietnam after these tapes came out showing how jane fonda showed bush sr to be a liar......lol

********
Bombing of Vietnam's Dikes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Late in the Vietnam War, the United States of America engaged in a policy of systematically bombing a system of dikes in Vietnam's Red River Delta that protected several hundred thousand people from having their land overrun by water.

The threat of the bombing was used as a leveraging tool against the North Vietnamese to encourage them to accept a proposed truce. The Red River Delta provided the majority of the food to North Vietnam, and the destruction of the farmland and the people within would have starved the nation's population and army. Under this threat, in September, 1972, North Vietnam agreed to drop their demand that President Theiu of South Vietnam be overthrown. Theiu rejected the treaty, not wanting to leave North Vietnamese troops in the south.

Many have referred to the bombing of the dikes as a war crime, although little was accomplished in the bombing before it ceased. Actress Jane Fonda is often credited with helping publicize the bombing, for which then U.N. Ambassador George H. W. Bush ACCUSED HER OF LYING.

The following transcript between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on the subject was recorded in 1972; it has since been published in "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by journalist and publisher of The Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg.

Nixon: We've got to quit thinking in terms of a three-day strike [in the Hanoi-Haiphong area]. We've got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack - which will continue until they - Now by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond. I'm thinking of the dikes, I'm thinking of the railroad, I'm thinking, of course, the docks.

Kissinger: I agree with you.

President Nixon: We've got to use massive force.

Two hours later at noon, H. R. Haldeman and Ron Ziegler joined Kissinger and Nixon:

President: How many did we kill in Laos?

Ziegler: Maybe ten thousand - fifteen?

Kissinger: In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen.

President: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind, power plants, whatever's left - POL [petroleum], the docks. And, I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

President: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

President: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes. (Ellsberg p. 418, ellipses original)

posted June 06, 2005 01:33 AM              

I don't care who gets the money, and I'm not sure it's something everyone should be worrying about.

posted June 06, 2005 06:37 AM              

Henry Kissinger’s assessment of the president’s condition on the night of Oct. 11, 1973, is contained in more than 20,000 pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls as the president’s national security adviser and secretary of state — records whose privacy he had guarded for three decades. The National Archives released them Wednesday.

'He was loaded'
They show the powerful adviser trying to manage world crises even as Nixon’s presidency teetered from the Watergate scandal that would consume his administration in August 1974.

In October 1973, U.S.-Soviet tensions were peaking over the Arab-Israeli war, and British Prime Minister Edward Heath’s office called the White House just before 8 p.m. to ask to speak with Nixon.

“Can we tell them no?” Kissinger asked his assistant, Brent Scowcroft, who had told him of the urgent request. “When I talked to the president, he was loaded.”

Scowcroft replied: “We could tell him the president is not available and perhaps he can call you.”

Call back in the morning
Kissinger said Nixon would be available in the morning.

At the time, Kissinger was both national security adviser and secretary of state, his dual titles testifying to his influence with the beleaguered president.

But it’s clear from the records that Nixon did not tell him everything. The next day, Kissinger knew Nixon would announce a new vice president to replace Spiro Agnew, who had resigned. But Kissinger did not know whom Nixon had chosen.

In a phone call with Nixon aide Alexander Haig, Kissinger said he could go along with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller — “that gives me no pain” — or anyone except former Texas Gov. John Connally — “a no-no.”

Instead, Nixon picked Gerald Ford.

The transcripts cover Kissinger’s phone calls with world leaders, politicians, White House aides, celebrities and journalists from January 1969 to the end of Nixon’s presidency in August 1974.

posted June 06, 2005 08:38 PM              

quote:

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They think dredging up Richard Nixon and attempting to tie Nixon to Bush..his name or similar actions, will scare everyone into voting for their leftist dud duo of Kerry and Edwards. --jwhop

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************
Bush impressed fellow trainees with the way he learned to handle a plane, but he became a celebrity for something else. In the middle of his training, President Richard M. Nixon sent a plane down to fetch him for an introductory date with his older daughter Tricia, according to fellow trainee Joseph A. Chaney. It did not lead to another date, but the story lives on. So does memory of the graduation ceremony: Rep. Bush gave the commencement speech.

Then, after losing to Bentsen, Bush's father was named ambassador to the United Nations by President Nixon. The Bushes moved to New York, leaving their eldest son to rely on his family's old school and corporate ties to find a job.

By the end of 1972, Bush's father was mulling over a new job offer from Nixon – to be chairman of the Republican National Committee. With his parents back in Washington, Bush went to stay with them for the holidays and was involved in one of the most notorious incidents of his "nomadic" years. He took his 16-year-old brother Marvin out drinking, ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home, and when his father confronted him, challenged him to go "mano a mano" outside http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072899.htm

any1 have a morph program so i can see what the kid would have looked like?(bush+nixon lol)