SwiftVets.com

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SHALLOW THROAT
Guest Author
Jack Kelly
Thursday, June 2, 2005
from To The Point - http://www.tothepointnews.com

The self-outing of former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" still leaves the most important questions about Watergate unanswered.

Bob Woodward has said Felt was Deep Throat, and he was seen visiting Felt at his Santa Rosa, California home in 1999. What is cloudy is how much of a role Felt played in the Watergate saga. We know of Deep Throat not from the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did for the Washington Post in 1972, but from their book, "All the President's Men."

But Woodward's literary agent, David Obst, has said Deep Throat was not mentioned in the original book proposal, and emerged only after Woodward had discussed movie possibilities with Robert Redford.

Is Deep Throat a Hollywood invention?

Woodward said he met Felt when, as a naval intelligence officer on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer he "sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House."

Therein lies a tale which we in journalism have been reluctant to explore. At the time Woodward worked for him, Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was spying on the Nixon White House. Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who was assigned to the staff of the National Security Council, admitted to investigators he "took so darn much stuff I can't remember what it was."

It is doubtful that Yeoman Radford, a junior enlisted man, would have been Moorer's chief spy, or that Woodward, Moorer's messenger, would have been unaware of what his boss was doing.

In an interview two years ago, Alexander Haig told Christopher Ruddy of NewsMax he suspected Felt was Deep Throat, but added he doubted the FBI agent was Woodward's sole source.

Felt couldn't have been the source of the most important piece of information Woodward attributed to Deep Throat, the existence of an 18 ½ minute gap on the June 20th, 1972 White House tape, argues Joan Hoff, a history professor at Montana State University, who wrote a book about the Nixon presidency.

Only a handful of people at the White House, among them Haig, could have known that, she said.

It's important to remember that what broke Watergate open was a letter one of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge John Sirica (who had been threatening them with draconian sentences if they didn't talk) on March 19, 1973.

When McCord retired from the CIA in 1970, he was head of physical security at headquarters in Langley. Of the five burglars, he was an unlikely candidate to break under pressure, and most unlikely to have made the elementary mistakes he made which led to the discovery of the break-in.

(Among other things, McCord taped open a door to the Watergate building horizontally, so it was visible to a security guard making his rounds, rather than vertically, as every would-be spy is taught in Tradecraft 101.) It's almost as if CIA agent McCord wanted the burglars to be caught.

In his 1984 book "Secret Agenda," journalist Jim Hougan speculated the CIA got Nixon before Nixon got the CIA. Nixon was mad at the CIA for the well founded belief officials there leaked classified information to John F. Kennedy during the 1960 campaign.

Public disclosure of the CIA's clumsy attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro would have humiliated the agency (as it did three years later when then CIA Director William Colby exposed the "family jewels."). Only weeks before the break-in, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman had been at Langley reviewing those files.

Despite the Felt revelation, Hougan still believes Woodward got most of his information from Robert Bennett, now a U.S. senator from Utah, but then the head of a CIA front which employed E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars.

In a memo to his boss (obtained by Hougan under the Freedom of Information Act), Bennett's CIA case officer, Martin Lukoskie, wrote that Bennett had told him he was feeding stories to Woodward, and that Woodward "was suitably grateful."

It's apparent Woodward isn't telling all he knows, and that his scoop was based less on his skills as an investigative reporter than on his prior contacts as a naval intelligence officer, one who may have been involved in a plot to spy on the president.

It isn't time to close the book on Watergate just yet. Mark Felt isn’t Deep Throat. He’s Shallow Throat.


Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.


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The following article is located at:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/122/53.0.html

Christianity Today

Colson Blasts 'Deep Throat'
Christian statesman, former Nixon aide says leaks were unethical and unnecessary.
Interview by Stan Guthrie | posted 06/03/2005 09:30 a.m.

Charles Colson has sharply criticized Mark Felt, the former No. 2 official at the FBI, for leaking classified material to The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal. Colson was special counsel to President Nixon and served a prison term for leaking FBI files. Colson became a committed Christian during the scandal and later founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry to prisoners and their families. Stan Guthrie, Christianity Today's senior associate news editor, interviewed Colson, a CT columnist, about his comments about Felt, as well as his new book, with Harold Fickett, The Good Life.

On CNN and the Today Show and elsewhere you've said that Mark Felt's actions as "Deep Throat" were not honorable. Why?

Because he was basically leaking FBI files, which ironically is what I went to prison for. He was handing out FBI files, which are held in the greatest secrecy, in a clandestine operation with Woodward and Bernstein. That's the most secure thing in the United States government, because the FBI, for goodness sakes, has files on half of the American people. And if they indiscriminately pass this out, for whatever they deem to be a worthy purpose, you've broken down the whole system.

I gave one FBI file on Daniel Ellsberg to a newspaper reporter. So I don't think it's honorable to do what Felt did. I think he had an honorable solution, which he chose not to use.

You basically believe he should have just gone to the President and then, if necessary, held a press conference.

What he could have done is gone first to the director of the FBI and say, "There's criminal activity going on in the White House, and these guys are obstructing justice." If the director of the FBI wouldn't go with him to the President, then if Mark Felt had called me, I could tell you, guarantee you, I would have gotten him in to see the President because, I would have been afraid that if [we] didn't, the FBI would bring down the President. And the President would have done something immediately, not out of moral compunction but out of self-interest, because you can't have the No. 2 official in the FBI believing there is obstruction of justice in the White House.

Many others have voiced disagreement with you about this, saying Felt brought down a corrupt White House and should be applauded. Doesn't that argument have some merit?

That's the curse of relativism. That's the era we live in that is so dangerous. That is saying, "I could sit there and make a judgment about what is right even when the law says something else." This is not a case of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King in the Birmingham jail, in which he appeals to a higher law saying that the law at the time was unjust and therefore he couldn't obey it. That was a principled position. He was correct. But that's not the case of Mark Felt. Mark Felt had an obligation to report obstruction of justice to the officials and to a grand jury, if necessary—not to leak it to reporters.

What do you think about the role of journalists in our society in uncovering government corruption?

I think it's what the press has always done and does well. And I, in this case, don't fault the press. If Mark Felt was willing to give them this kind of information, they were justified in printing it. I do think we have to be careful with anonymous sources. That's another question, because anonymous sources can be trying to settle a score, which may or may not have been the case with Mark Felt. That part is unknown at the moment. What really motivated him was his belief that the Nixon presidency was corrupt.

Using illegal means to achieve a just objective can sometimes be ethically justified—the classic standard being somebody's drowning in a pond and there's a no-trespassing sign, but you violate the law and jump over the no-trespassing sign and go rescue the person. But Felt had legal means available to him. I know people say it was a paranoid era and he would have gotten transferred to Alaska, and as a whistleblower we'd have ruined him. That's nonsense, because all he had to do was try to see the President. If the President wouldn't see him, then he's totally within his rights to resign publicly and to say why. And if he did that, it probably would have ended the issue right there. And I dare say he would be a hero.

What would have happened differently if he'd taken the route that you suggest?

I think it would have precipitated an immediate crisis. If the No. 2 guy in the FBI says, "There's wrongdoing out in the White House and they won't listen to me, I'm resigning," the President would clean house in a hurry, or the impeachment would have taken place within two weeks, instead of nine more months.

You have roles not only as a former Nixon administration figure but also as a Christian statesman. From which role does this perspective come?

It's interesting, and that's a good question. It's interesting because I can identify with Mark Felt. In my political heyday I used a lot unethical means to justify what I considered very noble goals: getting our prisoners home, ending the war, and not leaking documents that could undermine it. So I learned in the Nixon days after my conversion that human beings have the infinite capacity for self-justification.

What I've learned as a Christian, and how I've reflected this on my own experiences, [should] moderate us from deifying or beatifying Mark Felt. I watched some high-school kids on TV last night who knew nothing about Watergate. They all said he was a hero. I'm thinking, "Oh, wait a minute. They are being taught Machiavellian ethics. This is terrible." Woodward said in a piece in The Washington Post today that Felt "believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their effort to manipulate the bureau for political reasons."

Do you realize what's in FBI files? I would hate to think mine could be dropped out if somebody wants to put pressure on me. That's illegal. When I was in the White House, I thought this was a pretty good thing. I put out an FBI file. I thought it was justified. Now it horrifies me. So I think I'm speaking as a Christian.

How did Watergate change you?

Well, I've written books about that. Watergate changed me in the sense that I realize that the power that you think is so awesome when you're in government is very shallow. It changed me in the sense that my life has been totally redirected because, being in the middle of the Watergate crisis, I came to Christ. I now have a passion for serving "the least of these" in society. I see the world differently.

In my new book, The Good Life, I write about how Watergate has changed my perspective. But also I talk about integrity being the ultimate quality that you're looking for. And integrity means embracing the truth. It means finding what is true and just and good and doing it. You'll never live the good life apart from the pursuit of truth. To be the second-ranking official in the FBI sneaking around at night looking for flower pots on ledges and marking in The New York Times to take super-classified FBI interview forms and give them to a reporter, that is not pursuit of truth. That's not a life of integrity.

Let him live the rest of his life out peacefully. I'm not trying to hurt him at all, and I'm not motivated by anger. I'm glad we got knocked down. Because of Watergate, I'm doing things that are much more meaningful in my life. I've been forgiven, for which I have much to be forgiven. But I'm just saying, "Don't teach this example." That's my passion. That's my greatest concern.

Your new book, The Good Life, is something of a departure for you. Why did you write it?

It's a departure for me for a couple of reasons. One is I have written primarily to the church up until now. Now I'm writing, I hope, to seekers. You won't find references to Scripture until you get to the very end of the book. I'm writing for seekers who are looking for answers to the meaning and purpose of life. And I'm explaining the things I experienced in my life, which turned out to be dead ends, and then taking the reader on a journey through rational, reasoned arguments which you pursue in order to find what is true in life.

It's kind of a natural order approach. It's a, I hope, kind of apologetic defense or apologetic presentation that seekers will find helpful. I've written the book primarily for seekers. Now, a lot of Christians are seekers. A lot of Christians have a nominal faith, and they don't really understand it. But what I argue in the book is that only the biblical worldview makes sense of life. But I don't get to that point until the end.

A lot of people have said that we're living in a postmodern era and rational arguments don't seem to work with those kinds of people anymore. Do you think this book will scratch people where they itch?

Young people are looking for answers to what life's about, and they're not rejecting religious answers. In fact, they're looking for religious answers. They are simply, woefully, ill-informed. I don't think reason is out the window. I think it needs to be resurrected to lead people through intelligent arguments about reality. In my opinion, you have to challenge the postmodern generation. This book does that. It challenges postmodernism as being a bankrupt way of seeing life. So I'd love to have a postmodernist read it. I don't believe the way you deal with postmodernism is to embrace it and build on it. I think you refute it.

What do you think most people are looking for?

I think people want to know what life is all about. Rick Warren exposed a raw nerve in the world. And that is, people want to know why on Earth they're here, as he put it so well. I started writing this book before The Purpose-Driven Life, but I was greatly inspired by Warren's example, because he's taking the Scripture and showing people how life has a purpose, which is terrific. I'm doing it by reason and by what I hope are thoughtful arguments that get you to the same place.

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[kate]

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Thought this was interesting!!

The Nation Company Inc.
The Nation

May 31, 1986

A new theory: Watergate - the Greek connection.

BYLINE: Hitchens, Christopher

WATERGATE-THE GREEK CONNECTION On June 17 it will be fourteen years since Richard Nixon's burglars were caught in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. These fourteen years have seen many changes, including an incomprehensible rehabilitation of Nixon himself; but we still lack an answer to one of the five cardinal questions of the investigator. We know who, we know what, we know where and we know when--but we do not know why. What were the burglars after? What were President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell hoping they would find?

One footprint turns up at every stage of Richard Nixon's criminal career, from his election to the presidency in 1968, to the Watergate scandal, to the various attempts made to cover up that scandal. That footprint belongs to Thomas A. Pappas, an ultrareactionary Greek-American tycoon who lives in honorable retirement in Boston. The most succinct summary of Pappas's influence on the Nixon Administration occurs in J. Anthony Lukas's book Nightmare. Lukas quotes a February 9, 1973, conversation between presidential counsel John Dean and Attorney General Mitchell, in which the thorny question of raising hush money for the burglars' defense was discussed. Dean asked, "Did you talk to the Greek?" Mitchell replied in the affirmative, and Dean then asked, "Is the Greek bearing gifts?" Mitchell said, "Well, I want to call you tomorrow on that." As Lukas takes up the tale:

The "Greek" was Thomas A. Pappas, a Greek immigrant to the United States who had returned to his native land in the 1960s to build an oil, shipping, and chemical empire. Pappas had been a major financial backer of his landsman Spiro Agnew while Agnew was still governor of Maryland, and has been credited with a prime role in the selection of Agnew as Nixon's running mate. Friendly with both the Greek junta then in power and the CIA--"I have worked for the CIA anytime my help was requested," he once boasted--Pappas became virtually the official host for U.S. dignitaries visiting Athens in the early 1970s. He spent much of 1972 shuttling between Greece and the United States, helping to raise money for Nixon; and he himself contributed more than $ 100,000 before the April 7 deadline. Sometime during the winter of 1973, Dean says, Mitchell's aide Frederick LaRue told him to ask Pappas for $ 250,000-$ 300,000--as a quid pro quo for some import quotas Pappas needed to construct two crude-oil conversion plants in the United States or Canada. Both Mitchell and LaRue spoke with Pappas. On March 21 Dean told the President, "Pappas has agreed to come up with a single amount, I gather from Mitchell." (Later in the spring Nixon said, "Good old Tom is raising money...." But Pappas insists he made no such contribution and there is no evidence that he did.)

Well, now there is evidence that he did. And that evidence, viewed in context, allows one to offer a general theory of the Watergate case. A Greek journalist named Elias P. Demetracopoulos, who is described in Central Intelligence Agency documents as "a scooper," and who was an active foe of the dictatorship in Athens, has been on this case for many years and has recently unearthed some unpublished material from the Watergate special prosecutor's office. These papers show that on February 2 and February 5, 1974, Pappas was interviewed, in the presence of his lawyer, John Doukas, by four members of the special prosecutor's team. One of these, Roger M. Witten, wrote a memorandum about the interviews, dated February 7, 1974. It states:

Pappas met John and Martha Mitchell in their New York apartment after the election. Mitchell was watching the T.V., was upset, and was taking notes. Mrs. Mitchell was also very upset. Pappas stated that Mitchell did not ask him for funds or ask him to raise funds after the election.

The interview was continued on February 5, with Ben-Veniste, Volner, Koeltl, Witten, Pappas and Doukas present. Pappas stated that Mitchell asked him for a $ 50,000 loan in late 1972, which he gave to Mitchell. Pappas further stated that he was asked about contributing to the defendants in a discussion where LaRue and others were present. Emphasis added.

"The defendants" are unmistakably identified in the remaining text as the Watergate burglary conspirators. The same set of documents from the special prosecutor's office shows:

sec. That Pappas, an admitted "asset" of the C.I.A. and co-chair of the finance committee of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, solicited campaign contributions from corporations and individuals, including foreign nationals, in clear violation of U.S. law forbidding such donations.

sec. That one of the foreign contributors was rewarded with a lucrative government contract. In return for a $ 15,000 donation to CREEP, and an additional contribution of between $ 10,000 and $ 12,500, a Greek businessman named Nicholas Vardinoyiannis was awarded the fueling contract for the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The special prosecutor's memorandum speaks of six possible violations of American law in this instance alone.

sec. That although he had broken the law, Pappas was not prosecuted. Among the grounds given by Witten for this leniency was Pappas's age. Yet in 1972 alone, Pappas flew to and from Greece no less than twenty-four times.

In order to appreciate the extent of the "Greek connection," it is necessary to go back in time a little. The story begins on October 31, 1968, in the closing stages of the presidential campaign that first brought Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew to power. On that day, Democratic national chair Lawrence O'Brien called on Nixon and Agnew to explain their relationship with Pappas. He pointed to Pappas's role as "a key Republican fund-raiser, go-between for Nixon and Agnew, and an unofficial representative of the Greek junta." O'Brien's statement, which was issued from the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, ended with the words, "I think that both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Agnew should explain their relationships with him Pappas , and let the American people know what's going on."

It has since been established that O'Brien was more right than he knew. In secret testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in 1976, Henry Tasca, Nixon's Ambassador to Greece in the years of the fascist dictatorship, confirmed that in 1968 money from that dictatorship was funneled to the Nixon-Agnew election campaign. The source of the money was Michael Roufogalis. Roufogalis, now serving a life sentence in Athens for high treason and for his part in the murder of dissidents under the junta, was then the strongman of the Greek C.I.A. Known and feared under the acronym K.Y.P., this agency was founded and heavily subsidized by Langley, Virginia. The conduit for the money was--Thomas A. Pappas.

In other words, the Nixon camp had a dirty and dangerous secret, guarded by a few intimates, that dated back to 1968. A C.I.A. asset was recycling C.I.A. money from a particularly repulsive foreign dictatorship that wanted to influence an American presidential election. It seems fair to speculate that O'Brien's call for more information alarmed the President's men.

We do not know the exact sum the Greek dictators gave to the Nixon campaign. We do know that they got their money's worth. On September 27, 1968, forty-eight hours before the Athens junta was to hold a phony plebiscite legitimizing its rule, Spiro Agnew held a press conference at which he reversed his declared "neutrality" on the issue and praised the dictators for moving toward democracy. During the subsequent Nixon-Agnew years the junta moved even further from democracy and was flooded with aid and good will from Washington.

O'Brien's call for clarification of the Pappas connection might have been a shot in the dark, or it might not. It became urgent for the President's men to find out what O'Brien knew, and simultaneously to block any further avenue of inquiry. This is where Demetracopoulos enters the story. It was he who first gave evidence to O'Brien, and it was he who kept up the campaign to ventilate the issue. In July 1971 he was invited to testify about Pappas before Representative Ben Rosenthal's Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe.

Recent successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by Demetracopoulos against the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. (which culminated on April 16 of this year with the C.I.A.'s admission that it possessed "no derogatory information" about him) elicited documents showing that he was under extremely heavy surveillance during this period. A letter signed by F.B.I. Director William Webster to Representative Don Edwards admits that "rather extensive" surveillance of Demetracopoulos was conducted between November 9, 1967, and October 2, 1969; between August 25, 1971, and March 14, 1973; and between February 19, 1974, and October 24, 1974.

Demetracopoulos did not know he was being invigilated, but he did know that he was drawing unwelcome attention because of his efforts to highlight the Pappas connection. On September 7, 1971, Nixon's henchman and confidante Murray Chotiner told him bluntly over lunch at the fashionable Jockey Club: "Lay off Pappas. You can be in trouble. You can be deported. It's not smart politics. You know Tom Pappas is a friend of the President." On October 27, 1971, lunching with Robert Novak at the Sans Souci restaurant, Demetracopoulos was threatened by Pappas himself, who came over from an adjacent table to tell him, and Novak, that he knew their employers and had sufficient pull to make life hard for those who wanted him investigated.

These were pinpricks compared with the barrage unleashed by Attorney General Mitchell. My witness here is Louise Gore, who has a fair claim to be considered an unimpeachable source. She was a key member of the Republican establishment in Maryland, a State Senator and one of those most responsible for getting Spiro Agnew the governorship. (It was also she who introduced him to Nixon.) She was a close friend of John and Martha Mitchell and, at the time of which I am writing, had returned to Washington while still Richard Nixon's representative to Unesco. On January 24, 1972, she sent a handwritten letter to Demetracopoulos, of which I possess a copy. It reads:

Dear Elias--

I went to Perle's Perle Mesta's luncheon for Martha Mitchell yesterday and sat next to John. He is furious at you--and your testimony against Pappas. He kept threatening to have you deported!!

At first I tried to ask him if he had any reason to think you could be deported and he didn't have any answer--But then tried to counter by asking me what I knew about you and why we were friends.

It really got out of hand. It was all he'd talk about during lunch and everyone at the table was listening. . . .

At the table were George Bush, then ambassador to the U.N., Hubert Humphrey's sister Frances Humphrey Howard, J. Willard Marriott and numerous other diplomats and luminaries. In front of these people the Attorney General of the United States conceived it as his responsibility to make threats against a dissident for questioning the probity of the President's bagman. Demetracopoulos, ignoring Chotiner's warning, submitted the requested memorandum to Representative Rosenthal's subcommittee on September 17, 1971. He closed his testimony with these words: "Finally, I have submitted separately to the subcommittee items of documentary evidence which I believe will be useful." Those words, which were printed in the record of the hearing, caused what Rowland Evans and Robert Novak described as "extreme nervousness in the Nixon White House."

Why did they have that effect? The Nixonites had every reason to fear disclosure of their corrupt practice of taking money from the Greek junta for the 1968 campaign. What was their reaction? To try to debauch the 1972 campaign as well. On June 17, 1972, five months after his vulgar public outburst against Demetracopoulos at Perle Mesta's, John Mitchell ordered the burglars into the Watergate building.

Now, the uniqueness of the Pappas connection lies in the fact that it occurs in 1968, in 1972 and in the subsequent cover-up. Indeed, White House sensitivity to the mention of Pappas's name seems to have intensified at the same tempo as the Watergate investigation. A transcript of the Nixon tapes for April 26, 1973, which was not disclosed until 1977 by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, indicates the President was seriously worried. He feared that in his upcoming testimony to Congress, John Dean might recall Nixon's earlier admission that Pappas had raised "hush money" for the burglars. In six hours of foul-mouthed shoptalk with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon brought up Pappas seven times. At one point the leader of the free world fretted, "I think it's a matter of fact though that somebody said be sure to talk to Pappas because he's being very helpful on the, uh, Watergate thing."

Dean's memory was as good as Nixon had feared, or nearly so. On June 27, 1973, he appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee and said, under questioning from Senator Edward Gurney:

There was at one point in time, after Mr. Moore Richard A. Moore, a White House assistant had been to visit with Mr. Mitchell in New York, following the La Costa meeting, an effort to have Mr. LaRue go out and raise money. This had been discussed earlier and Mr. LaRue had done some activities of this nature. Mr. John Ehrlichman domestic affairs adviser to Nixon mentioned to me the fact that someone ought to go to Mr. Pappas, who was a long-time supporter of the President, and see if he would be of any assistance. Apparently, Mr. LaRue and Mr. Pappas had had some business dealings and as a result of those business dealings, Mr. LaRue was encouraged that something might be able to be done. But he told me that Mr. Pappas might want to have some favorable considerations from the government on some oil matters that resulted from this mutual venture they were in.

The "La Costa meeting" refers to a gathering at Haldeman's California villa in February 1973. At that meeting Ehrlichman asked what Dean, with his usual gift for phrase, called the "bottom-line" question: "Would the seven defendants remain silent through the Senate hearings?" The question was by no means an idle one. As Lukas puts it, "They all agreed that the strategy depended on continued silence, but Dean reported that the defendants were making new demands for hush money." Lukas also reports:

One of those LaRue spoke with about the unidentified "White House project" was Carl H. Lindner, board chairman of the American Financial Corporation and chairman of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Lindner was willing to contribute $ 50,000-$ 100,000 but wanted to know what he was giving for. LaRue consulted Mitchell, who said they obviously couldn't tell him what it was for. So that source too was abandoned.

Precisely. One merit of the Pappas hypothesis is that nobody had to explain to him what the money was for. Pappas already knew about the 1968 fascist slush fund; already knew that the connection was in danger of exposure; already knew what the burglars had been after. Thus Mitchell went to him for the money.

John Dean, like Lawrence O'Brien, was smarter than he himself realized. There were indeed "oil matters" and "favorable considerations" at stake, involving Nicholas Vardinoyiannis, the Sixth Fleet payoff contract and the funds for CREEP from unauthorized foreigners. But they constituted, to borrow Nixon-Kissinger argot, a sideshow to the real Greek connection--the funneling of junta money through Pappas. And the concentration on sideshow aspects of the matter allowed Pappas to appear before a Watergate grand jury and deny that he had ever given money for the cover-up. That was perjury, as the special prosecutor's documents show. February 1974, when Federal prosecutors questioned Pappas, after all, was several months before Nixon's abject resignation. How did the Pappas connection go undetected?

There were three attempts by Congressional committees to probe Pappas's activities. They did, as Seymour Hersh puts it in The Price of Power, "raise the question of whether the CIA . . . was aware that some of its funds were being returned to the United States for use in the presidential election." All three Congressional inquiries were terminated. Here is what happened to each.

The first was launched by Representative Wright Patman, a grizzled and combative veteran from Texas, who chaired the House Banking Committee. Within five days of the Watergate break-in, his staff had traced the numbered $ 100 bills found on the burglars through Mexico, and all the way back to Maurice Stans and CREEP. Patman prepared a subpoena list, causing Richard Nixon to start talking out of the side of his mouth again. "The game has to be played awfully rough," said the President at a meeting in the Oval office with Haldeman and Dean on September 15, 1972. "Tell Ehrlichman to get Banking Committee member Garry Brown in and Gerald Ford in, and then they can all work out something. But they ought to get off their asses and push it. No use to let Patman have a free ride here."

Political pressure was indeed brought to bear on Patman, through House minority leader (and future Watergate beneficiary) Gerald Ford. But ordinary political muscle was not thought sufficient. The F.B.I. was instructed to "leak" poisonous information about Elias Demetracopoulos to members of the committee. That information, since admitted by the Bureau to have been false and defamatory, accused him of being a dangerous Communist. It also suggested that he had arranged a Wall Street speaking engagement for Patman at a fee of $ 1,500. Shown "in confidence" to committee members, this concatenation of falsehoods had the desired effect. Six Democrats joined the Republicans in voting to deny Patman subpoena powers. John Dean recalled later that "another sigh of relief was made at the White House that we had leaped one more hurdle in the continuing cover-up." (On May 6 of this year, the F.B.I. released documents to Demetracopoulos which show that "upon closer examination" the fee paid to Patman "proved perfectly appropriate." Too late. The same papers show twelve "general indices at F.B.I. New York office regarding Wright Patman." After each of these appears the single word "destroyed.")

In ordering the collection of slanderous information about Demetracopoulos, the State Department had urged that "the Department of Justice do everything possible to see if we can make a Foreign Agent's case, or any kind of a case for that matter." At whose request was this catchall pseudo-investigation launched? None other than Henry Tasca's, Nixon's loyal Ambassador to the Greek junta and a close personal friend of Tom Pappas, who knew the dirty secret about the dirty money of 1968. In July 1971, a few days after Demetracopoulos had testified before Representative Ben Rosenthal's committee, Tasca sent a four-page secret cable from Athens urging that "a way will be found to step up investigation of Demetracopoulos." The cable was addressed in the ordinary way to William Rogers at State but also, and most unusually, to Attorney General John Mitchell.

The second investigation was sidetracked in a manner that was scarcely less ignominious. Under the chairmanship of Frank Church, the Senate began an inquiry into the abuse of the democratic process by its alleged guardians in the C.I.A. There was every reason to ask whether the agency had violated its own charter forbidding domestic political operations, since all of the Watergate burglars were connected with the C.I.A. But, as Seymour Hersh also says in his study of the matter:

This question the Greek connection was not looked into by the Senate Intelligence Committee during its CIA inquiries in 1975 and 1976. Sources close to the committee have said that its investigation was abruptly canceled at Kissinger's direct request.

Thus, the intervention in American internal affairs by foreign despots, themselves closely tied to the C.I.A., was thought too sensitive by a Senate committee appointed to consider such abuses.

The third investigation was prompted by George McGovern. He suspected the Greek connection from the start and, on October 29, 1976, asked Daniel Inouye, then chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to investigate it. By McGovern's account, Elias Demetracopoulos

incurred the animosity of both the Greek and American governments. In Washington, he was threatened with deportation by Attorney General John Mitchell, denounced in an anonymous State Department memorandum, his Wall Street employers were visited by FBI agents, the congressional committee before which he testified was visited by a Justice Department agent, and slanderous raw material and disinformation about Demetracopoulos was given to reporters and free lance writers like Russell Howe and Sarah Trott.

McGovern added in a follow-up letter to Inouye dated June 7, 1977:

It is also pertinent to note that in the material I supplied to you last October twenty-ninth there were intimations from a number of high officials, including Secretary of State Kissinger and former CIA Director William Colby, that the Agency's relationship with the Greek junta was such that if it were brought to light, that Administration's relations with the restored democratic government in Greece could be damaged.

Those in Washington who had hoped for such an outcome were to be disappointed. Inouye ceased to be chair of the intelligence committee at the end of 1977, and subsequent hearings during the tenure of Birch Bayh were prevented from calling C.I.A. witnesses by vice chair and later chair Barry Goldwater. In the words of one of his subordinates (the only name in this story I keep confidential), "Goldwater deep-sixed the Pappas investigation."

In October 1963, an interview with Goldwater was published In the Athens Daily Post. The interviewer was Elias Demetracopoulos. In the midst of a call for more private capital in Greece, Goldwater said:

The recently signed agreement between Tom Pappas of Boston and the Greek government for the investment of U.S. private capital of $ 160 million in Greece is an important beginning in this direction. I know Tom Pappas very well. He is one of my closest friends.

This distinguished friendship, which a new and more cynical world has learned to call conflict of interest, did not restrain Senator Goldwater from crushing the Pappas inquiry, nor impel him to reiterate his long and deep comradeship with its subject. Not to waste words, the Inouye probe into the Pappas question was unceremoniously flushed down the memory hole, where it joined its two promising predecessors.

Why not, just for once, take Gordon Liddy's word for it? He said that the purpose of the break-in was "to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats."

I know there are other hypotheses about the motive for the break-in. The most plausible, advanced by Michael Drosnin in Citizen Hughes, is that Nixon wanted to know what the Democrats knew about Howard Hughes and his payoffs. But Hughes was also paying off the Democrats, and there is no evidence that they ever planned to make a campaign issue out of him. To summarize the reasons why Nixon, Mitchell and Kissinger went into orbit at the very mention of Pappas's name:

* Pappas, exploiting C.I.A. connections, was the bagman for an illegal and shameful transfusion of campaign money in 1968.

* The Congressional investigation of this deed was edging closer to the truth in early 1972.

* That investigation was opposed at every step, by means legal and illegal, by Nixon and Mitchell. The American Ambassador to Greece, a friend of Pappas and a man who knew the guilty 1968 secret, took a hand in this wrecking operation.

* All of the burglars had C.I.A. connections, which may explain how they knew what to look for and why they kept silent.

* Pappas provided the only money we know about to John Mitchell for the burglars' hush money.

* All three subsequent House and Senate probes into the Pappas connection were sidetracked by men with either C.I.A. loyalties or connections to Tom Pappas, or both.

It's been fourteen years. It would be nice to say that there have been seven fat and seven lean ones. But here we are in 1986, and it is Nixon who has waxed fat, Kissinger who has waxed fat, Goldwater who has waxed fat. Those who modestly raised the banner of a discreet McGovern liberalism have seen history rewritten, and their own cherished ideals defamed as anti-American, by the heirs of a ghastly crook. As I write, Newsweek has a gloating cover story on Nixon, with the brainless headline, "He's Back." That pushover Governor Cuomo says of Tricky Dicky that he is "a man of great intellect, unique experience and extraordinary political wisdom." Fill in the rest for yourself. But before you do so, be sure that you can answer the following questions:

* Why was Thomas Pappas not prosecuted for his violations of U.S. law?

* Why was John Mitchell never asked about his soliciting of $ 50,000 from a man who was known to work both for the C.I.A. and for a foreign dictatorship, and who at the time was in breach of laws that Mitchell had taken his oath to uphold?

* Why was the Senate Watergate Committee never informed of the Pappas-Mitchell transaction uncovered by the special prosecutor?

* Did Henry Kissinger, who chaired the 40 Committee which oversaw covert action and whose members included John Mitchell (the first Attorney General to serve as a 40 Committee member), know of this evidence when he killed the Church committee's probe?

* Did Barry Goldwater, a "close" friend of Pappas, know of this evidence when he dropped Senator Inouye's later inquiry?

If those questions could be answered candidly, then bygones could be bygones. But there isn't even a conspiracy of silence about such questions. Rather, we have a conspiracy of nervous and sickly applause. The fact remains that a popular Republican Administration succeeded in subverting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that it got away with it without ever taking the witness stand and that the corrupt alliance with a foreign dictatorship was a crucial ingredient. Maybe that reminds you of something and maybe it doesn't, but there is still no legal obstacle to ex-convict John Mitchell stepping into the witness box and telling, at last, why he drummed up that fifty grand.

SBD

[shawa]

Here's Bob Woodward's account of his dealings with Felt. I don't buy it.
Note the cloak and dagger, clandestine aspects. This may have happened but I don't think it was Felt, who said all that cloak and dagger stuff never happened 'Woodward just made that up'.

I agree with JACK KELLY (a very saavy journalist), Felt may have given Woodward some SOME info, but he was NOT Deep Throat! Woodward is a TWO-BIT so-called "journalist" who conveniently makes things up to suit his purposes. I think he decided to pin Felt as DT to cover the real DT. He got the family to agree, because they could make some money. In another article, Felt's son said HE had written a book about it. When asked when the book would be published, he said I'm not sure, I'm waiting to hear from Woodward.
WHY!! Woodward was obviously running the show!! And covering up the REAL DT!!

[SBD]

Isn't it interesting that this guy who happens to be involved in bringing down the Nixon Presidency, is also a graduate from Yale and is the same age as the other Nixon foe named Traitor Kerry.

SBD

[shawa]

I've been thinking along the same line, SBD.

With all the discussion about Watergate reminding me of the fact that Nixon TAPE RECORDED all his conversations in the Oval Office. I am sure that somewhere there is tape of Nixon discussing kicking Kerry's butt out of the Navy!! (If it hasn't been destroyed)
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776)

[shawa]

Re Bob Woodward, from Wickipedia:

[SBD]

I think Deep Throat is Kissinger!!

SBD

[kate]

[Rdtf]

[kate]

[PC]

A friend of mine told me that one of the first classes he attended after becoming an agent in 1968 was given by Mark Felt. The topic was Ethics and Following The Rules of the Agency. Priceless.

[kate]

well well well seems ole Mark Felt had some accomplices,,an FBI agent from Albany, NY spills the beans
story 1st broke by the AlbanyTimesUnion