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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 12:40 pm Post subject: Was Nixon set up? |
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Hmmm. Interesting stuff!!
| Quote: | Was Nixon set up?
Sunday, June 12, 2005
WASHINGTON -- It was a different era with new values. There were ongoing battles in Vietnam with heavy U.S. casualties. The Vietnamese communists were finding assistance in America from our homegrown revolutionaries -- the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and a large anti-draft movement posing as peace-at-any-price groups.
June 17, 1972, fell on a Saturday. Two events took place that night in Washington. Together they set off reactions which culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon two years later.
Five men -- one of them Jim McCord, a former employee of the CIA -- were arrested at the Watergate complex in what prosecutors described as a plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee. During July, the FBI added E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to their list of suspects.
And an associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, began to dream about how he could best embarrass the Nixon administration.
The Felt file
Felt was bitterly angry for a number of reasons. On the death of John Edgar Hoover, he had been passed over for the top post; Nixon had appointed L. Patrick Gray as the new FBI boss.
There were two main reasons. Hoover's choice of Felt was based on the belief that Mormon and Catholic factions were competing for power in the bureau. Felt listed no religious affiliation. But, according to a transcript of a presidential tape, he was Jewish.
Nixon's choice of Pat Gray also was, in part, based on the president knowing that Mark Felt was passing information to the media. To challenge him, at that time, would have placed in jeopardy a White House source in the FBI.
Second, Felt knew Nixon had battled with the CIA since, as vice president in 1958, he had been ordered by President Eisenhower to discipline the agency's top leadership for the failure of a heavily publicized mission in Indonesia.
In early 1970, Nixon, realizing that even Hoover's FBI were failing to curb domestic unrest, riots and bombings by revolutionary groups and the anti-draft movement, began to back away from the bureau and looked for help from the CIA, led, since 1966, by the ultra-professional Richard Helms.
Even worse for the Felts of the bureau was how the president was placing Nixon loyalists in rival agencies to the FBI such as in the Internal Revenue Service and the drug enforcement agencies. And, as a crowning insult to many in the FBI, Nixon, with the support of Richard Helms, began to implement the Huston Plan.
Shared intelligence
Tom Charles Huston was a young White House speechwriter in the 1960s. With the help of some FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Defense Intelligence Agency officers, he developed the plan that carries his name. It focused on encouraging the collection and sharing of intelligence information among all agencies in our government so as to achieve safety and security. The Huston Plan was put into effect by the president on July 14, 1970, but canceled by him within two weeks because of complaints from Hoover that the FBI had lost power.
Until the Patriot Act of 2001, the Huston Plan was almost forgotten. Today, many of the programs envisaged by Tom Huston, now in his 60s and a distinguished attorney in Indianapolis, are contributing to our security from terrorism.
If the Huston Plan had been in place and operating, the attacks on New York and Washington -- and the deaths of several thousand Americans -- might have been avoided. And if the Huston Plan had been operating in 1972, the Watergate break-in might not have taken place.
Marge Tabankin, then the first woman president of the National Student Association -- later to become Jimmy Carter's head of VISTA, director of the ARCA Foundation and political guru to Barbra Streisand - was in Washington. She attended a party with leaders of the anti-war and draft movement in Vietnam, the National Lawyer's Guild and the Marxist think-tank, the Institute for Policy Studies.
Voluble about her then recent travels to Vietnam, Tabankin also talked about a letter from the North Vietnamese to Sen. George McGovern, a presidential candidate. Perhaps it was the hope of photographing that letter that led to the break-in.
Inconsistencies
At 91, Mark Felt is too old and befuddled to answer any questions. But some of the facts he presents are glaringly inconsistent. Why did a senior FBI official - Felt - exchange telephone numbers with young Naval officer Bob Woodward during a casual encounter in the White House cafeteria?
Why was an off duty, plainclothes team of officers from the Intelligence Division of Washington's police department working with the CIA, already deployed at the Watergate, waiting for an assistance call from the security guard?
And, why did none of the senior police officers recognize Jim McCord, the presidential campaign security manager, who had been meeting with them during the week?
Perhaps Mark Felt and other "patriots" were so afraid of the Huston Plan that long-planned treachery was their last resort. |
www.pittsburghlive.com
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“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) |
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kate
Admin
Joined: 14 May 2004
Posts: 1891
Location: Upstate, New York
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| Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 4:27 pm Post subject: |
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interesting stuff is right...
this was written before the unmasking of the supposed Deep Throat
| Quote: | link
by Robert Baer ,Sep 13 2004
I found myself thinking about one morning shortly after I joined the CIA. I was drinking a cup of coffee, reading the morning traffic, when a fellow desk officer sitting next to me said out of the blue: "You know, it was the CIA that took down Nixon." I waited for the punch line, but he wasn't joking. "The Watergate burglars taped the door open on purpose," he continued. "The plan was for a security guard to find the tape, call the police, and leave enough bread crumbs along the way to finger Nixon. Why else would they leave tape on the door like that?"
Working for an outfit that does break-ins for a living, I had to agree that leaving tape on the door was an act of gross incompetence. During basic training, the first thing they teach is that you always "pick to decode"-- make a key. One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, had been a CIA security officer; he definitely knew that taping or jamming open a door is the quickest way to get caught in a black-bag operation. Stranger still, at the arraignment McCord volunteered that he was a CIA agent, another major Langley no-no. From my office mate's point of view, McCord was practically handing Nixon's head on a platter to the Washington Post. If I worked at it hard enough, I could have come up with a reason the CIA might have wanted to take Nixon down. (It wasn't so Spiro Agnew could take his place.) It was the idea of a conspiracy itself that I never could accept. |
from Jack kelly...
| Quote: | link
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 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 gratefu |
this link has much much more on McCord, CIA plant Martinez, and the masking tape
one snippet~~
| Quote: | Andrew St. George, Harper's Magazine (October, 1974)
Both the CIA and the FBI had long known, of course, about the existence of the Hunt-Liddy team. The CIA had infiltrated it with a confidential informant just as if Hunt and Liddy had been foreign diplomats, and the informant, an old Company operative named Eugenio Martinez, code-named "Rolando," who had reported in advance on the Watergate project, was in fact at that moment himself under arrest for his part in the break-in. "Ah, well," Helms said. "They finally did it." He chatted for a few moments with the young watch officer, who said it was "a pity about McCord and some of those guys." "Well, yes," Helms said. "A pity about the President too, you know. They really blew it. The sad thing is, we all think `That's the end of it,' and it may be just the beginning of something worse |
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GM Strong
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 18 Sep 2004
Posts: 1579
Location: Penna
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| Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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You need to get Liddy's take on it. It makes more sense. It involves John Dean and his then girlfriend and a Prostitution ring with ties to a DNC Secretary. It had nothing to do with bugging the DNC per se as campaign strategy.
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