After the Tall Timber (57 page)

And looking back, then, at the alleged purpose of the association with Giancana and Roselli, there arises at least this question: Does it make sense for the CIA to have enlisted organized crime as an ally in a plan for an assassination of the highest importance, while, at the same time, it claims responsibility for suppressing traffic in narcotics, which is the most highly profitable enterprise for organized crime? Does either half of this proposition, which would make of the secret collaborator in one international enterprise the bitterest conceivable enemy in the other, make any sense? (The fact is, of course, that Castro was not assassinated. Narcotics traffic, on the other hand, has flourished, supporting not only organized crime but all those bureaucracies whose mission is to suppress it.) The reason the questions are not idle is that there is evidence, scattered throughout the Church Committee report, that, at least since its demoralization in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA has changed from a band of courageous and patriotic amateurs into another sort of band entirely.

Investigative reporting is not what I intended or what I have done here; my politics, such as they are, tend to be moderate. But one cannot help, in looking at documents which might establish a context for a last inference about the Nixon administration, finding signs, in government in recent years, of something, in economic terms at least, radically amiss—evidence of great improprieties involving immense sums of cash. There are, to take two examples, transactions involving two of the CIA’s “proprietaries”—the businesses which the CIA says it must own, as a cover for its intelligence activities. The first is the sale of an airline, Southern Air Transport, which the CIA bought, in 1960, for use in Asia. The CIA bought the airline, which was based in Miami, Florida, for approximately $300,000, and held the shares in the name of a former board member of its other airline, Air America. In 1973, it sold Southern Air Transport, to its former owner, for approximately $6 million—several million dollars less than its book value at the time, and $2 million less than what had already been offered, in cash, by another buyer. The CIA’s explanation for the sale was this: it sought “to avoid a conflict of interest.” However complicated other aspects of the transaction may have been, one thing is clear: Selling to former associates, at a price millions of dollars below book value and below a competing cash offer, does not so much
avoid
as it quite openly declares the most direct and glaring conflict of interest.

A second case concerns a $30 million “insurance complex,” which the CIA claimed it was obliged to set up abroad, as a result of the death of four agents in the Bay of Pigs. Leaving aside the question of whether it might not have been possible to compensate four surviving families by some means other than an enterprise costing millions, the CIA went on to claim that for reasons of “cover” the insurance complex had to make investments, in foreign and American stocks, and also to keep some “non-interest bearing deposits” in foreign banks. The only “issue” which a section of the report obviously written by the CIA itself could find in the matter of these deposits was that the selection of the banks was “non-competitive”—as though the Agency might have been showing favoritism in its choice of banks, or attempting to influence their policies. That is not, of course, the real issue at all. An “insurance complex,” in foreign banks, with a portfolio of foreign and American stocks, and deposits on which it claims to get no interest, is not a necessary or even plausible “cover” for intelligence work but an opportunity—stated with a brazenness that insults the committee which investigates—for fraud on a scale that no private corporation could contemplate. Since the CIA refused, on grounds, it says, of national security, to disclose how much money it has at all, and since Congress has so far indulged that refusal, the Agency continues in its special capacity for making illegal profits and never having to account to anyone for them, or to give any explanation of who or what has that money now.

As for the FBI—as portrayed in the Church Committee report, it seems so locked in obsessions of its own that it hardly bears on the Nixon case. In federal government, it has always been vital interests such as defense (and more recently, medical care) which present special opportunities for impropriety, because of their intense importance to a public that, lacking expertise, is helpless in terms of oversight. All this by way of a cursory outline of situations which existed in government, quite apart from the Nixon administration; and to establish a context for what I think the Nixon scandal itself had to be. It would have to be of an entirely other order than any of these, as it were, more normal scandals; and it required not the most florid and aberrant explanation but the worst and perhaps the most obvious. And here’s what I think, inescapably, it has to be.

V. BOTTOM LINE

People are accustomed to speak of the tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate, or of the post-Vietnam post-Watergate morality, as though they were linked only in some abstract, ethical sphere. Then, one looks at those transcripts once again. In his conversation of February 28, 1973, with John Dean, President Nixon discussed an allegation that, in 1968, at President Lyndon Johnson’s insistence, the FBI tapped conversations between Agnew, the candidate for Vice President, and Anna Chennault, widow of General Claire Chennault and president of Flying Tiger Airlines. The rationale for this tap was supposed to be that Mrs. Chennault was urging the South Vietnamese to slow down or stop the peace negotiations in Paris, to help assure the election of a Republican administration, under which, she was supposed to be telling the South Vietnamese, they would get better terms.

Mrs. Chennault says she did not even know Spiro Agnew in 1968; but that is not the point. She says she knew Richard Nixon very well. On February 28, 1973, President Nixon was preoccupied only with whether there had been such a tap, not with the rationale behind it. One remembers that, less than a week before the 1968 election, the South Vietnamese did stop the negotiations cold. Less than a week. One remembers, too, the remarkable suddenness and, even for refugees, unprecedented hysteria and chaos with which the war, in March 1975, finally did end; and the apparently real fury and sense of betrayal President Thieu expressed when he so precipitately, and it seemed spitefully, gave up. And one cannot help thinking back on 1968 and believing that, in 1972, there must have been a deal. On October 26, 1972, two weeks before the election, Henry Kissinger said of Vietnam, “Peace is at hand.” Peace is at hand. There can and could be no doubt that he sincerely meant it. Within the week, however, Alexander Haig flew to Vietnam. There was unprecedented bombing and the mining of Haiphong. After all that, in January 1973, when the accords were signed, the terms were in no substantial way different from the ones Henry Kissinger had gotten, months earlier, when he genuinely thought peace was at hand. Then, one remembers we were pouring huge amounts of money into South Vietnam; and that the government there, being famously corrupt, was getting a lot of it. One remembers that President Nixon himself was getting a lot of illicit campaign contributions, from a lot of strange sources, and diverting at least some of them to his personal use. And one can’t help thinking that, in 1972, the South Vietnamese administration, not wanting peace to be at hand just yet, used some of the enormous amounts of money we were pouring in there to bribe our administration to stay in.

All right, it is difficult, monstrous; and, of necessity, only an inference, impossible to prove. But one looks back—thinking, not laundered money, foreign money. It is hard to recall the sums and characters, where they came from and where they went. But, early in the Ervin Committee hearings, there is the dim sound of the testimony of CREEP Finance Chairman Maurice Stans. He mentioned a contribution, $30,000 in cash, from a “Philippine national”—a contribution, Stans said at the time, he had been too fastidious to keep. Gordon Liddy’s successor as counsel to the Finance Committee to Re-Elect, Stans said, had told him that it would not be legal to accept such money. So Stans had arranged, he said, with Fred Larue, an assistant to John Mitchell at CREEP, to return that $30,000 to its source. “Since then, and this is more irony, Senator,” Stans went on, amiably, in the ensuing colloquy, he had learned from a Justice Department official that it would have been “perfectly proper” to accept that money from a foreign national, “so long as he is not an agent of a foreign principal.” That is what Stans testified on June 12, 1973.

It would not, as it turns out, have been “perfectly proper” to accept a campaign contribution from a foreign national. It would have been illegal. But the sum itself is so trivial, $30,000. One wonders why Stans testified at such length about it. Hugh Sloan, the Finance Committee treasurer, testified at length about it, too. It is not until
four volumes
later, in the records of the Ervin Committee hearings, that one finds any correspondence that deals with this transaction. It occurs in support of the testimony of Fred Larue, who had paid some of the hush money to the burglars, and who was by then negotiating his plea. Stans had not asked Larue to return any money to any source, it turns out, until May 9, 1973—more than a year after the Finance Committee had accepted it; but less than a month before the Ervin Committee hearings began. And even in his letter of May 9, 1973, Stans did not specify to whom the money was to be returned. Larue simply wanted to return the CREEP money in his possession. His counsel
did
specify, more or less. The $30,000, Stans’s attorney finally wrote, in acknowledging a letter dated May 16, 1973, from Larue’s attorney, was “paid” to Anna Chennault, for “return to foreign nationals”—nationality, Philippine or other, unspecified.

The only reason this trivial amount, this $30,000, came to light at all was that it was part of $81,000 in cash that Hugh Sloan was stuck with when the source of the cash in the possession of the Watergate burglars had been traced to those checks endorsed by the Mexican lawyer Manuel Ogarrio. And that, one recalls, was the cash that had interested the Patman Committee. At first, Stans had told the committee staff that the money came from Ogarrio; then, that he could not disclose whom it came from, since they were Texans to whom he had promised anonymity; finally, that he did not know who the donors were. The Patman Committee staff, having coincidentally discovered, at about the same time, that $700,000 in cash had come to CREEP, in a suitcase, from an American corporation by way of Mexico, was at first misled into thinking that the story had to do not with contributions by foreign nationals but with donations by American corporations and citizens (illegally and in secret) by way of foreign banks. As it turned out, the story was both: Americans and foreign nationals. But the committee, lacking its subpoena power, never got Stans or any other CREEP official under oath—as the Ervin Committee, so many months later, did. And that petty $30,000, within the $81,000 (which remained of the original Ogarrio $89,000), came back to haunt Stans, Sloan, Larue, CREEP, Mrs. Chennault, and the country as a whole. On June 23, 1972, Stans had instructed Sloan to give the $81,000 to President Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who gave it to Larue, who happened to use it as part of the hush money. And Larue plea-bargained. So, in whatever disjointed form, the $30,000 had to be accounted for. And it was foreign.

And thinking foreign, there are anomalies great and small, everywhere one looks. Hugh Sloan explained to the Ervin Committee that he had been unable to give a proper accounting of CREEP funds between April and July 1972, because Kalmbach had been “abroad.” Abroad. There is no reason why the President’s personal attorney and principal fund-raiser should not travel abroad. The height of the political campaign just seems an odd time for his holiday. In his own testimony, Kalmbach always insists, and when he does, elicits sympathy, that he was deceived and “used.” In the memorandum of June 16, 1972, however, there is Kalmbach, returned from abroad, requesting assignments that are “tough and dangerous.” Within days, he was raising, from domestic sources this time, the cash for the hush money. Kalmbach had already raised more than $12 million for the 1972 campaign. A political-matters memorandum as early as October 7, 1971, says, “Kalmbach keeps asking for tough, interesting assignments.” On February 1, 1972, he is reported to have declared himself “willing to run the very high risk of violating the criminal provisions” of campaign-spending legislation.

And even in what remains of the records of CREEP itself—on file, as required under post-Watergate law, at the Federal Election Commission—one finds both foreign and domestic oddities. What was still until last year the Committee to Re-Elect the President is now called the 1972 Campaign Liquidation Trust. It reports an interest income of $80,000 a year, with this income annually exceeded by expenses—as might be expected in a fund that wants to liquidate. It is only that campaigns normally end with deficits, and that an interest income of $80,000 reflects a lot of capital—which raises the question of who or what has that money now, and by what right. Some domestic curiosities: Until October 1976 the Campaign Liquidation Trust still had on its books a suit against John Dean and his attorney—for the return of $15,100, paid “on or about April 12, 1973.” (The suit was settled with the return of that money to the Trust.) On a single day, May 3, 1973, six months after the President had, after all, been overwhelmingly reelected, the Committee to Re-Elect listed on its books seven separate payments of $3,000 and one of $2,500 to Maurice Stans, as “Salary”—making his salary for that day $23,500; four days later CREEP paid him another salary of $3,000. It paid Stans that sort of salary on a lot of days. More surprisingly, perhaps, CREEP was still paying Hugh Sloan—who made such an issue, before the Ervin Committee and elsewhere, of his resignation on the grounds of conscience, in July 1972, on account of Watergate—considerable sums every month until at least spring 1973. In January 1973, Sloan was still carried on the books as “Treasurer”; but his salary had become “Consulting Fee.” By February, his title had become “Consultant.” On February 15, 1973, Sloan’s consulting fee was $1,320; on February 21, 1973, $1,080, and so on. Unlike John Dean, Sloan was never sued by the Committee to Re-Elect. But Sloan had, after all, handled enormous cash contributions, as treasurer to the Finance Committee, in the 1968 campaign as well; and, unlike Dean, he could be presumed to know in 1972, although he never really told, about the sources of the cash.