Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (18 page)

The Watergate Affair is one of the key conspiracy tales of our time. Not because it is the most outlandish or extraordinary of conspiracies, but because it turned out to be true. What began as a simple burglary turned out to be a scandal that forced the resignation of a United States president. Here was a real conspiracy and it was uncovered layer by layer until the conspirators – all the way up to President Richard Nixon himself – had to resign or face criminal charges. And perhaps the most lasting effect of the episode was to make sure that conspiracy theorists could no longer simply be written off. Previous events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy now looked more suspicious than ever and the conspiracy theorists, once described as crackpots, were all of a sudden "experts". Never again would the American public simply accept what it was told – even by its president.

The whole extraordinary business began in the early hours of 17 June 1972 at a hotel and office block complex called the Watergate building in Washington, DC. On that day a security guard named Frank Wills noticed a piece of tape being used to hold open a door leading in from the parking garage. Wills removed it, but did not think much of it. He imagined that the cleaning team had perhaps left it there. However, when he returned soon afterwards to discover that someone had put another piece of tape on the door, he decided to call the police. He told them that he suspected that a burglary might be in progress.

The police showed up and at 2.30 a.m. they found five men hiding in an office in the part of the building occupied by the Democratic National Committee. The five men were arrested and were found to include two Cubans, two men with CIA connections and a man named James W. McCord, Jr. who was employed as Chief of Security at a Republican organization called the Committee to Re-elect the President. Alarm bells quickly started to ring. This was clearly no ordinary burglary but a politically motivated one.

Then it emerged that this was not the first Watergate break-in. The same team had already broken into the Democratic Campaign HQ and planted bugs there. Part of the reason for their return was to fix some wiretaps that were not working properly. Further alarm bells went off when the telephone number of one E. Howard Hunt was found in McCord's notebook. Hunt was a former White House consultant and CIA employee.

J
UST A THIRD-RATE BURGLARY?
As news of the break-in made its way into the press, questions began to be asked about who in the White House might have known of it. On 19 June The Washington Post reported that a Republican security aide was among the Watergate burglars. The former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon re-election campaign, denied any link with the operation and the White House did its best to play down the significance of the affair. Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler called it a "third-rate burglary" and the American public found it hard to accept that a President like Nixon – who was way ahead in all the opinion polls – would sanction a wiretapping operation against his rivals. On 30 August Nixon claimed that White House counsel John Dean had conducted an investigation into the Watergate matter and concluded that no one from the White House was involved. Nevertheless, press speculation refused to go away.

At his 5 September indictment, James McCord identified himself as retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. The Washington, DC district attorney's office began an investigation into the links between McCord and the CIA, and so too did a couple of young journalists from
The Washington Post
, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They started to dig deep, aided by leaks from a mysterious anonymous source, known only as "Deep Throat".

During the weeks leading up to the November election The Washington Post ran stories reporting that John Mitchell, while serving as attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund that was used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats. Then it reported that FBI agents knew that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage that was being conducted on behalf of the Nixon re-election effort. Still the public took no notice and Nixon was duly re-elected by a landslide.

On 8 January 1973 the original burglars, along with Hunt and another former intelligence operative turned White House security consultant named Gordon Liddy, went to trial. All except McCord and Liddy pleaded guilty and all were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wire-tapping. The accused had been paid to plead guilty but say nothing and their refusal to confess to the crimes angered the trial judge John Sirica (known as "Maximum John" because of his harsh sentencing). Sirica handed down thirty-year sentences, but indicated that he would reconsider if the group would be more co-operative. McCord capitulated and wrote a letter to the judge in which he claimed that the defendants had pleaded guilty under duress. He said they had committed perjury at the urging of John Dean, counsel to the President, and John Mitchell, when he was the attorney general.

S
ECRET TAPES
By now the "third-rate burglary" had become a major scandal. The revelations just kept coming. On 6 April John Dean, the White House Counsel, began cooperating with the Watergate prosecutors. Nixon promised fresh investigations but began to look like a man engaged in a desperate cover-up. Dean was sacked and other presidential advisers were forced to resign, but the press were still not satisfied. Dean testified that he had mentioned the Watergate break-in to the President thirty-five times. Nixon denied it. But then the existence of tapes that contained all of the President's conversations in the Oval Office was discovered.

Nixon at first refused to release the tapes, but then handed over edited transcripts. Legal moves eventually forced him to hand over the original tapes, but parts of them were discovered to have been erased. Finally, Congress began to consider an extraordinary move – to impeach the President. At first this seemed impossible but then, with the August 1974 discovery of the "Smoking Gun" tape that proved that Nixon knew of the cover-up operation, the impeachment process looked certain to go ahead. On 8 August Nixon accepted that the game was up and announced his resignation.

And so the most sensational conspiracy case in American history came to its end. Or did it? Today, there are any number of revisionist Watergate theories out there. Some say that the Democrats deliberately set Nixon up. Other suggest that Dean himself was responsible for the whole business and had ordered the break-in to cover up a prostitution scandal in which he was allegedly implicated.

In the final analysis though, it seems that the conspiracy theorists should learn to quit while they are ahead. Watergate was a conspiracy and it went all the way to the top. The guilty parties were even punished for it. What more satisfying end to a major conspiracy could there possibly be?

One of the most notorious conspiracies of the Reagan administration was the Iran–Contra affair, in which the United States government sold arms to Iran (supposedly an enemy state), and also funded anti-Communist forces, known as the Contras, in Nicaragua. Both the Iranian and the Nicaraguan activities were not only against declared United States government policy but were also in contravention of laws passed by Congress. When the activities were exposed, there was a scandal and several important figures were indicted, including Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, a key military official and John Poindexter, National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan. President Reagan himself was forced to make an appearance on television to explain his actions to the American public. He maintained that he considered what he had done to be right and he survived the scandal, but it damaged the reputation of his administration considerably.

D
OUBLE DEALING
At the time that the scandal broke, in the mid-1980s, Nicaragua was in the midst of a civil war between the Marxist government, known as the Sandinistas, and their opponents, the anti-Communist Contras, who were engaged in guerrilla warfare. The country's proximity to the United States meant that they were always vulnerable to influence from their powerful neighbour and it was clear that the United States was opposed to the Marxist government in power there. However, the fact that the United States was funding the Contras, in the hope that they could topple the left-wing government, did not become public knowledge for some time. Even more shocking, it later transpired that the money that was used to fund the Contras had come from the sale of American arms to Iran, which at the time was being run by an Islamic fundamentalist government and was ostensibly an enemy of the United States. What came out was that the Americans were hoping that the sale of arms to Iran would persuade the Iranians to intercede with Islamic terrorists in Lebanon, who were holding hostages there. However, this double dealing was completely against international law and was also hypocritical since, in public, President Reagan was critical of the regime in Iran.

A
RMS FOR HOSTAGES
To solve the problem of how to get the hostages back, a secret deal was made in which arms were sold to Iran in exchange for the release of the hostages in Lebanon. The proposal for the plan came from the Israeli government, who suggested that the United States should broker a deal to sell hundreds of missiles to Iran, which at the time was fighting the Iran–Iraq war. The missiles were designed to defeat armoured tanks and they boasted important new features, including laser range-finders and thermal optics. In exchange, the terrorists in Lebanon that were holding Benjamin Weir, an American hostage, would release their captive.

The deal took place under the direction of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the first American hostage was freed in September. Two months later, a similar transaction took place in which 500 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles were to be shipped to Iran. The purpose of the Hawk missiles was to shoot down aircraft and they could be launched from the ground into the air by a single soldier. However, the cost of these missiles was so high that the proposal needed to go through Congress. Robert McFarlane, the President's National Security Adviser, pressed for the deal to go ahead and, in 1985, the first shipment of missiles reached Iran. Negotiations continued into 1986, setting out a new deal in which an intermediary, Manucher Ghorbanifar, would sell arms to Iran in exchange for the hostages.

However, the plan began to founder when, after releasing their hostages, the terrorists began to take new ones. Also, Ghorbanifar and Colonel Oliver North, the aide to Reagan's national security adviser, were accused of selling the weapons at highly inflated prices.