The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (27 page)

MITCHELL:
Can we get somebody that could devote full time to this project that’s knowledgeable?

NIXON:
We have that.

EHRLICHMAN:
We do have that, John, and we’ve got [Plumbers supervisors] Bud Krogh and Dave Young virtually full time on this with three other people. […]

MITCHELL:
John Ehrlichman was talking about somebody that’s on our side 100 percent, is knowledgeable about foreign affairs, could devote his whole time to this thing and has a little bit of dirty tricks to play.

HALDEMAN:
David Young?

MITCHELL:
Well, Young is off the NSC staff and knows where all the bodies are buried in that group…

EHRLICHMAN:
Well, we have a couple of fellows under Krogh—Liddy and Hunt—who know what they’re doing and have been around.
⁴⁰

As mention of Liddy and Hunt portended, publication of the Pentagon Papers marked a watershed in the Nixon presidency. Leaks were now at the very top of the president’s agenda. The White House adopted a “reverse of the legal burden of proof,” under which, as Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan later testified, “You had to be able to establish that you were
not
the source of the leak.” The summer of 1971 also brought Nixon’s first wish for Mitchell’s replacement at Justice. The problem was not Mitchell’s intelligence, diligence, or loyalty—all beyond question—but, rather, his innate civility, his reverence for the law, his opposition to the Plumbers, and his reluctance to use raw investigative data to smear Ellsberg in the press.
⁴¹

Nixon always assumed left-wing bureaucrats, opposed to his conduct of the Vietnam War, were to blame for the steady stream of damning, damaging leaks, and that his attorney general had become a liability in the battle to stop them. But the next major leak crisis to bedevil the administration, the most serious of all, revealed Nixon was wrong in both assumptions. It was not the liberal left that was most actively sabotaging his national security policies, but the conservative right; not lowly pencil pushers buried in the civilian bureaucracy, but the most senior uniformed commanders at the Pentagon. And when the eyes of the commander-in-chief were opened to this astonishing revelation, it was Mitchell who again emerged as the indispensable figure, the strong man of the Nixon presidency.

At 6:09 p.m. on
December 21, 1971, the president summoned Mitchell for an extremely rare—and tense—evening session in the Oval Office. Also present were Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The men had gathered to discuss a crisis unique in American history—“a federal offense of the highest order,” as Nixon termed it that night. Just days before, Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a lanky young stenographer attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) liaison office with the NSC, had confessed to a Defense Department interrogator that, for more than a year, he had been passing thousands of top-secret NSC documents to his superiors at the Pentagon. Radford had obtained the documents by systematically rifling burn bags, interoffice envelopes, even the briefcases of Kissinger and Haig. According to the yeoman, he had given the documents to his supervisors, two admirals, who had in turn passed them to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and occasionally to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations, among others. It was, in short, an unprecedented case of internal espionage at the highest levels—in wartime.
⁴²

Like so much of the internecine intrigue of the Watergate era, the military spying had its origins in the Kennedy-Johnson years. Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs developed a mutual distrust after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as documented on Kennedy’s own White House tapes; and LBJ, in the early stages of the Vietnam War, made a virtual science of circumventing the chiefs. By August 1967, they bordered on mutiny: After Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sharply undercut the chiefs in congressional testimony, they met “in complete secrecy, late into the night,” to plot retaliation. JCS chairman Earle Wheeler advocated resignation en masse; the others agreed. Only with Wheeler’s withdrawal, amid acute chest pains, did the plot, undisclosed until the 1980s, collapse.
⁴³

By decade’s end, the chiefs had come to regard their NSC liaison office, with its perch inside the White House complex, as a kind of intelligence asset, a means through which the brass could monitor national security policymaking in successive, and increasingly secretive, administrations. Even before the end of the Johnson presidency, the liaison office was being used for clandestine purposes, “doing end-runs around the secretary of state and secretary of defense…sometimes the whole Cabinet and national security structure,” Mel Laird recalled. “I don’t think Clark Clifford or McNamara really realized it, but I knew what they were doing, because…I had a lot of friends in the military that had warned me about it.”
⁴⁴

In April 1970, Nixon elevated Admiral Moorer, a fifty-eight-year-old native of Mt. Willing, Alabama, to chairman of the Joint Chiefs. High school valedictorian and Naval Academy graduate, Moorer was a cocksure aviator whose early career, in the thirties, saw him piloting fighter planes off the decks of aircraft carriers. On December 7, 1941, Lieutenant Moorer was serving with Patrol Squadron 22 at Pearl Harbor, one of the few pilots that dark day to get a plane into the air. He drew as the attack’s central lesson: “Why didn’t you buy more defense?” Decorated for valor in combat, Moorer swiftly ascended through the ranks, making admiral and becoming head of the Pacific Fleet by 1964. He also tended toward insubordination, criticizing his superiors in memoranda and meetings. When he publicly called Vietnam a “dirty little war,” the Johnson White House rebuked him.
⁴⁵

As JCS chairman under Nixon and Kissinger, Moorer only hardened in his view of the civilian command. According to a Defense Department study, the chairman “often found his and the chiefs’ advice disregarded by the president and the secretary of defense.” It is true that Moorer helped Nixon and Kissinger direct the 1970 Cambodian operation, and backed their decision, in February 1971, to provide tactical support for missions in Laos. Moorer also orchestrated the mining of Haiphong Harbor in May 1972 and the subsequent “Christmas bombing” of the North. Yet Nixon and Kissinger only intermittently included Moorer and the chiefs in planning, something on which the generals and admirals, conditioned by Kennedy and Johnson, had already reckoned. Enlisted in devious end-runs around others, like Laird, the chiefs knew better than to imagine they were not also being played.
⁴⁶

And for what? Despite Nixon’s reputation as a staunch anticommunist, his foreign policy as president—withdrawal from Vietnam, engagement with China, détente with the Soviets—alarmed the chiefs, as did the heavy hand of Kissinger. Admiral Zumwalt saw Kissinger as a dangerous appeaser who believed “the dynamics of history are on the side of the Soviet Union [and] that before long the USSR will be the only superpower on earth.” Certain facts on the ground fueled this alarmism. Every day of the Nixon presidency, it seemed, fresh headlines heralded the Soviets’ ascendancy in strategic weapons production, and Washington’s attendant retreat from postwar hegemony. “American Power Margin Is Slipping” cried the
Washington Post
. “Parity” became the era’s grim watchword.

Nixon, for his part, grew to despise the brass. More than once, he angrily shouted at Moorer—unusual for this commander-in-chief, who invariably shrank from personal confrontation—and expressed contempt for the chairman’s slipperiness in war planning sessions. “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one!” Nixon thundered at one point. “Goddamn it, the military, they’re a bunch of greedy bastards!” he ranted in April 1971. “They want more officers’ clubs and more men to shine their shoes. The sons of bitches are not interested in this country.”
⁴⁷

From this long-simmering
cauldron of suspicion and deceit bubbled the high-stakes espionage case that drew Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman to the Oval Office on the chilly evening of December 21, 1971. The matter had begun a week earlier, as yet another leak investigation. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, a thorn in Nixon’s side since the fifties, had published a series of columns detailing the deliberations of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), an elite crisis management group comprised of senior State, Defense, and CIA officials, and chaired by Kissinger. The group had been weighing options for U.S. action on the Asian subcontinent, where chronic tensions between India and Pakistan had erupted into full-scale war. Personally distrustful of Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, the president had secretly ordered Kissinger, despite public professions of neutrality, to find ways to bolster Islamabad, which had used its good back-channel offices to foster Nixon’s opening to China.
⁴⁸

Anderson had somehow obtained five top-secret White House and Defense Department memoranda, as well as minutes of the WSAG meetings of December 3–4, the day war broke out. “I am getting hell every half hour from the president that we are not being tough enough on India,” the minutes quoted Kissinger as saying. “He doesn’t believe we’re carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.”
⁴⁹

Coming so soon after the Pentagon Papers, and after publication a month later, also in the
Times
, of classified data relating to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) negotiations with the Soviet Union—a national security breach that convinced the president “his very ability to govern was threatened”—Anderson’s columns on the Indo-Pakistani war revived Nixon’s fury over the maddening problem of leaks. Investigators immediately fastened on Yeoman Radford: The young stenographer had once been stationed in New Delhi; was known to have enjoyed a casual friendship with his fellow Mormon, Anderson; and had personally handled all the documents Anderson obtained.
⁵⁰

Radford’s boss at the JCS-NSC liaison office was the stately Admiral Robert O. Welander, author of a memorandum quoted in Anderson’s column of December 14. After reading Anderson’s piece that morning, Welander rushed to Alexander Haig to convey his suspicion that Radford was responsible for the leak; the yeoman, Welander believed, suffered from “some kind of Ellsberg syndrome.” Haig, in turn, directed the nervous admiral to John Ehrlichman and the Plumbers. Within twenty-four hours, Radford was placed under virtual house arrest; by the afternoon of December 16, he found himself attached to a National Security Agency polygraph machine, answering questions from W. Donald Stewart, the Pentagon’s most seasoned investigator.
⁵¹

Stewart was a notoriously tough interrogator and “hammered away” at the frightened yeoman “a couple of times a day.” The questioning turned up Radford’s acquaintanceship with Anderson—years earlier the young man had shown Anderson’s parents around New Delhi—but the yeoman steadfastly denied leaking to the columnist, a claim the polygraph operator cited, according to previously unpublished documents, as an example of “deception.” Under Stewart’s profane assault, Radford finally broke down and wept. He would go no further without permission from Welander. When contacted, the admiral instructed the yeoman to answer all questions truthfully.
⁵²

It was then that Radford unloaded his bombshell—what Nixon termed “a federal offense of the highest order.” Working in the JCSNSC office and serving as an aide-de-camp for Kissinger and Haig—at Haig’s insistence—on sensitive trips to India, Pakistan, China, and Vietnam, Radford had stealthily obtained or copied some five thousand pages of highly classified material, including crumpled drafts, carbons, and completed memoranda, and secretly passed the documents to his bosses: Welander and his predecessor, the late Admiral Rembrandt Robinson. Welander and Robinson had in turn funneled the papers to Admiral Moorer.
⁵³

What started as an investigation to determine the sources for the classified data that routinely, if no less alarmingly, showed up in Anderson’s columns—Don Stewart had run eleven such probes on Anderson in the past nine months—had morphed into a far more serious matter: wartime espionage against the commander-in-chief by the nation’s top uniformed officers.
⁵⁴
“Under the implied approval of his supervisor, the admiral,” Ehrlichman told the Oval Office group on the evening of December 21, Radford “has systematically stolen documents out of Henry’s briefcase, Haig’s briefcase, people’s desks—anyplace and everyplace in the NSC apparatus that he could get his hands on—and has duplicated them and turned them over to the Joint Chiefs, through his boss.” He added, “This has been going on now for about thirteen months.”