Jefferson Morley - Scorpions Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate

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Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

THE TEMPEST, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

NO INVOLVEMENT

The CIA had no involvement in the break-in, declared the duly sworn witness, Richard Helms, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his voice starting to rise. Helms spoke to seven U.S. senators seated at the desks not ten feet in front of him. No involvement whatever, Helms emphasized with a broadside of rattling consonants. And it was my preoccupation, consistently from then to this time, to make this point and to be sure that everybody understands it.

Helms, a saturnine scion of Philadelphias Main Line, sixty years of age, sat forward at the wooden witness table. His long, slate-gray hair curled over the collar of his silk suit jacket. Filaments of silver glistened on his temples in the glare of white TV lights. His jaw was firm and active. He was surrounded by hundreds of spectators crowded into Room 318 of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. The televised hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee (formally known as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities in 1972) were high political theater in America that summer, though not quite the hot ticket they had been a few months before. When the TV camera swung his way, Helms bared his teeth in a grin.

Anticipation accompanied the witness. Richard Helms had served as director of Central Intelligence for almost seven years, from June 1966 until January 1973, when President Richard Nixon named him U.S. ambassador to Iran. He was making his fifth appearance before a congressional committee, but this was his first full public accounting of the Agencys role in the scandal that had already forced the resignation of Nixons chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and his chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman. Despite a year of intensive news coverage, first by the Washington Post and then by the rest of the Washington press corps, the role of Americas clandestine service in the Watergate burglary was still murky. CIA directors never testified in open session, much less about a domestic political crime committed by former Agency employees.

The witness caught the crowd by surprise. With one hand, he clasped the microphone at its base. With the other, he chopped the table with his neatly aligned fingers, and his voice rose still further.

It doesnt seem to get across very well for some reason but the agency [thump] had nothing [thump] to do [thump] with the Watergate break-in! he shouted. The murmur of talk in the far reaches of the hearing room was stilled as his words resounded to the high ceiling. No involvement whatever. Helms surveyed the faces around him. I hope all the newsmen in the room hear me clearly now.

They did. The CBS Evening News and ABC News both led their coverage of the hearing with footage of Helmss bravura outburst. That was a story many people wanted to believe as the Watergate affair consumed Washington: the law-abiding CIA director as an innocent bystander to a lawless president.

Empirically speaking, Helmss claim that the Agency had no involvement in the break-in was dubious. Four of the seven men arrested at the Watergate office complex in the early hours of June 17, 1972, had worked on or collaborated with CIA operations to overthrow the government of Cuba. A fifth burglar had held a senior position in the Agencys internal police force, the Office of Security.

No involvement implied no connection or association with the burglary. Yet two of the burglars, Howard Hunt and James McCord, had retired from the Agency two years before and gone into business with Helmss personal blessing and CIA institutional support. The Agencys statement, reported as fact, that Hunt and McCord were former employees with whom we have had no dealings since their retirement was simply false.

A third burglar, Rolando Martnez, was known in the Langley cable traffic as AMSNAP-3. He had worked for the Agency as a full-time boat captain from 1963 to 1971, running Then he was kept on as an informant.

A fourth burglar, Bernard Macho Barker, was a police captain in Havana who had become a CIA source in the 1950s. Known by the code name AMCLATTER-1, Barker recruited a number of valuable agents in Cuba, according to one classified memo.

A fifth burglar, Frank Sturgis, had briefly served in Castros government and then joined the exiles in Miami, where he cultivated a reputation for violence. No one in the Senate Caucus Room would have guessed that the Watergate crew included three aspiring assassins, and Helms didnt leave them any wiser.

It was true that the CIA, as an organization, did not select the target for the break-in. But Hunt, the former undercover man working in the Nixon White House, had brought the four Cubans into the operation. Without Hunt there would have been no team of burglars at the Watergate. And unbeknownst to senators and spectators, Hunt was a longtime personal friend of Helms, whom the director had groomed for fame. At the witness table, Helms transmuted tacit involvement into total innocence.

In ninety minutes of testimony, the former director recounted how President Nixons Praetorian Guard, namely the vigilant Haldeman and Ehrlichman, had pressured him at a meeting on June 23, six days after the break-in. He said they practically ordered him to tell L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director, that further investigation of the burglars would compromise a CIA operation. He refused, he claimed. He had stood up to presidential pressure from the start, he declared, which had the virtue of being almost true.

Fred Thompson, counsel for the Republican minority on the committee, took over the questioning. An incisive lawyer with a head of hair that would take him far in Hollywood and Washington, Thompson noted that Helms had testified, under oath, just ten weeks before, that the subject of Watergate never came up at the June 23 meeting. Helmss colleague, deputy CIA director Vernon Walters, had stated, under oath, that it did. Thompson read back to Helms his earlier statement. He asked if he stood by it.

It was the first tough query Helms had fielded all day. Helms hedged, saying, come to think of it, Walters was probably right, that Watergate had been discussed at the meeting. Mr. Helms, Thompson asked, are you basing your testimony now on your own memory or on Mr. Walterss memory? The agile Helms squirmed out of Thompsons clinch like the lithe long-distance runner that he was. It was a combination of the two, he explained gaily.

To the Capitol Hill crowd and a TV audience of millions, Helms dissembled with evident sincerity. He allowed that he knew Mr. Hunt. A bit of a romantic, he sniffed. Couldnt remember a single operation he had participated in, Helms added, an audacious lie affably expressed. Helms knew the operational details of Hunts political action and propaganda work over two decades, including his involvement in the Guatemala operation, his role as producer of the animated version of George Orwells Animal Farm, his divisive leadership in the Bay of Pigs operation, and his ghostwriting stints for a New York Times columnist who liked to lunch with Helms. On more than one occasion, Helms had extricated Hunt from trouble with more straightlaced (and competent) colleagues. No one in the Senate Caucus Room guessed that story either. Not even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prizewinning