Ashton Gray - Watergate: The Hoax

WATERGATE: THE HOAX

by

Ashton Gray

Published in association with ChaletBooks.

Copyright 2016 by AshtonGray.

All world rightsreserved.

A forensic tour deforce.

Jerry Barksdale,formertrial lawyer

Monumental achievement.

Stephen Mitchell,writer/producer/director

Exciting, insightful,page-turner.

Jane Lanyon,clinicalpsychologist

Table of Contents

Dramatis Person

Preface

In that direction, the Cat said,waving its right paw round, lives a Hatter: and in thatdirection, waving the other paw, lives a March Hare. Visit eitheryou like: theyre both mad.

But I dont want to go among madpeople, Alice remarked.

Oh, you cant help that, saidthe Cat: were all mad here.

Im mad. Youre mad.

How do you know Im mad? saidAlice.

You must be, said the Cat, oryou wouldnt have come here.

Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures inWonderland

On 12 January 2004 a messageappeared in several UseNet newsgroups. It had been posted throughanonymous remailersservices that hide the identity of thesenderbut was signed with the posting pseudonym, THE REAL DEEP THROAT .

The title of the message wasstartling: There was no first break-in at the Watergate. Theopening paragraphs were as startling as the subjecttitle:

There was no first break-in atDemocratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate on 28May 1972 as claimed by Liddy, Hunt, McCord, Baldwin and theirCIA-trained pack of Cuban liars, nor were there any failedattempts on 26 and 27 May 1972, as they also claimed. It is, andalways has been, a lie.

There is not now, and never hasbeen, a single scrap of evidence to corroborate their stories ofthe alleged first break-in and prior failed attempts. They onlycorroborated each other.

In all the annals of Watergate, noone ever had made any such claim. No evidence? Of coursecorroborative testimony itself is considered evidence, but thisherald was claiming that no physical evidence had ever existed toback up the stories that the perpetrators told to policeauthorities, to the courts, to the press, to the public, and toCongress.

How could that be possible?Watergate was the most intensely covered, studied, analyzed, andcriticized crime of the 20th century.

Its easy to confuse this conceptof a first break-in with the well-known arrest of five men insideDNC headquarters at the Watergate in the wee hours of 17 June 1972,which received so much press coverage. In that event, there was noquestion that the men had broken in, or that they had electronicbugging devices in their possession when they werearrested. Their story after they were arrested, though, was thatthey had been arrested while doing a second break-in to correctproblems with bugs they said had been planted during a purportedsuccessful and undetected first break-in several weeksearlierover the long Memorial Day weekend of 26, 27, and 28 May1972.

The writer calling himself THE REAL DEEP THROAT was declaringunequivocally that the claims of a first break-in were false, andhe was by no means done with that first startling message. Over thecourse of a dozen days, between 12 January and 23 January 2004, heposted six messages into a range of newsgroups, each post asstartling as the first:

12 January 2004

There was no first break-in atthe Watergate

13 January 2004

Why is Liddy lying about 26 May1972?

15 January 2004

Liddy lied about photos ofOBriens office

17 January 2004

No bugs were planted in theWatergate

19 January 2004

Liddy and Baldwin lied for eachother

23 January 2004

What Sally Harmony Saw

And then there was silence. Everyone of his messages had been like a cannon shot. They exploded themost precious and treasured core beliefs about the Watergate saga.They had rattled the very teacups in the District ofColumbia.

That was evidenced by the rapidappearance of copycat message posters, right after the seriesbegan, who pretended to be THE REAL DEEPTHROAT , each posting lunacy, using the intel trick ofdiscrediting someone by pretending to be him and acting insane.That was brought to a sudden halt when THE REALDEEP THROAT posted a separate message with no other purposethan to secure his authorship of the series using an encryptedsignature created by the ironclad encryption software Pretty GoodPrivacy (PGP). All of his subsequent messages contained hisencrypted signature.

And then there was silence. But notfor very long.

Just over a year and a quarterlater, on 31 May 2005, the disciples of The Official Story ofWatergate trotted out someone they claimed to be the realreal Deep Throat, a stroke victim named Mark Felt who had beenhighly placed in the FBI during Watergate, and who admitted in abefogged state that he had been the informant to Bob Woodward andCarl Bernstein. Wood-Stein quickly chimed in to confirm Feltsconfession, and even CIA marionette Ben Bradlee, editor of theWashington Post during Watergate, joined the chorus. All ofthis happened despite Woodward and Bernstein having vowed that noone would ever learn who Deep Throat was until the person was dead.Something certainly had forced their hand. That something almostcertainly had been the posts of THE REAL DEEPTHROAT.

A little less than a year later, on27 April 2006, someone called Huntley Troth created a new articleat Wikipedia titled Watergate first break-in. It was anexhaustive recitation and analysis, compiled from publishedrecords, of events in and around the Watergate Hotel in Washington,DC, over Memorial Day Weekend of 1972: Friday, 26 May throughSunday, 28 May. That Sunday was the date of the purported firstbreak-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in theWatergate complex.

The thing that set the articleapart from every other Watergate analysis that had gone before wasthat it led to only one possible conclusion: there never was anyfirst break-in at DNC Headquarters at all.

Thats exactly what THE REAL DEEP THROAT had said in UseNet two yearsearlier.

Yet all the voices of The OfficialStory of Watergate were holding Mark Felt up to say, Look, see,it happened just the way we told you, and there really was a firstbreak-in!

The research and the citations inthe Wikipedia piece were impeccable. The article used the quotedtestimony and confessions of the suspects themselves.

It laid out the same evidencethat had been pored over and taken apart repeatedly by the FBI,Congressional investigative committees, the international press,and thousands of previous articles and books, but in ways no onebefore had ever achieved.

The conclusion it led to wasastonishing in comparison to the Wood-Stein/Mark Felt puppet story:there was no first break-in at the Watergate on Sunday, 28 May1972.

It never happened. It was fiction.It was a hoax.

The world may never know whoHuntley Troth really was. One of his vocal critics on Wikipediawhoinvested enormous industry in vandalizing and undoing what HuntleyTroth had wroughtpointed out that Huntley Troth was an anagramfor only the truth. Whoever Troth was, I owe him a debt forpointing the way down the path that resulted in this work. Ibelieve that the world owes him a debt, too. Fortunately, somepeople saved his original article before it was hijacked andsabotage by proponents of The Official Story, so the editors ofthis work and I have liberally borrowed from his analysis andcitations in portions of this work, and we are honored to includehis original article, attributed, as an appendix to thisbook.