What is Watergate?

[seemslikeadream]

Watergate's Company men: McCord, Sturgis and Hunt



"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a CIA setup." - Frank Sturgis

Yesterday there was an answer - and it may not even be the answer - to the question Who is Deep Throat? But that's a sideshow, and not even a particularly interesting one, when there's still no satisfactory answer to What is Watergate?

It's become part of history, as it was meant to, that Watergate was all about a botched White House intelligence operation at Democratic headquarters and its bungled cover-up. It's not hard to see why. Nixon's paranoia was more than sufficient to account for its implausibility. And though the Democrats needed no help imploding in 1972, they were neatly nudged along by Republican dirty tricks. After all, Karl Rove cut his teeth on the campaign. (Rove's mentor Donald Segretti served six months in prison for forging letters on the stationary of early frontrunner Edmund Muskie.) As Lisa Pease suggests, even the shooting of candidate George Wallace may have been an example of the oldest dirty trick in the book.

So bugging the DNC made a perfect cover story. But it's not the story.

In Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, Jim Houghan establishes, using FBI documents and sources ignored by those hypnotized by the misdirection, that the DNC telephones were never actually bugged, and that false evidence - crude, defunct bugging devices - were planted in the headquarters months after the Watergate arrests to support the cover story. He also found that E Howard Hunt and James McCord, both CIA men, were using the White House only as a cover for domestic espionage, including spying on the administration. Most significantly, Houghan determined that clients of prostitutes in the Columbia Plaza Apartments, adjoining the Watergate complex, were the real targets of the operation.

Houghan's conclusions may have appeared incredible in 1984. In 2005, they should be predictable:

"Watergate," then, was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was, secretly, a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in the simplest of terms, tripped on its own shoelaces. There is more, much more, but the point is made: our recent history is a forgery, the by-product of secret agents acting on secret agendas of their own.

By 1969, McCord had become director of the technical and physical security sections of the CIA's Office of Security. The broad responsibility of the OS was to protect CIA assets, operations and personnel. which entailed maintaining more than 1.7 million files on "persons of interest." The OS, therefore, had an admitted domestic reach, reported directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Houghan writes that, "in effect, the OS is an extension of the director's office in a way that other CIA components are not; and because of this...it has served as a vehicle for some of the agency's most questionable operations." These include conducting the CIA's first mind control programs, Bluebird and Artichoke; the Mafia-assisted assassination attempts upon Fidel Castro; infiltrating anti-war and black power organizations in the sixties; "Operation Chaos" and sexual sting operations.

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[gordianot]

1. I have a suspicion someone is going to finally figure out "Watergate".

Deep Throat was/is the Rosetta Stone for this affair and maybe other covert operations in the 1960'-70's. Now that we know who, it might be possible to understand some of the motives in the FBI.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

2. Here we go ........

You bet the FBI and CIA were nuts back then. Probably as nuts as they are today, only now they're better at covering it up and we have no investigative journalists worth a damn to go after the stories.

But, the Watergate break-in was the complete construction of Liddy and Mitchell et al., the morons of CRP. It wasn't even up there with Ellsberg's shrink's office burglary; it was just a sophomoric caper dreamed up by idiots who wanted only to get their guy reelected so that they could be their version of Hot Shits.

As with all capers that go bad, the cover-up became worse than the crime.

Keep in mind that not one of those men involved - and good old Rose Mary Woods - had a shred of dignity, honor, decency, or integrity about them prior to the Watergate break-in, and they sure as hell didn't develop any after it.

But, to put it in the same category as something as insidious as, say, COINTELPRO (I'm still dealing with the effects of that fucking brainstorm), would be to make a grievous error about exactly what the FBI and CIA was up to back then. It was far too small potatoes for them.

[gordianot]

3. That's what I can't figure minor caper dumb cover up.

All the crap that was going on (much more today) why did they concentrate basically on small potato's "two bit burglary" vetted by no less than the Deputy Director of the FBI. What was it really?

[OldLeftieLawyer]

4. Because of John Sirica

In the end, the credit for taking Nixon down lies with "Maximum John" Sirica, a judge who knew exactly what power was and how to use it. Watch what happened there, and you'll see what a bunch of jerks they were.

[gordianot]

5. You have that right, Nixon was going down for the cover up.

For me this raises more questions.

The grand jury and prosecutors (with Sam Erwin's end game) were nailing him, not just articles in the Washington Post. But why would the Deputy Director of the FBI talk to (former Naval intelligence) a reporter possibly releasing then secret Grand Jury testimony? Isn't that risky?

Was Felt wanting to sway public opinion, or was it as John Dean is now suggesting Nixon's paranoia regarding the FBI justified?

[OldLeftieLawyer]

6. I don't think it was only Felt

I think there were a number of people talking to Woodstein, and Felt was just one of them. I think there were a number of people - good people - in different agencies who saw terrible things happening, and who wanted them to stop.

Knowing Felt, I'd say he did it out of a perverse sense of rescuing the FBI. Nothing at all altruistic or patriotic about his snitching - I think he was just trying to maintain an institution to which he'd devoted his life. Guys like that think like that.

Sam Irvin. Peter Rodino. Sam Dash. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have men like that serving our country today?

[gordianot]

7. We are missing those kind of fighters.

On the way home on NPR I listened to an interview with Ben Bradlee. He stated Felt was the only source feeding them information. What convinced Bradlee was that all of the information they got from Felt checked out. They were not using other sources. Get this Bradlee did not know the name of Deep Throat until after Nixon resigned.

It seems to me there must have been some heavy weights out to end Nixon and Agnew (remember they got him too). You could almost feel sorry for both except they were true scum.

Note: I consider our current scum in a league of their own, Nixon pales in comparison.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

8. "...our recent history is a forgery..."

All history is a cheap forgery.