WHAT BURGLARS?
By now we know well what everyone, right up to Nixon, knew about Watergate and when they knew it, with one big exception: the CIA. Jefferson Morley
Updated Jun. 05, 2022 2:59AM ET / Published Jun. 04, 2022 11:02PM ET
When asked about the role of the CIA in the Watergate affair, Senator Howard Baker famously said, “There are animals crashing around in the forest. I can hear them but I can’t see them.” As co-chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, Baker filed an appendix to the panel’s final report raising what he said were unanswered questions about the actions of CIA director Richard Helms. The Agency, Baker suggested, knew more about the burglars than Helms ever admitted.
In writing a book about the complex relationship between the two ruthless Richards, Nixon and Helms, I found much to support Baker’s suspicions. Helms was far closer to burglar Howard Hunt than he admitted under oath. He and Hunt were longtime friends who lunched three to six times a year, sharing personal and professional confidences. Hunt gave Helms a wedding present in 1968. Helms returned the favor by promoting Hunt’s spy novels to powerful Hollywood friends as possible movie material. And there is compelling, if not conclusive, testimony from two CIA officers, that Hunt passed intelligence reports to Helms while working for the White House.
But I also discovered the full story is off-limits to the American people. Key details of the CIA’s relationship with three of the Watergate burglars are still shrouded in official secrecy, even on the 50th anniversary of the break-in that lead to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
An October 1970 memo shows that the agency’s first statement about the burglars was false. After the arrest of five burglars in the offices of the Democratic National Committee early in the morning of June 17, 1972, the agency claimed that the men were former employees “with whom we have had no dealings since their retirement.” But the partially declassified memo shows that the agency’s Office of Security approved a request for “utilization” of Hunt for a project whose name is redacted. The memo was written six months after Hunt’s supposed retirement from the Agency and 20 months before the botched break-in.
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