The Nixon Cover-Up You Never Heard About

[Octafish]

History untaught and unreported: The admiral on the right in the picture below ran a spy operation on the president at left.



The reason? He thought Nixon was going soft on communism.

Al Haig, The NSC and the White House Spy Ring: The Nixon Story You Never Heard

Joan Hoff
Montana State University, Jan. 2014, M

EXCERPT...

Over three decades ago on December 21, 1971, Richard Nixon approved the first major cover-up of his administration. He did so reluctantly at the behest of his closest political advisers, Attorney General John Mitchell, Domestic Counselor John Ehrlichman, and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. The public remains ignorant of this seminal event in Nixon’s first term and journalists and historians have largely ignored it. The question is why? A recently released Nixon tape transcribed from an enhanced CD produced by the Nixon Era Center provides the clearest answer to this thirty-year-old Nixon secret.

On that December day Nixon agreed to cover-up a criminally insubordinate spying operation conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff inside the National Security Council because of the military’s strong, visceral dislike of Nixon’s foreign policy. In particular, the JCS thought Nixon gone “soft on communism” by reaching out to the Chinese and Russians, and they resented Vietnamization as a way to end the war.

As early as 1976 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt publicly made these military suspicions and resentment abundantly clear in his book, On Watch: A Memoir. “I had first become concerned many months before the June 1972 burglary,” Zumwalt wrote, “(about) the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security.” In a word, Zumwalt, like many within the American military elite, thought that Nixon’s foreign policies bordered on the traitorous because they “were inimical to the security of the United States.”

This atmosphere of extreme distrust led Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the JCS, to first authorize Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson and later Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, both liaisons between the Joint Chiefs and the White House’s National Security Council, to start spying on the NSC. For thirteen months, from late 1970 to late 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles E. Radford, an aide to both Robinson and Welander, systematically stole and copied NSC documents from burn bags containing carbon copies, briefcases, and desks of Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and their staff. He then turned them over to his superiors.

SNIP...

The most striking aspect of this tape is the passive role played by Nixon–the so-called original imperial president. First, he is out-talked by the others throughout this fifty-two-minute conversation. Toward the end of tape, the president can be heard saying to his advisers in a loud voice that the JCS spy activity was “wrong! Understand? I’m just saying that’s wrong. Do you agree?” A little later he called it a “federal offense of the highest order.” Up to this point, however, John Mitchell told the president that “the important thing is to paper this thing over” because “this Welander thing . . . Is going to get right into the middle of Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

In other words, Nixon would have to take on the entire military command if he exposed the spy ring. Moreover, this expose would take place in an election year and when the president had scheduled trips to both China and the Soviet Union to confirm improved relations with these countries–which the military opposed. Taking on the military establishment with such important political and diplomatic events on the horizon could have proven disastrous for the president’s most important objectives and revealed other back-channel diplomatic activities of the administration. Later in his memoirs the president said that the media would have completely distorted the incident and exposure would have done “damage to the military at time when it was already under heavy attack.”

In contrast, at the time all three men agreed with Nixon about the seriousness of the crime committed by the JCS. Mitchell even compared it to “coming in (to the president's office) and robbing your desk.” However, they advised him to do no more than to inform Moorer that the White House knew about the JCS spy ring, to interview Welander (who was later transferred to sea duty), and to transfer Radford. Moorer subsequently denied obtaining any information from purloined documents, fallaciously claiming that Nixon kept him fully informed about all his foreign policy initiatives. If this had been true there would have been no need for Moorer to set up a spy ring. Welander, for his part according to this tape, had initially refused to answer questions about the spying he was supervising on the questionable grounds that he had a “personal and confidential relationship” with both Kissinger and Haig.

CONTINUED...

http://spikethenews.blogspot.com/2014/01/al-haig-nsc-and-white-house-spy-ring.html

Yeoman Radford stole from Henry Kissinger's briefcase on secret trip to China...



...in all he may've copied more than 10,000 documents.

"I didn't know he screened through the thing, but I knew he did carry 'em to me and I just returned from San Clemente and I had been told every damn thing that was in there...I gave the things back to (Alexander) Haig." -- Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

SOURCE: http://nixontapes.org/welander.html

History shows that the brass hats who run the Pentagon are just as liable as any lowly journalist to forget for whom they work. Thanks to NSA and all the rest of the oxymoronic alphabet soup of an Military Industrial Intelligence Community, while we don't need to remind them what we think of that, as they're listening and reading just about everything that's transmitted, they know. We do need to remind them of who's the boss. And as long as there's a Constitution, We the People will.

PS: To H20 Man, who long ago reminded me of this story on Democratic Underground, and to my brothers and sisters on DU, especially those who gave me Valentine's hearts and have given me so many other truly heartening ideas over the years, thank you.

[LuvNewcastle]

1. I'd love to know what was in Kissinger's briefcase.

If Nixon distrusted him so much, why did he keep him around? That's one thing that's always baffled me about Nixon. I guess Nixon didn't really trust anyone, though, so he probably figured that he would get someone just like him if he was replaced.

[Octafish]

4. Vietnam War Peace Talk strategy...

...China opening...USSR Detente...

Palace Intrigue in the Nixon White House

EXCERPT...

Yeoman Radford was a highly eager to please young man with a young family who readily engaged, on orders of his superiors, in theft of highly classified documents, including Eyes Only memos exchanged between Kissinger and Nixon. Radford rifled through Kissinger’s and Haig’s brief cases, burn bags, White House in and out boxes, personal contacts, and anywhere else he could find documents of relevance to the JCS. Very little was deemed irrelevant for pilfering purposes including office gossip for which daily briefings were held. Radner even managed to steal the ultra secret correspondence between Kissinger and Nixon about the opening to China and the peace negotiations between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho.

SOURCE...

http://theamericanchronicle.blogspot.com/2012/02/palace-intrigue-in-nixon-white-house.html?m=1

It seems the Chiefs were worried peace would break out. History shows they had nothing to worry about.

[LuvNewcastle]

9. How true. We can always find people to kill somewhere.

[Octafish]

12. "Money trumps peace."

That's something that only a war criminal and warmonger would say.



Yet, "money trumps peace" are the very words of George W Bush uttered Feb. 14, 2007 at a press conference in which not a single member of the callow, cowed and corrupt press corpse saw fit to ask a follow-up.

While Corporate McPravda ignored the remark and accompanying smirk fir the last seven years, I remember Cindy Sheehan tried to bring it to our nation's attention.

[Enthusiast]

19. The very image of "smug asshole".

Born on third base with a silver spoon in his mouth imagining he had hit a triple.

[arely staircase]

20. and a Playboy nt

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

2. Bob Woodward

i haven't read the link yet so maybe this is included there.

from Wiki:

He received his B.A. degree in 1965, and began a five-year tour of duty in the United States Navy.[citation needed] In his navy career Woodward served in the Office of Naval Intelligence, where he was a part of a group which briefed top intelligence officials; at one time he was close to Admiral Robert O. Welander, being communications officer on the USS Fox under Welander's command.

[H2O Man]

7. ONI

It's important for people to fully understand the difference between ONI and CIA. (Some folks here have confused Bob as CI.)

One of the people Woodward briefed in the Nixon White House was also ONI; his name was Mark Felt.

[ReRe]

14. Ahem...

Slap me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Mark Felt "Deep Throat?"

[H2O Man]

21. He was the

publicly identified member of a group that Woodward called Deep Throat. And very likely Felt was the head of that operation.

[Octafish]

8. Small world.

Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA

Strange Bedfellows

by JIM HOUGAN

EXCERPT...

In his June 2 article in the Post, outing his source, Woodward tells us that Felt regarded the Nixon White House as "corrupt…sinister…(a) cabal." And, as the Post reporter makes clear, this was before Watergate. Indeed, Woodward says, "Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis."

As it happens, this is exactly what I thought at the time, as did nearly every other liberal that I knew. Strange, then, to learn that this same point of view was shared by Mark Felt, a professional Red-hunter so highly placed in the FBI that only the Director, J. Edgar Hoover, outranked him.

Or maybe it’s not so strange.

A similar view of the Nixon Administration was held by James McCord, the rightwing evangelist and former CIA Security chief who led the break-in team at the Watergate. In a series of queer "newsletters" written after he had been arrested, McCord put forward a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Rockefeller family was lunging for control of the government’s critical national security functions, using the Council on Foreign Relations and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as its means to an end.

At the Pentagon, the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, went even further. To Zumwalt, the Nixon Administration was "inimical to the security of the United States." (1) Indeed, as the admiral later explained, he eventually left the Administration (this was in 1974) because "its own officials and experts reflected Henry Kissinger’s world view: that the dynamics of history are on the side of the Soviet Union; that before long the USSR will be the only superpower on earth andthat the duty of policy-makers, therefore, is at all costs to conceal from the people their probable fate…" (2)

Zumwalt, Felt and McCord were by no means alone in their deep mistrust of the Nixon White House. Within the Pentagon, a military spy-ring was pillaging Kissinger’s secrets on behalf of Adm. Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 1970.

Within the offices of the National Security Council, and on secret missions to China, Kissinger’s briefcases were rifled and his burn-bags ransacked. In all, perhaps a thousand top-secret documents were stolen and transmitted to Moorer’s office (if not elsewhere, as well) by Yeoman Charles Radford, a young Mormon acting on orders of Adm. Robert Welander.

Here, matters become a bit incestuous.

Admiral Welander was an aide to Moorer. But he was also a mentor of Lt. Bob Woodward, whose commander Welander had been aboard the USS Fox. Reportedly, it was at the urging of Welander—who had yet to be implicated in "the Moorer-Radford affair"—that Woodward extended his tour of duty in 1969, going to the Pentagon to serve as Communications Duty Officer to then-CNO Tom Moorer.

SNIP...

While president, Nixon was determined to keep the affair secret, telling Kissinger aide David Young, "If you love your country, you’ll never mention it." But the Pentagon’s chief investigator, W. Donald Stewart, was more forthcoming. Asked how seriously the affair should have been taken, Stewart replied with a rhetorical question: "Did you see that film, Seven Days in May? That’s what we were dealing with…"

The film is about a military conspiracy to topple the president. A coup d’etat, in other words.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/06/08/strange-bedfellows/

So many CIA people around the removal of another president. Another coincidence, one should think.

[JDPriestly]

17. Yes. According to the book, Silent Coup, pages 70-71, Woodward worked for

Rear Admiral Francis J. Fitzpatrick, then Rear Admiral Robert Weilander. He helped manage the communications office in the Pentagon as a communications watch officer. A lieutenant, Woodward was, according to the author of the book, allegedly the briefing officer for --- wait for this: Alexander Haig.

Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin who wrote the book, state that Bob Woodward denies that he was the briefing officer to Army Gen. Haig.

I cannot vouch for this claim. Someone with better understanding of these matters than I would have to explain what that would really mean.

I started to read Silent Coup but dismissed the theory in the book as a crazy conspiracy theory. At the same time, the book unsettled my thinking enough that I have kept a copy of it for many years. I never finished the book, but there is something fascinating yet very alarming about it. It raises a lot of strange questions. I really don't know what to think about it.

Has anyone read the whole book, Silent Coup?

Another strange but irrelevant fact about my book is that I have no idea where I got it. I don't think I bought it. I just have no idea where it came from. I have a lot of books, and I usually remember where and how I got them. But this one is kind of a mystery to me.

[MinM]

25. John Dean tried to sue both Hougan (Secret Agenda) and Colodny (Silent Coup)

Only to end up dropping both suits.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=521152#p521152

Jeff Stein ‏@SpyTalker: A story of Nixon's treason that needs telling again and again. http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668 …

[John1956PA]

26. I read Silent Coup, but I do not know what to think of its claims.

The first part of the book presents the theory that Nixon was forced out by the machinations of the military, including Alexander Haig, who was assisted by Woodward.

The last part of the book claims that Gerald Ford became Vice President in exchange for his promise that, after he became President upon Nixon's resignation, he would subsequently pardon Nixon.

Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with the book's claims, it is an interesting read in that it frames certain chapters of silent diplomacy (e .g., negotiations with Pakistan) in the context of the era.

[aquart]

3. The Joint Chiefs of Staff spied on the NSA. Spied on the NSA!

Is this irony I'm appreciating?

[Octafish]

11. Same crowd, similar acronym: National Security Advisor...

While Kissinger held the job, it was more powerful than Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The only person with more power would answer to Rockefeller or Saud.

[H2O Man]

5. Recommended.

Very important case. Glad to read this. (There is, of course, a heck of a lot more involved in it, some ripples that continues today.)

[Octafish]

13. Russell Tice said NSA started surveilling Obama in 2004.

Old news to you, H2O Man. News to Corporate McPravda.

Russ Tice, Bush-Era Whistleblower, Claims NSA Ordered Wiretap Of Barack Obama In 2004

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing
Posted: 06/20/2013

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst who in 2005 blew the whistle on what he alleged was massive unconstitutional domestic spying across multiple agencies, claimed Wednesday that the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.

Speaking on "The Boiling Frogs Show," Tice claimed the intelligence community had ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

"Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois," he said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It's a big white house in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the president of the United States now."

Host Sibel Edmonds and Tice both raised concerns that such alleged monitoring of subjects, unbeknownst to them, could provide the intelligence agencies with huge power to blackmail their targets.

"I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on," Tice said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html

Thanks to you citing this important history, I started Hougan's "Secret Agenda." I purchased the book at Duquesne from a friend I made there. The Times review is interesting, written by a writer Hougan contradicted.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/11/books/a-new-explanation-of-watergate.html

[grasswire]

6. who is this author Joan Hoff, writing from MSU?

I wonder.

Great job.

Thanks, Octafish.

[Octafish]

15. A distinguished research professor of history...

Truth. Integrity. Purpose. Bravery. Someone who knows how to make a better world.

Thank you, grasswire, and the great many academics who cannot be bought.

[H2O Man]

10. Another thought:

What group located James Earl Ray in England? Not who nabbed him; who identified where he was, including where those who nabbed him could be sure he would be that day? Hint: This group is known by the initials "NSA."

At the time, people were happy that the suspected murderer of MLK was caught. Very few questioned how the heck NSA was involved. Then it was largely forgotten.

A few of us do remember. It's documented -- it's not speculation.

Curious. Very curious.

[RC]

16. And to think that there are people on DU that think Edward J. Snowden was wrong for exposing the

criminals corrupting our government. Most of us really have no idea of how close we are to being a total dictatorship, from the selective mass hoovering of our communications.
What do they have on Obama? They have to have something. Obama came for nowhere to being President - after being a target for their spying. For a being the "Liberal" he used to be, he is doing a lousy job if it now.

[Octafish]

28. Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) warned us, so NSA spied on him.

Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.

The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.

And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:

In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.

SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1

From GWU's National Security Archives:

"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.

Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era

Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted – September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr

Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 – During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).

SNIP...

Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]

SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/

I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-CT) also got the treatment from NSA?

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.” — Senator Richard Schweiker on “Face the Nation” in 1976.

Lost to History NOT

[Wilms]

18. ^

[Octafish]

29. ''Can I ask how in the name of God do we have a yeoman having access to documents of that type?''

Nixon demanded of his aides at that initial meeting on the evening of December 21.

Nixon and the Chiefs

IN THE LAST DAYS OF 1971 PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON AND HIS CLOSEST AIDES MET TO DISCUSS THE ASTONISHING DISCOVERY THAT THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF HAD BEEN SPYING ON THE WHITE HOUSE. TRANSCRIPTS OF NIXON'S SECRET TAPES OF THESE MEETINGS, PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME, OFFER A CASE STUDY IN NIXON'S PARANOID STYLE OF GOVERNING—AND HIS SURPRISINGLY SUCCESSFUL EFFORTS TO SALVAGE ADVANTAGE FROM MISFORTUNE


By James Rosen
The Atlantic, April 2002

At 6:09 on the evening of December 21, 1971, President Richard Nixon convened a tense and confidential meeting in the Oval Office with his three closest advisers—John N. Mitchell, his Attorney General; H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff; and John D. Ehrlichman, his top domestic-policy aide. Notably absent was Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national-security adviser. The men had come together to discuss a crisis unique in American presidential history—"a federal offense of the highest order," as Nixon would put it in the meeting. Just days before, Yeoman Charles E. Radford, a young Navy stenographer who had been working with Kissinger and his staff, had confessed to a Department of Defense interrogator that for more than a year he had been passing thousands of top-secret Nixon-Kissinger documents to his superiors at the Pentagon. Radford had obtained the documents by systematically rifling through burn bags, interoffice envelopes, and even the briefcases of Kissinger and Kissinger's then-deputy, Brigadier General Alexander Haig. According to Radford, his supervisors—first Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson and then Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander—had routinely passed the ill-gotten documents to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sometimes to Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the chief of naval operations. It was, in short, an unprecedented case of espionage that pitted the nation's top military commanders against their civilian commander in chief during wartime. Nixon and his advisers had gathered to consider how to react.

James Rosen, in a joint effort with Mountain State University's Nixon Era Center, constructed the transcript of the center's enhanced version of the December 21, 1971, White House tape. Click here to read the transcript and White House conversation.

The Joint Chiefs' espionage effort was not born in a vacuum. Nixon's style of governance was highly secretive, and his presidency hung precariously on the constantly shifting lines of "back-channel" communication that he encouraged among Kissinger, Haig, the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and Secretary of State William Rogers. The military often felt cut out of crucial decision-making on matters of national security, foreign policy, and the conduct of the war in Vietnam. In his 1976 memoir, On Watch, Admiral Zumwalt lamented "the deliberate, systematic and, unfortunately, extremely successful efforts of the President, Henry Kissinger, and a few subordinate members of their inner circle to conceal, sometimes by simple silence, more often by articulate deceit, their real policies about the most critical matters of national security." Scarcely alone in his views, Zumwalt marveled "that rational men could think that running things like that could have any other result than 'leaks' and 'spying' and all-around paranoia." Indeed, he said, "they had created a system in which 'leaks' and 'spying' were everyday and essential elements."

The espionage case ultimately came to be known as the Moorer-Radford affair. Although the details of the story may be new to many readers, historians and journalists have written about Nixon's handling of the affair—most notably Seymour M. Hersh, in The Price of Power (1983), and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, in Silent Coup (1991). Until now, however, chronicles of the White House's reaction have mostly been derived from the selective memories of some of those involved (including Radford, who has spoken to the press)—and have therefore proved either incomplete or less than fully reliable. But in October of 2000 the secret tapes that Nixon made of his initial conversations about the affair were declassified and released for public access, buried amid 420 hours of other Nixon recordings. Published here for the first time, excerpted transcripts of those conversations do much more than fill out the historical record. In fact, they offer an absorbing case study in the behavior and tactics of Richard Nixon under fire, trying to cope with a potential disaster of his own making. "Damn," he exclaimed to Haldeman on the day following that first meeting, as the details began to unfold. "You know, I created this whole situation, this—this lesion. It's just unbelievable. Unbelievable."

The tapes show that Nixon was stunned by Radford's revelations. He pounded his desk in anger. He spoke gravely about prosecuting Admiral Moorer, along with others involved. He voiced deep suspicion about the role played by Haig, who had personally selected Radford to accompany him and Kissinger on the foreign trips during which Radford had done his greatest damage. Nixon pronounced Kissinger, his national-security adviser, a threat to security. And yet within days he had developed a strategy for handling the affair that not only averted a major public crisis—which is where most Presidents would have been content to stop—but also skillfully salvaged advantage from misfortune and furthered his personal and political agendas.

Shaped considerably by Attorney General Mitchell, Nixon's response to the Moorer-Radford affair essentially consisted of covering it up, transferring Admiral Welander and Yeoman Radford to remote posts, and, daringly, retaining Moorer as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The President—who had alternately conspired with and against the Chiefs—"had two ways of going," as Ehrlichman later recalled. "He could either tear up the Joint Chiefs or he could continue to do business with them." Nixon chose the latter, figuring, in Ehrlichman's words, that Moorer would from then on be a "preshrunk" admiral over whom Nixon could exert increased influence. Indeed, within days of the first White House meeting about the affair, having recovered from the shock of the revelations, Nixon and Kissinger were already plotting how to use Moorer's diminished status to further a secret policy goal. Nixon also reckoned that disclosing the scandal could irreparably damage the armed services—something he felt the country could ill afford in the Vietnam era.

The strategy clearly worked—Nixon gained an increased measure of control over the Joint Chiefs (in particular over Moorer, whom he reappointed Chairman six months later) and kept his various back channels in place; when the Moorer-Radford story broke, in January of 1974, a scandal-weary nation scarcely noticed. In 1986, recalling Nixon's handling of the affair, John Mitchell summed the matter up succinctly: "Richard Nixon was smarter than hell to sit on this thing."

Or was he? In burying the scandal, some historians have written, Nixon and his men perhaps sealed his subsequent fate as President. By allowing a cast of characters he distrusted, and who distrusted him, to remain in place in the White House and in the Pentagon, Nixon virtually ensured that the culture of secrecy and paranoia that infused his first term would persist until the Watergate scandal prematurely ended his presidency.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/04/nixon-and-the-chiefs/302473/

Wonder who has the tapes these days? Guessing from the ambassador's recent wishes for Europe, they're probably with Smirko's friend, Pooty Toot, the good soul that he is. Either that or with some friend of Carlyle Group like the nice man Steve Bezos.

[G_j]

22. wow

here's a story I never heard of. Though it is completely logical, that this would happen.

[Octafish]

23. New Evidence Confirms Pentagon Stole and Leaked Top Secret Documents from Nixon White House

EXCERPT from NixonTapes.org (link includes MP3s, etc. where we can hear Tricky Dick and his crew give inspiration to The Sopranos:

Nixon: You can just say there is a federal offense of the highest order here. And, you have reported it to the president. The president says he can't discuss it. And the Attorney General is handling it. Period. I wouldn't worry.

Mitchell: What about further interrogation of Welander on this thing?

Nixon: What's that?

Mitchell: Further interrogation of Welander on this thing?

Nixon: Well—

Ehrlichman: I don't think that's indicated.

Haldeman: What about telling Henry that Welander has refused to cooperate on the grounds of his personal relationship with Henry and that Henry is to call Welander and dissolve that relationship which will free Welander to testify?

Mitchell: That's it exactly.

Nixon: Why don't you tell Henry that?

Haldeman: I don't think Henry seems to think that Welander—

Mitchell: Tell Henry just that much directly.

Nixon: Now.

Mitchell: Yeah. And then—

Haldeman: Because they know you're investigating, so just say there's a block in the investigation.

Nixon: I don't want Henry to know...yet. Don't you agree? You see what I mean?

Haldeman: Yeah, I just think he might find out about Moorer.

Ehrlichman: I am sure Haig has told Henry that much.

Nixon: Does Haig know all this? That's my point.

Ehrlichman: Not the polygraph.

http://nixontapes.org/welander.html

[bobthedrummer]

24. K&R and a mention of some people that we don't hear about too much anymore that made a killing

through the manipulation of capital that came out of the "national security community"-the community that is analyzed in this thread.
Wirt Walker III
A.B."Buzzy Krongard
Prince Bandar
Cofer Black
George Tenet

etc...

[joeybee12]

27. Yeah, and I'm sure they haven't spied on any other president since...

Kind of explains why our Dem Presidents are so cautious in their dealing with the military.

[Octafish]

30. Wanna know who REALLY runs the Pentagon?

Seems the national security state has a mind of its own, when it comes to Washington.

Hint: Chuck Hagel Isn't One of Them

The Men Who Really Run the Pentagon

by WINSLOW T. WHEELER
CounterPunch, WEEKEND EDITION FEBRUARY 14-16, 2014

Before Chuck Hagel was nominated to be secretary of defense about a year ago, he made a reputation for himself as a independent Republican politician who described Pentagon spending as “bloated.” In office, however, the former Nebraska senator has argued that the Pentagon should be rescued from historically minor and appropriate reductions. In doing so, he seeks to reverse one of the few real reforms that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates before him enforced on high spenders inside the Pentagon and in Congress.

Hagel and the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Sylvia Mathews Burwell, say they want to revive the old “wish list” process in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff used to connive with each other and Congress, behind the back of secretaries of defense and OMB, to make additions that couldn’t cut the mustard in the regular budget review process.

Hagel has shown himself to be the individual of lesser stature that many were stunned to observe at his infamous confirmation hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee last year. The Hagel-OMB undertaking also reveals who or what is really running the Pentagon these days: As with feckless secretaries of defense in the past, it’s the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that run the show.

Gates deserved some real praise for stopping the JCS from running behind the backs of defense secretaries (and presidents) to solicit spending above and beyond officially approved defense budgets. For years, the JCS had pre-arranged with high-spending members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to be asked at hearings to submit lists of programs for extra spending. The JCS preferred to call these lists “unfunded requirements;” everyone else called them “wish lists.”

As a national defense staffer in the Senate Budget Committee in the 1990s, I often listened to Armed Services Committee staffers boast about how they could supplant defense budgets — defying the president, OMB, and even DOD — with the help of eager members of the JCS. Either clueless or too weak to put a stop to the process, secretaries of defense simply stood by, making themselves into figurative pigmies on budget, hardware, and even political issues. Ships, planes, vehicles, and a host of other programs were either increased or started through this process — all without consulting the secretary of defense or even the president. Politically, the JCS was making a monkey of them both.

SNIP...

One easy way to skirt the cap is to magically convert non-war spending into “war” spending (also known as the Overseas Contingency Operations fund). Last year, Congress used this method to add an additional $10.8 billion to the 2014 defense budget over and above the $19.2 billion they added by rewriting the Budget Control Act. If they added a total of $30 billion in 2014, adding $26 billion in 2015 will not be hard. All that will be needed is for the Joint Chiefs to say they want the money. Their eager facilitators on Capitol Hill will be all the more receptive in an election year.

Clearly, the secretary of defense won’t be calling these shots. That Hagel is reported to be “directing” the Pentagon to add this $26 billion “investment fund” is a bad joke. Having said that Pentagon spending is “bloated” and “needs to be pared down” prior to his confirmation hearing, Hagel has reinvented his DOD budget song and is looking for ways to push the numbers higher, not lower. Even without the wish-list additions, the 2015 budget is higher than the $450 billion in today’s dollars the Pentagonaveraged during the Cold War — when the United States faced the existential threat of the Soviet Union and a dogmatically hostile Peoples Republic of China. With the wish-list, Hagel will have more to spend than most secretaries of defense since the end of World War II — and that’s according to the Pentagon’s own budget records.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/14/the-men-who-really-run-the-pentagon/

When it comes to cash and power: Trust, but Verify requires spying.

[joeybee12]

31. Good article...thanks...nt