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While Richard Nixon's culpability for Watergate has long been established, what's truly remarkable is that after almost fifty years, conventional accounts of the scandal still don't address Nixon's motive. Why was President Nixon willing to risk his reelection with so many repeated burglaries at the Watergate—and other Washington offices—in just a few weeks? What motivated Nixon to jeopardize his presidency by ordering the wide range of criminal operations that resulted in Watergate? What was Nixon so desperate to get at the Watergate, and how does it explain the deeper context surrounding his crimes?
For the first time, the groundbreaking investigative research in Watergate: The Hidden History provides documented answers to all of those questions. It adds crucial missing pieces to the Watergate story—information that President Nixon wanted, but couldn't get, and that wasn't available to the Senate Watergate Committee or to Woodward and Bernstein. This new information not only reveals remarkable insights into Nixon's motivation for Watergate, but also answers the two most important remaining questions: What were the Watergate burglars after? And why was Nixon willing to risk his Presidency to get it?
Watergate: The Hidden History reexamines the historical record, including new material only available in recent years. This includes thousands of recently declassified CIA and FBI files, newly released Nixon tapes, and exclusive interviews with those involved in the events surrounding Watergate—ranging from former Nixon officials to key aides for John and Robert Kennedy. This book also builds on decades of investigations by noted journalists and historians, as well as long–overlooked investigative articles from publications like Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619022676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 816 |
| Sales rank: | 898,446 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means ..." President Richard Nixon to Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, 5-23-73
* * *
Long-secret memos written by Senate Watergate Committee investigators in late 1973 and early 1974 — and only released by the National Archives in 2012 — provide the final critical missing pieces to the puzzle of Watergate. They fundamentally rewrite the history of the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.
These crucial files show that President Nixon's "motivation for the break-in to the offices of the DNC [Democratic National Committee, at the Watergate] on June 17, 1972," was Nixon worries about the CIA's "plot to assassinate Fidel Castro" using Mafia don "John Rosselli." Senate investigators noted in the new files that the plot between the CIA and the Mafia originated "during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration," when Nixon was Vice President — and locked in a fierce battle for the presidency with Senator John F. Kennedy. Nixon "was motivated by a fear that ... some of this sensitive information about the plot" between the Mafia and the CIA had been transmitted to DNC Chairman Lawrence O'Brien, resulting in the burglary of his offices by the five Watergate burglars.
The investigation of Johnny Rosselli by Senate Watergate Committee investigators — and their interview with him on February 20, 1974 — was kept secret at the time, and not mentioned in their Final Report or to the press. The CIA-Mafia plots themselves would not be officially confirmed until the following year, well after Nixon's resignation, when the Senate "Church Committee" — headed by Senator Frank Church — held well-publicized hearings about the plots. But the Church Committee never publicly linked the CIA-Mafia plots or Johnny Rosselli to Watergate. As a result, the contents of Rosselli's Watergate interview remained secret until it was first published in the June 2012 hardcover edition of Watergate: The Hidden History. However, other important parts of the story gradually emerged, allowing this book to finally tell the full story of Watergate, Nixon, and the Mafia for the first time.
In February 2013, independent confirmation for the revelations in this volume and the new Watergate Committee files was obtained by the author, and is reported in this trade paperback edition for the first time. In 1975, the CIA and the Senate Church Committee publicly confirmed that powerful Miami-based godfather Santo Trafficante was Rosselli's most important partner in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro that began in the summer of 1960. Two years before that revelation, in 1973, Trafficante was being represented by noted attorney F. Lee Bailey, whose small firm was also representing Watergate burglar McCord.
In May 1973 — less than a year after the arrests at the Watergate, and more than a year before President Nixon's resignation — Santo Trafficante told F. Lee Bailey's Chief Investigator about Nixon's central role in Watergate. Trafficante said that the break- ins at the Watergate were "ordered by Nixon, personally." Nixon even ordered a White House aide to use the three Cuban exiles who were eventually arrested at the Watergate (Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez), plus former CIA asset and longtime mob associate Frank Fiorini, who used the name Frank Sturgis during Watergate. According to Trafficante, Nixon also personally ordered the use of veteran CIA officer E. Howard Hunt in the operation. (Hunt had "retired" from the CIA just a year before beginning work as a White House "consultant," though declassified CIA files show that Hunt continued to do work for the CIA after his "retirement.")
Santo Trafficante said that Nixon wanted those people in particular involved in the Watergate break-ins, because "Nixon was terrified" that DNC Chairman O'Brien might have information about Nixon's central role in spawning the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960. Trafficante indicated those five were best suited for the Watergate break-ins because they had been involved in various aspects of the CIA-Mafia plots themselves. (Something independently confirmed for each of the five, as detailed in later chapters.)
Trafficante explained to F. Lee Bailey's Chief Investigator that in the summer of 1960, Vice President Nixon had originally reached out for help to his longtime patron, the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes, who did extensive work for the US government, assigned his key aide Robert Maheu to handle the matter. Maheu, a longtime CIA asset who had performed assignments for Nixon in the past, reached out to Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, who in turn asked Santo Trafficante to join the operation. Trafficante had owned casinos in Cuba before the Revolution and still had extensive contacts there, since his former casinos remained open.
However, Trafficante was leery about the operation, since he — of all the mob bosses who had left Cuba — had worked out a type of accommodation with the new Cuban regime. Trafficante told Rosselli and Maheu that he wanted some form of personal assurance that Vice President Nixon was actually behind the operation. At Trafficante's third meeting with Rosselli in Miami about the plots, they were joined by a CIA security official, who personally confirmed to Trafficante that Vice President Nixon had ordered the Castro assassination operation. Trafficante agreed to join the venture, and to use his men in the operation.
The information that Trafficante gave to F. Lee Bailey's Chief Investigator, published here for the first time, was revealed by Daniel Sheehan, then a young attorney just three years out of Harvard Law School. Before joining Bailey's firm, Sheehan had worked extensively on the Pentagon Papers case for the firm representing The New York Times. After leaving Bailey's firm — in part because of the troubling ramifications of Trafficante's revelations — he went on to become a prominent social activist attorney. He won noted victories in the Karen Silkwood case and against members of the Ku Klux Klan for the murders of five anti-Klan demonstrators, as well as exposing parts of the Iran-Contra scandal. Sheehan continues to be a public interest attorney, and his upcoming autobiography, People's Advocate (August 2013), will have more about Trafficante, F. Lee Bailey, and his other noted cases.
What's remarkable about Santo Trafficante's revelations regarding Watergate and Nixon is how much independent corroboration exists for what the godfather said, and how well it ties in to what the Senate Watergate Committee investigators uncovered in late 1973 and early 1974. As this book extensively documents, the connections between Trafficante's associates and Watergate — and Nixon — are numerous. For example, Bernard Barker and Frank Fiorini (Sturgis) not only worked on the CIA-Mafia plots for Trafficante starting in September 1960, they were still working for Trafficante when they were arrested at the Watergate on June 17, 1972. E. Howard Hunt, who in 1960 was a veteran CIA officer specializing in overthrowing Latin American governments, likewise started working on the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro in September 1960, when the CIA assigned mob associate Barker to be Hunt's assistant. In addition, as the book later details, Hunt had dealings with Nixon well before Watergate, while Barker and another of the Watergate burglars had business ties to Nixon's associates.
Further confirming Trafficante's revelations, Chapters 6 through 9 document that Vice President Nixon was extensively involved in Cuban operations for President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and before. By the time Nixon spearheaded the creation of the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli and Trafficante in 1960, Nixon had been receiving financial support from the Mafia for fourteen years — and those ties would continue for at least another fifteen years, until a year after he resigned the presidency. Further confirmation came from Hughes aide Robert Maheu — the CIA's liaison to Rosselli and Trafficante — who later admitted "that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project [and] it had been Nixon who had him do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro" before the 1960 election.
Because key information about Nixon, Watergate, and the Mafia remained hidden or hard to obtain for so long, the most important questions about the scandal remained unanswered: what the Watergate burglars were really after, and why Nixon wanted it so badly. Instead, misinformation about the Watergate scandal has flourished.
For example, more than forty years after the Watergate arrests on June 17, 1972, three myths about it remain particularly pervasive.
First, that the scandal only concerned "a third-rate burglary" of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Second, that the "cover-up was worse than the crime." And finally, that two reporters — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post — "brought down" President Richard M. Nixon.
Not one of these is true.
The three myths of Watergate have been demonstrably false for decades. President Nixon had his spokesman minimize the scandal's importance by calling it "a third-rate burglary," and Nixon was initially successful: Watergate was not a factor in — or even widely reported during — the fall 1972 Presidential campaign between President Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern. Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide.
What's wrong with the "third-rate burglary" claim? To begin with, even the singular term "burglary" is misleading, since Congressional and Justice Department investigations showed that four burglaries were actually attempted at the Watergate. Additionally, in the weeks before the final Watergate break-in, Nixon's Watergate operatives committed several other burglaries. Their targets ranged from Democratic offices (including those of McGovern, Gary Hart, and Sargent Shriver) to journalists to the Chilean embassy in Washington.
Was the "the cover-up" worse than "the crime?" No — that's another completely inaccurate myth, since Nixon's own words prove that there wasn't just one "crime." From February 1971 to July 1973, Nixon secretly recorded his conversations at the Oval Office, and his other offices away from the White House. Only a handful of his closest aides knew about the taping system, and Nixon never intended for the tapes to become public. On those tapes, many released only in recent years, Nixon discussed many dozens of serious felonies, ranging from illegal political espionage (surveillance, bugging, wiretaps, beatings) to massive corporate bribes and illegal slush funds. In the early 1970s, evidence of Nixon's clear culpability for those crimes was known only to a few dozen officials and investigators at the Justice Department and in Congress. With that proof now more widely available, it clearly shows the pervasive criminal culture of Nixon's White House.
Finally, it's true that The Washington Post played a leading role in reporting the crimes that led Nixon to resign rather than face impeachment. However, for decades Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and The Post have been trying to point out that their reporting was not what "brought down" Nixon. Instead, it was the huge range of proven felonies that Richard Nixon and his men committed that resulted in Nixon's resignation, and the convictions of more than thirty of his officials and associates.
Yet these three basic myths have kept the public and most journalists from looking at the tremendous amount of important new information about Nixon and Watergate that has emerged in recent years.
While Richard Nixon's culpability for the Watergate break-ins has long been established, most recently by PBS in 2003, what's truly remarkable is that after forty years, conventional accounts of the scandal still don't address Nixon's motive. Why was President Nixon willing to risk his reelection with so many repeated burglaries at the Watergate, and at other Washington offices, in just a few weeks? What motivated Nixon to jeopardize his Presidency by ordering the wide range of criminal operations that resulted in Watergate? What was Nixon so desperate to get at the Watergate, and how does it explain the deeper context surrounding his crimes?
For the first time, the groundbreaking investigative research in Watergate: The Hidden History pulls together documented answers to all of these questions. It adds crucial missing pieces to the Watergate story, information that President Nixon wanted but couldn't get — and that wasn't available to the Senate Watergate Committee, or to Woodward and Bernstein. This new information not only reveals Nixon's motivation for Watergate, but also answers the two most important remaining questions: What were the Watergate burglars after? And why was Nixon willing to risk his Presidency to get it?
Many people think the Watergate burglars broke in just to bug the DNC, yet why were the burglars caught with enough film to take photos of over fourteen hundred pages of documents? Why were all of the Watergate burglars current or former CIA agents? And why were most of those agents Cuban exiles, veterans of the CIA's anti-Castro operations of the early 1960s?
Watergate: The Hidden History explains why by reexamining the historical record, including new material only available in recent years. This includes thousands of recently declassified CIA and FBI files, newly released Nixon tapes, and exclusive interviews with those involved in the events surrounding Watergate. This book also builds on decades of investigations by noted journalists and historians, as well as long-overlooked investigative articles from publications such as Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.
This book provides dramatic new revelations by focusing on three key areas overlooked by previous Watergate books:
• Richard Nixon's long ties to the Mafia, especially to associates of Miami-based godfather Santo Trafficante.
• Two top secret CIA anti-Castro operations linked to Nixon, both involving key Watergate participants.
• The secret Cuban Dossier that Nixon was after at the Watergate, an explosive file that could link the Mafia to his secret CIA anti- Castro operations. This Dossier of CIA attempts to kill Castro — attempts that began when Nixon was Vice President and continued while Nixon was President — is published here, for the first time in any book.
Richard Nixon's use of the Mafia and CIA anti-Castro personnel in both 1960 and 1972 is the most important missing piece of the Watergate story. As mentioned earlier, in 1960, Vice President Nixon had helped to forge perhaps the darkest connection in American politics, bringing together the CIA and the Mafia in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Remarkably, for his 1972 campaign, President Nixon brought several of the same players together again.
In September 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon faced a close race in his run for the Presidency against Senator John F. Kennedy. Nixon had been President Eisenhower's point man for Cuba, and he used that role to pressure the CIA to work with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro before the election. The mobsters chosen included godfather Santo Trafficante and his associate, Mafia don Johnny Rosselli. At the same time, Nixon received a $500,000 bribe from Santo Trafficante and his closest Mafia partner, Louisiana/Texas godfather Carlos Marcello, to stop the federal prosecution of their ally, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.
Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election by a narrow margin, but those CIA-Mafia plots would continue to haunt him for the rest of his political career. Nixon was finally elected President in 1968, narrowly winning the popular vote over Vice President Hubert Humphrey. As the 1972 election approached, Nixon faced what he feared would be another close election, either against Humphrey or possible nominees such as Senators Ted Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, or (Nixon's preferred choice) George McGovern.
In 1972, three veterans of Nixon's 1960 CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro were part of Nixon's Watergate burglary team: E. Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, and Frank Fiorini (a.k.a. Frank Sturgis). All three were former CIA agents who had also worked with Trafficante or Rosselli. Watergate burglars Barker and Fiorini — plus Nixon's hush-money paymaster, Cuban exile Manuel Artime (Hunt's best friend) — were still working for Trafficante during the time of Watergate. Also in the months before Watergate, President Nixon had the CIA continuing operations against Cuba, including a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. At the same time that Nixon's CIA was targeting Castro, Nixon's men had arranged another huge bribe involving Trafficante and Marcello, just prior to the start of the 1972 campaign. That $1 million Mafia bribe, verified by the FBI and Time magazine, was part of a deal to release Jimmy Hoffa from prison, which occurred less than five months before the first Watergate break-in.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Watergate The Hidden History"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Lamar Waldron.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PART I,
Chapter 1,
Chapter 2 Richard Nixon Runs for Congress,
Chapter 3 Nixon: Congress, the Senate, and the Race for Vice President,
Chapter 4 Vice President Richard Nixon: The First Five Years,
Chapter 5 Nixon, the Mafia, and the CIA vs. Fidel Castro,
Chapter 6 Nixon, Hunt, and the CIA-Mafia Plots to Kill Fidel,
Chapter 7 August–October 1960: Nixon and the CIA-Mafia Plots to Kill Castro,
Chapter 8 September–November 1960: Nixon's First Mafia Bribe for Hoffa, and the Election,
PART II,
Chapter 9 November 1960–Early April 1961: The CIA Hides Its Mafia Plots from JFK,
Chapter 10 April 1960: The Real Reasons "the Bay of Pigs Thing" Failed,
Chapter 11 Spring 1961–Fall 1962: Bay of Pigs Aftermath to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
Chapter 12 Late 1962: "You Won't Have Nixon to Kick Around Anymore",
Chapter 13 January–June 1963: Nixon, JFK, and Cuban Operations,
Chapter 14 Summer and Early Fall 1963: Nixon, Hunt, and JFK's Cuban Coup Plan,
Chapter 15 September–November 1963: Nixon and JFK Go to Dallas,
Chapter 16 November 22, 1963: Dallas, Washington, New York, Tampa, New Orleans,
Chapter 17 Late November and Early December 1963: National Security Cover-Ups,
Chapter 18 December 1963–Mid-1966: Nixon in New York, Helms Is Promoted, Hunt Prospers, Barker Is Fired,
PART III,
Chapter 19 1966: Nixon & Rebozo, Helms & Hunt,
Chapter 20 January–March 1967: Jack Anderson, Rosselli, and Helms,
Chapter 21 Spring–Fall 1967: Another Helms Cover-Up and Nixon Decides to Run,
Chapter 22 1968: Tragedy for America, Triumph for Nixon,
Chapter 23 1969, Nixon's First Year in Office: Leaks, Electronic Surveillance, and "Dirty Tricks",
Chapter 24 1970: Nixon's Covert Actions Involving Vietnam, Cuba, and Chile,
Chapter 25 January–July 1971: The Road to Watergate,
Chapter 26 Summer and Fall 1971: Nixon, Hunt, Barker, and the First Burglary,
Chapter 27 Nixon, the Mafia, Hoffa, the CIA, and Castro in 1971: Echoes of September 1960,
Chapter 28 The 1972 Campaign: Why Nixon Ordered the Watergate Break-Ins,
Chapter 29 Nixon, the CIA-Mafia Plots, and Break-Ins: From the Chilean Embassy to Watergate,
Chapter 30 Mid-May to Mid-June 1972: The First Three Watergate Burglary Attempts,
Chapter 31 June 16 to Late June 1972: Another Watergate Burglary, Nixon, and "the Bay of Pigs Thing",
Chapter 32 Late June 1972 to December 1972: The Cover-Up Holds and Reelection,
Chapter 33January to Early May 1973: Nixon's Pinnacle and the Gathering Storm,
Chapter 34 May 1973 to August 1974: Nixon, Rosselli, and Resignation,
Epilogue Late 1974 to 1979: Nixon Golfs with Mobsters, Investigations Continue, and Rosselli Is Murdered,
Photo section appears after page 726,
Appendix,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,