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Watergate

By VVAW

In late June of 1970, Richard Nixon sought to establish his own personal domestic espionage unit. John W. Dean was transferred from the Justice Dept. to head the unit under the cover of White House Counsel. While in the Justice Dept., he had specialized in infiltration and undercover work in radical groups. Ehrlichman staff aide John Caulfield was appointed as Dean's deputy. The original planning meeting was attended by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), the Justice Dept., and others. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover then vetoed the plan as it called for clandestine domestic operations by the CIA which is illegal and similar activities by other agencies which included authorized burglaring and wire-tapping against both U.S. citizens and foreign embassies.

Even with Hoover's veto, Nixon had no worries about being able to implement the plan. Since taking office in 1969, the number two positions of some of these agencies had been taken over by Nixon 'loyalists', i.e. William Colby (CIA), Thomas Sullivan (FBI), etc. Nixon had no problems with the NSA as it's chairman was Henry Kissinger; or the Justice Dept. as it was headed by long-time friends John Mitchell, Richard Kleindeinst, Robert Mardian and Henry Peterson.

To get around Hoover's veto, the White House merely led Hoover to believe that the plan had been shelved and the unit was then hidden in the White House stronghold, the Justice Dept., given the name of Inter-Departmental Information Unit and placed under the control of the Internal Security Division which Mardian headed.

Here's how the unit functioned. Intelligence data was received by all the various agencies, passed along thru regular channels within each agency, and when it reached the unit's contact man in each agency, the data was then rechanneled to the unit's central gathering point in Mardian's office. Mardian's office then passed along the information to Dean and Caulfield in the White House where it was then funneled to Charles Colson, Emil Krogh, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord and others working either in the white House or CREEP.

However, when the data was received from Mardian's office by the White House, it was often severely distorted or else totally fabricated. Nixon believed certain things to be true of the victims of the espionage and when the information received didn't substantiate it, Nixon believed that the agencies were falling down on the job and criticized them for it. So in order to please their "commander-in-chief", Mardian, Guy Goodwin, and others deliberately forged the data they passed on to the White House.

These falsified intelligence reports were used as the basis for all the criminal acts committed by members of the White House, Creep, and agents of the participating agencies. Clandestine operations were directed against the Canadian embassy in an attempt to obtain information about U.S. draft resisters, the Chilean embassy to steal documents pertaining to the ITT/CIA scandal regarding Chile, and at least one Arab embassy suspected of giving financial aid to the Black Panther Party, along with other embassies suspected of giving aid to the Panthers, the Weathermen, and VVAW/WSO. In late June of 1972 John Caulfield was ordered by Colson to burglarize the Brookings Institute which was planning to publish a critical study of the Vietnam War; and when Caulfield couldn't gain entry as security was too tight, Colson then instructed Caulfield to plant a firebomb in the building and steal the documents in the ensuing confusion.

Wholesale burglaries were committed all over the country of offices of movement lawyers working on the defense of radicals on trial resulting from grand juries led by Guy Goodwin, chief hatchet-man for the Justice Dept. and full participant in the 'special unit.' The burglaries that have come to light so far include the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, the office of an attorney for the VVAW/WSO Gainesville 8, various offices connected with the defense of the Seattle 7, the Chicago Weathermen, Detroit 13, and the Harrisburg 7, all of which, with the exception of Ellsberg, were being prosecuted also by Goodwin; and finally the office of Dade County attorney Richard Gerstein who was investigating the secret CREEP campaign funds that were 'laundered' in mexico and then deposited in a Miami bank.

It is hopeful that as time goes on, the continuing investigations into the criminal activities of this unit will uncover more incidents such as these in order to give us a much clearer picture of how wide-spread their activities were. But from what we know even now, we can see that Nixon had planned from the first day in office back in 1969 to completely control the government of the United States by placing 'loyalists' in key positions. The number-two men in almost every governmental agency including the departments within the cabinet, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, every intelligence agency under the control of the executive branch and then some, were 'Nixon Loyalists." All were in a position to seize the top spot of their respective agencies at the proper time.

What really is, or was, Nixon's final goal? And has the Watergate scandal and subsequent disclosures stopped his plans, even temporarily? Perhaps Senator Sam Ervin best summed up the situation when he said, "These people had the same mentality employed by the Gestapo in Nazi Germany." There's no doubt they have the mentality of the Gestapo. What's really dangerous is they also have the politics of the Gestapo to go along with it.