’70s CIA director misled FBI, report says
Agency tried to sully reputation of man in Pentagon Papers leak
CIA Director Richard Helms misled the FBI in June 1972 to cover up his agency’s role in smearing the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked a secret history of the Vietnam War to the press, a newly released CIA document shows.
In a June 28, 1972, memo to his deputy, Vernon Walters, Helms wrote that he asked the FBI to “desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” Those details are included in a 155-page CIA inspector general’s report that was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch and released Tuesday. Other elements of the document were first reported Tuesday by Fox News.
Helms’ misdirection enabled the CIA’s role in the Pentagon Papers case to go undiscovered for 11 months amid a growing political scandal that would force President Richard Nixon from office and lead to an extensive investigation into abuses by the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community.
The FBI was investigating a break-in June 17, 1972, at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington. Five burglars with ties to the CIA were arrested inside the DNC offices; one, James McCord, was a retired CIA official and the head of security for Nixon’s re-election committee. Two other team members, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, were monitoring the break-in attempt from a nearby hotel.
The CIA report was produced by the agency’s inspector general in 1974 to examine the agency’s ties to the break-in and whether CIA officials were involved in the operation’s planning and execution.
Hunt, the group’s leader, was a former CIA agent and member of a secret White House investigative team known as the Plumbers. FBI investigators recovered a phone book of Hunt’s that included the names of two CIA officials, John Caswell and Karl Wagner, whom the bureau wanted to interview.
Helms told acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray on June 28 that Caswell and Wagner were active CIA agents who should not be interviewed. Agents had already talked to Caswell, who told them little, but Gray ordered the FBI not to interview Wagner, records show.
Wagner was the CIA official who coordinated the agency’s extensive assistance to Hunt, who obtained disguises, fake identification, special cameras, psychological evaluations and the use of a safe house as part of the White House-led campaign to investigate Ellsberg.
At the time of the CIA’s assistance to Hunt in the summer and fall of 1971, Wagner was the executive assistant to Deputy CIA Director Robert Cushman. It has long been known that Cushman, who worked for Nixon when he was vice president, helped Hunt get CIA assets. It was Wagner, who facilitated most of the agency’s assistance of Hunt, and it is that role that is illuminated in great detail in the CIA report.
Wagner recorded a meeting July 22, 1971, between Cushman and Hunt in which they discussed the agency’s help for Hunt. When Cushman left the CIA in December 1971 to become the commandant of the Marine Corps, Cushman’s secretary and Wagner “had gone through all his files and records, including room and telephone transcripts, destroying some, sending others to archives and in a few cases retaining items which they felt had continuing relevance,” the CIA report said. Wagner kept the Cushman-Hunt transcript in his safe but could not find it when the post-Watergate break-in investigation started.
On July 22, 1971, the CIA report said, “Wagner was asked by Hunt not to identify him to other personnel or to indicate it was a sensitive matter requested by the White House.”
Gray complied with Helms’ request to not interview Wagner, but he eventually concluded that the White House was trying to hinder the FBI investigation into Watergate. In a 2008 book written with his son Ed, Gray said he realized later that Helms had lied when he asked him not to interview Wagner.
“In our telephone call, and again later in the investigation when he held back physical evidence, Helms committed obstruction of justice,” Gray wrote in his memoir, In Nixon’s Web.
Ellsberg, a former contractor for the Pentagon who was working for a think-tank, had stolen the Pentagon’s secret history of the U.S. role in Vietnam and given it to The New York Times, which first published details in June 1971. The history, soon dubbed the Pentagon Papers, showed how U.S. officials from the 1950s through 1968 lied about American policy in Vietnam and how the nation steadily drifted into a war that would cost more than 58,000 U.S. service members their lives.
Although Nixon was not mentioned in the papers, which were compiled before he took office in January 1969, he was concerned that other documents concerning his sabotage of the Paris peace talks in 1968 could leak. He asked the FBI, led by Director J. Edgar Hoover, to investigate, but Hoover refused. Nixon authorized the creation of a special investigations unit at the White House, which soon became called the Plumbers, to investigate and to smear Ellsberg ’s reputation in the press.
The Plumbers included Hunt, Liddy, former National Security Council aide David Young and White House aide Egil Krogh, who was the group’s nominal leader.
Hunt and his colleagues learned that Ellsberg had seen a Beverly Hills, Calif., psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, in 1969 and 1970. They suspected Ellsberg ’s file in Fielding ’s office contained potentially damaging revelations about Ellsberg ’s mental health.
Using CIA-provided aliases, disguises, cameras and electronics gear, Hunt and Liddy led two break-ins into Fielding ’s office in September 1971. Those break-ins would become part of one of the two articles of impeachment against Nixon in July 1974.