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TV, Documentary Watergate - Cover Up episode 2 -BBC
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00:07Richard Nixon flew home from Moscow triumphant after he had signed the first superpower treaty
00:13to limit nuclear weapons. He came straight to Congress. It was election year. Well of course
00:19it will not be lost on many people in his audience both in the capital and elsewhere tonight but
00:25this is a pretty good way to impress a lot of voters. The President of the United States.
00:37I suppose this is just about the peak of Richard Nixon's political career this moment.
00:48The President savored the moment then before the hard slog of the campaign took a brief break.
00:55We had a long long difficult schedule before that. I'd just returned from the Moscow summit
01:01and we'd had long meetings. I wanted everybody to have the weekend off.
01:09While Nixon was away five of his men were arrested in Washington. They were caught red-handed inside Democratic Party
01:17headquarters in a building called the Watergate.
01:21The same team had already committed a succession of crimes for the White House.
01:26The President and his inner circle saw no option but to organize a cover-up.
01:31It was a program or a concern for containment to keep this problem and this investigation and the story, the
01:41publicity on it and all that limited to the Watergate break-in.
01:46The President and his inner circle saw no one on the other side of Russia.
01:53The President of the United States.
01:56Her Republican Party on the United States.
01:59The President of the United States.
02:01The President of the United States.
02:12It was a program or a concern that was in the state of the United States.
02:13The President of the United States.
02:27The Watergate break-in had been planned, paid for and executed by Nixon's election campaign
02:33committee. But their high command wasn't in Washington on the day of the break-in.
02:39They were in California to campaign with one of the key figures in the Republican Party.
02:45Our primary purpose was to ensure that Governor Reagan felt comfortable with the campaign.
02:52So we had planned a series of events culminating in a very fancy fundraising dinner at one of
03:00the Hollywood stars' homes on a Saturday night.
03:04Back in Washington, the man who had presided over the fiasco at the Watergate had to make
03:09a difficult phone call.
03:11And I wanted it to be an absolutely secure conversation. I still had a White House pass.
03:17I went over into the White House and I went into what is known as the Situation Room.
03:21There was a KYX scrambler phone over there and it would be available.
03:26Well, of course, there's no scrambler phone in the hotel where I'm told Mr. Magruder is.
03:30So I called Magruder and I said, look, I need to speak to you securely.
03:35There is a missile base, a guided missile base run by the Air Force just in such and such a
03:40place.
03:41I go down there and hit Magruder. Why do I have to go to a missile base? Why do I
03:44have to talk to you?
03:46And I said, look, I need to speak to you securely.
03:50All I thought was there was Liddy playing his, you know, little spy games again.
03:57Magruder used the most secure line available, the hotel pay phone.
04:03Liddy told him that four of the men arrested, the same Cuban Americans they'd used before,
04:08couldn't be connected to Nixon. But the fifth man could.
04:12He was James McCord, who worked full time for the President's campaign.
04:17Now Magruder had a difficult message for his superiors.
04:21He said, we got a slight PR problem. And I said, well, if it's a PR problem, that's your bailiwick.
04:29He said, this is a PR problem that requires a lawyer.
04:35Their top lawyer was Nixon's ex-Attorney General, now campaign chairman, John Mitchell.
04:41He had approved Liddy's costly plans, but had left the day-to-day operations to Magruder.
04:46Mitchell asked Magruder point-blank, how much money did you give Liddy?
04:52And Magruder replied, $80,000.
04:56Mitchell said, he was aghast. He said, $80,000?
05:01And before he finished the sentence, Magruder said, but you authorized $200,000.
05:09Mitchell's reply was, yes, but the campaign hasn't started yet.
05:15And that I will well and faithfully discharge...
05:19And that I will well and faithfully discharge...
05:21Their thoughts turned to Richard Kleindienst, Mitchell's successor as Attorney General.
05:26He had the power to order McCord's release from jail.
05:29But to get him to do it would be an obstruction of justice.
05:33You know, I just...
05:34At some point somebody...
05:36I don't even know...
05:37I don't know if Mitchell said this.
05:39I don't know if Marty Inter said it.
05:41Hell, I may have said it.
05:42Let's call Kleindienst and find out what's going on.
05:44But the Attorney General wasn't at home.
05:47Their next call, as this phone bill from Mitchell's suite shows, went to Gordon Liddy's number
05:53at Nixon campaign headquarters.
05:55John Mitchell wanted me to get a hold of Richard Kleindienst, who was then the Attorney General
06:01of the United States, and to say that he, John Mitchell, wanted Richard Kleindienst to get
06:07McCord out of jail because McCord was the security chief of the committee to re-elect the president.
06:15Direct connection.
06:18Liddy tracked down Kleindienst at Burning Tree, an exclusive golf club outside Washington.
06:24They met in the locker room.
06:27Whereupon I said, okay, I don't know whether you've heard about the break-in or anything,
06:31and I said, I have to tell you, that was our operation, my operation, I was responsible.
06:37He said, oh, God, you know.
06:39I said, yeah, I made the mistake.
06:40He said, General, he said, John Mitchell told me to tell you to get these people out of jail right
06:46now,
06:47and I mean right now.
06:48And I said, what in the hell do you think you're talking about, Gordon?
06:51You know, Kleindienst was just apoplectic.
06:54I'm not going to do what you said, and if you say anything like that to me again, I'm going
06:59to put you in jail.
07:00And I said, yes, I said, I understand.
07:02I said, you know, God knows what could happen to you if you do a thing like that.
07:06He said, fuck what happens to me.
07:08What happens to the President of the United States that do a stupid thing like that?
07:13The newly sworn in Attorney General ordered that Watergate should proceed like any other case.
07:19Yet he sat on the information that could have cracked it wide open on its very first day.
07:25Kleindienst didn't tell the Watergate prosecutors about Gordon Liddy's confession,
07:29nor about John Mitchell's criminal request to spring McCord.
07:33I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
07:37The Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States was turning a blind eye to the cover-up.
07:44That same morning, FBI agents, his department,
07:47were struggling to make sense of the unusual haul seized from the Watergate burglars.
07:54When we went into the property room, spread out on the table were electronic devices, walkie-talkies, cameras,
08:04a huge amount of film, and a gym bag.
08:08Curious that I was, I opened the gym bag and saw more film,
08:12and then there was some tissue paper.
08:14And I reached in to pull the tissue paper and out fell a little black device with a couple of
08:20wires on it.
08:24This device was one of several electronic bugs the burglars had brought in to Democratic headquarters.
08:33The men were also caught with keys to their rooms in the Watergate Hotel.
08:37In one of them, Bernard Barkers, the FBI stumbled across an innocuous-looking clue.
08:42One of the agents, while assisting the police, was going through the dresser drawer
08:48and being as thorough as he was, you know, just flipping through there,
08:51the paper goes up and there's this envelope.
08:56I had given a letter of mine to Bernie Barker, the mail,
09:00asked him to, when he left the hotel room where Lydia and I were,
09:04heading out to the elevators, I had asked him to take this letter and drop it in the mail's chute.
09:12Howard Hunt's carelessness cost far more than the $6.36 he owed his country club.
09:20The FBI ran his name through their files and found that he was a long-time CIA officer,
09:26whom they had vetted for White House employment a year earlier.
09:30A few phone calls confirmed that he was indeed on the White House staff.
09:34For Nixon's men, keeping Watergate away from the President was going to be a nightmare.
09:43A few hours later, the Campaign High Command, their wives, and the First Lady, Pat Nixon,
09:49were at their Hollywood fundraising party.
09:53There, they hobnobbed with such stars as Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Charlton Heston.
09:59On one side, it was a great party.
10:01I mean, it was wonderful.
10:03The women were having a great time, my wife had a great time.
10:05On the other hand, I'm still on the phone talking to some of my staff,
10:10trying to figure out really what's going on back in Washington
10:13after this disaster that occurred the night before.
10:16I went to the room for something, and my wife said,
10:19Fred, what's wrong with you?
10:21She said, you look strange.
10:22You look like you're really upset about something.
10:25I said, I just can't talk about it right now,
10:28but something has occurred that could very well bring down this administration.
10:51If Nixon sensed the threat to his re-election,
10:54he showed no sign of it the next morning.
10:57He was still relaxing in Florida.
11:00I came over, I saw the Sunday morning papers,
11:03and saw an item in the Miami Herald.
11:07Nixon has always maintained that his first reaction was anger.
11:10His line was that the Democrats kept no real secrets at party headquarters.
11:15It was the most foolish, useless political caper of all time,
11:24because what reason would anybody want to go,
11:28if you're going to do any bugging,
11:29you're going to bug the Democratic national headquarters?
11:38Nixon needed someone at the White House to be full-time manager of the cover-up.
11:42The president's lawyer, John Dean, was perfectly placed to obstruct the criminal investigation.
11:48Dean is counsel to the president.
11:51He's liaison to the FBI and the police department and all of that.
11:55That is a natural part of his duties.
11:59When I arrived in the office, normal hours on Monday morning,
12:04Jeb Magruder called, told me what had happened,
12:06told me that Liddy had messed this whole thing up,
12:08and that he said, John, I can't talk to Gordon Liddy.
12:11You've got to talk to him and find out what happened and why.
12:15Dean met Liddy for his debriefing on a park bench across from an art gallery
12:20just yards from the White House.
12:22I put him completely in the picture in a way so that he,
12:26being knowledgeable about these things,
12:28Dean could attempt to control the investigation and thereby the damage.
12:36I then finally said to him something that disturbed Dean.
12:42I had in my head knowledge which could bring down a president of the United States.
12:50He said, John, I'm a soldier.
12:52He said, see that street corner over there?
12:55If you want me to stand on that street corner,
12:57you just tell me when and where I'll be there and you can shoot me.
13:03And John Dean said, well, gee, Gordon, I don't think we've gone that far yet.
13:07When Dean got back to his office,
13:09he discovered the crimes he would have to cover up didn't end at the campaign committee.
13:14The guilt extended far into the White House.
13:16Within the White House, I was the president's line to the re-election committee.
13:23And Gordon Strawn was my line.
13:24And Strawn had the responsibility assigned by me to stay abreast of all that was going on.
13:33Gordon Strawn asked for an urgent meeting with John Dean.
13:37He said, John, my files are clean.
13:40He said, I talked to Haldeman over the weekend, and I've gone through everything,
13:45and there's nothing there that's going to embarrass us.
13:51I know that Gordon Strawn has testified that I told him to make sure the files were clean.
13:59It was in the context of their clearing files over at the re-election committee.
14:07Haldeman had ordered the shredding of all the political espionage memos sent to him by the campaign committee.
14:13These were evidence of criminal complicity in Watergate at the highest level.
14:20This was the most troublesome report I had had in my initial review of what was going on.
14:27Because I said, if Strawn knows, Haldeman knows.
14:31If Haldeman knows, the president knows.
14:36So I looked around and I said, this place is in a world of hurt.
14:44On day three of Watergate, the White House was already up to its neck in the obstruction of justice.
14:50There would be no going back.
14:52And the president's campaign committee still held the original evidence of the crime.
14:57The transcript of conversations bugged at the Watergate, codenamed Gemstone.
15:03I said to Mitchell, what should I do with the Gemstone files?
15:06And he said, I think you ought to have a fire in your fireplace tonight.
15:09Well, of course, it was late in June, rather unusual time to have a fire,
15:15but that's what he wanted to do, and that's actually what I did.
15:25Not all John Mitchell's problems were so easy to deal with.
15:29His flamboyant wife, Martha, a darling of the campaign platform,
15:33had a habit of making indiscreet phone calls.
15:38All right, Isabelle, here's the scoop.
15:41I've never talked to her yet, but what I haven't gotten a good news story,
15:44so I automatically, she was in California,
15:47and the Democratic headquarters alleged bugging incident had broken out,
15:53and that was my immediate question.
15:54Well, what do you think about that?
15:56And she said, I've given John an ultimatum.
15:59This really set her off.
16:01While she talked to the UPI reporter, Martha Mitchell's security guard
16:05phoned Fred LaRue on another line.
16:09He said, Fred, Miss Mitchell's on the phone with Helen Thomas.
16:16She's telling her a bunch of stuff about Watergate.
16:20And I said, well, she really doesn't know anything about Watergate.
16:23And he said, well, she's telling her a bunch of stuff anyway.
16:26What should I do?
16:28And I said, well, just go pull the phone out of the wall.
16:30And pretty soon, I mean, we weren't into a conversation,
16:34but I heard her saying, get away, get away.
16:37And I didn't know what was happening, and then there was a phone disconnect.
16:41To keep her from talking about Watergate,
16:44Martha Mitchell was forcibly sedated and held incommunicado.
16:49It was easy enough for her husband to paint the affair
16:52as the antics of a hysterical female.
16:55Finally got him on the phone, and he was not too perturbed.
16:59He said, I love that little girl.
17:01He said, so it seemed that everything was going to be all right.
17:07Late that Monday night, the president returned to Washington,
17:10and took the reins into his own hands.
17:15In the first few days after Watergate,
17:19the president was proactive in this thing.
17:23I think partly because he's a compulsive conspiracy theorist
17:30and just couldn't leave the stuff alone.
17:34The president's conversations with his aides,
17:37which were automatically captured by his secret taping system,
17:40proved that he devoted hour after hour to Watergate.
17:45For 20 years, Nixon managed to prevent access to most of these tapes.
17:50Now, a tape not previously played in public
17:53reveals that Nixon was directing the conspiracy
17:56even earlier than had been known.
17:58He acted through his closest associates,
18:02John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, and Chief of Staff Haldeman.
18:14The question now about Mitchell's concern is the FBI.
18:19And, uh, there's the question of, uh,
18:43that John and I raised, both of us have been trying to think of, uh,
18:48step one step away from him and look at his strategy
18:51and see whether there's something that we can do
18:54other than just sitting here and watching him drop on us
18:57and then by a bit as he goes along.
19:00The president had an idea.
19:03Howard Hunt, before Watergate and his job at the White House,
19:06had been in the CIA.
19:07He was one of the officers in charge of the agency's 1961
19:11Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
19:15Perhaps the White House could use Hunt's past to confuse the FBI.
19:23I mean, he's done a lot of things.
19:27What I've got to get is that there could be isolated instances.
19:31I mean, in fact, a man's worked for various things.
19:33We've got to be careful pushing that very hard
19:38because he was working on a lot of stuff.
19:41The problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements
19:47and if they start a fishing thing on this,
19:49they're going to start picking up traps
19:50and that's what appeals to me about trying to get one jump ahead of them.
20:00Someone else who could lead the FBI to those other involvements
20:04was Gordon Liddy.
20:06He laid out for Nixon's campaign managers just what could come out.
20:12Liddy's warning was delivered back in the Watergate complex.
20:15It was not only seen of the crime,
20:18but also home to many members of the Nixon set,
20:21including Mitchell's close confidant, Fred LaRue.
20:25Gordon commenced to tell us there were other things that had been done
20:30that we should be aware of.
20:31I said, well, what other things?
20:35He said, well, we've had an operation going,
20:40or Hunt's had this operation going.
20:42We've done certain things for the White House.
20:46Liddy told the tale of the White House plumbers' unit
20:50and the crimes he and the Watergate team had carried out for the President.
20:55The most serious was a break-in mounted by Howard Hunt
20:58to neutralize Daniel Ellsberg,
21:01a leading opponent of Nixon's Vietnam policy.
21:04They had tried to steal his psychiatric files
21:08and use them to smear him.
21:10If that came out, Nixon could kiss goodbye to re-election.
21:15Well, when he started disclosing all these nefarious activities
21:20that he was involved in at the behest of the White House,
21:30and what he inferred was with the full authority
21:33of the President of the United States just appalled me.
21:37Martian was throwing pencils up in the air and going, whew, like that,
21:41and leaning over backwards in his chair and going forward
21:43and just getting very excited and so on and so forth.
21:48Liddy also told them how they tried to break in
21:51to Democratic candidate George McGovern's headquarters.
21:54Liddy had his own way of dimming the lights outside.
21:58I just shot out the first three lamps.
22:01The second three I found I couldn't get a clear shot at
22:05because of a steel girder over-structure.
22:09So I called over the ever-helpful Frank Sturgis,
22:14who's a big bull of a man, and he bent over,
22:17and I climbed up on his shoulders
22:19and was able to get up onto the steel scaffolding,
22:21and from there I shot out the remaining three lamps.
22:25I said, Gordon, you told me that none of the Cubans could identify you.
22:30Certainly the man whose shoulders you sat on
22:32to shoot the light out could identify you.
22:35He said, no, he couldn't. He never saw my face.
22:37It was a frightening experience.
22:39I mean, here we are trying to zero in on, you know,
22:42on the campaign, on McGovern,
22:44and now we find we've got, you know, we've got all sorts of problems.
22:49Those problems could be contained only if the break-in team kept their mouths shut.
22:55Liddy explained what had to be done.
23:00The usual thing in a situation like this in the intelligence service
23:03is that they will have bail provided for them,
23:05they will have legal counsel provided for them,
23:08there will be support for their families.
23:13Mardian and LaRue reported to John Mitchell,
23:16Nixon's closest political friend.
23:18He had to decide whether to honour the commitment to pay hush money.
23:23I said, John, you know, it's not just the Watergate.
23:25We have other potential problems here that could easily come up.
23:34And I guess we looked at each other and at that point,
23:39we both knew those commitments had to be kept.
23:44That same evening, Mitchell got a call from the President,
23:48the first since the Watergate break-in.
23:52He was terribly chagrined that people in his organisation
23:56could have engaged in such a thing and that, as I recall it,
24:00he said, I just wasn't policing the people in my organisation
24:07as well as I should have.
24:09The President called me after I had gone home.
24:12He called from his EOB office and mentioned the fact
24:16that he had talked to John Mitchell
24:18and told him not to worry about the Watergate stuff,
24:20that we may be able to keep it under control.
24:24Five days after the break-in,
24:26the burglars were brought to court to be released on bail.
24:29The President's men set about organising their hush money.
24:33Richard Nixon's private lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, got the assignment.
24:38Herb Kalmbach was a close personal friend of mine
24:41and I trusted him in every respect.
24:43So when he came to me and said he'd like to have all the money
24:49I could find up to $100,000.
24:52I said, I can't find $100,000, but I know where there is some money.
24:56But can you tell me anything more about it?
24:58He said, I can only tell you that it's a matter of the White House
25:02needing some money related to the campaign.
25:05Kalmbach collected $75,000 of Nixon campaign funds,
25:09but he had to find somebody to deliver it.
25:14I got a call to come down to Washington
25:17and to meet with Mr. Herbert Kalmbach.
25:20I came to the hotel in Washington, D.C.
25:24I came up right away, he didn't have his socks on
25:27and he apologised for that.
25:28And I'd been in the Army and the Navy
25:30and he apologised for not having his socks on.
25:32At any rate, he got into this story
25:34that he had met with John Dean,
25:39a park bench across from the White House.
25:41Dean said that on the highest authority
25:44it was decided that Herb Kalmbach would provide funds
25:47and that Tony Alasiewicz, the only one that they could trust,
25:51would distribute said funds
25:53to those who broke into the Watergate building.
25:59So now he has an attache case
26:03and he's got $75,000 in there.
26:06The $75,000 now, he's taking it out of the attache case
26:10and putting it on a bed.
26:12Now, $75,000, you know, is quite a bit of lettuce.
26:15And there was a laundry bag in the closet,
26:17one of these very thin brown paper
26:20that you put your laundry in and leave it out the door.
26:22And I plucked all that cabbage, I put it into the bag,
26:28tied it up with the string, maybe twice over,
26:31put it under my arm and said,
26:33we'll be in touch.
26:34Now I'll await your instructions.
26:37On June the 23rd, day seven,
26:40the nation woke up to discover that much of the eastern United States
26:44was under floods.
26:45But Nixon's mind was on Watergate.
26:47That day, he would issue an order which, when it became public two years later,
26:53ended his presidency.
26:55What led to the order was a meeting between the cover-up's manager,
26:58John Dean, and FBI director, Pat Gray,
27:01who had alarming news about the investigation.
27:05On that morning, Dean called me with a report,
27:10as he did from time to time when there was some development on Watergate,
27:15in which he said, and I'm reading from my notes here,
27:19my notes say, investigation out of control,
27:21Gray doesn't know what to do.
27:24Then I say, they've found money out of Mexican bank.
27:27We'll know who the depositors were today.
27:32FBI agents had traced the cash seized on the Watergate burglars
27:37to a bank in Mexico.
27:39If the FBI weren't stopped immediately,
27:42they would discover that this money laundered in Mexico
27:44came from the Nixon campaign.
27:48Fortunately for the White House,
27:50FBI director Gray drew the wrong conclusions
27:52from this foreign connection.
27:54On the evening of June 22nd,
27:57I met with Pat Gray over at his office in the FBI.
27:59And he now was convinced after looking at everything
28:02that the most likely explanation for what had gone on
28:05was this was a CIA operation they'd stumbled into.
28:11Nixon's men knew the CIA wasn't behind Watergate.
28:15The FBI's confusion, however,
28:17gave them a plausible pretext to shut down the investigation.
28:21Nixon would say it was jeopardizing national security.
28:25After talking to Dean,
28:27Haldeman briefed the president in the Oval Office.
28:30The tape of this meeting would be the smoking gun
28:33that ended the Nixon presidency.
28:35I said, now on the investigation,
28:37you know the Democratic break-in thing.
28:40I mean, it wasn't Watergate then.
28:42It was the Democratic break-in thing.
28:57Haldeman presented the president with the plan.
29:00Again, I'm saying what Dean,
29:02what Mitchell recommended and Dean concurred with,
29:04according to what Dean told me,
29:06is for us to have Walters,
29:08Walters is the deputy director of the CIA at that time,
29:11General Vernon Walters,
29:12call Pat Gray,
29:13Pat Gray was the director of the FBI at that time,
29:16acting director,
29:17and just say,
29:18stay the hell out of this.
29:19This is a business here we don't want you to go any further on.
29:22And that will fit rather well,
29:24because the FBI needs to do our work in a case.
29:28At this point,
29:29you know that's what it is.
29:32It's the CIA.
29:33But would the CIA bosses cooperate?
29:37Nixon told Haldeman to threaten the director, Richard Helms,
29:40that if the FBI went ahead,
29:42his agency's worst humiliation,
29:44the 1961 fiasco at the Bay of Pigs,
29:47would be dragged up again.
29:49He said, when you get in,
29:50when you get in the people,
29:52say, look, this is the president now saying to me,
29:55look, the problem is that this will open the whole,
29:57the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
30:01the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
30:08It's a sort of comedy.
30:09The president believes that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
30:17And if you call it actually out,
30:19the countries don't go any further.
30:24My purpose,
30:26my primary purpose,
30:28as is clearly indicated by the tape.
30:31And I don't dispute it at all.
30:33I wanted to stop the investigation, if possible.
30:41We got word that Haldeman and Ehrlichman
30:45wanted to meet with Helms and Walters
30:47at one o'clock at the White House.
30:50And we went in to see Mr. Ehrlichman,
30:55who talked in a general way about the embarrassment of this
30:57and so forth and so on.
30:59And people had shown excessive zeal.
31:02And then Mr. Haldeman came in.
31:04The president has asked us to tell you that he wants,
31:09I think I said Dick Walters, to contact Pat Gray at the FBI
31:12and explain to them that exploring these Cubans and their ties
31:16and all that sort of thing, and the money source,
31:20may lead into all sorts of other things that we shouldn't be getting into,
31:24and that they should not go any further in that exploration.
31:29At that point, Haldeman carried out the president's ploy.
31:32He warned Helms that Watergate could reopen the Bay of Pig scandal.
31:37Helms, a typically cold-as-a-cucumber, icy, super-spy type guy,
31:45came totally unglued.
31:47Frankly, to this day, when I think back on that meeting,
31:50it's a long time ago,
31:52but it didn't seem to me that any of these things made any sense much.
31:56He leaped up in enormous excitement, concern, and panic
32:01and said, this has nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs,
32:04and there's no problem about the Bay of Pigs,
32:05and the CIA had nothing to do with this, and on and on and on and on.
32:09And he finally calmed down,
32:11and they agreed that Walters would go talk to the FBI.
32:14You know, in this government,
32:17if a president tells you that something is going on,
32:23you, at your own peril, decide right then and there that it isn't going on.
32:29Helms prudently complied.
32:31He sent General Waters to the FBI
32:33to ask Gray to cut off the investigation in Mexico forthwith.
32:38The case agent, the agent in charge, Angie Lano, came to me
32:41and told me that there'd been a halt.
32:43I'd asked him, you know, what was happening,
32:45what was going on with the investigation in Mexico,
32:48and Angie told me there'd been a halt put on it by the CIA.
32:52I'm getting telephone calls from the assistant United States Attorney,
32:57Earl Silbert, saying,
32:59Angelo, what's going on?
33:01And I'm saying, Earl, what can I tell you?
33:03Every time we want to do something, somebody says,
33:06hold, wait, stop, no interview, wait, hold, stop.
33:12The FBI agents didn't know the half of it.
33:15Inside the White House, Howard Hunt had a safe crammed with files
33:19on Watergate and earlier covert operations.
33:22John Dean had it drilled open.
33:25I realized that some of this material is extremely explosive politically.
33:31Some of it is probably direct evidence of crime.
33:36I went over to Ehrlichman's office to explain to him what we'd found in the safe.
33:40And he told me that he had proposed to deliver these contents personally
33:47to Pat Gray, who was the acting director of the FBI,
33:51and leave it to Gray's discretion then,
33:54so that if there were an investigation of what became of Howard Hunt's possessions,
33:59we could very truthfully say that we had turned them over to the investigators.
34:03That seemed like a reasonable formula to me.
34:05I said, Gray is going to be in my office this afternoon at 5 o'clock.
34:09Why don't you bring him over then?
34:12I distinctly recall Mr. Dean saying that these files were political dynamite
34:17and clearly should not see the light of day.
34:21It is true that neither Mr. Ehrlichman nor Mr. Dean expressly instructed me to destroy the files.
34:30But there was and is no doubt in my mind that destruction was intended.
34:39Gray, a Nixon loyalist, took the files home and put them under a pile of shirts.
34:44Six months later, he would burn them with his Christmas wrapping paper.
34:49While their boss was burning evidence, FBI agents were uncovering more.
34:54Combing through one of the burglar's address books, the agents were baffled by this entry.
34:58They discovered that Howard Hunt's telephone in the White House, WH, number 202-456-2282,
35:06wasn't being billed in the normal way.
35:08The bill was being sent to a girl over in Alexandria, Virginia.
35:13So we said, well, that's strange.
35:14So we went to Alexandria and found out that she was an employee at the White House named Kathleen Chenow.
35:22Kathleen Chenow, secretary to Hunt and Liddy when they worked in the White House plumbers unit,
35:27had typed all their memos, including break-in plans.
35:31She had knowledge that could bring the investigators right to the Oval Office.
35:36She happened to be on holiday in England, in Birmingham.
35:40The FBI sent off a teletype to their man in London asking him to track down and question Chenow.
35:46But the White House had been tipped off.
35:49Immediately we realized that, you know, if she was broadsided by agents, no telling what she'd say.
35:55So we decided we had to find her first.
35:58And I don't think the request was over here five or six hours when the telephone rang again and said,
36:07hold.
36:08And I said, on what?
36:10And they said, no interview of Chenow until the White House is going to bring her back.
36:16I then talked to my deputy, who really enjoyed these kind of little missions.
36:22I guess he was a former army intelligence man, and maybe this was a harking back to the old days.
36:27But he went over to England and traveled around the countryside until he found her and then flew her back.
36:34Well, I couldn't believe that I was 23 years old and someone from the White House was coming to England
36:43to talk to me about a burglary in Washington and that within 90 minutes I'd be back in London
36:50catching a plane back to Washington to be interviewed by the FBI.
37:05The next morning after they arrived, we impressed upon her the importance to not spill the beans, if you will.
37:11We told her, first of all, these things were not relevant to the Watergate investigation.
37:14He told me to answer all the questions truthfully and to the best of my ability, but to remember that
37:23I was under the cloak of national security,
37:27that I had had many top secret and intelligence clearances.
37:30They came under this broad category of national security, which was a wonderful tool for us to sweep a lot
37:41of things that we didn't want out under the rug.
37:44The FBI questioned Chenow, but got nothing out of her.
37:49Two vital weeks had been lost since FBI Director Gray had stymied the investigation at CIA request.
37:56But his staff was straining at the leash.
38:00He called me and said he couldn't suspend this anymore.
38:03So I went to see him and I said, I have carefully investigated this matter.
38:06There are no operations of the CIA that will in any way be jeopardized by this and you're perfectly free
38:10to do it.
38:12Nixon, on holiday in California, learned that Walters and Gray couldn't impede the investigation any longer.
38:19He put the best possible face on it.
38:22I called Pat Gray to congratulate the FBI on a very successful operation they had in apprehending some hijackers.
38:32He then brought up the subject of the Watergate investigation.
38:37He said that there are some people around you who are mortally wounding you, or might mortally wound you,
38:46because they're trying to restrict this investigation.
38:50I said, Pat, you go right ahead with your investigation.
38:55Well, it's easy to miss the irony, perhaps, in this, which was that this whole thing was Richard Nixon's idea
39:01to involve the CIA in deflecting the FBI.
39:08The President promptly came up with a more brazen scheme to scupper the Watergate case.
39:14To pull it off, he needed some new prisoners of a different persuasion.
39:19What he would do is cause a bunch of Democrats to be arrested,
39:26and then he would grant clemency to both Democrats and Republicans.
39:31Ehrlichman's note shows that they would tell the Secret Service to book and charge anti-Nixon demonstrators.
39:38Then, the day after the election, the President would issue a general pardon and order the prosecutions ended.
39:53But there were still four months till polling day.
40:17Nixon's re-election machine looked unstoppable.
40:23But he knew that if the Watergate burglar started talking, it would be all over.
40:31So his campaign funds were used to buy more than just rallies, they bought silence.
40:39Howard Hunt and his wife began taking delivery of the hush money to distribute to the burglars.
40:56I'm going to do these drops at the airport.
40:59And I would, because lockers were always handy.
41:03I'd get a locker number, I'd take the key, put the money in the locker, take the key out,
41:08and I would tape it underneath the telephone.
41:11Then I would call on another phone, I would call the person, whatever name we used,
41:15Mrs. Hunt in that time.
41:16One time, Mr. Hunt appeared and picked it up.
41:18And I'd say, the key is taped under, you take that key and go to the locker and pick up
41:24your drop.
41:26And that's the way we did it.
41:28And it worked very well.
41:31Nixon's men paid out over a quarter of a million dollars in hush money that summer.
41:35It did the trick.
41:36The burglars kept silent.
41:38So too did Howard Hunt and his partner in crime.
41:42Gordon Liddy had now become a prime suspect.
41:45We called over to FBI headquarters and we said, we identified another person.
41:50Can you run this name?
41:51And within minutes, they come back and say, gee, Gordon Liddy, former FBI agent.
41:56Well, you know, by now I'm going, you know, what is this?
42:01CIA people, FBI people, you know, what is it?
42:05You know, real, what is going on here?
42:07Who's hiring all these people and why?
42:09The way the conspiracy appeared to us to be shaping up with Liddy at the top based on the evidence
42:14we had,
42:15if it went higher and we didn't know whether it went higher,
42:18the logical person based both on position and responsibilities would have been Jeb Magruder.
42:25Magruder, as the deputy campaign chief, had to explain away nearly $100,000 that Liddy used for Watergate.
42:34Magruder concocted a story that the money was budgeted for campaign security,
42:39but that Liddy, all on his own, decided to spend it on the break-in.
42:44Now, what I had to do was, number one, I had to go to the prosecutors and tell that story
42:49and make that believable, but number two, I had to have somebody to back it up.
42:53Well, I refer to this as the sting.
42:57I was in my office and Jeb came to the door and asked if I could join him in his
43:02office.
43:03Well, I pitched it to Bart basically on the basis that I needed his help,
43:06that we were in a quandary that this guy Liddy had gone off on his own,
43:11had done these things that had really created problems,
43:14but we had to have some way to justify giving him the money.
43:18Magruder asked Porter to corroborate his story of a meeting
43:22at which Liddy's $100,000 budget was supposedly agreed.
43:27Basically, the bottom line was, if anybody asks you,
43:30it's kind of if anybody asks you, whether it was an attorney or whoever,
43:33anybody asks you, it would be helpful if you could remember a number like around $100,000
43:36that we discussed at that time.
43:40And so, without much ado, my big error, of course, was that I said,
43:47yeah, I would do that.
43:49They would have to testify under oath before the Watergate grand jury.
43:53If the prosecutors and the jurors didn't swallow their story,
43:57Magruder would be charged.
43:58Inevitably, he would drag Nixon's top aides down with him.
44:05We were all aware that I was going to go up and perjure myself,
44:08and that was the way the cover-up was going to work.
44:11You go up and you testify to why we spent the money with Liddy,
44:15and then you bring Porter in and he backs up your story.
44:20We were not five-year-olds.
44:23It's a lawyer's distinction, but I must say, and it's self-serving,
44:28that I did advise him.
44:29I said, Jeb, I can't tell you to go in front of that grand jury to perjure yourself,
44:33but I will tell you, I'll give you a good question,
44:36and I know exactly the kind of questions they're going to ask you.
44:38And so I spent about a couple hours just grilling him
44:42and getting him ready for his perjury.
44:46Magruder swore his oath and told his lies.
44:48Then it was Porter's turn.
44:52I had to repeat this particular story about the $100,000 amount,
44:59and all the rest of it was, all the rest of what I said there was quite factual.
45:04My mention of the $100,000, as we know, was not.
45:10Porter appeared before the grand jury and made a very credible impression.
45:14His father was a judge, I think he'd been an ex-Marine,
45:18and his whole presence carried with it an air of credibility.
45:23And he corroborated Mr. Magruder's account of the purpose and use of the money,
45:28and that certainly was of great assistance to Mr. Magruder.
45:33Magruder made it.
45:34Federal indictments were returned in Washington today in the Watergate bugging affair.
45:39There are no complaints.
45:39Sources here at the Justice Department say the investigation by both the FBI and the grand jury is over.
45:45There is no evidence, they insist, that anyone else is involved.
45:48The last witness was called this morning, virtually guaranteeing there will be no trial before election day.
45:55On September the 15th, the four Cubans, McCord, Hunt and Liddy were charged. No one else.
46:07We had contained the matter during the campaign because I didn't feel at that time that any erosion of the
46:16strength of the President in the country,
46:19of his support in the country, and also I didn't feel that his defeat in an election would be in
46:28the best interest of the country.
46:29On September 15th, I came back to my office. Jane, my secretary, said,
46:35the President wants to see you over in the Oval Office. I was really quite surprised.
46:39The basic reason for the meeting was to give John Dean a feeling that the President was pleased with his
46:44work
46:44and was thanking him for it, patting him on the shoulder and saying, good boy, well done.
46:48In essence, the President said, you know, just want to tell you what a good job you've done with the
46:53cover-up.
46:53What surprised me is I really, for the first time, began to see who Richard Nixon was in this meeting.
47:01He sort of let down and began to tell me about how we've got to get after our enemies
47:07that have done us wrong during this whole Watergate matter after the election.
47:11I don't know about the most comprehensive notes on all those that have tried to do this in,
47:17because they didn't have to do it. They didn't have to do it.
47:21Now they're doing this quite differently, and they're asking for it, and they're going to get it.
47:26We haven't used the bureau. We haven't used the Justice Department.
47:29But things are going to change now, and they're going to change, and they're going to get it right.
47:43On November the 7th, 1972, Richard Nixon carried 49 out of 50 states.
47:49He was re-elected President by the biggest margin in history.
47:54It looked as though he'd got away with it.
47:56New York Army
47:57No, no...!
48:24New York Army
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