Watergate- Bringing It All Back Home

WATERGATE - BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Watergaters Headed Fed'l Anti-Weed Drive; Busting Leary Led Liddy to White House

Convicted Watergater & former narc G. Cordon Liddy

Editor 's Note: The on-going Watergate revelations are making it obvious, to those who had any lingering doubts, that the Nixon administration is and always has been made up of men who value only their own power and the extension of it by any means. What is less obvious, in the straight media's coverage of Watergate and in the staid investigations of Senator Sam Ervin 's Committee, is that the members of Nixon's secret spy squad did not begin their nefarious careers at the Watergate, nor even with the burglary-pillage of private medical files on Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon 's goons, according to Michael Aldrich, Editor of the Marijuana Review, have been carrying out their leader's dirty work as spies, narks, robbers and provocateurs ever since Nixon first laid hands on Presidential power in 1968. Among the Watergate conspirators are the creators and supervisors of the federal government's hysterical marijuana project, "Operation Intercept," and some of the goons were narking around the country for years before joining Nixon at the White House. Consider their histories, if you dare, as outlined below by AIdrich.

From Narks to Waterbuggers . . .

Watergate is just the hole that pierced the dam; now that it has burst, corruption oozes from every pore of the Nixon regime. Watergate was engineered by the same sordid mentalities that produced years of harassment against Tim Leary, national and international; Operation Intercept, the 1969 fiasco which captured a few pounds of grass, interfered not a whit with pot smuggling, but brought Mexico groveling to its knees in agonized cooperation with U.S. drug police; and CIA complicity in the Southeast Asían narcotics trade. The almost unfettered arrogance of power granted to narcotics enforcers by John Mitchell's and Richard Kleindienst's Justice Department since President Nixon fïrst took office is precisely the same kind of power evidenced in Watergate. And it goes deeper than that: The tactics used at Watergate, including illegal entry and search (No-Knock), clandestine unauthorized wiretaps, and the guilty post-operation cover-ups, perjury, lies, and payoffs - all have been established by law or in fact as standard Nark procedure. Moreover, most of those implicated in the Watergate affair have been narks at one time or another, and the organizational structures of the numerous Interdepartmental Task Forces, Justice Department strike teams, and the various secret intelligence gathering groups in the White House and CRP are mirror images of each other. The same people keep reappearing in different guises; drug law enforcement under President Nixon, like all the spy networks associated with Watergate, has been a series of crazed adventures by fanatic right-wing Narks in a Circus Hall of Horrors.

G. Cordon Liddy, for example, paved his way to fame and glory by busting Leary's Millbrook farm countless times in 1967, when he was Assistant D.A. of Dutchess County, N.Y. His personal vendetta against Millbrook's hapless freaks earned him a cushy appointment in 1969 as a special assistant in the Treasury Department - one of the prime movers in that year's Operation Intercept.

Although Liddy lost that job for making an unauthorized speech on gun control, he was quietly re-hired by John Ehrlichman, the White House supervisor for Operation Intercept, in June, 1971, to work under Ehrlichman's assistant, Egil Krogh. Liddy's first assignment: to fly to California in August, 1971, to case the offices of Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding. And the rest, as they say, is history.

E. Howard Hunt, who also did the bag job on Fielding's office with Liddy, had been hired as a special assistant by White House Special Counsel Charles Colson. Just five days after Hunt was nabbed in relation to Watergate, White House sources gave this intriguing pocket biography of the conspirator: "At the CIA, from which Hunt retired in 1970, he developed contacts within the Far Eastern narcotics trade controlled by Syrian (sic) and Corsican interests." While at the White House but before August, 1971 when the psychiatrist break-in was planned, Hunt "was a' specialist in international narcotics and assisted the White House while it was developing a major push against narcotics traffic." That's funny: the major event in international narcotics in early 1971 was that CIA complicity in the Southeast Asian dope trade was first coming to national view, in articles researched by Allen Ginsberg and myself. Even funnier: we brought that information to the attention of Presidential Candidate George McGovern, McGovern wrote a fiery note to then-CIA Director Richard Helms, demanding an investigation; and Helms made his first public speech about the CIA to deny the charges.

Meanwhile, back at the Off-White House Liddy and Hunt got the go-ahead from John Ehrlichman and Egil "Bud" Krogh to raid the psychiatrist' s office, and "The Plumbers" were born. As President Nixon admitted in his Watergate speech April 30, he himself authorized the Plumbers "to plug leaks of vital security information" - namely the Pentagon Papers - after the FBI and CIA refused to do his illegal dirty work. Hunt flew to Miami to recruit the services of his old friend from the CIA Bay of Pigs invasion, Bernard Barker and his ever-ready Cuban refugees.

Bernard L. Barker, caught red-handed at Watergate, began his checkered career in spying and security work as a nark in pre-Castro Cuba. Testifying before the Ervin Committee, he said that among other tasks (such as security for President Truman's visit), he had helped conduct U.S. .Treasury Department (Narcotics Bureau) drug investigations as a Cuban secret policeman in 1947-48. This is interesting because in pre-Castro Cuba, the Mafia controlled the Havana dope trade, and when the New York mob eased out of direct heroin smuggling in the Sixties, they turned it over to Cuban refugees from the pre-Castro secret police. The Cuban connection is blurry, but someone should take on a special investigation of Barker's relation to the CIA and then the White House and CRP, in light of these facts: Miami replaced New York as the chief heroin importing entry-point in 1969; Florida Mafia leader Santo Trafficante, according to McCoy, went to Southeast Asia in 1968 to re-arrange smack smuggling into the Miami area from the CIA-supported heroin regimes of Laos; and, given that Barker was a Miami real estate man, connections between the Mafia and Nixon-Rebozo real estate deals (see Sundance, Nov-Dec 1972), as well as campaign-contribution laundering in Mexico that somehow ended up in Barker's bank account - all should be uncovered. When McGovern attempted to expose probable Nixon and CIA complicity in the dope trade during the campaign, it seemed too preposterous for belief; but remember that Barker and his Cuban assistants attempted to sabotage McGovern not only at Watergate, but also at the various demonstrations in hippie disguise.

Moving from the Waterbuggers themselves to the hierarchy that supervised them, we also find a pack of loony narks.. Egil "Bud" Krogh, who came to the White House from Ehrlichman's Seattle law firm, coordinated the Plumbers' psychiatrist-office break-in Sept. 1971. When the Plumbers moved over to CRP in 1972, Krogh stayed on at the White House as Director of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control. In July 1972, less than a month after the Watergate arrests, Bud Krogh surfaced at a conference with President Nixon as the "White House aide who coordinates the anti-drug campaign." Krogh was embroiled in a cover-up of a cover-up, quite distinct from the Watergate affair. In July, 1972, the CIA was attempting to get Harper and Row to stop publication of Al McCoy's book (see: McCoy, "A correspondence with the CIA," New York Review of Books, 21 Sept. 1972) because the book showed how the CIA and State Department was involved in heroin trafficking; and Bud Krogh, as White House aide in charge of international dope control and commissioned a report from the CIA and the State Department on this very subject - complicity in the Southeast Asian traffic.

The CIA report, however, said "the governments in S. E. Asia, particularly Thailand and South Vietnam, were not cooperating in the worldwide effort to end illegal drug which corroborated McCoy's other thesis that the military dictatorships supported by Nixon in Asia were also the chief refiners and runners of some of the finest smack in the world. This left Krogh in the dubious middle; to protect the Nixon Administration from further charges of supporting Thai and Vietnamese dope chiefs, he announced that the CIA study was "sloppy, inaccurate, and completed too hastily."

Krogh may have had a hand in setting up the Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (DALE) agency headed by Myles Ambrose. As scandals surrounding DALE - including the murder of Dirk Dickensen in Humboldt County, California, and the weird "mistaken" raids on homes in Illinois and elsewhere by DALE agents - deepen, Ambrose has confirmed that his resignation is on the President's desk. But the connection to Watergate may prove to be even more interesting, and here we return to Bud Krogh.

Chicago researcher Sherman Skolnick and his Committee to Clean up the Courts have discovered important information regarding the December 8, 1972 United Air Lines plane crash in which Mrs. E. Howard Hunt was killed. Skolnick's researchers showed evidence that the plane was sabotaged and the pilot , two gas company employees from El Paso Gas Company (owned in part by John Mitchell who dropped anti-trust charges against the company while Attorney General), CBS newswoman Michele Clarke, Mrs. Howard Hunt, and others were recipients of lethal doses of cyanide. $40,000 in bills allegedly traceable to Watergate, in addition to the $10G announced after the crash, were carried by Mrs. Hunt, thought to be the pay-off woman for the Waterbuggers. The Sarelli gang, with long-time Mafia and CIA sabotage connections, disabled the altimeters of the plane, according to Skolnick. And finally, the poisoner of the seven persons connected to Watergate is said to have been identified as a DALE agent named Metcalf.

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Waterbuggers & Nares continued from page 8

Exactly one day after the plan crash, Egil "Bud" Krogh was appointed by Nixon as Under Secretary of the Transportation Department - the agency ultimately responsible for investigating the plane crash. So Bud Krogh 's career went from supervisor of the Liddv-Hunt-and-Plumbers bag job of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, to international narcotics intelligence coordinating with DALE and the CIA, to the Transportation Department No. 2 man who was supposed to find out if a DALE agent poisoned Hunt's wife, or if the Sarelli gang who disabled aircraft for the CIA had disabled the plane which carried documents, money, and witnesses all related to Watergate, the Plumbers, John Mitchell's gas company , and the subsequent Watergate cover-up and pay-offs. Shortly after Ehrlichman admitted authorizing the psychiatrist's office bag job (May 1, '73), Bud Krogh took a sudden leave of absence from his Transportation Department position.

James W. McCord, Jr., is the missing link of the Watergate investigation, and his background and role differs significantly from the other Waterbuggers. McCord has no visible connections either with past narcotics enforcement or the right-wing Bay of Pigs exile Cuban community in Miami. McCord was in the FBI 1948-51 , then the CIA until 1970: at CIA he was an electronics expert, as Ulasewicz later called him, "the best wireman in the business." He had been involved in U-2 overflight surveillance meetings with Russia and had eventually worked his way up to chief of security at CIA Headquarters n Langley, Virginia. From there he went to the White House as a member of Nixon's special wartime contingency planning group, and he was one of the earliest men in CRP - its security chief, who hired bodyguards like Stephen King for Martha Mitchell, and who coordinated security for the GOP Miami Convention. (It was McCord's arrest which allegedly led Mrs. Mitchell to declaim about "all the dirty things that go on" in politics.) Unlike the rest of the Waterbuggers, McCord refused to plead guilty (like Liddy) and then (unlike Liddy) exposed the whole White House cover-up scheme in a letter to Judge Sirica. At the Ervin hearings, McCord was centered, calm, intelligent - and sang about the offers of executive clemency, the pay-offs Mrs. Hunt made to the defendants to plead guilty and shut up, and the other spy system run for Ehrlichman by Jack Caulfield.

McCord also testified (May 18) that he had joined the Liddy-Hunt Waterbuggers team because Liddy told him the Attorney General, John Mitchell, the top legal officer in the Justice Department, and John Dean III, the top legal officer in the White House, had approved the plan. At that point, Senate investigative sources told Newsweek (May 28, p. 30) that "a White House group led by former top aide John D. Ehrlichman has in fact been preparing to place responsibility for the Watergate bugging and cover-up on former counsel John Dean II and Mitchell himself. The Ehrlichman group charted this strategy, these sources said, when it was realized that Waterbugger James McCord was not going along with the cover-up 'game plan'." Thus McCord opened a whole new area of investigation - which leads without hesitation right back to more narcotics agents.

John J. "Jack" Caulfield, and his operative friend from their old days on the New York P.D. Red Squad, Anthony T. Ulaseqicz, were Ehrlichman's agents in offering McCord executive clemency (in July '72 and again in January '73) if he would cop a plea and shut up. Working back thru Caulfield's career: after McCord fingered him as offerer of clemency, Caulfield resigned from his job as assistant director of law enforcement for the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the agency which performs the antique Prohibition functions of catching moonshiners, keeping statistics on cigarette rolling papers, and checking up on gun registration and control. He had been with Treasury since April '72, when he had been a security consultant to CRP, resigning disenchanted when he found himself used merely as a bodyguard for John Mitchell. While at CREEP, Caulfield has proposed a broad security plan code-named "Sandwedge" - to do some dirties that, according to a friend of Caulfield's quoted in Newsweek (May 28), would later be "recognized in action" at the Watergate complex. This is a likely tale because it jibes with Caulfield's testimony that he and Ulasewicz had performed a variety of spy jobs for Ehrlichman and Dean starting in 1969, including running a 1971 group of agents to infiltrate the organizations of various Democratie presidential contenders and dig up the dirt on them. Caulfield is currently awaiting trial in Florida for distributing a letter falsely attributed to candidate Muskie. A nice job for Ehrlichman's White House aides!

But it was nothing new. A secret June 6, 1969 Interdepartmental Task Force report - excerpts from which were published in my magazine, Marijuana Review, reveals that Caulfield was the White House liaison for the planning of Operation Intercept, reporting to Ehrlichman on progress in direct fulfillment of candidate Nixon's September 1968 promise to "move against the source of drugs." Since Ulasewicz joined Caulfïeld's team in July '69 (paid out of Kalmbach's secret fund), it is likely that Intercept was also one of his early jobs for the White House.

Though it seems like ancient history now, it is important to realize that fabled Operation Intercept was not a single pot-shot event of September-October, 1969. Intercept was but the first event in implementing a long-term, international, narcotics enforcement program spanning many agencies, involving many of the people later implicated in Watergate, and designed to be set in action over the entire period of the President's first term. All these plans were, in fact, carried out in the next 3 years.

By whom? Some familiar names: John Mitchell, for one, as the Attorney General who expanded the Justice Department's use of wiretaps particularly in narcotics cases such as Operation Eagle, the legality of which is now being challenged in court; and who also brought us delightful novelties of law and order like No-Knock entry and search. His assistant for many years, Richard Kleindienst, who took charge in 1969-70 of the "Operation Cooperation" negotiations with Mexico; and his former legislative aide, John W. Dean III, who helped route the President's and the Justice Department's new laws and regulations through Congress. It was Dean, incidentally, who gave final approval in 1970 to the President's appointees to the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, including the appointment of its Executive Director, Mike Sonnenreich. who had drafted the President's omnibus drug bill that became a law 1970. And lest we forget, Jack Caulfield worked directly under Dean in 1971.

What does it all mean?

First, it means that the espionage activities which now so outrage the American public in the series of scandals associated with Watergate, have been precisely the same sort of unlawful, crooked, dirty spook acts practiced by the Narks during these Nixon years. Second, it means that those who work for constructive social change - such as removal of criminal penalties for marijuana - have been obstructed by the same mentality, and often precisely the same people in high government office that planned and carried out Watergate and attempted to cover it up. Third, it means that Watergate is by no means an isolated event, an exception to some more vigorously lawful mode of Nixon Administration policy. Instead Watergate is typical of the kind of activity that has been carried out in the name of law'n'order government by Nixon's closest and most loyal people: Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Krogh, Caulfield, Dean - and so on down the list to the lowly Waterbuggers. And the President cannot shift the blame for specific actions to underlings, because it is not specific actions which concerns us: it is the very modus operandi of Nixonian government. The American System itself, of checks on executive power, of balances that would not allow the White House, for instance, to cover-up Watergate or complicity in Southeast Asian heroin smuggling.while making war on marijuana - the lawful system oi government itselt has been tampered with, ever since Nixon and his cronies came to power.

The answer? Throw the buggers out.

The Inside Dope is presented as a free public service by AMORPHIA, The Cannabis Cooperative, makers of "Acapulco Gold" rolling papers from which all Amorphia's proceeds go to help end marijuana prohibition. Write for details: 2073 Greenwich St, San Francisco, CA 94123. Copyright 1973 by Michael R. Aldrich.