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PART THREE

SHADY WHITE HOUSES

33

NUKE THE RUSSIANS?

Nixon’s Vietnam Peace Plan

“Tricky Dick” had his own version of Operation Northwoods, and if this one had backfired, we would’ve been in a nuclear war. Lining up the bombers to look like we were attacking Russia is so far-fetched it was like reading a comic book when I first came across this. Amazingly enough, during Nixon’s first year in office, he and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, cooked up a plan to end the Vietnam War by pretending to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

They code-named the operation Giant Lance; I’m going to avoid speculating whether the sub-title was “Mine’s Bigger than Yours.” they set the whole thing in motion on October 10, 1969, when the Strategic Air Command received an urgent order to ready our most powerful thermonuclear weapons for immediate potential use against the Russkies.

According to an article in Wired magazine (February 25, 2008), on the morning of October 27, 1969, a squadron of 18 B-52s “began racing from the western U.S. toward the eastern border of the Soviet Union. The pilots flew for 18 hours without rest, hurtling toward their targets at more than 500 miles per hour. Each plane was loaded with nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the ones that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki…The aircraft were pointed toward Moscow, but the real goal was to change the war in Vietnam.”

This was one of a bunch of military measures aimed at putting our nuclear forces on a higher state of readiness. We had destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers doing all kinds of maneuvers in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Gulf of Aden, and Sea of Japan. This was all executed secretly but designed to be detectable—but supposedly not alarming—to the leadership of the Kremlin. And our commanders-in-chief (CINCs) had no idea why Nixon had ordered the “Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Readiness Test,” also to become known as the “madman theory.”

You can find the following document at the National Security Archive website (Electronic Briefing Book No. 81).

34

THE CIA VS THE PRESIDENT

Nixon’s Pursuit of the CIA’s Secret Files

In December 2010, a new release of documents relating to the Nixon years transpired at the National Archives. One that I found especially telling was this “Memorandum for the Record” by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, about the president’s attempt to pry out secret CIA files related to the Vietnam coup that overthrew Diem in 1963 as well the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis. Just why Nixon wanted all this material remains unknown to this day, but it seems he definitely wanted to get some “goods” on the Kennedy administration. And he may have had another motive—to find out what the CIA might have on why JFK was killed. Or on Nixon’s own involvement in the attempts to kill Castro, for example. There are a lot of redactions in these three pages, but one thing comes through crystal clear: there was a small war going on between Nixon and Richard Helms, director of the CIA.

Again, what people need to understand is that it appears the CIA answers to no one. They’re supposed to be the president’s arm on foreign intelligence, but the best way I can put it is: There’s been an amputation. That body part is not attached anymore. Time and again, the CIA thumbs its nose even at presidents. So who runs this agency if the president doesn’t?

35

RESTLESS YOUTH

How Nixon Wanted the CIA and FBI to Crack Down on Youthful Dissidence

I can’t leave the Nixon years without another tidbit released at the end of 2010. This shows clearly how Nixon was looking to bring the CIA and FBI together in 1970 to crack down on the antiwar protesters and other “restless youth.” Keep in mind that the CIA was forbidden by statute from taking part in such domestic operations, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. This is the basis of what later