American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [57]
Following the Watergate trail into early 1973 came the bombshell that ignited the Senate hearings: the letter from McCord to Judge John Sirica. McCord wrote: “The Watergate operation was not a CIA operation. The Cubans may have been misled by others into believing that it was a CIA operation. I know for a fact that it was not.” Why did McCord feel compelled to state this? Maybe because this was just the latest gambit in his long history of cover-ups on behalf of the CIA? McCord’s attorney happened to be Bernard Fensterwald Jr., who had a private Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA) and had once represented James Earl Ray. In exchange for helping McCord post bond, the papers said, “It was understood, however, that McCord agreed to help Fensterwald in some of his research at a later date.”25
McCord’s letter kicked off a chain of events that eventually led to the resignations and indictments of nearly Nixon’s entire staff. And the links back to the JFK assassination just kept cropping up. After the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 where Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, a Houston lawyer named Leon Jaworski was named to replace him. Jaworski had helped the Warren Commission check out a possible connection between Oswald and the CIA. That, in itself, was something of a conflict of interest—since Jaworski was also a board member of a CIA front company, the M.D. Anderson Foundation.26 When Jack Ruby made his anguished plea that the Warren Commission get him out of Texas and fly him to Washington if it wanted to learn the truth, only three people were present—Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, and Leon Jaworski. They didn’t take him up on his offer.
The overlap between the Warren Commission and Watergate legal staffs didn’t stop with Jaworski. Arlen Specter, for a time a member of Nixon’s defense team, was the originator of the “magic bullet” theory. Albert Jenner, minority counsel during the House impeachment proceedings, had been in charge of looking into conspiracy rumors for the Warren Commission. David Belin, a junior counsel and the commission’s staunchest defender through those years, would be President Ford’s choice as executive director of the Rockefeller Commission that was assigned to scrutinize the CIA’s illegal domestic operations.
General Alexander Haig, who became Nixon’s chief of staff through the final days, had been the Pentagon’s chief “assistant on all matters pertaining to Cuba” in July 1963. In that capacity, Haig—along with Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the existence of the White House taping system to Senate investigators—had as a primary task the resettlement of the Bay of Pigs prisoners released by Castro, such as Artime. As Charles Colson later told the story, Haig had called him to a meeting in January 1974 and said: “Well, if the President’s going to be impeached, better he go down himself than take the whole intelligence apparatus with him.”
More than a decade later, I find it remarkable how many of the Watergate players are tied into the Kennedy assassination. They not only escaped justice the first time, but here they are back again. I wonder what else they did in between, what other damage to the country?
In terms of all the burglarizing, you commit crimes because the end justifies the means, I guess. As long as you achieve the goal, the way you do it doesn’t matter. One job only leads to the next. In 1974 there occurred six unsolved burglaries into Howard Hughes’s offices in only four months: two in Las Vegas, one in an L.A. suburb, one in New York. Another break-in occurred at the Mullen Company’s Washington office. In most of these instances, no papers were reported taken. Then someone made off with all of Hughes’s handwritten memos, hidden away in a block-long two-story building in Hollywood; a federal judge had just ordered some 500 of these memos to be turned over to Maheu.27 At the same time, the Watergate Committee staff had just begun looking into the Maheu-CIA-Mob-exile connections