Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [209]
But if Hughes himself remained oblivious of Watergate, his henchmen were becoming ever more entangled in it. Back in Washington, the mysterious Bob Bennett immediately assumed a central role in the cover-up, acting as go-between for Liddy and Hunt, all the while doing his best to expose it, reporting not to Hughes or even his fellow Mormons, but to the CIA and the Washington Post.
On July 10, over lunch at a Marriott Hot Shoppes, Bennett came in from the cold. To his CIA case officer, Martin Lukasky, he passed on everything he had learned about Watergate from Hunt and Liddy. He said that the White House was behind the break-in and pointed the finger at his pal Chuck Colson: “Colson most likely suggested the break-in to Hunt on an ‘I don’t want to know, just get me the information’ basis.”
Lukasky deemed Bennett’s report so sensitive that he hand-carried it to CIA Director Richard Helms.
The report revealed that Bennett was busy on several fronts, all aimed at undermining the cover-up. He had established “back-door entry” to Edward Bennett Williams, the lawyer representing Larry O’Brien in a million-dollar civil suit filed against Nixon’s campaign committee.
And he was talking to the press—to the Washington Star, to the New York Times, to Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times. According to a CIA report, “Bennett took relish in implicating Colson in Hunt’s activities, while protecting the Agency at the same time.”
But most of all Bennett was talking to the Washington Post. He told the CIA he was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was “suitably grateful,” making no attribution to Bennett and protecting his valued source.
Later, much later, Nixon would tell Haldeman that he believed Bob Bennett was “Deep Throat,” and he would wonder whether Hughes and the CIA had plotted together to bring him down.
For the moment, however, Nixon remained obsessed by Larry O’Brien. And just a month after the break-in he saw his chance to go back on the attack.
The president was sitting with his feet up on his desk, sipping a cup of coffee, when John Ehrlichman came to see him on July 24. Ehrlichman had just received the latest IRS “sensitive case report” from the still growing Hughes investigation. There was more bad news about Donald, but that was not the big news. A new name had popped up in the probe—Larry O’Brien. The IRS had turned up the dirt that all the president’s men had failed to find: proof of O’Brien’s Hughes connection.
Ehrlichman read it to Nixon: “Hughes Tool Company paid $190,000 to Lawrence F. O’Brien and Associates, Washington, D.C., during 1970. Purpose of these payments are unknown.”
The president was excited. He took his feet down off his desk, swung around, and leaned toward Ehrlichman. “The American people have a right to know about this!” he declared. “The American people need to know that the chairman of one of its two great political parties was on Hughes’s payroll.”
Ehrlichman had rarely seen Nixon so excited. Even now, even after his pursuit had led him to Watergate, the president remained determined to nail O’Brien on Hughes.
“This made a lot of trouble for me, and it’s going to make a lot of trouble for O’Brien,” said Nixon. He was sure that the IRS had uncovered only the tip of the iceberg, that O’Brien had received a lot more Hughes money, and that he had probably failed to report it all on his tax returns. He told Ehrlichman to order a full audit of O’Brien’s financial records and to get him for income-tax evasion.
“I want to put O’Brien in jail,” said the president, pounding his fist on the desk. “And I want to do it before the election.”
Ehrlichman immediately called Nixon’s man in the commissioner’s office, who took a surreptitious look at O’Brien’s returns and found that he had received a whopping $325,000 from Hughes but had reported it all and paid his taxes.
Nixon was not satisfied. He had Ehrlichman call Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz and tell him to push the O’Brien audit. Shultz reported