Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [228]
The columnist had aroused the fury of the Nixon administration time after time, publishing more than seventy articles based on intelligence sources. He was already, illegally, under CIA surveillance. Hunt, himself a former CIA officer reported to have been involved in plots to assassinate foreign leaders, told Liddy that Anderson had finally gone too far. As a result of one of his columns, he asserted, a key U.S. intelligence source abroad had been fatally exposed.
Hunt later told associates that the order to kill Anderson came from a ‘senior White House official.’ Liddy claimed the idea as his own. The man said to have admitted to one past killing had – by his own account – recently acquired a CIA 9 mm parabellum pistol, ‘for use in the event Bud Krogh or other of my White House superiors tasked me with an assassination.’
In the paneled luxury of the Hay Adams dining room, Hunt, Liddy and the ‘retired’ CIA physician discussed the possibilities. Should Anderson be killed in a staged car accident? Should he become the victim of a fatal mugging? Or should they try ‘Aspirin Roulette’ and plant poison pills in his medicine cabinet?
The CIA had been hatching such plans for years. Its Technical Services Division had produced botulism-injected cigarettes to kill President Nasser of Egypt, a poisoned handkerchief to do away with General Kassem of Iraq, a chemical to be smeared on the toothbrush of Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba, gelatine capsules and a booby-trapped ballpoint pen to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro. While none of these plots came to fruition, governmental murder by poison had been established as a concept in the secret world.1
‘I was willing to obey an order to kill Jack Anderson,’ Liddy wrote later, ‘… this killing would not be retributive but preventive.’ Whichever method was to be used, he and Hunt decided the plot should include exiled Cubans – as had the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and as would the Watergate operation. Liddy was to be disappointed. After arranging to obtain a poison that would leave no traces, Hunt was told the plan to kill the columnist had been called off. The pair resumed work on the nefarious schemes that would lead to Watergate.
Some believe Watergate was only the tip of the iceberg. During the Nixon administration, unidentified intruders invaded the homes and offices of numerous people whom the administration considered to be its ‘enemies.’ There were at least a hundred such break-ins, all apparently politically motivated, all unsolved. Radicals and foreign diplomats deemed to be subversive were regular targets. But so were respected reporters. There was a break-in at the home of then CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather in April 1972, and later at the office of his colleague Marvin Kalb. Tad Szulc, a thorn in the Nixonian flank, was raided too. So were prominent politicians – Democratic Party Treasurer Robert Strauss in 1972, Senator Lowell Weicker the following year. And there may have been an even more famous victim – J. Edgar Hoover.
Some of the victims of the mysterious break-ins possessed documents thought to be compromising to the Nixon regime. Edgar, more than any other potential target, had knowledge of a whole range of sins and an unknown quantity of documentary proof.
A year after Watergate, Mark Frazier, a young reporter working in Washington, was to pick up an intriguing lead. Three sources, he learned, had given affidavits to the Senate Watergate Committee referring to two break-in operations at Edgar’s home in Rock Creek Park. They were, allegedly, ‘directed by Gordon Liddy.’
In the welter of news arising from Watergate, Frazier was unable to get the story published in a Washington paper. Instead, it ran in a university publication, The Harvard Crimson. The article drew on interviews with a source on the Watergate Committee, with a ‘past associate of Howard Hunt’ and with Felipe DeDiego, a Cuban who worked with Hunt