What is Watergate? [View All]

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Watergate's Company men: McCord, Sturgis and Hunt



"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a CIA setup." - Frank Sturgis

Yesterday there was an answer - and it may not even be the answer - to the question Who is Deep Throat? But that's a sideshow, and not even a particularly interesting one, when there's still no satisfactory answer to What is Watergate?

It's become part of history, as it was meant to, that Watergate was all about a botched White House intelligence operation at Democratic headquarters and its bungled cover-up. It's not hard to see why. Nixon's paranoia was more than sufficient to account for its implausibility. And though the Democrats needed no help imploding in 1972, they were neatly nudged along by Republican dirty tricks. After all, Karl Rove cut his teeth on the campaign. (Rove's mentor Donald Segretti served six months in prison for forging letters on the stationary of early frontrunner Edmund Muskie.) As Lisa Pease suggests, even the shooting of candidate George Wallace may have been an example of the oldest dirty trick in the book.

So bugging the DNC made a perfect cover story. But it's not the story.

In Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, Jim Houghan establishes, using FBI documents and sources ignored by those hypnotized by the misdirection, that the DNC telephones were never actually bugged, and that false evidence - crude, defunct bugging devices - were planted in the headquarters months after the Watergate arrests to support the cover story. He also found that E Howard Hunt and James McCord, both CIA men, were using the White House only as a cover for domestic espionage, including spying on the administration. Most significantly, Houghan determined that clients of prostitutes in the Columbia Plaza Apartments, adjoining the Watergate complex, were the real targets of the operation.

Houghan's conclusions may have appeared incredible in 1984. In 2005, they should be predictable:

"Watergate," then, was not so much a partisan political scandal as it was, secretly, a sex scandal, the unpredictable outcome of a CIA operation that, in the simplest of terms, tripped on its own shoelaces. There is more, much more, but the point is made: our recent history is a forgery, the by-product of secret agents acting on secret agendas of their own.

By 1969, McCord had become director of the technical and physical security sections of the CIA's Office of Security. The broad responsibility of the OS was to protect CIA assets, operations and personnel. which entailed maintaining more than 1.7 million files on "persons of interest." The OS, therefore, had an admitted domestic reach, reported directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Houghan writes that, "in effect, the OS is an extension of the director's office in a way that other CIA components are not; and because of this...it has served as a vehicle for some of the agency's most questionable operations." These include conducting the CIA's first mind control programs, Bluebird and Artichoke; the Mafia-assisted assassination attempts upon Fidel Castro; infiltrating anti-war and black power organizations in the sixties; "Operation Chaos" and sexual sting operations.

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