"Silent Coup" Chapter 4

4
NIXON ORDERS A
BURIAL
LESS than two hours after they had obtained Admiral Welander's
taped confession on the afternoon of December 22, 1971, John Ehrlichman and David Young sat in Nixon's hideaway office in the Executive
Office Building. The transcription of the tape would not be ready until
the following day, but Ehrlichman thought he had a political disaster
on his hands, and insisted on bringing the bad news immediately to
the president. Bob Haldeman and John Mitchell, the two senior
members of the administration on whom Nixon most usually relied,
were also in attendance as Ehrlichman laid out the story for the
president as he and Young had heard it from Welander. Ehrlichman
was clearly disposed toward pursuing a thorough investigation. Now,
what would the president do?
Looking to precedent, Nixon knew all too well the actions of one of
his predecessors, President Harry S. Truman, in regard to the insubordination of General Douglas MacArthur during the war in Korea.
When the Supreme Commander of U.S. and Allied forces in Korea
publicly challenged Truman's conduct of that war, Truman summarily
fired him, even though the action brought down on the president a
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Spy RING
firestorm of negative publicity. Historians have said in retrospect that
the firing of the popular MacArthur was among Truman's most important acts, one that strengthened the presidency and the president's
authority under the Constitution. Arguing from precedent and citing
massive insubordination, Nixon could well have fired Moorer and
gained from the episode.
However, in this meeting with his top advisers, the first signals that
the president put out were not in that direction. Ehrlichman recalls
that Nixon did not ask to hear the tape recording, and evidenced no
interest in reading the transcript when it became available. The reason
for this would soon become evident: His mind was already made up as
to the course of action he would have to take.
Nixon's reactions to this crisis, John Mitchell told us after reviewing
our evidence, went to the core of his being-they were political. He
was concerned with how this affair might hurt him, or help him. Could
the situation be turned to his advantage? Where could blame be placed,
and for what purpose?
The president's chain of logic in the crisis would soon become
apparent. John Ehrlichman, who met with the president several times
during the first days of what became known as the Moorer-Radford
affair, offered us in a recent interview the following analysis. As a
political man, Nixon was convinced that the matter of utmost importance was his reelection in 1972, and he was also convinced that what
would most recommend him to the electorate for reelection were
foreign policy triumphs. He was scheduled to visit Peking in February
1972, to hold a summit in Moscow in the late spring at which he would
sign the SALT and ABM treaties, and he was also hoping that the
secret talks with Le Due Tho would bear fruit before the following
November. He envisioned a steady series of these foreign policy
thunderclaps, and riding them easily to reelection. In his mind those
triumphs, in turn, depended on backchannel communications of the
sort enabled by the JCS. Nixon also feared, Ehrlichman says, that "if
he disciplined Moorer for conducting espionage activity against the
president and Henry" it would expose the backchannel, reveal publicly
how Secretary Laird had been repeatedly circumvented, and ultimately
"give Laird a whip hand over the Joint Chiefs." Therefore, Ehrlichman
concludes that Nixon reasoned, the backchannel must be protected.
Guaranteeing the continued existence of the backchannel then became
the engine that drove Nixon's actions. In his autobiography, RN, Nixon
wrote he was "disturbed" to learn "the JCS was spying on the White
House" but offered two additional reasons for keeping the scandal
quiet. First, he worried that exposure of it would further demoralize
Nixon Orders a Burial
49
the military at a time when the armed services were already under
attack by the antiwar movement. Second, he believed that top-secret
information would leak out if the case was pursued. Ehrlichman and
Mitchell offered a third reason: Nixon did not want the world to know
that he had been spied upon; it would be embarrassing to him, and
undermine the image of a strong leader that he was trying to protect.
We have been told that at the December 22 meeting the president,
seated at his EOB office desk, turned in his chair, stared out the
window, and rhetorically asked, "Why did Tom do this?" referring to
Moorer.
Later, he told everyone at the meeting to keep quiet about the
espionage; news of it was not to go beyond the room. Yet Nixon also
instructed Young to write a full report, a directive with which Young
enthusiastically began to comply, and eventually produced quite a
thick day-to-day account of the investigation that contained all the
evidence of the spying. Nixon also decided that Moorer had to be
spoken to, but the president didn't want to do it himself. A key Nixon
personality trait was the avoidance of personal confrontation at almost
any cost. Among Nixon's first decisions was to give the job of bracing
Moorer to John Mitchell. But even before the attorney general summoned the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Nixon had made up his mind
not to fire or discipline Moorer.
The reason was not then apparent to those in the room, but did
emerge in later discussions. If Nixon kept Moorer in office after
bloodying the chairman's nose a bit, Ehrlichman remembers that the
president argued, the chairman would be even more pliant than he had
been in the past, and that would be good for Nixon. "He had two ways
of going. He could either tear up the Joint Chiefs or he could continue
to do business with them. And he says to himself, 'I've got to keep that
[backchannel] in place and keep doing business with them. And maybe
it turns out to be an advantage for me because they know that I know
[about the spying].' "
A Nixon diary entry from December of 1971, reprinted in RN,
gives further inkling of Nixon's analysis of the crisis. He declared that
Radford's "spying on the White House for the Joint Chiefs is something
that I would not be surprised at, although I don't think it's a healthy
practice. "
Having decided to bury the spy ring but to keep alive the recipient
of the stolen documents, Nixon nevertheless had to deal with the other
people touched by the affair. In his autobiography, Nixon suggested
the train of thought that led to his next actions. "Whether or not
[Radford] had disclosed classified information to Anderson, the fact
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remained that he had jeopardized the relationship of the JCS to the
White House," Nixon wrote. Having twisted the facts to fit his
preconceptions about the origins, dimensions, and dangers of the
scandal, Nixon now proceeded to vent his ire on the press and the
yeoman rather than to discipline Moorer, Welander, or Robinson.
Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to have the investigators uncover what
the president was sure existed, a homosexual liaison between Radford
and Jack Anderson; Ehrlichman bucked that task down to David Young,
who relayed the request to Pentagon investigator Don Stewart. There
was no prior evidence of such a relationship between Radford and
Anderson, and Stewart refused to try and "find" one. Ehrlichman was
put in the unfortunate position of having to follow up on this presidential imperative, and found that Mel Laird thought it was a terrible idea
and resisted asking Radford to take a lie detector test about it. Laird
pointed out that the subject matter of a polygraph test must first be
disclosed to the person who is going to take it, and that person may
refuse to take it if he doesn't want to risk
for any
other reason. Suppose, Laird suggested to Ehrlichman in a telephone
call on the morning of December 23, just suppose that "if [Radford]
decides not to take the test and then he goes out and tells the press that
that's what we're running here, I think we just get in a hell of a lot ofWe blow the lid." Ehrlichman had to instruct Laird to try anyway,
because it was the president's wish, and because Nixon felt "there is
no apparent motive for this fellow turning these papers over to Anderson."
So they were searching for a motive that didn't exist, and they were
looking in the wrong direction, away from the spy ring. The homosexuality premise had been pursued with Welander, who told Ehrlichman
and Young he had seen no evidence to support the idea that Radford
and Anderson were so linked. Radford only learned about the thesis of
homosexuality much later, and now laughs about such an idea. "It's
comical," he told us, pointing out that he and Toni have been married
twenty years and have together raised eight children. When advised
that the possible homosexual link had been Nixon's idea, Radford
responded, "It's embarrassing."
Nixon seemed obsessed with Jack Anderson. He asked Ehrlichman,
who had begun in the administration as counsel to the president, if the
columnist had committed a crime in publishing the White House
documents on the India-Pakistan situation, and what the statute of
limitations was on such a crime. Ehrlichman understood the reference:
Nixon had spoken to him several times about Anderson and other
"enemies" to be targeted for punishment after reelection in 1972, when
Nixon Orders a Burial
51
Nixon would be in a position to disregard any negative public reaction
to such treatment. Currently, though, Nixon wanted Ehrlichman to
come down hard on the one known connection between Radford and
Anderson: the Mormon Church. In a move that Ehrlichman characterized to us as "Nixon's typical generic revenge," the president ordered
all Mormon clergymen barred from performing services at the White
House. "Don't use Mormon Bishop," states one of Ehrlichman's notes
of his meeting with Nixon.
There remained several other major players who had to be handled.
John Mitchell was dispatched to question Moorer. Interestingly, when
Mitchell summoned Moorer, he did so, he told us just before his death
in 1988, without having learned any details of what Welander had said
in his interview with Ehrlichman and Young.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs hurried to see Mitchell, flatly
denied any knowledge of the stealing, and said that if he had ever been
shown contraband material the blame lay with Welander, who should
be disciplined. Because he never heard the tape or saw the transcript of
Welander's interview, Mitchell believed the chairman and reported
Moorer's denial back to Nixon. This report by the attorney general
may have been the flimsy evidence on which Nixon relied when six
months later, and to the astonishment of many of his aides, he
reappointed Moorer for a second term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
But, as Ehrlichman succinctly told us in an interview, this was to
Nixon's advantage because he had a "pre-shrunk admiral" as head of
the JCS.
Then there was Secretary of Defense Mel Laird. Nixon worried
that exposure of the backchannel would strengthen the hand of Laird,
whom the president deeply distrusted. Laird had known about the
liaison office through coming into contact with it in prior administrations, during his eight terms as a congressman who sat on a defenserelated subcommittee. Laird had argued with Nixon at the outset of
this administration that the liaison office should be closed because it
always had been a nuisance and a source of leaks. But Nixon needed
the backchannel that the liaison office helped to enable, and his
disagreement with Laird over the necessity of such a channel was part
of the reason for his distrust. Nixon wanted to keep the secretary on
board but not cognizant of the matters being discussed through the
backchannel. It was obvious to Ehrlichman from his December 23
phone call to Laird that the secretary knew what was going on. Laird
said he was "sure that Robinson bootlegged things" to the Pentagon
brass, but "not to me. I never saw any of it." He knew that "somebody
was giving them [the Joint Chiefs] information" and was certain "that
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Spy RING
the president wasn't calling them directly and giving them this sort of
information." In a later White House meeting, Nixon would dispatch
Mitchell to neutralize Laird and to tell him to keep the lid on the
espionage story.
Nixon's major personnel problem stemming from this crisis, everyone agreed, was Henry Kissinger. The national security adviser hated
leaks other than his own and would be apoplectic when he learned that
he had been spied upon, that his briefcase had been rifled, and that his
diplomatic initiatives had been known to the JCS. Typically, Nixon
refused to deal with Kissinger personally until Ehrlichman had given
the national security adviser precise instructions on how to behave in
Nixon's presence. In an early afternoon meeting on December 23,
Nixon issued his instruction to Ehrlichman. First, Kissinger must be
told that he should never mention the espionage mess to the president.
That tactic would work, because Kissinger was always circumspect
when addressing the president, who was the source of whatever- power
Kissinger possessed. Next, Ehrlichman reports, the president "wanted
me to tell Henry that I was handling the situation [together] with
Mitchell and that the president is aware of the situation because of his
backchannel relationship with the Joint Chiefs." Third, Nixon told
Ehrlichman not "to let Henry get involved in the question of, Do we
keep Moorer or not." However, Kissinger was to be thrown a boneallowed to shut down the JCS liaison office at the NSC-but was to see
to it that the backchannel to the JCS was not dismantled.
Nixon's final order, as reflected in Ehrlichman's notes of the
meeting, was odd: "Don't let K blame Haig." The president had
obviously concluded that Kissinger would indeed try to fault Haig, the
assistant who had the closest ties to the JCS, for having permitted a
situation to exist in which Radford could steal from Kissinger.
In retrospect, Ehrlichman told us recently, it was clear to him that
the president's instruction was "a very explicit injunction from Nixon,
intended to protect Haig." This was the first time, Ehrlichman recalls,
that he ever saw Nixon protect Haig, and at the time Ehrlichman
dismissed the action as a simply logical one: Nixon didn't want
Kissinger blaming his chief military aide because the espionage had
been conducted by the military.
Haig, Kissinger, and Nixon had a complex three-way relationship.
When Nixon had hired Kissinger as national security adviser, the
Harvard professor had sought a military aide not only to liaise with the
JCS, but also because he and Nixon would need a backchannel
communications capability, and that military aide would have to be
Nixon Orders a Burial
53
privy to it and might help facilitate it. The military at first thought
they'd better suggest a man with advanced degrees who would be
comfortable with Kissinger, but Kissinger wanted what he described
in his memoirs as "a more rough-cut type," preferably with combat
experience, someone who didn't have the same academic viewpoint as
he did and could provide a new perspective. Colonel Al Haig, then on
the staff at West Point, was recommended by a mutual friend, and that
nomination was seconded by Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who
had been Haig's boss at the Pentagon in the early 1960s when they
served McNamara and Army Secretary Cyrus R. Vance. Kissinger
liked that Haig had been endorsed by both conservatives and liberals,
and hired him after one interview, and, as Kissinger himself wrote,
"Haig soon became indispensable. He disciplined my anarchic tendencies and established coherence and procedure in an NSC staff of
talented prima donnas." Within months, the army colonel, who had
not been initially seen as a threat by Kissinger'S civilian staff, had
elbowed all of them out of the way and become Kissinger's principal
deputy.
Then came a moment, former Nixon speech writer William Safire
reports in his book Before the Fall, when the balance changed. Nixon,
Kissinger, and Safire were working on a speech and needed a figure on
troop strength. Haig was called into the room. He delivered the figure
and was about to withdraw, but Nixon asked him to stay, then turned
to Safire and murmured "thought and action." It was a phrase from
another speech Nixon and Safire had discussed, one that contrasted the
man of thought with the man of action; Haig, Nixon implied, was a
man of action who counterbalanced Kissinger. But Nixon, Safire
wrote, also wanted to include Haig "not as a messenger but as an
adviser." Short! y thereafter, John Ehrlichman remembers, whenever
Nixon was displeased with Kissinger on any account, he would have
Haig brief him for five or six days, until Kissinger was softened up
enough to be allowed to come back into the president'S good graces.
An NSC aide close to Kissinger recalls that "Henry would be an
absolute wreck, he'd be close to a nervous breakdown because the
president was meeting with Haig." Talk of urging Kissinger to see a
psychiatrist was also rampant in the Oval Office-simply another
instance of Nixon's sadistic treatment of his chief foreign policy
adviser. Ehrlichman wrote that Nixon told him to bring the subject up
with Kissinger but "I could think of no way to talk to Henry about
psychiatric care."
Being in the White House was good for Haig. He "earned his star,"
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SPY RING
that is, jumped from colonel to brigadier general, in less than a year,
and earned a second star, making him a major general, in 1972. As
Haig continued to rise in the White House hierarchy, Kissinger worried
about his aide. "Can I trust Haig?" he would wonder, according to one
NSC staff member who talked privately with Kissinger. No one could
give the professor complete assurance on that score. In public, say in
front of the staff or Haldeman or Ehrlichman, Kissinger would often
berate Haig for minor mistakes and seem to humiliate him, describing
military officers as "animals" who were too "dumb" to understand the
intricacies of foreign policy. (This is the view of the Haig-Kissinger
relationship portrayed in the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein book
The Final Days.)
We have learned that in private, however, Haig was the more
dominant character, acting as what one source who knew both men
called "a schoolyard bully." This source recalls angry, nasty screaming
matches between the two men in which Haig threatened to punch
Kissinger out, and Kissinger cowered. "Haig took the crap in public;
Henry took it in private," this source told us.
Why would Kissinger take insubordination in any form from Haig?
Because, this source insists, "Haig could leak so many things about
Henry'S personal behavior or the secret way he was carrying out
[foreign] policies. On an emotional level, Henry would ask himself, 'Do
I really want to cross him?' " But on the other side of the coin, "Haig
himself knew that if he wanted another star he had to get along with
Kissinger, too."
Kissinger and Haig shared many secrets, and this sharing had
begun in the early days of the administration. Nixon had authorized
(and Kissinger and Haig encouraged) an enormous bombing campaign
against suspected North Vietnamese and Vietcong havens and supply
lines in neutral Cambodia. The air strikes continued for seven weeks,
unknown to the American public until May 9, 1969, when William
Beecher, the Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times, broke the
story with a front-page article on the secret raids.
Kissinger was on vacation with Nixon in Florida, and when they
read the story both were enraged. During that day, Kissinger had four
conversations with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover wrote
memos of his Kissinger calls to his senior officials. In the first call,
Kissinger asked Hoover to use "whatever resources" were necessary to
find Beecher's source, although Kissinger expected this to be done
"discreetly." By the fourth call, Kissinger was vowing to Hoover that
the White House would "destroy whoever did this if we can find him,
no matter where he is." Hoover, in turn, suggested a possible leaker, a
Nixon Orders a Burial
55
former Harvard associate of Kissinger's who was then on the NSC
staff, Morton H. Halperin.
Unfortunately, Kissinger had to agree with the assessment. Halperin had been in the Pentagon during the Johnson administration, and
had advocated a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, a strategy that
angered many military and civilian defense officials in Washington.
When Kissinger announced his intention of bringing Halperin to the
NSC, the proposed appointment drew criticism from General Wheeler,
then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, from Senator Barry Goldwater, and
from Director Hoover. To defend Halperin now, Kissinger believed,
would undercut his position with Haldeman and Nixon. By six that
evening, the FBI managed to activate a tap on Halperin's home telephone.
The very next morning, Alexander Haig went to Assistant FBI
Director William C. Sullivan with the names of three more individuals
to be tapped, NSC aides Daniell. Davidson and Helmut Sonnenfeldt,
and Air Force Colonel Robert E. Pursley, military assistant to Secretary of Defense Laird; Pursley was distrusted by Haig and other
military hardliners who scorned him as a dove on Vietnam and for
being too close to civilian officials. Kissinger's deputy told Hoover's
deputy that the taps on all four men were ordered "on the highest
authority," and that the matter should be handled "on a need-to-know
basis, with no record maintained." The desire for secrecy, Haig later
testified in a civil suit, arose from his own experience in the Pentagon
in the early 1960s when Hoover circulated through upper levels of the
government a damaging report on Martin Luther King, Jr., which "just
about blew the Pentagon apart." The Hoover report was "flushed all
through the bureaucracy," Haig testified, adding, "I think that is the
kind of concerns we had" about the new wiretapping effort in May
1969.
Ten days after his first meeting with Sullivan, Haig, accompanied
by Kissinger, showed up at Sullivan's office to give him the names of
two more NSC staffers to be tapped, and to read the first logs of the
in-place taps. Sullivan's memo of the meeting quotes Kissinger as
saying, "It is clear that I don't have anybody in my office that I can
trust except Colonel Haig here."
During the next two years, Haig transmitted more names of the
seventeen government officials and newsmen whose phones were
tapped at various times over a period of twenty-two months from May
1969 to February 1971. Some of those tapped had ties to high Democratic party powers such as Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former
ambassador W. Averell Harriman, some were Republicans such as
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speechwriter William Safire, and some were reporters whom the White
House disliked.
Haig effectively became the operations officer of the wiretapping
program. Periodically he would visit Sullivan, read dozens of wiretap
summaries, and take some to Kissinger. In his biography of Haig, The
General's Progress, Roger Morris described what happened after Kissinger had read the reports. Morris was at that time a fellow NSC staff
member; he remembers the reports being kept in "a small, wired safe
in the West Basement situation room," and wrote that while by mid1969 the wiretap reports were "an open secret among the NSC staff,"
no one but Haig and Kissinger knew who had been targeted.
Nixon later wrote that he authorized the wiretapping to stop news
leaks and to protect "national security." But no leakers were ever
discovered, and the surveillance seemed openly political, especially
since in several cases, such as that of Halperin and NSC staff member
W. Anthony Lake, the taps were continued after the subject had left
the government and had gone to work for Muskie, or had ceased to
have any access to classified material.
In any event, on February 8, 1971, Haig finally called Sullivan to
order that the program be discontinued, and the taps were shut off two
days later. The logs were not destroyed, however, and six months later
Sullivan's copies as well as those from Haig's safe were placed at the
instruction of Nixon into Ehrlichman's safe, where they lay for two
years, a secret bomb waiting to explode. In later testimony, Haig
would say that the wiretap reports were "an awful lot of garbage," and
that whatever he had done had been on behalf of Dr. Kissinger-but,
as the FBI records show, over a two-year period Haig encouraged the
collection of the garbage and pored over the results.
Considering their close linkage, it was no wonder that, in thinking
about Kissinger's reaction to the spy ring in December 1971, Nixon
would consider Haig in almost the same breath.
Moments after seeing the president on the afternoon of December
23, Ehrlichman and Haldeman briefed Kissinger. In his 1982 memoir,
Witness to Power, Ehrlichman described Kissinger at this meeting as
"calm, almost sleepy, as I recounted what we'd learned. His only
reaction was to remark, almost indifferently, that the Joint Chiefs'
liaison office must be closed at once." Ehrlichman was surprised at the
mildness of Kissinger's reaction, for "I had expected a huge eruption
of emotion. Haldeman had told me that Henry was being a tremendous
problem for the President that week. He had been mounting elaborate,
daily tirades about [Secretary of State] Bill Rogers; Nixon, Haldeman
Nixon Orders a Burial
57
reported, was nearly to the point of firing Henry, just to end the wear
and tear." Although it seems clear that such sentiments were just a way
of venting presidential spleen, and that Nixon never seriously considered sacking Kissinger, it was obvious that in late 1971 Kissinger was
under considerable stress and that the public exposure of the ill-fated
tilt to Pakistan had severely strained his relationship with Richard
Nixon.
In the meeting with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Kissinger displayed his diplomatic face, but when he returned to his own quarters
he exploded into angry action. That very afternoon, he closed the JCS
liaison office and ordered Welander's files and safes seized. Unfortunately, this order was not completely carried out. Though Kissinger
got many materials, more remained in Welander's hands. In midJanuary, Welander was given a sea command and transferred away from
Washington. Before he left, though, he was ordered by the secretary of
defense to turn over materials from his safes. Instead, Welander asked
Al Haig what to do, and an edict came down from Ehrlichman to hand
over the remaining materials to the White House. Welander gave the
documents to Haig, and Haig gave a packet of materials to an Ehrlichman aide who placed them directly in Ehrlichman's safe. Today,
Ehrlichman says he never reviewed that material, and doesn't know
whether he got all of what Welander had turned over to Haig, or if the
batch was sanitized by either man. At the time, Ehrlichman points out,
his main concern was the president's fiat to keep those files out of the
hands of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.
The next casualty of the Kissinger explosion was Yeoman Radford.
Within days of Kissinger's learning of Radford's involvement, the
yeoman was hustled out of the capital, together with his wife and
children, and sent to a new assignment at a Naval Reserve Training
Center in Oregon.
By the time he arrived at the base, Radford had figured out that he
held a few good cards, and when an effort was made to yank his
security clearance-a move that would have effectively gutted his
ability to work as a yeoman-he played them. He threatened to cause
trouble for the upper echelon if the Navy didn't continue his clearance,
and the Navy quickly backed down. Nonetheless, a White Houseapproved tap was placed on his home telephone and remained in
operation for the next six months. It caught two calls between Radford
and Anderson. In the first, Radford declined an invitation to visit the
elder Andersons. In the second, in May of 1972, Radford congratulated
the columnist on winning the Pulitzer Prize for the "tilt to Pakistan"
column. Some investigators tried to make hay of that call, saying it was
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evidence of complicity in the affair, but there was overwhelming
evidence to the contrary-dramatized by the fact that the tap was
discontinued a month later, inJune 1972, as completely useless.
Ehrlichman had urged Nixon to hold off any questioning of Moorer
until after Rembrandt Robinson had been interrogated, "but Nixon
couldn't be patient." When Admiral Robinson, who was then stationed
in San Diego, finally arrived for his interview on December 27,
Ehrlichman wrote in his memoirs, the "self-assured" admiral was in
full uniform "complete with gold braid and battle stars." In an unpublished diary entry, Ehrlichman recorded that Robinson admitted receiving "one set of trip papers" from Radford, "but denies animus."
Robinson was "voluble, articulate, pushed all the right buttons?'; those
"buttons," Ehrlichman reported in his diary, included Robinson's
assurance that he was "the president's man for four more years, etc.,"
and that Robinson expressed "concern for Moorer and the system."
Ehrlichman ended the entry with the observation that Robinson "can't
explain disparity" between his testimony and that of Radford and
Welander. Ehrlichman later learned that Robinson had been to the
Pentagon and had seen Defense Department general counsel Fred
Buzhardt before arriving to see Ehrlichman; therefore, Ehrlichman
now concludes, Robinson was primed for his questions. Confirmation
that Robinson had been in the Pentagon on the day in question was
provided to us by investigator Don Stewart, who had come across him
in the halls and had been surprised to see Robinson running off to
Buzhardt's office. Robinson managed to avoid the questions of both
Ehrlichman and Stewart, and to salvage his sea duty. Later in 1972,
however, he was posted to Vietnam, where he was subsequently
in a helicopter crash in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The firing of Welander and the closing of the liaison office by Kissinger
did not please Brigadier General Haig. Though it had been Haig who
had initiated the investigation into the leak to Anderson, it was Haig
who, in the hours following the moment when Kissinger learned of the
espionage, conversely began a desperate, emotional attempt to protect
Welander. That evening, December 23, Haig called David Young in a
rage and accused him of impugning Welander on naught but circumstantial evidence. Young did not inform Haig that he and Ehrlichman
had interviewed Welander or that a tape of that interview existed. From
what Haig said and did not say, Young concluded that Haig had
probably talked to Laird, and had thought that the only evidence of
espionage was the Radford confession. The call shook the White House
aide, but also fed Young's growing conviction that Haig was doing more
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Nixon Orders a Burial
than coming to the defense of an embattled fellow officer-that he was
pressing his own agenda, one that to Young clearly showed that Haig's
loyalties lay more with the JCS than with Kissinger or Nixon.
Ehrlichman knew of Young's suspicions. "David Young suggested
to me that Al Haig had probably planted Radford to help the military
spy on Henry," Ehrlichman wrote in his memoir, "but that did not
seem logical to me because I assumed Haig had full access to Henry's
papers and files. Young insisted that Haig constantly sold Henry out to
the military." Ehrlichman wrote that at the time he "discounted"
Young's allegation because he thought Young was a rival of the rapidly
rising Haig, and he knew that there was "obviously bad blood between
them."
That evening of December 23, while Haig berated Young, Kissinger
was also heating up the telephone wires. Ehrlichman was at home in
the midst of a Christmas party, he wrote, when Kissinger called to say
that he had fired Welander and closed the liaison office. Haig had
obviously been talking to Kissinger, because Kissinger now asked if
there was "hard evidence" of Welander's culpability. Ehrlichman told
Kissinger that there was a tape of Welander's confession, and that he'd
be glad to play it for Kissinger the next day in his office. Kissinger said
he'd be there, and, "Would it be all right if I bring Al Haig along?"
The tape-play was arranged to take place just after the early morning
senior-staff meeting.
Ehrlichman's next call at the party was from "a badly shaken"
David Young, who related his own conversation with the agitated Haig
in some detail. "I suggested to Young that he not attend in the morning
when I played the tape for Henry and Haig," Ehrlichman wrote in his
memOIrs .
Young agreed, but he remained troubled about the entire affair and
early the next morning, December 24, he wrote a remarkable short
memorandum for Ehrlichman that he hoped Ehrlichman would read
before playing the tape:
JOE
EYES ONLY
8AM
Fri 12/24
John,
1.) After reflecting on yesterday'S events and particularly last
night's call to me by Haig, I am all the more convinced that it is
Spy RING
60
now up to only you and Bob [Haldeman] to protect Henry; i.e.,
it is very difficult for him to say no to Haig.
2.) Haig's change from enthusiastic retribution against Welander to outrage over the dismissal of Welander is odd.
3.) The imminent return of Adm. Robinson and the possibility
that we might talk more with Welander especially about his
"confidential relationships with Haig" may be the cause of Haig's
concern.
David
When Ehrlichman played the tape for Kissinger and Haig at 9:00
the general said almost nothing, but "this time Henry wasn't so
calm," Ehrlichman wrote in his memotr. "When the tape ended he
began striding up and down loudly venting his complaints," among
them that Nixon now wouldn't fire Chairman Moorer. Ehrlichman
quotes Kissinger as saying, "They can spy on him and spy on me and
betray us and he won't fire them! If he won't fire Rogers-impose some
discipline in this Administration-there is no reason to believe he'll fire
Moorer. I assure you all this tolerance will lead to very serious
consequences for this Administration!"
Ehrlichman dutifully conveyed Kissinger's desire that Moorer be
fired to Nixon when the president returned that morning from his
annual physical at Bethesda Naval Hospital. "Ch JCS must go," read
Ehrlichman's note of Kissinger's demand. Nixon had no intention of
firing Moorer, for all the reasons noted earlier in this chapter, but
neither did he have any intention of telling that to Kissinger right away,
because he seems to have enjoyed watching Kissinger rant and rave and
display his insecurity. Such Kissinger tantrums reinforced Nixon's
confidence that he held the upper hand over his volatile national
security adviser.
Later in the meeting, Kissinger crashed the gathering, though not
happily. "Mood indigo," Ehrlichman cryptically noted of Kissinger's
demeanor. Speaking in what Ehrlichman later wrote was "a very low,
somber voice," Kissinger spread "gloom and doom" for the president
and urged him to take some action. Nixon tried to joke with Kissinger
and offer him some encouragement, but when Kissinger left the
meeting, he showed no signs of having been relieved of his distress.
As was his wont, Nixon now spent some time weighing the pros
and cons of sacking Moorer, and by this process reaffirmed to himself
the wisdom of the decision he had already made: He'd keep Moorer,
albeit on a tighter leash. It was at this meeting that Nixon decided to
A.M.
Nixon Orders a Burial
61
send Mitchell to direct Laird to "keep quiet" about the spying. Mitchell, Nixon instructed Ehrlichman, was to tell Laird that public exposure
would hurt Laird himself, the administration, and "the uniform," by
which he meant the entire military apparatus of the United States.
Laird was prepared to agree, even though he was in the process of
learning rather completely what had happened in the liaison office--something Nixon did not want him to do. He was receiving briefings
from Defense Department general counsel Buzhardt, who oversaw the
Don Stewart investigatory team. Buzhardt had the polygraph examinations of Radford, and through the White House had somehow
obtained the most damning evidence, Welander's confession, and had
listened to it-something Nixon did not know, and would have preferred not to have happened. This last piece of evidence was so secret
that it was not even known to investigator Stewart, nor did Ehrlichman
and Young, who had interrogated Welander, know that Buzhardt had
obtained it. Later, the transcript of the Ehrlichman-Young-Welander
interview was included in Buzhardt's report to Laird of January 10,
1972. It is not clear where Buzhardt got the transcript. However,
Ehrlichman says that if Nixon had known about it, he would have been
angry. As we shall shortly see, the Buzhardt report also contained
some further material.
Laird says today that he still has that report, to which was attached
the transcript of Welander's confession, but won't release it. He told us
that when Buzhardt brought him a copy of the tape, he listened to it.
We asked whether Buzhardt had told him that Moorer was involved in
the espionage, and Laird responded, "Fred Buzhardt told me yes, that
he [Moorer] was ."
Buzhardt knew that fact in his bones, because he was from the
military, too, even if he no longer wore a uniform, and he understood
as well as Admiral Welander the degree of compulsion inherent in the
chain of command. Originally from South Carolina, Buzhardt graduated from West Point just a year before Alexander Haig, and had
known Haig at the academy and kept in touch with him afterward.
Buzhardt wore spectacles, had slightly stooped shoulders, and spoke in
a drawl that reflected his home county. From the academy he went into
the Air Force and became a pilot, then left the military entirely to go
to law school. A protege of the ultraconservative senator from his home
state, Strom Thurmond, he then served as Thurmond's aide and
developed close contacts with Thurmond's colleagues on the Hill, such
as Representative Melvin Laird and Senator John Stennis, who also sat
on defense committees, and with civilian and uniformed Pentagon
officials. He went to the Pentagon in 1969 as a special assistant to the
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Spy RING
secretary, and Laird chose him as Defense Department general counsel
in August 1970.
Since starting at the Pentagon, Buzhardt had been a fireman,
helping Laird and the military to stave off or limit the fallout from a
variety of scandalous episodes including the Army's domestic spying
program against the political left, the My Lai massacre, and the
publication of the Pentagon Papers. Buzhardt collaborated directly
with the White House Plumbers to find the source of news leaks
including the Pentagon Papers leak. Buzhardt's brief in the MoorerRadford affair was the same as it had been in these other disasters: to
determine the extent of the damage and then work to contain it. His
secret report to Laird told the secretary more than what he was being
told by the White House, and it verified Laird's good sense in having
earlier prophesied to Nixon that the liaison office would cause more
harm than good.
In January of 1972, Buzhardt suddenly decided that he needed to
interview Welander, much as Ehrlichman and Ym,mg had done two
weeks earlier, and even though he had their interview in hand. The
ostensible reason for the reinterview was to verify independently the
Radford information-but as we shall see, there may well have been a
hidden reason.
While Stewart was on vacation in January of 1972, he received a
call telling him to rush back to Washington, and when he got there,
Stewart was told that he and Buzhardt would together question Welander. Stewart remembers being told by Buzhardt that this was being
done "at the request of the president." That was untrue, but Stewart
didn't know it, and was specifically not told that Welander had already
confessed on tape to Ehrlichman and Young. Buzhardt and Stewart
proceeded to interview Welander on January 7, 1972, and a report was
written of the interview.
We have obtained the report. Welander again admitted that Radford
brought him documents to which the admiral himself did not have
access. He boasted to Buzhardt and Stewart that Radford "had great
contacts amongst the White House people," that the yeoman had
routinely picked up documents from NSC secretaries, and that Welander would photocopy the most interesting ones. Welander discussed
Radford's activities on trips and confessed to tabbing and indexing the
papers that Radford stole before passing them to Moorer and then
locking some of the documents in his safe.
The material he provided to Moorer from the Kissinger and Haig
trips, the report said, "was so sensitive that the chairman did not keep
it overnight." In conclusion, the report added, "Admiral Welander
Nixon Orders a Burial
63
stated that no one knew Radford was conducting his clandestine
operation" and that while he had "not praised Radford directly," he
had told the yeoman that the material "was important and significant
and made many things understandable."
Stewart recalls that Buzhardt pressed Welander on one document
the admiral may have received from Radford-the memo on General
Haig's private conversation with South Vietnamese President Thieu.
Buzhardt insisted to Welander that "the president has to know" if
Radford stole the document. "He [Buzhardt] hammered away at that,"
says Stewart, who didn't know at the time that Buzhardt was only
using Nixon's name to pull the information out of Welander. The
admiral then admitted he had gotten the memo from Radford, had
shown it to Moorer, and then locked it in his safe.
The two most striking things about the reinterview of Welander are
the matter of who ordered it, and the matter of what was not said in it.
Both matters are interlinked.
Ehrlichman says that neither he nor the president ordered such a
reinterview, and in fact they were unaware of it at the time, and so was
David Young. The president, Ehrlichman points out, was trying to
bury the whole affair, and would have vetoed the idea of a further
interview of Welander if he'd known about it. Nor would Kissinger
have wanted it, and Laird says he didn't order it.
Examining the two interviews of Welander side by side, we found
that in the Buzhardt-Stewart reinterview Haig was mentioned several
times in passing-but all references to Welander's confidential dealings
with Haig were omitted. There could possibly have been an innocent
reason for this-maybe Buzhardt did not bring up his friend Haig's
name, and Stewart, unaware of what Welander had actually said to
Ehrlichman, didn't see fit to introduce Haig's name. But that is
unlikely. The most likely candidate to have ordered the reinterview
was Haig himself.
To see why, we must jump ahead in time to a congressional hearing
in March 1974. The military spy ring was being investigated, and Fred
Buzhardt was testifying. He had become the counsel to the president,
and Alexander Haig was White House chief of staff. Buzhardt baldly
told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7 that there was
"no material substantive difference" between his reinter view of Welander and Ehrlichman's. Buzhardt waved a copy of his reinterview about
in the faces of the senators, and if they had insisted on having a
document, would have given that to them (rather than the EhrlichmanYoung-Welander interview). And the only person who would have
benefited from that would have been his old comrade and current
64
Spy RING
superior, Alexander Haig. Thus, the reinterview seems to have been
conducted for the purpose of shielding the Welander tape of December
22 on the chance that some document of Welander's admissions would
one day have to be disclosed.
Queried by us about the military spy ring, Laird now says that
Buzhardt's contemporary report to him was "full" of references to
Haig, but not because Laird specifically asked Buzhardt to look into
matters concerning the general; rather, because in the EhrlichmanYoung interview of Welander, as Laird put it, "Haig was drawn in
through the back door on the thing .... If you've listened to the tape
you certainly know what the problem is." Laird told us he was
"disappointed" by what Welander had to say about Haig, but added,
"I think that's enough to say." But we pressed on. Why was he
disappointed? "I didn't think it was fair to the president." Despite his
reluctance to elaborate, Laird then made it plain that he believed that
Haig knew what was going on and Laird emphasized that his disappointment was specifically with Haig not telling the president, and not
just with the activities of Robinson; Welander, and Radford.
"Are you saying you didn't think it was fair to the president that
they were collecting the material?" we asked.
"Without Haig telling the president," Laird responded.
"That he knew about the Radford situation?" we asked.
"Yeah," Laird said.
Welander had confessed twice, to two different sets of interrogators,
that Chairman Thomas Moorer was aware of the espionage-but
Moorer has always refused to acknowledge that what Radford, Robinson, and Welander stole amounted to more than a small whitecap on a
vast ocean. Yes, he agrees he did see material collected by Radford on
Kissinger'S China trip, but he insists that he learned nothing new from
those documents or from any of the others Welander confessed to
conveying to him. "I met with Kissinger frequently, every week, and
went into his office, the two of us, and talked about these things, and
I'm not aware of anything that I ever learned from Radford that 1 didn't
know already, and let's leave it at that," Moorer told us in an interview.
But why would Welander assert that Moorer had learned new
things from these documents and had reacted as if the information was
fresh? "[Welander] didn't know what I was doing either." Moorer
challenged the assumption, made by Radford and Welander, that he
benefited from the pilferings. "It wasn't a spy case or anything like
that .... You can go around, 1 imagine, in our bureaucratic system
and if you 'were trying to prove, whatever in the hell you're trying to
Nixon Orders a Burial
65
prove, you can find people who'll say everything. I can build up just as
many people to say the opposite." When we tried to proceed with our
telephone interview, Moorer said, "Look ... you can write any damn
thing you want about me," and hung up the phone.
Before John Mitchell's death in 1988 we laid out the evidence for
Moorer's complicity, and asked Mitchell about his 1971 interview with
Moorer. He reiterated that it had been done before he learned the
details of Welander's confession, and that when he had determined that
Moorer's denial was plausible, he had done so in the absence of crucial
evidence to the contrary. "If I had heard that tape or heard it discussed,
I would have had to follow an entirely different course than I did," he
told us. After reading a copy of the transcript of the EhrlichmanYoung-Welander conversation, Mitchell concluded, "the president
played a game with me" by not disclosing all the facts at the time
Mitchell was sent to brace Moorer. "It sounds like I was set up,"
Mitchell said.
Why would that happen? The answer, Mitchell thought, had to do
with Nixon's personality and style of governance. In 1971, had Nixon
laid out all the evidence for Mitchell and asked his advice, the exattorney general said in 1988, he would have strongly pushed for the
dismissal of Moorer. But that's not what happened, and so Mitchell
reached the conclusion that Nixon never intended to seek his guidance
on how to handle the military spying crisis, because he already knew
what he wanted to do. Mitchell based this conclusion on the fact that
at the time of the crisis, Nixon sent Mitchell-unencumbered by
evidence-to ask Moorer a few questions and obtain a cursory denial,
because Nixon did not want to hear what he expected Mitchell would
have to say had the attorney general become convinced of Moorer's
culpability. The president used him as a prop, Mitchell asserted in
retrospect-as a vehicle through which Moorer could assert that he was
clean. In the Moorer-Radford affair, then, Mitchell, one of Nixon's
closest friends, said he was used by the president to justify the clearing
of the admiral who held one of the dirtiest secrets of the Nixon years.
Why didn't Nixon listen to the Welander tape? Mitchell thought it
was a deliberate refusal to face the facts. Mitchell agreed that had
Nixon listened to the tape, or allowed an aggressive pursuit of all the
leads on Welander's tape by his own investigators operating under
Ehrlichman, or by Mitchell himself, the consequences would have been
severe. Severe for whom? For Alexander Haig. "It would have taken
and put Haig in a different light and probably gotten him the hell out
of there," Mitchell told us.
The transcript of the Welander interview, said Mitchell after read-
66
SPY RING
ing it, bolstered his preexisting belief that "Haig was no great supporter
of Richard Nixon's; he was in business for himself."
However, Nixon was intent on burial of the episode, not exposure,
and the actions he took to cover the traces of the matter ensured that
Welander's admissions and his references to Haig were not explored.
On only one point in his assessment of the affair can Mitchell be
faulted-what Nixon would have done if he had learned what Welander
had to say about Haig, and on this, the former attorney general may
have been blinded by his loyalty to Nixon. All the evidence suggests
that the president would have dealt with Haig precisely as he dealt
with Moorer: kept him around, and shortened his leash. This was the
conclusion reached by John Ehrlichman. He imagined for us the
scenario that would have unfolded if Nixon had listened to the tape,
and he invented what Nixon would most likely have said to Haig: "I
know what you're doing and I'm going to keep you in place anyway,
but you better realize that I'm looking down your throat." Had Haig's
relationships with Robinson and Welander been exposed, Ehrlichman
contends, even if Nixon kept Haig on after 1972, he would never have
been allowed to become chief of staff, as he did in May 1973.
"I missed the boat on Al Haig at the time," Ehrlichman told us
recently, after reviewing the transcript of his old interview with
Welander, and David Young's worried early morning memo, and all the
other warning signs. At the time, he muses, "I heard what Welander
was saying, but 1 didn't fully realize its implications in terms of Haig's
role as an agent for the Joint Chiefs." Rather, he was focused on
Welander's confirmation of the spying, on Moorer's complicity, and on
dealing with the Anderson leak. He now concludes that Welander,
while at pains not to appear disloyal to a fellow officer, was trying to
show Ehrlichman and Young the path to the truth about Al Haig. "The
implications are that Haig was a prime source for the Joint Chiefs,"
Ehrlichman now understands. "I think it's pretty clear on the four
corners of the interview with Welander that Haig had an enormous
conflict of interest between his loyalty to the president, who had really
sponsored him and fostered his career on the one hand, and the Joint
Chiefs on the other .... Haig had an impossible situation-which 1
guess he resolved in favor of the Joint Chiefs."
Ehrlichman is adamant that Nixon did not have any sense of what
Welander had said about Haig, because the president had not reviewed
either the tape or the transcript, and because the subject of Welander's
veiled accusations didn't really come up in Ehrlichman's conversation
with the president. "Nixon didn't want to know anything," Ehrlichman
recalls. And so Nixon didn't know that the man he would later appoint
Nixon Orders a Burial
67
as his chief of staff previously had had "confidential relationships" with
those implicated in the military spy ring that had operated against
Nixon in 1970-71.
Alexander Haig has repeatedly refused to comment or to answer
any of our questions about the Moorer-Radford affair, or on any other
subject, either orally or in writing. His assistant Woody Goldberg
advised us that Haig is writing his memoirs and that everything he has
to say about the Nixon years will be contained in that work.
By Christmas Day of 1971, Richard Nixon had made his decision and
had begun his burial of Moorer-Radford. He would protect the backchannel that was so vital to his secret foreign policy, and in order to do
so he would not disrupt the Joint Chiefs of Staff by publicly exposing
or punishing their espionage. The following day Nixon left for a
vacation in Key Biscayne, but not before issuing one last instruction to
Ehrlichman about the crisis: He asked the domestic adviser to oversee
a detailed security review of the NSC.
This was a deliberate needle in the heart of Henry Kissinger, but
Ehrlichman recalls that Nixon both wanted to insert it and to slip it in
gently, for Nixon needed Kissinger as much as he needed Moorer.
"The president wanted it done delicately . He did not want Henry to
feel that his shop was being totally torn up by this process," Ehrlichman told us.
A retired Air Force colonel conducted the review, questioning
scores of Kissinger staffers and reporting back to the president in
February of 1972 that the NSC staff suffered from low morale. Kissinger later testified that he never saw the report because Haig got hold of
it first "and told me there was nothing in it of significance." A few
procedural changes were implemented, Haig was left in place, and the
report was shelved. The crisis was past, and no one wanted to hear
anything more about it.
By early 1972 Nixon's attention had turned to his upcoming
Chinese summit and his reelection. The White House machinery was
geared toward those goals and the military spying episode, seemingly
contained, quickly receded. Reflecting on those events, however, John
Ehrlichman says he now realizes how vulnerable the White House was
to military surveillance. "All the cars that we rode in at the White
House were driven by military drivers," Ehrlichman recalls. "All of
the telephone calls that we made in and out of our homes, in and out
of Camp David, were through a military switchboard. It was a little bit
like the purloined letter. It was there so plain nobody noticed it most
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SPY RING
of the time. We talked in the cars, we talked on our phones, we talked
from Camp David, and thought nothing about it. This was part of the
warp of the place, that you had military listening or in a position to
listen to everything."