KISSINGER AND NIXON IN THE WHITE HOUSE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830031-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 28
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 7, 2012
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: May 1, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 3
May 1982
KISSINGER AND NIXON
IN THE
WHITE HOUSE
Seymour lti. Hersh, a former correspondent for The New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for international
reporting in 1970, for his revelation of the nwssacre at My Lai, in South Vietnam. He is the winner of virtually
every major journalism award, including the George Polk Award, which he has received four times-nwre than
any other reporter in the history of the Polk Awards. His new book, which will be published early next year by
Summit, is a history of Henry Kissinger's service as national security adviser to Richard Nixon, during Nixon's
first term. The article below is drawn from that book; it deals with White House wiretapping activities and with the
White House internal-security unit known as the Plumbers. A second Atlantic article by Mr. Hersh, to be published
later this year; will be concerned with one aspect of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy during Nixon's first term.
1. THE WIRETAPS
ROGER MORRIS QUICKLY WON HENRY A. KISSINGER'S
trust in the early months of the Nixon presidency.
Not only was he a good friend of Lawrence S. Ea-
gleburger, who had emerged, after Colonel Alexander M.
Haig, Jr., as Kissinger's closest confidant among the staff
members of the National Security Council, but he was also
bright, articulate, and appropriately caustic for a thirty-
one-year-old Harvard Ph.D. at work in the White House.
Morris's responsibility was primarily for African affairs,
and his memos on the situation in Nigeria-where the fed-
eral government was waging a bitter civil war with Bia-
fran separatists-had impressed both Kissinger and
Nixon.
It was not surprising, then, that Morris was asked by
Eagleburger to sit in Kissinger's office and "cover" it one
weekend day sometime in the late spring of 1969. Haig,
who usually worked seven days a week, had rare time off,
and Eagleburger had an appointment outside the White
House and needed relief. Kissinger was spending the
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weekend in New York at his parents' home-a trip that, in
those early days, he often made.
Morris literally moved into Kissinger's office that day.
At one point during the quiet morning, a courier from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation came in and left a sealed
envelope for Kissinger. Morris brooded about the highly
classified document. The courier had explained that the
letter contained "very urgent" material. Should he call
Henry? Morris could imagine Kissinger's angry impatience
at his caution: "Idiot! Of course open it." And so he opened
The envelope was from J. Edgar Hoover-for Kis-
singer's "Eyes Only." "It was this long, detailed account of
Martin Luther King's sex life," Morris says. "There were
transcripts"-obviously from wiretaps-"and indications
that photographs were available." Some of the women
with Dr. King had apparently been FBI informants. Morris
was appalled.
A few hours later-sometime after lunch-Morris was
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BY SE.YMOUR M. HERSH
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joined by Larry Eagleburger, and Morris quickly showed
him the FBI documents. "I was speaking as an old friend
and as a Foreign Service colleague and I said, `This is abso-
lutely scurrilous stuff.'
"Larry just glanced at the first page or two, with the ho-
hum attitude of an aide reading a telephone directory; and
said, 'Oh, yeah, we get these all the time.' " Eagleburger
then went to a nearby file cabinet, opened it, and pulled
out Hoover files on members of the NSC staff, including
Morton H. Halperin, who had worked in the Pentagon in
the Johnson Administration. Files were being kept on
Martin Luther King (who had been slain the previous
year), Eagleburger told his distressed colleague, "to blunt
the black anti-war movement." Morris was not reassured,
but kept his peace.
In the beginning, morale was high among the newly re-
cruited members of Henry Kissinger's National Security
Council staff, who felt themselves to be a hand-picked elite
assembled not as a result of post-election patronage but
solely on the basis of their expertise. Many, such as Roger
Morris, were Democrats and former members of the John-
son Administration's National Security Council who vis-
cerally disliked Richard Nixon, but Kissinger had been
persuasive in insisting that his staff would be above poli-
tics. Bureaucratic life in the last years of the Johnson Ad-
ministration had been stifling-the White House's foreign
policy had been intertwined with the Vietnam War to the
exclusTion of nearly all other issues. This would change,
Kissinger assured his staff. There would be an open sys-
tem, in which all foreign-policy issues would be analyzed
and reviewed and then presented to the President, with op-
tions, for his decision. There would be afresh approach to
resolving the Vietnam War and-so Nixon and Kissinger
assured their aides--settlement of that exhausting and di-
visive issue within, the year. In fact, nothing would
change, because Nixon and Kissinger were obsessed not
with opening the system to new ideas but with seizing con-
trol of it. -
HENRY KISSINGER HAD ENTERED THE WHITE
House on Inauguration Day with immense power
and no illusions about its source. He understood
that his authority would never be disputed as long as he
kept his sole client-Richard Nixon-pleased. Kissinger
had loyally supported and endorsed Nixon's decision in
late February to begin secretly bombing Cambodia with
B-52 aircraft from the Strategic Air Command. The bombs
were to be reported, even inside the military chain of com-
mand, as having fallen in South Vietnam. In April, Kis-
singer had been among those advocating extreme mea-
sures against North Korea when a North Korean aircraft
shot down an unarmed Navy electronic-intelligence plane,
known as an EC-121, ninety miles off the Korean coast,
killing all thirty-one crew members aboard. His loyalty
and his toughness in those incidents had strengthened his
position, but by the end of April, 1969, the President still
seemed unwilling, or unable, to isolate Melvin R. Laird,
the secretary of defense, and William P. Rogers, the secre-
tary of state, from White House decision-making.
Sharing his foreign-policy authority with Lairtl and Rog-
ers inevitably made Kissinger insecure-and this insecur-
ity never really went away while he was in the White
House. Being Jewish didn't help. There is no evidence that
Kissinger was an anti-Semitic Jew or was in any way
ashamed of his Jewishness. But being Jewish was a chink
in his armor-a vulnerability that could threaten his posi-
tion. Nixon clearly viewed Kissinger's Jewishness as a
drawback, at least during the early years of his presidency.
Immediately after taking office, he assigned all responsi-
bility for the Middle East to William Rogers. It would be
the only area of such responsibility for Rogers.
There were days when Nixon would directly castigate
liberal Jews in front of Kissinger. "Nixon would talk about
Jewish traitors, and the eastern Jewish establishment-
Jews at Harvard," senior presidential aide John D. Ehr-
lichman recalls.. "And he'd play off Kissinger. `Isn't that
right, Henry? Don't you agree?' And Henry would re-
spond: `Well, Mr. President-there are Jews and Jews."'
When Jerome B. Wiesner, former science adviser to the
Kennedy Administration, criticized Nixon's decision, in
March of 1969, to deploy a limited antiballistic-missile sys-
tem, Ehrlichman says, Nixon angrily denounced Wiesner
in front of Kissinger as "another one of those Jews."
That spring, Morton Halperin quickly became a domi-
nant concern in the White House. During the last years of
the Johnson Administration, Halperin had been a marked
man to senior military men in the Pentagon-most notably
to Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-
for his role in turning around the government's policy on
Vietnam. Wheeler was later among the first to complain to
Kissinger after Halperin joined the NSC staff. Senator
Barry Goldwater also complained, in a letter sent April 22,
1969, to John Mitchell, the attorney general. Goldwater
described Halperin as among those who "made it so hard
for the military to operate in the Pentagon by their strate-
gic papers which were forced down the throats of the Joirit
Chiefs and Commanders."
Hoover, too, repeatedly expressed doubts about Halper-
in's loyalty; among other things, he told the White House,
Halperin had once sponsored a Vietnam War teach-in at
Harvard. Kissinger knew better, of course. Halperin had
sponsored the teach-in as a supporter of the war. He had
been among those advocating a strong military response to
the North Korean attack on the Navy spy plane; he had
helped set up a newly revised National Security Council
system that had provided Nixon and Kissinger with im-
mense personal control over the bureaucracy; his advice on
issues ranging from strategic-disarmament talks to the
Vietnam War was superb; he was a tireless worker who
believed that the Nixon Administration was committed to
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MAY 1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
getting out of Vietnam. Throughout the spring of 1969,
Halperin repeatedly praised the Nixon-Kissinger team to
his friends in Washington and Boston. He was not disloyal.
But Hoover and Mitchell and Goldwater and Nixon
thought he was, and so Kissinger began to savage Hal-
perin behind his back. John Ehrlichman later testified
about taking notes, as was his custom, on conversations
between Kissinger and Nixon in the Oval Office that
spring. The men were discussing possible leakers of infor-
mation, and Mort Halperin was prominently cited by Kis-
singer, Ehrlichman said, "as being singularly un-
trustworthy." Ehrlichman added, "I gathered from the
context of the conversation that Dr. Kissinger knew him,
knew him quite well." During the conversations, Kissinger
depicted Halperin as "philosophically in disagreement"
with the President on matters of policy. Ehrlichman said
that it was his impression that Halperin did more than
merely disapprove of the Nixon-Kissinger decisions: "I
gather that he sabotaged them."
THE WHITE HOUSE WIRETAPS WERE INITIATED ON
May 9, a few hours after the publication, on page
one of The New York Times, of a highly accurate
dispatch from Washington revealing the B-52 bombing of
Cambodia, by William Beecher, a military correspondent.
Beecher's dispatch did not describe the excessive secrecy
and fraudulent record-keeping involved in the bombing,
but it did report that the missions were designed to "sig-
nal" North Vietnam that the Nixon Administration would
be tougher and far more willing to take military risks for
peace than previous administrations had been. Kissinger
spoke with Hoover four times on May 9, asking him to find
the leakers and declaring, according to a Hoover memo-
randum, that the White House "will destroy whoever did
this if we can find him, no matter where he is."
Later, in attempting to deny responsibility for initiating
the wiretaps, Kissinger told newsmen that he had met on
the day of the article's publication with Mitchell, Hoover,
and Nixon to discuss newspaper leaks. He subsequently
changed that account and said that the meeting had taken
place, according to his less-than-precise office logs, on
April 25, in the Oval Office. In all of his comments and
testimony about the wiretapping, Kissinger depicted him-
self as a passive participant in the decision, made by his
superiors, to begin the surveillance. "I can say that the
idea that this was not common practice or that this was in
any sense illegal simply never crossed my mind," he told
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September of
1973. In While House Years, the first volume of his mem-
oirs, Kissinger provided a further explanation: his motive
in going along with the wiretapping "was to prevent the
jeopardizing of American and South Vietnamese lives by
individuals ... who disclosed military information en-
trusted to them in order to undermine policies decided
upon after prayerful consideration . . ."
In truth, the May 9 Beecher article simply provided the
rationale for installing the wiretaps; it was a catalyst, not
the major factor. Kissinger and Nixon were equally=if not
more-concerned about a series of leaks in late April and
early May regarding some of the hard-line options that had
been discussed after the downing of the Navy's EC-121
reconnaissance plane. On May 6, three days before the B-
52 story, William Beecher had published a detailed and ac-
curate account of some of the secret deliberations during
the EC-121 crisis. Beecher revealed that Nixon and Kis-
singer had considered B-52 bombing raids against airfields
in North Korea as well as the use of nuclear weapons.
Amazingly, the Beecher account was not considered an im-
portant story by other newspapers or by radio and televi-
sion, although it flatly contradicted the White House's
public version that Nixon and Kissinger had calmly and
coolly decided not to take action. Late in the afternoon on
May 5, according to Hoover's office calendar, Kissinger vis-
ited the FBI Director at the Justice Department; the
meeting was undoubtedly linked to Beecher's report, to be
published in the next morning's Times, which would tell
the nation that the men in the White House were talking
war, not peace.
For Nixon and Kissinger, the May 6 Beecher account
may have brought additional chills, for they could not be
sure how much the Times reporter knew about one of the
truly important secrets of the EC-121 crisis. Did he know
that Nixon had become quite drunk early in the crisis?
Nixon's drinking had yet to be perceived as a significant
problem for Kissinger and his immediate staff, and the in-
cident was quickly hushed. Halperin, for one, was not told.
Larry Eagleburger kept a standing lunch date with an old
friend that first week after the EC-121 shootdown and was
obviously upset. "Here's the President of the United
States, ranting and raving--drunk in the middle of the cri-
sis," the shaken Eagleburger told his friend.
There were other secrets to protect, too. Both Nixon
and Kissinger knew by early May that if the North Viet-
namese did not respond to the administration's offer of mu-
tual withdrawal, to be presented formally at the Paris
peace talks and-to the American public within days, the
response would be escalation of the war. And Kissinger
knew, too, that Halperin's support of the administration's
policy in Vietnam was based on what Halperin thought
that policy was, and not on what Nixon and Kissinger
knew it would be. The same held for Halperin's dovish col-
leagues on the National Security Council staff.
Another factor in the increasing discord in the White
House was Alexander Haig, who had been chosen by Kis-
singer as his military aide. As a certified hard-liner on
Vietnam, Haig had little use for the NSC moderates'
doubts and concerns about the war. Halperin was a special
target, not only because of his role in the Johnson Admin-
istration but also because of his closeness to Kissinger.
"Halperin was the early once-and-future menace-for ev-
erybody," Roger Morris observes. "In essence, everyone
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believed that Mort was doing what in fact Haig did-mov-
ing in on Henry. Nobody gave Haig any credit for moving
in.".
Al Haig was immensely popular with the young, bright,
and ambitious Kissinger aides when he first joined the
NSC staff. He was not viewed as an intellectual threat-
his first assignment was the routine task of preparing the
President's daily intelligence summary-and the Army
colonel struck most of his colleagues as open and self-effac-
ing. He laughed easily, held his gin well, and had a lively,
scatological wit. Along with handling the daily intelligence
summaries, Haig had access to the vast number of private,
back-channel messages from Kissinger's office to Ameri-
can officials throughout the world. He saw, as few other
NSC staffers could, the enormity of the foreign-policy
takeover that Kissinger and Nixon were trying to accom-
plish by side-stepping William Rogers and Melvin Laird.
As an excellent bureaucrat, he knew that more power for
Kissinger meant more power for him.
None of the NSC members, in scores of interviews many
years later, were quite sure how Al Haig did it, but within
months he managed to become indispensable to Henry
Kissinger. His loyalty was astonishing: Haig seemingly
worked all the timevery day, every night, every week-
end-ensuring that the flow of documents in and out of
Kissinger's chaotic office was uninterrupted. And Haig
was no minor-league courtier; he had learned from his days
as an aide-de-camp and in the Pentagon the art of flatter-
ing a superior in a way that put him at ease.
Others on the staff-ever sensitive to the bureaucratic
pecking order-soon came to realize that Haig's aggres-
siveness and assertiveness were being encouraged and
countenanced by his patron, Henry Kissinger. For Kis-
singer, Haig's very presence in his outer office served as a
way of demonstrating to the senior military men in the
Pentagon and to the hawks in Congress and on the Presi-
dent's staff that Kissinger was reliable. "Haig was the guy
Henry could point to," one former NSC staff man recalls,
"and say, `If I were a Harvard liberal, a left-wing kook,
would I have AL-Haig working for me?' He was Henry's
insurance policy."
Haig was that, but there was much more. As Richard L.
Sneider, Kissinger's aide for East Asian affairs, recalls,
"Haig moved in on Henry and he moved in from the very
beginning. First of all, he was Henry's butler and his
chauffeur. Henry never knew the kind of perks that could
be arranged-private planes for trips to New York for din-
ner, limousines-and he loved it. Haig also was very
shrewd politically where Henry was naive. He was advis-
ing Henry at first on how to handle Haldeman and Ehrlich-
man. When Henry had to wear a white tie and tails for his
first White House dinner, it was Haig who went to Henry's
house and helped him dress for the first time."
Haig knew far more about wiretapping and the govern-
ment procedures involved than did anyone else in the
White House; he had been exposed to FBI wiretap materi-
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als while working as a special assistant in the Pentagon in
the early 1960s, and had struck up a friendship then with
William C. Sullivan, a senior Hoover assistant who was in
charge of FBI domestic intelligence activities.
Wiretapping NSC aides was a dirty business, and every-
body in the White House and the FBI knew it. Kissinger's
method of handling it was simple: he put Haig in charge. It
was Haig who, over the next two years, would formally
transmit the names of NSC staff members and reporters to
be wiretapped. It was Haig who repeatedly went to Wil-
liam Sullivan's office in the FBI to read the wiretap tran-
scripts and summaries. It was Haig who, nearly two years
later, transmitted the final order to curtail the sur-
veillances.
It was Haig, too, who gave Kissinger his basic alibi for
his role in the wiretapping. "I would not say that I ever
said to the FBI, Please tap this individual," Kissinger told
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July of 1974.
"My perception is that I would not have said anything to
the FBI. That was done by Haig. I would have said to
Haig, We have had this leak, give the names of the people
who had access to the information."
Haig seemed truly to enjoy the snooping. In subsequent
years, he constantly checked up on younger staff members
to ensure that they did not meet with journalists. One ju-
nior NSC official recalled being braced by Haig for not get-
ting clearance in advance for one such lunch. The conver-
sation was rattling and left a distinct impression that Big
Brother was always watching.
Haig-seemed to have no ambivalence about what he was
doing. In 1973, just before the White House wiretaps be-
came a Watergate issue, he told me: "I have absolutely no
apologies to make. The wiretaps for the purposes were
justified and anyone who claims otherwise is not filled in."
It was as if the National Security Council were an Army
boot camp, and the men working for Henry Kissinger were
recruits with no right to privacy, aides-de-camp who could
be subjected to a dressing-down from an officer at any
time. If Henry Kissinger did not fully share that attitude,
he at least condoned it.
The wiretaps did not stay secret very long. In June,
Roger Morris decided to visit Larry Eagleburger, who had
fallen ill with tension and overwork, at the Washington
Hospital Center. "He was lying there as we talked," Mor-
ris recalls. "Tears welled up in his eyes and he said, `Don't
say anything on your phone. You're being tapped."' Eagle
burger also confided that Halperin was finished in the
White House.
Morris may have been the first to know, but within
weeks the word was out: Halperin was being wiretapped,
and he was in trouble. So were two other liberal NSC
aides, Daniel I. Davidson and Richard M. Moose. The mes-
senger was Al Haig. Halperin's demise pleased Laurence
E. Lynn, a former Pentagon analyst who had joined Kis-
singer's staff and immediately engaged in a running battle
with Halperin over control of the NSC studies on the
SALT talks; both men were constantly passing memoran-
dums to Kissinger without informing each other. At one
point, Lynn was offered another spot in the Nixon Admin-
istration and-not being an amateur in the ways of bu-
reaucracy-sought to pass the word to Kissinger through
Haig. Haig immediately made it clear that Halperin was
on the way out, Lynn recalls. Halperin was in trouble with
the President and with Senator Barry Goldwater, Haig
said, and was being "monitored." Lynn, who understood
what Haig meant, stayed on the job.
Early that summer, Davidson, who alsb was a holdover
from the Johnson Administration, left the White House
after a talk with Haig, and word quickly filtered through
the staff that Davidson had been caught leaking on a wire-
tap. Larry Eagleburger added to the rumors in these
weeks by confiding to Roger Morris that Halperin's name
had shown up on an intercept by the National Security
Agency of a Japanese Embassy transmission. The NSA
reported that Halperin had been discussing sensitive nego-
tiations over the future status of Okinawa with Japanese
officials in Washington, who had cabled the conversation to
their 'foreign office in Tokyo. Morris got the impression
from Eagleburger that the White House could have made
a case against Halperin for treason. (Halperin acknowl-
edges holding private talks with the Japanese; such talks,
he says, were also held during the Johnson Administra-
tion, and were always considered to be part of the normal
bargaining process.) By midsummer, too, Moose, a Foreign
Service officer who was known to be a dove on Vietnam,
was reported to be on his way out. Moose had spent five
months in 1966 on a congressional fellowship program in
the office of Senator J. William Fulbright, the Arkansas
Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee-and Richard Nixon's instant enemy.
Moose also had run afoul of Haig, who viewed Fulbright-
so he told Moose-as a "traitor" to the United States.
Sometime in June, W. Anthony Lake, a young Foreign
Service officer, arrived from a sabbatical at Princeton Uni-
versity to replace the stricken Eagleburger as Kissinger's
special assistant. There was an immediate change in the
office outside Kissinger's office, in the cramped White
House basement quarters. Al Haig moved to Eagle-
burger's desk, a few feet from Kissinger's private office,
and Lake slipped into the desk vacated by Haig. The sig-
nificance of the shift was not lost on the NSC staff, whose
members knew that Haig was getting close to the job
many wanted-that of deputy. Lake later revealed to the
Watergate Special Prosecution Force that within months
he had become aware of the wiretapping and had also be-
gun to suspect that wiretap transcripts were being kept in
a top-secret safe in the Situation Room in the basement of
the White House. The safe, designed for the storage of the
nation's nuclear-targeting materials, as well as the codes to
activate and arm America's nuclear weapons, was under
twenty-four-hour guard.
Lake and Morris, fellow Foreign Service officers, even-
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'MAY 1982 - THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE41
tually became close friends, and it wasn't long before Lake
shared his suspicions about the Situation Room safe.
Over the next two years, a number of personal aides
would rotate in and out of Kissinger's immediate office; all
quickly learned that the White House was wiretapping
some of its aides.
K n ISSINGER QUICKLY SEIZED UPON THE WIRETAPS,
ot only as a way of proving anew his loyalty to
ixon but also as a means of verifying the personal
loyalty of his own staff. Equally important, the wiretap-
ping would enable Kissinger and Nixon to monitor the loy-
alty of Secretary of Defense Laird.
Inside the National Security Council the hatred for
Laird and his military assistant, Air Force Colonel Robert
Pursley, was palpable. In late April of 1969, Kissinger had
been infuriated by the refusal of Laird and Pursley to go
along with the White House plans for military retaliation
in North Korea after the EC-121 shootdown. There were
other serious disagreements on policy issues-including
nuclear-disarmament talks and the administration's Viet-
namization plans. Laird still insisted, to Kissinger's out-
rage, on making the decisions as to when and where
American troops would be withdrawn from South Viet-
nam. "Cutting out Mel Laird is what we did for a living,"
Larry Lynn says. "Henry used to joke about Lairds horri-
ble syntax. He'd let us listen in on their conversations and
Henry would predict accurately what Laird was going to
say and then make gestures and smirk at us as they
talked." Another senior NSC aide has recalled, with a
laugh, "For a long time, I thought Laird's last name was
'crook."Mel Laird's a crook,' Henry would always say."
Haig's attitude was similar. Charles M. Cooke, Jr., a for-
mer Pentagon official who joined the staff of Elliot L. Rich-
ardson, then an undersecretary of state, recalled a lunch
later in 1969 with Al Haig in the White House mess. It was
his first meeting with Haig, who initiated the conversation
by reminiscing about his relationship with Cooke's father, a
four-star admiral who had briefed General Douglas Mac-
Arthur's staff in Japan before the Korean War. Haig was
then a junior officer on the MacArthur staff. It began as a
pleasant conversation, Cooke recalls. "I didn't know much
about Haig. Then he starts telling me what a traitor Mel
Laird is. Haig said, 'He's a traitor to the country and will
destroy the Armed Forces."' The appalled Cooke said
nothing as Haig continued to rail. "Haig said Laird was
trying to destroy our capability to destroy our enemies and
our capability to hit North Vietnam," Cooke recalls. One
specific complaint stood out, he says; Haig cited Laird's
effort to recall the Air Force's F-105 fighter-bombers from
duty over North Vietnam because of the planes' high loss
rate in combat. A similar proposal had been debated hotly
in the Johnson Administration.
Haig's complaint stood out because Cooke, who had been
a major in the Air Force and had taught at the Air Force
Academy in Colorado Springs for years, agreed with
Laird's view. After lunch, Cooke says, "my decision was
that I could not deal with Al Haig-.-and I never did deal
with him again."
It is only against this background of distrust and in-
trigue that the earliest group of White House wiretaps can
be assessed. The first man to be wiretapped was Halperin,
whose' home telephone was 'under surveillance shortly
after 6 P.M. on the evening of May 9, three days before
Attorney General Mitchell formally signed the FBI au-
thorization for the tap. Three other wiretaps-on Dan Da-
vidson, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, and Bob Pursley-were in-
stalled on May 12. (Sonnenfeldt, a Soviet specialist, had
known Kissinger for many years and had been among the
first to be invited to join the NSC staff.) On May 90, NSC
staff members Richard Sneider and Dick Moose, the for-
mer Fulbright aide, were wiretapped.
Haig, with his simplistic view that those who were
against the war were enemies of the state, may indeed
have believed that the taps were a necessity. But Kis-
singer knew better. For him, the wiretaps provided.a secu-
rity blanket, more proof to Nixon, Hoover, and Mitchell
that he could be trusted. Kissinger was an ardent leaker
himself and knew, as any senior national-security official in
Washington quickly learns, what to say and what not to
say on the telephone.
Halperin summed up the situation in an interview years
after the wiretapping: "The notion that you can find out
who's leaking and the notion-which Henry keeps putting
forward-that you can prove that somebody was not leak-
ing or exonerate somebody by tapping their phone is abso-
lutely preposterous. I'm not going to come home at night
and dial Bill Beecher and say, 'Hey, Bill, we're bombing
Cambodia.' I'm sure the FBI knows that Beecher lives
about ten minutes from me, and in that particular year we
happened to have theater tickets together with our wives.
We used to drive down to the Arena Stage [a Washington
theater] together, and, obviously, if I was going to tell him
anything, which I wasn't, I would have done so on a grassy
knoll near the Arena Stage and not on the telephone. You
just don't find out whether people are leaking by wiretap-
ping, and I think they knew it, too."
The wiretap on Colonel Pursley must have been one of
the most important ones to Kissinger. Kissinger and Nixon
believed, and continued to believe throughout Nixon's first
term, that Laird was constantly leaking stories in an effort
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? I PAGE42 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
~I)
II
to ingratiate himself with the press as a secret clove and to
fight Kissinger's growing power. The other wiretaps
served a multitude of purposes for Kissinger. To begin
with, four of those tapped-Davidson, Halperin, Sneider,
and Sonnenfeldt-were Jewish; tapping them not only
played into the anti-Semitism in the Oval Office but also
demonstrated that Kissinger was able to rise above his re-
ligious background, a point Kissinger needed to prove if he
was to have any influence on Middle East policy. In addi-
tion, Davidson was considered to be a protege of W. Aver-
ell Harriman, a senior Democratic statesman, and Kis-
singer, by agreeing to that wiretap, would have a new
window on the Democratic establishment, a group that he
was privately beseeching not to criticize the Nixon poli-
cies. And finally, and perhaps most important, the wire-
taps on Moose, Sneider, Davidson, and Halperin would tell
much about what those men-all known to favor a quickly
negotiated settlement in Vietnam-thought of him.
On May 20-according to one of William Sullivan's
memorandums to Hoover-Kissinger and Haig came to
the FBI offices in downtown Washington to read wiretap
logs. The Sullivan memorandum says: "On doing this, he
[Kissinger] said `it is clear that I don't have anybody in my
office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.' He men-
tioned that he was under great pressures to adopt a soft
line on foreign policy. But he said he is not going to do so."
Kissinger later denied making the visit, and Sullivan
would testify that he.had no recollection of it. But the
memorandum, found in the FBI files during an inquiry into
the wiretaps four years later, remains.
The next stage was to begin wiretapping newsmen. By
September, Kissinger and Haig had forwarded the names
of three-Henry Brandon, of The London Sunday Times,
Marvin Kalb, of CBS News, and Hedrick Smith, of The
New York Times-to the FBI. Brandon and Kalb were
close to Kissinger and were direct recipients of many brief-
ings and leaks. National security surely was not a rationale
for the wiretaps on them, since Kissinger knew that he
was the source of much of their classified information. J.
Edgar Hoover had long considered Brandon, who was
born in Czechoslovakia, to be an agent for the Czech and
British intelligence services, and Richard Nixon and a
group. of aides in the White House were told by, of all peo-
ple, Henry Kissinger, late in 1969, that Kalb was an agent
of the Rumanian government.
Kissinger knew the allegations against Kalb and Bran-
don were preposterous. His interest in the wiretaps had
nothing to do with such beliefs but was personal: he was
playing to the President's prejudices in an effort to ingrati-
ate himself further.' He also wanted to learn the, identities
of Brandon's and Kalb's other sources in the government
and perhaps to find out as well what the two reporters
were saying behind his back., There was another reason,
perhaps irresistible to the White House, for the Brandon
wiretap: monitoring the private life of Senator Edward M.
Kennedy. Brandon's wife, Mabel, was extremely friendly
with Joan Kennedy, and many of their most intimate con-
versations were monitored by the FBI. (Not everything
got to the White House, however. The Watergate prosecu-
tors later learned that one highly personal discussion of
Mrs. Kennedy's "problems with Teddy" was typed up and
delivered to Courtland J. Jones, a supervisor in the FBI's
Washington field office, for transmission to higher officials.
Jones told the prosecutors that he destroyed the transcript
instead of sending it to the White House. "I knew what
those people would do with this stuff," he explained.)
Brandon, who was one of the few reporters in Washington
to have some access to Nixon, was also known to be talking
to Halperin. The FBI had gone beyond mere wiretaps in
the case; its agents were able to supply the White House
with photographs of the two meeting for lunch in clown-
town Washington.
In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, Kissinger suggested that the wiretap on Brandon
may have been aimed at him. "I must have been tapped
frequently on that tap, because Brandon was the only jour-
nalist I knew socially when I came to Washington, and I
spoke to him very frequently and I had no conceivable in-
terest in tapping Brandon." There is no evidence, how-
ever, that Kissinger was a target of the FBI or of the Oval
Office in those early months of the Nixori Administration.
His close aides, such as Larry Eagleburger and Al Haig,
were not wiretapped, although they, theoretically, also had
access to the most sensitive information about the EC-121
incident and the B-52 bombings. And, as Kissinger also
knew, Eagleburger was among those who had been leaking
to favored columnists and reporters. By the spring of 1969,
for example, Eagleburger had established rapport with
Robert Novak, one of the authors of the widely syndicated
Evans & Novak column, and, at Kissinger's direction, had
begun passing along a series of leaks. "We called it `feeding
the animals,"' says Morris.
THE WIRETAP ON HEDRICK SMITH PROVIDES THE
most evidence of Kissinger's direct role. The tap
was authorized on June 4, 1969, the same day Smith
reported in the Times that a summit meeting between
Nixon and President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Viet-
nam-previously scheduled for June 8 at Midway Island-
might result in an announcement that the number of
American troops in Vietnam would be, reduced. By that
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late date, however, the Nixon Administration's tentative
decision to begin withdrawing American troops had been
widely reported. Of perhaps more significance was Smith's
exclusive dispatch in the Times of the day before revealing
that Nixon was willing to return Okinawa to Japanese con-
trol and withdraw American nuclear weapons from the
American bases there. Smith did not report, however, the
essence of the bargain, which assured continued American
use of the Okinawa bases. The Smith story was published
six days after issuance of top-secretNational Security De-
cision Memorandum Number 13 by the White House. "Our
fallback position was thus in print before our negotiations
had even begun," Kissinger complained in his memoirs.
Nixon also singled out the Smith story for complaint in his
memoirs.
On June 4, Kissinger had a previously scheduled meet-
ing with Hoover at the FBI, and before it Haig, ever the
alert deputy, presented his boss with a memorandum
(marked "Top Secret-Sensitive") summarizing some of
the issues to be discussed. Kissinger was first to express
his appreciation to Hoover and William Sullivan "for their
outstanding support in recent weeks in uncovering securi-
ty problems within the NSC," Haig wrote. Kissinger was
also to ask Hoover "for his views on how we should proceed
with Halperin, who has been involved in indiscretions and
who obviously has a reputation for liberal views but who
has yet to be firmly linked with a security breach." Finally,
Kissinger was to ask Hoover'if he has any additional infor-
mation or guidance which he feels would be helpful in this
very difficult situation."
There was one other problem, Haig's memorandum
suggested. Nixon was seemingly having second thoughts
about the wiretapping, and Haig urged Kissinger to "in-
quire about the requirement for prolonging the taps, mak-
ing it clear that the President wishes to terminate them as
soon as possible." Haig added that it was his opinion that
the wiretaps on Halperin and another NSC staff member
"should be kept on for at least another two weeks so that a
pattern of innocence can be firmly established." In Halper-
in's case, the wiretaps remained on until February of 1971,
a total of twenty-one months, more than enough time to
prove his innocence.
After that meeting, about which no memorandums have
been made public, William Sullivan authorized the Smith
wiretap, specifically mentioning Kissinger as the official
who made the request-the only time Kissinger was so
named in the FBI's wiretap files. Sullivan wrote, "Today
Dr. Kissinger requested that a telephone surveillance be
placed on Hedrick Smith, who has been in contact with
individuals on whom we have telephone coverage in this
case." In his 1974 Senate testimony, Kissinger discussed an
FBI report that Smith had been overheard talking to Dan
Davidson on wiretaps. But neither he nor any other gov-
ernment official was able to supply evidence linking those
conversations to any of Smith's stories.
Smith's dispatches came at a trying time for Kissinger.
There was renewed pressure I from Nixon over leaks. And
Mel Laird was still insisting: on the implementation of his
Vietnamization plan. That plan, which called for the South
Vietnamese army to take over the. function of American
troops as they were withdrawn, was initially viewed by
Kissinger as an insurmountable drawback to his Vietnam
negotiating strategy. How could he negotiate a mutual
withdrawal of United States-and North Vietnamese forces
when Laird and Nixon were beginning to withdraw troops
unilaterally?
It seems clear, based on Kissinger's own statements to
the press and to various inquiries, that Smith's two stories
preoccupied Kissinger when he yisited Hoover in his office
at 9:30 A.M. on June 4. Yet, in is 1974 testimony to the
Senate, Kissinger said he could not remember whether
they came up. "I am confident I did not ... request a tap
from Mr. Hoover," Kissinger testified, "but what else was
said in this conversation wouldbe very hard for me to re-
construct. These conversations' one has to see in the con-
text. It is the wrong idea to assume that one went to Mr.
Hoover who passively listened to descriptions of security
violations and then reluctantly went along with orders.
Usually what happened was that the Director would give
one an enormous amount of alleged security violations to
which one tried to make a more or less reasonable re-
sponse." Hoover had died in 1972, so Kissinger could speak
without fear of contradiction.
Kissinger had no fears about what he said over the tele-
phone: he knew that William Sullivan and the others in-
volved in the FBI would be terrified, as would any careful
bureaucrat, at the prospect of confronting a superior in the
White House with evidence of possible indiscretions. Dur-
ing the twenty-one months that Mort Halperin's home
telephone was wiretapped, the FBI sent thirty-four let-
ters to Kissinger, Nixon, and H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's
chief of staff and closest aide, summarizing the information
overheard. Nothing was reported, however, about an ex-
tensive phone conversation Halperin and Kissinger had on
a Saturday afternoon in early August of 1969. By
then, Halperin had been wiretapped for three months and
no incriminating information had been obtained. Yet Kis-
singer had been increasingly isolating him from classified
materials inside the NSC, and Halperin was on the verge
of resignation. Kissinger spoke very frankly that Saturday.
in urging Halperin to stay, knowing that his remarks were
being overheard, because he had placed the call to Hal-
perin at his home. Kissinger's statements would have out-
raged President Nixon, if made available to him, and
would have threatened Kissinger's Oval Office standing.
In the FBI transcript of that August conversation, Kis-
singer was quoted as praising Halperin's work as extraor-
dinary and urging him not to leave the White House. Kis-
singer even promised to talk about Halperin's role with
Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell-a promise that he
knew he could not keep-to see "if they feel we can't tailor
something [for Halperin] right now."
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The conversation was sheer hokum on Kissinger's part;
his only concern was to ensure that Halperin kept his
peace. Nonetheless, Kissinger obviously would not have
held such a conversation if he thought there was any
chance that the FBI would routinely forward a summary
to Nixon. It is unlikely that the precise details of the ar-
rangement between the top level of the FBI and Kis-
singer's office ever will be known, but Kissinger obviously
felt free to talk on the telephone to those of his staff-and
various reporters-whom he knew to be wiretapped. His
enemy in all of this was not Hoover.
Al Haig's conversations also were insulated. None of his
telephone talks with Bob Pursley, many of which, Pursley
recalls, dealt with classified information, were included in
the FBI telephone transcripts. (Pursley did discover, upon
reviewing his transcripts years later, that the FBI had
been quick, however, to faise doubts about him. In mid-
1970, he had taken a brief vacation, his first in years, with
his wife. On the morning after his return to work, Mrs.
Pursley telephoned and asked him how it felt to be back.
"Miserable," said Pursley, not unnaturally. "I wish t wasn't
here." At this point in the transcript of the call, an FBI
agent noted: "He appears to be a disgruntled employee."
Similarly, Morton Halperin's wife, Ina, was constantly tell-
ing callers that her telephone was wiretapped. In one con-
versation with a close relative in the fall of 1969, Mrs. Hal-
perin suddenly exclaimed, "You hear that beeping?" At
this point in the FBI logs, the agent preparing the tran-
scripts noted parenthetically: "There isn't any beeping on
the line. Ina has a complex her phone is being tapped.")
In a conversation in 1973, conducted at the time on a
not-for-attribution basis, William Sullivan told me that
none of the wiretaps produced any evidence of NSC
wrongdoing. "There wasn't one member of the staff who
was disloyal to the country. But they were disloyal to Kis-
singer, and they were giving him real problems. Some of
them began to disagree with him and they weren't with
him." (Sullivan was killed in a hunting accident near his
home in New Hampshire in November of 1977, six years
after he resigned from the FBI.)
Richard Nixon, accotding to a transcript of a White
House tape recording that was made public during the
1974 impeachment hearings, strongly suggested that it
was Kissinger who urged the wiretapping. Discussing the
wiretaps on Halperin and Tony Lake (who was not wire-
tapped until 1970), Nixon said; "I know that he [Kissinger]
asked that it be done. And I assumed that it was. Lake and
Halperin. They're both bad. But the taps were, too. They
never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material: gossip and
bullshitting-the tapping was a very, very unproductive
thing. .."
In his various public statements, Nixon has consistently
said that his approval of the wiretaps was based on
grounds of national security. Kissinger has also cited na-
tional security in defense of his involvement. During his
1974 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, Kissinger was asked whether any of his aides were
fired because of indiscretions. His full answer, not included
by the committee in its published hearings, amounted to
innuendo. "As a result of this program, there were two
violations that I remember," Kissinger testified. "In the
case of one person, he was separated from the staff over a
period of months in such a way that it did not appear that
he'd been fired for a security violation. I thought it was an
indiscretion. I did not want to blight his whole career, so
first I had him transferred out of the National Security
Council to another government position and suggested to
him as a friend that he resign after a decent interval....
It was clearly an indiscretion, but I did not want to have
him blighted."
Kissinger was referring to Dan Davidson, a tact private-
ly conveyed to me years later by Al Haig. But Davidson
was never accused of any leaks, nor was he transferred to
another job, nor, he says, did he have a conversation with
Kissinger in which he was advised to "resign after a decent
interval." In fact, Davidson recalls being intensely loyal to
Kissinger then. "At that early stage, most of us liked him
very much," Davidson says. "He was a hypnotic guy." Da-
vidson was told by Al Haig in mid-1969 that his resignation
was desired, and he was offered his choice of a new post.
He left government instead to begin practicing law in
Washington.
In his classified testimony to the Senate, Kissinger also
told of the second alleged security violation, which was
Halperin's. "In the case of another person, we suddenly
separated him from classified documents to a point he felt
he wanted to resign, but that was an attempt on my part to
minimize the damage to the individuals themselves," Kis-
singer said. "If they had been overwhelming security vio-
lations, we would have thrown them out. They were bor-
derline cases, where you erred on the side of protecting
the security but did not feel justified in blighting the whole
career of the man."
In 1976, in testimony in connection with a suit filed by
Halperin that year, Kissinger significantly altered his ac-
count. He testified that as of August, 1969, when he had
the extended discussion with Halperin and urged him tb
stay on at the NSC, "I had no information that would make
me-=on security grounds-make me change my mind
about keeping him." It was "my judgment" that Halperin
was not a security risk, Kissinger said.
BY THE FALL OF 1969, KISSINGER HAD STRIPPED
his staff of many of those who were deemed to be
offensive to the man in the Oval Office. Halperin
formally resigned in September, Sneider and Davidson
were long gone. All left quietly. Coping with Nixon, pleas-
ing him, and trying to find out what he really wanted were
always the most important priorities for Kissinger. If his
staff was too Jewish and too liberal for Nixon and his chief
aides, Kissinger made the necessary adjustments.
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"MAX INM THE ATLANTIC MO!. THLY PAGE45
More and more subservient, even fawning, to his pa-
tron, Kissinger was increasingly vicious and outspoken
outside the Oval Office. the backbiting grew intense by
the end of the year. Secretary of State Rogers was a "fag"
who had some strange hold over the President; Mel Laird
was a megalomaniac who constantly leaked anti-Kissinger
stories to the press; and Richard Nixon was a secret drunk
of dubious intelligence.
There was a steady stream of private invective from
Kissinger, and his personal aides heard it all. One of his
major obsessions in the first year was Bill Rogers. At one
time Kissinger told his staff that a prominent Georgetown
columnist had confided to him that Rogers was keeping a
house in Georgetown with a young male paramour in it.
(The aides knew that such stories were absurd but also felt
that Kissinger to some degree wanted to believe them.)
Morris and others who were trusted by Kissinger eventu-
ally ended up working on Kissinger's private diary, which
was transcribed and edited daily. On some days, Morris
says, the Kissinger entries filled fifteen pages-not with
high-level diplomatic strategy but with low-level gossip.
"We caught glimpses of Nixon, Laird, Rogers, and Kis-
singer in action," Morris says. "Nixon drank exceptionally
at night and there were many nights when you couldn't
reach him at Camp David." The diary was treated as if it
wefe the most sensitive document in the government-
which it may have been. Morris recalls that it was stored
in an electronically protected safe in Kissinger's office
along with'materials from the secret Paris negotiations
with North Vietnam.
"It was a goldmine of bureaucratic duplicity and maneu-
ver," Morris says. "When Henry went home at night, he
didn't discuss policy; he discussed the nature of people. He
is really interested in personalities and their weaknesses;
he analyzed issues and people the way a good boxer ana-
lyzes his opponent's boxing style." The diary was replete
with evidence that Kissinger privately held many of his
colleagues in contempt, Morris says.
Morris often listened in on Kissinger's conversations
with an obviously drunk Nixon. "There were many times
when a cable would come in late and Henry would say,
'There's no sense waking him up-he'd be incoherent,"'
Morris recalls. The young aide was frightened by the idea
of a President who was not fully competent after sundown.
He often wondered what would happen if the Soviet Union
attacked at night.
Morris said nothing to his outside friends about such go-
ings-on. "It's hard to explain," he said later.-"It's a constant
barrage. You go around taking it for granted that Nixon's
nuts. Henry and others go around wringing their hands for
the President and saying Rogers is a fag. After a while,
you lose your perspective. You don't feel a sense of out-
rage. All of the things that you think about later-the
drunkenness, the wiretapping-you've become inured to
while in the White House. It isn't a matter of constant
moral torment when you're there."
Kissinger on more than orte occasion told his personal
staff about his first formal White House reception and his
first meeting with ' Mrs. Nixon. He naturally began to
praise the President lavishly, but Mrs. Nixon leaned over
and interrupted him by saying, "Haven't you seen through
him yet?" Morris recalls that Kissinger would tell the
anecdote to the staff and joke about it, "as if to say, 'This
man is not stable."'
"It's a curious paradox about Henry," Morris says. "No-
body schemed or planned more than Kissinger about his
enemies-and yet nobody was as careless. He didn't really
conceal his contempt for all of these people, except in face-
to-face dealings."
Colonel Bob Pursley similarly-recalls that Kissinger and
Haig would seek his support, and the support of Laird, for
a White House stratagem "by telling me, 'We've got a mad-
man on our hands.' They'd always say that to me; it was a
continual thing."
Just how serious was Nixon's drinking problem? Many
of his former associates and aides, such as Charles W. Col-
son, dismiss its significance by saying that the President
had a notoriously low capacity for alcohol, and would slur
his words and appear to be somewhat drunk after one or
two highballs. Yet John Ehrlichman recalls that he had re-
fused to work on Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968 un-
less Nixon promised to stop drinking. "Nixon promised to'
lay off during the campaign and he did," Ehrlichman says.
"There were times when he got drunk-no question about
it. But it wasn't that frequent, and he had a sense of when
he was on and when he was off."
Another close aide to Kissinger recalls, however, that
Nixon always seemed to be "off" during his many week-
ends at the Florida White House in Key Biscayne. On
those weekends, Nixon spent an inordinate amount of time
drinking martinis with two old cronies, Charles G. (Bebe)
Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. "To the extent there was a
problem," the aide recalls, "it was very real in Key Bis-
cayne." Kissinger's main concern during those Florida
weekend trips, which were working weekends for the Na-
tional Security Adviser and his staff, was avoiding social
encounters with the Nixon entourage. "We always played
hard to get for- Nixon," the aide says; his job was to find a
way to say no without saying no. On occasion, Nixon him-
self would telephone with a request, and Kissinger would
go. One night in Miami, Nixon stopped an attractive wom-
an as he left a restaurant-after having had a few drinks
too many-and offered her a job in the White House. "She
looks like she's built for you, Henry," the President said.
The Kissinger aide learned of the encounter from a Secret
Service man. "Hearing this kind of a thing made my veins
hurt," the aide says. "The President of the United States,
drunk in a restaurant, making crude remarks and engag-
ing in familiarity with a strange woman in a public place-
all clearly attributable to martinis . . . " Nonetheless, the
aide says, "I didn't think of his drinking as a real problem-
although you sort of wondered what would happen if there
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MAY 1982
The conversation was sheer hokum on Kissinger's part;
his only concern was to ensure that Halperin kept his
peace. Nonetheless, Kissinger obviously would not have
held such a conversation if he thought there was any
chance that the FBI would routinely forward a summary
to Nixon. It is unlikely that the precise details of the ar-
rangement between the top level of the FBI and Kis-
singer's office ever will be known, but Kissinger obviously
felt free to talk on the telephone to those of his staff-and
various reporters-whom he knew to be wiretapped. His
enemy in all of this was not Hoover.
A] Haig's conversations also were insulated. None of his
telephone talks with Bob Pursley, many of which,. Pursley
recalls, dealt with classified information, were included in
the FBI telephone transcripts. (Pursley did discover, upon
reviewing his transcripts years later, that the FBI had
been quick, however, to taise doubts about him. In mid-
1970, he had taken a brief vacation, his first in years, with
his wife. On the morning after his return to work, Mrs.
Pursley telephoned and asked him how it felt to be back.
"Miserable," said Pursley, not unnaturally. "I wish I wasn't
here." At this point in the transcript of the call, an FBI
agent noted: "He appears to be a disgruntled employee."
Similarly, Morton Halperin's wife, Ina, was constantly tell-
ing callers that her telephone was wiretapped. In one con-
versation with a close relative in the fall of 1969, Mrs. Hal-
perin suddenly exclaimed, "You hear that beeping?" At
this point in the FBI logs, the agent preparing the tran-
scripts noted parenthetically: "There isn't any beeping on
the line: Ina has a complex her phone is being tapped.")
In a conversation in 1973, conducted at the time on a
not-for-attribution basis, William Sullivan told me that
none of the wiretaps produced any evidence of NSC
wrongdoing. "There wasn't one member of the staff who
was disloyal to the country. But they were disloyal to Kis-
singer, and they were giving him real problems. Some of
them began to disagree with him and they weren't with
him." (Sullivan was killed in a hunting accident near his
home in New Hampshire in November of 1977, six years
after he resigned from the FBI.)
Richard Nixon, accotding to a transcript of a White
House tape recording that was made public during the
1974 impeachment hearings, strongly suggested that it
was Kissinger who urged.the wiretapping. Discussing the
wiretaps on Halperin and Tony Lake (who was not wire-
tapped until 1970), Nixon said, "I know that he [Kissinger]
asked that it be done. And I assumed that it was. Lake and
Halperin. They're both bad. But the taps were, too. They
never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material: gossip and
bullshitting-the tapping was a very, very unproductive
thing. .."
In his various public statements, Nixon has consistently
said that his approval of the wiretaps was based on
grounds of national security. Kissinger has also cited na-
tional security in defense of his involvement. During his
1974 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee,Kissinger was asked whether any of his aides were
fired because of indiscretions. His full answer, not included
by the committee in its published hearings, amounted to
innuendo. "As a result of this program, there were two
violations that I remember," Kissinger testified. "In the
case of one person, he was separated from the staff over a
period of months in such a way that it did not appear that
he'd been fired for a security violation. I thought it was an
indiscretion. I did not want to blight his whole career, so
first I had him transferred out of the National Security
Council to another government position and suggested to
him as a friend that he resign after a decent interval....
It was clearly an indiscretion, but I did not want to have
him blighted."
Kissinger was referring to Dan Davidson, a fact private-
ly conveyed to me years later by Al Haig. But Davidson
was never accused of any leaks, nor was he transferred to
another job, nor, he says, did he have a conversation with
Kissinger in which he was advised to "resign after a decent
interval." In fact, Davidson recalls being intensely loyal to
Kissinger then. "At that early stage, most of us liked him
very much," Davidson says. "He was a hypnotic guy." Da-
vidson was told by Al Haig in mid-1969 that his resignation
was desired, and he was offered his choice of a new post.
He left government instead to begin practicing law in
Washington.
In his classified testimony to the Senate, Kissinger also
told of the second alleged security violation, which was
Halperin's. "In the case of another person, we suddenly
separated him from classified documents to a point he felt
he wanted to resign, but that was an attempt on my part to
minimize the damage to the individuals themselves," Kis-
singer said. "If they had been overwhelming security vio-
lations, we would have thrown them out. They were bor-
derline cases, where you erred on the side of protecting
the security but did not feel justified in blighting the whole
career of the man."
In 1976, in testimony in connection with a suit filed by
Halperin that year, Kissinger significantly altered his ac-
count. He testified that as of August, 1969, when he had
the extended discussion with Halperin and urged him to
stay on at the NSC, "I had no information that would make
me-on security grounds--make me change my mind
about 'keeping him." It was "my judgment" that Halperin
was not a security risk, Kissinger- said.
BY THE FALL OF 1969, KISSINGER HAD STRIPPED
his staff of many of those who were deemed to be
offensive to the man in the Oval Office. Halperin
formally resigned in September, Sneider and Davidson
were long gone. All left quietly. Coping with Nixon, pleas-
ing him, and trying to find out what he really wanted were
always the most important priorities for Kissinger. If his
staff was too Jewish and too liberal for Nixon and his chief
aides, Kissinger made the necessary adjustments.
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MAY 1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE 45
More and more subservient, even fawning, to his pa-
tron, Kissinger was increasingly vicious and outspoken
outside the Oval Office. The backbiting grew intense by
the end of the year. Secretary of State Rogers was a "fag"
who had some strange hold over the President; Mel Laird
was a megalomaniac who constantly leaked anti-Kissinger
stories to the press; and Richard Nixon was a secret drunk
of dubious intelligence.
There was a steady stream of private invective from
Kissinger, and his personal aides heard it all. One of his
major obsessions in the first year was Bill Rogers. At one
time Kissinger told his staff that a prominent Georgetown
columnist had confided to him that Rogers was keeping a
house in Georgetown with a young male paramour in it.
(The aides knew that such stories were absurd but also felt
that Kissinger to some degree wanted to believe them.)
Morris and others who were trusted by Kissinger eventu-
ally ended up working on Kissinger's private diary, which
was transcribed and edited daily. On some days, Morris
says, the Kissinger entries filled fifteen pages-not with
high-level diplomatic strategy but with low-level gossip.
"We caught glimpses of Nixon, Laird, Rogers, and Kis-
singer in action, " Morris says. "Nixon drank exceptionally
at night and there were many nights when you couldn't
reach him at Camp David." The diary was treated as if it
were the most sensitive document in the government-
which it may have beets. Morris recalls that it was stored
in an electronically protected safe in Kissinger's office
along with materials from the secret Paris negotiations
with North Vietnam.
"It was a gold mine of bureaucratic duplicity and maneu-
ver," Morris says. "When Henry went home at night, he
didn't discuss policy; he discussed the nature of people. He
is really interested in personalities and their weaknesses;
he analyzed issues and people the way a good boxer ana-
lyzes his opponent's boxing style." The diary was replete
with evidence that Kissinger privately held many of his
colleagues in contempt, Morris says.
Morris often listened in on Kissinger's conversations
with an obviously drunk Nixon. "There were many times
when a cable would come in late and Henry would say,
'There's no sense waking him up-he'd be incoherent,'"
Morris recalls. The young aide was frightened by the idea
of a President who was not fully competent after sundown.
He often wondered what would happen if the Soviet Union
attacked at night.
Morris said nothing to his outside friends about such go-
ings-on. "It's hard to explain," he said later. "It's a constant
barrage. You go around taking it for granted that Nixon's
nuts. Henry and others go around wringing their hands for
the President and saying Rogers is a fag. After a while,
you lose your perspective. You don't feel a sense of out-
rage. All of the things that you think about later-the
drunkenness, the wiretapping-you've become inured to
while in the White House. It isn't a matter of constant
moral torment when you're there."
Kissinger on more than oriie occasion told his personal
staff about his first formal White House reception and his
first meeting with Mrs. Nixon. He naturally began to
praise the President lavishly, but Mrs. Nixon leaned over
and interrupted him by saying, "Haven't you seen through
him yet?" Morris recalls that Kissinger would tell the
anecdote to the staff and joke about it, "as if to say, 'This
man is not stable."'
"It's a curious paradox about Henry," Morris says. "No-
body schemed or planned more.-than Kissinger about his
r
enemies--and yet nobody was as careless. He didn't really
conceal his contempt for all of these people, except in face-
to-face dealings."
Colonel Bob Pursley similarlyrecalls that Kissinger and
Haig would seek his support, and the support of Laird, for
a White House stratagem "by telling me, 'We've got a mad-
man on our hands.' They'd always say that to me; it was a
continual thing."
Just how serious was Nixon's drinking problem? Many
of his former associates and aides, such as Charles W. Col-
son, dismiss its significance bysaying that the President
had a notoriously low capacity for alcohol, and would slur
his words and appear to be somewhat drunk after one or
two highballs. Yet John Ehrlichman recalls that he had re-
fused to work on Nixon's presidential campaign in 1968 un-
less Nixon promised to stop drinking. "Nixon promised to'
lay off during the campaign and he did," Ehrlichman says.
"There were times when he got drunk-no question about
it. But it wasn't that frequent, and he had a sense of when
he was on and when he was off."
Another close aide to Kissinger recalls, however, that
Nixon always seemed to be "off" during his many week-
ends at the Florida White House in Key Biscayne. On
those weekends, Nixon spent an inordinate amount of time
drinking martinis with two old cronies, Charles G. (Bebe)
Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. "To the extent there was a
problem," the aide recalls, "it was very real in Key Bis-
cayne." Kissinger's main concern during those Florida
weekend trips, which were working weekends for the Na-
tional Security Adviser and his staff, was avoiding social
encounters with the Nixon entourage. "We always played
hard to get for Nixon," the aide says; his job was to find a
way to say no without saying no. On occasion, Nixon him-
self would telephone with a request, and Kissinger would
go. One night in Miami, Nixon stopped an attractive wom-
an as he left a restaurant-after having had a few drinks
too many-and offered her a job in the White House. "She
looks like she's built for you, Henry," the President said.
The Kissinger aide learned of the encounter from a Secret
Service man. "Hearing this kind of a thing made my veins
hurt," the aide says. "The President of the United States,
drunk in a restaurant, making crude remarks and engag-
ing in familiarity with a strange woman in a public place-
all clearly attributable to martinis . . . " Nonetheless, the
aide says, "I didn't think of his drinking as a real problem-
although you sort of wondered what would happenif there
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was ever a nuclear threat." Most of the time, he says, "it
was one of the things you knew about in terms of handling
papers-'Oh, no, this is not the time to get him to sign
these."'
Whatever the truth, Kissinger's personal aides-who
rarely saw Nixon-were convinced that they were dealing
with a defective President, and Kissinger did little to reas-
sure them.
Keeping certain people cut off from the flow of informa-
tion was a way of life in the Kissinger White House. Most
of Kissinger's staff in the Old Executive Office Building
simply did not know what he was doing. Mort Halperin
recalls that the process began early. "The President's trip
to Asia [in July and August} was planned and conceived
without the guy in charge of Asia knowing about it. The
guy working on Vietnam did not know about the Presi-
dent's letter to Ho Chi Minh [in July]. The Kissinger oper-
ation right from the beginning was a one-man operation
with a couple of staff guys."
At a much more trusted level were Kissinger's personal
staff aides, who included at varying times in 1969 Eagle-
burger, Haig, and Tony Lake. In August, William Watts,
one of Kissinger's former colleagues from the 1968 Rocke-
feller presidential campaign, arrived to replace Dick
Moose as staff secretary. He, too, was given a position of
trust, and spent much of his time in the West Wing base-
ment offices when Kissinger was traveling. These men not
only saw all of the highly classified documents that
streamed into Kissinger's office but were also very much
aware of his effort to isolate other staff members and the
bureaucracy from the decision-making process. These men
further saw many of the FBI documents that were sent by
Hoover to Kissinger, including the wiretap summaries.
The office secretary, and occasionally one of the personal
aides, monitored Kissinger's telephone conversations with
the President and other officials in and out of the White
House. Kissinger's personal staff was also responsible for
drafting and monitoring the flow of memorandums from
Kissinger to Nixon. -
Many of the NSC staff members got a chance to see Nix-
on in action in the first few months, usually at the National
Security Council meetings. Nixon was impressive. Staff
members recalled that he seemed to have done his home-
work and understood the intricacies of the foreign-policy
issues under discussion.
Within a few months, however, as Nixon and Kissinger
tightened their hold on the bureaucracy, the formal meet-
ings., were recast as caricatures-ritualistic devices by
which the President could be exposed to his Cabinet and
his senior advisers under tightly controlled conditions. By
mid-1969, Kissinger was ordering his staff to include the
admonishment that "no decisions will be made here" in
presidential briefing papers submitted prior to the NSC
meetings.
By then, too, Nixon seemed to be giving far less atten-
tion to the formal meetings, and far less attention to his
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PAGE 48 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAY1982
homework-the many studies and documents prepared by
the NSC staff. The talking papers prepared for Nixon pri-
or to formal Security Council meetings soon began to in-
clude word-for-word dialogue. One staff aide vividly recalls
the first of many such papers he wrote for Nixon: "It was
like a first-grade primer-`Run, Spot, Run' kind of thing,"
the aide says. In his script, Nixon began the meeting by
saying, "Gentlemen: Today we are dealing with etc., etc.
There are four issues: first, we have etc., etc." After stat-
ing the issues, Nixon was to call on Kissinger and ask him
to summarize the available options. When Kissinger had
done so, the script called for Nixon to say, "Thank you, Dr.
Kissinger." Then Nixon was to say, "Now it's Mr. So-and-
so's turn," the aide says; and bring in a Cabinet member
for discussion. The astonishing thing, the aide recalls, was
that Nixon followed the script exactly.
Kissinger's NSC staff mushroomed to 114 members and
secretaries by fall. One addition was particularly vital to
the National Security Adviser-that of Peter W. Rodman,
his former student from Harvard University. From the
moment of Rodman's arrival, some of Kissinger's close
aides understood that his mission was to assemble and pre-
pare the documents for Kissinger's memoirs. "He indexed
everything that came in," Roger Morris recalls. Morris lat-
er became convinced that another Rodman mission was to
be ready to "evacuate the personal files" within hours if
Kissinger ever felt that he was on the verge of being forced
out by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Even as early as 1970,
Morris says, Rodman was routinely shipping the most sen-
sitive Kissinger files to Nelson Rockefeller's estate at Po-
cantico Hills, New York.
By then, the bureaucratic intrigue and personal betrayal
in the National Security Council were taking their toll.
"There was a dawning recognition that this was a frighten-
ing place," Larry Lynn recalls. "It was like walking into a
room with a bad odor. After a while you get inured. You
realized that this is not the way the government should
work. I had to do a lot of things out of loyalty to Henry
that I preferred not to do-the secrecy, the confinement of
activities to certain agencies, the confinement of communi-
cations to certain people, the centralization of power. Hen-
ry used to kid me a lot. He used to say, `You've got too
much integrity.' "
Many of the young NSC staff members had joined Kis-
singer in the hope that, somehow, he and Nixon would do
what Lyndon Johnson could not: reverse America's policy
in Southeast Asia, as Nixon had promised in the 1968
campaign. Instead, to the dismay of the aides, the White
House came perilously close in the fall of 1969, to a drastic
escalation of the war. Nixon and Kissinger planned an
operation-code-named Duck Hook-that would have led
to the mining of Haiphong harbor and the B-52 bombing of
major cities, including Hanoi and Haiphong. The offen-
sive was canceled at the last moment by Nixon, after a
huge anti-war demonstration in Washington on October
15. The young aides clung to hope even as such planning
continued. Kissinger began his secret peace talks in Paris
with Le Due Tho, a member of North Vietnam's ruling pol-
itburo, and there were renewed contacts with the People's
Republic of China. In late April of 1970, Nixon and Kis-
singer decided to invade Cambodia. 7bny Lake, Roger
Morris, and Bill Watts immediately resigned. Larry
Lynn's resignation came later. The aides were convinced
that the White House's policy of threats and escalation in
Cambodia and elsewhere would not work; the war was still
in the south, and had to be resolved there. Inside the White
House that spring there was talk not of negotiation but of
victory. Nixon and Kissinger were determined to show
Hanoi's leaders-and the Soviet Union-that they were
willing to risk all to bring North Vietnam to its knees.
THE WHITE HOUSE WAS STUNNED BY THE INTENSITY
of the outcry over the President's decision to extend
the war to Cambodia. The nation was suddenly
alive, once again, with protests against the war and
against the men running it. The pressure grew on May 3,
when Bill Beecher of the Times reported that Nixon had
renewed the bombing of North Vietnam; the President had
ordered the most intensive raids since the bombing-halt
agreement that was negotiated by the Johnson Adminis-
tration shortly before the 1968 elections. Kissinger had un-
successfully sought to prevent the article's publication
with a personal plea to Max Frankel, Washington bureau
chief of the Times, and when that failed, he and Nixon
turned again to wiretaps.
On the evening of May 2, shortly after Kissinger first
learned of the Beecher story, Beecher's article was cited as
a "serious security violation" by Al Haig in a formal re-
quest to the FBI for four more wiretaps. This time Kis-
singer and Nixon were going for broke, seeking to learn
who inside the administration was loyal and who was not.
Bob Pursley was to be wiretapped again at home and in his
office, the real target clearly. being Mel Laird. Richard Pe-
dersen, a State Department counselor who was known to
be close to Bill Rogers, was also to be wiretapped at home
and at work; he shared two private lines on his desk with
the Secretary of State. William H. Sullivan (no kin to the
FBI deputy), the former ambassador to Laos who was
then a deputy assistant secretary of state, was on the list.
And finally, Bill Beecher, whose articles since early 1969
had been a source of grief for the White House, was to be
wiretapped, Haig told the FBI, at home and at the New
York Times offices. However, taps through the large
switchboard at a newspaper or a government agency were
not feasible, and were not installed. The FBI wiretaps on
the four men stayed on until February 10, 1971.
Kissinger explained in his 1974 testimony to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that all four men were wire-
tapped because they had access "to the information, to
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MAY 1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
sensitive information that had leaked," and thus could logi-
cally be considered suspects. In fact, as Kissinger had to
know, none of the four-not even Beecher-was aware of
the real secret involved in the May 3 story: Laird had not
authorized the bombing but had been bypassed.
On May 9, the White House wiretaps produced a conver-
sation between Mort Halperin and Daniel Ellsberg, a for-
mer Pentagon official and Vietnam analyst for the Rand
Corporation who had worked briefly for Kissinger early in
1969. Ellsberg was renowned inside the government as a
former hawk who had turned against the war, and who
.now was telling all who would listen that the war could not
be won. Halperin told Ellsberg, so the wiretap revealed,
that he had decided after the invasion of Cambodia to
sever all ties to the National Security Council. At the
time, Halperin still was a consultant to the White House.
Halperin also told Ellsberg, according to an FBI transcript
of their talk, that "the major and most certain conse-
quence" of the Cambodian invasion "is that a large number
of Cambodian civilians will be killed and labeled Viet
Cong." Two days later, J. Edgar Hoover rushed Nixon and
Kissinger "Eyes Only" letters reporting Halperin's views.
Earlier, Halperin had been overheard informing a caller .
that Mel Laird and Bill Rogers had disagreed with Nixon's
decision on Cambodia. Halperin also said, as Hoover re-
ported to the White House, that "in his opinion the Presi-
dent had never had the intention of getting out of Viet-
nam." He added; "The only effective way to oppose the
present policy is to elect a Congress which will stop the
war by cutting off funds."
Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig have given conflicting ac-
counts of what happened next, but it is known that the
Halperin intercepts led to a frenzy of high-level action. On
May 12, the FBI was requested by Haig, who cited Kis-
singer's name, to wiretap two more members of the NSC
staff-Tony Lake, who had announced his forthcoming res-
ignation, and Winston Lord, a Halperin protege who had
proved his mettle in Kissinger's and Haig's eyes by not
joining the others in resigning over Cambodia. Lake and
Lord were wiretapped for the next nine months.
On May 13, Hoover attended a White House meeting
with Nixon and Haldeman, and perhaps others, at which
he was told to deal only with Haldeman on the White
House wiretaps from then on. Kissinger and his office
were no longer to be included on the mailing list for wire-
tap summaries. On that day, too, Hoover provided the
White House with some of the FBI's verbatim logs of the
Halperin wiretaps upon which the summaries had been
made.
At this point, Kissinger had reached a new height of
power and authority inside the Nixon White House, and it
was inconceivable that Nixon would punish him by strip-
ping him of direct access to the wiretap information. One
obvious factor in the procedural change was Tony Lake,
who was going to remain on the NSC staff for the next few
months, and thus might learn of FBI reports on his own
wiretap-just as he had learned of the wiretaps on others.
Similarly, ,Winston' Lord was going to be playing a far
greater role in Kissinger's immediate- office, something
that Kissinger surely knew, and would also be exposed to
the FBI records. Lake was wiretapped not for any indis-
cretion but because of what he knew and the White
House's fear that he would begin talking-which he did
not. Lord had been brought into the National Security
Council by Halperin, for whom he had worked in the Pen-
tagon, and was thus a prima facie suspect in the hysteria
over Mort Halperin that persisted in the Oval Office.
What is baffling about the history of the White House
bureaucratic maneuvering on May 13 is how all the princi-
pals lied about it in subsequent investigations and man-
aged to get away 'with the lies. President Nixon told J.
Edgar Hoover, as reported in an FBI memorandum, that
Haldeman was to be the sole recipient of the wiretap sum-
maries "inasmuch as the President is anxious to cut down
leaks that are occurring at the present time." In his depo-
sition in the Halperin wiretap lawsuit, however, Nixon vol-
unteered a different reason for making the change: "Gener-
al Haig came in to see me. He expressed great concern
about Dr. Kissinger's very emotional and very concerned
reactions to the Cambodian action, not that he was oppos-
ing it ... He said we have simply got to get some of the
load off.... He wanted it transferred to someone else and
suggested that it might be Mr. Haldeman." But Haig, in
his deposition, said that he had learned of the switch in
policy only when Kissinger told him about it. Kissinger
"said the decision has been made that we are out of it and
there was a decision that I welcomed," Haig testified. In
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
a few months earlier, however, Haig acknowledged, "I had
urged Henry to disassociate the National Security Council
staff, meaning me or anybody else, from what was essen-
tially an internal-security matter.... I know he either
took that matter up with the President or Mr. Haldeman
or somebody outside of our office, and he informed me that
we would in fact be out of it." Kissinger, in his Senate tes-
timony, explained that the transfer to Haldeman's office
"was no climactic event. During the course of the spring it
had become clear to me that while I was getting occasional
reports, I was in no position to do anything with these re-
ports and I would just look at them and throw them into
my out basket. I, therefore, pointed out on a number of
occasions to the President that my office would serve best
if it concentrated on foreign-policy matters and if internal-
security matters were shifted somewhere else." After
Cambodia, Kissinger said, "when I had mass resignations
from my staff ... I believed then that it was probably de-
cided that the combination of my preference and some of
the difficulties that had existed on my staff made it desir-
able to accede to my recommendation and shift it to an-
other office. I was informed of this as a routine matter sev-
eral days later.... The President never spoke to me about
it.,,
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L , MAY 1982
Kissinger did not testify about a communication be-
tween his office and John Mitchell that may have explained
why he was anxious to get out of the wiretap business. In
an interview with the FBI after the Watergate scandal
broke out, Mitchell recalled discussing the White House
wiretaps with either Haig or Kissinger or both. The FBI
quoted Mitchell as agreeing with Haig and/or Kissinger
that "the wiretaps could become 'explosive"' and that the
whole wiretap operation was "a dangerous game we were
playing." Mitchell later told me that, in his opinion, Kis-
singer simply "wanted to get out" of the wiretap oper-
ations that spring. "He was just ducking-running for cov-
er," Mitchell said.
Exactly what provoked the procedural change remains a
mystery. The change did remove Kissinger from direct
control of the wiretap operation. By then, his NSC staff
had been purged: those who were malcontents or dis-
affected had already left his office or were in the process of
resigning. Morris, Lake, Watts, and Lynn would be re-
placed over the next few months by aides who were far
less mercurial, independent, and brilliant-but far more
trustworthy, from Kissinger's point of view. The new NSC
aides would learn to follow orders without question. Cam-
bodia was a watershed for Kissinger; no longer would he
permit himself to become personally fond of those on his
staff as he had of Lake and Morris. Kissinger also began to
delegate to Al Haig much more of the work in handling the
NSC staff members and their papers.
BY JUNE, HAIG, NOW A BRIGADIER GENERAL,
had finally been appointed as Kissinger's deputy
and was firmly in charge of the day-to-day work of
the National Security Council staff. Kissinger continued to
operate his office on the same principle: ruthless exclusion
of staff members from any contact with Richard Nixon. He
was able to do so in mid-11970 with one exception. Alex-
ander Haig. Haig's relationship with Nixon had become
close after Cambodia, a period in which Haig was outspo-
ken inside the White House in. defense of the invasion.
Haig's militarism and his hard-line approach to foreign-
policy problems, which Kissinger had seized upon as a
shield, were attractive and reassuring to Nixon. Haig be-
gan appearing more frequently on Nixon's appointments
calendar, as maintained by the Secret Service, in early
April of 1970. One of Kissinger's personal aides recalls,
with a visible shudder, the first time the President tele-
phoned Haig directly: "There was more tension than I can
ever recall in that office," he says. Kissinger was in his
outer office, conferring with his secretary, Julie Pineaa,
when Nixon's direct line rang. "Julie picked it up," the aide
says, "and Henry started walking back to his office. [Kis-
singer always took the President's calls in privacy.] Julie
said, 'It's for you, General Haig.' Haig went to his office
and Henry stood by the door [of Haig's office] as Haig and
Nixon talked." After a moment or two, the aide says, Kis-
singer resignedly "walked into his office and shut the door.
He stayed in there for hours." Haig, meanwhile, was
"drenched in sweat" by the time he concluded the presi-
dential call. The aide was convinced that neither Haig nor
Kissinger discussed the call that day. "From Henry's point
of view, someone else now had access to the President,"
the aide says-and thus Kissinger had suffered a loss of his
personal power.
Kissinger's concern about Haig's rise in influence must
have created doubts, but he could not afford to turn on
Haig openly, for the same reason that Nixon eventually
was unable to turn on Kissinger: each knew too much
about the other. Kissinger knew that Haig was a double-
dealer who had ingratiated himself with Nixon and Halde-
man and other senior aides by savaging Kissinger behind
his back and spying on him. But Kissinger also knew that
Haig's expertise on the Pentagon was invaluable if he and
Nixon were going to maintain their ability to circumvent
Laird and Pursley and directly order military action in the
Middle East or in Southeast Asia. Haig could also be trust-
ed to execute orders conscientiously and discreetly in the
back channel. Haig, on his part, was aware of the compli-
cations in the Nixon-Kissinger relationship in a way no
one else in the White House could be: he was constantly
hearing each man's complaints about the other. Nixon did
enjoy the savaging of Kissinger that repeatedly went on in
his office, Haig knew, but the President also realized that
among his aides only Kissinger had the intellectual stam-
ina and the deviousness to be successful at conducting si-
multaneous back-channel negotiations with the Soviets
and the Chinese. Haig also understood in early 1971 that
future promotions lay with Kissinger as much as with the
President.
Kissinger and Haig also shared knowledge about the
White House wiretapping that, they knew, would cause se-
rious-and perhaps fatal-problems for themselves and
the Nixon presidency if made public. The wiretapping
must have been particularly sensitive for Kissinger in ear-
ly 1971, for the main target of the White House program-
Morton Halperin-was a constant reminder to Nixon,
Mitchell, and Haldeman of Kissinger's poor judgment in
initially filling his office with liberals and Democrats who
were not loyal to Nixon and his policies. Kissinger was
saying little by early 1971, at least to the NSC staff, about
Halperin and the three close aides who had resigned over
Cambodia-Roger Morris, Tony Lake, and Bill Watts. But
Haig could be irrational about them. The three were "trai-
tors" to Kissinger and 'the NSC staff, Haig told one NSC
newcomer in a rage, and Halperin was a "Communist."
Haig had a special reason for being exceedingly angry with
Halperin: he knew what the former Kissinger aide was
saying about him on the telephone. In one conversation
with a former colleague, for example, Halperin depicted
Haig as a "blabbermouth who hears 'everything.... all
phone conversations to the President and everything."
The wiretapping remained an important program for
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Kissinger and Haig through early 1971. Kissinger no long-
er received direct "Eyes Only" letters from J. Edgar Hoo-
ver summarizing important conversations, but he was still
very much in the flow. The conduit was Haig, who contin-
ued to maintain the NSC's wiretap files and continued to
visit FBI headquarters to read verbatim transcripts of
conversations. William Sullivan, the FBI assistant direc-
tor, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
Haig had visited his office "about twelve to eighteen times
between May, 1969, and February, 1971," when the-wire-
taps were turned off at Hoover's request. Sullivan, whose
memory seemed to grow more vague every time he was
ordered to testify, also told the committee that his estimate
of the number of Haig's visits was "a guess." Asked specifi-
cally whether Haig continued to visit his office to read
transcripts after May of 1970-the time by which Haig and
Kissinger, according to their repeated testimony, had
ended their active role-Sullivan said: "Yes, he did come to
my office after May, 1970."
Just why Haig and Kissinger were so adamant in deny-
ing involvement with the wiretap program after that date
is not clear. Whatever stigma-moral, legal, or other-
they felt for having participated in the program would not
be erased by their having stopped midway.
THE WIRETAP ON MORT HALPERIN'S HOME TELE-
phone was by far the most significant. Halperin, no
liberal when he joined Kissinger's staff, was in-
creasingly outspoken in his opposition to Nixon's and Kis-
singer's Vietnam policies after he left the White House. By
mid-1970, he was a member of the foreign-policy group ad-
vising Senator Edmund S. Muskie, of Maine, the Demo-
crat who was considered to be Nixon's strongest challeng-
er for the presidency in 1972. FBI summaries sent to Bob
Haldeman in the fall and early winter of 1970 consistently
reported on Ialperin's wiretap, and showed the former
Kissinger aide to be heavily involved in Democratic and
anti-Nixon politicking. On October 14, for example, Halde-
man was told by Hoover that Halperin had discussed pub-
lishing an article on the workings of the National Security
Council with a reporter for a German newsmagazine-a
prospect that must have filled Kissinger with dread. A few
weeks later, Halperin published a trenchant analysis of
Vietnam policy in The New York Times. Nixon was refus-
ing to force a political settlement on Saigon, Halperin
wrote, and his Vietnamization policy "will at best lead to
an indefinite presence in Vietnam of thousands of Ameri-
can troops. It could well drive the President to massive
escalation, the mining of Haiphong Harbor and saturation
bombing of North Vietnam." Such escalation was still a
subject of constant debate among Nixon, Kissinger, and
key aides. The men at the top in the White House had to
conclude that Halperin had somehow learned of the plan-
ning. Halperin's essay in the Times undoubtedly helped
ensure that the wiretap on Winston Lord, who had become
one of Kissinger's personal aides after Cambodia, would
remain active until the very end. Six days after publication
of the Halperin assessment, Hoover reported to Haldeman
that Halperin had been in contact with Leslie Gelb, a for-
mer Pentagon aide to Clark M. Clifford, Lyndon Johnson's
secretary of defense, and Paul C. Warnke, a Clifford depu-
ty, and the three had discussed a Muskie advisory-group
meeting on "China policy."
In early December came another FBI report on Hal-
perin, this one dealing with a planned trip to Moscow by
Senator Muskie. The trip had been recommended-so Hal-
perin told Gelb in a conversation monitored by the FBI-
by Averell Harriman, an outspoken critic of Nixon's poli-
cies. Harriman so alarmed the White House that the FBI
had been instructed to report verbatim every conversation
he held with Tony Lake. On December 30, Haldeman re-
ceived another FBI report on Halperin and Gelb revealing
that Bob Pursley, who was also being wiretapped at his
home, had sent some papers to Clark Clifford's office. Gelb
told Halperin that Clifford had asked that he come to his
office to look over "about twenty pieces of paper that Purs-
ley sent over." Gelb, Halperin, and Pursley had worked
closely together in the Pentagon during the last years of
the Johnson Administration, and also shared detailed
knowledge of the conclusions of the Pentagon Papers. The
papers, a 7,000-page top-secret study of the history of
America's involvement in Vietnam, had been undertaken
in 1967 at the request of Secretary of Defense Robert S.
McNamara, and assigned to Gelb, then deputy director of
the Defense Department policy-planning staff.
The Halperin wiretap reports were extremely useful not
only to Haldeman, who maintained strong control over all
of the White House political operations, but also to Kis-
singer, who was obviously informed of Muskie's foreign-
policy planning and of the fact that Halperin was still in
touch with current NSC staff members. In early Novem-
ber, the FBI reported that Winston Lord had made uncom-
plimentary remarks about Kissinger and Nixon on his
home telephone. A summary of that conversation, as pub-
lished by the House Judiciary Committee, did not give fur-
ther details, but Lord was still in touch with Mort Halperin
and, according to Halperin's wiretap logs, would occasion-
ally share some gossip with him. One of Kissinger's per-
sonal aides depicts this period as one of "general paranoia"
inside Kissinger's office.
The stream of secrets was intense. There were the bad
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i; .
secrets, dealing with the continuing White House wire-
taps. There were the good secrets, such as the back-
channel negotiations with China and with the Soviet Union
that would lead to breakthroughs-without any State De-
partment involvement-before the year was out. And
there were the routine secrets, the enormous flow of docu-
ments and cables that were handled by Kissinger and his
staff as he continuously expanded his influence. As the
flow of secrets intensified, so did Kissinger's concern about
the security of his immediate office. His telephones were
still being repeatedly swept for signs of wiretapping, but
Kissinger insisted that such surveillance not be placed on a
routine basis with any single agency. Special teams from
the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, or National Security
Agency would be summoned to his office at random and on
short notice to inspect the telephones, raising the inevita-
ble question among Kissinger's staff: Who was the enemy?
One aide, asked why Kissinger did not simply permanently
assign the FBI to monitor his phones, responded: "Who
trusted Hoover?"
In 1974 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee, Kissinger repeatedly sought to minimize his inter-
est at this period in the White House wiretap program.
"After May of 1970," he said, "I had no basis for knowing
whether a tap had been initiated or was continuing.... I
construed my instructions from Mr. Haldeman to mean
that my tangential connection with the program was being
terminated." Kissinger testified that in mid-October of
1970, when a second wiretap was authorized for Hal
Sonnenfeldt, who was then Kissinger's closest personal
friend on the NSC staff, his role was even more tangential.
"... it is hard to imagine the flood of material that goes
across my desk. I am apt to look at something and say this
is for somebody else and throw it into my out basket. Most
of these documents are not noted for extraordinary preci-
sion." The less-than-precise document in question in
Sonnenfeldt's case, however, was an FBI summary of a
wiretap on the Israeli Embassy in which Richard N. Perle,
an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, was overheard discuss-
ing classified information that had been supplied to him by
someone on the National Security Council staff. Hoover,
following normal practice with sensitive materials from
embassy wiretaps, had sent the document to Kissinger.
Kissinger hesitated a few days. Then, despite his insis-
tence that he was out of the internal-security business
After May of 1970, he forwarded the material to Haldeman,
who immediately telephoned Hoover, according to FBI
documents, and ordered that the FBI be assigned to deter-
mine which NSC staffer was in contact with Richard Perle.
Haldeman and Nixon must have hit the roof. In a tele=
phone call on October 15, 1970, to Hoover, Haldeman in-
voked the name of Henry Kissinger in asking for another
wiretap on Sonnenfeldt. Kissinger had to realize that
Haldeman and Hoover would suspect Sonnenfeldt, who
was known from previous wiretaps to have close ties to the
Israelis as well as to Perle. Sonnenfeldt, a former State
Department intelligence official, had been repeatedly in-
vestigated by the FBI for other suspected leaks early in
his career, and Kissinger, as he told the Senate committee,
was aware that Sonnenfeldt had "been the subject of a ma-
licious campaign by a group of individuals who had been
out to get him for a long time." But Al Haig was now part
of that group-another fact Kissinger surely knew.
Sonnenfeldt had been among Haig's early rivals in 1969 for
the job as assistant to Kissinger, that, plus Sonnenfeldt's
continued closeness to Kissinger-despite the mistreat-
ment Kissinger handed out-was enough for Haig to mark
him permanently as the enemy. It was inconceivable that
Kissinger would not realize the consequences of his act in
turning over the Israeli Embassy wiretap to Haldeman,
who would inevitably link Sonnenfeldt, a Jew, to the inter-
cepted conversation. Kissinger was, in essence, turning in
his closest remaining friend on his staff. It had to be, at
best, a painful moment. Kissinger handled questions about
the Sonnenfeldt wiretap from the Senate committee in his
usual fashion: he dissembled. "I have no recollection of this
at all," he testified. "All that could have happened is that
the FBI sent over something off a tap on the Israeli Em-
bassy which I did not think was relevant to my concern
and on which I wrote, `Give this to Haldeman.' " The com-
mittee members apparently accepted that explanation.
M ORT HALPERIN'S WIRETAP NOT ONLY PROVIDED
valuable political information about Senator Mus-
kie's foreign-policy planning, as relayed by Les
Gelb and others, but also enabled the White House to learn
more about the one former insider who truly was capable
of leaking vital secrets-Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, like Halperin, was a source of embarrassment
for Kissinger, who had permitted him--despite his dovish
reputation-to draft one of the administration's first op-
tions papers on the Vietnam War. Ellsberg had spent the
month of March, 1969, in Washington, working quietly on
Vietnam issues for the White House. He had worked with
Kissinger in South Vietnam in the middle 1960s, and the
men had been impressed with each other. Kissinger would
tell his colleagues that he had "learned more about Viet-
nam" from Ellsberg than from any other American. Ells-
berg thought Kissinger understood, as he had come to,
that the war was unwinnable. During the twenty-one
months of the wiretap on Halperin, Ellsberg was over-
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MAY 1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
heard fifteen times by the FBI. Their conversations re-
volved around Vietnam and what both men correctly per-
ceived as the administration's secret plan to escalate the
war. Halperin was careful, of course, on his telephone, but
Ellsberg was not. He talked openly about drug use and
sex. It is not known how Nixon, .Haldeman, or Mitchell
reacted to the connection of Ellsberg, drugs, and Morton
Halperin; such revelations, however, could not have en-
hanced Kissinger's reputation as an employer of prudent
aides. Halperin and Ellsberg knew literally hundreds of
government secrets, ranging from the most specific infor-
mation about America's nuclear-targeting procedures to
the working of the National Security Agency's far-flung
electronic eavesdropping' operations. The White House's
concern was not limited, however, to past secrets that
Ellsberg and Halperin could expose; the men at the top
were worried about what Ellsberg and Halperin thought
the administration's future war policy was. Late in the
summer of 1969, Ellsberg had visited with Halperin, who
was still a White House consultant, to share his insights
into the war policy, and it was then, Ellsberg recalls, that
Halperin first informed him of the B-52 bombing of Cam-
bodia and of a secret warning by Kissinger to the Soviets
about escalation in Vietnam. Halperin also described Kis-
singer's repeated studies on the mining of Haiphong har-
bor, and speculated that Richard Nixon would not go
through the 1972 election without putting his escalation
plan into effect..
Both men knew that the Johnson Administration had
much earlier sought to bully North Vietnam into accepting
a defeat in the south. Diplomatic documents, still unpub-
lished then, showed that Ho Chi Minh ' was warned in
August of 1964 that unless his nation ceased its support of
the Viet Cong in the south, "it can expect to continue to
suffer the consequences." The warning, delivered by J.
Blair Seaborn, the Canadian member of the International
Control Commission, came a few days after American
planes bombed the north for the first time, in retaliation
for what Washington said was a North Vietnamese attack
on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Ellsberg had been officially aware of the Seaborn mis-
sion, and he recalls the response to the threat: within
months, one of the best North Vietnamese battalions had
begun infiltrating the south. "They did it when they were
staring right down the barrel at LBJ's threats," he says.
He was convinced after his talks with Halperin that Nixon
and Kissinger were going to make the same threats with
the same results. Ellsberg began to brood about doing
what Halperin would not-talk publicly against the war.
Over the next year, he began to meet privately with in-
fluential journalists and business groups to attempt to de-
scribe what he thought was the real Nixon strategy. His
message was that Nixon's coercion strategy was a contin-
gency plan that would go into effect only if the threats
made against the North Vietnamese did not work. "I
wasn't saying," Ellsberg recalls, "that they had a conscious
plan that on a certain date they would enlarge the war.
Escalation was not in their thoughts, but they were
committing themselves to threats that.would fail." Ells-
berg told his audiences that the administration was being
honest, to a degree, in publicly claiming that it did not
want to enlarge the war and did not expect to do so. But
there was a missing link, one he sought futilely to provide
to his listeners: "They were making explicit threats which
they expected to be effective without being carried out,
and it was this that they were not hinting at or telling any-
body." No one paid much attention---except in the White
House.
In September of 1970, Kissinger agreed to meet with
Ellsberg at San Clemente. Why Kissinger did so is not
clear-needless to say, Ellsberg was not mentioned in the
first volume of Kissinger's-memoirs. Whatever Kissinger's
motive, there was nothing outwardly unseemly about their
meeting: as of September, 1970, Ellsberg had yet to be
linked to any leak of classified materials and was -widely
known inside the government as a leading theorist on deci-
sion-making. The appointment coincided with a burgeon-
ing crisis over the PLO and Jordan in the Middle East.
Kissinger began, Ellsberg recalls, by saying, "I'm afraid
Rogers's policy is going to explode." Ellsberg responded,
"Well, Henry, I'm here to talk about your Vietnam policy.
I'm afraid it may explode." For the next ten minutes or so,
Ellsberg quickly summarized his view of the White
House's threat strategy in Vietnam, which hinged on a
series of escalations that included an invasion of Laos and
the mining of Haiphong harbor. "I thought to myself,"
Ellsberg says, "if I'm right, he's got to be hemorrhaging
inside." Kissinger said nothing, drumming his fingers on a
table and staring intently as Ellsberg talked. When Ells-
berg concluded, Kissinger said only, "I do not want to dis-
cuss our policy; let us turn to another subject." Ellsberg,
who was not easily put off, turned the talk to the Pentagon
Papers. He knew that Kissinger'was aware of the history
project and had been invited to be a consultant in its initial
stages. Kissinger acknowledged that there was a copy in
the White House safe but said that he had not looked at it.
Should he? Ellsberg recalls that he urged Kissinger to read
at least the summaries, the few pages condensing each vol-
ume. Kissinger said he did not want to do so. "Do we really
have anything to learn from this study?" he asked. At this
point, Ellsberg says, "My heart sank."
"The major lesson of the study was that each person re-
peated the same patterns in decision-making and pretty
much the same policy as his predecessor without even
knowing it. I thought, 'My God! He's in the same state of
mind as all the other makers of decision in this long pro-
cess, each of whom thought that history had started with
his administration, and had nothing to learn from earlier
ones."' Ellsberg, who had begun illicitly photocopying the
Pentagon Papers late in 1969, would soon turn to a news-
man he knew from Vietnam, Neil Sheehan of The New
York Times.
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? YAlir. b6 Ift t HTLANTIG 111V.4TtILI MAY 1982
tion-were such estimates made? Kissinger started to say
that one had to consider the options. 'I know the option
game, Dr. Kissinger,' said Ellsberg, 'can't you just give us
an answer or tell us that you don't have such estimates?'
Kissinger again evaded the question; he said the question
had racist overtones. Ellsberg pressed him again. For the
first time the meeting took on the air of confrontation-
then the student moderator stood up and abruptly ended
the questioning, saying that Dr. Kissinger was tired and
thanked him for coming. The audience, save a few of us,
applauded."
On June 13,1971, The New York Times began to publish
the Pentagon Papers, ending Daniel Ellsberg's twenty-
month attempt to get those documents on the public rec-
ord. By the afternoon of June 14, the White House had
decided to challenge the nation's most influential news-
paper directly, and the next day filed suit in federal court
seeking to halt publication of the material. Richard Nixon
had chosen to defend the record of his Democratic prede-
cessors in Vietnam. The administration's court suit
turned what had been a first-rate newspaper story into a
national event. The papers and the man who leaked them,
Daniel Ellsbery, were the most prominent news story in
the country for a month--until it was announced, on July
15, that Henry Kissinger had silently stolen into Peking
for his astonishing meeting with Chou En-Lai, ending a
diplomatic impasse between the United States and China
that had begun in 1949.
II. THE PLUMBERS
Kissinger and Ellsberg met face to face once more be-
fore publication of the Pentagon Papers, at a private con-
ference on the war held at MIT on the last weekend in
January of 1971. The weekend meeting was sponsored by a
moderate group of student leaders, academics, journalists,
businessmen, and former government officials, and Kis-
singer, still the administration's most effective lobbyist
with such a group of establishment liberals, as Nixon
viewed them, flew from Washington to speak off the
record. It was a tour de force at first, with Kissinger being
charming and disarming as usual, confiding to the group
that Richard Nixon had not been his first choice for the
presidency and telling a questioner that e would resign
his position if, as Ellsberg recalls, the "whole trend of the
policy became morally reprehensible to me." Even then,
he added, he would not publicly attack the President if he
did resign-"unless gas chambers were set up or some hor-
rendous moral outrage." Finally Ellsberg rose. The NSC
staff, he said, was known to have made estimates on the
number of Americans who would be killed during the next
year of the war. "What is your best estimate of the number
of Vietnamese who will be killed in the next twelve months
as a consequence of your policy?"
Derek Shearer, a former Yale University student who
attended the conference, described in The Nation what
happened next. When Kissinger responded, "his voice
sounded suddenly less certain; he hesitated, then called
Ellsberg's question 'cleverly worded."I answer even if I
don't answer,' he said. Ellsberg interrupted to say that he
had no intention of being clever, that this was a basic ques-
N THE EARLY EVENING OF JUNE 17, 1971, HENRY
Kissinger held forth in the Oval Office, telling his
President, and John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman,
all about Daniel Ellsberg. Kissinger's'comments were re-
corded, of course, on the hidden White House taping sys-
tem, and four years later, a portion of that tape was lis-
tened to by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force,
which was then investigating the internal White House
police unit known as the .Plumbers.
The special prosecution force had informally agreed with
the White House early in the Watergate inquiry that all of
the Nixon-Kissinger meetings were prima facie concerned
with national-security matters, and none of their extensive
conversations was ever subpoenaed. Prosecution files
made available to me show, however, that Kissinger, who
took part in the fifty-minute meeting on June 17, was inad-
vertently overheard expressing concern not only about
Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers but also about other
documents and secrets he might make public. On that day,
or the day before, perhaps, the White House learned that
Ellsberg had also provided Senator Charles McC. Mathias,
Jr., a liberal Republican, of Maryland, with a copy of one of
the administration's first studies on Vietnam. Mathias had
brought the top-secret document to the? White House Situ-
ation Room, where it was verified as authentic.
Nixon was most anxious about the Brookings Institu-
tion, a liberal think-tank in Washington to which Mort
Halperin had gone after leaving Kissinger's staff. Also at
Brookings was Leslie Gelb, who, many in the White House
believed, was involved in the Pentagon Papers leak to the
Times. At one point during the meeting, prosecution files
show, Nixon and Kissinger spoke of the possibility that
other top-secret documents were stored in Halperin's or
Gelb's safe at Brookings, awaiting future release. "They've
got the stuff over there," Nixon said. "Stuff that we can't
even get out of there from the Pentagon." Kissinger re-
sponded: "Can't we send someone over there to get it
back?"
No attempt was actually made by the White House to
get access, legally or by other means, to the documents
believed stored by Halperin and Gelb, although many
plans-including a proposed fire-bombing-were dis-
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MAY 19s2 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE57
cussed over the next few weeks. Kissinger was not a tar-
get of the Special Prosecution Force, and his taped com-
ment had no immediate relevance. Knowledge of the June
17 tape was kept tightly sealed inside the Special Prosecu-
tion Force's files. "There was incredible ambivalence about
the whole thing," one Watergate attorney recalls. "Do you
want to go up against him? Kissinger was being promoted
by everybody as the one guy in the administration who's
solid-and he's threatening to resign. I got a sense that if
we found something that finished Henry, the country was
going to be in bad shape."
Kissinger escaped any serious investigation during Wa-
tergate, as those attorneys who had some doubts soon
found themselves immersed in various other matters. One
prosecution official, discussing that White House tape re-
cording years later, recalled a quality of Kissinger's con-
duct in front of Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman that
made him wish he could have listened to more of Kis-
singer's Oval Office meetings. "He was like one of the boys,
talking tough. One says, 'Let's bring knives.' Another
says, 'Let's bring bats.' And Henry pipes up, 'Let's bring
zip-guns."' The prosecutor recalled his surprise at hearing
Kissinger: "I thought he might have been classier."
Kissinger dominated the meeting on June 17 with his
description of Ellsberg and the threat to national security
he posed. Ehrlichman's notes of the meeting, as later pub-
lished during the House impeachment inquiry, showed that
Kissinger depicted Ellsberg as a half-crazed genius whose
views on the' war had turned dovish with excessive drug
use and aberrant sexuality. It was a shrewd performance,
which played perfectly to the prejudices and preconcep-
tions of Nixon and his two top aides. It was also an exer-
cise in character assassination, similar in intent, if not in
degree, to Kissinger's performance in maligning Morton
Halperin in front of the President. Ehrlichman's notes
showed that Kissinger described Ellsberg as a "genius"
who was the "brightest student" Kissinger had ever had at
Harvard. (In fact, Kissinger had never taught Ellsberg.)
Ellsberg was further described by Kissinger as one who
"shot at peasants" while serving in Vietnam and who
seemed "always a little unbalanced." (Ellsberg has em-
phatically denied ever shooting at civilians while in Viet-
nam.) Kissinger then recounted Ellsberg's alleged use of
drugs, information that he could have learned only from
the White House wiretaps. Kissinger said that he hadn't
seen Ellsberg in one and a half years, except for the meet-
ing at MIT at which Ellsberg "heckled" Kissinger-an-
other lie, for the two had met the previous September at
San Clemente, where Ellsberg had urged Kissinger to
read the Pentagon Papers. Ehrlichman's notes at that
point included the phrase "Murder in Laos," a reference,
obviously made by Kissinger, to an early 1971 essay by
Ellsberg in the New fork Review of Books in which Ells-
berg restated the theme, initially expressed at MIT, that
the White House had made no estimate and took no account
of civilian casualties in analyzing its Vietnam programs.
Kissinger's performance on June 17 was all the more re-
markable because he had, in essence, run through the
same allegations the day before in front of the President,
but not in front of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. On June 16,
Charles Colson had taken two young Vietnam veterans,
John O'Neill and Melville L. Stephens, both of whom were
supporters of the White House's war policies, to visit the
President in the late afternoon. After a few moments of
conversation, Colson recalls, the President summoned
Kissinger to his office. Responding.with enthusiasm to the
President's obvious cue, Kissinger proceeded to give a
twenty-minute diatribe on Ellsberg, which Colson recalls
as "one of his most passionate tirades. He described Ells-
berg as a sexual pervert, said he shot Vietnamese from
helicopters in Vietnam, used drugs, had sexual relations
with his wife in front of their children. Henry said he was
the most dangerous man in America. today. He said he
`must be stopped at all costs.' Melville Stephens, who
later joined the White House staff, confirms Colson's ac-
count and recalls leaving the Oval Office convinced that
Ellsberg "obviously had access to lots of other sensitive
documents."
Nixon's and Kissinger's concern about Ellsberg was
real, but there was obviously also an element of perfor-
mance in the White House hysteria that Kissinger created
and Nixon encouraged in the first few days after publica-
tion of the Pentagon Papers. These must have been ex-
tremely difficult days for Kissinger. (He was, for one
thing, on the eve of his secret trip to China.) He had to
distance himself from Ellsberg quickly and decisively to
ensure the President's continued trust. After all, he had
brought Ellsberg onto the Security Council staff as a con-
sultant and encouraged him to work on the review of Viet-
nam policy in early 1969 that had ended up in Senator
Mathias's office. Furthermore, Kissinger himself was men-
tioned in the Pentagon Papers in connection with his role in
the Johnson Administration in seeking diplomatic contact
with the North Vietnamese. Kissinger also knew far more
about the project than anyone in the White House: despite
his later disavowals, he had read some of its most sensitive
volumes, dealing with negotiations to end the war. Thus,
the publication ofthe papers directly threatened Kissinger
by serving as yet another example of his poor judgment-
in the view of the President and his advisers-in the staff-
ing of his office. Ellsberg was a personal-security threat.
Richard Nixon understood almost immediately that the
Pentagon Papers posed no threat to national security but
provided a vital opportunity to score political points
against the anti-war movement and the liberal Democrats.
Now he could cite national security as the basis for striking
at a small group of Muskie advisers, including Mort Hal-
perin, Tony Lake, and Leslie Gelb, who had been over-
heard repeatedly denigrating the White House on the
wiretaps.
By mid-June of 1971, the White House had already been
threatened with exposure of its wiretapping by J. Edgar
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Hoover, who understood only too well-and let the Presi-
dent and his advisers know he understood-that national
security had little to do with the twenty-one months of
wiretapping. If there was to be a break-in at Brookings, or
other clandestine activities against the Democrats, the
national-security justification would have to be airtight.
Kissinger, with his harangues against Ellsberg and his
warnings of national calamity, was providing Nixon with
the rationale and the protection he needed to initiate what
Hoover had stopped in 1970-the Huston plan, with its call
for the FBI, with the aid of other intelligence agencies, to
make aggressive use of wiretapping, illegal break-ins, and
other techniques to monitor and combat the more extreme
elements of the anti-war and black-liberation movements.
I N LATE JUNE OF 1971, KISSINGER WAS FAR BUSIER
than anyone else in the White House. Planning for the
secret trip to China was imposing enough, but he had
other travel plans as well. He was scheduled to meet with
Le Duc 'rho in Paris on June 26, to receive Hanoi's re-
sponse to a revised American peace offer that had been
made secretly in May. Kissinger arranged for a public two-
day visit to London beginning on June 24, in part to dis-
guise his mission across the English Channel. There were
other pressing issues: the fall presidential elections in
South Vietnam; the nearly concluded four-power talks on
Berlin (which Kissinger and Nixon were trying to manipu-
late in the back channel, to prevent the State Department
from claiming a success); and the continuing efforts by
the State Department to work out a Middle East settle-
ment.
Despite Kissinger's growing ascendancy inside the
White House, Secretary of State Rogers was still a con-
stant source of insecurity. for him and one reason he saw
the China trip as all-important. A successful visit to Pe-
king would deliver a telling blow to Rogers's prestige and
effectiveness, Kissinger realized. There was nothing in the
Pentagon Papers that would jeopardize the China rap-
prochement; the far greater threat came from Ellsberg and
the President's obsession with the idea that the NSC stat
was not trustworthy. Over the next few months, as Nixon
continued to focus on the Pentagon Papers and other leaks,
Kissinger would not dare to do other than fully support his
President. His heavy travel schedule posed an obvious
problem, and it was Al Haig who inevitably was assigned
the major liaison role for the National Security Council as
the White House organized the Plumbers unit in early
July.
During the 1973 Senate Foreign Relations Committee
inquiry into wiretapping, Kissinger was asked-almost ca-
sually-about the White House attempts in mid-1971 to
make political use out of the Pentagon Papers. Kissinger's
response seemed plausible: "There were a number of indi-
viduals in the White House who occasionally made re-
quests of various kinds, which, as a matter of principle, I
refused.... I frankly thought there were a few Boy
Scouts who were trying to win some points, and I always
rejected them."
In the first volume of his memoirs, Kissinger went even
further in his protestations and suggested that the political
opportunism that the Pentagon Papers provoked in the
Oval Office had little to do with him: "The sudden release of
over 7,000 pages of secret documents came as a profound
shock to the Administration. The documents, of course,
were in no way damaging to the Nixon presidency. Indeed,
there was some sentiment among White House political
operatives to exploit them as an illustration of the machi-
nations of our predecessors and the difficulties we inher-
ited. But such an attitude seemed to me against the public
interest: Our foreign policy could never achieve the con-
tinuity on which other nations must depend, and our sys-
tem of government would surely lose all tivst if each Presi-
dent used his control of the process of declassification to
smear his predecessors."
Kissinger found it easy to take the high road in his mem-
oirs, but the reality of the White House in 1971 did not
permit such indulgence. To stand aside quietly and allow a
group of political operatives to become involved in an in-
vestigation of national-security leaks involving his office,
and his judgment, was unthinkable. The delicate task of
defending both the National Security Council staff and
Henry Kissinger inside the Oval Office fell to Al Haig, who
played a pivotal role in the summer and fall of 1971 as the
White House began its illegal activities against Daniel
Ellsberg and others conveniently believed by John Mitch-
ell and some of his aides in the. Justice Department-as
well as by the President-to be involved in a political con
spiracy against the White House and the Vietnam War.
Haig had been faithful to Kissinger during the nearly two
years of wiretapping. It was Haig who directly exposed
himself by regularly consulting with FBI officials and who
was responsible, in large measure, for drafting and signing
the documents that relayed Kissinger's wiretap instruc-
tions to the FBI. Haig was bureaucratically sophisticated,
as an ambitious Army officer had to be , and he would know
how to protect Kissinger when things got rough behind his
back-as Kissinger knew they would. Kissinger's decision
in late 1968 to bring Daniel Ellsberg into the White House
as a consultant had turned out to be a mistake for which he
would pay in the Oval Office; the issue was how to limit the
damage. .
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rALnoz 7HE ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAY1982
Nixon began his attacks on the National Security Coun-
cil staff within days of Kissinger's departure for Peking.
On July 2, Ehrlichman was assigned full responsibility for
investigating the Ellsberg case by the President, and or-
dered to appoint a staff aide to devote himself full-time to
the "conspiracy" involving Ellsberg and his fellow Demo-
crats. A continuing Nixon concern was Hoover and the
FBI, which, the White House believed, was less than en-
thusiastic about the investigation of Ellsberg and his fel-
low conspirators. On July 6, Ehrlichman's notes quoted
Nixon explicitly expressing his feeling about Kissinger's
staff: "Can't assume NSC staff not participants" in the as-
sumed conspiracy. The President suggested that Larry
Lynn, the former Kissinger aide who was then an assistant
secretary at HEW, be given a lie-detector test to deter-
mine his involvement. He told Ehrlichman to "put a non-
legal team on the conspiracy"-sand thus the Plumbers unit
was born.
There was also talk that day of a "Communist" link to
Ellsberg-a connection that no government agency was
ever able to demonstrate. Three days later, while Kis-
singer was in China, the President told Ehrlichman and
Haldeman that Kissinger's "staff must be cleaned out." By
that day, too, Ehrlichman had found the right man to di-
rect the "non-legal" team sought by the President-David
Young, one of Kissinger's former personal aides. Nixon ap-
proved the choice and asked Ehrlichman to bring Young in
for a face-to-face meeting. One of Young's functions would
be to investigate Kissinger's NSC staff. Kissinger, in
China, was not to be bothered by the new "special duty"
for Young, but Al Haig would be informed, Ehrlichman's
notes showed.
By mid-1971, Young was one of the few remaining mem-
bers of the National Security Council staff who had
worked closely with Kissinger and befriended him prior to
Nixon's election. Young, then thirty-four years old, had
met Kissinger while working on Nelson Rockefeller's 1968
presidential campaign. His credentials seemed impeccable:
he was associated with a prominent Wall Street law firm
and had attended Oxford before graduating from Cornell
University law school in the early 1960s. After Nixon's
election, Young approached Kissinger to volunteer his ser-
vices, and he was put on the NSC staff in early 1970 to help
handle Kissinger's scheduling and other personal matters.
By all accounts, the balding, seemingly self-assured
lawyer was dutiful in his loyalty to Kissinger. Young's wife
took care of Kissinger's laundry, and he, according to for-
mer NSC aides, was responsible for buying some of Kis-
singer's clothing. One aide recalls inadvertently finding a
note from Young to Kissinger asking, in essence: "Did you
like the tie? I thought it would go well with your blue suit."
The Kissinger-Young relationship soured, nonetheless, as
did most of Kissinger's relationships with his personal
aides, and David R. Halperin, a former Navy officer, was
added to Kissinger's personal staff. Young had been unable
to outmanipulate Haig, and by late 1970 began to tell his
friends inside the White House about his desire to assume
a more substantive role in the government.
In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval,
Kissinger acknowledged that Young had run "afoul" of
Haig, and claimed that he had been shifted in January of
1971 "from my immediate office to a make-work job of re-
search in the White House Situation Room." There is evi-
dence, however, that Young-his "make-work job" to the
contrary notwithstanding-continued to be directly in-
volved in some of the most sensitive and closely held issues
in the White House. On January 25, 1971, for example,
Kissinger brought Young and no other aide to a meeting
with the chairman, general counsel, and chief security
officer of the Atomic Energy Commission to discuss the
security clearance of the operator of a nuclear-fuel-pro-
cessing plant in Pennsylvania,- who was suspected of help-
ing to divert 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium to the
Israelis. Adding to the sensitivity of the meeting was the
fact that agents from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence ser-
vice, were believed by some CIA officials to have been in-
volved in the diversion of the uranium-enough material
to make five to ten nuclear bombs. Within months, how-
ever, Young's meaningful role inside Kissinger's staff had
eroded to the point where he approached John Ehrlichman
and appealed for a job on the Domestic Council. "Young
came to me," Ehrlichman recalls, "and literally broke
down and cried. He felt he'd been badly treated by Kis-
singer and didn't know what to do." Young complained
that Kissinger no longer "was seeing him," Ehrlichman
says, "and Haig was bedeviling him." It was against this
background that Ehrlichman had proposed Young for the
Plumbers job in early July of 1971, before Kissinger re-
turned from China, in the belief that Kissinger would not
object. Young later told a friend on the NSC staff that Kis-
singer's heated objection created a "major battle" that was
settled, after Nixon's intervention, with a compromise.
Young's friend, one of few in whom Young confided, further
recalls: "David told me that the deal that was worked out
was that David would be on loan to other people but Kis-
singer could call on him whenever he wanted. He did see
Henry from time to time; he said Henry still had some kind.
of claim on him."
By duly 6, there was an added element in the White
House anxiety: Nixon's insistence once again that the
Brookings Institution be penetrated and that Gelb's and
Halperin's files be removed and returned to the White
House. The catalyst in Nixon's renewed concern was Charles
Colson, the President's political aide, who had obtained
a 1969 Brookings brochure announcing a two-year history
project on the Vietnam War by Leslie Gelb, which was to
culminate with the publication of a "balanced and accurate
history . . ." Ellsberg, according to the brochure, was on
an advisory panel for the study, along with John J. McCloy,
the international lawyer, and Stanley Hoffmann, the Har-
vard political scientist. The timing indicated, Colson told
Ehrlichman in a subsequent memorandum, that "another
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MAY1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
installment of the Pentagon Papers" would be made public
in a few months. When Nixon learned of the new study,
Colson recalls, he "blew up at Haldeman" and said, "God-
dammit, Bob, haven't we got that capability in place? How
many times am I going to have to tell you? Get 'em [the
White House documents believed to be in Brookings]
back." After the meeting, Haldeman took Colson aside and
said, Colson recalls, "Well, you heard the President. Take
care of it."
Over the next two months, there was repeated and seri-
ous talk inside the White House of a possible fire-bombing
of Brookings in an effort-to steal the classified papers be-
lieved to be stored there. The project eventually came to
the attention of G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent,
and E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA operative, who had
been hired, with Ehrlichman's eventual approval, to work
in the Plumbers unit. In his memoirs, Liddy wrote that he
and Hunt developed a plan in September to buy a used fire
engine and firemen's uniforms for a squad of Cubans who
would be trained in fire-fighting techniques "so their per-
formance would be believable." Brookings would "be fire-
bombed" with delayed-timing devices; the Cubans would
respond, "hit the vault [where Nixon believed the docu-
ments were held], and get themselves out in the confu-
sion...." The plan was rejected as being too expensive,
Liddy wrote. (All of this scheming took place after Liddy,
Hunt, and the Cubans had broken into the Beverly Hills
office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Ellsberg's psychoanalyst, in
a futile effort to find Ellsberg's psychiatric records or other
possibly detrimental information.)
ISSINGER WAS BEING PROTECTED FROM DIRECT
participation in all of this by Al Haig, who emerged
ver the summer as more indispensable than ever.
There is no evidence that Haig had knowledge of the pro-
posed fire-bombing of Brookings in mid-1971, but accord-
ing to Haldeman's memoirs, he had joined in similar plan-
ning with Haldeman in 1969 at Nixon's request. More
significant, there is evidence that Haig was involved in an
effort during the summer of 1971, also triggered by the
President, to conceal the fact that Ellsberg had been over-
heard on the White House wiretaps.
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PAGE 65
and logs in Kissinger's office. The President then said:
"O.K. Obtain and destroy all logs.. Tell Hoover to de-
stroy." A few moments later, according to the notes, the
President, again discussing the wiretap records, ordered
Haig, who was not at the meeting, to return the White
House copies of the summaries and logs to Sullivan's office
in the FBI. Sullivan was then to forward all the documents
to Mardian's office "for destruction," Nixon ordered. There
was to be an additional role for Haig, Nixon said, according
to Ehrlichman's notes: "Haig request the F.B.I. (Sullivan)
to destroy all special coverage." Thus Haig, who had
played a role in setting up the White House wiretaps, was
ordered to help get rid of the evidence, along with Mar-
dian, the senior Justice_ Department official who had
signed the formal letter to the FBI requesting all wiretap
information on Ellsberg and the others. The FBI eventu-
ally reported that Ellsberg had not been overheard on a
wiretap and also said that Halperin and the other potential
grand jury witnesses had not been the subjects of direct
wiretaps. (The failure of senior FBI officials to respond
honestly to the Ellsberg requests later became the focus of
an extensive criminal investigation by the Watergate pros-
ecutors, but no charges were filed.)
Haig, even more than Kissinger, was a presidential in-
sider that summer, one who could be trusted to play "hard-
ball"--even on an issue as sensitive and potentially damag-
ing as the destruction of Ellsberg wiretap evidence at the
height of the government's prosecution of the heavily pub-
licized Pentagon Papers case. Kissinger returned from Pe-
king and Paris early on the morning of July 13, the day
after the fateful decision on the wiretaps. Did Haig tell
Kissinger what was going on? Former National Security
Council staff aides, in scores of interviews, have said it is
inconceivable that he did not. Kissinger's denials-.often
made-of any knowledge of the White House's activities
involving Daniel Ellsberg or the Plumbers unit were taken
at face value by many in the public and the media through-
out the Watergate inquiry in the mid-1970s, largely be-
cause so little was known about the full extent of Haig's
complicity. Haig did more than merely know what was go-
ing on in the White House: he was part of it.
Later on July 13, two days before Nixon's announcement
of the secret visit to Peking, Kissinger was formally told
by Ehrlichman that David Young was leaving his staff to
work on the Ellsberg investigation. In an interview with
me, Ehrlichman recalled an extended conversation with
Kissinger aboard the presidential helicopter at San Cle-
mente in which the functions of the Plumbers operation
were specifically discussed: David Young would be investi-
gating leaks. Kissinger resisted bitterly, Ehrlichman re-
called: "Henry had no objection to the activity, but he
didn't want to give up Young." The President decided that
Young would join forces with Egil (Bud) Krogh, Jr., one of
Ehrlichman's aides on the White House Domestic Council,
to set up the "non-legal" internal-investigations unit. Kis-
singer's concern about Young's departure was inevitable
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and, in part, almost reflexive: aides such as Young, who
were permitted access to many of the back-channel secrets
and some of Kissinger's private telephone conversations.
knew far too much. Young knew, for example, about the
White House wiretaps, and was provided with, or took,
copies of some of the wiretap summaries and perhaps some
of the original FBI logs of the Halperin-Ellsberg conver-
sations when he went to the new Plumbers office in the
basement of the Old Executive Office Building.
David Young would escape prosecution in the Ellsberg
case by cooperating with the Watergate Special Prosecu-
tion Force's investigation of Ehrlichman,,who was con-
victed in 1974 of violating Ellsberg's civil rights and lying
to a grand jury; no investigator from the prosecution force
or the House Judiciary Committee ever formally ques-
tioned him on the link, as co-director of the Plumbers, to
Henry Kissinger.
In his public statements, Kissinger has insisted that he
did not know in 1971 that Young had left his staff to set up
Nixon's special investigation unit. In a private briefing for
a group of Time magazine executives in early 1974, Kis-
singer declared: "Let me put David Young's relationship to
me in perspective. He was not a big man in my life, and I
was in his life." As far as he was concerned, Kissinger said,
Young had been reassigned only to handle declassification
matters for the President. That, of course, was the cover
story used by Young to explain his new job to his friends
And associates. Kissinger, despite his denials, not only
knew the truth about Young's important new role but must
have suspected that Young's most urgent assignment
would be to investigate the NSC staff and even Kissinger's
personal involvement with White House leaks.
The President and all of his senior advisers-with the
exception of Kissinger-were enthusiastic about the
Plumbers and the concept of the White House taking
charge of "national-security" investigations. Richard V.
Allen, Kissinger's former aide who had returned to the
White House in 1971 to help handle foreign-trade issues,
recalls hearing Haldeman describe Howard Hunt that
summer as a "balls-out" CIA operative. Nixon was then
moving to the right politically as part of his drive to cap-
ture the hard-hat Middle America vote, and punishing
Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers fit right
in. The President also began relying more on John Con-
nally, the conservative Texan who had been named trea-
sury secretary in late 1970, and who was emerging-to
Kissinger's dismay-as a rival for the President's ear. Men
such as Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were viewed as
exciting additions to the Plumbers unit; they were tough
and experienced agents ready to operate clandestinely on
behalf of the President and his. re-election. Egil Krogh,
Ehrlichman's aide who was assigned to direct the Plumb-
ers along with David Young, could also be tough when it
came to the President and national security.
Charles Cooke, Elliot Richardson's longtime aide, initi-
ated a series of casual lunches at the White House and
elsewhere with Krogh shortly after moving with Richard-
son to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
in 1970. Although he and Krogh had many domestic issues
to discuss, Cooke recalls, they invariably talked about
Vietnam. Late in the year, after Nixon ordered the re-
sumption of bombing in the north, Cooke started to sum-
marize all of the arguments against it, beginning with the
fact--obvious to him-that the war was in the south and
could only be won on the ground there. "Krogh just blew
up," Cooke recalls: "'My God, don't you people under-
stand-the man [Richard Nixon] is going to blow them off
the face of the earth unless they cave in.' That was our last
lunch," Cooke says.
Krogh knew little about foreign policy in 1971. He had
been brought by Ehrlichman on to the White House
Domestic Council in early 1969, after having worked part-
time for Ehrlichman's Seattle law firm in the late 1960s,
while he was a student at the University of Washington
law school. Krogh's primary responsibilities on the Domes-
tic Council revolved around narcotics control, crime pre-
vention, and transportatioh policy; he also ran the White
House command post during the many anti-war rallies that
convulsed Washington in the early years of the Nixon Ad-
ministration. Krogh and Young knew each other casually
in mid-1971, but they were not close friends; both were
members of a group of White House aides who met occa-
sionally in a Georgetown bar for drinks and free-wheeling
gossip (although Krogh, a Christian Scientist, does not
drink).
Shortly after their assignment as co-directors of the
Plumbers, Krogh recalls, Young began doing exactly what
Kissinger feared: gossiping about the Kissinger-Nixon re-
lationship. In one of their first extended conversations,
Krogh says, Young "told me of the time he was on the
phone [listening in] when Nixon and Kissinger were talk-
ing. Nixon was drunk and he said, `Henry, we've got to
nuke them.'" The anecdote was chilling, Krogh says, and
added a sense of urgency to his mission: the Vietnam War
had to be won and Dan Ellsberg had to be stopped. "We
were going after an espionage ring, not just Daniel Ells-
berg," Krogh explained to John Ehrlichmari in 1973 during.
the Watergate crisis. "We had guys like [Paul] Warnke,
Gelb, and Halperin ... Halperin had even been tapped
when he was on the NSC staff because they didn't trust
him. They thought he was a traitor. We didn't know if
there were spies all over this country at that point ..."
Krogh, with his inexperience in foreign policy, may well
have believed that such a conspiracy existed. David
Young's beliefs are much more difficult to assess. Young
knew that a success in the Plumbers job would put him in
line for a senior appointment in the Nixon Administration.
Did Young really suspect that Ellsberg was part of a con-
spiracy involving Mort Halperin and. other Democrats?
Young had access to the Halperin wiretaps, and knew that
Ellsberg was as hostile privately about Nixon and Kis-
singer as he became in his public statements and writings
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M'AAY 1982 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PAGE 67
by 1971. But the wiretaps were devoid of any disclosures
of national-security information; Ellsberg may have been
able correctly to predict the administration's future course
of action in the Vietnam War, but he was not violating any
laws in so doing. Most of the significant leaks of national-
security information, as Young knew, originated in Henry
Kissinger's office. Young was also aware that Ellsberg had
met with Kissinger the previous September to urge an end
to the war; he may have known that Kissinger requested
that Ellsberg meet again with him. All of this meant, as
Young clearly had to understand, that the issue of Ellslrg
was far more complicated than Krogh, Ehrlichman, and
the President believed. Yet Young joined with alacrity in
the White House machinations against Ellsberg in the
summer and fall of 1971.
Further evidence of Haig's-and hence Kissinger's-
direct involvement with the Plumbers was provided in a
series of FBI documents released to the Times's William
Beecher in a Freedom of Information suit. The documents
show that Young and Krogh worked directly with Haig to
investigate yet another Beecher revelation--a July 23,
1971, dispatch outlining the administration's revised SALT
negotiating position. The Times story, which publicly re-
vealed that the administration had decided to seek controls
over submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs),
enraged the President and the disarmament community.
Nixon summoned Egil Krogh and Ehrlichman to an Oval
Office meeting on the next day, a Saturday, and ordered
widespread polygraph tests and a revision of the classifica-
tion system. A few hours later, Krogh called a meeting of
his own to discuss the Beecher story; those in attendance
included two senior FBI officials, Robert Mardian, Al
Haig, Howard Hurit, and David Young, among others. Ac-
cording to an FBI summary of the meeting, Krogh de-
scribed the President as being "up on the ceiling" about the
leak and wanting the sources located within thirty-six
hours. General Haig then reported, the FBI memorandum
said, "the results of his coordinating and he found that over
200 persons in various agencies, excluding clerical person-
nel, had access to the [National Security] Decision Memo-
randum relating to the U.S. proposals." Haig was thus
more than merely participating in the SALT leak inquiry;
he-along with Krogh, Young, and the other Plumbers-
was one of its administrators.
Kissinger himself got directly into the internal-security
business once again, shortly after his return in late July
from another secret meeting in Paris with Le Due Tho. His
target was William Beecher. On July 29, Beecher had done
it again-reporting that the Nixon Administration had
ended its long-standing spy flights over China in an obvi-
ous effort to avoid any serious incident before Richard
Nixon's summit meeting in early 1972. In a memorandum
for the record, W. Donald Stewart, the Pentagon official in
charge of investigations, reported that Kissinger had per-
sonally telephoned William Sullivan of the FBI to relay
"his great concern" about Beecher's new story and to urge
a full investigation. Such a request would be perfectly ap-
propriate for the President's national security adviser, but
Kissinger, it ;should be stated again, repeatedly testified
during the various Watergate inquiries that he chose to
stop dealing in internal-security matters as of May, 1970,
when the White House ordered all wiretap summaries to
be sent only to Bob Haldeman's office.
0 N AUGUST 5, JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER KISSINGER'S
complaint to William Sullivan about the Beecher
story, one of the final steps in the wiretap saga took
place in Kissinger's office. Robert Mardian, to whom Nix-
on had assigned the task-along with Haig-of getting rid
of the White House wiretap records, visited the NSC of-
fices that day to inspect Kissinger's wiretap records. Mar-
dian had earlier discovered that some copies of the FBI
summaries had disappeared in the Justice Department;
the suspected culprit was none other than J. Edgar Hoo-
ver, who had made clear to the President that he would
stop at nothing to protect his job. Exactly what happened
to all of the wiretap documents is pot known.
The prosecutors did learn, according to unpublished
files, that sometime in mid-July, just after the crucial July
12 meeting at San Clemente involving the President, the
White House files of Kissinger, Haldeman, and Nixon
were stripped of all wiretap summary letters and logs.
Those documents were returned to the FBI, where they
eventually came under Mardian's personal control, as
Nixon had ordered. Mardian and his aides subsequently
determined that a few of the FBI summary letters were
missing, and it was that fact that prompted Mardian's visit
to Kissinger and Haig. His goal, apparently, was fully to
account for Kissinger's copies of the FBI documents, and
to ensure that Kissinger's records were consistent with the
FBI's tally. It wouldn't do to have such papers floating
about the bureaucracy.
Mardian, as the FBI account of the interview reported,
"specifically remembered the incident because when he
came into the office, Dr. Kissinger addressed a remark
which Mr. Mardian felt was in extremely poor taste under
the circumstances.... Kissinger said something to the
effect, `Do you have what I said on the phone?' implying,
according to Mr. Mardian, that Mardian had results of a
wiretap on Dr. Kissinger.... Dr. Kissinger also said that
he had been keeping logs for the time when he writes his
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PAGE 68 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY MAY1982
memoirs, but laughed and said he doesn't keep them any
more."
Kissinger and Haig then got down to the business at
hand, and carefully went through Kissinger's copy of the
wiretap records. It was not clear from Mardian's interview
with the FBI whether Kissinger kept a set of the wiretap
summaries and logs in his office or merely had a summary
of what had been in his possession and previously re-
turned. Mardian later personally delivered all of the col-
lected wiretap records to Nixon, who instructed Ehrlich-
man to bury them in his files, where they were discovered
a few days after Ehrlichman's resignation from the White
House in 1973. In his August 5 meeting with Kissinger and
Haig, Mardian acknowledged that the careful checking
was necessary to ensure that Hoover did not have access
to any of the documents, and thus was not in a position to
blackmail the White House. Kissinger, in his interview
with the Special Prosecution Force in late 1975, also ac-
knowledged that he was aware of Hoover's blackmail
threat, although he denied being present when Mardian
and Haig went through his office wiretap records. In a re-
port on the interview, the Special Prosecution Force fur-
ther quoted Kissinger as conceding that he was aware that
"the nature of this [Hoover's] blackmail threat related to
the embarrassment that would be caused if it were known
that newsmen had been tapped."
"Embarrassment" was hardly the word. Kissinger had to
realize that such a revelation would have been devastat-
ing, not-only to him personally but perhaps even to Nixon's
re-election campaign. It would also have heightened the
resolve of the U.S. anti-war forces. Kissinger suffered
through the meeting and the distasteful comparing of
wiretap documents with Mardian for the same reason that
everyone else in the White House did-fear of exposure.
William Sullivan of the FBI understood how far Kis-
singer would go to avoid embarrassment. Sometime in the
spring of 1973, amid the Watergate revelations, he sent
Kissinger a memorandum summarizing his understanding
of the White House wiretapping, which had yet to become
publicly known. The document enraged Kissinger, accord-
ing to a close aide, but he knew what to do without being
told. Sullivan soon became Kissinger's and Haig's choice to
be named director of the. FBI. It was Haig, Nixon's new
chief of staff, who telephoned Elliot Richardson, the newly
nominated attorney general, and strongly recommended
Sullivan for the job in the first week of May. Richardson's
senior aides, J. T. Smith and Jonathan Moore, moved
quickly and successfully to prevent Sullivan's nomination.
Moore says that he had no special knowledge in arguing
against Sullivan. 'He was the wrong guy with the wrong
history," he says. Within two weeks, Sullivan made avail-
able to The New York Times copies of White House wiretap
authorizations, which directly linked Kissinger to the re-
quests for wiretaps on his own staff aides.
Kissinger's concern that spring was not only wiretap-
ping. He also had to worry about David Young. who had
continued to operate-as only a few knew-in Kissinger's
sphere despite his assignment to the Plumbers.
In the fall of 1980, I obtained access to a private journal
that was informally maintained by a key Kissinger aide,
who served in a position of confidentiality throughout the
Watergate era; it summarized many conversations be-
tween Kissinger and the President, as well as between
Kissinger and Haig. The journal, made available under the
condition that the name of its author not be revealed,
showed that Haig was directly receiving progress reports
on the Plumbers' activities from David Young. Kissinger
was "worried," the journal noted in an entry dated March
15, 1973, "concerning the Plumbers' work." At that date,
of course, there had yet to be any public revelation of the
existence of the Plumbers unit or of its wrongdoing. As the
Watergate scandal unraveled later that spring, the journal
further revealed that David Young had emerged as a con-
stant cause of concern for Kissinger. In early June, the
journal noted that Kissinger was openly worried about
Young and whether he was truly loyal or was just saying
that he "was a Kissinger man." At one point that spring,
according to the journal, Kissinger even considered rein-
stating Young as an aide on the NSC staff, to help ensure
that he would not tell all he knew.
By October of 1975, when Kissinger finally agreed to be
interviewed by the Watergate prosecutors, it was safe to
do so. Gerald R. Ford was President, and Watergate
seemed far removed. In retrospect, Kissinger had made a
wise choice in deciding to deny any knowledge whatsoever
of the Plumbers operation. Al Haig and David Young kept
their silence. If Kissinger had taken another tack and ad-
mitted to having some idea of what David Young and Egil
Krogh were doing, he would have exposed himself to fur-
ther inquiries and, inevitably, more admission of knowl-
edge. That Kissinger had lied about his role in the wire,
tapping and his knowledge of the Plumbers was widely
assumed in the Washington press corps, and even inside
the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, but Kissinger
was permitted to slide by with his half-truths and mis-
statements. Only Richard Nixon, Alexander Haig, some of
the men around them, . and a few Watergate prosecutors
fortunate enough to have learned what was on the White
House tapes understood the truth: Kissinger was
involved. D
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000402830031-4