DEEP THROAT, PHONE HOME

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180024-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 24
• Publication Date: November 25, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180024-3
Deep Throat,
-Phone
eme
SECRET AGENDA .
Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA
By Jim Hougan
Random Hcuse. 347 pp. $19.95
By Anthony Marro
1~1
WASHINGTON POST
25 November 1984
N OTHIN
political
` rl
in or
but of t(
ORE THAN 150 books already have been writ-
e ten about Watergate, and to understand the
new dimension Tim Hou
an ho
g
pes
Secret A
d
a, it is necessary to
gen
understand the official,
or at least th ver-
sion of events. Boiled to its essence, it goes something like
this:
In May and June 1972, a group of men working for the
Nixon reelection campaign staged two break-ins at the
Democratic National Committee offices at Watergate. The
group included G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, and E.
Howard Hunt. Liddy was a former FBI agent. Hunt and
McCord were retired CIA officers. With the aid of some hire-
lings from ,Miami's Cuban exile community, McCord installed
two wiretaps on the night of May 27-28, one of them on the
phone of Lawrence O'Brien, the DNC chairman, and a sec-
ond on the phone of R. Spencer Oliver, another party official.
For about two weeks, in a motel room across the street,
yet another former FBI agent, Alfred C. Baldwin III, eaves-
dropped on the wiretapped phone conversations, and typed
up summaries for McCord. These were passed along to
Liddy, who had them retyped under the heading "GEM-
STONE," the code name for the operation, and then gave
them to Jeb Stuart Magruder and other cam
Because of a technical problem, the tap on 0'B teen's pho e
never worked. The information from the tap on Oliver's
phone proved to be far more personal than political, much of
it from women describing sexual escapades, performed or
anticipated. Baldwin assumed he was eavesdropping on DNC
secretaries, but so many of the conversations were so spicy
that they gave rise, as J. Anthony Lukas wrote in Nightmare:
The Underside of the Nixon Years, to "unconfirmed reports
that the telephone was being used for some sort of call-girl
service catering to Congressmen and other prominent Wash-
ingtonians."
In order to repair the wiretap on O'Brien's telephone, and
also to photograph his files, a second break-in was attempted
on the night of June 16-17. While inside the DNC office,
surgical gloves on their hands, cameras and listening devices
in their possession, McCord and the men from Miami were
discovered and arrested. The 'trail quickly led from them to
Liddy and Hunt and then to the White House.
in the office of then - _ ' - - u1 ud1L-ms were planned
attorney general
with money from the reelection scam John Mitchell, t by
the president's men. p? and execute fund d by
But this, Houganargues, is only part of the story. His ac-
count goes well beyond, to include a prostitution ring, heavy
CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on
the Democrats, and plots within plots, with McCord schem-
ing at the end to sabotage his own break-in. What he offers
up is not so much a totally revisionist history as a history
with a significant new dimension and perspective.
It likely will take some time for Hougan's reporting to be
absorbed, cross-checked, challenged and test po
ed, and whether
this proves to be an important book or simply a controversial
one will depend on how well it survives the scrutiny that it is
sure to receive. For what Hougan is doing here is attacking
the version of Watergate that has been constructed and rein-
forced by journalists, prosecutors, congressional investiga-
tors and academics over more than a decade-a version
which he now Iabels a "counterfeit history."
At bottom, his contention is this: Hunt and McCord never
left the CIA. They remained under the control of the agency,
with Hunt spying on the White House as well as on the
Democrats.
There never was a tap placed on the telephones in the
DNC offices. Instead, the conversations that were monitored
by Baldwin were from the wiretap of a prostitution ring lo-
cated in the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments, some of
whose customers were being steered there by a secretary in
the DNC. This tap most likely had been planted by a private
detective named Louis Russell, who died of a heart attack in
1973. Russell was a former FBI agent, a friend of one of the
prostitutes, an employe of McCord's private security firm,'
and, in Hougan's view, a CIA operative tapping the calls for
the agency. The connection between the prostitutes and the
DNC had been arranged by a Washington attorney, Phillip
Bailley,-who had persuaded a secretary at the DNC to steer
clients to a prostitute identified only as "Tess." Since he
traveled frequently and his office was empty, the secretary
and the clients had used Spencer Oliver's phone to arrange
meetings with "Tess."
This secret CIA operation involving the prostitutes was so
sensitive that McCord and Russell set out to sabotage the
break-in at Watergate to insure that the other Watergate
burglars wouldn't stumble across it. "In effect," Hougan
writes, "the snake had swallowed its tail: CIA agents work-
ing under cover of Nixon's re-election committee came to be
targeted against their own operation. . . . All that the
agents could do was to stand tall and, when all else failed,
blow their own cover." By doing this, Hougan says, the infor-
mation from the wiretaps on the prostitutes would be pre-
served for the exclusive use of the CIA, which presumably
would use it to blackmail important people, or to create psy-
chiatric profiles of them.
imam lNixon s
apparatus was not to blame for the break-
..,. \t:..__ , - .. ...
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180024-3