Nixon's Crimes

July 30, 2012

Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen

Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen was the Justice Department’s No. 1 Watergate investigator—and he regularly sneaked the Nixon White House privileged information that allowed the Nixon administration to forestall the Watergate inquiry until after the 1972 presidential election.

by Don Fulsom

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relied on “Deep Throat” for inside intelligence on Watergate—the scandal they broke open 40 summers ago as rookie local reporters for The Washington Post.  Over the next two years, with extensive help from their dreamboat of a secret source, “Woodstein” wrote more than 400 exclusive stories about what became our biggest political scandal.

Their main source was the ever-accurate Mark Felt, the No. 2 man at the FBI.  Felt was a friend of, and father figure to, Woodward.  A cagey pro at his craft, Felt had access to more Watergate clues, findings and secrets than just about anyone.  His identity as The Post’s Subterranean Oracle (he favored post-midnight meetings with Woodward in a certain underground parking garage near a specific pillar) was not revealed until early this century, just before Felt’s death.

Far less known, but probably just as important, is that the prime architect of the Watergate cover-up, President Richard Nixon, had his own Deep Throat.  The Nixon’s loyalist and critically placed surreptitious leaker was a little-remembered man named Henry Petersen, who was even better informed than Felt was, at least on breaking prosecutorial developments. 

April 30, 2012

Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon

A “Top Secret” CIA report accuses then Vice President Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

by Don Fulsom

One of Richard Nixon’s vice presidential secrets surfaced only in recent years.  And it’s a doozy: a “Top Secret” CIA report accuses Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This CIA document—completed in 1983—is known as “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951- January 1961.”  (The CIA declassified only Volume III of the five-volume history in 1998.  It was discovered in the National Archives by Villanova professor David Barrett in 2005, and first posted on his university’s Web site. This volume is now posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive, which is suing the CIA for the release of the other volumes.)

Of course, it would not be the first nor the last time that Nixon—one of the stickiest fingered politicians in modern times—would be caught doling out favors to fat cats. 

Yet this declassified document exposes something even seamier than Nixon’s run-of-the-mill pay-for-play illegalities. Seamier, for example, than soliciting congressional campaign funds from L.A.’s top gangster; or keeping a secret senatorial slush fund rounded up by rich businessmen; or widespread presidential financial corruption – including the sale of ambassadorships; soliciting bribes from billionaires; or a go-easy attitude toward the ultra-generous Mafia godfathers and their thuggish Teamster allies.

These fresh revelations involve war and peace, life and death.  They lie buried among 295 pages of a CIA critique of the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles.  Written by a CIA historian, this document provides rich new details on Richard Nixon’s central role in plotting the invasion of a foreign country, Cuba, and the attempted assassination of its leader, Fidel Castro. It faults Nixon for taking risky anti-Castro actions, in large part, to satisfy a well-connected Castro-loathing U.S. plutocrat, William Pawley.

Historian David Kaiser, in his book The Road to Dallas, notes that Pawley worked closely with the CIA “on building anti-Castro organizations both inside and outside of Cuba.  He was, in effect, an informal (CIA) case officer.”  As such, it is almost certain that Pawley was aware of the recommendation, in early January of 1960, by CIA heavyweight J. C. King for Castro’s “elimination.”

March 6, 2011

Between March of 1969 and August of 1973, President Nixon illegally bombed Cambodia, causing over three-million tons of bombs to rain downs on the neutral country and the deaths of an estimated half-million Cambodian citizens.     

by Don Fulsom

In mid-March 1969, President Richard Nixon launched “Operation Breakfast,” the first assault in the first stage of the Henry Kissinger-inspired covert carpet-bombing of defenseless and neutral Cambodia.

From the start of this surreptitious warfare, records were falsified to hide the attacks.  They were reported as strikes against Communist forces within Vietnam.

In the first attack, scores of Guam-based B-52 Stratofortresses—operating in waves—struck enemy ammunition dumps, fuel depots and troop concentrations three miles inside the Cambodian border.  Initial reports indicated that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces there had been disabled.

Jan. 10 ,2011

Daniel Ellsberg (left)

The WikiLeaks disclosures of top-secret government documents recall the time in 1971 when the intrepid Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.   

by Don Fulsom

In the summer of 1971, The New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Defense Department study critical of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam.  The huge report had been methodically stolen and duplicated by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had turned against the war.  He leaked copies to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

Newly declassified tapes show President Richard Nixon first realized the seriousness of the leak during a June 13th noontime telephone call from National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s top deputy, Alexander Haig:

Haig:  This goddamn New York Times expose [is] of the most highly classified documents in the war.

Nixon:  Oh, that!  I see!  I didn’t read the story.  You mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

Haig:  This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.

By the time Nixon talked to Kissinger himself a short time later, the President was climbing the walls over the leak:

Nixon:  That Henry, that to me is just unconscionable, this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.

       Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.

Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? What kind of—what kind of people would do such things?

       Kissinger: It has the most—it has the highest classification, Mr. President.

       Nixon: Yeah. Yeah.

Kissinger: It’s treasonable! There’s no question it’s actionable. I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.

Next on the tape, the President gives his chief foreign policy advisor permission to call Attorney General John Mitchell to determine the options for prosecuting the newspaper. 

Sept. 17, 2010

Air Force Gen. John Lavelle

President Richard Nixon’s criminalities and cover-ups continue to be exposed, 36 years after the Watergate scandal forced him from office.

by Don Fulsom 

Recently declassified tapes and documents from President Nixon’s archives exploded a bombshell about how Nixon framed and slandered a distinguished U.S. military commander in Vietnam, Air Force Gen. John Lavelle.

In 1972, Lavelle became Nixon’s fall guy for obeying what turned out to be the commander in chief’s own top-secret orders to expand the bombing of North Vietnam in late 1971 and early 1972.

Nixon didn’t want to take the heat for that decision, unpopular with critics of the war—so Lavelle was sacrificed as the scapegoat, stripped of two of his four stars, and sacked.