When George Bush chooses a new CIA director, the nominee should mosey over to the National Archives and listen to the pickle in which President Richard Nixon placed his top spook.
According to previously undisclosed Oval Office tapes, Nixon and top aide John Ehrlichman worked strenuously, and cynically, to persuade CIA Director Richard Helms to fork over secret documents so that they might muddy political enemies, notably the Kennedy family.
Conversations show Nixon and Ehrlichman rehearsing lines to use on Helms as they sought to procure CIA records on the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as of the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
It is clear that Helms, a fabled CIA official, knew what they were up to and did his best to resist, but finally surrendered a fair number of documents.
On Oct. 8, 1971, Ehrlichman notifies Nixon that Helms “would not give me any of the Diem stuff until he had an opportunity to talk to you. He said that his relationship with past presidents had been such that he would not feel comfortable about releasing some of this very, very dirty linen to anyone without first talking it through you” because he was sure that when Nixon was out of office, “you would want to feel whoever was at the agency was protecting your interests in similar fashion.”
“And I said, well, nobody was going to see this stuff except the president and me,” says Ehrlichman. “And he said this is incredibly dirty linen and I would not feel comfortable about it without talking to the president first.”
Diem was murdered in a military coup that clearly had U.S. support. But did President Kennedy approve in advance an attempt on his life?
History suggests that while we may have been in with the coup plotters, Kennedy did not give a go-ahead to kill Diem. Nixon was convinced otherwise and hoped to find such incriminating documentation in the CIA files.
It even led Nixon to approve a cable forged by the notorious E. Howard Hunt, who would become famous with his involvement in the Watergate burglary in June 1972. That cable claimed to prove Kennedy’s knowledge of an assassination attempt when, in fact, Kennedy waffled on the subject of Diem and had wanted to offer him asylum and safety.
As for the Bay of Pigs mess, Nixon again wanted damaging information on Kennedy. In particular, he hoped to find proof that Kennedy was more directly involved in the decision-making than history suggested he was.
“So let me ask you this,” Nixon asks of Ehrlichman. “What the hell is the, you mean Kennedy didn’t know these things? Johnson didn’t know these things? Whad’ya think, they were innocent of these things? You can be goddamn sure if some Democrat gets in this chair, they will get everything that we’ve got. Everything.”
Knowing that Helms will arrive shortly to discuss all these matters, Ehrlichman prepares Nixon for Helms’ concerns that “this stuff shouldn’t be spread all over the newspapers,” according to the aide.
“I agree,” says Nixon.
But the agreement is belied by subsequent comments, even as Ehrlichman continues to pass along Helms’ concerns that disclosure of much of the information will make a lot of CIA personnel “look stupid as hell. Ah, he doesn’t want that to happen because that makes his agency that much weaker. Much less able to function.”
“Maybe the lesson is just get rid of Helms,” Nixon responds sharply.
Ehrlichman indicates that, “I was kind of mysterious with him about why you were doing all this. And I said, look, the president has got some very heavy negotiations coming up in the future and implied it was important for you, for instance, to understand the whole background of the Cuban missile crisis since you were going to negotiate with the Russians. I didn’t say that in so many words, but I said this all goes to the president’s preoccupation with careful preparations.”
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So they have basically figured out a line to throw Helms. They will claim that upcoming arms negotiations with the Soviets necessitate Nixon knowing everything they might know about unseemly American actions. Still, Nixon wants to tie up some loose ends.
“But why do we want the Kennedy stuff, the murder?” asks Nixon.
“Diem?” says Ehrlichman. “Well, you’re getting hit with that stuff all the time.”
Ehrlichman then speaks to their real motives.
“Suppose we get the Diem stuff and suppose there’s something we can really hang Teddy or the Kennedy clan with. I’m gonna want to put that in Colson’s hands and we’re gonna want to run with it,” he says, referring to Charles Colson, the chief political henchman who was later convicted and sent to prison for his Watergate actions.
“I have a right to” the documents, says Nixon. “I am the president. The CIA is not. It’s a self-perpetuating bureaucracy.”
“That’s an unassailable position, it seems to me,” says Ehrlichman.”
Rehearsing his position moments before Helms actually enters the Oval Office, Nixon says, “`Give it to me and I will take responsibility for it.’ Exactly. Exactly.”
Helms enters and after some small talk about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon says, “Ah, let me come to this point that you’ve been talking to John about.
“I think maybe I can perhaps put it in a clearer perspective than John was able since you probably wonder what the hell it’s all about, why we’re interested in these things.”
Nixon is theatrically coy, saying that interest in the Bay of Pigs will somehow be “quite clear within a few weeks, that it is, ah, I just want to be sure I am totally aware of everything we have ever dealt with with the Russians in the past. And what they did, and what we did, and what was promised and what was not promised and so forth, and so on, and how it worked.”
He tries to apple-polish Helms by claiming the CIA’s Bay of Pigs plan was a fine one, it just was undermined by other factors and people. And, he assures, any documents will not wind up in the hands of White House staff.
“It’s for my information,” Nixon declares. “Second, I need it for a defensive reason,” namely for the negotiations with the Soviets. He then goes into an odd riff, claiming that the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers makes his having these documents all the more incumbent.
“I need it because due to the miserable Pentagon Papers,” there are questions flying about. “Who shot John? Is Eisenhower lying? Has Johnson been lying? Has Kennedy been lying? Has Nixon been lying? Et cetera, et cetera. . . . I need to know what is necessary to protect, frankly, the intelligence gathering and the integrity of the department [CIA].”
Helms’ one- and two-word responses strongly suggest his skepticism. His first lengthy comment involves the “claptrap of odds and ends” that one can find in CIA documents, collections that don’t “really give a balanced picture of what occurred.”
Ultimately, Helms does give Nixon certain documents, including “after-action” reports and the CIA inspector general’s reports on certain matters, including on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. What Nixon craved, but did not get from Helms, was a particular after-action report on the Bay of Pigs written by Gen. Maxwell Taylor.
There is no evidence that Nixon wound up using any of what he cajoled out of Helms. Still, there is one unintentionally humorous point of agreement between the spy and his boss.
It involves meetings. Helms said, “I don’t run many meetings.” And he followed an urging of President Lyndon Johnson, who was “very explicit about not wanting notes in meetings.”
When Helms visited Johnson in Texas (presumably after he’d left office), Johnson said he thought Helms had written notes about various lunches they had. He told Johnson, “I never wrote a word down. I didn’t write a single note . . . .”
“You know, unfortunately, I don’t either,” says Nixon, perhaps momentarily forgetting that his tape system is running.