HL           Deep Throat, Phone Home
DD        11/25/84
SO        WASHINGTON POST (WP), PAGE 05: BOOK WORLD
TX           SECRET AGENDA Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA By Jim
          Hougan Random House. 347 pp. $19.95
             By Anthony Marro
             MORE THAN 150 books already have been written about
          Watergate, and to understand the new dimension Jim Hougan
          hopes to add to this record with Secret Agenda, it is
          necessary to understand the official, or at least the widely
          accepted, version 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 hirelings 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 second 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,
          eavesdropped on the wiretapped phone conversations, and typed
          up summaries for McCord. These were passed along to Liddy,
       *  who had them retyped under the heading "GEMSTONE," the code
          name for the operation, and then gave them to Jeb Stuart
          Magruder and other campaign officials. Because of a technical
          problem, the tap on O'Brien's phone 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 Washingtonians."
             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.
             NOTHING in Hougan's book suggests that Nixon's political
          apparatus was not to blame for the break- in, or that Nixon
          himself didn't deserve to be run out of town on a rail. The
          break-ins were planned in the office of then attorney general
          John Mitchell, funded with money from the reelection
          campaign, and executed by the president's men.
             But this, Hougan argues, is only part of the story. His
          account 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
          scheming 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 tested, 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 reinforced by journalists, prosecutors, congressional
          investigators and academics over more than a decade -- a
          version which he now labels 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 located
          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 working
          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 information
          from the wiretaps on the prostitutes would be preserved for
          the exclusive use of the CIA, which presumably would use it
          to blackmail important people, or to create psychiatric
          profiles of them.
             A secondary theme of the book is that the press in general
          and The Washington Post in particular was so blinded by its
          hatred of Nixon that it focused almost entirely on the White
          House, ignoring leads that might have shown that Hunt and
          McCord wre being controlled by the CIA, and that Watergate
          was as much a sex scandal and an intelligence agency scandal
          as a political one.
             AS THIS summary suggests, there are different levels of
          reporting and an uneven quality of evidence presented in this
          book. Hougan has attacked the official record of Watergate
          with persistence and considerable skill, pointing up scores
          of questions, flaws, contradictions and holes. At the same
          time, much of the new evidence he assembles, and the way in
          which he weaves it together, is likely to itself come under
          challenge. His case that the phone conversations overheard by
          Baldwin really were those of a prostitution ring, for
          example, centers in large part around a disbarred lawyer
          (Bailley), a dead man who Hougan describes as a drunk
          (Russell), a prostitute identified only by a pseudoymn
          ("Tess") and a DNC secretary (who is not named but whose
          identity is clearly hinted at), who appears not to have been
          questioned by Hougan about any of this. Indeed, of all these
          ey people only one -- Bailley -- appears to have been
          interviewed by Hougan; neither McCord, who Hougan says
          refused to be interviewed, nor Baldwin seems to have been
          confronted with this new information.
             Because Hunt and McCord and the men from Miami, all of
          them Bay of Pigs veterans, had been on CIA payrolls, there
          were attempts right from the start to link the agency to the
          break-in. While reporters and congressional investigators
          found many contacts between the burglars and the agency,
          however, no one was able to show conclusively that they were
          operating under agency control. Hougan cites the technical
          help that the CIA provided Hunt for his White House missions
          (wigs, cameras and various spying devices), the many contacts
          between Hunt and CIA officials in this period (Hunt describes
          them as social lunches and tennis dates; Hougan calls them
          "clandestine meetings"), the reports that Hunt was feeding
          the CIA "gossip" about White House officials, and then argues
          that, when added together, "the evidence is overwhelming that
          the retirements of Hunt and McCord had been fabricated," and
          that Hunt was "spying on the White House."
             Nearly all of his evidence is circumstantial, of course,
          and while it is plausible, some readers won't see it as being
          as "overwhelming" as he does. His reporting on the possible
          lack of a wiretap at the DNC seems more impressive, the key
          evidence coming from FBI reports that he says he obtained
          through the Freedom of Information Act. They indicate that
          the FBI was convinced that an inspection of the DNC phones
          and offices immediately after the break-in showed no signs of
          wiretaps or bugs, and that the devices later uncovered (they
          were not found until September 13, after a DNC secretary
          complained of noise on the phone line) probably could not
          have transmitted to the receiving equipment Baldwin had been
          using to monitor calls.
             Hougan's theory is that the devices found on the DNC
          phones had been planted, probably by Russell, in such a way
          as to insure that the FBI would find them. They were so big
          and clunky that no one could miss them. Both the bureau and
          the media would then assume that a tap actually had been
          placed on Spencer Oliver's phone, as Baldwin had been telling
          reporters, and thus would be steered away from the taps on
          the prostitutes.
             Hougan's reporting on this seems, from a distance, solid
          enough to be taken seriously. But one obvious question is
          why, if the FBI reports are as clear as Hougan makes them to
          be, they didn't surface long before now, either leaked by the
          FBI to the White House to help defuse the scandal, or
          provided to defense lawyers whose clients would seem to have
          been entitled to them for use in their trials. And this is
          only one of the many new questions raised by the evidence
          that Hougan offers up in posing answers to old ones, among
          them his contention that the prostitution ring was really a
          CIA operation, and such an important one that McCord would
          get himself arrested to protect it. H
             OUGAN cites no
             sources and produces no
             documents showing that
             the CIA had launched such a project, received information
          from it, or even knew about it. Using a journalism of
          juxtaposition he builds a case that goes something like this:
          McCord and Hunt were still working for the CIA. McCord and
          Russell were working as a team. Russell probably was
          wiretapping the prostitutes. The CIA often gathered
          information on the sex lives of people. Hunt was sending
          "gossip" to the CIA. McCord did so many things to compromise
          the break-in --  putting tape back over a lock after it had
          been removed by a guard, for example -- that it's clear he
          was trying to sabotage it, and the only reason would be to
          protect an even more important operation. Conclusion: Russell
          and McCord were wiretapping the prostitutes for the CIA, and
          this was the operation McCord wanted to protect.
             One of the disconcerting things about this book is the
          frequency with which Hougan mixes diligent information
          gathering with questionable, even reckless, assumptions about
          motive and purpose. At times his piecing together of
          information and events resembles not the careful mosaic he
          insists he is creating but a hodgepodge of fact, innuendo,
          untested hypotheses and conjecture.
             Even if Hougan is right about the wiretaps on the call
          girls, there are other, more benign (or at least different)
          explanations for what might have been taking place. It is
          possible that Russell was tapping the calls simply because
          his friends, the prostitutes, had asked him to. It is
          possible that he was himself hoping to blackmail the clients.
          It is possible he was doing it for his own amusement, as a
          sort of electronic voyeur. And it is possible that McCord,
          having failed to plant a working device during the first
          break-in, plugged into the wiretaps he knew Russell had
          placed on the prostitutes, using the material to pacify Liddy
          and Magruder until a second break-in could get his own
          wiretaps at the DNC working properly.
             Indeed, if McCord was so concerned with preserving the
          secrecy of the call girl operation that he would torpedo the
          Watergate break-in to protect it, one has to ask why he would
          have let Baldwin eavesdrop on the phone calls in the first
          place. And if the purpose of the second break-in was to get
          information about the prostitutes and their clients, which
          Hougan insists that it was, it seems strange that none of the
          plotters, including Magruder in his testimony and Liddy in
          his book, has ever cited it as one of their goals.
             THE SUBTITLE of this book is "Watergate, Deep Throat and
          the CIA," and there are suggestions that the true identity of
          "Deep Throat," the name Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave
          to one of Woodward's most important sources, might be a key
          to understanding how the Watergate scandal unraveled in the
          way that it did. The chapter on "Throat," however, begins
          with the disclaimer that "any conclusion must be
          speculative," and then quickly degenerates into a sort of
          journalistic parlor game, the bottom line of which seems to
          be that it might have been Al Haig (like Deep Throat, he
          smoked and drank scotch whiskey) but then again it might not
          have been.
             Hougan also suggests that "Deep Throat" might have been a
          member of the intelligence community, perhaps someone
          Woodward had gotten to know while serving as a Navy officer
          in a Pentagon communications unit. And in this, too, he seems
          to be searching for yet more conspiracy, for evidence that
          The Post and its reporters allowed themselves to be steered
          away from possible CIA involvement because of nudgings from
          people, presumably CIA operatives or friends, who would
          prefer they investigate links to the Nixon White House rather
          than links to the agency.
             What is one to make of all this?
             To believe it in toto, one has to believe that unbeknownst
          to Liddy and the White House, Hunt and McCord were working
          for the CIA; that unbeknownst to Hunt, McCord was involved in
          yet another CIA operation that would cause him to sabotage
          the break- in; that unbeknownst to Baldwin, he was monitoring
          wiretaps not from Democratic headquarters, but from a
          prostitution ring. One has to believe not only that the CIA
          would risk spying on the White House and on the sexual
          activities of powerful Democrats, but that it would use the
          likes of McCord, who Hougan says behaved so oddly that agency
          officials "fretted over his eccentricities," and Russell, who
          he describes as a drunk, to do it. This is a lot to accept,
          even knowing that the agency's history of sexual spying would
          make a Bronx vice squad detective blush, and that it once
          proposed assassinating Castro with an exploding conch shell.
             Some of Hougan's contentions, particularly those labeling
          the alleged prostitution ring as a CIA operation, strike me
          as simply not justified by the evidence cited. Some of his
          flat assertions, such as his statements that "The conclusion
          is inescapable that McCord sabotaged the June 16 break-
          in..." and that Hunt was "spying on the White House," still
          seem, at the end of 347 pages of documentation, to be more in
          the nature of working hypotheses than prudent conclusions.
             Hougan warns readers at the start that he doesn't have all
          the answers, saying his hope is for yet another formal
          investigation of Watergate. Even without one, he has added an
          enormous amount of raw data and information to the record,
          and his book should lead to a reexamination and reassessment
          of important parts of the the story. Whether the ultimate
          conclusions match Hougan's remains to be seen. But sometimes
          the best that journalism can do is to raise legitimate
          questions, and this, at the least, Hougan seems to have done.
          u itor of Newsday, covered the investigations of Watergate
          and the intelligence agencies while a reporter for Newsday,
          Newsweek and The New York Times.

              END OF DOCUMENT