Did the CIA Take Down President Nixon?

What the two 'hero' reporters didn't bother to find....or weren't smart enough to check out, or--most likely--didn't care about because it ran counter to Their Narrative:  Nixon Bad, Bad, Bad.

Maybe he wasn't.

All in a book, Secret Agenda, by Jim Hougan--a real reporter, not a WaPo/MSM dilettante.

...No credible historian now questions that both Hunt and McCord – though each officially retired from the CIA when they joined the Nixon White House and Committee to Re-elect the President, respectively – maintained direct contact with the agency’s senior echelons, in ways that called their allegiances, and agendas, into question. Consequently, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate is now widely understood as deeper – more entrenched, controlling, and malign – than was known in 1974.

Likewise, it now stands beyond dispute, as Hougan was first to assert, that the Ellsberg break-in was not a failure but instead resulted in the location and photography of the files sought – and, as Hougan reported, the diversion of the undeveloped film from the hands of the Plumbers to CIA headquarters.

It was to the agency that Hunt had turned for much of the technical support he and Liddy required: electronic gadgetry, aliases, disguises, the preparation of “pocket litter” and charts. For the break-in at the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, it can now be reported, Langley provided Hunt with a camera designed to deprive the Nixon White House of access to the intelligence....

Then there's Eugenio Martinez.

 ....revelations – that CIA officials considered Eugenio Martinez “an agent” during his work for the Plumbers; that Langley was prepared to fight to the death to withhold the reports Martinez filed, and those of his case officers, even from the hands of the Watergate special prosecutors; and that no less a figure than Richard Helms immediately thought of Martinez when the subject turned to possible CIA foreknowledge of the break-in – only substantiated the evidence and conclusions that Secret Agenda had presented about “Muscolito,” the agency he served, and the broader and deeper dimensions of Watergate....

You never heard of his book?  Don't be disappointed in yourself.

 ...Secret Agenda did not become a bestseller: Most Americans, including some journalists who think they know the Watergate story, have never heard of it. The book had some deficiencies. The publisher’s marketing efforts were desultory; the book lacked blurbs; and the cover art was uninspired. But I am convinced the real problem was the author’s fearless calling out of those powerful establishment forces whose fortunes and reputations rested on the history of Watergate remaining unchanged.

The appearance of Secret Agenda marked a David-and-Goliath moment: the lone researcher, accomplished and well credentialed but clearly not a member of the Beltway club, taking on all of established journalism. Hougan’s was a quixotic quest, a decade after the fact, to correct the record of the greatest, most voluminous exercise of political power, the criminal justice system, and news media influence yet witnessed in the Information Age.

That he had the evidence on his side – tens of thousands of pages of irrefutable evidence – ultimately, and sadly, mattered little at the time. The cherished narrative Hougan proposed to upend belonged not to just any public event but to the quintessential public event: a saturation-coverage mythos embedded as deeply in the Western cultural imagination as the Civil War or the Beatles. And the lesson Hougan challenged most directly was the central one, the scandal’s supposed saving grace: The system worked....

But, of course, it "worked" only in the sense that the American citizen only heard and saw what certain people wanted them to hear and see.

Here's something you probably don't know:

...No less startling was Hougan’s unveiling of the official correspondence between Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert and the FBI laboratory. With painstaking methodology, the bureau’s lab technicians presented unassailable evidence to buttress their conclusion that the Democrats themselves had planted the crude and inoperative bugging device they “discovered” on Oliver’s telephone, and announced to the press, in September 1972 – three months after the arrests.

“No one seems to have asked the obvious,” Hougan wrote at a separate point in Secret Agenda – yet nowhere else in the Watergate saga was this observation more apt than with respect to the September Bug. Here were the top officials of the Democratic National Committee, in an election year, announcing their discovery of a bugging device in their headquarters three months after the bugging suspects had been arrested on the premises, and after the FBI had made three exhaustive sweeps of the DNC telephones and found no devices installed.

That this planting of evidence, this obstruction of justice, didn’t blow the Watergate scandal wide open, didn’t trigger the dismissal of the charges against the burglars, Hunt and Liddy, was only because federal prosecutors wrongly withheld the September Bug correspondence – exculpatory evidence in any bugging case – from the defendants’ attorneys....

Gee Golly Whillikers, Batman!!  Crooked Federal prosecutors???  What would Any McCarthy say??

And hookers!!  There had to be hookers; after all, this was a CIA/Democrat op, right?

 ...Where Secret Agenda had established a link between the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring and the Democratic National Committee, Silent Coup went a step further and asserted a link between Columbia Plaza and White House Counsel John Dean, a central figure in Watergate. The book alleged that the name Maureen Biner, Dean’s girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife, appeared in the Columbia Plaza “trick books.” In 1984, Hougan had been the first to report John Dean’s interest when news of the call-girl ring hit the newspapers on June 9, 1972, shortly before the final Watergate break-in. As Secret Agenda revealed, Dean summoned the federal prosecutors in the case to his office and instructed them to bring all the evidence with them to the White House. There Dean circled names in the trick books with a Parker pen.

Silent Coup alleged that Dean’s observation of his own girlfriend’s name in those pages gave the impetus to the second, doomed Watergate break-in of June 16-17....

Yah....."Cleanup on Aisle Hooker!!"

And you never knew that John Dean is another of the liars, whose book had to be 'disavowed' by Dean himself, not least because parts were 'woven from whole cloth..' did you?

Sex and lies:  the Democrat/CIA tools of the trade.

Still think Nixon's a crook??