Silent Coup - Softcover

Colodny, Len

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634240537 ISBN 13: 9781634240536

Publisher: Trine Day, 2016

Synopsis

This is the true story of betrayal at the nation's highest level. Unfolding with the suspenseful pace of a le Carre spy thriller, it reveals the personal motives and secret political goals that combined to cause the Watergate break-in and destroy Richard Nixon. Investigator Len Colodny and journalist Robert Gettlin relentlessly pursued the people who brought down the president. Their revelations shocked the world and forever changed our understanding of politics, of journalism, and of Washington behind closed doors. Dismantling decades of lies, Silent Coup tells the truth. 

About this title

About the Author

In 1992, journalist Len Colodny co-wrote with Robert Gettlin Silent Coup: The Removal of a President. He is also the co-author of The Forty Years War, The Rise and Fall of the Neocons from Nixon to Obama.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Silent Coup

The Removal of a President

By Len Colodny

Trine Day

Copyright © 2015 Len Colodny
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63424-053-6

Contents

Cover, 
Title page, 
Copyright page, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Cast of Characters, 
Foreword, 
Epigraph, 
Book One: Spy Ring, 
1) Spying on the White House, 
2) Carrying the Contraband, 
3) The Admirals Confession, 
4) Nixon Orders a Burial, 
5) The Woodward-Haig Connection, 
Book Two: Golden Boy, 
6) The President's Private Eye, 
7) Sandwedge Becomes Gemstone, 
8) The Bailley Connection, 
9) The Last Break-in, 
10) Los Angeles And Manila: The Cover-up Begins, 
11) A Walk in the Park, 
12) "The Smoking Gun", 
13) Hush Money — For Hunt, 
14) Damage Control Action Officer, 
15) The Pressure Mounts, 
16) Confession Time, 
17) The Cancer within the Presidency, 
Book Three: Exit The President, 
18) The Return of Alexander Haig, 
19) Stewart Shakes Up the White House, 
20) Five Days in July, 
21) The Saturday Night Massacre, 
22) The Eighteen-and-a-half-minute Gap, 
23) Moorer-Radford Disinterred, 
24) Senator Stennis Holds a Hearing, 
25) The Real Final Days, 
Epilogue: ... And Throw Away the Key, 
Appendix A: List of Interviewees, 
Appendix B: Welander Confessions, 
Notes, 
1. SPYING ON THE WHITE HOUSE, 
2. CARRYING THE CONTRABAND, 
3. THE ADMIRAL'S CONFESSION, 
4. NIXON ORDERS A BURIAL, 
5. THE WOODWARD-HAIG CONNECTION, 
6. THE PRESIDENT'S PRIVATE EYE, 
7. SANDWEDGE BECOMES GEMSTONE, 
8. THE BAILLEY CONNECTION, 
9. THE LAST BREAK-IN, 
10. LOS ANGELES AND MANILA: THE COVER-UP BEGINS, 
11. A WALK IN THE PARK, 
12. "THE SMOKING GUN", 
13. HUSH MONEY — FOR HUNT, 
14. DAMAGE CONTROL ACTION OFFICER, 
15. THE PRESSURE MOUNTS, 
16. CONFESSION TIME, 
17. THE CANCER WITHIN THE PRESIDENCY, 
18. THE RETURN OF ALEXANDER HAIG, 
19. STEWART SHAKES UP THE WHITE HOUSE, 
20. FIVE DAYS IN JULY, 
21. THE SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRE, 
22. THE EIGHTEEN-AND-A-HALF-MINUTE GAP, 
23. MOORER-RADFORD DISINTERRED, 
24. SENATOR STENNIS HOLDS A HEARING, 
25. THE REAL FINAL DAYS, 
EPILOGUE: ... AND THROW AWAY THE KEY, 
Bibliography, 
BOOKS, 
PERIODICALS, 
Index, 
Postscript (1992): Protecting the Myth — The Washington Post and the Second Watergate Cover-up, 
Silent Coup Update (2016), 
Photo Section, 

CHAPTER 1

Spying on the White House

ON Thursday afternoon, December 16, 1971, Navy Yeoman Charles Edward Radford left his house at Bolling Air Force Base on the edge of Washington, D.C., and steered his blue Datsun toward the Pentagon. It seemed like springtime; the temperature had climbed to a record 74 degrees, and as he passed the Tidal Basin and then crossed the Potomac River Radford could see a few cherry blossoms sprouting on the trees, and joggers running along the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial. The lanky, mustachioed twenty-seven-year-old with the friendly open manner had made the routine commute many times since arriving in Washington fifteen months earlier, but this was a special trip, one that made Radford too tense to enjoy the balmy weather. A day earlier, the Navy had placed him under virtual house arrest, and he dreaded what was now about to happen. He was on his way to an interrogation by Defense Department investigators who suspected that Radford had leaked classified documents to columnist Jack Anderson.

Radford had never liked Washington. He had enlisted in the Navy in 1963, and four years later the Navy had sent him to Defense Intelligence School near the capital. He'd developed a strong dislike of the city, and was glad when his administrative training ended. In May 1967, he was posted to the defense attaché's office in the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India. He liked New Delhi, where he met and married the daughter of a U.S. Navy officer. The first two of their eight children were born in India. After three years, when the assignment to India ended, Radford sought the job of "admiral's writer," a post that involved clerical work, dictation, and memo writing, and that would make him personal aide to a flag officer; that was the route, Chuck Radford thought, to earning an officer's commission. The Navy agreed to give him such training at a school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and Radford hoped that after it he would land a post in the Pacific Northwest, close to his own family and that of his in-laws.

The Navy had other plans for him. In the summer of 1970 a prestigious and highly sensitive assignment linking the Pentagon and the White House opened up, and Radford, third in his class at the "admiral's writer" school, became a leading candidate. Offered the job, he was urged to take it. In the Navy you don't say no very often if you want to get ahead, so he accepted the post.

Upon arriving in Washington in September 1970, with his wife Toni and two children, he went to work in an office that directly served the nation's senior military man, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Radford became the personal aide to Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson, an ambitious and politically savvy officer, who served as a top assistant to the chairman, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer. Moorer was the boss, an ardent anticommunist who concealed tenacity and a thirst for bureaucratic combat beneath a thick Alabama drawl.

Admiral Robinson and Yeoman Radford were a two-man team that ran the Joint Chiefs' liaison office to the National Security Council (NSC). Their assignment didn't amount to much on the organizational chart, but it connected them on one side to the highest reaches of the military, and on the other to the White House and its powerful national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. Robinson and Radford handled the flow of classified documents and messages between the Joint Chiefs and the NSC. Though small in size, under Kissinger the NSC wielded far more power than the mammoth bureaucracies of the departments of Defense and State, principally because President Richard M. Nixon wanted it that way.

The two-man team was Moorer's eyes and ears at the NSC, and Robinson stressed to his yeoman that his loyalty to Moorer stood above all else. "It was his responsibility to keep the chairman informed, and I was to help him to do this," Radford later testified of his instruction from Robinson. Though Radford performed all the usual menial tasks of an assistant, from taking dictation to typing, filing, pouring coffee, serving lunch, and arranging Robinson's transportation, the yeoman understood that his main job was to assist Robinson by ensuring that everything they saw and heard inside the White House was promptly passed on to Chairman Moorer.

The Robinson-Radford team would begin each morning at the Joint Chiefs' suite on the second floor of the E-Ring of the Pentagon, then drive to their NSC office, 376A of the old Executive Office Building (EOB) just west of the White House; later in the day they would return to the Pentagon. They often worked past dark, and usually had long, grueling schedules that allowed Radford little time for his family. That loss was offset by his contiguity to power and the intimate secrets of the nation's foreign policy. His dedicated service to Robinson, Moorer, and the Joint Chiefs earned him Robinson's praise and the promise of an officer's commission.

Chuck Radford was a sensitive young man, the product of an unusual childhood and a broken home. His father was a Native American, his mother descended from Slavic, Irish, and Jewish ancestors, and Radford had had difficulty gaining acceptance at the places to which his family moved, and at the foster homes to which he had occasionally been sent. Perhaps that was why, from the very outset, Yeoman Radford was enthralled by his new job. "It's a long way from an Indian reservation to a position like that," he remembers. "I thought, my gosh, I've finally broken those ties with my past, and I can really be better than a lot of my cousins and a lot of my family had been. I can finally accomplish something. I even stopped reading newspapers — that's how exciting it was — because the stuff in the newspapers was boring; they didn't know what they were talking about."

The fall of 1970, when Yeoman Radford took up his post, was a pivotal time for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From their point of view, the president of the United States was out of control.

On January 20, 1969, Richard M. Nixon had become the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Earlier, as a private citizen, Nixon had contemplated several historical foreign policy shifts, including new relationships with the United States' cold war adversaries, China and the Soviet Union, an end to the war in Vietnam, and an attempt to stop bloodshed in the Middle East. Though long regarded as a conservative anticommunist, Nixon actually had a worldview that favored diplomacy and arms control over confrontation and a continued arms race. He cultivated a public image of anticommunism because he found it useful, but privately was more flexible in his thinking.

His slim electoral victory in 1968, with a margin of only a half-million votes, represented a tremendous comeback from defeats in the presidential election of 1960 and in the California gubernatorial race in 1962. As he entered the White House, Nixon was full of bitterness and anger about these past defeats, and about years of perceived slights from others in the political establishment. He believed he had never been treated with the respect that a former vice-president should have received. He viewed the nation's capital as a hostile territory populated by his enemies. "Washington is a city run primarily by Democrats and liberals, dominated by like-minded newspapers and other media," Nixon wrote in his autobiography, RN. He urged his cabinet to replace holdover bureaucrats with "people who believed in what we were trying to do," and insisted they do so quickly, or the old establishment would "sabotage" their intended reforms. What he wanted from these new people was "undivided loyalty."

Nixon's need to control his political destiny and to prevent the blunting of his agenda by bureaucrats pushed him toward the establishment of what was, in effect, a secret government. An intensely private and withdrawn man, almost the opposite of the usual gregarious politician, Nixon often recoiled from social situations and preferred to be closeted with familiar aides or to sit alone with a pad and pen and jot down his own thoughts. "Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him," Henry Kissinger observed of his former chieftain in the first volume of his own memoirs, White House Years. Nixon usually directed his chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, his counsel and later domestic adviser John D. Ehrlichman, or his attorney general and close friend John N. Mitchell to carry out the dirty work of imparting bad news or even somewhat unpalatable directives to subordinates.

Both Nixon and Kissinger saw the government bureaucrats as roadblocks to be circumvented. To Nixon, Congress was under the thumb of the Democrats; the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency were havens for Eastern Establishment liberals who hated him; and the military was full of doctrinaire, inflexible anticommunists. To circumvent them all, Nixon determined to use an agency first established in 1947 that had lain dormant in the Kennedy and Johnson years but was under the complete control of the White House — the National Security Council. For a man who loved secrecy, it was perfect. While the statutory members of the NSC were officers of the cabinet, the national security adviser and his staff were presidential appointees who did not have to be confirmed by Congress. The NSC was chartered as a clearinghouse for information from State, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community flowing to the White House, and it could take action quickly. Nixon had seen the NSC work under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but then it had been balanced by the power and influence of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Nixon constructed a cabinet that could be ignored or easily manipulated, depending on the whim of the White House. Generally, the most important cabinet post for an incoming administration is the secretary of state. Nixon appointed to that post William P. Rogers, attorney general under Eisenhower, and a man who had befriended Nixon at a time when he had needed friends, after the gubernatorial defeat in 1962. In the opening hours of Rogers' tenure as secretary of state, Nixon had Kissinger send letters to many leaders of foreign nations, without advising Rogers or his department that he was doing so. Rogers' refusal to show outrage at this deliberate slight assisted in his department's emasculation. Rogers' complete eclipse occurred less than a month later, when Nixon met with Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin without Rogers present, and told the ambassador that Kissinger would meet regularly with him from then on. As Kissinger reports in his memoirs, after that, Rogers was routinely left out of all important initiatives having to do with foreign policy, or informed only after they had been irretrievably set in motion. Items on which Rogers was kept in the dark included the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) with the Russians that aimed to put a ceiling on nuclear arsenals, the secret negotiations with China and the trip to Peking, and the secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris.

Whereas Bill Rogers had no real foreign policy experience, the man selected by Nixon as secretary of defense had considerable experience in military affairs. Melvin R. Laird had spent eight terms as a congressman sitting on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which handled the funding of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. He understood the military bureaucracy far better than Nixon or Kissinger. He also appears to have understood the way Nixon planned to work, and though he protested being cut out of many decisions, he decided to continue on in his post in an attempt to make his own imprint on winding down the war in Vietnam.

Nixon's agreement to let Johnson holdover Richard M. Helms remain as the director of the CIA was among his most astounding appointments. "The two were polar opposites in background," Haldeman wrote in his memoir, The Ends of Power, "Helms the aloof, aristocratic, Eastern elitist; Nixon the poor boy (he never let you forget it) from a small California town." The appointment was especially puzzling in light of Nixon's deep-seated belief that the CIA had contributed to his loss in the 1960 election. Back then, Nixon told friends, the CIA had played politics with the Bay of Pigs operation, briefing candidate John Kennedy on it to the point where he was able to take a strong anti-Castro stand that Nixon did not want to take because it might jeopardize the impending Bay of Pigs invasion; the CIA had also given Kennedy ammunition for his accusations about a "missile gap" that he exploited in similar fashion. On both of these issues, sabotaged by the CIA, Nixon believed he had appeared weak or uninformed during the televised debates, which were widely credited with having won Kennedy the election. That the election had turned on a number of factors, not the least among them Nixon's physical appearance on television rather than the content of his remarks, did not prevent Nixon from continuing to believe that the CIA had done him in. Nixon planned to ignore the CIA as much as he could, and leaving Helms in place — where he and his agency could be embarrassed — became part of the plan. Nixon and Helms thought little of each other; there was at least one near-confrontation between them. According to Nixon's memoirs, when Nixon requested the complete Bay of Pigs files, Helms, after initially balking, turned over what the president believed to be a sanitized file.

Nixon's relationships with the senior military officers of the nation were the most complex of those within the upper echelon. It was impossible to carry out the war in Southeast Asia without cooperation from the Pentagon, and such matters as the secret bombings in Cambodia and the air war against North Vietnamese cities required the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Kissinger courted individual service chiefs and encouraged them to report directly to him rather than to Secretary Laird. He also, on behalf of the president, requested that the JCS set up a "backchannel" through which he and Nixon could transmit private messages within the government and abroad. Such backchannels were normally operated for the government by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), but Nixon wanted to circumvent those intelligence agencies. Using special codes, teletypes, and secure terminals located at the Pentagon and in the White House Situation Room, the president and his national security adviser could send and receive messages to selected American officials and members of foreign governments around the world without alerting the rest of the United States government.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Silent Coup by Len Colodny. Copyright © 2015 Len Colodny. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trine Day
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1634240537
• ISBN 13: 9781634240536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 520