Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

by Jim Hougan

Overview

The exposé that reveals “a prostitution ring, heavy CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats, and plots within plots” (The Washington Post)

Ten years after the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, Jim Hougan—then the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine—set out to write a profile of Lou Russell, a boozy private-eye who plied his trade in the vice-driven underbelly of the nation’s capital. Hougan soon discovered that Russell was “the sixth man, the one who got away” when his boss, veteran CIA officer Jim McCord, led a break-in team into a trap at the Watergate.

Using the Freedom of Information Act to win the release of the FBI’s Watergate investigation—some thirty-thousand pages of documents that neither the Washington Post nor the Senate had seen—Hougan refuted the orthodox narrative of the affair.

Armed with evidence hidden from the public for more than a decade, Hougan proves that McCord deliberately sabotaged the June 17, 1972, burglary. None of the Democrats’ phones had been bugged, and the spy-team’s ostensible leader, Gordon Liddy, was himself a pawn—at once, guilty and oblivious.

The power struggle that unfolded saw E. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord using the White House as a cover for an illicit domestic intelligence operation involving call-girls at the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments.

A New York Times Notable Book, Secret Agenda “present[s] some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past . . . The questions [Hougan] has posed here—and some he hasn’t—certainly deserve an answer” (The New York Times Book Review). Kirkus Reviews declared the book “a fascinating series of puzzles—with all the detective work laid out.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504075275
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	366
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jim Hougan is an award-winning journalist, a former Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, and the author of two investigative works of nonfiction: Spooks and Secret Agenda. Writing with his wife under the pseudonym John Case, he has published six thrillers, including New York Times bestsellers such as The Genesis Code and The First Horseman. Executive producer of the Emmy Award–winning Confessions of a Dangerous Man, Hougan worked with Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes and has produced investigative documentaries about the Jonestown massacre, the Russian Mafia, among other topics.

Table of Contents

Introduction 5

I Well-Measured Steps

1 Of Hunt and McCord 11

2 ODESSA: The Plumbers Get to Work 32

3 The Unplumbed Depths of Daniel Ellsberg 45

4 Total Surveillance 59

5 The Prescient Investigator 76

6 Project Mudhen 83

7 The Tickler 93

8 Operation Sapphire 107

9 Mr. Hoover's Secret Files 117

10 The May Break-ins 130

II It Comes Down

11 The Surveillance and the Reports 149

12 "Why? Who Wants to Know?" 156

13 The Last Break-in 162

14 An Operational Overview 187

15 Summer Fires 195

16 Signposts Ignored 213

17 The September Bug 220

18 Robert Bennett, the Press and the CIA 236

19 Throat 253

20 Legacy: A Counterfeit History 272

Appendices

I Some Notes on Paisley 304

II "If I Was a Jury, I'd Convict Me" 310

III Ehrlichman vs. Cushman 314

IV Break-in Operations 317

V CIA Documents 319

CIA Employee Statement, January 17, 1974 319

Memorandum for the Record by Martin Lukoskie 321

Memorandum for the Deputy Director for Plans Eric Eisenstadt 323

Bibliography 329

Index 333

About the Author 353