Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

SECRET AGENDA was the first thorough argument, and perhaps remains the best, for the thesis that the Watergate break-in team was guided chiefly by the CIA. All the men on the team -- aside from its supposed leader, goofy (pawn?) G. Gordon Liddy -- were CIA officers (Hunt and McCord) or contract agents (Sturgis, Barker and the three other anti-Castro Cubans, all Hunt's people going back to Bay of Pigs). Hunt and McCord each "retired" (early) from CIA, within months of each other, in 1970. Hunt was soon hired by Chuck Colson in the Nixon White House, where he was first tasked with forging State Department cables to indicate that JFK had ordered the assasination (rather than removal) of President Diem of Vietnam in 1963. Hunt then hired McCord to help the Plumbers plant bugs. But one of Hougan's accomplishments is to document the fact that McCord was not (as typically stated in the press even today) a lowly CIA electrician. He was high in the Office of Security -- the "internal affairs" unit of the CIA, rising to head of OS for Europe in 1961, during the height of the Cold War. As such he reported directly to the Director. Hougan's book remains a must read on the subject. It argues well the case that Nixon was helped in a big way out of office by DCI Richard Helms employing officers Hunt and McCord. (One might argue that Helms & co. did the country a favor. That would be another book.) (OR: Read John Ehrlichman's novel THE COMPANY, a roman a clef that paints the Nixon-Helms relationship with care.) As for SILENT COUP, which came out in 1991, seven years after SECRET AGENDA, and which several reviewers here are recommending rather than Hougan's book ... Be clear: SILENT COUP is NOT an elaboration of Hougan's thesis, but rather an attempt to eviscerate it (and I imagine the CIA had something to do with its publication). The attempt largely fails. Which is not to say there's nothing of value in SC. Just that the overall package is a truth-bender clearly designed to accord with CIA public relations. SILENT COUP details something Hougan had touched on: the late-Vietnam Beltway struggle between the National Security apparat, on the one hand, and Nixon and Kissinger, on other. The latter were trying, in their way, to bring the Vietnam war to an end with "back channel" diplomacy that cut the Pentagon and CIA out of the loop. But the generals and spymasters were by then accustomed to controlling foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger (like JFK a decade before) were getting in the way. SILENT COUP nails this: Nixon's "paranoia" and Ehrlichman's Plumbers were first provoked to active life not by "Leftist" spies/leaks, but by a Pentagon intelligence operation active inside the White House, intent on finding out what the hell Nixon and Kissinger were saying to the Chinese and Hanoi about shutting down the war. Ehrlichman & co finally stumbled across the spy, a Navy ensign (if memory serves) named Radford, revoked his White House pa

This was an interesting book. There are a lot of details in here that you did not get from All The Presidents Men. I would recommend reading the book for the extra information. The book was adequately written but did not drag. I think the better book is Silent Coup, but this book is still worth reading.

For an education on the Watergate scandal, I recommend you read (in order): 1) Will by Liddy; 2) Silent Coup by Colodny & Gettlin; and then 3) this book. Forget Woodward and Bernstein entirely. These first two books are OUTSTANDING. This last one will fill in a few details, though I would not regard it as the final word. I suspect you're here because of Silent Coup, anyway. Hougan makes a few egregious left-wing points in his book that are real howlers, but they are off to the side of the story, and he is primarily concerned with establishing the facts.Who knows what the 4th book should be? Or the 5th? Maybe it has yet to be written. I suppose in continuing the education, it might be fair to turn next to a conventional account of the history, perhaps to Stanley Kutler; or to the perspectives of Dean or Magruder or Haldeman.

This is an important book, but mainly because it inspired the book SILENT COUP: THE REMOVAL OF A PRESIDENT. SILENT COUP expands to a great degree what this book establishes.