There’s this scene from “The Blues Brothers”. Belushi and Aykroyd have taken a table at an upscale restaurant, tossing prawns and generally stirring things up. Then Belushi turns his attention to a nearby table where a family is eating. “How much for the little girl?” he demands of the father.

Such an innocent time it was, where that kind of question provoked barking hilarity. These days, the question is being asked by television producers, and it leads not to laughter but to negotiations. Our kids are officially for sale now.

CBS television, a hotbed of creative talent, is presenting for your viewing pleasure a “reality show” called “Kid Nation.” On it, forty children, ages 8 through 15, were placed in a New Mexico “ghost town” for forty days without, for the most part, any contact with their own parents. They were to ‘make it on their own’ while the network filmed them. The product was to be 13 episodes in the first “cycle” of the show.

With the first episode to be aired next month, questions are finally being asked which in a nation not otherwise preoccupied with the latest escapades of talentless nitwits like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan would’ve been asked a lot louder and from the beginning.

For example, it seems that conditions have been less than healthy, and several of the children have been injured. The only reason we know even this much is that one parent has filed a complaint, and New Mexico authorities have noted that conditions violate state licensing requirements for child housing as well as child labor laws.

But CBS has no worries. For example, all of the injured were “treated immediately and by professionals,” the press release said, although it did not say whether these professionals were of the medical variety or merely public relations whores.

And the 22-page contract put together by CBS lawyers and signed by the kids’ parents or guardians basically waives every human right any of these kids might’ve previously owned.

Get this:

* Under the contract, the parents (and children) agreed to “hold CBS harmless” for deaths or injuries, or if they receive inadequate medical care. The network is not liable for any “emotional distress, illness, sexually transmitted diseases, H.I.V., and pregnancy” that might occur if the child “chooses to enter into an intimate relationship of any nature with another participant...”

* Neither the children nor their parents are permitted to speak with the media or grant interviews without network consent for three years following completion of the show, not simply the 13-episodes in which a child appears. CBS is already interviewing more victims for the next series and therefore, depending on how long the show itself is on television, the kids and their parents may be denied permission in perpetuity.

* Violation of this confidentiality agreement carries a penalty of five million bucks.

* According to the New York Times article (from which I’ve cribbed most of this), CBS and the production companies involved in this grotesquerie now contractually own the “rights to the children’s life stories ‘in perpetuity and throughout the universe’,” and also the right to portray the children “for humorous or satiric effect.”

* The children were required to do whatever they were told by the show’s producers, twenty-four hours a day, or be expelled from the show. Upon expulsion they would still be bound by confidentiality provisions. Despite this arrangement, the kids’parents agreed that even if money changed hands the children were not to be considered employed by the program and, therefore, would not fall under the protrection of state or federal labor laws.

“How much for the little girl,” Belushi wondered. Now we know. The parents of these children sold them for forty days (and their own “life stories” forever) to a corporate empire, waiving all protections against “emotional distress,” not to mention sexually-transmitted diseases. Presumably this applies to the eight-year-olds.

How much? $5,000.00. That’s not a typo or a misprint. Five grand. Well, if your child is selected “best participant,” there’ll be fifteen thousand more. Oh, and check this: the money won’t be paid until after the broadcast of the entire series, which means that if you open your mouth you won’t get a dime.

One parent who filed a complaint with the State of New Mexico – whose Governor is, by the way, out campaigning for the Democratic nomination for President and might not want to take a position on this pornographic exploitation of children for fear of offending CBS – is not allowed under threat of being sued to talk to reporters.

The network, however, is not shy about rebutting the woman with the tape over her mouth. “(T)he series was filmed responsibly and within all applicable laws...” its statement reads, and the complaining parent is “distorting the true nature of the ‘Kid Nation’ experience.”

That’s what they actually said. I am not fucking kidding you.

Well, let’s talk about “distortion.” We’ve got injured children whose rights have been bargained away for five thousand bucks by their parents. We’ve got at least one parent who evidently has second thoughts and is contractually-barred from speaking to the media. We’ve got the bland, unspecific claims of CBS, reassuring us that, like George Bush taking care of our civil liberties, responsible adults are handling things and we don’t need the details.

And while the mother who woke up is forbidden to talk, CBS has trotted out another, someone named Tabitha (parents are not allowed to reveal last names) from a town in Georgia, who says that before signing away her 10-year-old daughter’s rights she read the contract “over and over again.”

Ask yourself how a parent, any parent, could do to a child what this mother has done. Tabitha’s answer: “People may say she may only be 10 years old, but she was willing to take that chance. CBS did everything to inform us parents. I don’t feel like I was let down, misled, or that it was exploitation.”

No, Tabitha, I’m sure you were not misled. I’m sure you knew exactly what you were doing and what you were exposing your daughter to for forty days and nights. She would not be in any danger; that’s why CBS had you sign away any rights she might have in the event she were to be killed or maimed, or emotionally scarred, or sexually abused. As you say, your daughter was “willing to take that chance.”

It’s not any surprise that CBS could locate parents prepared to sell their offspring, not in this culture. It’s not a surprise that a corporate media empire would do anything at all to sell advertising. It’s not even surprising that huge numbers of Americans spend their time watching crap on television, entire lifetimes pissed away on brain-junk like this.

In a nation which values money, raw power, public ‘acclaim’, and violence more than it does kindness, honor, love, or human rights, children become just another commodity, to be exploited, even sold when profitable.

Where is our outrage? Who will stop this madness?

(thanks to Edward Wyatt at The New York Times for the facts cited in this article).

It’s that time again, Back To School time, where parents take out second mortgages (not so easy these days) to buy computers, cell phones, and a veritable shitload of somehow necessary accessories, and say goodbye to their children for another ten months.

The “school year” has, like the education business, grown a little bit every year for quite a while. It was once a nine-month stint, run by teachers and administrators, with whatever parental participation a locality could manage. Kids escaped from what, even in the best of circumstances, was a confining environment; they could play in the afternoons, hang out with friends, look for a little adventure. They ate dinner at home with families, when their families could catch them. They had weekends, Christmas and Easter vacations, and three months in the summer.

In other words, children, especially adolescents, were permitted time and space to develop themselves as social and emotional beings. They were able to explore themselves and their world. They were able to be foolish and to make mistakes. They were able, in short, to learn.

But learning is no longer a personal matter; it has been institutionalized in its entirety. After a full day in school, students today carry four hours of additional work home . They also, if they or their parents harbor any intention of their reaching college, “volunteer” for “community service,” play on athletic teams, participate in a number of school-related activities, and take courses which prepare them to qualify for the coveted “Advanced Placement” classes, and to score as high as possible on the Long Death March of High School Standardized Tests.

You can forget family life. You can also forget about ever getting sick. One high school sophomore at Tam High in Marin County, a 4.2 student, told me that she continued to attend classes although very ill. She couldn’t afford to miss even a day, she said, because she’d fall behind and she was already pressed to the breaking point. I argued that her health, physical and emotional, was more important than any grade, but she said she wanted to be a doctor, and that she couldn’t hope for admission to a really good university with anything less than a 4.2 g.p.a.

There is a very dangerous effect of the way we’re running education these days that is not being talked about, at least not anywhere I’ve seen. It’s this:

When you deprive adolescents of the time to develop themselves as individuals, limit and compress their time with parents, siblings, friends, and the outside adult world, you force them to develop in a relatively small, rigid, distorted, and often highly authoritarian environment – which is precisely what schools are now.

The cost to the young, the deeply imprinted influences of this daily life, is nothing short of catastrophic.

And nothing whatever is being done about it.

There is a fellow named Leroy Greer in Houston. Leroy was going through what ABC News described as “an amicable divorce.” It has recently become less amicable, thanks to Leroy’s wandering weinie, although, in the true spirit of modern-day America, he blames others, notably the folks at 1-800-Flowers.

Leroy, as it happens, was having it off, as they say, with a woman to whom he was not actually wed, and although he wished to express to the object of his affections the depth and sincerity of his feelings, he was loathe to make this expression a matter of public interest, which it has now sadly become.

He ordered a dozen long-stem red roses delivered to his new sweetie-pie, enclosing a note which read, according to court documents, “Just wanted to say I love you and you mean the world to me.” I sure hope so, because “the world” may cost Leroy three hundred grand, the tidy sum his soon-to-be-ex-wife has in mind for this indiscretion.

They apparently place a very high value on sex in Texas, probably accounting for all of those lonesome cowboys.

Leroy is now suing 1-800-Flowers for a million smackers, claiming that he was assured by the company’s privacy policy that it would not share his purchase with a third party. His lawsuit alleges that the Flowers folks sent a thank-you note to his house and that his wife saw it. How she saw it remains unclear. Presumably the note was not sent to “householder,” making it a reasonable guess that either Leroy left it lying around or that his wife likes to open his mail.

Mrs. Greer promptly telephoned the company, which then faxed her a receipt. The receipt contained the text of Leroy’s love proclamation.

“This is not a moral issue,” Leroy’s attorney, Kennitra Foote, said. “The issue is, is 1-800-Flowers in the business of causing divorce...”

Well, now, Ms. Foote, this divorce thing was in the works well before Leroy’s wife got her copy of the receipt, maybe even before she began steaming open her husband’s mail. Of course, lawyers are trained to turn things upside down; the most successful ones qualify for appointment to federal court.

The ABC story does not reveal to anxious viewers whether Leroy’s lover got the roses, whether she liked them, whether Leroy, in turn, means the world to her. Shoddy journalism. Wouldn’t have happened if William Randolph Hearst were still alive. Were the roses in perfect shape on arrival? Were they placed in a vase? At roughly $25,000.00 each, these are not idle questions.

Love usually comes at a price. And in Texas we now know what it is.

Wow! Great news! The Democratic National Committee has written to me as a “Grassroots Democratic Leader,” and asked my advice on the important issues of our time. It says it right here: “Special Notice... You have been selected to represent Fairfax, CA in the 2007 Grassroots Survey of Democratic Leaders...”

Imagine how seriously I take this responsibility. Although I have not sought it, leadership has once again been thrust my way, and as one who has shed a tremendous amount of skin over the years attempting to influence the course of public events, I am so beaten stupid by now that I’m willing to do it again.

This time, though, I can do it from home. No interminable meetings where I have to sit next to horrible little trolls like whats-her-name on the high school board, watch in shock as colleagues urinate on ordinary citizens who thought their opinions might matter. I have webLog power. And from the growth of subscribers to News From A Parallel World (a couple of million more and we will surpass The New York Times, or maybe not) there’s a possibility that a Party regular, one of those who work for what’s left of the machine, will read this.

The letter informs me that “your survey responses will give the DNC a better understanding of the views of Party members in the Fairfax area.”

Okay, but before we get to the all-important questions, I’d better mention a couple of things about my home town.

* In the 2000 national election, George Bush finished third in Fairfax.
* A clear majority of our citizenry would vote to imprison George Bush and Dick Cheney; a minority would also vote to imprison the Democratic Party leadership.
* Our mayor is a sentient biped.

Now, for our questions.
“1. Which of the following issues is the most important to you? Please rank from 1-10 with “1” being the most important...”
Answer: the matters listed are not issues, they are topics. No one can rank them because they are meaningless without context. In that sense, I suppose they are the literary inverse of the Party’s leadership, which has context without meaning. “Improving public education,” “Protecting the environment,” “Iraq war,” and so forth.
My answer is that the Party is basically useless on each of these topics. For Christmas, the American people ought to send you knee pads.

“2. When do you believe there should be a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq?” This is followed by boxes indicating: “Immediately,” “Sometime in 2007,” “Sometime in 2008,” or “Other.”
Answer: “Sometime In New York City,” a newly-reissued album by John Lennon with Elephants Memory Band, a great, howling, angry recording from the 1970s. My answer? My answer is that you suckers voted for it, you either bought Bush’s horseshit, which makes you too dumb to waste oxygen on, or you bought the political “necessity” of pretending to believe him, in which case you’ve got a lot of blood on your hands.

“3. Dou you support increased defense spending to fight the war against terrorism?”
Answer: Do you support rolling oranges over the lawn to fight the war against the screwheads? There is no “war against terrorism.” There is a war against the American people, a war against the constitution, a war against the Bill of Rights, a war against immigrants, poor people, people of color. “Defense spending,” which you robots vote for whenever asked, using whatever power you have to insure that some of that jack is spent in your own districts. “Defense spending” is a way to extract the product of thirty percent of every working person’s paycheck and funnel it to Lockheed, Boeing, Halliburton, Bechtel, and NBC (oh yeah, NBC is owned by General Electric, an arms manufacturer).

It’s a fraud. And you vote for it. You don’t even question it. At a fairly recent “debate” among Democratic candidates, only John Edwards refused to agree that there was such a “war on terror.” Clinton, Obama, and the lesser lights (although perhaps Kucinich and Gravel also dissented) climbed all over each other in proving how seriously they took the matter and how tough they would be on “terrorists.”

Oh, hell, I’m not going through the whole survey. It’s comprised of thirteen questions, none of them likely to invoke anything other than disgust, and these are followed by two others: “To help make progress on issues like those discussed (sic) in this survey, will you join the Democratic National Committee as a contributing member today?”
And: “If you answered “yes” to question 14....”

In a word: go fuck yourselves.

Next Monday, about the same time I am trying to keep my tee shot out of the parking lot on the first hole at San Geronimo, Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison will go on trial in McMinnville, Oregon, charged with ten counts each of sex abuse. If convicted, each faces jail for a maximum of ten years and a lifetime of registering as a sex offender.

Mashburn and Cornelison caught a break, I guess. Initial charges of felony sex abuse have been dropped, but if they are convicted of any of the multiple misdemeanors with which they are charged, they will have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives – which may be a long, long time, since Mashburn and Cornelison, being 13 years old, have barely hit puberty.

Their crimes, according to the district attorney, are that they administered what are conceded to have been friendly slaps on the ass to fellow students, female, in the halls of Patton Middle School.

According to the boys, who spent five days in a juvenile detention facility before their parents could spring them, the behavior was widely practiced among the students at Patton as a sort of “hello” akin to a secret handshake. Cory Mashburn said he and Ryan Cornelison slapped each others' and other kids' bottoms every Friday. "Lots of kids at school do that," he said. In fact, police reports filed with the court said other students, both boys and girls, slapped each other “on the bottom.”

Nonetheless, after being taken to the principal’s office and questioned by school authorities and the police, the offenders were taken away in handcuffs. The district attorney is offering a plea bargain: probation in exchange for guilty pleas. But the terms of probation would include prohibition against sexual contact with anyone, and no contact at all with younger children. It would be a violation for Cory Mashburn to be alone with any of his younger siblings.

I am not making this shit up.

The district attorney, Bradley Berry, says, ”What’s being lost in this whole thing are the victims, who have been pressured enormously by these boys’ friends.”

Well, Jeeze, you asshole, who the devil put them in this position?

I do not know what it is about America these days. In recent years we’ve seen an increasing criminalization of adolescent sexual activity regardless of relative youth and the triviality of the offense. These are two 13-year-olds. Remember being thirteen? The district attorney is concerned with – what? – his sexual inadequacy? What his daughter might be up to? His own repressed tastes?

Two kids who if found guilty are looking at a year for each count, and a lifetime of registering as sex offenders. Probation would still require registration for life. Hey, I know, 9-11 changed everything. One day an ass slapper, next day a terrorist.

We have lost something it is extremely dangerous to lose.

We don’t allow kids to be kids anymore. We have stolen from them their innocence. The culture feeds them ubiquitous messages of sex and violence. Sleaze is celebrated. Look around. We are already torturing them in the schools with the force-feeding of factoids, the eternal testing, and the institutional discouraging of thought. But serious punishment now is meted out for infractions that in earlier times would’ve merited, maybe, a phone call to the parents, perhaps a short suspension. When I was on the local high school board for three, horror-filled, years, I saw kids kicked out of school for essentially nothing while the board flat-out mis-read and mis-applied state law in doing it.

I’m not too sure what form the flashpoint will take, but I am sure there is one coming. Even a generation raised to be docile consumers has a breaking point, and when it’s reached they are going to take over their schools because it’s the only way they can collectively force the “adults” to take them seriously.

And it’ll be broadcast all over the world, videos that can’t be stopped, communiqués from a thousand fronts. And then it’s going to get really interesting.

One of the subscribers to this webLog is a teacher on the east coast of the U.S. After the first couple of posts on Watergate, he informed me that he was assigning the series to his students who were to examine it as an exercise in “analysis of (my) sources, logic, currency, authority and credibility,” and will grade them on their efforts.

Of course, that’s a trap, and for about a day I felt stuck in it. I’d had no intention of a lengthy Watergate journey here. I wanted to raise a number of very interesting and coincident facts, because the totality of what has been established is so strongly indicative of a deeper story than the “official” version, and because the more one really looks at both the chronology of events and the “dramatis personae” involved in them, the more another picture emerges, a highly disturbing one.

An analysis of my “sources” is pretty much impossible. Without footnotes (and in some cases lengthy explications of individual points), no reader who is limited to this text can possibly know whether what I cite as facts are actually facts or only the dark ravings of some left coast loony. And I was not going to footnote it. This isn’t a book, folks: just an outline.

“Currency” is an interesting concept. I believe what he means is: does this information – and does my theory – relate to present-day America? To me, it does, profoundly, however that is yet another book, one which traces America’s modern political history back to Dallas in 1963, and even earlier, to the creation of a national spy network from the O.S.S. of World War II. Does Watergate matter these days? It does if one is interested in following the chain of events which led to our current predicament.

As to “authority,” I could offer only that I’ve spent or mis-spent a large chunk of my time (mostly when I was much younger) reading, researching, talking to witnesses, and attempting to understand a deeper mosaic in America’s political life than is generally promoted by the country’s power structure (and not concidentally its mass media).

There is an enormous chasm between the facts of political murder and conspiracy and the sanitized “history” which the society at large takes for granted and is not engaged enough to examine. Take for example these items:

* The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the murders of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were the product of conspiracies. The Committee referred these cases to the Justice Department for further inquiry. But no Justice Department – not under the Democrats and not under the Republicans – has done anything about it, and the mass media ignored it.

* E. Howard Hunt, in his deathbed confessions and in his published writing, described the Dallas assassination as being directed by high-ranking people in the CIA. The media has generally ignored this, as well.

* Details of the wiretapping and bugging of the White House, specifically the Oval Office, by American intelligence agencies, covering at least the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies, has been made public by the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, and in subsequent hearings, notably before the Church Committee. The matter has never been further investigated, nor its obvious implications considered in any official forum. And the media, again, well, snoooooze.

As Kurt Vonnegut might say, and so it goes.

I’ve put together what amounts to the briefest of outlines. Interested readers can go to original sources and see for themselves what they think about it all. Try these, for starters:

Hearings before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (The Watergate Committee), volumes I-XIII, U.S. Government Printing Office,1973.

The White House Transcripts, Bantam paperback (this is a highly-edited version; many of the more significant conversations are truncated and some are omitted entirely).

Harpers Magazine, October, 1974. Your local library probably has this on microfiche.

Peter Dale Scott, “Crime and Cover-Up: the CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection,” Westworks, 1977. Scott is a U.C. Professor.

Carl Oglesby, “The Yankee and Cowboy War,” Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1976.

Victor Marchetti and John Marks, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1974.

Philip Agree, “Inside The Company.”

Louis Tackwood, “The Glass House Tapes,” Avon paperback, 1973.

David Wise and Thomas Ross, “The Invisible Government,” Vintage paperback, 1964, 1974 (revised).

Additionally:

References to the CIA systematic placement of agents inside federal agencies, including the White House itself, New York Times, July 10, 1975. President Ford’s order to return CIA files – effectively terminating the congressional inquiry – described in the Washington Post, September 13, 1975.

Sam Donaldson’s ABC report citing several sources that the CIA’s White House spy “had ranked just below Haldeman and Ehrlichman” from New York Times, same date as article cited, above.

Butterfield named as CIA White House agent, United Press International wire story, July 11, 1975.

Nixon the target of CIA surveillance, including wiretapping, U.P.I., September 23, 1975.

It has been documented that after the burglars were caught, the CIA sent agent Lee Pennington to McCord’s home to search for documents and to destroy what he found, Report of the Senate subcommittee on the CIA, chaired by Howard Baker (R) Tennessee, released July, 1974.

Additional Colson remarks about the break-in, included these, after his release from prison: “A lot of guys in prison who’d done ‘bag jobs’ told me that the first lesson in break-ins is to place the tape vertically, not horizontally like the Watergate guys did. Horizontally, it can be seen. It was almost like a signal...” Interview in Argosy Magazine, March, 1976. Colson also notes that Hunt recruited the break-in team four months before he was hired to work at the White House.

The first Colson piece was one by Rudy Maxa in the Washington Post, “Colson’s Suspicion That CIA Planned Watergate,” June 24, 1974.

Documentation of a “no-holds-barred power struggle” between Nixon and the CIA and Pentagon, and of Nixon’s creation of the D.I.S., from Tad Szulc, New York Magazine, January 20, 1975.

This is the last post in the Watergate series, and I’m very glad of it. Most of the facts I’ve related were last referenced about thirty years ago, and because I got sort of suckered into writing the thing I wound up having to dig out old articles. There may well be much more detail available by now, supporting, undermining, clarifying, or confusing the matters mentioned briefly in this series. I don’t know; I won’t be looking for it.

But if you do, if you really look, and if you think about what you find, you will certainly know this: there is a great difference between the fairytales spun by the government and the realities which emerge at the end of genuine, open-minded inquiry.

On Friday afternoon, December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt, the wife of E. Howard Hunt, boarded United Air Lines flight 553 in Washington for the weekend commuter run to Chicago. A few hours later, 553 crashed trying to land at Midway Airport. Hunt and 42 others were dead. There were 18 known survivors.

The press reported that Hunt had been carrying $10,000.00 in cash, and that she had purchased $225,000.00 in flight insurance earlier that day. But nowhere was it reported that she had also been in possession of more than two million dollars in negotiable securities stolen from The Committee to Re-elect the President.

What happened to these securities is clear but how they reached their destination is a different matter. Airport personnel and other witnesses said that dozens of FBI agents were at the crash scene almost before the plane hit the ground. It’s reasonable to assume that they recovered whatever was to be recovered. However, weeks later, the securities turned up on the black market in Chicago, being peddled by gangsters.

What happened to Dorothy Hunt, and why, is not so clear.

Throughout the fall, her husband had been threatening to “blow the lid off Watergate” if he was not granted executive clemency and handed plenty of money. Dorothy Hunt was the courier for these and other payoffs. The $10,000.00 cash she carried was earmarked for a Chicago source of arcane surveillance equipment not requisitioned from the CIA.

Dorothy Hunt was not the only interesting corpse fished out of the wreckage of 553. There was CBS newswoman Michele Clark, who was investigating Watergate. And there were a couple of lawyers for Northern Natural Gas Company of Omaha named James E. Krueger and Ralph Blodgett. These men had in their possession stock transfer lists of a Northern competitor, El Paso Natural Gas, which implicated John Mitchell in illegal activities. Northern was being prosecuted by the Mitchell Justice Department, and the lists were to be used as blackmail, since they are said to have proven Mitchell owned a piece of El Paso, through a front-man, while arranging to drop anti-trust action against the company. Mitchell was never prosecuted for this, however the Supreme Court later re-instated the charges.

I offer for your consideration the following.

Flight 553 was supposed to land at O’Hare Airport but was instead directed to Midway. The National Transportation and Safety Board, which later held hearings, was unable to determine who had caused this to happen.

Midway had only one runway capable of handling a 737, runway 13-R. Only 13-R was long enough to accomodate a 737, and it had glidescope capacity, a navigational aid for altitude. United 553 was mis-directed to runway 31-L. When circuit breakers “began popping in the cockpit” 15 minutes before landing, the crew lost the capacity to determine altitude, and the lack of glidescope at 31-L became dangerous.

In charting course for 31-L, 553 was dependent upon it’s altimeters, two separate altitude measuring and display systems for the pilot and co-pilot. In order to fool the crew, each system would have to fail in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. NTSB hearings established that this had never happened before. But it did on United flight 553.

There were other malfunctions. Because of the twin failures of the in-flight altimeters, the Midway “outer marker” was critical. This marker was a vertical electronic beam transmitted to aid aircraft in runway approaches. At Midway, the “outer marker” or Localizer, was positioned at 87th and Kedzie in Chicago.

Less than two minutes before the crash, as shown in the tape of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, the Kedzie Localizer was properly functioning. Abruptly, it went out. Immediately after the crash, it was again functioning.

Then there was the Flight Data Recorder, which kept track of aircraft parameters, such as barometric and transponder altitudes, air speed, and aircraft roll and pitch angles, and monitored instrument presentations to the crew. 15 minutes before the crash, the Recorder also failed.

Making all of this even crazier is the possibility that one of the surviving passengers was trailing Dorothy Hunt with the intention of killing her. The manifest included the name of Harold R.Metcalf, since identified as a professional assassin. Metcalf had been assigned seat B-17, near the food galley and the rear door. Metcalf was seen by eyewitnesses exiting the tail of the plane wearing a jump suit.

I am not making this up: Metcalf was identified by a former military intelligence officer who used his credentials to access the crash scene and testified before the NTSB. In fact, NTSB transcripts document each of the foregoing system failures, as well as one other bizarre fact:

When a plane crash is accompanied by fire, the burning of plastic gives off hydrogen cyanide. This substance is often found in the bodies of victims. However, in the case of United flight 553, the amount of cyanide found in the bodies of Dorothy Hunt, Captain Wendell Whitehouse (I know, I know), and Flight Officer W. O. Coble, exceeded what had been found in any other crash victim – ever: 3.9 micrograms per millimeter, sufficient to cause death by itself. These tests were conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration’s toxicology laboratory in Oklahoma City.

On the day after the crash, White House aide Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, with direct responsibility of overseeing the NTSB investigation. And ten days after that, Alexander Butterfield was named administrator of the F.A.A., the parent agency for the Bureau of Aviation Safety, which also investigated the crash.

One cockpit warning device which did not malfunction was the “stickshaker”, a function of the Air Data Computer, which monitored the health of the entire system, including air speed, engine thrust, and aerodynamic configuration. The device is meant to warn a pilot and co-pilot of impending stall.

When the “stickshaker” warning buzzer sounded, less than a minute before the crash, as is found in the CVR tape, the crew did not respond. No attempt was made to alter course or correct for a stall.

None of these things in isolation would prove very much. Taken together, they imply that there was a cause for this crash beyond the NTSB finding of “pilot error.” If 553 was sabotaged, who was the intended victim? It is of course speculative. But it is obvious that if someone wanted to kill Dorothy Hunt and harbored no qualms about what various administrations have termed “collateral damage,” this method had the great attraction of making it appear to be accidental while any inquiry would be simultaneously subject to political control. It also served to scare the bejeezus out of Howard Hunt, as well as to sever the payment of money for silence which Nixon had approved.

As I say, it’s all speculative in the sense that we don’t know what it means. However, we probably know what it was: murder. I considered leaving this section out of the Watergate series because I do not know if it is what it appears to be. And although I could guess who did it and why – and so can you – this series is not meant to involve a lot of guessing. The hard facts are generally enough, and as to Watergate itself they seem to me conclusive. I posted Part 9 because the facts I recited are all found in government documents, principally the Report and exhibits from the NTSB, the “findings” of the NTSB are not supported by its own exhibits, and a reader may want to pursue this event him/herself.

Next, Watergate, Part 10: The Matter Of Proof. This will be the last post in the series, thank God.

Spiro T. Agnew, Governor of Maryland, had been Nixon’s odd choice for a running mate in 1968. Columnists wrote derisively of this selection, asking “Spiro who?”

It’s still a good question.

In 1968, Nixon received ten million dollars in secret campaign funds. Investigators have since tracked the money through the hands of what was then the Greek dictatorship. The conduit was Tom Pappas, an Agnew friend, who was closely associated with both the Greek generals and the CIA. The Greek generals, it should be noted, are the ones depicted in Costa-Gavras’ brilliant film, “Z”, who murdered the nation’s leading peace candidate to attain power. Nixon knew the source of the funds.

When Nixon went “out of his mind over the CIA and Pentagon roles in Watergate,” as Colson confided to Bast, he certainly realized that with Agnew poised to succeed him in the White House the CIA had plenty of reason to push him out the window. He fought back.

In 1970, before he’d served half of his first term, his Attorney General, John Mitchell, received information leaked from a Baltimore grand jury which named Agnew, among others, in a massive bribery and extortion racket. Mitchell declined to prosecute; the U.S. Attorney assigned to the case did likewise.

When it became obvious that he was in a fight for his political life, Nixon rolled Agnew under the bus. The Vice President, whose alliterative assaults on “radical-liberals” and on “nattering nabobs of...” (well, never mind) had made him Nixon’s attack dog, was suddenly indicted for the very crimes the Justice Department had known all about back in 1970.

Spiro, whatever his moral IQ, was smart enough to figure out what was being done to him, and by whom. Agnew’s assistants, notably his chief of staff Ted Gold, publicly accused the President of being behind it.

It bought Nixon some time. Until he named a successor, it would not be possible to impeach him without bringing down the entire house. The presidency would be delivered to the Democrats. Nixon had warned the CIA that “all the trees in the forest” would fall, and he would not go down alone.

The problem was, however, all those tapes, boxes and boxes of them, and the taping system still operating, even as Dean jumps ship and Haldeman and Ehrlichman resign, even as the Senate Committee, with Sam Ervin as chairman, begin televised hearings and the American people, fascinated at last, slip away from him.

On Sixty Minutes, the CBS News Magazine, July 13, 1975, Mike Wallace talked about the taping system, described the friendship between its installer, Al Wong, and James McCord, who was CIA’s chief of security when Wong put in the system, and then said that a member of the Senate Committee had told him that there had been “a direct feed” from the White House taping system and that the CIA had copies.

Here’s what I think we know:

The Watergate burglary which led to the capture of McCord, Barker, Martinez, Gonzales, and Sturgis – and Hunt and Liddy – plays like an old Keystone Kops show. In fact, it was fucked-up by experts.

McCord’s tape jobs, odd disappearance (which necessitated a second taping), ordering the walkie-talkie turned off; Hunt’s instructing the burglars to carry their room keys and money with them while taking the IDs and parking those in their rooms; the bewilderment of Eugenio Martinez who’d never seen anything like it, and whose questions to Hunt via Barker brought the “do as you’re told and don’t ask questions” response. McCord’s buddy, Carl Shoffler happening to work overtime, right around the corner.

Between them, Hunt and McCord had around fifty years of work for the CIA; the latter had been chief of security, the former chief of domestic intelligence. I don’t care what kind of rationalizations you can dream up, there is no way in the world these had been mistakes. None. Think it through a little. You’re E. Howard Hunt. You do not want the burglars caught, and not in possession of anything that looks suspicious, such as sequentially-numbered – and traceable – hundred dollar bills, and you definitely do not want them caught with their room keys, which will lead to their address books with your name and White House phone number in them. No, you do not.

Not only that. Even if you, Mr. Hunt, are in some sort of fog, it is bound to get your attention when James McCord, having ‘discovered’ the removal of the first tape job, comes to your room for a consultation. Since the removal of the tape means that somebody is onto you, it might be prudent to abort the mission. Come back another time; figure out something else.

Nope. Screw it. Full speed ahead.

Same with McCord. Here you are, nine years of handling security for the CIA. You are an expert by now or your body is holding up a building, take your pick. You place the tape on the locks so that everybody can sneak inside, but when its time to go in you see that you’ve been discovered. The tape is gone. The door is locked. Has to be a security guard, making the rounds. Do you bail out? Hell, no. You huddle with Hunt and then tell the boys, we’ve decided to go ahead.

Thing is, though, for reasons never quite clarified, you can’t go up with the rest of them. Got a brief errand. So when Gonzalez picks the lock, you have to retape the door. Horizontally. Barker later asks, did you remember to take the tape off on your way in, and you lie and say yes. This time, Frank Wills calls the cops.

I don’t want to sound too argumentative, but how many feet of hose does it take?

Coming soon, Watergate, Part 9: Dorothy Hunt Takes A Little Trip

Charles Colson, Special Assistant to Nixon, was famous as a take-no-prisoners kind of political operative, perhaps not as big a prick or as much a pervert as Karl Rove in George Bush’s White House but considered pretty treacherous in his time.

Just days before he was to begin a prison term for obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, Colson spent a couple of evenings chatting with an old friend, D.C. private eye Richard Bast. In yet another delicious twist, Bast had installed his own taping system and thus captured Colson’s words. Bast’s tapes were later played for Washington Post reporter Rudy Maxa and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

“Colson portrayed the President as a virtual Oval Office captive,” Maxa wrote, “of suspected high-ranking conspirators in intelligence circles against whom he dared not act for fear of domestic political repercussions... Colson’s underlying suspicion was that the CIA planned the break-ins at Watergate and the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.”

What was the CIA’s motive? “Colson indicated that the CIA was concerned it was being bypassed on policy matters and channels of information bearing on national security.”

Anderson wrote that Colson speculated that the CIA had planned and executed a “Seven Days In May takeover of the government,” and asserted that “the Pentagon practiced extortion to keep Nixon from arresting military men who stole (documents) right from Henry Kissinger’s briefcase.”

Okay, this is the same Charles Colson who, by discovering Jesus in prison helped inaugurate what is now a commonplace and loathsome aspect of white collar, religious, and/or political criminals – the alleged re-birth which absolves one of damned-near everything. Why should we believe him? Maybe the Bast taping itself was orchestrated to shift the blame away from Tricky Dick, in whom Colson still avowed his secular faith.

Let’s consider a few other items:

* When Henry Kissinger was named Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1969, he insisted upon authority to control CIA access to Nixon. In fact, neither William Colby, nor Helms, ever saw Nixon outside of the presence of Kissinger.

* In 1970, Nixon initiated what later became known as the “Huston Plan,” a document which outlined a proposal to bring America’s intelligence agencies under a single director to be named by Nixon. The plan was said to have been scrapped because J. Edgar Hoover protested, however some elements remained in the President’s creation of something called the “Defense Investigative Service,” with offices across the street from the White House. The D.I.S. reported directly to the Secretary of Defense, thus cutting the Pentagon, whose creature D.I.A. was, out of the loop.

* Nixon and Kissinger were embarked on several foreign policy initiatives which were opposed by the military and intelligence leaders, among these the .S.A.L.T. talks designed to curtail production of nuclear weapons, and the recognition of the largest nation on earth, the People’s Republic of China, formerly called “Red China” and barred from membership in the United Nations.

* Nixon’s China policy was carried out via a “back channel” established by Kissinger, and neither the CIA nor the Pentagon was informed about it, let alone made a part of the internal discussions. The Pentagon was so incensed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff used a liaison with the National Security Council, Yeoman First Class Charles E. Radford as a spy, at one point ordering him to steal documents from Kissinger’s briefcase. Radford was caught.

Investigative journalist Tad Szulc, who had developed extensive intelligence sources as a New York Times reporter, wrote that for at least several months in 1970, the Oval Office was bugged without Nixon’s knowledge. A “tiny laser beam transmitter was installed by a painter...who was employed and controlled by one of the intelligence agencies,” said Szulc, and it was so sophisticated that it could relay every conversation, even those conducted over “scrambler” telephones, and could separate several simultaneous conversations. The transmitter was discovered and removed by the Secret Service.

The foregoing is really not very surprising. John Kennedy had told a number of friends that attempts had been made to bug his office and living quarters.

In 1975, the House Select Committee on Intelligence had been given access to CIA files (those that remained; Helms had personally ordered the destruction of Watergate-related materials less than a week after Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had instructed the CIA to preserve them).

Among the revelations contained in the files it was able to examine, the House Committee found that the CIA had engaged in a systematic program of infiltrating its agents into federal agencies and departments of government, including the Office of Management and Budget, The Treasury Department (and the Secret Service), the Commerce Department, ...and Nixon’s White House. One member of the Select Committee, Wisconsin Republican Robert Kasten told the press that he had evidence that this manifestly illegal and constitutionally impermissable program “extended to more than one” administration.

ABC reporter Sam Donaldson said that his sources had informed him that the White House agent “had ranked just below H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. “It was the Oval Office, not just the White House,” to which this spy had access.

President Ford thereupon ordered the Select Committee to return the files to the CIA.

Excuse me, but don’t you think that this begs the mother-humping question? Who was it? Who among ‘All The President’s Men’ would turn out instead to be the CIA’s man? Might be an important question, a question worth asking.

Colonel Fletcher Prouty had for nine years served as the Air Force liaison to the CIA. Before the Watergate break-in, Prouty went to Mullen and Associates to see Robert Bennett, then acting as the firm’s president. He asked Bennett’s help in contacting “the CIA’s man in the White House.” Bennett introduced him to Howard Hunt. And Hunt told him that the person he was looking for was Alexander Butterfield.

Coming soon: Watergate, Part 8: “Spiro Agnew, And Other Inconveniences”

Before Watergate, the CIA had never, ever filled a requisition for eavesdropping equipment from a former agent. But when E. Howard Hunt decided to stock-up for his nighttime adventures with the boys, he asked CIA Director Richard Helms to give him a hand and Helms did so.

After Nixon’s resignation, the Senate Select Committee did not disband; in fact, it morphed into further inquiries into America’s intelligence community. Helms was a key witness.

Surprisingly – at the time – much of the questioning came from Republican Senators who had been close to Nixon. Florida’s Senator Gurney, for example, relentlessly chased Helms about the Agency’s special treatment of Hunt, and did not buy Helms’ wide-eyed protestation that he had no idea what Hunt was up to. “It’s such an unusual request,” he said, “that I am really surprised that no one had a little curiosity about what was going to be done...”

Helms evidently wasn’t the kind of spook who asked questions. For example, he also did not ask Patrick Gray what the FBI Director had in mind when he told Helms that the Bureau had been running into the CIA everywhere in its Watergate investigation. So he was unable to tell the Senate what Gray might have meant. “I knew we didn’t have any involvement,” Helms said.

And when H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s number one guy, delivered the Howard Hunt/Bay of Pigs threat a week after the break-in, Helms, as he swore under oath, didn’t bat an eye, didn’t have any idea what that meant, and didn’t ask.

From this we infer: either Richard Helms, who ascended to the top job at CIA by running the Agency’s black ops, which include burglary, blackmail and extortion, and assassination, was as simple-minded as a parakeet, or... Or he had his own agenda of which the Senate investigators knew nothing.

Let’s see if we can fill in the picture.

Helms ordered the destruction of Watergate-related files one week after Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield asked that they be preserved. One which escaped the shredder was a 25-page document written by Eric W. Eisenstadt, chief of the Central Cover Staff of CIA’s clandestine directorate.

The Eisenstadt memo talks about Howard Hunt’s employment after ‘retirement’ from the CIA at Mullen and Associates, a Washington public relations firm widely-believed to have been a CIA front. Robert Mullen had been reluctant to hire Hunt but Helms had “twisted my arm” until he did so.

Hunt had become chief of domestic operations – which are still illegal under the CIA’s charter – a post created after JFK’s assassination, and enjoyed a special relationship with Helms right up to the Watergate burglaries, but Helms denied knowing him very well, and told Senators that it was “questionable how well he carried out his assignments,” although he couldn’t seem to recall what any of these had been.

Helms also swore that he had no relationship with James McCord, who’d been chief of security for the physical plant of CIA itself, in Langley, Virginia. The two men had been guests in each others’ homes, yet he “barely” knew him, Helms said.

Okay, so Helms is a liar, big deal. He’s the top spook, he’s supposed to lie, he’s trained to do it, and we expect him to. So what?

So, this:

The Senate Committee heard lies about “what” but never about “why not.” Helms said he never asked Hunt what he wanted with all those electronic gizmos. He never asked L. Patrick Gray what the FBI chief meant about running into “CIA involvement.” He never asked Haldeman what Nixon had meant by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” I suppose a little incredulity is healthy for the mind, but this has got to take your breath away. The head of the CIA being requisitioned, warned, and clearly threatened, yet professing no curiosity at all concerning what these messengers were on about.

If Helms couldn’t recall any of Hunt’s assignments, history can do better. For one thing, there’s the “Bay of Pigs” itself, the disastrous attempted invasion of Cuba planned under Eisenhower, whose White House action officer had been Richard Nixon, and which became a humiliation early in the Kennedy presidency. Hunt had been the CIA’s liaison with the exile groups, including Alpha 66, Friends of Democratic Cuba, and the Democratic Revolutionary Council. In the aftermath of this failure, Hunt had told the exiles that Kennedy had pulled the plug on air cover, thus leading to their defeat.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Kennedy had expressed grave doubts about it, demanding that the Joint Chiefs sign a statement confirming that they recommended the plan. Hunt then instructed exile invasion groups training in Guatemala that if Kennedy cancelled it they should launch the invasion anyway. He could not conceivably have issued this instruction without the CIA’s blessing.

But what might Nixon have meant, using the language he used, in his blackmail threat to Helms about Hunt and Cuba? As far as the general public was concerned, everyone already knew about that. What else was there, what dark secret was so dangerous that the President was sure its threatened disclosure would force Helms to intervene and stop the FBI?

We don’t know with any certainty. There have been two theories floating around over the years. The first and least explosive was the CIA-Mafia relationship. The “Bay of Pigs” might be Nixon’s code for the plots to kill Castro in which the Mafia was involved. This would indeed be an embarassment for the CIA, as it was to become once it was uncovered in congressional hearings after Watergate. The drawback seemed to be that Hunt had no direct connection with, nor first-hand knowledge of, the relationship.

A second theory was that Nixon was warning Helms that CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy would be revealed if Hunt began talking. This theory, until very recently, required suppositions which could not be proved. But Hunt himself indirectly offered substantiation when he penned what amounted to a deathbed confession, writing that he had been a participant – and had knowledge of others – in the plot which killed Kennedy. According to Hunt, and verified by recent statements of his son, in whom he further confided, CIA higher-ups had operationally directed Dallas.

But Hunt made no deathbed disclosures about Watergate, and the other participants in this tableau are also dead, so we will probably never know what Nixon meant when, less than a week after the arests at the Watergate, he played what he thought was his best card to coerce Helms. We will never know but, despite his ridiculous testimony, Helms certainly did.

It is my premise that the bungled burglary was the first in a deliberate, systematically-engineered chain of events which was to include McCord’s letter to Sirica and Alexander Butterfield’s blurting about the tapes. The purpose of this plan was to pressure Nixon to alter or abandon his foreign policy initiatives and to reassert the power of the CIA and the Pentagon in relation to the presidency.

In the next post I will detail specific evidence which bears on this possibility. “Watergate, Part 7: Back Channels, Transmitters, Spies And More Spies” coming soon.

Technically, it wasn’t blackmail. It was extortion.

I’m not talking about the ten thousand bucks Nixon’s paymasters had forked over to Howard Hunt’s wife Dorothy, and not even to the two million bucks in stolen securities she was carrying when killed, among all forty-three passengers, when United flight 553 crashed at Chicago’s Midway Airport on Friday, December 8, 1972. That was straight blackmail.

I’m talking about the extortion Richard Nixon practiced, or tried to practice, on the CIA.

You may have forgotten this small historical footnote, since its disclosure came on the last tape Nixon was forced to cough up, just before he resigned. The tape itself was of a conversation Nixon had with Haldeman less than a week after the arrests at the Watergate.

Nixon is heard railing against Hunt, whose demand for what was termed “hush money” had already arrived. He was worried, too, about the FBI investigation and what it might find. .

Nixon then instructs Haldeman to speak with General Vernon Walters and have Walters in turn approach Richard Helms, Director of the CIA. Helms is to warn the FBI off the investigation, to get L. Patrick Gray, acting FBI Director, to stop pursuing leads. Tell Helms, Nixon says, that the CIA had to do this because otherwise there will be disclosures extremely damaging to the Agency.

“Hunt,” Nixon says. “You pick that scab and the whole Bay of Pigs thing will come out.” (see *footnote).

Let’s put aside for the moment the meaning of this warning and consider only these obvious facts:

* Nixon, in the immediate aftermath of the arrests at Watergate, was afraid of what the FBI might uncover. He needed to avert or at least severely hamper its inquiries if he could. But he did not directly approach Gray. Instead, he sent a message to the CIA, to Richard Helms, the text of which he believed would force Helms to assist him.

* While the FBI continued its field investigations and, as subsequent revelations exposed, determined in early October of 1972 that Watergate was actually a small part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage, it did not turn this information over to anyone, despite the fact that it could prove illegal activities were engaged in by virtually everyone in the White House.

* By February, 1973, at about the time McCord wrote his letter to the Judge, the FBI had transferred three of its top Watergate investigators, including the Special Agent In Charge in Washington, D.C. The Bureau had very damaging information but Gray was concerned that it also had an internal leak. A lot of what the FBI was sitting on kept showing up in the Washington Post. And Nixon, following his inaugural, booted Richard Helms from directorship of the CIA, naming him Ambassador to Iran.

* After Nixon’s resignation, for more than a year, congressional committees held hearings on a wide range of illegal governmental activities and on the behavior of its intelligence agencies. The FBI was asked: why did you “limit” your investigation to the burglary and reign-in agents who went after the bigger picture? Gray answered: we were only allowed to do what the Justice Department told us to do. Since Attorney General John Mitchell was known to have directed the illegal funds to the burglars, both Mitchell and Gray knew that the FBI would not be sending much useful shit to Justice. Gray’s answer did not make the Senators happy.

We know this: the FBI was at least cursorily investigating Watergate but impeded its own agents. It reassigned agents who had been either too inquisitive or suspected of talking to reporters, including the Special-Agent-In-Charge of it’s D.C. office. Nixon believed Helms had spoken with Gray, that his message to Helms had brought results, and perhaps this was so. But over time, the evidence indicates, he became considerably less confident that the CIA had confined itself to that.

Once McCord wrote to Sirica, we were on the road to indictments and impeachment, but not many people knew that, and it would be eighteen months before Nixon was gone, and, anyway, the letter alone wouldn’t have done it, nor would John Dean’s testimony, nor the money trail. There were plenty of layers of deniability. Hell, even if they got through Dwight Chapin to Haldeman himself, most of it would be supposition and it could not be shown that Nixon orchestrated any of it.

One more piece was necessary. This was supplied by Butterfield’s disclosure of the taping system and its reels of evidence. At last, The Watergate Committee could find out who was lying and about what. Nixon himself was recorded as authorizing payment of Hunt’s blackmail.

Still, Nixon did not destroy the tapes. He might’ve done so and provided any number of stories. The taping system had already been dismantled, he might say, or maybe it never really existed and Butterfield was crazy. Maybe the reels had been used for reference only and had been routinely erased along the way. Maybe no one would’ve believed him, but at least the Congress would never find the “smoking gun” it was seeking.

It’s time to begin answering the questions posed earlier, and to add a few.

* Who was Alexander Butterfield?

* Who installed the White House taping system and who controlled it?

* What access did the CIA have to the tapes?

The next installment, “Watergate, part 6: The Curious Case Of The Incurious Spy” will be posted soon.

(*footnote):

The pertinent portions of the Nixon tape on June 23, 1972, during which Nixon is instructing Haldeman to extort from the CIA its active assistance in obstructing justice, include these comments:

Nixon: “When you (Haldeman) get in...say ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, without going into details, the President believes that... and that they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don’t go any further into this case, period!’”

And:

Nixon: “Just say...’very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damn much, if it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuban thing would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and the country.’ Just tell him to lay off!”