Dirty Tricks by Shane O'Sullivan

Author:Shane O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2018-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

In late November or early December, James McCord sent Lee Pennington a memorandum on Jack Anderson and Pennington gave it to his case officer, Louis Vasaly, of the Security Research Staff. On December 4, 1972, after showing the memorandum to Osborn, Steven Kuhn wrote a memo to Evans:59

At the request of the Director of Security, I advised Mr. Vasaly that he is not to ever discuss Mr. McCord with Mr. Pennington nor is he to accept any more items from Mr. Pennington which concern Mr. McCord or which come from Mr. McCord. Mr. Vasaly agreed and stated that, in all of his future contacts with Mr. Pennington, Mr. Paul F. Gaynor, chief, security research staff, would be present.60

On December 8, a mistrial was declared in the Ellsberg case and Dorothy Hunt died in a plane crash in Chicago. Since early July, Hunt’s wife had been the conduit for CRP money to cover living expenses and attorneys’ fees for Hunt, Liddy, and the Watergate Five through a “Mr. Rivers,” who would call her at pay phones and left the first payment in a locker at Washington’s National Airport. Dean later identified Rivers as Nixon intelligence operative Tony Ulasewicz. When $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills was found in Dorothy Hunt’s purse in the plane wreckage, a “barrage of innuendo and insinuation” followed, but the serial numbers did not correspond to the checks lodged in Barker’s bank account and the CRP payments “had been in untraceable bills.” Hunt claimed the money was for a hotel investment (according to Baker’s staff, a proposed Holiday Inn in Nicaragua). Curiously, before boarding the plane, Dorothy bought $250,000 in flight insurance, payable to her husband. As Hunt flew back to Washington after the funeral, facing “the stress of a four-to-six-week trial now less than a month away, and convinced that the government was concealing the only documentary evidence [his notebooks] … that I had been acting in good faith, I decided to plead guilty….”61

On December 13, the CIA completed preparation of its answers to Silbert’s questions. By now, Ehrlichman had heard about Colby’s revelation (perhaps Peterson had mentioned it to Dean) and two days later, he met with Colby, Helms, and Dean to hear how his name had been reluctantly surfaced. While Helms and Colby had provided the material to allow Silbert to prepare for a possible “phony” CIA defence, they worried Silbert “was now talking in somewhat different terms.” Dean thought Silbert probably wanted to use CIA testimony “to prove that Hunt and Liddy operated in alias … [but] it was agreed all around this would be a mistake, as the entire matter was totally irrelevant to the main trial and would be a red herring.” Dean asked Colby to sit on the package prepared for Silbert for a few days.62

Finally, on December 20, as Silbert chased him for a response, Colby called Dean, who agreed to release the second package of documents. Colby reminded Dean that the CIA objected to being actively involved in the trial,

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