and spoke of Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, as unqualified for the Presidency. The
Republican Party was handed another four yeFord were the gainers. But then Richard Nixon became the focus of all Establishment attacks forar Administration. Bush, Kissinger, Rockefeller and
Watergate, while the money trail that Patman had pursued was forgotten. Wright Patman was forced
out of his Committee chairmanship in 1974. On the day Nixon resigned the Presidency, Patman
wrote to Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asking him not to stop
investigating Watergate. Though Patman died in 1976, his advice still holds good. ***
As the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told the journalist Andrew Tully in the days before June,
1972, "By God, he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men working for him that I'd kick out of my
office. Someday, that bunch will serve him up a fine mess." [fn 20] The CIA men in question were
among the Plumbers, a unit allegedly created in the first place to stanch the flow of leaks, includingthe Jack Anderson material about such episodes as the December, 1971 brush with nuclear war
discussed above. Leading Plumbers included retired high officials of the CIA. Plumber and
Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had been a GS-15 CIA staff officer; he had played a role in the
1954 toppling of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and later had been one of the
planners in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Ahave been a part of the continuing CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, code-named Operationfter the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Hunt is thought to
Mongoose, ongoing at the time of the Kennedy assassination. All of this puts him in the thick of the
CIA Miami station. One of Hunt's close personal friends was Howard Osborne, an official of the
CIA Office of Security who was the immediate superior of James McCord. In the spring of 1971
Hunt went to Miami to recruit from among the Cubans the contingent of Watergate burglars,including Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and the rest. This was two months before the
publication of the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, provided Kissinger with the pretext
he needed to get Nixon to initiate what would shortly become the Plumbers.
Another leading Watergate burglar was James McCord, a former top official of the CIA Office ofSecurity, the agency bureau which is supposed to maintain contacts with US police agencies in
order to facilitate its basic task of providing security for CIA installations and personnel. The Office
of Security was thus heavily implicated in the CIA's illegal domestic operations, including
cointelpro operations against political dissidents and groups, and was the vehicle for such mind-
control experiments as Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK-Ultra. The Office of Security alsoutilized male and female prostitutes and other sex operatives for purposes of compromising and
blackmailing public figures, information gathering, and control. According to Hougan, the Office of
Security maintained a "fag file" of some 300,000 US citizens, with heavy stress on homosexuals.
The Office of Security also had responsibility for Soviet and other defectors. James McCord was at
one time responsible for the physical security of all CIA premises in the US. McCord was also aclose friend of CIA Counterintelligence Director James Jesus Angleton. McCord was anxious to (^)
cover the CIA's role; at one point he wrote to his superior, General Gaynor, urging him to "flood the
newspapers with leaks or anonymous letters" to discredit those who wanted to establish the
responsibility of "the company." [fn 21] But according to one of McCord's own police contacts,
Garey Bittenbender of the Washington DC police Intelligence Division, who recognized him afterhis arrest, McCord had averred to him that the Watergate break-ins had been "a CIA operation," an (^)
account which McCord heatedly denied later. [fn 22]
The third leader of the Watergate burglars, G. Gordon Liddy, had worked for the FBI and the
Treasury. Liddy's autobiography, Will, published in 1980, aworld outlook had a number of similarities with that of George Bush: he was, for example, obsessednd various statements show that Liddy's (^)
with the maintenance and transmission of his "family gene pool."
Another key member of the Plumbers unit was John Paisley, who functioned as the official CIA
liason to the White House investigative unit. It was Paisley who assumed responsibility for the