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. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Hunt is
thought to have been a part of the continuing CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, code-
named Operation 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 of Security, 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 also utilized 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 a close 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
after his 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, and various statements
show that Liddy's world outlook had a number of similarities with that of George Bush:
he was, for example, obsessed 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 overall "leak analysis," that is to say, for defining the problem of
unauthorized divulging of classified materal which the Plumbers were supposed to