Attached from the recent December 2022 CIA CREST upload are:
1. A 1971 memo from John N. McMahon (Moynihan), then Director of ELINT, to DDCI Cushman regarding Gary Powers, whom McMahon/Moynihan had debriefed after his return to USA. Recall Cushman would be a significant witness during Watergate, testifying before the Ervin Committee re…
Attached from the recent December 2022 CIA CREST upload are:
1. A 1971 memo from John N. McMahon (Moynihan), then Director of ELINT, to DDCI Cushman regarding Gary Powers, whom McMahon/Moynihan had debriefed after his return to USA. Recall Cushman would be a significant witness during Watergate, testifying before the Ervin Committee regarding Agency contacts with Hunt.
2. An in-house chronology of Watergate, encompassing the wider, proper understanding of the break-in as part of a vast expansion of intelligence activities, ostensibly stemming, during the Nixon administration at least, from the effort to "combat" drug trafficking and radical groups. (It had actually begun before, and has never stopped.)
Entry one, dated July 9, 1970, concerns Moynihan and Tom Huston "thinking well of the memorandum on 'Black Radicalism in the Caribbean.'" The entries spiral downhill from there you might say.
3. A memo regarding TIME magazine reporter Sandy Smith investigating Robert Bennett and Howard Hunt and the Mullen & Co. PR firm. My hunch is that the last two redactions at paragraph 18 obscure the name McMahon. If so, it would be McMahon (i.e., Moynihan) that had urged Bennett to hire Hunt at Mullen & Co. Not coincidentally, I think Sandy Smith's enquiries on the subject of who had hired Hunt at Mullen & Co. was more or less shut down by TIME and the agency shortly after this memo. (The memo indicates that The Washington Post had already done so, contrary to the myth of its dogged persistence by "Woodstein.") Indeed, it's around this time that Smith was eased out as TIME's correspondent on the subject. By '74, TIME would call allegations of CIA involvement in Watergate "Chuck Colson's crazy theory."
4. Relatedly, another memo indicates on the routing slip on the second page that the secretary to another TIME correspondent, Hays Gorey, was a former Agency employee. The point being that TIME was effectively an Agency adjunct.
The December 28, 2022 uploads to the CIA CREST database include many revealing documents regarding Agency desire to frustrate requests by Senator Howard Baker and counsel Fred Thompson, for example; it's quite evident that Thompson's Democratic counterpart Terry Lenzner was far and away an Agency favorite. Lenzner would then turn around and represent Gottlieb re MKULTRA.
I suspect that the reason behind the release is to, quietly and gently, begin to let out that a lot of the firewalls -- THE firewall, in fact -- of the Watergate story has cracked, to lessen the impact any forthcoming reporting may have by implying that much of the underlying information had already been publicly released. The possibility of Congressional investigation by the new Church Committee may also have contributed.
Any new Church committee must be willing to go where the facts lead and just as importantly prevent recommended reforms from, again, leaving the fox guarding the henhouse.
Abolish FISA/The FISC.
The root problem is the secrecy system itself; until that's destroyed the club of the insiders will continue to dictate to the rest. And their survival requires that those who step out of line, or become a risk, or become no longer useful, be culled. Secrecy requires the system to eat its own, eventually but inevitably, as truth comes out.
Hays Gorey would become the ghost-writer for John Dean’s wife Maureen Kane Owen Biner Deanand later tried (and failed miserably) to debunk the book Silent Coup.
Attached from the recent December 2022 CIA CREST upload are:
1. A 1971 memo from John N. McMahon (Moynihan), then Director of ELINT, to DDCI Cushman regarding Gary Powers, whom McMahon/Moynihan had debriefed after his return to USA. Recall Cushman would be a significant witness during Watergate, testifying before the Ervin Committee regarding Agency contacts with Hunt.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/03073663
2. An in-house chronology of Watergate, encompassing the wider, proper understanding of the break-in as part of a vast expansion of intelligence activities, ostensibly stemming, during the Nixon administration at least, from the effort to "combat" drug trafficking and radical groups. (It had actually begun before, and has never stopped.)
Entry one, dated July 9, 1970, concerns Moynihan and Tom Huston "thinking well of the memorandum on 'Black Radicalism in the Caribbean.'" The entries spiral downhill from there you might say.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/01430372
3. A memo regarding TIME magazine reporter Sandy Smith investigating Robert Bennett and Howard Hunt and the Mullen & Co. PR firm. My hunch is that the last two redactions at paragraph 18 obscure the name McMahon. If so, it would be McMahon (i.e., Moynihan) that had urged Bennett to hire Hunt at Mullen & Co. Not coincidentally, I think Sandy Smith's enquiries on the subject of who had hired Hunt at Mullen & Co. was more or less shut down by TIME and the agency shortly after this memo. (The memo indicates that The Washington Post had already done so, contrary to the myth of its dogged persistence by "Woodstein.") Indeed, it's around this time that Smith was eased out as TIME's correspondent on the subject. By '74, TIME would call allegations of CIA involvement in Watergate "Chuck Colson's crazy theory."
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/01482446
4. Relatedly, another memo indicates on the routing slip on the second page that the secretary to another TIME correspondent, Hays Gorey, was a former Agency employee. The point being that TIME was effectively an Agency adjunct.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/01482413
The December 28, 2022 uploads to the CIA CREST database include many revealing documents regarding Agency desire to frustrate requests by Senator Howard Baker and counsel Fred Thompson, for example; it's quite evident that Thompson's Democratic counterpart Terry Lenzner was far and away an Agency favorite. Lenzner would then turn around and represent Gottlieb re MKULTRA.
I suspect that the reason behind the release is to, quietly and gently, begin to let out that a lot of the firewalls -- THE firewall, in fact -- of the Watergate story has cracked, to lessen the impact any forthcoming reporting may have by implying that much of the underlying information had already been publicly released. The possibility of Congressional investigation by the new Church Committee may also have contributed.
Any new Church committee must be willing to go where the facts lead and just as importantly prevent recommended reforms from, again, leaving the fox guarding the henhouse.
Abolish FISA/The FISC.
The root problem is the secrecy system itself; until that's destroyed the club of the insiders will continue to dictate to the rest. And their survival requires that those who step out of line, or become a risk, or become no longer useful, be culled. Secrecy requires the system to eat its own, eventually but inevitably, as truth comes out.
Hays Gorey would become the ghost-writer for John Dean’s wife Maureen Kane Owen Biner Deanand later tried (and failed miserably) to debunk the book Silent Coup.