“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.” By this admirable standard, no non-fiction writer of the 20th century fulfilled his duty to history – to the record of our times – more fully, more brilliantly, than Jim Hougan.
When Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA was first published by Random House in November 1984 – more than a decade after the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon – it presented such a large volume of new and revelatory information about a subject so widely considered exhausted that the book was greeted with the staggered astonishment typically reserved for apparitions.
“If even half of this is true,” wrote J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times Book Review, “Secret Agenda will add an important new dimension to our understanding of Watergate.” Lukas’ was an important voice. A Pulitzer Prize-winner, he had covered Watergate for the New York Times Magazine and wrote Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years in 1976. This critically acclaimed book was the first comprehensive account of Watergate. “But,” Lukas added, “it may be months before reporters can sort through this material, check Mr. Hougan’s sources and decide which of these revelations is solid gold, which dross.”
Now, 40 years after Secret Agenda appeared, the verdict is in. While some of Hougan’s analytic conclusions have come under challenge – including by me, an avowed acolyte of the author – the wealth of new facts and documentation he presented has stood the test of time. Where once it seemed impossible to reckon with the contribution Secret Agenda made to Watergate, it is now impossible to reckon with Watergate, even after the release of thousands more tapes and documents, without reference to Hougan.
Introducing his findings, Hougan described Secret Agenda as “an attempt to correct the record … and to suggest avenues of further investigation.” Several authors over the ensuing decades, including me, took him up on that challenge, and a couple of epic lawsuits unfolded, with the result that the book’s central thrusts were only strengthened.
Reckoning with Secret Agenda is hardly an academic matter. If Hougan and the other Watergate revisionists are correct, then the scandal that toppled Richard Nixon from power was about much more than a third-rate burglary attempt, the wiretapping of the opposing party, or even a series of covert crimes ordered by a paranoid president. Secret Agenda and its progeny force us, instead, to conceive of Watergate as a Cold War-era power struggle between a duly elected president and the national security state, with Nixon as much a victim in the affair as he was a perpetrator. In a time when legions of Americans believe in the existence of a “deep state,” getting the history of Watergate right takes on new urgency.
These accounts held far-reaching implications. If Hunt and McCord worked with each other in the post-Bay of Pigs period, one ready inference is that Gordon Liddy was a dupe in the DNC mission he was ostensibly managing. Moreover, if the Hunt-McCord alliance predated the break-in, our understanding of how Watergate fit into the Nixon presidency would require substantial revision – as Secret Agenda maintained. Hougan highlighted the fact that Hunt and McCord had used the same alias with Ruiz-Williams: a lapse of protocol the two co-conspirators repeated, but which was not widely reported, a decade later in Watergate.
So was Ruiz-Williams correct – had James McCord played some role in the CIA’s resettlement of the Bay of Pigs exiles? In 2002, during my research for The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, I secured from the Library of Congress the release of 5,000 pages of executive-session testimony taken by the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972, better known as the Senate Watergate committee. These were depositions taken by committee counsel in closed-door session in advance of the witnesses’ testimony before the full committee. The depositions revealed how McCord, Jeb Magruder, and other witnesses were frequently coached to change their testimony, to be made more incriminating to Nixon and his top aides, between the dry run of executive session and the televised hearings. These documents also included testimony from figures never summoned to the Senate Caucus Room for public testimony.
Among this latter group was Felipe De Diego, the Cuban operative who participated in the September 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and in the first Watergate break-in, in May 1972. Space constraints prevented the inclusion of De Diego’s unsealed testimony in The Strong Man; the contents of his deposition are published here for the first time.
In July 1969, the records revealed, nine months before Hunt officially retired from the CIA, he was reprimanded by superiors for an “Open Safe security violation” that occurred earlier that month – his second such offense in less than a year.
“I am sure you are aware of the seriousness of this matter,” Hunt was told, along with being “warned of possible consequences of future violations.”
It was the CIA’s Office of Security – specifically the office’s Physical Security Division – that conducted the internal investigation into Hunt’s security breach. Hunt, his secretary, and the security officer who discovered the open safe were all interviewed, generating a flurry of notes, reports, forwarding documents, and stamped routing slips. On July 25, Hunt’s supervisor, one of the highest-ranking CIA officers in Europe, received a stern summary of the episode, and a demand to be apprised of any disciplinary action enforced, from the chief of the Physical Security Division: James W. McCord Jr.
No disciplinary action was taken. But a few months after the open-safe incident, the Hunt personnel records revealed, the agency’s leaders had new reason to be concerned about his compliance with security procedure. In January 1970 they received a tip that two years earlier, Hunt – under the pseudonym “Edward J. Hamilton,” an alias almost identical to one he later employed in Watergate – had circulated, without agency clearance, a manuscript about his Bay of Pigs experiences. The recipients included conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr., a close friend to Hunt and godfather to his children, and two publishers: Arlington House and John Wiley & Sons.
No credible historian now questions that both Hunt and McCord – though each officially retired from the CIA when they joined the Nixon White House and Committee to Re-elect the President, respectively – maintained direct contact with the agency’s senior echelons, in ways that called their allegiances, and agendas, into question. Consequently, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate is now widely understood as deeper – more entrenched, controlling, and malign – than was known in 1974.
Likewise, it now stands beyond dispute, as Hougan was first to assert, that the Ellsberg break-in was not a failure but instead resulted in the location and photography of the files sought – and, as Hougan reported, the diversion of the undeveloped film from the hands of the Plumbers to CIA headquarters.
It was to the agency that Hunt had turned for much of the technical support he and Liddy required: electronic gadgetry, aliases, disguises, the preparation of “pocket litter” and charts. For the break-in at the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, it can now be reported, Langley provided Hunt with a camera designed to deprive the Nixon White House of access to the intelligence.
“The camera was constructed in such a way that it was pre-loaded by CIA technicians,” Hunt disclosed in executive-session testimony on June 12, 1973, previously unpublished. “We had no way of entering it to take out a cassette of film. The entire object had to be returned to the CIA. We never saw it again.”
Subsequent scholarship has similarly affirmed the focus Secret Agenda placed on the theretofore-overlooked role of Eugenio Rolando Martinez: the most mysterious of the Cubans recruited by Hunt. As Hougan was the first to disclose, the sinewy Bay of Pigs veteran, nicknamed “Muscolito,” was the one member of the Liddy-Hunt-McCord team actively on the CIA payroll at the time of the DNC operation. Among the documentary treasures of Secret Agenda was the rich record of interactions between Martinez and his CIA case officers.
Hougan also broke new ground in reporting that during the Watergate arrests, the Metropolitan Police had wrestled from Martinez’s possession – at gunpoint, and after a scuffle – a key taped to a small spiral notebook. The FBI swiftly matched this key to the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. In the spring of 1972, she was the secretary to an obscure DNC official named R. Spencer Oliver Jr., the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen. In a fact often overlooked in Watergate studies, the telephone used by Oliver and Wells was the installation site of the lone working wiretap monitored by McCord and Baldwin across the three-week lifespan of the DNC surveillance operation. That central fact made the Oliver-Wells line the true target of the Watergate operation.
Eugenio Martinez never disclosed how, or from whom, he obtained the key to Maxie Wells’ desk. As Hougan reported, the FBI also determined that the only two known copies of the key, held by Wells and a fellow secretary, Barbara Kennedy, were produced by the women when investigating agents asked to see them. This remains one of several Watergate mysteries for the next generation of scholars to pursue.
However, a lengthy CIA document declassified in August 2017 – released in response to litigation filed by Judicial Watch, the conservative legal advocacy group, and first reported by me – demonstrated how determined the agency was to conceal Martinez’s work as a CIA informant during his service to Hunt and Liddy.
On that date, Helms had met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In their meeting, Kissinger related that Alexander Haig – Kissinger’s former deputy at the National Security Council, by then serving as Nixon’s final chief of staff – had made what Kissinger considered a shocking proposal: Sen. Howard Baker, ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, should be enlisted to charge publicly that “the Agency knew about the Watergate burglary 30 minutes before it occurred.”
Kissinger assured Ambassador Helms he had poured cold water on the idea, purportedly telling Haig: “To do this would be wildly irresponsible.” On Dec. 3, Helms cabled Langley to express his own alarm, adding that it was unclear to him whether Haig “would have been basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what” (emphasis added).
These revelations – that CIA officials considered Eugenio Martinez “an agent” during his work for the Plumbers; that Langley was prepared to fight to the death to withhold the reports Martinez filed, and those of his case officers, even from the hands of the Watergate special prosecutors; and that no less a figure than Richard Helms immediately thought of Martinez when the subject turned to possible CIA foreknowledge of the break-in – only substantiated the evidence and conclusions that Secret Agenda had presented about “Muscolito,” the agency he served, and the broader and deeper dimensions of Watergate.
All subsequent scholars have readily acknowledged that Hougan’s use of FOIA – probably the most skillful and historically significant of any researcher since the enactment of the law in 1966 – enabled Secret Agenda to present the most detailed account of the Watergate break-ins and surveillance operation ever published. Even Stanley Kutler, the dogged anti-Nixon historian at the University of Wisconsin (Hougan’s alma mater) who spent the last quarter-century of his life inveighing against the Watergate revisionism Secret Agenda had pioneered, conceded in 1990: “Hougan has established the most thorough reconstruction of the crime.”
As the Washington editor for Harper’s, where his articles appeared alongside the work of Tom Wolfe, Seymour Hersh, Norman Mailer, and other major journalistic and literary figures, Hougan was a savvy reporter who knew that where close examination of the DNC operation was concerned, he had the playing field pretty much to himself: The final report of the Senate Watergate committee, for example, some 1,250 pages long, had devoted only four pages to the DNC mission.
This was in part because the panel’s chief counsel, Sam Dash – an avowed antagonist of the Nixon administration who had been filing activist lawsuits against Attorney General John Mitchell, a key witness before the committee, even before the break-in – was only given a few hours to review the FBI’s investigative file. The bureau was determined to hide its skeletons.
Moreover, as Secret Agenda noted, the Democrats and the Washington press corps harbored little interest in peering too deeply into the details of the operation, into what the burglars and wiretappers, in their repeated assaults on the DNC, were after. Rather, what mattered most to the inquisitors in the great scandal was how to exploit the political dimensions of the crime, with the ultimate objectives being the removal of the president and the incarceration of his aides. “I think we all know,” Dash said contemptuously in executive-session interrogation of Hunt in June 1973, previously unpublished, “what happened in the early morning hours of June 17.”
Equally impressive was Hougan’s prowess as an interviewer. This was a man who knew how to find and contact people: some famous and walled-off, others obscure, even criminal, none too eager to revisit the catastrophe of Watergate.
That Hougan persuaded so many sources to talk – a gift shared by Fink and Goldberg – was critical to the editorial achievement of Secret Agenda. And he questioned them skillfully: alternating between gentility and aggressiveness, concealing and revealing as warranted what he already knew, all in service to the greater goal of obtaining the information, or denials, sought.
Among the most remarkable – and, oddly, the least remarked-upon, in all the reviews and references to Secret Agenda – was Hougan’s interview with a former Secret Service officer named William McMahon, who disclosed that the CIA had detailed employees from the Office of Security, James McCord’s employer, to the Secret Service unit that maintained the White House taping system.
This revelation carried with it the implication, as Hougan noted, that the CIA had enjoyed “unrivaled access to the president’s private conversations and thoughts” for the two years (1971-73) the taping system was operational. This is another area of Watergate scholarship ripe for new research.
Likewise, Hougan found his human sources the old-fashioned way: letting his fingers do the walking through telephone directories, current and outdated, in libraries and offices; shoe-leather pounding of the streets of Washington; working existing contacts to introduce him to new ones. Documents alone, after all, do not a book, nor a thesis, make. As author Walter Isaacson once said, “memories plus memoranda” are the necessary ingredients for a great work of non-fiction, and Hougan had both in abundance.
Secret Agenda treated its readers not as students in civics class but as mature adults, sophisticated consumers of information capable of moving beyond the elemental question of whether wiretapping the Democratic National Committee was right or wrong to consideration of why the tradecraft employed, despite the presence of so many highly-experienced operators, was so poor, so consistently – to the point of being suspicious in its own right.
Hougan also recognized, and reminded his readers, that the entire cast of Watergate was staffed with liars – asserted, proven, convicted – and that making sense of the conflicts between their accounts, sometimes within their accounts, occasionally required the author to engage in deduction or informed speculation, or to acknowledge that “some issues of importance to the scandal cannot be resolved”: the arrival, as he put it, at a cul-de-sac.
Secret Agenda did not become a bestseller: Most Americans, including some journalists who think they know the Watergate story, have never heard of it. The book had some deficiencies. The publisher’s marketing efforts were desultory; the book lacked blurbs; and the cover art was uninspired. But I am convinced the real problem was the author’s fearless calling out of those powerful establishment forces whose fortunes and reputations rested on the history of Watergate remaining unchanged.
The appearance of Secret Agenda marked a David-and-Goliath moment: the lone researcher, accomplished and well credentialed but clearly not a member of the Beltway club, taking on all of established journalism. Hougan’s was a quixotic quest, a decade after the fact, to correct the record of the greatest, most voluminous exercise of political power, the criminal justice system, and news media influence yet witnessed in the Information Age.
That he had the evidence on his side – tens of thousands of pages of irrefutable evidence – ultimately, and sadly, mattered little at the time. The cherished narrative Hougan proposed to upend belonged not to just any public event but to the quintessential public event: a saturation-coverage mythos embedded as deeply in the Western cultural imagination as the Civil War or the Beatles. And the lesson Hougan challenged most directly was the central one, the scandal’s supposed saving grace: The system worked.
This was heretical stuff in 1984. No wonder Bob Woodward privately enlisted Sy Hersh to contact the editor of Secret Agenda, ahead of publication, and convey the skepticism the Watergate legend harbored about Hougan’s reliability.
“What Woodward did was totally scurrilous,” Hougan told reporter Robert Gettlin in May 1985. “He was trying to sabotage the project before he’d read it.” Elsewhere, Woodward claimed Hougan never contacted him, despite the fact that Hougan’s interview of Woodward, testy when challenged, made for one of the book’s most memorable passages.
Central to Hougan’s challenge to the Established Order were the two discoveries that represented, amid all the incredible sleuthing he accomplished, his twin masterstrokes: the evidence that the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 1972 was, like the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President, engaged in criminal conduct.
No less startling was Hougan’s unveiling of the official correspondence between Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert and the FBI laboratory. With painstaking methodology, the bureau’s lab technicians presented unassailable evidence to buttress their conclusion that the Democrats themselves had planted the crude and inoperative bugging device they “discovered” on Oliver’s telephone, and announced to the press, in September 1972 – three months after the arrests.
“No one seems to have asked the obvious,” Hougan wrote at a separate point in Secret Agenda – yet nowhere else in the Watergate saga was this observation more apt than with respect to the September Bug. Here were the top officials of the Democratic National Committee, in an election year, announcing their discovery of a bugging device in their headquarters three months after the bugging suspects had been arrested on the premises, and after the FBI had made three exhaustive sweeps of the DNC telephones and found no devices installed.
That this planting of evidence, this obstruction of justice, didn’t blow the Watergate scandal wide open, didn’t trigger the dismissal of the charges against the burglars, Hunt and Liddy, was only because federal prosecutors wrongly withheld the September Bug correspondence – exculpatory evidence in any bugging case – from the defendants’ attorneys.
Two events subsequent to the publication of Secret Agenda forced a re-examination of the issues Hougan had raised.
The first was the publication by St. Martin’s Press, in 1991, of the book Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin. A kind of successor to Secret Agenda, this book was treated to some of the same suppression tactics by the self-appointed guardians of the publishing industry. Nonetheless, Silent Coup became a bestseller.
Over seven years of research, the authors of Silent Coup conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with key players and secured access to several important, previously unpublished documents. Where Secret Agenda had established a link between the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring and the Democratic National Committee, Silent Coup went a step further and asserted a link between Columbia Plaza and White House Counsel John Dean, a central figure in Watergate. The book alleged that the name Maureen Biner, Dean’s girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife, appeared in the Columbia Plaza “trick books.” In 1984, Hougan had been the first to report John Dean’s interest when news of the call-girl ring hit the newspapers on June 9, 1972, shortly before the final Watergate break-in. As Secret Agenda revealed, Dean summoned the federal prosecutors in the case to his office and instructed them to bring all the evidence with them to the White House. There Dean circled names in the trick books with a Parker pen.
Silent Coup alleged that Dean’s observation of his own girlfriend’s name in those pages gave the impetus to the second, doomed Watergate break-in of June 16-17.
Silent Coup established that the ring’s madam, Heidi Rikan – referred to in Secret Agenda as “Tess,” a pseudonym created by Hougan – was in fact Mo Dean’s close friend and occasional roommate. A photograph of Rikan appeared in the photographs section of Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate (1975); in 1967, the same woman appeared arm-in-arm in a photograph with Joseph Nesline, one of Washington’s top organized crime figures. The federal prosecutor who investigated Columbia Plaza identified Rikan as the ring’s madam. On the basis of this and much other evidence, including arrest records, Colodny and Gettlin made what many considered a persuasive case: that John Dean ordered the first Watergate break-in to exploit his knowledge of the DNC-Columbia Plaza nexus, and then ordered the second break-in, after the existence of the Columbia Plaza ring was publicly reported, to conceal his girlfriend’s connection to it.
In 1992, the Deans filed a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against Jim Hougan, Gordon Liddy, the authors of Silent Coup, and various publishing companies. Hougan was swiftly dropped as a defendant. But the epic struggle that ensued between the Deans on one side, and Liddy and Colodny on the other, would be to Watergate what M*A*S*H was to the Korean War: the chronicle of an event that lasts three times as long as the event itself. As a result, the Watergate scandal – a phenomenon of the early 1970s, the era of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers – became the subject of testimony and court rulings in the 21st century, with surviving figures tracked down and returned to the witness stand.
Dean v. St. Martin’s Press never went to trial but was settled out of court after a decade of discovery. Not one word of Silent Coup was retracted. On the other hand, across eight days of grinding deposition testimony in 1995, John Dean disavowed his own Watergate memoir, Blind Ambition (1976), as an unreliable account, woven in part from “whole cloth.” The case also produced sworn testimony linking Maureen Biner to the Columbia Plaza ring, despite her denials.
Midway through those proceedings in 1997, Maxie Wells, the former DNC secretary – using the same attorney as Dean, a former staff lawyer on the Senate Watergate committee – filed a $5.1 million defamation suit against Liddy for a series of speeches in the mid-1990s in which he endorsed the thesis of Silent Coup and linked Wells to the DNC prostitution activity she denied knowing anything about. (Likewise, Spencer Oliver has always maintained he knew nothing about any prostitution activity.)
Wells v. Liddy went to trial in federal court in Baltimore not once but twice in 2001-02. Among those placed under oath were Liddy himself – who had never testified during the hearings and trials of the early 1970s – Oliver and Wells, Alfred Baldwin, Jim Hougan (on whose work Liddy claimed to have relied when making the contested statements), and me (the only reporter ever to have interviewed Wells at length).
In April 1998, J. Frederick Motz, chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, dismissed Wells’ lawsuit on summary judgment, ruling that no “reasonable jury” would find in her favor. Drawing on Watergate evidence produced by Liddy’s defense team and citing entries from the revisionist literature – including Secret Agenda, Silent Coup, and my own work in National Review – Judge Motz found “sufficient pieces of evidence … that can arguably be viewed as corroborating … that Wells provided a connection for [the Columbia Plaza ring] at the DNC.”
Wells appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned Motz’s dismissal and remanded the case for trial. In doing so, the higher court improved Wells’ odds considerably by declaring that she was not a public figure. This meant that to prevail in establishing that Liddy had defamed her, Wells had only to prove that Liddy had acted negligently, not with actual “malice” or “reckless disregard” for the truth, the higher standard established by the Supreme Court that public figures must meet when proving defamation.
The trial was held in January 2001. After two weeks of testimony and eight hours of deliberation, the jury notified Motz it could not arrive at a verdict; noting that seven of nine jurors polled for Liddy, Motz dismissed the case a second time, as a matter of law. He found “a reasonable person … would think that one of the purposes [of the Watergate operation] was to get embarrassing sexual information about the Democrats.” Finally, Motz’s ruling remarked on the credibility, as writer and witness, of Jim Hougan: “His testimony dispelled any inference that he is a fanatical conspiracy theorist … A former Washington editor for Harper’s, Hougan brought to his study of Watergate a perspective” the judge found valuable.
Wells appealed to the Fourth Circuit again, and once again, in February 2002, the case was remanded back to Maryland for a second trial. This time, however, the opinion of the higher court included a statement of huge significance for the history of Watergate: Reeling off a litany of data points critical to the case – including Eugenio Martinez’s possession of the key to Wells’ desk, Hougan’s legacy – the Fourth Circuit found “this evidence tends to corroborate the call-girl theory generally.” Here was an extraordinary moment: a rare stamp of approval on Watergate revisionism from one of the nation’s federal appellate courts, one rung below the Supreme Court. And here, too, the bench took note of Hougan, “a well-known author.”
Wells v. Liddy II was held in the courtroom of Frederic N. Smalkin, the successor to Motz as Maryland’s chief district judge. On July 3, 2002, the jury found in Liddy’s favor. The re-litigation of Watergate – a remarkable court test of academic debate over the quintessential public event, powered by compulsory document production and sworn testimony from the surviving players – was finally over. The revisionists had prevailed: The texts of Secret Agenda and Silent Coup stood unchanged.
Moreover, the bulk of the evidence generated in this final burst of Watergate court activity proved highly damaging to the Deans, Oliver and Wells, and the DNC. John F. Rudy II, the former federal prosecutor who had tackled the Columbia Plaza ring, and who was one of the government lawyers summoned to Dean’s office on June 9, 1972, delivered a bombshell. Rudy testified that his team had developed credible evidence showing that “employees [at the DNC] were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza.” But, he added, the probe was “shut down” in the summer of 1972 by the district’s U.S. attorney, the late Harold Titus, who felt “the DNC should not be pursued, that it was a political time bomb.”
And in Wells v. Liddy I, it was the plaintiff herself who, under direct examination, answered questions that her attorney, David Dorsen, hadn’t posed, but which were central to the litigation, to the history of Watergate:
What was in Wells’ desk that might have interested the burglars? And why did Eugenio Martinez, the CIA’s “agent” on the break-in team, carry a key to her desk?
But the damage had been done. Wells locked her desk with a key not to protect scissors, hand lotion, or personal notes but – phone books! And not just any phone books but ones that contained – as Wells put it – dirt! And that was why Eugenio Martinez, the CIA’s “agent” on the Plumbers team, possessed a copy of that key.
Wells’ mention of these dirty phone books came just after she had spoken of Republicans using the Watergate grand jury to embarrass Democrats on “moral” grounds. It was the same “crisis” Wells had cited three decades earlier, in September 1972, when she had composed a panicked handwritten letter to her friend Joann – known forever-after as “the Joann Letter,” first surfaced in the Liddy litigation – in which young Maxie had fretted about the “good scandal” the Republicans had on “moral grounds” in her case, and in which she had mysteriously assured her friend “the other records will be private.” So damning was the Joann Letter that Judge Motz, in his second dismissal of Well’s litigation, ruled that “a reasonable person, simply reading the language of that letter, could … conclude that Ms. Wells had been involved in activities … embarrassing [to] the Democratic Party.”
The appearance in Secret Agenda of the correspondence between Earl Silbert and the FBI laboratory – so revelatory the New York Times felt compelled to cover it as a news story before the book was even reviewed – left unresolved an outstanding, and centrally important, question:
What was the location of the wiretap that McCord and Baldwin had monitored for three weeks?
Among the most forceful and fair criticisms of Secret Agenda at the time of publication was made by reviewers who noted that Hougan, the master of documentary evidence, had provided none on this point. His conclusion was based more on the absence of taps discovered at the DNC. Indeed, Secret Agenda specified no physical location for the tap, either at the Columbia Plaza apartment complex or elsewhere, and identified no beginning or end date to the surveillance.
For 20 years or so, this has been the subject of collegial disagreement between Hougan and me. That Baldwin was monitoring Spencer Oliver’s telephone – or one used frequently by Oliver and Wells – was confirmed by numerous contemporaneous sources. One was Sally Harmony, Liddy’s secretary who typed up the intelligence and who told the Senate she recalled seeing only “the name of Spencer Oliver and another name given as Maxie.” We can talk, the discussants were overheard to say, I’m on Spencer Oliver’s phone. DNC employees, by many accounts, knew Oliver traveled frequently and sought out his office telephone for privacy.
Finally: Alfred Baldwin, the first member of the break-in team to cooperate with authorities, positively identified Oliver’s phone. “I told them where the phones were,” he said in previously unpublished Senate testimony, taken in executive session, in November 1973. “I physically described looking out the window [of the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge] where the phones were, what offices were being used [inside the DNC].”
This was progress. But one cul-de-sac we continue to wander, not so much lost as at a loss: If the Oliver/Wells line was indeed what Baldwin was monitoring, then why did the FBI find no wiretaps in their sweeps of the DNC? Here it is I who must acknowledge the absence of physical proof; but the only other logical answer is that the wiretap was indeed placed on Oliver’s phone and removed prior to the MPD arrests and FBI sweeps.
This, too, remains an area for future scholarship. Such research will likely train fresh scrutiny on the mysterious tour of the DNC that Baldwin secured for himself on June 12, 1972, during which he has acknowledged that he sought out Wells, and Wells has acknowledged that she left Baldwin alone, in Oliver’s office, for several minutes.
It will be both a historical and literary event when, as propriety demands, an enterprising doctoral student undertakes someday to write a good biography of Jim Hougan. In the hands of this ambitious scholar, Hougan will at last find himself subjected to Houganian diligence, the tracing of his life story, in memories + memoranda, to produce the definitive answer, or at least informed speculation, as to how he did it: How Jim Hougan came to write the most important book on Watergate, the quintessential public event, already the subject of hundreds of books when he embarked on the project.
