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Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA [Hardcover]

Jim Hougan
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)


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Book Description

November 1984
Five men were arrested in the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Wearing business suits and surgical gloves, they were in possession of bugging devices and photographic equip ment. The book reveals that accounts of the break in have been deliberately falsified by a CIA cover story. One of the most important political events in American history, the Watergate affair, came to a dramatic end in 1974 with the resignation in disgrace of President Richard M. Nixon. Ten years later, investigative journalist Jim Hougan, relying upon thousands of pages formerly secret FBI and CIA documents, police vice squad reports and interviews with White House officials, Cabinet members, landladies, secretaries, security guards - at least a hundred in all - has come to startling conclusions about what really happened at the Watergate and asks questions never before posed


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 347 pages
  • Publisher: Random House Inc (T); 1st edition (November 1984)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0394514289
  • ISBN-13: 978-0394514284
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #715,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
(9)
4.7 out of 5 stars
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I would recommend reading the book for the extra information. John G. Hilliard  |  3 reviewers made a similar statement
It also happens to be wonderfully written -- a rare grace in the genre. William Ney  |  2 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 44 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars SECRET AGENDA and SILENT COUP April 5, 2008
Format:Hardcover
SECRET AGENDA was the first thorough argument, and perhaps remains the best, for the thesis that the Watergate break-in team was guided chiefly by the CIA.

All the men on the team -- aside from its supposed leader, goofy (pawn?) G. Gordon Liddy -- were CIA officers (E Howard Hunt and James McCord) or contract agents (Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez, all Hunt's people going back to the Bay of Pigs).

Hunt and McCord each "retired" (early) from CIA, within months of each other, in 1970. Hunt was soon hired by Chuck Colson in the Nixon White House, where he was first tasked with forging State Department cables to indicate that JFK had ordered the assasination of President Diem of Vietnam in 1963. Hunt then hired McCord to help the Plumbers plant bugs.

But one of Hougan's accomplishments is to document the fact that McCord was not (as typically stated in the press even today) a lowly CIA electrician. He was high in the Office of Security -- the "internal affairs" unit of the CIA, rising to head of OS for Europe in 1961, during the height of the Cold War. As such he reported directly to the Director.

Hougan's book remains a must read on the subject. It argues well the case that Nixon was helped in a big way out of office by DCI Richard Helms employing officers Hunt and McCord.

(One might argue that Helms & co. did the country a favor. That would be another book.)

(OR: Read John Ehrlichman's novel THE COMPANY, a roman a clef that paints the Nixon-Helms relationship with care.)

As for SILENT COUP, which came out in 1991, seven years after SECRET AGENDA, and which several reviewers here are recommending rather than Hougan's book ...

Be clear: SILENT COUP is NOT an elaboration of Hougan's thesis, but rather an attempt to eviscerate it (and I imagine the CIA had something to do with its publication). The attempt largely fails.

Which is not to say there's nothing of value in SC. Just that the overall package is a truth-bender clearly designed to accord with CIA public relations.

SILENT COUP details something Hougan had touched on: the late-Vietnam Beltway struggle between the National Security apparat, on the one hand, and Nixon and Kissinger, on other.

The latter were trying, in their way, to bring the Vietnam war to an end with "back channel" diplomacy that cut the Pentagon and CIA out of the loop. But the generals and spymasters were by then accustomed to controlling foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger (like JFK a decade before) were getting in the way.

SILENT COUP nails this: Nixon's "paranoia" and Ehrlichman's Plumbers were first provoked to active life not by "Leftist" spies/leaks, but by a Pentagon intelligence operation active inside the White House, intent on finding out what the hell Nixon and Kissinger were saying to the Chinese and Hanoi about shutting down the war.

Ehrlichman & co finally stumbled across the spy, a Navy ensign (if memory serves) named Radford, revoked his White House pass -- and acquired signed confessions from the brass running the op in the Pentagon. Shades of SEVEN DAYS IN MAY.

Nixon then decided not to publicize the matter. Nor to even cashier the guilty brass.

Then the Pentagon Papers hit ... And "paranoia" blossomed.

Thus, this chapter of SILENT COUP makes the book worth the coin. But its overarching aim is to clear CIA of Hougan's charge that it was running an anti-Nixon op thru Hunt and McCord -- to some extent by blaming the Pentagon instead (an old pattern, an old Beltway rivalry -- see Fletcher Prouty's THE SECRET TEAM). Hougan seems much closer to the truth.

But wasn't all that stuff already mere history? Why would Langley bother to publish SILENT COUP in 1991?

Answer maybe: Former CIA director (late 70s) and contract agent (early 60s) George HW Bush was still president when SC was published, and hoping for re-election the following year.

Bush pere's ne'er do well oil company, Zapata, had been involved to some degree in the Bay of Pigs affair, rubbing elbows then and there with shady people who later popped up in JFK's murder, Watergate and Iran-Contra (of which Bush as Reagan's VP was a principal manager).

People used to joke in 1988 that if you attend a Bush campaign meeting you should wear a trenchcoat (like everybody else in the room).

That is: a lot of CIA officers/goons were fired during the house-cleaning of the 70s (Rockefeller Commission, Church Committe, House Select Committe on Assassinations). They wanted Bush to win in 1988, to get back some of their own, and they staffed his campaign -- and, lo, the first major failure of exit polls to forecast election results occurred in the 1988 presidential race. Then the polls worked fine. Until 2000. And 2004 ...)

SILENT COUP, then, seems motivated in 1991 by Langley desire to not only defuse Hougan's thesis on its own behalf, but to "clear brush" for longtime Company man Bush's re-election.

The same desire helps explain why the astounding Kennedy books of 1992 -- JFK AND VIETNAM, by John Newman, PLAUSIBLE DENIAL by Mark Lane, and JFK by Fletcher Prouty -- all must reads -- were trashed or (worse) ignored by the press. (Search Operation Mockingbird). And why, the same year, Oliver Stone's film JFK, which drew on Prouty, Lane et al. for support, was attacked with such vigor. The Company was both defending itself and doing its best to keep certain skeletons from tumbling from the closet during Bush's re-election campaign.

The national press was co-opted by its mass participation in the JFK cover up, and has not yet recovered its "freedom." The First Amendment can't protect something that died. Hougan's SECRET AGENDA was a blow for that freedom. SILENT COUP was mostly The Company Strikes Back.

Finally: One of the best conversations about American politics since the end of the war (1945) is a book that tries to make sense of the domestic terrorism the US experienced from the murder of JFK thru Watergate: THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WARS by Carl Oglesby. It also happens to be wonderfully written -- a rare grace in the genre.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Wild Man June 24, 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Hougan's book is excellent. It demythologizes Watergate. Front and center is the CIA. For a great overview of what actually happened, and all of the behind the scenes machinations, this book can't be beat. I've read almost everything there is on Watergate--as well as Hearings Transcripts and White House Transcripts. This is the single best book on Watergate.

Unfortunately, as the title suggests, Hougan's thesis is that McCord, the master spy, "shut down" E. Howard Hunt's operation as it got too close to an on-going prostitution ring likely being used by the CIA. This was the "Secret Agenda" at play during Watergate.

Personally, I think Hougan was too close to the Spooks he had contact with, and they spun his story.

To those who want to know what Watergate was really about, I would ask you to focus on one single question: Was Daniel Ellsberg a CIA asset? If this is true, then the entire Watergate saga must be re-written. Interestingly, if you read the book "Wild Man", a biography of Ellsberg, the opening chapter gives us an entirely different version of what the burglars did when breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, one at odds with what Hunt tells us happened. And, what do we find in "Wild Man"? Well, it starts out with the funeral of a heralded CIA fighter, who Ellsberg just happened to know from Vietnam. (BTW, when in Vietnam, Ellsberg was 'dating' the daughter (journalist--a quaint and common CIA cover) of the #2 guy in the CIA.) We also find out that when Ellsberg is at trial, his co-defendant (well, not exactly a co-defendant because Ellsberg asked that their trials be separated, much to the consternation of Anthony Russo) came to court one day with a "red book". The biographer, for reasons unknown, doesn't tell us what the book was (I happened to research it in a library, on microfiche). It turns out to be Fletcher Prouty's "Secret Team"!! Why didn't the author identify the book? Why didn't he look into any possible CIA connection Ellsberg may have had. For Russo, reading Prouty's book---wherein Prouty, the Air Force liaison to the CIA during the 50's and early 60's, identifies Ellsberg as a CIA asset---helped him to make sense of Ellsberg's behavior. It should do that for all of us as well.

Just look at the time line in all of this: April 1971, the putative "Pentagon Papers" arrive at the NYT; May 1971, Hunt visits south Florida for his Bay of Pigs buddy Bernard Barker; June of 1971, the Pentagon Papers are published. June 1971, Colson hires Hunt; September 1971, Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office is broken into.

And why was it broken into? So that the CIA could do a "psychological profile" on Ellsberg. But, you see, if Ellsberg was a CIA asset, then so, too, was his psychiatrist. And there would have been no need whatsoever for the CIA types to break in. The real reason for the break-in was that Ellsberg would later on be let off any charges against him on the grounds that the government never informed his lawyers of the break-in. Ellsberg wasn't going to release the papers unless he was sure he wouldn't spend years in jail. He got his insurance policy via E. Howard Hunt.

From what I can tell, Watergate was just part of a war of survival on the part of the CIA. Hoover knew just how treacherous they were. He didn't trust them. During the Vietnam War Years, the CIA and military intelligence--as well as Wm. Sullivan's CoIntelPro--were infiltrating protest groups. The FBI did this somewhat legally; but MI and CIA had no authorization to be doing domestic spying. Hoover didn't trust these agencies one bit (cf. the Huston Plan). Hoover stopped the "black bag jobs" because he wanted police agencies to know that any black bag jobs were not FBI jobs. This pulled the cover out from underneath MI and CIA. To those who are sophisticate enough, you will see that a 'smear campaign', much like the Post's and Times' job on Nixon, was unleashed by the CIA (cf the Church Committee's findings---I had to go to a Law library). The CIA used Liddy (the apparent dupe in all of this) to go after Hoover. When Nixon wouldn't force Hoover to resign, the smear campaign started. Hoover, tough as he was, knowing who he was dealing with, was not flustered by any of this. And then.........he dies. What do you know about that!

The Pentagon Papers were let out by the CIA (they were actually National Security Council papers---it seems to me "Pentagon Papers" is a great misnomer) to point the finger at JFK and to all the dirty stuff connecting him with Liem's assassination and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. "The Company", by Erlichman, brings this side of things out nicely.

So this was the tainted milieu within which Watergate unfolded. Per Haldeman, Nixon's fall in Watergate happened because Nixon, after the '72 election, had asked that EVERY federal employee resign, so that he could hire back "his own people". But, of course, the CIA had, and has, people in all parts of the government, some needing years to get into places of power. They weren't about to let that happen. And, so, when Nixon wins the election, and makes this decision to force resignations, guess what, next thing to happen is James McCord sending a note to the White House saying that if DCI Helms were forced out, "all the trees in the forest will fall." That's a fairly apt description of Watergate, isn't it?

McCord then changed lawyers, and, before you know it, he's written a note to Sirica saying that perjury had taken place. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The only book that even gets close to what really happened are Haldeman's, "The Ends of Power", and Hougan's. This book will sweep away all of the media nonsense we, the unsuspecting public, are force-fed by the (CIA influenced) media.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars There is still a lot we don't know about Watergate January 2, 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Jim Hougan is an able investigative reporter with an interest in the "underworld" of Spooks and Spies. Hougan's book "Spooks", in many ways a companion volume to "Secret Agenda", was the product of a four year investigative project. Hougan does his home work.

"Secret Agenda" raises questions about Watergate and the numerous CIA connections in the case. In particular Hougan explores the implications of the Radford spy ring, an "unofficial" Pentagon spy operation directed at Kissinger's secret diplomacy, and a Washington DC based "Call Girl" ring over which the CIA's general security unit had some influence.

It is difficult to assess how Hougan's theory holds up today. During the famous Frost / Nixon interviews, Nixon himself alluded to some national security angles to the Watergate affair and recently Gordon Liddy has made statements in support of some of Hougan's ideas in connection with a recent court case. Still Hougan's pick for the identity of "Deep Throat" has not panned out. One person he explicitly passed over, the FBI's Mark Felt, turned out to be the one. Still as Hougan has commented from his web site, having Felt, the former chief of the FBI's Cointelpro operations as "Deep Throat" raises new questions.

Hougan's writing style is professional, clear and entertaining. Since retiring from investigative journalism, Hougan now applies his talents to spy and detective fiction.
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