ITT and Watergate: The Colson Connection
Ingram, Timothy
ITT and Watergate: The Colson Connection by Timothy H. lngram The Colson memorandum was introduced to the Watergate Committee on August I , 1973, without fanfare, almost as a throwaway. Sam...
...Instead, not mix...
...In short, despite a search, this memo could by lying around anywhere at 1701 [Pennsylvania Avenue, CRP headquarters.] The memo implicating Mitchell was still at large...
...Even after the confusing ITT story faded from the headlines, O’Brien and the DNC refused to drop the issue...
...ITT also raised the compli- most of those involved in the Watercated jurisdictional questions involved gate hearings have proceeded with a in defining congressional turf...
...Neither the Watergate Committee nor the press has ever developed a One reason for the neglect of the coherent theory of thc case...
...On February 29 Jack Andcrson had blown the scandal open by publishing the “Dita Beard memorandum ” This document indicated that the Justice Department had let ITT off the hook on a major antitrust charge after the company had pledged $400,000 for the Republican Convention...
...It is, of course, appropriate for the President to instruct the Justice Department on policy, but in the context of these hearings, that revelation would lay t%is case on the President’s doorstep...
...Copies were addressed to Magruder, Mitchell, and Timmons...
...This hypothesis does not purport to explain every detail in the case, but it does offer a way of fitting a number of unexplained facts together...
...In March, 1972, when the final go-aheads were being given for Gordon Liddy’s plans, the White House was in near hysteria over the ITT affair...
...Given the ferocity of the Democratic Party’s fratricidal struggles, it is hard to believe that cvcn the “most professional’’ Democratic political operator could intimidate such a hardnose as Colson...
...Perfectly contrite, loolung prison pale in his wash-andwear suit, Hunt asserted that his mcn had hoped to find evidence at the DNC connecting the Democrats to taintcd money from Cuba...
...ITT and Watergate: The Colson Connection by Timothy H. lngram The Colson memorandum was introduced to the Watergate Committee on August I , 1973, without fanfare, almost as a throwaway...
...But the burglars’ main purpose was to find out whether Larry O’Brien had the missing ITT memoranda...
...In other words, with so much money, so few scruples, and such a finely developed sense of paranoia, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) should almost have been expected to have bugged the Democratic Party headquarters...
...A bit of scene-setting may be useful...
...To Colson the danger was clear: “Kleindienst is not the target, the President is...
...If the documents were as damning as Colson feared, they might provide the issue that could allow even George McGovern to defeat Richard Nixon...
...and Mitchell testimony, but had little The task of sorting out the impor- more understanding of the rationale tance of the colson memo-as for the break-in than they did a year other items introduced and tlien forgotten during the hearings-was left to the press, already overextended by the Seem Obvious to any detecsheer bulk of the Watergate hearings...
...Howard Hunt, for example, gave an explanation which met all the criteria except plausibility...
...Richardson told me that the pictures showed surgical gloves holding memos and letters, some of which bore the DNC letterhead and were signed “Larry...
...What no one seemed to realize is that events build on themselves and that scandal does not respect jurisdictional boundaries...
...Meanwhile, a special group made up of Colson, John Elirlichman, and Fred Fielding of Dean’s staff was on plumbing duty at the White House, examining the ITT documents that had not yet hit print...
...Finding out how much he knew-and, if necessary, preventing him from using what he did have-might easily have justified an operation like the Watergate burglary...
...To their horror they realized that copies of some of the most potent evidence were still unaccounted for...
...The detachment worthy of the most peSenate Judiciary Committee had al- dantic of scholars...
...There were no photographs of financial records or account books...
...Admittedly, the Watergate burglars might, through serendipity, find other useful evidence at the DNC...
...We won’t form ready spent two months looking into any opinions until all the facts are in” the ITT affair, and as a result the sounds judicious, but it certainly Ervin Committee tended to shy away doesn’t equip the Committee to ask from the issue...
...Lacking their own hypotheses, the Committee investigators have becn left with the theories generously offered by the burglars themselves...
...Dash was asking Haldeman whether he always informed the President of pot en t ially embarrassing developmentsand he offhandedly cited the Colson memo as an example...
...The limited mind set which saw the Watergate scandal in one category and the ITT scandal as a separate entity has also blocked a thorough investigation of both episodes and their cover-ups...
...Why was Larry O’Brien so important...
...Both Mitchell and Geneen have testified that they discussed policy only, not this case, and that Mitchell talked to no one else...
...As Senator Daniel Inouye askcd incredulously, “Did you expect the photographer to find somcwlzere in a ledger: ‘Received from Fidel Castro, x number of dollars’?’’ Hunt’s explanation also seems to rest on a flimsy factual basis...
...That something was ITT...
...Another indication of the White House concern over ITT was John Dean’s conversation with General Vernon Walters, deputy director of the CIA, in February, 1973...
...If members of the Committee did not press Hunt and the others harder for an explanation, it may be because they suspected that ultimately there was only a “why not...
...In one DNC publication, Fact, a box entitled “Watch This Man” itemized the wheelings and dealings of the President’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, a man at that time virtually unknown...
...tive...
...The consequences of his obtaining the missing memos could be disastrous...
...The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, now has the wayward memos that Colson panicked about in his letter to Haldeman...
...Scandals, like metaphors, do me nts of various witnesses...
...At the end of the first introduced without a frame work and phase, television viewers knew about without any real effort by the corn- the discrepancies between the Dean mittee to fit it into the larger picture...
...If the men surrounding the President could tolerate the bumbling of a Donald Segretti, why wouldn’t they spend $250,000 to keep Gordon Liddy and his ubiquitous flow charts out of their hair...
...Perhaps the memos will help Cox develop the theoretical framework the Watergate Committee has found so elusive...
...In December, 1971, tnrce months before Jack Anderson’s Dita Beard story, O’Brien had sent a letter to John Mitchell asking whether there might be a connection between “ITT’s sudden largesse to the Republican Party and the nearly simultaneous out-of-court settlement of one of the biggest merger cases in corporate history...
...Michael Kichardson, the one outsider in a position to know what the burglars were photographing, has contradicted Hunt’s claims...
...In April of this year Dean told James Schlesinger, then director of the CIA, that several CIA veterans who had been involved in Watergate had taken part in the Chilean embassy incident...
...Many found it hard to take this explanation seriously...
...Richardson works at Rich Photos in Miami and developcd the film shot inside the DNC headquarters during the burglars’ first successful break-in...
...Make no mistake, the Democrats want to keep this case alive, whatever happens to Kleindienst .” O’Brien had been the most effective adversary on ITT...
...Dated March 30, 1972, the same day Jeb Magruder said that final plans for the Watergate break-in were approved, it warned of the existence of other internal memoranda that would “directly involve” President Nixon in arranging the favorable settlement of the government’s antitrust suit against Timothy Ingram is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...This was the fear that led Colson to compose his memorandum of March 30, 1972, outlining the evidence that could implicate the President and Mitchell: A memo -sent to the Vice President addressed “Dear Ted” from Ned Gerrity [of ITT] tends to contradict John Mitchell’s testimony because it outlines Mitchell’s agreement to talk to McLaren [head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the man who had pushed thc case against ITT] following Mitchell’s meeting with [ITT President Harold] Geneen...
...Referring to a burglary of the Chilean embassy in Washington nearly a year earlier-in which the intruders took documents rather than property-Dean told Walters he believed that Frank Sturgis, a Watergate burglar and former CIA employee, was involved...
...We don’t know whether we have recovered all the copies...
...The apparent motive for the burglary was to search for documents exposing ITT’s plans to subvert the Allende government in Chile...
...The memo further states that Ehrlichman assured Geneen that the President had “instructed” the Justice Deparment with respect to the bigness policy...
...To those close to the President, O’Brien looked like a dangerous man...
...He had the dope on ITT, and ITT was what frightened the Administration the most...
...Sam Dash, the Committee’s chief counsel, had obtained it the night before from a secretary who worked at the White House, and he wanted to slip it in somehow during the third day of H. R. Haldeman’s testimony...
...It would carry some weight in that tile memo was written contemporaneous with the meeting...
...the lnternational Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT...
...In the months preceding the Watergate burglary, as Attorney General nominee Richard Kleindienst went through a protracted inquisition before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the White House grew increasingly suspicious that Larry OBrien had inside information on the whole ITT affair...
...At no Colson memo was that it dealt with point during the entire proceedings ITT and therefore appeared non-ger- has any hypothesis been advanced mane in the midst of the Watergate that could be tested against the statehearings...
...Overshadowed by the Haldeman testimony, it was soon forgotten by both the Committee and the press...
...tion with “who-knew-what-when” and Like so many other elements of “is-he-repentent,” the hearings lost the hearings, the Colson memo was their focus...
...Failing to pursue the logic of the Colson memo, both the Watergate Committee and the press lost a golden opportunity to try to answer that oft en-forgotten, but fundamental, question: Why, on June 17, 1972, did seven men burglarize and bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee...
...What was it that was worth the high risk, the $250,000 cost, and the amount of planning and energy that went into the Watergate operation...
...relevant questions along the way...
...Jeb Magruder explained that the White House regarded O’Brien as the Democrat’s “most professional political operator” and feared that if O’Brien rcmained as DNC chairman he could be “very difficult in the coming campaign...
...the even more explosive evidence concerning Nixon was in the files of the Security and Exchange Commission, and thus, far from invulnerable...
...But something else could-and did-scare Colson, who probably was the prime motivating force behind the break-in...
...motivation for the burglary...
...O’Brien’s importance is underlined by Magruder’s testimony that Charles Colson had telcphoned him “sometime in February” to urge that Magruder “get on the stick and get the budget approved for Liddy’s plans...
...It was a truly astonishing document...
...What, in God’s name, were Howard Hunt and his faithful Cubans Amid the Committee’s preoccupalooking for...
...Thanks to Senator Edward Gurney, the Committee’s attention was deflected from the Colson memorandum before anyone had a chance to gauge its importance...
...The statements and publications tnat came from O’Brien’s office during this period were remarkably prescient...
...The evidence “would lay this case on the President’s doorstep,” warned White House Special Counsel Charles Colson...
...This memo put the A. G. [Mitchell] on constructive notice at least of the ITT commitment at that time and before the settlement, facts which he has denied under oath...
...One reason why the ITT-Watergate connection has not been explained is that John Dean, who appeared to expose every other White House intrigue, did not mention ITT in his testimony...
...There is a [Herb] Klein to Haldeman memo, dated June 30, 1971, which of course precedes the date of the ITT settlement, setting forth the $400,000 arrangement with ITT...
...The problem with this hypothesis is that the Watergate burglary seems to have been far morc than a simple make-work expedition...
...Dean’s silence may have been based on self-interest, since Dean had been intimately involved in the original ITT settlement...
...that we need information, particularly on Larry O’Brien...
Vol. 5 • November 1973 • No. 9
