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With regard to National Security Council duties, the liaison officer was a senior staff member of the NSC with an office in the old Executive Office Building. The liaison officer had a special White House pass permitting access throughout the Executive Office Building. The liaison office was located with other NSC staff offices, administratively integrated with them and subject to the same staff administrative procedures, except for communications to and from Kissinger and Haig dealing with military matters. These were transmitted by hand delivery outside usual staff channels.
The first liaison officer in the Nixon administration was Rear Admiral Rembrandt Robinson, a man of unique talent and professional competence, able to “suck up information like a sponge,” who took on vast amounts of work and responsibility. As a member of the NSC staff, Rem was on regular, authorized distribution lists of copies of daily cablegrams received by the White House, intelligence reports, study directives, study responses, decision memorandums, incoming and outgoing correspondence with other branches of the executive, intrastaff memorandums and papers, and a wide variety of other material. Much of this information was highly classified and extremely sensitive.
Kissinger and Bud treasured Rem Robinson. In a November 6, 1970, meeting, Kissinger told Bud that “Rem Robinson had his full confidence and was authorized to tell Admiral Moorer and me everything K was doing.”44 When Rem departed for his next rotational assignment, Bud wrote a personal note that his detachment from the Washington area brought mixed emotions. “Joy on account of the honor of breaking his flag at sea, but also remorse, because your splendid performance in a particularly delicate assignment will be sorely missed. Words are inadequate to describe how very much you have assisted me during my first year in office.”45 Upon his untimely death in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, Bud wrote to Rem’s widow, Joan, “I came to feel personally so close to Rem that I feel part of me is gone.”46
It was apparent to Rem that, notwithstanding Kissinger’s professed desire to keep the JCS chairman fully informed, there were many things he was not sharing with the chairman and the secretary of defense. Zumwalt started keeping his own record of these omissions, prepared by executive assistant Burt Shepherd. “My impression from my discussions with Henry Kissinger and with other members of his staff is that he and the President wanted Admiral Moorer to feel that he was getting all the information but they in fact did not intend him to get all information. And that they had their own little plot within plots that was designed to exclude him.”47
But there was another counterplot within the counterplot, involving navy yeoman Charles Radford.
Radford had joined the navy in Reno, Nevada, on July 8, 1963. He found the navy to be a rewarding and meaningful experience and went to great lengths to please his superior officers and serve his country. On September 18, 1970, he reported for duty on the staff of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, working for Rear Admiral Robinson.
Robinson told Radford that he was in a position of great trust. He would be seeing things that, in some cases, Robinson would not be seeing and therefore needed to keep an eye out for materials he thought Robinson might be interested in. It would take a while for Radford to learn what types of things Robinson might need to see, but Rem made it clear that he wanted copies of such materials. “He stated that if I was able to make a copy, to do so and give it to him. He made it clear that my loyalty was to him, that he expected my loyalty, and that I wasn’t to speak outside of the office about what I did in the office. He further stated that he worked directly for the Chairman and that it was his responsibility to keep the Chairman informed and that I was to help him do this. He also stated that I would find some people who would deliberately leak things to him to prove their own points, and that I should be careful of any information that was deliberately given to me, to assess the person’s character and actions at the time I received the information and communicate these things to him, in order that he could properly assess the value of the information he received.”48 Radford’s role was to be “a shadow of him, or an extension of himself, which I don’t mind being, as I admired the man.”
Radford soon proved himself up to the task, impressing Robinson enough that he arranged for Radford to accompany Haig on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. Radford was an exceptional stenographer, and he served as Haig’s stenographer on the trip. The assignment meant that Robinson would be privy to all cable traffic and messages between Haig and Kissinger. “The Admiral stated that this was an opportunity to do a job for the Joint Chiefs, and that it would be of quite a bit of value; that he would like me to keep my eyes open for any and all information that might be useful to the Joint Chiefs.” Intelligence mastermind Vice Admiral Earl Rectanus knew exactly what was going on, telling Paul Stillwell, “Someday you might want to keep in the back of your mind—I’m not going to go into it, but Rembrandt Robinson and his days in the White House with Henry Kissinger, the opening of China and the relationship of Naval Intelligence, with that whole thing.”49
Robinson was specific with regard to the types of information he needed—troop strength and projections of reductions in Vietnam, the details of any agreement the White House might be discussing with President Thieu of South Vietnam, and any information Radford might see bearing on General Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. Radford returned from his trip with Haig on December 17, 1970, giving Robinson copies of materials he had collected. Robinson seemed quite pleased, as were members of the JCS staff. “One time I remember specifically that Captain Train walked through the outer office from Admiral Robinson’s office and said to me, ‘Radford, you do good work.’ He didn’t say any more than that and kept walking through the office, smoking his pipe. Since I had just returned from the second trip with Brigadier General Haig and had given Admiral Robinson much information, I knew what the captain was talking about.”
In the first week of June 1971, Rear Admiral Robinson was transferred to the command of Cruiser-Destroyer Flotilla 11, homeported in San Diego. He was replaced by Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander. Bud considered Welander a good staff officer but not in the same league as Robinson. Welander soon approached Radford about going on a trip with Kissinger in July 1971. “Admiral Welander told me that he would be interested in anything I could get my hands on.” By this he meant diplomatic dealings with China and anything else. “He cautioned me to be careful and don’t get caught. He said, ‘Don’t take any chances.’ ” Eager to please his new boss and having gained the trust of Haig and Kissinger, Radford expanded his role from transmitting information to stealing it, being proactive about getting it.
The Haig trips had provided useful information, but the assignment to accompany Kissinger on his July 1971 worldwide trip, with the secret detour to China, was where Radford hit the mother lode. Radford was in the briefing book three category, no need to know, but he found out about the trip by rummaging through Kissinger’s personal papers, burn bags, and briefcase in Pakistan. Sneaking into Kissinger’s room, the yeoman rifled through Kissinger’s personal belongings and discovered that Kissinger was heading to Beijing.50 He had so many documents by the time he got to New Delhi that he asked a friend to mail them back to him at his White House office. Radford coded the envelopes so he would know if they had been tampered with.
Radford wanted to make sure that Moorer had the information Kissinger was withholding. Most of these documents had been obtained by going through Kissinger’s briefcase, “reading or duplicating whatever papers he could get his hands on, and sometimes retaining discarded carbon copies of sensitive documents that were intended to be disposed of in the ‘burn bag.’ ”51 He brought back copies of everything he could. Moorer would soon be seeing materials he clearly was not intended to get pertaining to Kissinger’s first meeting with Zhou Enlai. “The Chiefs thus had an extra measure of knowledge about Kissinger, much as Henry did about Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird thanks to the wiretap the FBI had placed on Laird’s military aide.”52 Welander complimented Radford on a “great piece
of work” and warned him to “never tell anybody that I had done it.”
Radford returned from the trip with Kissinger by way of San Clemente. He telephoned Welander in Washington, and in the course of that conversation, “He [Welander] asked me to get a copy of the agenda items of the meeting that was going to be held in San Clemente that he and Admiral Moorer were going to fly out for at the end of the week.” Radford made an exact copy of the agenda book being used and personally gave it to Welander in El Toro, where his plane had landed. Welander later told him, “I had no idea how helpful it was for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to walk into a meeting and to know what is going to be said.”53
Two months later, in mid-September 1971, Welander told Radford that he was needed once again to accompany General Haig to Saigon. “I told him that I would go and he told me that I would be doing the same sort of things as before. He further told me that a lot of things were going on, and that he wanted information relating to the peace settlement in Saigon, or relating to South Vietnam, or relating to any messages that were sent by Henry Kissinger or Brigadier General Haig. He stated that information relating to these items would be of great interest to the Chairman, Admiral Moorer.”54 Radford was able to provide field reports by rifling through Haig’s briefcase as he was returning from South Vietnam. By his estimation, Radford took over five thousand documents in his fifteen months on Kissinger’s staff.55 He knew it was wrong, but “I was loyal to the ‘cause’—the Navy. . . . The government stank. The JCS weren’t getting all the information that they wanted and were forced to steal their information.”56
It remained a highly efficient, productive, and clandestine method for obtaining information until December 1971, when a series of Jack Anderson’s syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round columns appeared. The period of March to December 1971 is usually referred to as the Tilt, a time during which the Nixon administration abandoned its public pronouncement of neutrality to favor Pakistan in its war with India.57 Created in 1947 by a partition of India, Pakistan, a nation predominantly of Muslims with a minority of Hindus, was divided into East Pakistan and West Pakistan. The Punjabi elite controlled the central government in West Pakistan, and the Bengali minority lived in East Pakistan. India, a democracy under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, was predominantly Hindu.
In 1971, Pakistan’s third president, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, decided to squash an independence movement in East Pakistan by dispatching his army from West Pakistan to target Hindus living in East Pakistan. Somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Bengalis were killed in a genocidal purge, triggering the largest mass exodus in history. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus escaped into India. When Nixon remained silent on the genocide, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called for the independence of East Pakistan. In the White House, Nixon called Gandhi “an old witch” and “that bitch, that whore.”58 He feared that Gandhi’s actions would undermine his China initiative.
Despite the administration’s public line of remaining neutral in the conflict, privately Nixon was leaning toward Pakistan because of its role in brokering an opening with the People’s Republic of China. Then, on December 3, 1971, Pakistan attacked India. At a Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) meeting that same day, Kissinger moaned, “I am getting hell every half hour from the President that we are not being tough on India. He has just called me again. He does not believe we are carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt in favor of Pakistan.” These classified meeting notes were released verbatim in Anderson’s columns. He later released the complete texts of the minutes from other WSAG meetings of December 4, 6, and 8.
The conflict between India and Pakistan became another proxy battle in the Cold War. China backed Pakistan; the Soviets backed India. Ever the Realpolitik pragmatist, Nixon cashed in with Pakistan, needing a wedge for his opening with China. Nixon could not afford to do anything that could be construed as an affront to Yahya Khan, because Pakistan served as Nixon’s gateway to China. “We don’t really have any choice,” Kissinger told Nixon. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.”59
Laird, Moorer, and Zumwalt had reservations about the tilt. At a December 6, 1971, top-level senior staff meeting, Bud told Laird, “I am disturbed. The United States will take a lot of lumps siding with the Pakistanis.”60 Bud believed that East Pakistan would inevitably gain its independence and the Soviets would end up on the winning side. Bud soon had another reason for concern. On December 10, without consulting either Laird or Moorer, the president ordered a naval task force from the Seventh Fleet to be assembled with the aim of preventing the disintegration of Pakistan. Nixon feared that Gandhi would use the crisis as a pretext to destroy West Pakistan.
Bud was ordered to assemble a task force from the Seventh Fleet, then located off the coast of Vietnam. Neither Moorer nor Bud was given a mission for the ships to carry out. The administration’s official public explanation stated that the flotilla was being sent to evacuate fifty Americans from Dhaka in East Pakistan. The Indian government and just about everyone in the State Department scoffed at the transparency, noting that the task force included “the world’s largest nuclear aircraft carrier (USS Enterprise), the amphibious assault ship Tripoli with a marine battalion, assault helicopters, and a nuclear attack submarine.”61
Zumwalt and Moorer feared that a naval task force being sent into a war zone without orders could lead to unintended consequences. Moreover, the Indian Ocean Soviet navy deployments outnumbered the task force, and Bud worried about a confrontation at sea. “In the short term, the military balance in the Indian ocean area will go against us,” the CNO warned.62 The counsel fell on deaf ears, because for Nixon this was a power play to support Pakistan. On December 13, the flotilla (Task Force 74) was ordered into the Indian Ocean in daylight so that it could be easily detected by India and the Soviets.63 Inside the Oval Office, Kissinger said to Nixon, “You’re putting your chips into the pot again.” Nixon felt that the Chinese, Indians, and Soviets needed to know that “the man in the White House was tough.”64
The White House was in a rage over the leaks to Anderson, especially the details of policy discussions from the Washington Special Actions Group. Within twenty-four hours of the first Anderson column quoting from the classified meetings, Kissinger persuaded Nixon “to launch a full-scale investigation of Anderson’s penetration.”65 Ehrlichman knew the perfect person for the assignment—David Young and his Plumbers unit, the secret White House group created to stop leaks, named after Young’s father, who had been a plumber. Young had previously worked as Kissinger’s personal assistant but was now on Ehrlichman’s payroll. The Plumbers had been relatively inactive since breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office over Labor Day weekend in 1971, looking for evidence that might discredit the Pentagon Papers leaker.
Meanwhile, Admiral Welander was stunned when reading the first of Anderson’s columns. He saw a reference to “guided missile destroyers Parsons, Decatur, and Tartar SAM.” Weeks earlier, Kissinger had asked Welander to prepare a list of ships that were to accompany the USS Enterprise into the Indian Ocean. Welander recalled asking Radford to type the document for his signature. When reviewing the list, Welander caught the misuse of a word in identifying a ship in the destroyer category as a Tartar SAM (Tartar being the surface-to-air missile that the Parsons and Decatur carried). Welander personally corrected the error and made only five copies of the document. Welander realized that the leak must have come from his files, meaning that the leaker was someone who had access to them. This had to be Radford, but Welander was in a bind, because he knew Radford had been stealing for the Joint Chiefs, but apparently he was also in bed with Jack Anderson. Welander had no option other than dutifully informing Haig and Laird that he suspected Radford as the source of the leak to Anderson, never mentioning that he was also a spy for Moorer. Welander had the uneasy sense that his own neck was on the line.
On December 16, navy yeoman Charles
Radford was ordered to the Pentagon for questioning by Young and W. Donald Stewart, the Pentagon’s chief investigator whose office was in the Defense Investigative Service. The investigators were relentless in their focus on Radford’s relationship with Anderson, demanding a detailed accounting of his activities over the past weeks. Stewart cursed at Radford, threatening that he and Anderson would both end up in federal prison for violating the Espionage Act. “He used some of the worst profanity I ever heard, most of it directed toward Mr. Jack Anderson and ‘his kind’ and toward ‘traitors.’ At one point I thought him on the verge of hysteria,” recalled Radford, who was so shaken that he began sobbing.66
Radford denied giving any classified materials to Anderson, but four polygraphs indicated otherwise. According to Haldeman, the “polygraph makes clear that he did it.”67 Stewart was certain that he had found “the son of a bitch that’s giving everything out to Anderson.”68 Radford disclosed that he and Anderson were friends; in fact, they had dined together on December 12, the night before Anderson’s first India-Pakistan story appeared in the papers. Radford said it was coincidence. In an earlier assignment, Radford had been stationed in India, where he’d met Anderson’s parents in New Delhi’s Mormon church. When Anderson’s parents had a problem with their visas, Radford came to their assistance. As a way of thanking him, when Radford returned to the States, the Andersons invited him and his wife to dinner at Jack’s home. They became fast friends. They were members of the same Mormon church, and their wives enjoyed each other’s company. Radford had Indian students staying with him at his home. He was pro-India and, of course, the White House position was anti-India. Radford felt that Kissinger and Nixon were “irrational” when it came to India; he had an “animus” that the secret tilt was “very hypocritical, very two-faced.”69