All the President's Men (38 page)

Woodward placed a call to Capitol Hill to learn if the record of Krogh’s confirmation hearing contained any leads. It didn’t. But a congressional investigator who had worked on the hearing provided Woodward with the names of some of Krogh’s friends and acquaintances.

The reporters started calling. Soon there was a break: “Bud said  . . . that Hunt and Liddy were being routed information from national-security wiretaps,” Woodward was told. Krogh’s friend could recall no details. Krogh had mentioned it shortly after Hunt and Liddy had been indicted.

Working from a 1972 White House telephone directory, the reporters started calling the people under Ehrlichman’s jurisdiction. One former and one current member of the White House staff provided identical versions of the next link in the chain. David Young, the former appointments secretary to Dr. Henry Kissinger and Krogh’s deputy on the Plumbers’ project, had regularly routed transcripts of wiretapped conversations to Hunt and Liddy in 1971 and 1972. Both sources thought that reporters, and those suspected of leaking information to them, might have been tapped.

Woodward called Kathleen Chenow, the Plumbers’ ex-secretary, and asked about the tapped data Young had forwarded to Hunt and Liddy. “I can’t talk about that,” she said now.

The wiretapping activities—actual and suspected—of the Nixon administration had always been controversial. Under the administration’s “national security” wiretap policy, also known as the Mitchell Doctrine, the President’s men had claimed unprecedented authority to conduct electronic surveillance. Until the Supreme Court declared it illegal on June 19, 1972—two days after the Watergate arrests—the Justice Department had used electronic eavesdropping without court authorization against those suspected of domestic “subversive” activity. Radicals and civil-libertarians had long insisted that the term “subversive” was a euphemism for those who dissented too vigorously from the Nixon administration’s policies. Now the reporters attempted to learn if their colleagues in the news media were among the “subversives” the Justice Department had claimed the right to listen in on.

Judging from the reception their inquiries received, they were coming
close to something. Some officials were less than convincing in their denials, others refused to discuss it and some admitted they shared the reporters’ suspicions. The reporters had reached a dead end.

Woodward drafted a story based on the bare details. It reported that Hunt and Liddy had received information from national-security wiretaps; that it was routed to them by David Young, Dr. Kissinger’s assistant who was also a Plumber. The story noted that the Plumbers were in the business of investigating news leaks. Readers were left to form their own conclusions.

This time, too, Gerald Warren took a few hours to answer with the White House’s one-sentence denial: “After thorough checking, we can find absolutely no basis for the report.” Tiring of the game, Woodward asked him if that was a flat denial.

Warren, who became cold and formal in such situations, said, “I can’t say anything else,” and appealed for understanding. The article noted that Warren had not flatly denied the report.

Two weeks later,
Time
magazine published the first detailed account of the Nixon administration’s zealous campaign to trace news leaks by tapping the telephones of news reporters and government officials. According to the
Time
account, the phones of half a dozen reporters and twice as many White House and government aides had been tapped by the FBI for reasons of domestic “security.” The taps were begun in 1969, under a reluctant J. Edgar Hoover, and were continued under his successor, acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, until the Supreme Court decision of June 19, 1972. Hoover, said
Time,
had permitted his agents to install the taps
only
after John Mitchell authorized each tap in writing. In 1971, when the administration had tried to force Hoover to retire,
Time
said, the old bulldog-faced director had successfully resisted by threatening to reveal the details of the wiretapping campaign.

On February 26, the day
Time’s
edition hit the newsstands, Bernstein spent the morning at Justice, trying to confirm the details. Chasing from office to office after
Time’s
work on this one was less than fun. Bernstein got nowhere and took a cab back to the office. Dejected, he stepped into the elevator in the
Post
lobby and suddenly felt his arm grabbed and then his body being pulled back into the lobby. He started to struggle, then heard a female voice.

“Boy, am I glad to see you!” It was Laura Kiernan, a young news
aide who had recently been promoted to reporter on the local staff. “There’s a guy upstairs in the newsroom with a subpoena for you and your notes. Bradlee doesn’t want you up there to get it. He wants you out of here, fast.”

Bernstein dashed to a stairwell at the end of the lobby, then up seven flights of steps to the accounting department. Closing the door of an office with an adding machine on the desk, he dialed Bradlee’s extension. Woodward was off for a few days in the Caribbean, but they had long before agreed on what to do if they were subpoenaed. Turning over notes or naming sources in either a grand-jury proceeding or a judicial hearing was obviously out of the question. There would be plenty of time to fight that in court. The first thing to do was move their files to a safe place. Bernstein told Bradlee where the files were. They would be moved immediately, he said.

CRP had issued subpoenas for five people at the
Post:
Bernstein, Woodward, Jim Mann (who had worked on some of the initial Watergate stories), Howard Simons and Katharine Graham. Also reporters from the
Star-News,
the
New York Times
and
Time
magazine. Simons and Mrs. Graham, the only non-reporters on CRP’s list, had already been served. The subpoenas demanded that those served testify by deposition in CRP’s civil suit and bring with them all notes, tapes and story drafts in their possession regarding Watergate. Bradlee told Bernstein he couldn’t find the
Post’s
lawyers and he didn’t want him served until he’d heard their advice. “Get out of the building,” he said. “Go to a movie and call me at five o’clock.”

Bernstein went to see
Deep Throat
—the movie version. When he called at five, Bradlee told him to return to the office and explained the strategy. Bernstein would accept the subpoena. Custody of at least some of the reporter’s notes would pass to Mrs. Graham.

“Of course we’re going to fight this one all the way up, and if the Judge wants to send anyone to jail, he’s going to have to send Mrs. Graham. And, my God, the lady says she’ll go! Then the Judge can have that on his conscience. Can’t you see the pictures of her limousine pulling up to the Women’s Detention Center and out gets our gal, going to jail to uphold the First Amendment? That’s a picture that would run in every newspaper in the world. There might be a revolution.”

That night, Bernstein was at his desk typing when he saw the CRP
page hurrying down the middle aisle, arm outstretched. Bernstein continued to type. “Carl Bernstein?”

Head down, Bernstein raised one hand and picked off the subpoena. But the page stood there silently. Finally, Bernstein glanced up from the typewriter. The page looked about 21, tousled blond hair, wearing a V-necked sweater, very collegiate.

“Hey, I really feel bad about doing this,” he said. “They picked me because they thought somebody who looked like a student could get upstairs easier.” He was a law student who worked part-time at the firm headed by Kenneth Wells Parkinson, the chief CRP attorney. He promised to keep alert for any information that might be useful to the
Post
and gave Bernstein his home phone number.

13

A
FTER WOODWARD RETURNED
from the Caribbean later that week, a short, heavy-set young man with a thin beard ringing his face and wearing small, thick glasses arrived in front of his desk. “Tim Butz,” he said conspiratorially. He had once worked in Army intelligence, he said. Now he worked with a volunteer group of ex-intelligence types that was investigating people involved in domestic spying activities.

“I think we’ve found a George Washington University student who spied for CRP,” Butz said. “It will take some more work.” He told Woodward a rather disjointed tale. Woodward urged him to continue his researches and received almost a dozen telephoned progress reports in the next several days. After about a week, Butz called and said he had found a fraternity brother of the student spy who was willing to tell all. A dinner meeting was set that night, in the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel. When Woodward arrived, Butz was pacing the lobby with a young man he introduced as his “source”—a tall, nervous student named Craig Hillegass. The three went to a booth.

Hillegass described in vivid detail how Theodore F. Brill, his Kappa Sigma fraternity brother, had told him about being paid $150 a week by CRP to infiltrate the group of Quakers who had maintained a 24-hour-a-day vigil in front of the White House for several months. Brill’s assignment had been to make regular reports to CRP on the personal lives and plans of the demonstrators, he said, and then to assist in setting them up for arrests on drug charges. Eventually, the Washington police raided the vigil, but found nothing.

Brill, 20, was chairman of the Young Republicans at George Washington University. His job at CRP was terminated two days after the Watergate arrests. “The idea,” Hillegass said, thumping his water glass excitedly on the table, “was to create an embarrassment to the Democrats, because any embarrassment to radical groups would be considered an embarrassment to liberal politics and Senator McGovern.”

With unrestrained gusto, he went on to describe the James Bond way in which Brill was paid. “Ted said he once was told to meet a woman in a red dress with a white carnation, carrying a newspaper. He exchanged his written report for an envelope containing his pay. Another time, Ted told me, he went to a bookstore on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania [Avenue] and was handed a book by someone with his pay in the book.

“But it was part of a larger network. Ted said there were at least twenty-five others—and the information went to some pretty high-up people at CRP.”

Woodward was mindful of Harry Rosenfeld’s continuing pleas to find more of the 50 spies mentioned in the October 10 Segretti story. “Where are the other 49?” Rosenfeld would ask every week or two, though perhaps 25 had surfaced by that time. Theodore Brill did not seem exactly like a big-time operator, but—if his fraternity brother was telling the truth—he was part of the pattern.

George Washington University, five blocks from the White House, was on spring vacation. The next night, Woodward reached Theodore Brill at his home in River Edge, New Jersey. Playing the heavy with a 20-year-old history major made Woodward uneasy, but Brill might be one of those unexpected openings to something bigger. Eventually, Brill confirmed his fraternity brother’s story and added a few details. He had been hired and paid by George K. Gorton, 25, CRP’s national college director. “I was paid five weeks in May and June—once in cash and four times with Gorton’s personal check. I learned later that it was a mistake that I got paid in check because there were supposed to be no records kept. I got the impression from Gorton that there were a couple of others elsewhere doing the same work  . . . and Gorton said there was someone higher up who knew. I was supposed to go to the convention in Miami to do the same thing there with radical groups.”

Why didn’t you go? Woodward asked.

“My job was terminated two days after the Watergate bugging broke.
Gorton took me to lunch and said I had to stop because of Watergate. He said the operation was to be considered super-secret. People at the White House were upset,” said Brill, neatly undercutting the CRP-White House contention that nobody in either place had divined a relationship between Watergate and other spying and sabotage.

Did Brill have any thoughts about the ethics of his work?

“Ethics?” Brill repeated. He sounded astonished at the question. “Well, not illegal but maybe a little unethical.”

Woodward, feeling a bit too pious, thanked him and hung up. He found George Gorton’s home number and called. Rock music was blaring in the background and a young man’s voice said Gorton was out. After Woodward returned home, he tried again. It was nearly one
A.M.
More rock music. Gorton came to the phone and Woodward explained the story.

“Are you crazy?” Gorton shouted. “No
Post
reporter would call at one
A.M.
”

Woodward felt slightly wounded. Why didn’t people ever say that to Bernstein when
he
called at all hours of the morning? Woodward spelled his name and gave Gorton his home and office phone numbers.

“We’ll see,” Gorton shouted. “I’ve got a date here.” He slammed down the phone.

Woodward sat at his desk looking out the ninth-floor window at the lights of the capital city. “Creepsters,” Nicholas von Hoffman, the
Post’s
iconoclastic columnist, had called them. He stared out the window until he felt his anger subside.

The next morning, he was awakened by the phone ringing. “George Gorton,” the voice said. “I just couldn’t believe it was you calling in the middle of the night.”

Woodward asked him some questions.

“Oh, yeah, Ted Brill did a little work for me. . . . Spying is a funny way to put it. My direction to Brill was only to find out what radicals were doing. It was part of my job to know what all of youth was thinking.”

That, said Woodward, was a quaint way to conduct sociological research—planting an undercover agent, essentially an agent provocateur.

Gorton denied that Brill had helped arrange the raid on the Quakers
and insisted that Brill’s termination had “coincidentally” occurred two days after the Watergate break-in.

Then Gorton, who had been director of the Youth Ball for the President’s inaugural, declared proudly that he had people gathering information on radicals in 38 states.