A Texas civil jury, Congress and a Special Counsel have all cleared the FBI of intentional wrongdoing at Waco. Maybe correctly. Yet, at the very least, the FBI acted with criminal recklessness at Waco. Aside from using teargas against children, the FBI deployed a Bradley fighting vehicle to ram-raid the room where the Branch Davidian children were holed up. Autopsies showed that a number of the children died from crush injuries.
After Waco, America became a more suspicious place. The FBI bears a share of the guilt for that.
William Gazecki (director),
Dick J. Reavis;
Watergate
Everybody knows about the Watergate conspiracy. President Richard Milhous Nixon organized cronies to burglarize the Democratic offices in the Watergate Hotel, Washington DC; when the break-in was investigated by
In the accepted Watergate story, James McCord and his fellow-Plumbers, as Nixon’s private burglars were known, illegally entered the Democratic National Committee to place bugs. Nixon’s supporters, however, allege there was
Then there are the sources for the Woodward and Bernstein stories. The anonymous Deep Throat was long assumed to be Robert Bennett, manager of the Mullen Company (a CIA cover outfit). Why was the CIA briefing against Nixon? A fit of scruples because they didn’t like a President who ordered burglaries of opponents? Hardly. The obvious conclusion, again, is that the CIA was sabotaging Nixon.
In 1984 Jim Hougan published
The reason the CIA wanted Nixon out of the Oval Office is explained by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in
There was, of course, another plausible reason for removing Nixon, not one to be breathed by pro-Nixonites like Colodny and Gettlin. He was paranoid and going off the rails.
Against the “Nixon was smeared by the CIA” theory there have to be weighed the White House Tapes. These record Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office and clearly capture him plotting with regard to Watergate. Also the “Nixon was smeared” case was weakened in 2005 when it was revealed that Woodward’s and Bernstein’s snitch Deep Throat was not Bennett but the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt.
On the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, investigative reporter Jim Hougan commented, “If one tries to understand Watergate in terms of a single monolithic operation by a team of spooks with a unified goal, it will defy understanding.” The burglars themselves have given differing reasons as to why they were in the Watergate building on 17 June 1972.
Although Nixon was guilty of all the crimes that caused him to resign, it is by no means impossible that he was edged on his way by the CIA and elements in the White House who used Watergate to smear him.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward,
Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
Jim Hougan,
Harold Wilson
During the 1930s the KGB targeted bright young things at British universities for recruitment as spies, men and women who might quietly worm their way up the fabric of the British state while really working for the USSR. Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess—all were testament to the KGB’s success. Philby even made it to the head desk at MI6’s anti-Soviet IX Section. All these men were eventually unmasked, but there remained the nagging doubt that somewhere deep in the British state there were other spies as yet uncovered. The nightmare scenario, of course, was that one such plant would become the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
In 1963 Hugh Gaitskell suddenly resigned as leader of the Labour Party; he died shortly afterwards of lupus disseminata. So unusual was the disease in the UK that Gaitskell’s doctor is said to have reported the matter to MI5. Gaitskell had recently visited the USSR and, according to Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsin, the KGB Assassinations Department 13 was seeking to assassinate a European politician and put their man in his place. At this point, MI5 agent Peter Wright revealed in his memoir
Wilson had been a minor blip on MI5’s radar for a long while. He had flirted with Communists at Oxford in the 1930s, and in 1947 he’d made several trips to Russia as the government’s Secretary for Overseas Trade. If not already a Soviet agent, Wilson, MI5 believed, was recruited on these trips by the old means of a “honey trap”—a sexual liaison with a female KGB member. Filmed or photographed, the liaison opened up Wilson to perpetual blackmail. Proof that Wilson was “turned” ostensibly came during the Korean War, when the Labour MP was less than red-blooded in seeking North Korea’s eradication. James Angleton of the CIA is said to have confirmed to MI5 Wilson’s role as a Soviet stooge.
By any measure, though, MI5’s evidence against Wilson was meagre. This did not stop the spooks from running a major smear campaign against him, which was steadily stepped up over the course of Wilson’s four tenures as Prime Minister. Termed “Clockwork Orange”, the MI5 smear campaign dripped media stories that Wilson was having an affair with his aide Marcia Williams, and falsely alleged links between Wilson’s Labour Party and the KGB. According to Peter Wright, at least 30 MI5 officers were involved in the mid-1970s plot to destabilize Wilson, an accusation supported by MI6 chief Sir Maurice Oldfield and Captain Colin Wallace of Army intelligence. (Wallace was later framed for manslaughter because of his refusal to aid the Wilson plot; in 1996 a court quashed his conviction.)
With no prior warning, on 15 March 1976, Wilson announced his resignation as Prime Minister. The official explanation was that at 60 he was too tired to go on. Soon afterwards, however, he began briefing journalists about an MI5 plot against him, adding that in 1968 and 1978 “dark forces” had planned a military coup against him. So far-fetched did these claims seem that they met with all-round amusement, forcing Wilson to deny his own words.
In 1993 an official government investigation,
Even so, there is enough evidence from Colin Wallace to incriminate sections of MI5 in the destabilization of Wilson’s 1970s governments. Wilson’s retirement is thus explained by the fatigue and depression caused by having
