Nixon, the CIA and the ‘Who Shot John? Angle’

Nixon advised chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on how to get the CIA director to kill the FBI’s probe.

“Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”

The June 23 tape was incontrovertible evidence that Nixon had obstructed justice. The last vestige of support for Nixon on Capitol Hill evaporated. Two weeks later, on Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.

But the “smoking gun tape” was not only the denouement of the Watergate affair. It was — and is — an unsettling glimpse into the dark heart of the Watergate scandal, and the workings of American power in the mid-20^th century. The commander in chief voiced ominous threats that reeked of unspoken crimes to his intelligence chief, whose agency had employed four of the seven burglars. For the next 50 years, Nixon’s entourage, JFK conspiracy theorists, journalists and historians pondered the June 23 tape as a Rosetta Stone of Nixon’s psyche. What “hanky panky” was Nixon referring to? What did he mean by “the whole Bay of Pigs thing?” What story was going to “blow” if the CIA didn’t cooperate?

A long-overlooked White House tape provides the answers. The “hanky panky” referred to CIA assassination operations in the early 1960s. The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was the Agency’s reaction to its most humiliating defeat. And the story that might blow was the connection between those events and the murder of JFK.

Richard Nixon and Richard Helms first met at a Capitol Hill briefing in 1956. Nixon, a former Navy lieutenant, was the young, ambitious and anxious vice president. Helms, also a former Navy lieutenant, was a gentlemanly spy, rising in ranks of the CIA with bland efficiency. (“His smile did not always include his eyes,” observed Henry Kissinger.) Helms’ discreet style won over President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed him as Director of Central Intelligence in 1966. When Nixon was elected president in 1968, LBJ recommended he keep Helms on.

Nixon, the insecure workaholic from Southern California, and Helms, a scion of the Philadelphia Main Line, actually managed to get along. While Helms portrayed their relationship as stormy, he flattered Nixon’s wounded pride and supported his hardline policies on Vietnam and domestic surveillance.

On June 16, 1972, just hours before the Watergate burglars were caught, Nixon and Helms had a friendly phone conversation about his meeting with the president of Mexico. “He’s on our side all right,” Nixon said. “Oh, that’s great, Mr. President,” Helms replied.

Fourteen hours later, five burglars were arrested at the Watergate, and the tenuous bond between Nixon and Helms began to fray. Nixon, frantic to hide the burglars’ ties to the White House, assumed his intelligence chief would help. In his memoir, The Ends of Power, Haldeman wrote that when he relayed Nixon’s message about the Bay of Pigs, Helms exploded, shouting, “This has nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs!” Haldeman reported back to Nixon that the gambit had worked and Helms had pledged to help with the FBI. And indeed he had. Helms sent word to acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, to “taper off” the investigation. But when Gray pushed back a few weeks later, Helms acquiesced, and the investigation continued. The director abandoned his defense of the president.

Helms opened his own memoir, A Look Over My Shoulder, with an account of the June 23 conversation. He denied raising his voice and insisted Nixon’s message about the Bay of Pigs was “incoherent,” which didn’t explain his uncharacteristic loss of poise. Helms later told a CIA historian that the phrase had the “devious, hard-nosed smell” of a threat, which was more plausible.

Haldeman suggested that Nixon used the phrase, “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as a coded reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. It was, he wrote, “the president’s way of reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro, a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.”

Haldeman’s interpretation of the “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was disputed by TV talk show host Chris Matthews. He dismissed the story, saying Haldeman’s ghostwriter, Joseph Dimona, made up the JFK connection and put it in the book without Haldeman’s knowledge. Dimona, however, denied Matthews’ claim. He told documentary film producer Eric Hamburg that the book was “all Haldeman’s.”

Dimona and Haldeman are deceased, but Tom Lipscomb, the editor-in-chief of Times Books, which published The Ends of Power, is not. “Bob Haldeman was a perfectionist and a control freak,” Lipscomb said in an interview. “The idea that he didn’t believe what he wrote about the Bay of Pigs and JFK’s assassination is absurd. Absolutely he believed it. We talked about it all the time.”

Haldeman’s take on “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” lived on in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic “Nixon.” The film depicted an ominous exchange about the Bay of Pigs in which Helms (played by the chilly Sam Waterston) condescends to Nixon (played by Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins). In articulating his dream of détente with China and Russia, Nixon says, “Cuba would be a small price to pay.” Helms replies, “So President Kennedy thought.” Spliced with film footage of JFK’s assassination, the exchange implied enemies of Kennedy’s Cuba policy were behind his assassination.

Helms, his espionage skills undiminished with age, obtained a copy of Stone’s script before the film debuted and threatened litigation. Stone excised the exchange from the movie’s theatrical release — for reasons of length, Stone said in an interview — but included it in the director’s cut. Helms did not sue. (He died in 2002.)

Without corroboration, Haldeman’s speculation about Nixon’s meaning has left most Nixon biographers puzzled about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” But an edgy conversation between Nixon and Helms eight months before the Watergate arrests confirms that Nixon did indeed have JFK’s assassination on his mind when he pressed Helms about the secrets of the Bay of Pigs.

Rewind the White House tape to the fall of 1971.

With the Vietnam War sputtering and the 1972 election looming, Nixon expected a tough reelection campaign that would pit him against Sen. Ted Kennedy, the younger brother of the slain president. Nixon’s plan was to frontally attack the Kennedy legacy. From his first days in office, Nixon had ordered adviser John Ehrlichman to obtain the CIA’s files on two embarrassing events in JFK’s presidency: the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 and the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963. Every six months or so, Ehrlichman visited CIA headquarters in Langley and invariably returned empty-handed.

Irritated, Nixon summoned Helms to the Oval Office on October 8, 1971, for some blunt talk. The tape of their exchange (collected and annotated on nixontapes.org) captures a ruthless president pressuring a proud intelligence chief. While the tape has been in the public record for years, one key passage has been largely overlooked by historians.

“Let me come to this delicate point that you’ve been talking to John about,” Nixon started. “John’s been talking to me about it, and I know he talked to you about it. Maybe I can perhaps put it in a different perspective than John. You probably wondered what the hell this was all about.”

It was about CIA operations.

“Now to get to the dirty tricks part of it,” Nixon went on. “I know what happened in Iran [a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953]. I also know what happened in Guatemala [a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954], and I totally approve both. I also know what happened with the planning of the Bay of Pigs under Eisenhower and totally approved of it.”

Nixon wanted to talk about what he saw as JFK’s failure, namely his refusal to authorize air support for the CIA-backed rebels when Castro’s forces pinned them down on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs.

“The problem was not the CIA,” Nixon said. “The problem was that your plan was not carried out. It was a goddamn good plan. If it had been backed up at the proper time. If he’d just flown a couple of planes over that damn place …”

Nixon was specific about his interest.

“My interest there is not the internal situation, the fight in the CIA,” Nixon confided. After the failed invasion, the Agency’s leadership split over whether failure was due to an ill-conceived operation or a weak-willed president. Nixon didn’t care about the blame game. “My interest there is solely to know the facts.”

The facts of the Bay of Pigs, however, were not in dispute. The CIA-trained invasion force lost, and senior officers like Hunt were forever embittered. Nixon had something else, something very sensitive in mind.

“What I want, what I want, Dick,” he rasped, “regarding any understanding, regarding any information, I do not want any information that comes in from you on these delicate and sensitive subjects to go to anybody outside …”

Nixon was finally ready to tip his hand.

“The ‘Who shot John?’ angle,” he said quietly, 17 minutes into the conversation. Nixon did not dwell on the phrase. He didn’t need to. In the context of his long-standing demand for the CIA’s records, the invocation of “the ‘Who shot John?’ angle” can only refer to one thing: Kennedy’s assassination. The ambush in Dallas was the first thing on Nixon’s mind as he pressed the director for the agency’s Bay of Pigs files. The president intuited a connection between the failed invasion in 1961 and JFK’s assassination two years later.

Nixon had no desire to expose what Helms called the agency’s “dirty linen.” Rather, he wanted to use the Bay of Pigs issue against presumed rival Ted Kennedy while defending the CIA from recent allegations that the CIA’s plots against Castro had led to JFK’s death. Nixon knew the Agency was vulnerable to JFK’s assassination, which he presumed gave him leverage over Helms.

Nixon assured Helms that his concern was not the agency’s actions related to Kennedy’s assassination but the criticism he faced as president.

“Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame?” the president went on. “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It may become — not by me — but it may become a very, very vigorous issue. If it does …”

Nixon couldn’t have been referring to the Bay of Pigs or Cuba, which were both dead issues by then. The JFK assassination story, by contrast, had erupted vigorously earlier that year. In January 1971, a front-page New York Times story reported that Dallas police chief Jesse Curry published a book saying JFK had been killed by a conspiracy. The same day, Jack Anderson, the syndicated investigative reporter, wrote a startling column in The Washington Post that began, “Locked in the darkest recesses of the Central Intelligence Agency is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.”

The story, picked up by the TV networks, was disturbingly accurate to Helms. There was indeed a top-secret CIA Inspector General’s report that itemized the six plots; Helms was running one of them on the day JFK was killed. Anderson’s source was a well-connected Washington lawyer representing Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia boss whom the CIA had enlisted to poison the Cuban leader in 1960. Anderson intimated that Castro had intercepted the CIA’s assassins and orchestrated Kennedy’s assassination as retaliation.

By leaking his story, Rosselli effectively used the Post to blackmail the CIA — and it worked. The agency shielded Rosselli from deportation proceedings, according to a memo declassified in 1997. The CIA-blessed mobster never shared his knowledge of the Castro plots with federal prosecutors. The agreement prevented disclosure of the CIA’s assassination policy, which probably saved Helms’ job.

Now Nixon wanted to know more about “the Who shot John? angle.”

“I need to know what is necessary to protect, frankly, the intelligence gathering and the Dirty Tricks Department, and I will protect it,” the president avowed. “Hey, listen, I have done more than my share of lying to protect you, and I believe it’s totally right to do it.”

Helms stayed silent.

“If I don’t know,” Nixon asked plaintively, “then what do you have?”

The president was beholden to his spymaster. This was a harsh reality of the Watergate affair, not reported by the Washington Post, not uncovered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The CIA and Helms barely figure in All the President’s Men, or the iconic movie that followed.

The Oval Office dynamic was also rather different than the showdown depicted by Oliver Stone. Helms did not threaten Nixon with a veiled reference to Kennedy’s assassination. In historical reality, the frustrated president unsuccessfully begged the imperious spy chief for more information about who killed his predecessor.

“I don’t believe that you can say, well … the director of the CIA … is the only one who is to know what happened in certain circumstances,” Nixon said. “The president is to know, and that the president’s successor is not to know?”

The agency’s JFK secrets were safe with him, Nixon emphasized. “I am not going to embarrass the CIA because it served. … I believe in Dirty Tricks.”

Helms finally spoke. He appeased Nixon by offering a folder of CIA cables on the assassination of Diem, material that Nixon could use to impugn JFK’s legacy in the 1972 election. “Sir, I’m working entirely for you,” he assured the president. “Anything I’ve got is yours.”

The partisan president came away happy. The canny director had given up nothing on the Bay of Pigs, the Castro plots or Kennedy’s assassination.

Eight months later, when the Watergate burglars were arrested, Nixon expected Helms’ help. He had indeed protected Helms. Nixon had rejected Haldeman’s suggestion to re-open the investigation of JFK’s death, which could have exposed the fact that the CIA had lied to assassination investigators on several key points. Nixon had ordered his Justice Department to block publication of a damning memoir written by a disillusioned CIA officer who had served in Helms’ office. Nixon knew burglar-in-chief Howard Hunt had served in a senior position in the Bay of Pigs operation and held JFK personally responsible for the defeat. And he knew first-hand that Helms was loathe to surrender anything about the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. So Nixon sent Haldeman to deliver his blunt message: If Helms helped limit the FBI investigation, the president would defend “the Dirty Tricks Department” from questions about Dallas.

Helms knew exactly what Haldeman meant. He had not forgotten his last Oval Office meeting with the president. Nixon was using the threat of JFK revelations to coerce him into a cover-up. But Helms couldn’t be blackmailed. The director protected himself and his agency by refusing to block the FBI’s investigation, minimizing the Agency’s support for the burglars and saying nothing about JFK. Nixon resented his independence, and the once effective relationship between them swiftly unraveled.

Five months later, in November 1972, the president demanded Helms’ resignation in a tense meeting at Camp David. Helms extracted an ambassadorial appointment, and the two men parted warily. When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Helms was relieved. In November 1977, Helms was convicted of lying to Congress about an assassination operation in Chile, making him the only CIA director ever convicted of a crime. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the JFK investigation in 1978. A year later, it concluded that Kennedy had been killed by conspirators who could not be identified.

Nixon and Helms, observed Sen. Howard Baker, “had so much on each other, neither of them could breathe.”

And now we know why.

From Scorpion’s Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, by Jefferson Morley. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.