From The New Book 'The Nixon Tapes"... Spying On Teddy Kennedy...

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5. Operation Sandwedge

Operation Sandwedge and more on the Bear Trap


Possible parallels between the plot to kill Jack Anderson and Chappaquiddick ..

Fresh Air (4 years ago) about journalist Jack Anderson:

[font color=green]Dave Davies:[/font] The scandal that brought Nixon down, the Watergate scandal, kind of left Anderson behind in some ways. I mean other reporters really took the lead on that as well as, of course, congressional investigators and federal prosecutors. But it was fascinating to read in your book that Anderson himself was almost way ahead of this story.

[font color=blue]Mark Feldstein:[/font] Yes. Jack Anderson was ahead of the Watergate story in two respects. First, he exposed what was really the precursor to Watergate, which is known as the ITT scandal. This was a scandal where he got a smoking gun document from Dita Beard, the Washington lobbyist for ITT, one of the largest corporations, International Telephone and Telegraph, of its time, and he and his young leg man at the time, Brit Hume, who, of course, later became famous as an anchor man for Fox News, they broke this story in essence of how the Nixon administration took a bribe - or how the Republican Convention took a bribe, $400,000 was pledged by ITT, and in exchange they dropped antitrust action, watered down antitrust action, against ITT. And Anderson and Hume obtained the smoking gun document that proved it, which the lobbyist herself admitted it.

This threatened Nixon more than any of Anderson's national security secrets because it got to the heart of the corruption at the center of the Nixon re-election campaign. And Nixon's men went into overdrive trying to contain this scandal. They decided to plant false documents with Anderson, they plotted about breaking into his office, typing up documents on White House stationery on his typewriter, leaking it to him so that when he published it they could trace it to his typewriter and accuse him of forging documents. They, according to testimony I have in my book, concocted false photographs to put Anderson in photos to implicate him in wrongdoing. They engaged in all kinds of dirty tricks to try to stop Anderson from this - punish Anderson for this expose. And this was really the precursor to Watergate. And this was when they, you know, came up with a plot to actually assassinate Jack Anderson.

[font color=green]Dave Davies:[/font] Well, I wanted to talk about that, because after Nixon's re-election in 1972, they decided they really had to deal with Anderson. And the notion that there had been talk of assassinating Anderson, that was revealed a couple of decades ago. What did you learn about how serious an effort this was to kill him?

[font color=blue]Mark Feldstein:[/font] The plot to assassinate Anderson turned out to have been much more serious than anyone realized. There are documents in the National Archives that have never been released before in which prosecutors discuss this, investigated this. And I got what amounted to a confession from one of the conspirators, Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar, before his death in 2003, where he admitted for the first time what his co-conspirator, Gordon Liddy, had already admitted - that the two of them plotted to assassinate Anderson.

In fact, they went beyond merely plotting. They actually conducted surveillance of Anderson. They tailed him from his work spot, garage, to his house. They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities, how they could break in, how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle - that was one of the methods they discussed using. They talked about how they could spike his drink and [font color=red]they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash[/font]. They met with an agent from CIA who was a specialist in poisons.

They met just a block from the White House at the Hay-Adams Hotel on March 24th 1972, and they pumped this CIA operative - former CIA operative - for information about what kind of toxins, what kind of poisons would be best to use so it would not be discovered in an autopsy. So the plot to assassinate Jack Anderson that emanated from the Nixon White House was very real.

And it was ultimately called off because they decided instead that they needed Hunt and Liddy to break into the Watergate apartment complex and office building and that, of course, led to their arrest and the downfall of the regime...

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=130192940

BTW you should read / listen to the rest of that piece on Fresh Air. Reminds me of another great interview that Dave Davies conducted about the lack of accountability for the Wall Street Bankers.