Years ago, when Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy were doing their tandem “debate tour” of the nation, I asked Liddy if he had ever killed anyone. “No,” he said, adding, “But, if I had, I wouldn’t tell you.”

Believing what you’re told by intelligence agents is foolish business.
Posted by: Meteor Blades at December 4, 2003 08:28 PM | PERMALINK

Liddy wasn’t joking:

I was so confident of the ability of the [dirty tricks] group recruited that when I happened to meet Bud Krogh on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building, I thought of a proposal I’d made months before. I’d asserted that key foreign drug-smuggling operatives, who were well known should be recognized as killers of American children and subject to being killed themselves. By us. State had been horrified at the idea of such direct action as assassination and the suggestion had gone nowhere, but Bud had not seemed to object in principle. He had been traveling abroad quite a bit and had an appreciation of the difficulties involved in combating the drug barons with mere diplomacy. I was also very grateful to him for all he had done to advance me in the administration. I patted him on the back and said, “Bud, if you want anyone killed, just let me know.” He smiled and said, “I will.” I reacted to his smile by saying, “I’m serious.”

“I know you are,” said Krogh, his smile gone. “I’ll let you know.”

Long before Ann Coulter expressed the wish that al-Qaeda had flown jet airplanes into The New York Times building, Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt actually planned, themselves, on murdering an American journalist, Jack Anderson. Small wonder that John McCain, and the wingnutosphere which seeks to elect him, has little problem with Gordon Liddy, one of the first of the Army of Davids to think (albeit in Liddy’s case literally) about slaying the great monsters of the wingnut imagination, the much-hated Goliaths of the “MSM.” Showing how little things have changed over the years, Liddy always maintained that his scheme to murder Jack Anderson was “not retributive” but preventative, that it was a matter of principle — similar to how, nowadays, wingnuts insist their crusade against the press is not because of venal or vindictive reasons, but because of a disinterested desire to correct “bias.” In point of fact, both Liddy and his admirers (WFB found the assassination story “riveting“) are full of shit.

First for Liddy’s own account of how he planned to murder Jack Anderson. Here’s the version he told to Playboy magazine:

LIDDY: We worked out a plan, but it was ultimately never approved by our principals. Hunt and I started the ball rolling by meeting a physician from the CIA, who was introduced euphemistically as a specialist in “the unorthodox application of chemical and medical knowledge.”

PLAYBOY: Meaning an expert in killing people.

LIDDY: Crude but not inexact. Anyway, we had lunch over at the Hay-Adams across from the White House and discussed various methods of killing Anderson, including coating the steering wheel of his car with an LSD solution sufficiently potent to cause a crash, which we rejected as too chancy, and “aspirin roulette”, which we also turned down.

PLAYBOY: Dare we ask?

LIDDY: Aspirin roulette is intelligence jargon for a rather common assassination technique, which entails the substitution of an ordinary aspirin or other headache-remedy tablet in the target’s medicine cabinet with a look-alike that is actually a deadly poison.

Incidentally, “aspirin roulette” is a method by which the CIA tried to murder Fidel Castro. Proving the adage that wingnuts — even the novelists among them — are the most unimaginative lot, also involved in that project (“Track II”) was Liddy’s co-conspirator, E. Howard Hunt. Anyway, the version in Liddy’s memoir, Will (in which Liddy himself notes Hunt’s tendency to keep recommending the same method of murder over and over), is consistent with the above, only more detailed:

On a brisk February day shortly thereafter, Howard Hunt and I had lunch with a man he introduced to me as Dr. Edward Gunn, a physician retired from the CIA and an expert on “the unorthodox application of medical and chemical knowledge.” I took “retired” to be in quotes since that is standard technique and Hunt introduced me under my operational alias, “George Leonard.”…

The purpose of the luncheon, Hunt explained to me previously, was to take advantage of the expertise of Dr. Gunn in preparing, for the approval of Hunt’s “principal,” a plan to stop columnist Jack Anderson. Even with each other, Hunt and I often, when discussing the most sensitive of matters, used the term my principal rather than identify our superiors. I, at least, had several. Hunt, to my knowledge, had only one: Chuck Colson.

Anderson, Hunt reported, had now gone too far. As the direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days. That was too much. Something had to be done.

The conversation at lunch was in the hypothetical terms usually employed in such circumstances. We did not mention Anderson’s name explicitly. Hunt urged the use of LSD on the steering wheel of the “target’s” automobile to cause him to hallucinate at a public function and thus be discredited. Dr. Gunn shot down that idea on the ground that CIA experience with the drug had demonstrated the unpredictability of individual reaction.

I took the position that, in a hypothetical case in which the target had been the direct cause of the identification and execution of one of our agents abroad, halfway measures were not appropriate. How many of our people should we let him kill before we stop him, I asked rhetorically, still not using Anderson’s name. I urged as the logical and just solution that the target be killed. Quickly.

My suggestion was received with immediate acceptance, almost relief, as if they were just waiting for someone else to say for them what was really on their minds. There followed a lengthy discussion of the ways and means to accomplish the task best. Hunt, still enamored of the LSD approach, asked Dr. Gunn whether a massive dose might not cause such disruption of motor function that the driver would lose control of it and crash. Dr. Gunn repeated his earlier negative advice on the use of LSD. Besides, though LSD can be absorbed through the skin, our hypothetical target might be wearing gloves against the winter cold, or be chauffeur-driven. The use of LSD was, finally, dismissed.

Previously, Hunt and Liddy had conspired to spike Daniel Ellsberg’s drink with LSD before he gave a public speech, so that Ellsberg would, it was hoped, freak out and say or do something to discredit himself. Crazy as that scheme was, it was still only dangerous to Ellsberg himself. But giving someone LSD who is operating a motor vehicle, well… that could be dangerous to a great many people in traffic and Liddy and Hunt obviously don’t care.

Hunt’s suggestion called to Dr. Gunn’s mind a technique used successfully abroad. It involved catching the target’s moving automobile in a turn or sharp curve and hitting it with another car on the outside rear quarter. According to Dr. Gunn, if the angle of the blow and the relative speed of the two vehicle were correct, the target vehicle would flip over, crash, and, usually, burn. By this time I was sure Gunn had guessed the identity of the hypothetical target, since he asked whether he was local and suggested, if he was, that we use the method he had just described at Chevy Chase Circle, a route Anderson did travel. Chevy Chase Circle, he pointed out, is notorious as the scene of fatal auto accidents and its configuration ideal for use of the technique.

I argued that Dr. Gunn’s method would require the services of an expert to ensure success, and one might not be available to us. Dr. Gunn looked surprised, as if it had not occurred to him that we would not have available all the resources of the CIA.

Other methods were discussed and discarded. “Aspirin Roulette,” for example: the placing of a poisoned replica of the appropriate brand of headache tablet into the bottle usually found in the target’s medicine cabinet. That method was rejected because it would gratuitously endanger innocent members of his family and might take months before it worked.

I came up with the suggestion we finally agreed upon as the one to be recommended. It was a lethal adaptation of a technique long in use by the FBI during surreptitious entries. When an embassy safe, for example, is to be penetrated so that crypto material for use by NSA, everyone who might have access to the office is followed while the penetration is in progress. It is not begun unless a wiretap or other positive means has been established that the embassy personnel will be away for a sufficient period. Should someone return unexpectedly, however, he would never get into the embassy door. He would be assaulted, his wallet and watch removed, and, while he was unconscious as the latest victim of the outrageously high rate of street crime in Washington (which is not within the jurisdiction of, and therefore not the fault of, the FBI), the entry team would make good its escape.

Oh, so now they care about “collateral damage” as far as worrying about someone else in Anderson’s house taking the poison.

Also, it is interesting that Liddy, a law and order guy who came to Washington full of typically rightwing impatience with bureaucratic laxity (and excuses for that laxity), has just gleefully recommended perpetration of street crime, and neatly shifted the blame for it on a rival government entity, the Capitol Police. Thus the would-be murderer is also a bureaucratic weasel of the shiftiest sort.

I submitted that the target should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate. No one argued against that recommendation and, at Hunt’s suggestion, I gave Dr. Gunn a hundred-dollar bill, from Committee to Re-elect the President intelligence funds, as a fee for his services. I took this to be to protect Dr. Gunn’s image as “retired.”

Afterward Hunt and I discussed the recommendation further. It was decided to include the suggestion that the assassination of Jack Anderson be carried out by Cubans already recruited for the intelligence arm of the Committee to Re-elect the President.

“Suppose,” said Hunt, “my principal doesn’t think it wise to entrust so sensitive a matter to them?”

Obviously, this is pretty detailed. It also leads to still unanswered questions. Given the enthusiasm Hunt displays for the LSD method, one is reminded of Miles Copeland’s educated guess that Edmund Muskie had been given a dose of the drug before his public emotional crack-up derailed his campaign. Did Liddy and Hunt make a trip to Maine at about that time? Also, one wonders to what extent Richard Helms’s notoriously corrupt CIA was involved in all this. Even Liddy didn’t believe that “Dr. Gunn” was really retired. The CIA — probably through General Cushman — had indeed helped Liddy and Hunt with other schemes, the former with professional-looking charts for presentation of the “GEMSTONE” scheme, the latter with a professional disguise for an undercover trip to Dita Beard’s beside (about which more later).

Whenever Liddy tells the story about conspiring to kill Jack Anderson, he’s accustomed to the horrified gasps he hears in response; therefore, he’s taken a lot of time to craft an excuse. As you might guess from its coming from a Nixonite, the excuse is based on that traditional catch-all, “national security.” First, Liddy’s Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: And yet your book abounds with plots to murder opponents of and defectors from the Nixon adminstration, ranging from Jack Anderson to E. Howard Hunt —

LIDDY: None of which came to fruition.

PLAYBOY: Do we detect an unspoken “alas” at the end of that statement?

LIDDY: If you’re a mindreader, you tell me.

PLAYBOY: Why in God’s name did you want to murder Jack Anderson in the first place?

LIDDY: I’d prefer to call it justifable homicide, since murder is a legal term for a specific type of homicide that by its very definition is unjustifiable…

[snip]

Anderson is one of those mutant strains of columnist who are half legitimate, because he passes off biased interpretations and selective information as straight reporting. At one point, Anderson’s systematic leaking of top-secret information rendered the effective conduct of American foriegn policy virtually impossible…

Now to Will:

I am asked frequently whether I believe in “blind obedience” to orders from legitimate authority, the code that permitted many Germans to carry out genocide. I do not. While there is a presumption of regularity that must obtain in any orders from legitimate superiors without which no government could function, I believe in individual responsibility, free will, and the rule of reason. There is a point beyond which I will not go, and that is anything my conscience tells me is malum in se (evil in and of itself) or my judgment tells me is irrational. I have no problem with doing something that is malum prohibitum (wrong only because of the existence of a law prohibiting it).

An example of malum in se would be the sexual assault of a child. In every society such a thing would be recognized as wrong. It would require no act of the legislature forbidding it to inform people that it was wrong.” An example of malum prohibitum, on the other hand, would be the statute prohibiting driving through a stop sign without coming to a complete halt. Absent such a law, to do so would be a morally indifferent act.

Common sense tells us that minor problems require and justify but minor responses, and only extreme problems require and justify extreme solutions. In the case of killing it is well to remember that the Ten Commandments, translated correctly from the original Aramaic [sic — I think he means Hebrew; Aramaic would be correct for some of the New Testament], do not contain the injunction “Thou shalt not kill.” It reads, “Thou shalt not do murder.” Quite another thing. There are circumstances that not only justify killing but require it (when one is charged with the safekeeping of a child, for example, and the only way to prevent its death from another’s attack is to kill that other person). These are all situations that require informed and responsible judgments.

There are other ethical doctrines that may be applied. In World War II some bomber pilots were concerned when they knew that, for example, the ball bearing factory that was their target was across the street from an orphanage and their bombing altitude meant that it was very likely the orphanage would also be hit. In such a situation the principle of double effect comes into play; the unintended secondary effect of the destruction of the orphanage is permissible. The classical example is that of the driver of a loaded schoolbus [sic] going down the one-lane mountain road with a sheer thousand-foot drop one either side rounding a turn to see a three-year-old girl on a tricycle in the middle of the road. He is going too fast to stop. The choices are go off the road and take thirty-five children and himself to certain death to spare the three-year-old, or run over the three-year-old and save the thirty-five. I’d run over the three-year-old. I also fail to see any distinction between killing an enemy soldier in a time of declared war and killing an enemy espionage agent in a “cold” war, or even killing certain U.S. citizens. For example, were I back in my ODESSA position and were given the instruction from an appropriate officer of the government, I would kill Philip Agee if it were demonstrated (as it has often been argued) that his revelations have led directly to the death of at least one of his fellow CIA officers, that he intended to continue the revelations, and that they would lead to more deaths. Notice that this would not be retributive but preventative. It is the same rationale by which I was willing to obey an order to kill Jack Anderson. But I would do so only after satisfying myself that it was: a)an order from legitimate authority; b)a question of malum prohibitum; and c)a rational response to the problem.

I thought about the damage Anderson was doing to our country’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Most of all, I thought of that U.S. agent abroad, dead or about to die after what I was sure would be interrogation by torture. If Hunt’s principal was worried, I had the answer.

“Tell him,” I said, “if necessary, I’ll do it.”

Actually, Anderson at worst blew the cover of an asset, not an agent. Back to the Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: Casting Anderson as a villain who caused the death of a U.S. Agent is an effective rationale for silencing him, but the fact remains that his removal would have spared Nixon considerable political embarrassment. Wasn’t that the real motive?

LIDDY: No, it was not, though I recall George Bernard Shaw’s observing that assassination is the extreme form of censorship. [Liddy goes on to deny a political motive, saying that if the Nixon cronies had tried to whack every journalist who had it in for Nixon, the National Press Club would be full of wall-to-wall memorial plaques. Hah fucking hah.]

PLAYBOY: Anderson strenuously denies having done such a thing.

LIDDY: No, he doesn’t. What he does do is say over and over… that he never “revealed or identified a CIA officer.” Anderson desperately sticks to that tortured formulation, because it’s not a technical lie. Just like that other secular saint of the American liberal establishment, old Maximum John Sirica, he’s scared of getting his halo tarnished.

[…]

PLAYBOY: …What did you finally decide on?

LIDDY: A simple if un-James Bondish method… we merely decided to make it a lethal mugging.

PLAYBOY: Who would have done the job?

LIDDY: It was initially decided to assign it to some of our Cuban-exile assets, but then Hunt began to worry that our principals would deem it too sensitive a matter to be entrusted to them. So I volunteered to do it myself.

[…]

LIDDY: …We didn’t want to make it look like anything more than another Washington street-crime statistic, remember, so no sophisticated weaponry could be employed.

PLAYBOY: How would you have killed him?

LIDDY: Oh, I would have knifed him or broken his neck, probably. One of us would have died, no doubt about it. But, as I say, we never received the final green light.

PLAYBOY: Were you relieved or disappointed?

LIDDY: I was neither. I was acting on the instructions of my principal, and I was prepared to follow those instructions either way they went.

PLAYBOY: You really see nothing anomalous, much less frightening, about two aides to the President of the United States cold-bloodedly plotting to assassinate one of the country’s leading reporters?

LIDDY:I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded, but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating.

PLAYBOY: Including murder?

LIDDY: Drastic problems sometimes demand drastic solutions. Look, let me give you an example. Philip Agee, the CIA defector, has effectively exposed and compromised dozens of our intelligence agents around the world, and one of his revelations led directly to the assassination of the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch. This one man has done untold damage to the worldwide security interests of the United States. And what have we done about it? Nothing. Fifty years ago, Harry Stimson scuttled an effective American intelligence effort on the grounds that gentlement don;t read other gentlemen’s mail. The pendulum seems to have swung all the way back to that position, and the Russians couldn’t be happier. They’ve tried to destroy American intelligence capability for thirty-five years, and in five years we’ve done the job for them, with the help of demagogues like Frank Church. I just wish someone would point out to the good senator that the world is not run by the League of Women Voters.

PLAYBOY: Returning to Philip Agee for a moment, how would you deal with him? Would you, in CIA parlance, “terminate him with extreme prejudice”?

LIDDY: You’re damn right I would. If I were back serving in some capacity in the American intelligence community and I found Agee living comfortably abroad, outside the reach of our law and continuing his relevations, I would strongly recommend that he be assassinated. And were I given the task, I would undertake it, and feel completely justified in so doing. But let me stress that his killing would not be retributive but preventive… same rationale I employed in the case of Mr. Anderson.

PLAYBOY: You’d be willing to kill a man you’ve never met solely because he was on the opposite side of the political and ideological fence?

LIDDY: No, my friend, because he’s on the opposite side of the trench, in a political-military war between the United States and the Soviet Union that is crucial to our survival as a free nation…

PLAYBOY: And you’d feel no qualms, much less remorse, about liquidating someone like Agee?

LIDDY: No more than swatting a fly…

Ultimately, Liddy doesn’t give a shit about “national security” per se; he just, like many a wingnut (or mafioso, for that matter), wants to lethally enforce his own definitions of loyalty and treason. How can I say such things? Because Liddy has also shared his thoughts about killing John Dean and Howard Hunt after they went ‘dolchstoss’ on Liddy’s Fuhrer, Richard Nixon. In Liddy’s mind, any obstacle to Richard Nixon was a threat to “national security.”

There’s a lot of hypocrisy here to deal with. For one thing, there’s Liddy’s sneering remark that Anderson is making a distinction without a difference with regard to the outed asset. Liddy counts on the reader’s naivete of CIA lingo, hoping that the reader doesn’t catch Gordo’s very deliberate conflation of agent and contact or source or asset. One is an American citizen in the pay of the American government, acting — or supposed to be acting — in his country’s interests; the other, usually a foreign national and often a citizen of a belligerent country, is a source of information to the former, and this is exactly the type that was ‘outed’ by Anderson. As such, Anderson was doing exactly what… many CIA agents, in fact, do: burn sources. Come on, anyone who’s watched Spy Game knows how this works. Anyway, another giveway to the bad faith in the “national security” rationale is the sudden ambiguity of it. Notice how Liddy, just a minute before being so detailed in his examples (sharing the school bus parable with obvious relish), suddenly falls back on Anderson’s damage to the ability of the Nixon Administration to make foreign policy. See? Any dissenter could be guilty of that; the elasticity of the rule can stretch to the size of Daffyd ab Hugh’s waistband, allowing a great many of Liddy’s (and Nixon’s, which is the real point) political enemies to qualify for liquidation at the hands of Liddyan thugs.

For those who still like to think that Liddy’s just being protective of CIA agents, his remarks on the outing of Valerie Plame (an actual agent as opposed to asset or source or contact) are instructive:

MATTHEWS: Why shouldn‘t this guy do time?

LIDDY: Because I did time because I really did something.

Bear in mind that Mr. Fitzgerald, when they started this, knew who the leaker was, and knew it was not Scooter Libby.

MATTHEWS: Well, Libby was one of the leakers. He just wasn‘t the first.

LIDDY: No, he was—he was not the one who, you know, did the deed.

Secondly, he knew that there was no violation of either the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act.

So, what does he do? He goes and starts asking questions of people in and around the administration, and he gets a conflict between the recollection of Tim Russert and Scooter Libby.

He chooses to believing Tim Russert, rather than Scooter Libby, and he

and he prosecutes him.

(CROSSTALK)

LIDDY: Obstruction of justice? Obstruction of what? There was no crime.

[snip]

LIDDY: OK.

You—you left out one of the key elements of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. And that is that the person has to have been posted within the last five years abroad in a covert position. She was not. So, there wasn‘t any question about the violation of that. And there wasn‘t any question about any potential violation.

And:

Liddy claimed that the reason McClellan is being circumspect is because the special prosecutor has specifically asked that he not comment on it. Then Liddy tried to make the argument that the outing was really no big deal. He said Plame was not an undercover operative operating in the field, the kind of person the statute seeks to protect. (Comment: Then why is there such a lengthy investigation about the leak? Why did George Bush say he would fire the leaker? And why haven’t the Republicans made this argument in a big way up until now?).

Liddy also said that Plame’s name was made public by Novak, not Cooper, that Rove was just trying to help Cooper because he was “about to embarrass himself” by publishing that Vice President Cheney who had sent Ambassador Wilson to Niger. According to Liddy, Rove – in an uncharacteristic act of media altruism – said it wasn’t Cheney, it was Wilson’s wife “who apparently, he said, works over there at the agency. That is not violating the statute and he didn’t name her.”

And:

To Liddy, Rove’s perjury (if that’s what it was) was just “an act of omission,” no biggie.

And:

G. GORDON LIDDY, CONSERVATIVE RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: . Mrs. Plame, or Ms. Plame, whatever — however she calls herself — was not part of the DDO. She was not posted abroad. And so far as I know, she was not undercover.

Plame was part of the DO (the Directorate of Operations); the DDO is the Director of the DO, as somebody claiming to be G. Gordon Liddy, noted G-Man and Watergate felon, should know. I think this man is an imposter!

Anyway, as a NOC, Plame was part of the DO, both while she was assigned overseas, and while she served at CIA Headquarters. And of COURSE she was undercover, or the CIA would never have sent a Crimes Report to the FBI, and DOJ would have never opened a criminal investigation. G. Gordon, you’re such a moron. (And I mean that in a good way.)

And here’s some more from Liddy:

LIDDY: Look, the point that should be made here is that Mr. Rove did not disclose her identity. He attempted to keep Mr. Cooper from embarrassing himself by putting out a false story.

Isn’t it nice that a big shot like Karl worries about the tender feelings of reporters, and wants to save them from the embarrassment of putting out false stories?

LIDDY: The woman was not what is known in the trade as an operator. She worked at headquarters, probably doing some kind of research on WMD. She sent her husband, a former ambassador over there, who, according to his account, sat at a swimming pool drinking green tea talking to some people.

And then he came back and said that there was no attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium ore from Niger. The fact is, they did.

G. Gordon, nobody “in the trade” calls Case Officers or NOCs “operators.” That’s just something you read in a Matt Helm novel.

There’s always the possibility, of course, that Liddy excuses the outing of Ms. Plame on the basis that she’s just a hot chick, and everyone knows that the only thing they’re good for is display in the latest Gordon Liddy “Stacked and Packed” calendar. So what about CIA male assets (not even CIA agents, as was Ms. Plame) who’ve been outed? Let’s take, for instance, the case of Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh, mastermind of the Munich Massacre was (wait for it)… a CIA asset in the Middle East, almost exactly like the one Anderson outed, though probably far less important. Consistency would require Gordon Liddy to at least denounce the Israeli government generally and Mossad in particular, since they were responsible for not merely outing Salameh, but assassinating him. But, as you might imagine, Liddy has nothing but praise for the Israeli intelligence apparatus.

Similarly, Liddy, in discussing the planned assassination of Anderson, always cites the case of Philip Agee: He considers them equivalent, and says he’d have killed Agee, too, if he’d had the authority, because Agee allegedly outed several CIA agents including Richard Welch. This, too, is not exactly true:

When a CIA station chief, Richard Welch, was assassinated in Athens, his outing was blamed on the Church Committee, despite the fact that the Church Committee had nothing to do with his outing. The Church Committee had named no CIA agent, and hence the allegation was absurd. At the same time, Philip Agee, a renegade CIA agent, published a list of CIA agents using diplomatic cover (one of whom was not Richard Welch [*]). According to several sources, including Christopher Hitchens, Welch had been identified by N-17 because he was careless about his place of residence. Indeed, it seems incredible to me that anyone would suppose otherwise. In Greece, the CIA was regarded as the de facto ruler of the country between 1967 and 1974 (I disagree, but my point is that the Greeks naturally assume the despicable regime that ruled their country was a puppet of the USA; the opposition, of course, would have made it a top priority to know who the US “procurator” was in Greece, and in 1975 the CIA knew they had succeeded.

I submit there is a reason why these names, especially Jack Anderson and Philip Agee, are linked in the giant clusterfuck in Liddy’s head: because, ultimately, the targeting of Jack Anderson was done out of nothing but political motivation. Anderson had broken stories on the corrupt quid pro quo between the Nixon Administration and ITT, mobster Johnny Roselli (who was part of “Track II” in Cuba, a subject Nixon was terribly paranoid about), and the loan Howard Hughes had given to Donald Nixon. Anderson was a thorn in Nixon’s side, thus, in Liddy’s eyes, a traitor worth assassinating. Liddy’s association of Frank Church (and his committee) with Philip Agee, apropos Richard Welch, is also “logical” on grounds of perceived treason to Richard Nixon and therefore to America, because of the fact Church was onto and Agee (at least in Liddy’s mind) was close to blabbing, that the Greek junta laundered CIA money into Nixon’s election campaign coffers. Remember, if you’re not with a wingnut you’re against him, and if you were important enough, that was plenty enough reason for a toy fascist like Gordon Liddy to plot your murder.

John McCain approves!