Watergate
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Watergate, the break-in and cover-up that destroyed Richard Nixon's presidency, is John Kiriakou's recurring unit of measurement for scandal, a case study in tradecraft, and a thread that runs unexpectedly through his own case.

The lesson

The lesson Kiriakou takes from Watergate is not about the burglary. "Remember the lesson of Watergate: it's not even the crime that brings down presidents. It's the cover up of the crime that brings down presidents." The break-in itself he dismisses as "a second rate burglary, a bunch of idiots, former CIA officers, CIA contractors" who burgled the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and got caught. What followed was the White House denying and denying, "and it was that cover up that led to the one and only resignation of a president in American history."

He states it more bluntly still: "Richard Nixon didn't resign because of Watergate. Richard Nixon resigned because of the cover up of Watergate." It is the thing he says senior government officials cannot learn, "the cover up of the crime is always worse than the crime", and he applies it to the withholding of the Epstein files as the same situation repeating. The practical corollary he offers anyone sitting on damaging material is to release it themselves: it will be terrible either way, but "on our timing, not on someone else's."

The yardstick

When the CIA was caught monitoring the Senate committee investigating its torture program, reading what the investigators were writing and collecting, Kiriakou called it "a Watergate-level kind of scandal." The difference was the ending: Dianne Feinstein gave one angry floor speech, Eric Holder refused to press charges, and nothing ever came of anything. He deploys the comparison elsewhere with more optimism than history rewarded: the CIA's torture lies unraveling was "as inevitable as Nixon's men being caught and tied back to the Watergate break-in, it is only a matter of time." And when the government insists it must dig for a crime, he reaches for the same shelf: Scooter Libby, Iran-Contra, "Watergate even, once they start digging, they're going to find" something.

The scandal is also his explanation for a whole political style. Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor of Georgia nobody had heard of, became viable in 1976 by saying five words in an early debate, "I will not tell a lie", because in the immediate aftermath of Watergate that was what Americans wanted. Kiriakou uses it to answer what he would run on himself: not lying, and real oversight, which he defines as the job of the intelligence and other standing committees to keep honest people honest.

The agency's own

The Watergate cast overlapped with the service Kiriakou joined, and E. Howard Hunt was one of the men "people used to talk about at the agency a lot, just like James Angleton, for example." Hunt was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was one of Nixon's Plumbers, and was among the men who broke into the DNC's offices at the Watergate Hotel, Kiriakou hedges the year as 1970, 1971 or 1972, leading a team of Cuban exiles.

On the deathbed confession he is careful to give both sides and settle on neither. Hunt told his son hours before he died that he had been involved in the assassination of John Kennedy; Kennedy scholars say that is simply not true and cannot place Hunt in the conspiracy or in Dallas. "Who knows why he would confess something like that."

Watergate as tradecraft

Kiriakou also uses the scandal to teach how clandestine contact actually works, in answer to the question of why there would be no email trail. Meetings are triggered by prearranged signals, not messages: a phone call asking how somebody's mother is doing, answered "my mom is feeling much better, thank you", means a meeting in a particular car park at two in the morning, all of it set up in advance. His historical example is Deep Throat reacting to Bob Woodward putting an American flag in a flowerpot on his apartment balcony, "that triggered a meeting that night at 9:00 in a parking garage in Rosslyn, the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia." The point of the system is that nothing is ever put in writing.

Personal connections

Kiriakou's own defense had Watergate pedigree: his lead attorney, one of the Washington "legal titans", a phrase he credits to the Washington Post, had been Attorney General John Mitchell's lawyer during Watergate, and had also represented Monica Lewinsky and Aldrich Ames. He also tells the story of the man ordered to produce the psychological evaluation of Daniel Ellsberg, who refused, his boss did it and signed his name, and who stood up before the Watergate committee to say so: "sometimes you just have to stand up and call it like it is."

The Sheehan theory

Kiriakou has also relayed, as attorney Danny Sheehan's account, not his own, a far darker Watergate: burglar Bernard Barker as one of the anti-Castro Cubans funded through a bank tied to the JFK assassination's shooters, a bank note in a burglar's pocket traced back to that same bank, and Nixon wanting the break-in precisely because the Democrats' files on Howard Hughes could unravel the whole chain. "Way bigger, way deeper" than planting bugs, according to Sheehan.

See also

- JFK assassination
- James Angleton
- Aldrich Ames
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Dianne Feinstein
