Right Wing Nut House

Earlier today, I highlighted the possibility that Al Haig could be a second piece in the composite Deep Throat puzzle. I still believe there’s more to discover about the sourcing of the Wood/Stein stories and the outing of Mark Felt as the one and only Deep Throat just doesn’t close the books as far as I’m concerned. I may be tilting at windmills here in trying to pin something on Haig, but I thought that this would be as good a time as any to look into what has to be one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the executive branch, the Moorer-Radford Affair and how a relationship developed between a young naval briefing officer for the Pentagon named Bob Woodward and the Assistant to the National Security Adviser, Alexander Haig.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had maintained a liaison office with the National Security Council for many years. This office kept the Chiefs informed of White House thinking on security matters as well as other items of potential interest to the military. There was nothing unusual about this as the Pentagon liaised with a number of committees and boards throughout the national security establishment.

Then Nixon was elected and things changed dramatically. Nixon’s paranoia made him suspicious of all but a handful of close aides. Couple that with Henry Kissinger’s well known desire to keep as much of the decision making power for national security in his own hands and the Joint Chiefs suddenly found themselves left out in the cold on matters vital to the military. The Viet Nam war was still raging at the time and Nixon’s back channel negotiations with the Russians and the Chinese along with his plans to draw down troop strength was done with very little input from the Chiefs.

When Admiral Moorer took over as Chairman of the JCS, he named Admiral Robert Weland as JCS liaison to the NSC. Weland reported directly to Moorer and brought along a Yeoman to assist him, one Charles Radford. Where in the past, there was little if any clandestine activity on the part of the liaison office with regards to the NSC, Welander began what became nothing less than a covert operation on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to try and pry loose the secrets Nixon so desperately wanted to keep from them.

It was at this point that a young Pentagon briefer entered the picture. Bob Woodward’s role in the affair has always been speculated on because it became clear after a while that in addition to Yeoman Radford rifling through secret papers and the like, the Chiefs were being assisted by someone else on the White House staff. This was revealed when Jack Anderson, the muckraking columnist, published excerpts from highly classified briefings about the 1971 India-Pakistan conflict in which instead of being neutral, the US was “tilting” toward Pakistan.

Nixon was angry enough to sick John Erlichman on the leakers. What Erlichman discovered astonished the President. Accompanying NSC Deputy Haig on trips, Radford would return with gobs of information purloined from Haig’s briefcase. The Nixon tapes make clear that the President, Haldeman and Erlichman all believed that Haig was complicit in the Affair but could probably never pin anything on him.

The speculation about Haig centers on where his “loyalties” lay. Many observers believe that Haig could very well have been passing information on to the JCS due to his lifelong love and commitment to the military. And what better way to keep the Chiefs informed than by using the young Bob Woodward as a conduit back to Woodward’s boss Admiral Welander? At the very least, the briefings Woodward gave Haig in the basement of the White House establishes a prior relationship.

The final act of this drama was an anti-climax. After tracing the leaks to Radford, the Yeoman confessed his role in the spy ring and implicated both Welander and Moorer. When questioned, Welander implicated Moorer and perhaps even Haig, although some believe the record was expunged when Fred Buzzardt, Nixon’s lawyer and a good friend of Haig’s “reinterviewed” Welander sans the references to the former NATO Commander.

Nixon was in a quandary. Revelations like the ones made by Radford could roil the country even more than it already was in addition to lowering the stature of a military already suffering the effects of bad press from the Viet Nam war.

So Nixon sat on the scandal. It wasn’t until several years later that the Affair came to light. And by then, the impact of disclosure was muted by Nixon’s legacy of deceit. It just didn’t seem surprising that the JCS would have to spy on the executive in order to find out information they thought they were entitled to.

Some writers have taken this incident and run wild with speculation that the military somehow orchestrated Nixon’s downfall. What Moorer-Radford makes clear is that in the end, these guys weren’t clever enough to carry something like that off. Radford’s activities were amateurish and not very effective. Whether someone else was supplying the JCS with information is unknown to this day. Nixon’s idle speculation about Haig could very well have been a product of his penchant for paranoia with Haldeman and Erlichman as his chief enablers in this regard, always agreeing with him, always egging him on to more fantastic flights of fancy as to who was against him.

But one fact is undeniable and confirmed by Admiral Welander. Bob Woodward briefed Alexander Haig many times in the basement of the White House in the years 1969-1970. And when Woodward went to work for the Washington Post shortly after his leaving the military in 1971, he already knew where to go for information about the Nixon White House.