Once again, exaggeration is key to Trump.
Over a six-week period in the late summer of 1964, [CIA agent E. Howard] Hunt deployed Continental Press staff to undertake a new type of project: infiltrating the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater on behalf of President Lyndon Johnson.
There is some dispute about whose idea this was. In a memoir published in 2007, Hunt claimed the idea to spy on Goldwater originated in the White House. Johnson, had, Hunt claimed, “become obsessed with obtaining his competitor’s plans.” Having come to office through tragedy, and deeply resenting suggestions that he wasn’t up to the job, Johnson yearned for a blow-out victory in 1964’s presidential race.
In 1975, then CIA Director William Colby told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that spying on Goldwater had been the brainchild of Tracy Barnes, head of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division.
[...]
According to a CIA memo Colby provided to Congress, in 1973 Cooper told a member of the CIA Office of Inspector General that in 1964 Barnes had asked him “if he would like to have copies of [Goldwater’s] speeches and would it be useful to have them before he (Cooper) read them in the newspapers.” The memo concluded: “There is no question that Mr. Cooper was serving the White House in the political campaign while on the CIA payroll and that he was assisted, in part, by a member of the Agency’s Domestic Operations Division.”
[...]
In blaming Barnes and saying that he hadn’t informed anyone more senior about the operation, Colby created a convenient dead end: by the time the Agency pinned responsibility on Barnes, he had been dead for several years.
[...]
LBJ wasn’t squeamish about using the inside information, and he did so in a blunt fashion that must have made CIA officers cringe. Goldwater campaign staff noticed that the Johnson campaign had the unnerving habit of responding to points in their candidate’s speeches before he had delivered them. Johnson didn’t seem to care that his actions made clear to Goldwater that he was being spied on.
[...]
Hunt told Baker that he’d been disturbed by the order to spy on the Goldwater campaign. This wasn’t because he had any hesitation about conducting what was obviously an illegal violation of the CIA’s charter, which imposes strict limits on the agency’s domestic operations.Rather, it was because Hunt was one of the few Goldwater supporters in the agency. “However, as distasteful as I thought it was, I performed the duty, accepting White House orders without question,” he recalled.
[...]
Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and was hired by the White House in 1972 to lead a unit known as the Plumbers that was dedicated to plugging leaks within the Nixon administration, playing dirty tricks on Nixon’s opponents and obtaining political intelligence. Years later, Hunt justified his actions by comparing them to the CIA’s spying on Goldwater. His logic was that if it was OK to use surreptitious methods to obtain political intelligence on behalf of one president, it was acceptable to do the same for another president. “Since I’d done it once before for the CIA, why wouldn’t I do it again [inside Watergate in June 1972] for the White House?” Hunt explained to the New York Times in late December 1974.
[...]
Even in the heat of the ’64 campaign, as he thought he was being spied on, Goldwater never mentioned his concerns publicly, and even insisted that his aides kept quiet. Going public with the allegations would have distracted attention from his agenda, and absent any proof that surveillance was actually happening, complaints about being spied upon would’ve likely reinforced the common perception that he was paranoid.
Politico
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment