So too with the America’s drone industry. The Israeli influence is not visible but it is real, documented and extremely relevant to the future of drones in America. If you want to know how drones may change American airspace in coming years, just look to Israel, where the unmanned aerial vehicle market is thriving and drones are considered a reliable instrument of “homeland security.”

“There are three explanations for Israel’s success in becoming a world leader in development and production of UAVs,” a top Israeli official explained to the Jerusalem Post last year. “We have unbelievable people and innovation, combat experience that helps us understand what we need and immediate operational use since we are always in a conflict which allows us to perfect our systems.”

Israel’s drone expertise goes back to at least 1970, according to the UAV page of the Israeli Air Force. Mark Daly, an expert on unmanned aircraft at Jane’s Defense in London, notes the Israelis were the first to make widespread use of drones in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when the aircraft were used to monitor troop movements.

Now, as the Arab media and Western reporters such as Scott Wilson of the Washington Post have reported, the Israeli Defense Force uses fleets of constantly hovering drones to intimidate and control the Arab population in the Gaza Strip.  (The residents call these drones “zenana,” which both sounds like the aircraft’s distinctive buzz and is Arabic slang for a nagging wife.) The IDF regularly uses drones for targeted assassinations of suspected militants, saying the drones enable them to use “precision strikes” to avoid hurting civilians. Yet as Human Rights Watch has documented, the drone strikes during the Gaza War killed scores of children who were nowhere near armed combatants.

Israel markets its expertise in defense to the rest of the world. Israeli academic Neve Gordon cites a glossy government brochure on drones titled “Israel Homeland Security: Opportunities for Industrial Cooperation,” which boasts, “no other advanced technology country has such a large proportion of citizens with real time experience in the army, security and police forces.” The chapter called “Learning from Israel’s Experience” notes that “many of these professionals continue to work as international consultants and experts after leaving the Israel Defense Forces, police or other defense and security organizations.”

The work has paid off when it comes to drones: The Jewish state is the single largest exporter of drones in the world, responsible for 41 percent of all UAVs exported between 2001 and 2011, according to a database compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israeli companies export drone technology to at least 24 countries, including the United States.

In addition to exports, Israeli companies also create subsidiaries in consumer countries. “To increase sales outside Israel, Israel’s defense companies have to set up subsidiaries in target markets, rather than expand local manufacturing,” Haaretz reported  in 2009. The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark  “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.”

As for domestic drone uses, the Israeli example is perhaps most instructive at the U.S. border. The 5 million Palestinian Arabs living in and around Israel, like the 11 undocumented resident aliens in the United States, are ineligible for citizenship in the land they call home. Both groups are subject to monitoring, barriers to entry and rapid expulsion. Not surprisingly one of the first uses of drones by the Department of Homeland Security was to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, where it now flies Israeli-made Hermes 450 drones.

And the Israeli example is instructive not just at the border, but also south of it, where the Mexican government has allowed the U.S. to fly drone missions as part of the drug war. Mexico has, apparently, learned a thing or two from its northern neighbor about the best country for buying drones. In March, when it allegedly purchased two new drones of its own, it knew where to go: Israel.

In the near future, she hopes to take the stand as an expert witness against former de facto Guatemalan president Efrain Rios Montt, who presided over a genocidal “scorched earth” war that killed an estimated 200,000 people in the early 1980s, the worst genocide in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th century. An investigation documented 626 different massacres committed by the U.S.-backed military forces between 1979 and 1984; most of the victims were unarmed Mayan Indians.

Doyle’s forensic investigations over the last 20 years have made her an irritant to governments everywhere — including Washington — as well a friend to the families of the victims of human rights abuses throughout Latin America. She has won a host of awards, including this year’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive and Puffin Foundation award for human rights activism, one of the world’s largest prizes in the field. She will share the award with fellow investigator Fredy Peccerelli, who is the executive director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.

“She speaks with such strength because she speaks as an American,” Peccerelli said in an interview. “Very few times do you have someone investigating their own government and pointing to their own officials about their involvement. Kate speaks about the responsibility that Americans bear because of what they did. It’s very powerful.”

(Full disclosure: Doyle is a friend. I relied on CIA documents she obtained from the National Security Archive to write my book Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Like many journalists in Washington and Latin America, I have found her work to be built on a solid foundation of official documentation from the U.S. and other governments. )

She’s also a passionate advocate of freedom of information laws. Thanks in part to her work, seven Latin American countries have adopted freedom of information laws since 2000. The most distinctive feature of these laws is that, unlike the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, they explicitly forbid the withholding of information about human rights abuses on grounds of “national security.” A provision she calls  “very important but untested.”

“Having a legal mechanism to obligate the state to provide information is just the beginning,” says Doyle. She shares the information with prosecutors to develop cases based on “criminal patterns of action” that yield specific details of a disappearance or a massacre. Peccerelli’s forensic anthropologists exhume bodies and do DNA analysis.

Doyle has been largely frustrated in Mexico and El Salvador, where legal authorities are reluctant to confront the abuses of the past. But in Guatemala, she and her colleagues have uncovered some remarkable stories that have led to the prosecution of military officers involved in war crimes.

In the late 1990s, a source gave Guatemalan human rights activists a 54-page army log that revealed the fate of scores of people who were “disappeared” by security forces during the mid-1980s. The log included photos of 183 of the victims, along with coded references to their executions.

For the families of the victims, the results of the discovery of the so-called “death squad dossier” were close to miraculous. Not only are the officers named in the documents now under investigation, but thanks to Peccerelli’s DNA work, the bodies of five of the victims were identified and returned to their families, who had never known what had happened to their loved ones 30 years ago.

In 2009, another source gave Doyle a set of internal military documents about the scorched earth campaign of the early 1980s that were so damning in their details that the source recommended she immediately leave the country. “This person was worried that anybody who had possession of such incendiary documents would be targeted,” Doyle said.

The documents will be used by prosecutors in the trial of Rios Montt. “We have a very strong case,” Doyle says. But the continuing power of the Guatemalan military means the 86-year-old retired general may be able to avoid justice.

I asked her if she ever get discouraged by the enormity of the crimes she investigates.

“I don’t,” she replied. “I”ve met so many beautiful, dedicated people in Guatemala who have been working on this for 30 years that I feel privileged. What Fredy’s group has done with DNA findings is amazing. I’m inspired, not discouraged.”

Working with the families of people who have lost loved ones, she says, “is always painful. But I can bring them information that they’ve never been able to get. That’s mitigates the pain.”

I asked her if she ever gets scared.

“I have received threats,” she says with a rueful laugh. “But I’ve never felt one iota as frightened as my colleagues who have to stay in Guatemala all the time. Pressure and hostility and threats come with the territory” — the territory of the forensic archivist.

After years of secrecy, denials and no comments, the Obama administration is now hastening to defend the drone war publicly. This media offensive,  launched on May 1 by White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, was bolstered by the release of “Letters From Abbotabad,” a selection of 17 documents out of the reported 6,000 seized from the house where bin Laden was killed.

Obama’s public diplomacy on drones has its uses on the 2012 campaign trail, but for U.S national security policymakers it is needed to counter the daily reports out of Pakistan that virtually everybody from the pro-American foreign minister to the Islamist right opposes the drone war. In the country’s upcoming presidential election, perennial populist candidate Imran Khan is surging on the strength of his pledge to shoot down U.S. drones.

At stake are NATO supply lines into Afghanistan. Five months ago, Pakistani authorities protested a U.S. drone strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers by barring U.S. resupply trucks from Pakistani roads. The U.S. is now flying supplies into Afghanistan, an expensive proposition for a cash-strapped country. The Nation, a leading newspaper in Pakistan, says the resignation of Munter, who was sympathetic to Pakistani arguments against the drone strikes, “could complicate efforts to repair alliance with the U.S. and reopen NATO supply into Afghanistan.”

The Obama administration reinforced its narrative of effective drone war this week by confirming the story of a Saudi double agent who reportedly foiled a plot to bomb a U.S. civilian airliner with explosive undergarments. First reported Monday by the Associated Press, and amplified by the New York Times, the story reflected well on the Saudi intelligence service, which recruited the  double agent who obtained the explosive device and turned it over to the U.S. for inspection. The White House initially asked AP to delay publication of the story but once it was published, administration officials were quick to link the return of the underwear bomber to the drone war.

The Saudi double agent, U.S. officials told Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, had  tipped off the U.S. intelligence to the whereabouts of the man who built the explosive undergarments, an al-Qaida militant named Fahd al-Quso, who was also allegedly involved in the USS Cole bombing in 2000. Al-Quso was killed by a drone-launched Hellfire missile on Sunday.

Rep. King denounced the leaking of the story as an extraordinary violation of secrecy laws, which it certainly was. The Christian Science Monitor pointed out the disclosure will hinder  the efforts of U.S. intelligence organizations to track and detect Islamic militants. Whatever the costs of the leak of the story, the benefits will redound to the Obama White House.

The administration can also cite the presumably authentic  “Letters From Abbotabad,” which lend credence to the argument  that the drone war has disrupted Islamic jihadists planning to attack American civilians.

As the Guardian reported last week,

Crippling US drone attacks forced Osama bin Laden to consider withdrawing his fighters from what had previously been safe havens in Pakistan, according to newly released documents seized at the compound where the al-Qaida leader was killed a year ago.

CNN cited the “the dire impact” of the drone strikes. The Detroit Free Press said the documents showed “al-Qaida was on the run from drone attacks” while adding that the refusal of the Obama administration to release a fuller record of its bin Laden collection, makes it “difficult to glean any larger truths about the state of his organization.

The documents show that bin Laden, holed up in a safe house in the city of Abbotabad, heard from allies along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that the U.S. aerial war was making their lives miserable.

Our Waziristani brothers, for example, said that they were frankly exhausted from the enemy’s air bombardments. The enemy has been given almost a worldwide approval to violate the air space of other countries and to attack anyone whom it views as its enemy.

At one point bin Laden recommended that the group’s leaders be moved out of North Waziristan where the vast majority of U.S. drone attacks have occurred to “a faraway location.” If the experienced leaders in the region were killed, Bin Laden said

this would lead to the rise of lower leaders who are not as experienced as the former leaders and this would lead to the repeat of mistakes. I am leaning toward getting most of the brothers out of the area.

But if you’re going to accept the letters at face value, what about bin Laden’s assertion that the drone war had done nothing to forestall the failing U.S. effort in Afghanistan? Shortly before his death he wrote

Anyone who looks at the enemies in NATO, especially America, will know that they are in big trouble. This year has been the worst year for them in Afghanistan since they invaded it. The number of their dead has never been this high according to their own reports. Their financial crisis continues. Britain has lowered is defense budget and America is reducing the budget of the Pentagon. Anyone who knows the world and knows politics, knows that it is impossible for them to continue with the war.

His observations are hard to dispute. Some things are true even if Osama bin Laden says them.

And that’s the paradox of the U.S. drone war in Pakistan: since 2009 military success has reliably correlated with political failure. As drone attacks have made Americans safer, they have also generated more enemies. This approach is flailing but the Obama administration is determined to defend it.

Last Friday, Michael Toscano, president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, called on the FAA to expedite its rule-making for unmanned aviations systems in the U.S. airspace. “UAS will be the next big revolution in aviation,” Toscano wrote in a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “However, before this industry can really take off, we need rules from the FAA on how to safely operate alongside manned aircraft.”

So while civil liberties groups fear drone surveillance, universities teach the new technology, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dream of start-ups like the TacoCopter, the FAA has the more mundane task of ensuring the safety of domestic airspace, something Congress has ordered it to do for drones under 4.4 pounds by mid-May. The FAA has yet to publish draft drone regulations and solicit public comment on small drones, much less on the larger unmanned systems, which can have wingspans up to 20 feet and weigh hundreds of pounds.

In a timely post last month, Public Intelligence pointed out some of the perils involved. “Is it even logistically possible to operate thousands of pilot-less aircraft in the domestic airspace?” PI editor Michael Haynes asked in his article, ”The Problems With Domestic Drones.” Haynes reviewed several recent Pentagon studies about drone safety in war zones, which highlight some of the daunting issues facing the FAA.

One problem is the potential for so-called zombie drones. In an April 2011 report, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board identified “limited communications” systems as a problem for drone operators, especially “lost-link events,” in which the operator loses contact with the vehicle.

As PI notes:

Sometimes the link is reestablished and the pilot is able to maintain control of the drone. Sometimes the link cannot be reestablished and the drone is effectively turned into a zombie that can drift far from its intended target, as may have occurred recently with the RQ-170 captured by Iran in December 2011.

“Lost-link events are operationally uncommon,” the  Air Force science panel concluded, but are obviously “of primary concern” for drone operations in U.S. airspace, where there’s reason to fear they might be more likely.

That’s because there’s a lot more potential for electronic magnetic interference in crowded domestic spaces than there is in remote war zones. When the Pentagon’s Joint Spectrum Center analyzed the deployment of Predator drones over the Mexico-Arizona border, it had to examine potential conflicts between the drones and fixed microwave links in Mexico, nearby radio astronomy observatories and various other potential sources of interference.

Another example from PI:

When several Predator drones were needed for tests at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the Joint Spectrum Center had to study the potential for interaction with residential indoor and industrial outdoor radio local area networks, outdoor video surveillance networks and other potential signals arising from a nearby residential community.

A 2010 Air Force report on lessons learned from the use of small unmanned aircraft systems (known as SUAS) in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded “many of the current SUAS use datalink equipment that is not interoperable with other datalinks or tunable to other frequencies.” The limitations of this technology will “hinder” the integration of drones into U.S. airspace.

Another problem is the risk of midair collisions. These risks can be reduced with ground- and air-based “sense and avoid” radar systems, according to the Air Force study group. But installation of such systems may take two to three years and cost up to $3 million per aviation site, the study group said. No such systems for drones have been installed anywhere in the United States.

And then there’s the question of the electronic spectrum on which the whole drone business depends. “This might be the biggest issue of all because none of these aircraft can fly without a communications channel,” said Ben Gielow, manager of government relations for the Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International. Parts of the spectrum are allocated for specific uses such as civil aviation, law enforcement and the military. But there is no part of the spectrum that is reserved for command and control of unmanned aviation. In February, the United Nations’ World Radiocommunication Conference called for studying “additional allocations, to accommodate spectrum requirements of UAS consistent with the protection of incumbent services.” Which doesn’t sound like it’s going to happen quickly.

Gielow says the AUVSI is calling on the FAA to first issue proposed regulations on small drones operated by public safety agencies so it can meet the congressional deadline of opening U.S. airspace to drones of all sizes by the end of 2015. “A lot needs to be done,” he said.

In response to Toscano’s letter, an FAA spokesman issued a statement saying the agency  would act “later this year.”

Significant work is underway to ensure the safe integration of unmanned aircraft systems into the national air space. Specifically, the FAA is committed to safely integrating small UAS, and we expect to publish a proposed rule later this year.

So drones are coming to U.S. airspace, and these rules will be the best hope against Kabul’s near-disaster happening over an American city.

Not quite. As Reuters columnist and Watergate buff Jack Shafer points out, “Watergate is the Ur-journalism story.” It is a true tale that defines the profession’s imagination and its relation to Washington power. But this latest round at the Watergate cooler has been stronger on the Ur- than the journalism, focusing more on the implications of Woodward and Bradlee’s thinking than on the abuses of power that they sought to uncover.

That’s too bad. If Watergate still matters, it is because the story tells us something about the intersection of power and journalism in Washington. The ur-personalities of these veteran newsmen are important but so are new facts, and recent revelations illuminate one aspect of the story that is often overlooked: the role of the CIA.

Woodward acknowledged as much in what is perhaps the single most interesting Watergate revelation of recent years. In June 2007, the CIA released most of the so-called “Family Jewels,” a long-suppressed internal report on the agency’s abuses of power. The newly declassified documents, Woodward wrote in the Post, showed in “telling detail” how the CIA, under the leadership of director Richard Helms, served as “the perfect Watergate enabler.”

The Helms/Nixon relationship lies at the heart of the Watergate story. Nixon, of course, was a paranoid genius, a master of resentment politics at home and geopolitical maneuvering abroad. Helms, his long-serving director of Central Intelligence, was the epitome of a CIA man in the Cold War: correct, discreet and ruthless.

The CIA’s involvement in Watergate, Woodward noted, “is one of the murkiest parts of the story.” He and Bernstein didn’t write about it much in “All the President’s Men,” not because they didn’t have suspicions but because they could not pin the story down. Howard Baker, vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, likened the Agency’s role to  “animals crashing around in the forest — you can hear them but you can’t see them.” And Helms’ role was especially elusive. Said Baker: “Nixon and Helms had so much on each other that neither one of them could breathe.”

Thanks to the release of the “Family Jewels” report and an extraordinary collection of 11 conversations between Helms and Nixon in 1971-73 (first published online in 2009) we can see (and hear) what Nixon and Helms had on each other: knowledge of the other guy’s record of  ”dirty tricks.”

Plenty of people suspected this at the time. The Agency’s fingerprints were evident in the botched burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate apartment complex. It was well known that five of the seven burglars had worked for the CIA. Four were Cuban-Americans from Miami involved in the Bay of Pigs operation. It was less well-known that the two ringleaders, James McCord and Howard Hunt, were career officers who had been personally close to Helms for more than a decade.

In his 2007 Post story, Woodward revealed that McCord had written the CIA director after his arrest in June 1972, seeking assistance. Another senior Agency official told Helms that he “felt strongly” that the letter should be turned over to the FBI, which was supposedly conducting a rigorous investigation of Watergate.

“It was a critical moment in the Watergate probe,” Woodward wrote, “with Nixon seeking reelection that fall and desperate to keep the botched burglary from spoiling his chances.” He went to write:

McCord’s letter to the CIA could have been important evidence; according to later testimony, he was seeking assistance from the CIA, where he had worked for decades, and was on the verge of blowing the whistle about Watergate, as he did months later in a famous March 21, 1973, letter to Judge John J. Sirica.

Instead, Helms told the FBI nothing. Investigators never learned the story and Woodward and Bernstein could never shake Helms’ dubious denials of any connection to the burglars, whom the Agency blandly  portrayed as “retired” employees acting on their own.

In hindsight, Woodward wrote that Helms “was anything but forthcoming.”

“The CIA had no involvement in the break-in. No involvement whatever,” Helms testified to the Senate Watergate committee on Aug. 2, 1973. “The agency had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in,” he added. “And I hope all the newsmen in the room hear me clearly now.”

You get the feeling Woodward felt Helms was personally lecturing him. (I left a message for Woodward requesting comment; he did not respond.)

The question, Woodward wrote in 2007, was, “What could have Helms known?”

One possibility, he said, was that he knew Howard Hunt was carrying out burglaries for the president. Another document made public in 2007 showed that Hunt had sent a memo to the CIA two months before the Watergate burglary seeking to hire a former CIA employee “accomplished at picking locks.” Helms, Woodward suggested, might have gotten wind of what Hunt was doing.

The question of what Helms knew about Watergate still matters because, amazingly enough, after 40 years later, we still don’t know who ordered the burglary or why. As Shafer told the Poynter discussion, “I’ve read all the books, listened to all the lectures, and even eaten dinner in the Watergate and I don’t know why Nixon’s people broke into the DNC twice and bugged it.”

What is certain is that Helms knew Hunt was working for the White House as early as April 1971. In response to Nixon’s pestering, Helms had offered the president two CIA reports on the failed Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and a report about the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Nixon was looking for facts that  would impugn the reputation of President John F. Kennedy and thus harm the presidential ambitions of the martyred president’s younger brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy who was expected to run for president in 1972.

“Obviously, I’m going to hand this stuff over to the President,” Helms told Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, “but I’d be terribly glad if you would get his backing not to share it with a lot of the staff of there. For example, I know that Howard Hunt has been doing some work. There’s nothing he’d like better than, as an old Agency hand to run around in some of the soiled linen there is around here, in the garbage cans and so forth.”

Here you can almost hear the clench-jawed East Coast mandarin that Helms was — “terribly glad” and “soiled linen” and all that — doing his damnedest to suck up to the president. The Nixon-Helms collaboration deepened in October 1971 when Nixon summoned the CIA director to the White House. Before the meeting, Ehrlichman briefed Nixon why Helms’ was visiting: He had “dirty line” to share. He said the CIA director had told him

that his relationship with past presidents had been such that he would not feel comfortable about releasing some of this very, very dirty linen to anyone without first talking it through with you because he was sure that when you became a former president you would want to feel that whoever was at the Agency was protecting your interest in a similar fashion.

Ehrlichman also reminded Nixon of Helms’ concerns about Howard Hunt, the White House “consultant.”

“Helms is scared to death of this guy Hunt that we got working for us because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried,” he said.

When Helms arrived in the Oval Office, Nixon wasted no time in assuring him that he would keep the secrets of the CIA, which he called without irony, the “Dirty Tricks Department.” Nixon  said:

“I know what happened in Iran [CIA-sponsored coup in 1953] and I also know what happened in Guatemala [CIA-sponsored coup in 1954] and I totally approve of both. I also know what happened at the Bay of Pigs [the failed invasion to overthrow socialist Fidel Castro  in 1961], which was planned under Eisenhower. I totally approved of it. The problem was not the CIA. …

Nixon wanted it to be known that he could be trusted to defend the agency.

My interest there is solely to know the facts in the event that as time goes on here, things heat up, and this becomes an issue. That is what I want you to understand regarding any information.I need it for a defensive reason … “

Then, in his abrupt, awkward way, Nixon launched into a soliloquy about what political controversies the documents might shed light on:

Who shot John? Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame?

In the context of a negotiation over  sensitive government records from the early 1960s, Nixon’s aside — “Who shot John?” — could only have been a reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. But if Nixon was implying that the CIA might have something to hide on the question of who ambushed  the liberal president in Dealey Plaza, he was also assuring Helms he would keep the Agency’s secrets.

“I need to know what is necessary to protect frankly, the intelligence gathering and the Dirty Tricks Department and I will protect it,” Nixon said. “I have done more than my share of protection, and I think it’s totally right to do it.

Helms sensed his opportunity and spoke for the first time. He had an offering.

“Sir, as a matter of fact the reason that I want to speak …” he began. Helms said he had found a previously unknown document about the assassination of Diem in South Vietnam in 1963.

“When I saw this document I thought to myself, ‘This is the kind of document that I would be rather irresponsible if I didn’t go to the president and tell him what this document was,’” Helms explained. “I’ve got it right here. It’s got extracts from State Department cables, Defense Department cables …”

Helms passed the documents to Nixon. Nixon didn’t get anything with “who shot John” but he get a lot of who shot Diem (rival generals) and he might be able to use that against the hated Teddy Kennedy. The meeting ending on a satisfactory note for both men.

Nixon then passed the Diem cables to aide Chuck Colson (whose recent death was another blast from the Watergate past) who gave them to none other than Howard Hunt. A veteran undercover officer and dirty tricks specialist who loathed President Kennedy, Hunt doctored the cables to create the impression that JFK was complicit in the assassination of Diem, a pro-American despot.  The forged documents were then shown to a Life magazine writer in the hopes of creating problems for Ted Kennedy’s expected presidential candidacy. Life magazine turned down the story, perhaps because the animus behind the story was so transparent. Hunt moved on to other missions for the White House. The story of the doctored Diem cables was later uncovered by Watergate investigators but Helms’ supporting role remained obscure.

Helms and Nixon had forged an effective partnership. They spoke at least five more times in the coming months. On June 16, 1972, Nixon called him to tell about certain secret CIA operations involving Mexican President Luis Echeverria, the details of which are still secret. So when Hunt and other former CIA men were arrested at the Watergate the next day, Nixon simply assumed the CIA director would help him stonewall the investigation.

“We’ve protected Helms from a hell of a lot of things,” Nixon told his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972. He wanted to remind Helms that the investigation might lead to Cuba-related revelations that would harm the CIA.

“You open that scab and there’s a hell of a lot of things,”  Nixon went on, “and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have things go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”

Nixon could be sure Helms would know what he was talking about. He had been seeking sensitive CIA reports about the Bay of Pigs operations for more than a year; Hunt was a leading figure in that operation.  In his 1979 memoir, Haldeman speculated that Nixon was tacitly reminding Helms of two extraordinarily sensitive issues:  the CIA’s plots to kill Fidel Castro and the assassination of JFK.  The Oct.  8, 1971, tape lends credence to the notion. If Nixon had offered to protect the Agency’s interests on “who shot John” then surely Helms would cooperate with the White House in smoothing over what his press secretary described as a “third rate burglary.”

Nixon assumed wrong. “This has nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs,” the normally calm Helms shouted at Haldeman, who was surprised as his rage. Helms was a canny bureaucratic operator who was sensitive about Cuba and assassinations. He knew he could not block the FBI’s investigation without risk to his own position and he saw no reason why he should. Hunt was a useful scoundrel whose screw-ups were legendary but whose loyalty to the Agency was assured. Publicly and privately, Helms maintained the fiction that the Agency knew nothing of Hunt’s proclivities — and he kept very quiet about his own back channel to McCord. As Nixon and his aides scrambled to cover up the White House’s “dirty tricks,” the FBI — and the young reporters at the Washington Post — began to unravel the story, albeit without much insight into Helms’ role as enabler.

The secrets that Nixon and Helms shared exerted invisible gravitational force on the unfolding scandal. From his jail cell, Hunt let it be known that he would talk about his knowledge of “highly illegal conspiracies” at the CIA unless he was paid off. To underscore his point, he then published a memoir of the Bay of Pigs operation, “Give Us This Day,” which opened with a denunciation of  President Kennedy for his “shameful” failure to support the Agency’s anti-Castro rebels. His point was blunt and subtly ominous: if JFK had backed the CIA venture, he might not have been killed by an allegedly pro-Castro gunman in Dallas. Hunt was not one to get sentimental about the playboy president’s bloody end in Dallas. Like others in the CIA, he thought JFK was a contemptible weakling who had it coming. The “whole Bay of Pigs thing” was fraught indeed.

Amid such black intrigue, the spymaster proved more agile than the president. Helms avoided talking about what he knew of Hunt’s service to the White House while Nixon succumbed to the burglar’s blackmail, ordering aides to raise money to pay off Hunt for his silence. The CIA man cultivated Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham as a social friend. Nixon enmeshed himself further in the scandal.

Nixon and Helms parted ways in December 1972. Nixon forced the CIA director to resign; Helms extracted an ambassadorship so that his exit from Washington would not be tainted with Watergate or presidential disfavor. Besieged by investigators and the press, Nixon resigned 20 months later. Helms had to plead guilty to charges of lying to Congress about a CIA assassination conspiracy in Chile. But admiring colleagues rallied to his defense and, he was never held accountable for the Agency’s deeply suspicious role in the intelligence failure that culminated in the crime of Dallas. Thanks to the forgiving culture of Washington, both men outlasted their notoriety in the 1970s and lived out their lives as controversial but ultimately respectable statesmen.

The Shakespearean struggle of Richard Nixon and Dick Helms is central to the Watergate story. It speaks a volume about the covert workings of power in Washington and is still shrouded in official secrecy 40 years later. (For example, the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the National Archives contains 366 pages of  CIA documents on Howard Hunt that have never been made public.) But the unfinished story of the CIA and Watergate fits awkwardly in the annals of the scandal. Its implications eluded the best journalists of a generation and its legacy is not reassuring to readers.

–

Read: “The Keeper of Secrets Earns His Reputation,” by Bob Woodward, Washington Post, June 27, 2007.

Listen: “Who shot John?” Richard Nixon and Dick Helms’ discuss CIA dirty tricks on Oct. 8, 1971; read a summary here. Courtesy of Nixontapes.org.)