The Camelot Legacy [Part 1]
How blackmail, corruption, espionage, romance, and murder shaped the future of American politics
Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.
This story isn't about the Vietnam War, draft dodgers, CIA operations, President Nixon, or President Kennedy. It is about all of them. A story that spans across presidencies and decades and lands squarely with President Trump and the world we live in today. It is about plans being laid generations ago. Moves and countermoves which bring us to our current political landscape...
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace - a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That's how I saw it, and see it still. How Stands the City?
Internet Archive: New York Times: Transcript of Reagan's Farewell Address to American People
... and maybe a message that was passed down through the decades.
I know who shot John.
— President Richard Nixon
Unfortunately, to tell it, I am going to have to run through several world events, which in all honesty could be described in richer detail but were barely mentioned in order to find the shortest route to the 40,000 foot view. There is a lot of information to convey and short attention spans to contend with.
The Vietnam War And Draft Dodgers
November 1, 1955: War broke out in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It wouldn't be until March 8, 1965 when the first US ground troops arrived in Da Nang to engage in battle.
On July 28, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced an increase to the draft. It wouldn't be until December 1, 1969 that the first draft lottery was held.
The US has been no stranger to Anti-War movements. They have been around since the Revolutionary War. The war in Vietnam was no different. And as you can see, protests were as common in the 1960's as they are today.
As such, there were several young men who dodged the draft. Actions taken to get out of the war were ranged from burning draft cards to fleeing the country. One famous draft dodger, who would later become President of the United States, was Bill Clinton.
In the 1992 presidential campaign, when the first President Bush confronted Bill Clinton — who, like Cheney, avoided military service entirely — conservatives could hardly speak or write a paragraph about Clinton that didn't accuse him of being a draft dodger. In October 1992, Bush himself assailed Clinton. "A lot of being president is about respect for that office and about telling the truth and serving your country," Bush told a crowd in New Jersey. "And you are all familiar with Governor Clinton's various stories on what he did to evade the draft."
Attending college was one way to avoid going to war. Bill Clinton, who won the Rhodes Scholarship in 1968, took full advantage of that. He studied abroad at Oxford University in England in 1968 and again in 1969. While he was there, he took part in the Vietnam War protests and organized a Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam event in October 1969.
Internet Archive: New York Times: THE 1992 CAMPAIGN; A Letter by Clinton on His Draft Deferment: 'A War I Opposed and Despised'
Colonel Eugene Holmes was the officer in the United States Army who helped Bill Clinton enroll in the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. He was a highly decorated soldier who survived the Bataan Death March and three and a half years as a POW during World War II. This was his response when Bill Clinton ran for president.
Bill Clinton came to see me at my home in 1969 to discuss his desire to enroll in the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas. We engaged in an extensive, approximately two (2) hour interview. At no time during this long conversation about his desire to join the program did he inform me of his involvement, participation and actually organizing protests against the United States involvement in South East Asia. He was shrewd enough to realize that had I been aware of his activities, he would not have been accepted into the ROTC program as a potential officer in the United States Army.
The next day I began to receive phone calls regarding Bill Clinton’s draft status. I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fullbright’s office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program. I received several such calls. The general message conveyed by the draft board to me was that Senator Fullbright’s office was putting pressure on them and that they needed my help. I then made the necessary arrangements to enroll Mr. Clinton into the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas.
I was not “saving” him from serving his country, as he erroneously thanked me for in his letter from England (dated December 3,1969). I was making it possible for a Rhodes Scholar to serve in the military as an officer. In retrospect I see that Mr. Clinton had no intention of following through with his agreement to join the Army ROTC program at the University of Arkansas or to attend the University of Arkansas Law School. I had explained to him the necessity of enrolling at the University of Arkansas as a student in order to be eligible to take the ROTC program at the University. He never enrolled at the University of Arkansas, but instead enrolled at Yale after attending Oxford. I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification.
The December 3rd letter written to me by Mr. Clinton, and subsequently taken from the files by Lt. Col. Clint Jones, my executive officer, was placed into the ROTC files so that a record would be available in case the applicant should again petition to enter the ROTC program. The information in that letter alone would have restricted Bill Clinton from ever qualifying to be an officer in the United States Military. Even more significant was his lack of veracity in purposefully defrauding the military by deceiving me, both in concealing his anti-military activities overseas and his counterfeit intentions for later military service. These actions cause me to question both his patriotism and his integrity.
The question remains was this the ONLY actions that Bill Clinton took to dodge the draft? Why was Senator Fullbright so interested in getting Bill Clinton into the University of Arkansas' ROTC program? Who were those other phone calls from regarding Bill Clinton and the ROTC program?
After his efforts to enroll in the University of Arkansas ROTC program, he enrolled in Yale Law School in 1970. It was here that he met Hillary Rodham in 1971.
Operation MHCHAOS
Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) domestic espionage project, which targeted the American people, domestically and abroad, from 1967 to roughly 1973 domestically. (The "MH" designation is to signify the program had a worldwide area of operations.) The program continued on overseas after it was "officially" shut down in the United States. However, the exact dates of the operation and the full extent of what it entailed are not exactly known.
What is known is that it was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson during his presidency. It was later expanded during Richard Nixon's presidency. Whether either of these two were directly aware of the operation is unknown.
It's mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on anti-war and other protest/radical movements that had surfaced at the time. The operation was launched under the direction of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms, by chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober. There was a fourth person involved, or at least aware, of Operation MHCHAOS whose name will come up later — John Doar.
Despite judicial rulings, many of the files regarding this operation was either destroyed or "misplaced" by the CIA in order to cover-up their crimes, who were CIA assets, names of targeted individuals, and so on.
Here is a transcript from this video:
Domestic intelligence operation conducted in the United States between 1967 and 1973 and designed to identify and monitor anti-war organizations and individuals and to provide information on persons of interest traveling abroad.
In 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency, responding to a directive from president Lyndon B. Johnson, began operating an internal surveillance program that was tasked with uncovering potential links between the Anti-War Movement and foreign governments.
Richard Helms, CIA Director from 1966 to 1973, launched the initiative and gave broad authority to his Chief of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, to conduct surveillance and gather information on individuals and organizations that might have had ties to overseas governments. To carry out his mandate, Angleton used a wide variety of already in place CIA personnel and operations including the use of foreign agents and offices.
Upon the advent of the Richard M. Nixon administration in 1969, all domestic surveillance relating to dissent and anti-war activities were brought under the Chaos umbrella. Nixon had a visceral dislike for the counterculture and anti-war movements and was convinced that enemies of the United States, and even of his administration, had infiltrated these activities and were giving them aide and support.
Soon some 60 CIA agents working abroad were conducting surveillance on US citizens abroad using electronic eavesdropping, as well as physical surveillance to gather information on persons of interest. Clandestine surveillance in the United States also picked up in the early 1970's.
Operation Chaos kept close tabs on groups, such as Women's Strike for Peace, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers, among many others. The purview of operation chaos quickly spun out of control. However, when the CIA began conducting surveillance on groups and individuals who did not have any direct links to the Anti-War Movement. The Women's Liberation Movement had become a target by the early1970's, as had a Jewish organization B'nai B'rith. Indeed the CIA even targeted the Israeli Embassy to determine if B'nai B'rith had any links to the Israeli government.
Reportedly, the agency was so intent on monitoring correspondence from the Israeli Embassy, that it formed its own bogus trash removal company which allowed it to sort through discarded mail.
In his first report to President Johnson in November 1967, Helms reported that Operation Chaos had found no substantial links between anyone in the Anti-War Movement and foreign governments. The five reports that succeeded this one all drew the same basic conclusion. Yet the CIA's activities were not only extended, but broadened, especially during Nixon's first term.
By the time Chaos was ended in 1973, it is estimated that the CIA had compiled 7,000 files on individual Americans and 1,000 files on various groups and organizations. Furthermore a list of some 300,000 Americans have been compiled presumably as persons of interest although there was little information on them.
All of this domestic espionage had been conducted without American's knowledge or permission.
As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973, laying bare the excessive secrecy and dirty tricks of the Nixon White House, Operation Chaos was liquidated. Indeed the Nixon Administration feared that if the operation was revealed, the administration's already tenuous hold on power might be undermined entirely.
But Chaos did not stay secret for very long.
On December 22, 1974, just four months after Nixon's forced resignation from office, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the basic outlines of Operation Chaos in the New York Times.
In the immediate aftermath of the Watergate Scandal, the revelation sparked bipartisan outrage and triggered several investigations. The following year, US Representative Bella Abzug conducted an investigation via the House Subcommittee on government information and individual rights. The revelations coming from the hearings were troubling to all and triggered a larger investigation — the US Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, also known as the Rockefeller Commission, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
After the specifics of Operation Chaos and other CIA activities had come to light, the government, and especially the CIA, attempted to downplay the impact of the CIA's programs on civil liberties.
Dick Cheney, then President Gerald R. Ford's Deputy Chief of Staff, warned that the Commission should resist congressional attempts to encroach on the executive branch prerogatives.
George H.W. Bush, CIA Director in the last days of the Ford Administration, downplayed the Commission's findings — saying only that Operation Chaos resulted in some improper accumulation of material on legitimate domestic activities.
The CIA was recruiting students in the US, sending them overseas to provide a cover story, and bringing them back to infiltrate what they called radical groups, like the Anti-War Movement.
The Watergate Scandal
One thing that gets overlooked, surveillance wasn't just being carried out on American civilians. It was also being carried out in the White House.
“The CIA had no involvement in the break-in,” declared the duly sworn witness, Richard Helms, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his voice starting to rise. Helms spoke to seven U.S. senators seated at the desks not ten feet in front of him. “No involvement whatever,” Helms emphasized with a broadside of rattling consonants. “And it was my preoccupation, consistently from then to this time, to make this point and to be sure that everybody understands it.”
The History Reader: Watergate: “The CIA had no involvement in the break-in”
Here is a transcript of that video:
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean if you look at what happened to Richard Nixon, which I of course did not understand at all. Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA and with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter, who had been a naval intelligence officer working in the White House — working in the Nixon White House. And then he shows up like a year later. And he's this brand new reporter. He's never been a journalist at all. He's a Naval Intel Officer. The famous Bob Woodward, we all revere. And he's at the Washington Post. And somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post. He's the lead guy in that story.
Well, I worked in a newspaper. I've been in the news business my whole life. That is not how it works. You don't take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story. But he was he was that guy.
And who is his main source for Watergate? Oh! The number two guy at the FBI.
Ohhh! So you have the Naval Intelligence Officer working with the FBI official to destroy the president. Okay. So that's a Deep State Coup. How else would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say?
And yet the way it was framed, in the way that I accepted for decades, was this intrepid reporter fought power. No, no, no.
This Intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power — secret power — which is the most threatening kind — to bounce the single most popular president in American History, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term. And replace him with who? Oh! Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission.
Now how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon's Vice President? Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat Speaker of the House, told him you must choose him. We will only confirm him — when they sent the actual elected Vice President away for "tax evasion", Spiro Agnew of Maryland.
So you have a complete setup! Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission.
Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it. I was like that's completely insane.
You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation of the assassination? Okay. You're fake! Yeah. He was on the Warren Commission.
And so sorry for the long story. But the point is that happened in front of all of us, but the way it was framed cloaked the obvious reality of it. The people who broke into the Watergate Office Building — from which the name is taken, Watergate — was, I think it was six of them or seven of them. All but one was a CIA employee. That's real. It's like look it up on Google. So the whole thing...
Richard Nixon was elected by more votes than any president in American history in the 1972 election. He was the most popular by votes, which is the only way we can really measure popularity, the most popular president in his re-election campaign. And two years later, he's gone on undone by a Naval Intel Officer the number two guy at the FBI and a bunch of CIA employees.
You tell me what that is. Those are the facts. Those are not disputed facts. That's not crackpot. That's just... Look it up.
JOE ROGAN: So why did they want to get rid of Nixon?
TUCKER CARLSON: Um... You know there are a lot of theories on that. I mean we don't... First of all, we don't need to know motive to know what happened. "They" — meaning unelected federal employees — got rid of Richard Nixon, which is the most anti-democratic way to make a leadership change that there is. Okay.
I should just say at the outset, I actually kind of believe in democracy. Obviously, it's not working well obviously. It's ending globally. There will never be another liberal democracy unfortunately. But I'm attached to it because I was born here. I really believe in it, and it's better than any other system. So that's why I'm pissed.
What was their motive?
There are a lot of theories on this. There's an amazing conversation. It's on tape between Richard Nixon, when he was still president. I think it was in 1973. And I think it was Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, though I may have f*** that up. But it was the head of the CIA. I think it was Helms.
And Nixon says, "I know why they killed Jack Kennedy."
So Nixon was a student of history — obviously a flawed and complicated person — but a very, very smart person. And he was really interested in why this guy who'd been president, just one president before him, was murdered. And he didn't think it was a lone gunman who was mysteriously assassinated two days later by another lone gunman. Like it's so obviously bulls***. And he knew that. And he said to the CIA Director who — and you can listen to the tape — it's on the internet — is totally silent on this question.
So I think there was the impression... I don't think... I know that Nixon understood that the bureaucracy was really in control of the country. It wasn't elected officials and that's a massive threat, because it's true. So and there may have been other reasons too that I'm not privy to.
Look all I... And by the way, I didn't even know any of this despite having moved to Washington in high school and been around this stuff a lot. A lot, a lot. I didn't know any of it. And I know Bob Woodward personally. So I didn't. And I know Carl Bernstein personally. I even work for Carl Bernstein briefly. So I knew some of the actual players in this. But I didn't connect the obvious dots because they weren't framed that way.
That's the point I'm making. It's the way that you frame things. You can have all the information of available on Wikipedia, which is also controlled by the intel agencies. But it there's still information on there. The information can be out there in the public domain. It's a matter of seeing it for what it is, right?
JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So Nixon said that he knew why they killed JFK. Did he elaborate?
TUCKER CARLSON: Nope. And it's worth listening to. It's a very weird conversation that takes place in the Oval Office, which famously had tape recording devices in it. Obviously, this became a big feature during the Watergate hearings. But yes that conversation, and I may be mangling it slightly, but it's on the internet and absolutely worth listening to. And the CIA director has this kind of sinister silence.
So like, if I'm the president, you're the CIA director, and I say I know why the guy who was just president years ago was killed, the obvious answer would be like, "Well, why? Why? Why? Do you... What? You know why he was killed! You've got insight into the assassination of a US President!" He doesn't say anything — which is like a very weird response.
Like what? Just gonna' throw that out there?
Like if you say to me, you know, we're taking a leak. You're at the next urinal. And you're like, "I figured out the secret to life." And I'm like, "Huh! Okay." That's like not a good response, right?
Tucker Carlson was absolutely correct in what he said here. Nixon was setup to take a fall. The people involved were all intelligence agents or tied to intelligence agencies at one time or another.
Empirically speaking, Helms’s claim that the Agency had no involvement in the break-in was dubious. Four of the seven men arrested at the Watergate office complex in the early hours of June 17, 1972, had worked on or collaborated with CIA operations to overthrow the government of Cuba. A fifth burglar had held a senior position in the Agency’s internal police force, the Office of Security.
“No involvement” implied no connection or association with the burglary. Yet two of the burglars, Howard Hunt and James McCord, had retired from the Agency two years before and gone into business with Helms’s personal blessing and CIA institutional support. The Agency’s statement, reported as fact, that Hunt and McCord “were former employees with whom we have had no dealings since their retirement” was simply false. A month before his arrest, McCord bought electronic gear with Agency help. In retirement Hunt continued to meet with his long-time case officer, Tom Karamessines, the deputy director of operations and one of Helms’s closest confidantes.
A third burglar, Rolando Martínez, was known in the Langley cable traffic as AMSNAP-3. He had worked for the Agency as a full-time boat captain from 1963 to 1971, running hundreds of sabotage, infiltration, and terrorism missions into Cuba. Then he was kept on as an informant.
A fourth burglar, Bernard “Macho” Barker, was a police captain in Havana who had become a CIA source in the 1950s. Known by the code name AMC-LATTER-1, Barker recruited “a number of valuable agents” in Cuba, according to one classified memo. He went on to serve as deputy to Hunt in Operation Zapata, the CIA’s failed attempt to rout Fidel Castro’s socialist government in April 1961. As a prelude to the landing of the CIA-trained brigade at the Bay of Pigs, Hunt and his men planned to assassinate Castro, but Cuban security forces broke up the plot and several of Hunt’s men went to prison.
A fifth burglar, Frank Sturgis, had briefly served in Castro’s government and then joined the exiles in Miami, where he cultivated a reputation for violence. If Helms had checked the file — and he usually did — he knew that Sturgis had once participated in a plot to kill Castro, which the Miami station considered and rejected. No one in the Senate Caucus Room would have guessed that the Watergate crew included three aspiring assassins, and Helms didn’t leave them any wiser.
It was true that the CIA, as an organization, did not select the target for the break-in. But Hunt, the former undercover man working in the Nixon White House, had brought the four Cubans into the operation. Without Hunt there would have been no team of burglars at the Watergate. And unbeknownst to senators and spectators, Hunt was a longtime personal friend of Helms, whom the director had groomed for fame. At the witness table, Helms transmuted tacit involvement into total innocence.
The History Reader: Watergate: “The CIA had no involvement in the break-in”
That seems like an awful lot of CIA agents all involved in operations, assassination plots, and regime changes in Cuba. What did they have against President Richard Nixon? More importantly, what did President Nixon have on them?
And then there was the anonymous media source only known by the name Deep Throat. Who was he?
Vanity Fair was the magazine that finally uncovered the identity of "Deep Throat". This was later confirmed by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who originally broke the Watergate story. W. Mark Felt was the number two guy at the FBI during Watergate.
To be continued…
And just to keep you hanging, here is a shameless promotional teaser…
I was a teenager in the 60s and remember all of the Agnew/Nixon machinations….but, of course, didn’t realize the CIA involvement. Wow! You are a great researcher of the detailed information….thank you! Can’t wait for the next segment. God bless you.🙏
Crap. That’s a hell of a story:/