Secret Agenda: Hougan’s case

Hougan started with the burglary’s oddities. The tape on the doors that led a guard to the burglars was replaced after he first removed it. The lookout across the street was watching television. McCord, a skilled security man, made mistakes an amateur might avoid. To Hougan, McCord was sabotaging the operation for reasons of his own and the CIA’s. [1][3]

His second argument concerned the target. Hougan said the phone the burglars tapped was not Larry O’Brien’s but one used, through an extension on a secretary’s desk, by people arranging dates with women from a call-girl ring near the Watergate. A burglar had a key that fit only that secretary’s desk. On this reading, the White House wanted political intelligence, but the operatives on the ground had another agenda. [1][2]

Hougan was a serious journalist, a former Washington editor of Harper’s, and the book was reviewed as a work of real research. A federal judge later wrote that the call-girl theory, “or some part of it, may be correct.” [1][2]

Some of Hougan’s facts were accepted as undisputed in court. In Wells v. Liddy, the judge noted that burglar Eugenio Martinez had a key taped to his notebook that fit only Maxie Wells’s desk, that the phone that was tapped could be reached through an extension on her desk, and that no tap was found on O’Brien’s phone. [1]

But the same judge was careful. “This is not to say, of course, that what Bailley said was true or that the call girl theory is accurate,” he wrote. The conventional political-intelligence explanation “may be correct”, the call-girl theory may be, or neither, or both. The call-girl evidence rested largely on Phillip Bailley, a lawyer with a history of mental illness and a conviction tied to prostitution. Wells denied it under oath. [1][2]

The sabotage theory has no documentary support. McCord denied it was a CIA operation. The Rockefeller Commission found no CIA planning. Hougan’s case is a reading of anomalies, not a document or a witness. [4][5]

And whatever the burglars wanted, the cover-up was ordered from the White House. Secret Agenda is about the night of 17 June. It cannot touch the tapes of what Nixon did afterwards. [3]