Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

Paperback / softback. New. <b>The exposé that reveals “a prostitution ring, heavy CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats, and plots within plots” (<i>The Washington Post</i>)</b><br /><br /> Ten years after the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, Jim Hougan—then the Washington editor of <i>Harper’s Magazine</i>—set out to write a profile of Lou Russell, a boozy private-eye who plied his trade in the vice-driven underbelly of the nation’s capital. Hougan soon discovered that Russell was “the sixth man, the one who got away” when his boss, veteran CIA officer Jim McCord, led a break-in team into a trap at the Watergate.<br /><br /> Using the Freedom of Information Act to win the release of the FBI’s Watergate investigation—some thirty-thousand pages of documents that neither the <i>Washington Post</i> nor the Senate had seen—Hougan refuted the orthodox narrative of the affair.<br /><br /> Armed with evidence hidden from the public for more than a decade, Hougan proves that McCord deliberately sabotaged the June 17, 1972, burglary. None of the Democrats’ phones had been bugged, and the spy-team’s ostensible leader, Gordon Liddy, was himself a pawn—at once, guilty and oblivious.<br /><br /> The power struggle that unfolded saw E. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord using the White House as a cover for an illicit domestic intelligence operation involving call-girls at the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments.<br /><br /> A New York Times Notable Book, <i>Secret Agenda</i> “present[s] some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past . . . The questions [Hougan] has posed here—and some he hasn’t—certainly deserve an answer” (<i>The New York Times Book Review</i>). <i>Kirkus Reviews</i> declared the book “a fascinating series of puzzles—with all the detective work laid out.”