Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Reveals How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up. by Robert Merritt as told to Douglas Caddy, Original Attorney for the Watergate Seven

Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Reveals How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up.

Copyright © 2009/2010 Douglas Caddy and Debbie Man. All Rights Reserved.

Presentation Copyright © 2010 Trine Day, LLC

Published by:

Trine Day LLC

PO Box 577

Walterville, OR 97489

1-800-556-2012

www.TrineDay.com

publisher@TrineDay.net

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010932354

Caddy, Douglas, and Merritt, Robert

Watergate Exposed: A Confidential Informant Reveals How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set-Up—1st ed.

p. cm. (acid-free paper)

Includes bibliography, references and index.

(ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-35-9 (Epub Version)

1. United States——History. 2. United States—Watergate—History. 3. United States—Politics and government—History. 4. United States—Corruption—History. 5. 6. . I. Caddy, Douglas and Merritt, Robert. II. Title

First Edition

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Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn’t believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

— Daniel Keys Moran

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

— Yogi Berra

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

— John Le Carre

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.

— Richard M. Nixon

Publisher’s Foreword

An’ here I sit so patiently

Waiting to find out what price

You have to pay to get out of

Going through all these things twice.

– Bob Dylan, Memphis Blues Again

Will we ever know our true history? What does it mean when our republic gets it strings pulled by unelected players? Do the people in the shadows really know better? Are they operating in our country’s best interests? How would we know? Does it matter?

I was talking with a local newspaper editor, or more likely haranguing him about not covering TrineDay’s books, when the subject of Watergate came up. You could feel the pride of his profession: the system had worked, the fourth estate had taken down the evildoer, the country was saved. I mentioned Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin and Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, and how those accounts of Watergate were different from the one told by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The alternative scenarios even included a local angle, since the serviveman caught with his hand in Henry Kissinger’s briefcase was from Salem, Oregon. Yeoman Radford was spying for the Joint Chiefs … at least as far as we know.

Cutting me short, the editor told me most reporters and news professionals wouldn’t even look at a different view. I gathered this was because the events of Watergate were so ingrained in their psyche, their personas – celluloid reality heroes Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman make great role models. Never mind the facts; feeling good about oneself and one’s profession must be worth something.

With Watergate Exposed, we are again offered a different view of that historic scandal, and a very rare glimpse into the murky world of a confidential informant(CI). A domain of duress and duty, legality and illegality, pride and regret, tedium and excitement. Many times a CI doesn’t even know whom they are truly working for, or the real objective of the activity they have been asked to perform. In their arena, the ends justify the means.

In the early 1970s, Robert Butch Merritt was profiled and then groomed as a CI by Carl Shoffler, the D.C. policeman who arrested the burglars at the Watergate complex on the night of June 17, 1972. Carl was no ordinary beat cop, but had special intelligence training. Before his D.C. police duties, he had worked at the National Security Agency’s Vint Hill Farm Station in Virginia, a listening post that was generally staffed by members of the Army Security Agency.

Bob Woodward was no ordinary news reporter, As Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets states at whowhatwhy.com: "Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

A few short years later, had Charles Manson follower Lynette Squeaky Fromme or FBI informant Sarah J. Moore been better shots, President Leslie L. King, Jr. (aka Gerald R. Ford, Jr.), our country’s first appointed president, might have been assassinated and Nelson Rockefeller then would have fulfilled his quest to become President of the United States. Ah, the vagaries of life.

I was not a political supporter of Richard Nixon, but I do support our Republic, and any attack upon Lady Liberty puts us all at risk Then there is something called history. As George Santayana put it, History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

With Watergate Exposed, history is being rewritten, or at least an account from a different vantage point is being told. Is it the truth? This may be difficult to judge. For the shadows are secretive and duplicitous, and memories get clouded with time.But you’ll never find the truth if you don’t look.

Here is direct testimony that challenges the official dogma, and is validated on many points in hundreds of pages at the National Archives. Will we listen? Does it matter? Time and history … may tell.

Onward to the Utmost of Future!

Peace,

Kris Millegan

Publisher

TrineDay

October 2, 2010

Acknowledgments

Robert Merritt and Douglas Caddy wish to express their appreciation to the following persons, each of whom did something that made publication of our book possible:

Donald O. Graul, Jr., Executive Director, American Independent Writers, Inc.; Charles M. Klein; Will O’Bryan, Managing Editor, Washington Metro Weekly; Matthew Fulgham, Assistant Director, U.S. National Archives; William H. Davis, Archivist, U.S. National Archives; David Paynter, U.S. National Archives; Gregory Cumming, Supervisory Archivist, U.S. National Archives; John Simkin, Historian, United Kingdom; Brett Zongker, reporter, Associated Press; Frances D’Antuono, Esq.; Deacon MacCubbin, Lamba Rising; Antonio Williams, New York City; Ray Hill, Houston; Eben Rey with Los Angeles radio station KPFK 90.7 FM.

Author’s Foreword

Why is Robert Merritt telling his complete story now? It is a natural question to ask. After all, it is 38 years after the Watergate scandal broke open, so why the long delay?

There is no single answer. There are many. First and foremost is that Merritt would have been killed if he attempted to reveal all he knew of the origins of Watergate while Washington, D.C. police detective Carl Shoffler, the officer who arrested the burglars, was alive. It is that simple. Shoffler, to whom Merritt confided his prior knowledge of the planned break-in at Watergate two weeks before it happened, also recognized his own life was on the line. As recounted by Jim Hougan in his 1984 best-seller, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, Shoffler told Captain Edmund Chung, his former commanding officer at the National Security Agency’s Vint Hill Farm Station, that if Shoffler ever made the whole story public, ‘his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel.’

After the Watergate arrests and ensuing controversy, Shoffler went to great lengths on many occasions to impress upon Merritt the necessity to remain quiet. In the two years before Watergate, Shoffler and the FBI had directed Merritt as a Confidential Informant to commit hundreds of crimes, all done in the name of national security. Shoffler threatened Merritt that, on the basis these crimes alone, both of them could be prosecuted and imprisoned, as would certain FBI officials and agents.

Another factor was Merritt’s open homosexuality. Watergate occurred only three years after the Stonewall riot, which marked the beginning of the gay rights movement. Homophobia still reigned supreme. Shoffler told Merritt that his homosexuality would be used to discredit him and to railroad him into incarceration. Indeed, as Merritt prepared to enter the building to testify in executive session before the Senate Watergate Committee, a Democratic committee staff member, Wayne Bishop, stopped and told him his credibility was zero because he was a homosexual and threatened that if he told what he knew about the origins of Watergate, he would be immediately thrown into the U.S. Capitol Building’s jail.

Even the Republican in the White House, Richard Nixon, whose presidency could have been saved had Merritt disclosed what he knew, railed at the time against homosexuals. As revealed in a new book by Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, Nixon wanted so badly to discredit, or even prosecute, newspaper columnist Jack Anderson that he contemplated an investigation to see if Anderson was a homosexual, even though Anderson was married and had nine children. Nixon Aide H.R. Haldeman is quoted on a tape of an Oval Office meeting with the president as asking, Do we have anything on [Anderson aide Brit] Hume?... It’d be great if we could get him on a homosexual thing. In support of the witchhunt, another top aide, Charles Colson, ignorantly chimed in, He sure looks it.

So the overt and widespread hatred of gays during this period was a key factor in Merritt’s decision to keep quiet. He only had to look at what happened to me to see what fate might lay waiting for him. In the first month of the Watergate case, Chief Judge John Sirica falsely accused me of being a principal in the Watergate break-in crime. Sirica then held me, as attorney for the seven defendants, in contempt of court and ordered me jailed after I asserted the attorney-client privilege and Sixth Amendment right to counsel in behalf of my clients.

Sirica’s vicious homophobia was matched only by the judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who upheld his contempt citation of me in a gratuitously insulting decision. This unreported segment of Watergate – how these prejudiced judges attempted to set me up and destroy my legal career because I was gay – is told in my Epilogue to this book. They ultimately failed because there was not one scintilla of evidence that I was involved, which is why I was never indicted, named an unindicted conspirator, disciplined by the bar or even interviewed by the Senate Watergate Committee.

Despite the pressure to keep him quiet, Merritt on a number of occasions came close to disclosing what he knew about the prior knowledge of Shoffler and certain agents of the intelligence community of the planned break-in. This is covered in Chapter 6, A Series of Missed Opportunities: How Watergate Might Have Turned Out Differently. In each instance, for one justifiable reason or another, Merritt decided that the best strategy was to lie about his total involvement: remain quiet about all that he knew.

From 1985 to 2000, Merritt was a fugitive from justice, as he recounts in his story, even though during this period Shoffler continued to direct his activities from afar while the former worked closely as a Confidential Informant with law enforcement agencies in New York that were unaware of his wanted status. As a fugitive, Merritt’s goal was not to get caught. Talking publicly about what he knew about Watergate was out of the question.

In 1996 Shoffler died. After 2000, when the Government dismissed the criminal case against him, Merritt could give his full attention to disclosing the untold story of Watergate’s origins. He began to collect documents and information that would support his story, an effort that took years. Even so, the FBI has steadfastly refused to release over 300 documents from its files on Merritt requested under the Freedom of Information Act, documents that could contribute mightily to understanding what occurred.

In May 2008, Merritt contacted me to ask if I would help him write a book about what he knew. I agreed to do so. About the same time doctors who had been treating him for serious medical conditions told him that he had only three to four years to live. This knowledge spurred him to concentrate on getting his book finished. Even as I write this, I have learned that Merritt’s doctors told him within the last week that he likely has three to four months to live due to advanced cancer of the spine. They set the outmost date as Valentine’s Day 2011.

So this book is being rushed into print in order that Merritt can publicly answer questions that might arise while he is still capable of doing so. In a sense his story is a deathbed confession, as his only desire at this point in time is that the historical truth about Watergate be told fully and accurately.

Douglas Caddy

Attorney

Houston, Texas

September 19, 2010

SELECTED MEDIA COVERAGE OF ROBERT MERRITT

Revelations of a Gay Informant by Sasha Gregory-Lewis, The Advocate, February 23, 1977 and March 9, 1977: After Mayday [1971], police used Merritt for what appears to have been a crash course on homosexuality and gay liberation. ‘The police were very disturbed,’ Merritt says, ‘about the fact that gay people weren’t stereotyped anymore. They were mad about it. They said they couldn’t recognize them any more.’

Informants for Police Exposed by Paul Valentine, Washington Post, October 7, 1973: Merritt was quoted in The [Daily] Rag as saying he later did informant work for the FBI. FBI press spokesman Jack Herrington would not comment on that claim, but another source confirmed that Merritt performed ‘voluntary’ work for the agency and may have been paid for it.

Informant Tried to Spy on Kennedy by Columnist Jack Anderson, Washington Post, October 23, 1973: Washington police attempted to plant an informant in the household of Ethel Kennedy, widow of Sen. Robert Kennedy (D.-N.Y.) in 1971. The informant, E. Robert Merritt, Jr., committed burglaries and other dirty deeds for the police and the FBI. Confidential FBI files say of him: ‘Nothing has developed …to indicate that the informant has furnished other than reliable information.’

Informers Spied on D.C. Activists by Jarod Stout and Toni House, Washington Star-News, October 7, 1973: Police confirmed that Robert E. Merritt, 28, and Ann Kolego, 20, have been police intelligence informants, but they and the FBI would not give details of the undercover work.

FBI Informer Confesses, The Daily Rag, October 5-12, 1973: With the disclosure of Robert Merritt’s role as an FBI and Metropolitan Police informer, the reality of police surveillance of active community groups and illegal police activities in the District is confirmed. Such groups as the D.C. Statehood Party, RAP, Common Cause, Off Our Backs, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Gay Activists Alliance have been under surveillance. While the information Merritt provides on widespread police intelligence is substantial, it leaves open many questions as to what else is going on.

Two Lift Curtain onUndercover Work by Paul W. Valentine, Washington Post, November 26, 1973: Merritt said he also engaged in disruption and sabotage during street demonstrations. The actions included giving protesters false information about places and yanking the wires and tubes from two sound systems in West Potomac Park in early May 1971. Such is the varied life of the political informant.

Behavior of Informers Employed byFBI, Other Agencies Disturbs Some Critics by Stanley Penn, Wall Street Journal, March 23, 1976: Earl Robert Merritt stole mail from a prestigious Washington research institution. Robert Hardy taught anti-war activists how to burglarize buildings. Sara Jane Moore tried to kill the President of the United States. These people had similar sidelines. At one time or another each worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The American Police State by David Wise, (Random House, 1976): Some of the information had been provided [to Institute for Policy Studies attorney Mitchell Rogovin] by Robert Merritt, who told Rogovin that under the name of Robert Chandler he had worked for many months as an informant for the intelligence unit of the Metropolitan Police Department, and later for agents Terry O’Connor and William Tucker of the FBI.

Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America by Frank Donner, University of California Press (1990/1991):

Merritt collected information relating to planned demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican conventions in Miami, and since he was a homosexual he was also assigned to spy on the gay community and cultivate radicals believed to be homosexuals. In June 1972, shortly after the Watergate break-in, MPD officers tried to induce Merritt to ‘get close’ to the lawyer for the Watergate burglars, a rumored homosexual ‘associated with communist causes’ and to develop a sexual relationship with him.… After Merritt surfaced in the fall of 1972, he gave extraordinary detailed accounts of his four-year career as a spy based on files he had kept.

The User Who Got Used by J. A. Lobbia, Village Voice, September 9, 1999: For years Tony Merritt did the dirty work for cops and landlords, helping them bust and evict drug dealers. So why is the Times Square Hotel, his latest home, showing him the door?

Inside Man Profile by Will O’Bryan, Washington Metro Weekly, March 13, 2008: Butch Merritt was a leading spy in America’s homegrown cold war against homosexuals.

Watergate’s Strange Bedfellows by Will O’Bryan, Washington Metro Weekly, April 15, 2010: Community infiltrator Butch Merritt joins gay Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy for timely Watergate expose.

Special Note from Douglas Caddy

Readers of this book will find that there is redundancy in some sections with certain events being described a second time. This came about for several reasons. The first is that Robert Merritt told me his story over an eighteen month period and his repeating of some events was unavoidable. The second is that both Merritt and I during the writing of the book were targeted for abuse by powerful elements that did not want the book to see the light of day. On one occasion burglars broke into Merritt’s apartment in the Bronx when he was away and destroyed his computer and printer, while not taking anything of value. Also, two persons with whom Merritt is acquainted told him on separate occasions that they had seen a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice to local agencies directing that steps be taken to hinder the publication of this book. Furthermore, both Merritt and I were regularly subjected to spoofing phone calls, a technique routinely engaged in by U.S. intelligence agencies.

To assure that Merritt’s story would be told publicly in the event that publication of the book was prevented, I occasionally posted key parts of it on the Watergate Topic of the Education Forum, which operates under the direction of the noted historian John Simkin in the U.K. Some of what was posted, including two affidavits by Merritt, was subsequently incorporated directly into the book’s final contents, resulting in some redundancy.

Both Merritt and I recognize that Watergate Exposed raises as many questions as it provides answers. It is our hope that historians and other interested parties will attempt to find the answers to these questions. Future disclosure of relevant files will go far towards clearing up the mystery. Two files that need to be disclosed fully are the U.S. Government and Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) files on Carl Shoffler and on Robert Merritt. Merritt obtained over 400 documents from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) but almost everything in these was redacted. Persons and organizations who were targeted by the FBI and MPD, such as those named in third appendix in this book, are encouraged to use the