The Arrogance of Power (50 page)

“Unfortunately,” the committee also observed, “the President did not avail himself of the opportunity to clarify or explain the matters arising out of his dealings or his relationship with Rebozo.”

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The evidence suggests that Rebozo's hand was in everything that was dubious and touched on Nixon and money—not least the forbidden territory of foreign money.

One such area involved Nixon and Adnan Khashoggi, the hugely wealthy Saudi businessman. Usually characterized as an “arms dealer,” he once said
he preferred to be known as a “connector.” In 1997, interviewed at his Paris home, Khashoggi recalled that his relationship with Nixon began in the wilderness years—they were introduced by an associate of Paul Getty—and lasted through the presidency and Nixon's fall, with meetings continuing until shortly before Nixon's death.
¹¹

Khashoggi had courted Nixon in 1967 by putting a plane at his disposal to tour the Middle East after the Six-Day War. Soon afterward, using a proxy, he opened an account at Rebozo's bank in Florida. He did so, he explained to Watergate prosecutors, hoping to “curry favor with Rebozo,” to get an entrée to the man who might become president, and to pursue business deals. Khashoggi also told the prosecutors he thought Rebozo “not very smart and not nearly well-informed enough to serve as an effective spokesman.” He said to the author, by contrast, that he found Rebozo “very fine, very secretive, you know, the type you can trust. . . .”

Rumors of Khashoggi's largess proliferated after Watergate, but prosecutors were “cautious” in their questioning because of the witness' high-level connections in the Saudi government. Khashoggi asserted that he contributed forty-three thousand dollars in 1968, not as a cash contribution but to fund production of a recording of a Nixon speech. He also admitted to having sent a further fifteen thousand dollars through an intermediary. “I was afraid,” he told the author, “to spoil our relationship with money.

“I know it looks suspicious,” Khashoggi remarked of two separate unexplained hundred-thousand-dollar withdrawals from his account at the Rebozo bank during the 1972 election campaign. The proxy account holder had reported that his financial records for that year—and only those for that year—had been stolen in a burglary five days before Nixon resigned as president.

“If Nixon asked me for a million dollars,” Khashoggi said in the seventies, “I would have given it to him.” He added, however, that neither Nixon nor Rebozo ever asked him for money. The author mentioned these denials to former Democratic aide Pierre Salinger, who had an affable relationship in later years with both Nixon and Khashoggi and whom the author happened to interview within hours of meeting the Saudi.

According to Salinger, a million was exactly what Nixon received in 1972. “Adnan showed up in Washington and had a secret meeting with Nixon,” Salinger said, “and later on, he told me, he'd given a million dollars to help with the campaign. . . .”

Khashoggi is known to have met with Nixon on Rebozo's houseboat in Florida after the 1968 election and attended both Nixon inaugurals. When his first wife, Soraya, divorced him, her lawyers tried to subpoena Nixon to ask about “gifts of jewelry to members of Nixon's family.” Khashoggi said in 1997 that he had given jewelry worth sixty thousand dollars to Nixon's daughters and later donated two hundred thousand dollars to the Nixon Library. If true, it did not earn him a single mention in Nixon's memoirs.
¹²

Nixon should have avoided Khashoggi not just because he was a
questionable character but because to have accepted money or gifts from him during a campaign, or even to come under suspicion of having done so, was dangerous since it was against the law. It was, and is, a crime for an American politician to solicit or accept contributions from a foreign citizen, government, or political party. Yet whatever the truth about the Khashoggi relationship, Nixon appears to have committed precisely that crime—in inadmissible circumstances—in 1968.

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Seated beside Pat Nixon and her daughters at the 1968 convention, silent and expressionless, had been a man few recognized. This was sixty-eight-year-old Thomas Pappas, a vastly wealthy Greek-American with strong international connections and great generosity for those he favored.

Pappas was an immigrant who, like Nixon, had started his career in the family grocery store, built a vast supermarket and food import business, and then returned to Greece to found an oil, steel, and chemical empire. He had been raising funds for the Republican party since the twenties and had known Nixon since the Eisenhower days. Photographs autographed by Nixon adorned his office wall. He was a regular guest at White House dinners, attended Tricia's wedding, and donated fifty thousand dollars for a box in Tricia's and Julie's names at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

As Nixon would describe him on the White House tapes, he was “good old Tom Pappas.” That would be during Watergate, when Pappas was producing hush money for the burglars and referred to in White House telephone code as the “Greek bearing gifts.” In fact, Pappas had delivered a massive financial gift much earlier, as cochairman of the 1968 finance committee, but not without receiving a favor in return.

As we have seen, Nixon's choice of Agnew as running mate seemed incomprehensible at the time. In a celebrated editorial the
Washington Post
surmised that it would go down in history as “perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul.” Now that more has been revealed about the Pappas connection, however, the decision seems less inexplicable.

Agnew's Greek father had also been an immigrant, born Theodoros Anagnostopoulos, whose family came from a village in the Peloponnese close by Pappas's own. The millionaire said he “put in a good word for Spiro” at the convention, and Nixon himself admitted that Pappas influenced his selection. It was a decision that played well with the Greek-American community in the United States, and also in Greece itself.

Why, though, pick Agnew over all the more likely candidates? The answer almost certainly lies in a conjunction of events in Greece; the political responses of Nixon, Agnew, and Pappas; and—once again—dirty money.

In the spring of 1967, a military junta had seized power in the birthplace of democracy. It suspended civil liberties and political parties, imposed press
censorship, and imprisoned dissenters. Many of those jailed were tortured, some at a facility just steps away from the U.S. Embassy, and for many nations this brutal regime became a pariah to be shunned. The Johnson administration had maintained relations, for strategic reasons, but cut back on arms shipments.

The junta hoped for more overt acceptance under a Nixon administration, and it was Spiro Agnew who sent the first signal that this would be the case. The way he did that, however, hastened the discovery of a secret, one that—had it been revealed at the time—might have prevented Nixon's election as president. That the secret did come close to exposure was a result of the outrage and determination of a single Greek exile.

Elias Demetracopoulos, today in his early seventies, had worked all his life as a journalist, for American newspapers as well as for the Greek press. Then and since, having often reported critically on senior American officials, he has come under aggressive investigation, but always emerged with his reputation unscathed.
¹³
In Washington political figures on both the right and the left came to hold him in respect, as did numerous fellow journalists. “His data is meticulously accurate,” the columnist Robert Novak has commented. “I find him a triple A source.”

By the time Nixon and Agnew became candidates in 1968, Demetracopoulos had been in the United States for nearly a year, having fled Greece rather than be silenced by censorship there. Based in cramped quarters at Washington's Fairfax Hotel, he was working single-mindedly to overthrow the junta. With a Greek-American running for vice president, it was obviously important to him to learn what Agnew's attitude toward the regime would be, and at first there seemed no cause for alarm.

Demetracopoulos had been introduced to Agnew by Louise Gore, owner of the Fairfax and, as chairman of the Nixon-Agnew campaign in Agnew's home state, a Republican of impeccable credentials. There were three meetings with him in late 1967 and 1968, all of them encouraging to Demetracopoulos. In January, Agnew said he hoped soon to see an elected government back in power in Greece. When Gore and Demetracopoulos saw him about two months before the election, he assured them that—as a vice presidential candidate—he intended to remain neutral. Then suddenly, the very same week, he made a public statement sympathetic to the junta.

The turnabout was shocking, especially so because of the powerful encouragement it gave to the Greek dictatorship. “What happened?” Louise Gore wrote to Demetracopoulos. “Why did Agnew tell us one thing one day and say something else the next? . . . What made him change his mind—or rather
who!
What are you going to do?”

What Demetracopoulos did, after a quick blast at Agnew the next day, was what he did best: use his network of contacts to find out what was going on. What he learned was hugely compromising to Nixon.

The exiled journalist's sources told him that between July and October the Nixon campaign had received large sums of money from the Greek dictatorship. There had been three separate payments totaling $549,000, nearly $2.75 million at today's values, and Demetracopoulos discovered exactly how they had been made.

The funds, he learned, originated with the secret Greek intelligence agency, the KYP,
*
an organization founded, trained, and organized by the CIA. The payments, ordered by KYP Deputy Director Mikalis Roufogalis, were passed in cash, in large bills issued by the Central Bank of Greece, to Thomas Pappas, an active supporter of the renegade regime.
¹⁴
Pappas personally transported the money to the United States.

The accuracy of Demetracopoulos' information was confirmed years later by a future KYP chief, Kostas Tsimas, and by Henry Tasca, whom Nixon would appoint ambassador to Greece.
¹⁵
The details of exactly how the payments were processed, which Demetracopoulos supplied to a House committee, are still withheld in congressional archives.

Uncovered just weeks before the 1968 presidential election, this information was potentially politically devastating. Demetracopoulos contacted the parties most likely to have an interest in exposing the scandal: the Humphrey Democrats. Through Nixon's old foe in California, Governor Brown, he arranged an appointment with Democratic National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien. O'Brien met twice with the Greek exile, his staff as many as five times.
¹⁶
They were impressed by the quality of his information, but uncertain how to handle it.

O'Brien wanted corroboration, and that could be obtained only by sending aides to Greece to interview Demetracopoulos' contacts or by bringing the contacts to Washington. In the frantic final days of the campaign neither course seemed feasible. O'Brien did brief Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey on the matter. The president in turn was briefed by O'Brien.

The Democrats' hope was that Johnson would ask CIA Director Richard Helms, with his direct line to Greek intelligence, to confirm that the dictatorship was indeed funding Nixon. Yet Johnson took no action, and O'Brien made do with a half measure. Citing a newspaper report—also seeded by Demetracopoulos—that junta money had been reaching Nixon through Pappas, O'Brien issued the following press statement: “Mr. Nixon and Mr. Agnew should explain their relationship with Tom Pappas, and let the American people know what's going on.” In the clamor of the countdown to the election, the statement was barely noticed. Nixon and Agnew responded by not responding.
¹⁷

Yet in the months and years that followed, and in spite of attempts to silence him, Demetracopoulos would persist in trying to get the story out. Nixon had given another hostage to fortune.

Historians have speculated as to why Johnson did nothing about the information O'Brien brought to him about the junta funding. A persuasive explanation is that the president was at that very time preoccupied with a weightier matter, his struggle to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War. On the very day that O'Brien publicly challenged Nixon about Tom Pappas Johnson was confronting intelligence on Vietnam that, if accurate, was even more damaging to Nixon and Agnew than the Greek scandal.

Nixon's involvement with Vietnam went far back and is replete with mystery—some merely intriguing, some as serious as it is possible to be.

How many American soldiers
Died in this land?
How many Vietnamese
Lie buried under trees and grass . . .
Now the wineglass joins friends in peace.
The old men lift their glasses.
Tears run down their cheeks.

—Poem by former Viet Cong guerrilla Van Le, given to CBS correspondent Morley Safer, 1989

S
ergeant Hollis Kimmons, a helicopter crewman, was not one of the more than fifty-eight thousand Americans who died in the Vietnam conflict.
¹
When he returned home, after service with the army's 145th Aviation Battalion, he rarely talked about the war. Both his former wives, however, have recalled that he mentioned an encounter with Richard Nixon. It had been a “mission,” he said, but would not discuss the details.

In 1984, at home in Oregon with his second wife, Gaby, Kimmons noticed an ad in the paper. An autograph dealer on the East Coast, he read, was willing to purchase signatures or letters written by famous people. “I have something,” Kimmons told his wife, and dug out a page from an old notebook. On it, scrawled in faded green ink, was the following:

Kimmons responded to the autograph dealer, and eventually, after the dealer judged the handwriting to be genuine, sold his scrap of paper for a hundred dollars. In the process he told the dealer a remarkable story. Nixon had signed the notebook, the former soldier said, during an April 1964 trip to South Vietnam. Kimmons had been one of a helicopter crew of four assigned to fly him around during the visit, in the course of which, according to Kimmons, something most unusual happened.

The crewmen had been briefed by the unit commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, and by Major Schreck, who was to pilot the Nixon helicopter. Kimmons and his fellow fliers were told the mission was secret and not to be revealed for twenty years, which was exactly how long Kimmons waited to tell his story.

Before 8:00
A
.
M
. on the morning of the second day of the trip, Kimmons said, Nixon had boarded the helicopter dressed in army fatigues bearing no nametags. Escorted by two other machines, they had first flown to Phouc Binh, a provincial capital northwest of Saigon. There Nixon had met with “a Catholic priest named Father Wa.” Wa, according to Kimmons, was “a unique individual who had contact with the Viet Cong. . . . He was the go-between and arranged the exchange of gold for U.S. prisoners . . . a meeting place was arranged for the following day.”

The next day, Kimmons said, Nixon was flown first to An Loc, a town near South Vietnam's border with Cambodia, and then on to a jungle clearing. There, Kimmons told the autograph dealer, “Nixon met with a Viet Cong lieutenant and established a price for the return of five U.S. prisoners. The location for the exchange was agreed, and the crew departed for Saigon. . . .”

Later that day, according to Kimmons, the helicopter took on board a box loaded with gold—in those days very much a currency in Southeast Asia—and flew to “Phumi Kriek,” inside Cambodia.
²
“At the exchange point five U.S. servicemen were hustled out of the jungle accompanied by several armed soldiers. The box of gold was unloaded and checked by the VC lieutenant and the exchange was made. The crew and rescued prisoners immediately departed for Saigon where [the ransomed prisoners] were sent to the hospital.”
³

Nixon did indeed visit South Vietnam in April 1964. Old press clippings report a stay of two days, from April 1 to 3, on what he said at the time was “a private business trip” for Pepsi-Cola across Asia. In fact, as he later acknowledged in his memoirs, it was a political fact-finding trip, one of the many he made while out of office. But is there any truth to the account of U.S. prisoners, the Viet Cong, and gold bars?

The autograph dealer who bought Kimmons' scrap of paper with Nixon's signature, Mark Vardakis, has said that he tried repeatedly—through Nixon's office—to get him to confirm or deny the story. In the past, on another matter, Nixon had been helpful to Vardakis, but this time the dealer's phone calls and letters went unanswered. “I got the cold shoulder,” Vardakis told the author, “got no cooperation at all.”

In 1985, when the Forbes Collection acquired the note for its collection of presidential autographs, a story on the alleged incident appeared in the
New York Times.
The
Times'
reporter, in turn, received no assistance when he contacted Nixon's office. Nixon himself was eventually asked about the matter by the historian Herbert Parmet. Responding to questions submitted in writing in advance, he at first replied, in contradiction of his own assertion at the time, “The trip was purely political. I never took a trip to Vietnam for business purposes.” Then, when pressed on the specific allegation: “It's a marvelous story, but totally apocryphal . . . I've heard of it.”
⁴

Parmet was not sure what to believe. “Remember,” he reminded the author, “Nixon was a master of dissembling. . . . Everything has to be treated with caution.”

A hard look at the crewman's story fails to disprove it. While in Vietnam in 1964, Nixon was flown by helicopter—five heavily armed machines were involved—to see villages outside Saigon.
⁵
They were not the locations named by Kimmons, but nothing in the available record excludes the possibility that he had the covert meetings claimed by Kimmons.

Evidence exists, moreover, of a dispute between U.S. diplomats and army officers about Nixon's travel that day. A National Security Council memo written soon afterward referred to “the unfortunate episode of Nixon and the helicopters.” A footnote to the memo, published by the State Department in 1992, states that the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time, General William Westmoreland, “escorted Nixon . . . apparently by unauthorized use of helicopters.”

Other records indicate that Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam and Nixon's former running mate in the 1960 election, had ordered a senior aide to “keep an eye” on Nixon during the visit. He told the aide, Mike Dunn: “Get on the helicopter with him. I don't want him ever alone with anybody unless you are there to hear what he is told and what he says.” Dunn, who failed to join the group on the helicopter, was quoted as saying Westmoreland had turned him away.
⁶
Why he really became separated from the Nixon party was never fully resolved.

Notes written by Major Paul Schreck, one of the two officers named by Kimmons as having briefed the helicopter crews, show that he did pilot Nixon. They do not refer to the secret operation Kimmons described, and Schreck could not be interviewed; like Kimmons, he died in the early nineties. However, the second officer named, Lieutenant Colonel John Hughes, was alive and provided tantalizing information.

The battalion commander recalled meeting Nixon and ferrying him around on a “milk run,” the overt part of the trip.
⁷
Hughes said he assigned his “best people” to the job, including Kimmons, who served either as crew chief or door gunner. He had no direct knowledge of the story Kimmons told—of the meeting with the Viet Cong and the prisoner exchange—but he was aware that a part of the mission had been a secret operation.

“That was run by the Green Berets,” Hughes said carefully. “All I know about it is that the Green Berets took Nixon on a mission. . . . That was all classified, and I didn't have access to it. I knew he was going out on something unusual. . . . I didn't care for the idea of his doing that. He came out of it alive. Nobody got shot. No holes in the bird. I bellied up real close to the Berets, and I'm not going to tell you everything we did. . . .”

The famed Green Berets—more formally, the U.S. Army's Special Forces—were deployed in strength across South Vietnam at the time of the Nixon visit, with two camps near the Cambodian border in the area of the prisoner exchange that Kimmons described. They were working with other services that year under the umbrella of the Special Operations Group (SOG), answerable directly to the Pentagon. A new program of clandestine missions, approved by President Johnson two months earlier, involved what were politely described as “destructive undertakings”; using Vietnamese and Chinese mercenaries to run commando raids into Cambodia, North Vietnam, and Laos.
⁸

General Westmoreland, who accompanied Nixon on at least part of his helicopter tour, was one of a handful of senior non-SOG officers briefed on those operations. The go-between, remembered by Kimmons as Father Wa, almost certainly refers to a gun-toting soldier-priest by the name of Nguyen Lao
Hoa,
celebrated for organizing resistance to the Viet Cong under the patronage of Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA operative who pioneered covert actions in Southeast Asia. Lansdale was on close personal terms with Nixon.

Research has also unearthed an order to the U.S. Special Forces, dated the day of Nixon's arrival, instructing units to “cease activities within 5km. Of VN [Vietnam]/Cambodian border.” The command originated with “Maj. Gen./Prime Minister of RVN”—South Vietnam's prime minister, Major General Nguyen Khanh. Khanh and his foreign minister met Nixon for dinner during the visit. Were the U.S. Special Forces being ordered to avoid combat to keep a former vice president out of harm's way—as much as possible—during a secret negotiation?

U.S. personnel did go missing in those early days of the war. Yet published government records, subjected to intense scrutiny in the nineties because of claims that U.S. prisoners remained alive in enemy hands, reflect no prisoner exchange in 1964.
⁹
The chief of analysis for the Defense Intelligence Agency's office on POW/MIA affairs, Sedgwick Tourison, in 1999 judged Kimmon's account “farfetched.”

How then to account for the several components of the episode that seem to fit Kimmons's claims? Would Kimmons have named Major Schreck and his
former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, both alive when he made his allegations, had he known they were likely to challenge his story? Why did Colonel Hughes agree in his interview for this book that the Green Berets did take Nixon on a “classified” mission?

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At the time of Nixon's 1964 visit Vietnam had still been a small war in a distant country remote from day-to-day concerns in the United States. That year 146 Americans died there, and 1,039 were wounded. Four years later, with the 1967 U.S. death toll at nearly 1,000 a month and rising, it had become the key issue of the presidential election.

For Nixon, almost certainly facing his last chance of capturing the White House, the national crisis posed a difficult question. As the candidate presenting himself as an expert on foreign affairs, as the veteran of more trips to Southeast Asia than any other politician, what cogent Vietnam policy could he offer the nation?

Nixon had always supported the line U.S. leaders from Truman to Johnson had taken, namely that support for the South Vietnam regime was justified by the notion that its collapse would be followed by the loss to the Communists of the entire region. Fourteen years earlier Nixon had been one of the first to urge that the government “take the risk now by putting American boys in.” Then, he had even shown himself open to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
*

As late as 1992, Nixon would maintain that President Kennedy had been right to commit sixteen thousand “advisers” with air and naval backup, which represented the first step into the quagmire.
¹⁰
The United States, Nixon urged at the time, should allocate all possible resources to achieve victory. In those gung ho days, before the casualties started to mount, he was not alone. Robert Kennedy too had been confident his country was “going to win.”

In 1964, after the trip to Vietnam on which he allegedly negotiated the release of American prisoners, Nixon had called for “nothing less than victory.” As American deaths climbed into the hundreds, he charged that the Johnson administration lacked “the will to win . . . win for America and win for the Southeast Asians.”

By 1965 Washington raised its commitment to two hundred thousand men, including combat troops for the first time, and undertook the first strategic bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon now called for “victory over the aggressors,” arguing that U.S. forces could not be withdrawn until the South became capable of defending itself. On the ideological front, he claimed, “we have already won.” He opposed talk of a negotiated settlement, again insisting there could be “no substitute for victory.”

In 1966, with troop levels expanded to four hundred thousand and increased bombing failing to have the desired effect, Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara was assailed by doubt regarding the government's strategy. He advised Johnson to “level off military involvement for the long haul while pressing for talks.” The leader Nixon so admired, President de Gaulle, publicly called for American withdrawal, as he likewise urged Nixon privately both then and later.

The tycoon Elmer Bobst, so close a confidant to Nixon that he was Uncle Elmer to the Nixon girls, thought the war “an unmitigated disaster.” “We must stop this war,” he would write Nixon, “because of the uselessness of having to keep on killing and maiming thousands of human beings who have the right to live. We will have to face up to the world and state that for reasons of humanity alone we wish to bring this godless war to an end, without having to thrust further hundreds of Vietnamese into the earth.”