Dirty Tricks

The victory of Richard Nixon in the US presidential election of 1968 swung on an “October Surprise”—a treasonous plot engineered by key figures in the Republican Party to keep the South Vietnamese government away from peace talks in Paris, costing thousands of American lives. Dirty Tricks provides compelling new evidence of Anna Chennault’s Nixon-approved role in sabotaging the peace talks and ensuring a Nixon White House.

Dirty Tricks also provides the first detailed analysis of the CIA’s recently-released internal history of Watergate, documenting the backgrounds of the burglars and their associations with the Agency in unprecedented detail, and how the Nixon White House sought to implicate the CIA in the emerging scandal. CIA Director Richard Helms’ relationship with Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was much closer than previously disclosed and the CIA agent inside the plot was sent on a double agent mission by American intelligence after he got out of prison.

The alleged target of the Watergate break-ins was DNC chairman Larry O’Brien’s phone. Dirty Tricks reveals that the burglars didn't know where O’Brien’s office was and tapped the wrong phone with a bug that didn't work while O’Brien was in Miami preparing for the 1972 convention. Prosecutor Earl Silbert could "never determine the precise motivation for the burglary” but Dirty Tricks explains the political and sexual nature of the calls overheard on DNC official Spencer Oliver’s phone, and why no bug was found at the DNC until three months after the Watergate arrests.

Drawing on newly-declassified files and previously-unpublished documents, Dirty Tricks debunks the myths around Watergate and deepens our understanding of the “dirty tricks” that undermined democracy during the Nixon years. These scandals turn on the covert action of two powerful interest groups—the senior CIA officers around Helms, and the key advisers around Nixon—in this chilling story of political espionage and deception.