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"Yes, sir," was all I said. I walked out with fire in my eyes. I unloaded on both Dean and Magruder. "What's going on?"
Magruder was solicitous. "It may be that there just isn't the money for intelligence and dirty tricks they thought would be available. You're going to have to cut out the most expensive stuff. Try half a million."
In a second meeting with Mitchell, Liddy presented a cutdown version of his plan (hookers, but no houseboat, for example). Mitchell said he'd have to "think about it." At this point, writes Liddy, John Dean interposed an objection—not, as Dean has said, that such matters should not be discussed in the Attorney General's office, but that "I don't think a decision on a matter of this kind should come from the Attorney General's office. I think he should get it from somewhere else—completely unofficial channels." Liddy seethed, since that would delay a decision.
Plotting to Kill Jack Anderson
On a brisk February day shortly thereafter, Howard Hunt and I had lunch with a physician retired from CIA, an expert on what Hunt called "the unorthodox application of medical and chemical knowledge." Hunt introduced me under my operational alias, "George Leonard." We lunched in the Hay Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. The purpose of the luncheon, Hunt had explained to me previously, was to prepare, for the approval of Hunt's "principal," a plan to stop columnist Jack Anderson. Hunt and I often used the term "my principal" rather than identify our superiors. I, at least, had several. Hunt, to my knowledge, had only one: Chuck Colson.
Anderson, Hunt reported, had now gone too far. As the direct result of an Anderson story, a top U.S. intelligence source abroad had been so compromised that, if not already dead, he would be in a matter of days. That was too much. Something had to be done.
We did not mention Anderson's name explicitly. Hunt urged the use of LSD on the steering wheel of the "target's" automobile to cause him to hallucinate at a public function and thus be discredited. The doctor shot down that idea on the ground that CIA experience with the drug had demonstrated the unpredictability of individual reaction.
I took the position that, in a hypothetical case in which the target had been the direct cause of the identification and execution of one of our agents abroad, halfway measures were not appropriate. I urged as the logical and just solution that the target be killed. Quickly.
My suggestion was received with immediate acceptance.
Hunt asked whether a massive LSD dose might not cause such disruption of motor function that the driver of a car would lose control of it and crash. The doctor repeated his earlier negative advice on the use of LSD. Besides, though LSD can be absorbed through the skin, our hypothetical target might be wearing gloves against the winter cold, or be chauffeur-driven.
I submitted that the target should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate. No one argued against that recommendation and, at Hunt's suggestion, I gave the doctor a $100 bill, from Committee to Re-Elect the President