Word: butterfields
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most sensational charge was that the CIA had secretly planted its agents not only in the Treasury, Commerce and many other departments but also in Richard Nixon's White House. What was more, the alleged top agent was no file clerk or chauffeur but Alexander Butterfield, the former presidential deputy assistant who did as much as anyone to break open the Watergate scandal. It was Butterfield who supervised Nixon's notorious taping system. When an aide to the Senate Watergate committee casually asked Butterfield in July 1973 if conversations had been taped in the White House, Butterfield forthrightly...
...report that Butterfield had been a CIA man was persuasively denied by many sources, but it started a wave of speculation about how high and wide the agency had spread its covert operations. More basically, it produced a rare glimpse into the mysterious workings of the CIA and its use of "contact" people in Government agencies...
...such, he had acted as a liaison between the two establishments. Last week he said he had learned in 1971 that the CIA'S contact in the White House was Butterfield. At the time, Prouty was looking for access to the White House to get help for a project involving U.S. prisoners of war in Viet Nam. His CIA connections referred him to Howard Hunt, the convicted Watergate burglar and a longtime CIA agent. "If you're a Rotarian," explains Prouty, "you go to a member of the Rotary Club." The old school tie worked. Prouty said that...
Still, Prouty did not go so far as to call Butterfield a CIA "spy" in the White House. Indeed, from what Prouty said, Butterfield was performing only the traditional role of contact in Washington-acting as a go-between. The CIA, like most federal departments, relies heavily on contact men in other agencies to look out for its interests...
Vicious Nonsense. It was long rumored in Washington that Butterfield had been the "CIA man" in the White House and that the relationship was known to Nixon. As a contact, Butterfield would have routinely handled requests from the CIA. That certainly did not make him an "agent." CIA Director William Colby angrily maintained that the claim that the agency had infiltrated the White House was "outrageous, vicious nonsense." Without clearing Butterfield unequivocally, the White House declared that as far as it knew, no presidential aide had ever acted as "a secret CIA agent...