Word: pentagon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...updating of Seven Days in May, Fletcher Knebel's 1962 novel in which the military tries to take over the U.S. Government? According to news accounts, the Pentagon had planted a spy ring in the White House to ransack Henry Kissinger's classified files and copy documents relating to the National Security Council's most sensitive deliberations. The stolen information was then relayed to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Pentagon brass...
...bizarre-but basically true -tale raised a host of disturbing questions. Why did the military have to resort to spying to get information that it claimed was essential to maintain the nation's defenses? Was the Pentagon prying into matters that were none of its business? Were some leaders of the armed forces contemplating a coup? As it turned out, the story of the Pentagon v. the White House was not quite Seven Days in May but several deeply disquieting days in January (when the story first surfaced). It was something less than apocalyptic, but troubling nonetheless...
...Plumbers. The Pentagon's snooping occurred in 1971, when the Administration was engaged in a series of delicate foreign policy initiatives-an open-door policy with Peking, arms talks with Moscow, parleys with Hanoi to end the war in Southeast Asia. Fearing that publicity might imperil these negotiations, Nixon and his national security adviser, Kissinger, resolved to keep them secret. Not even Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers were to be fully informed...
...precautions, there were still leaks. In June the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon papers. As Nixon later contended: "There was every reason to believe this was a security leak of unprecedented proportions." To find out who was responsible, Nixon created the plumbers, an investigative unit designed to locate and seal off leaks. Yet the unauthorized disclosures continued. In July a Times story outlined the U.S. negotiating position at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki...
Despite such denials, the plumbers concluded that Radford and perhaps also Welander were clandestinely delivering national security information to the Joint Chiefs. But when the investigators followed the trail to the Pentagon and proposed giving lie detector tests to military personnel, Defense Secretary Laird threw them out. Laird also ordered J. Fred Buzhardt, then the Pentagon's general counsel, to find out what was going on. Buzhardt reported back that Radford and Welander had indeed provided high-ranking officers with copies of purloined classified information...