wind of a man involved in the
Watergate caper by the name of Frank Sturgis. Sturgis was getting
ready to talk during the early stages of the unfolding Watergate
drama. Sturgis was working with Andrew St. George, a good,
relatively independent journalist. The pair were going to write a
book about Sturgis' experience in Watergate, but Hersh threatened
to expose them first if they did not cooperate with him. In
return, Hersh promised not to name St. George and to run the
completed article by them first. St. George kept his side of the
deal. Hersh broke his. St. George was named in the piece twenty-
three times.
But there is another aspect to this story not mentioned by Anson.
When St. George did publish a piece on Watergate in Harper's, it
was based on his talks with another Watergate burglar, Eugenio
Martinez. It gave strong indications of the CIA's role in
Watergate, and that Howard Hunt was a double agent inside the
Nixon camp. A few years later, in High Times (April 1977) sans
Hersh, Sturgis now spoke. He depicted Watergate as a war not with
Sam Ervin and the Post on one side and Nixon on the other; but as
the CIA versus Nixon. None of this was in Hersh's piece, which
presented the typical White House-funneling-"hush money"-to-the-
burglars story which could have been written by Woodward.
Next for Hersh were his exposures in the New York Times of CIA
counter intelligence chief James Angleton's domestic operations.
Domestic ops were banned by the CIA's original charter, although
they had been done ever since that Agency's inception. But at
Christmas, 1974, Hersh's stories were splashed all over the
Times. Hersh won a Pulitzer for them. One would think this would
be a strong indication of Hersh's independence from, even
antagonism for the CIA. One would be wrong. As everyone familiar
with the Agency's history knows, in 1974 there was a huge turf
war going on between Angleton and Colby (formerly of the Vietnam
Phoenix program). An