SpyTalk

Share this post

Watergate’s Scorpions: The CIA and White House

www.spytalk.co

Watergate’s Scorpions: The CIA and White House

New revelations emerge in Jefferson Morley's tale of how the CIA's Richard Helms and Richard Nixon circled each other as mortal enemies—and allies.

Melissa Graves
Jun 7, 2022
11
Share this post

Watergate’s Scorpions: The CIA and White House

www.spytalk.co

Share

Jefferson Morley’s latest book on the intelligence underworld opens with former CIA Director Richard Helms telling Congress under oath that he and his spy Agency had nothing to do with Watergate. But in Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, Morley adds rich context to Helms’s half-truth, offering new and fascinating details to what he calls a  decades-long “clandestine collaborative” relationship between the two that had its origins in some of the ugliest chapters of Washington’s obsession with Fidel Castro. Coming on the 50th anniversary of the clumsy break-in that eventually toppled Richard Nixon, his welcome book is deeply informed by nine recently released recordings of conversations between the president and Helms that took place between February 1971 and June 1972.  By then, the two had long learned to distrust each other, even as they found the other useful. 

Morley traces Nixon’s initial disdain toward the CIA as an organization to a presidential debate…

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to SpyTalk to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
A guest post by
Melissa Graves
Associate prof of intel studies, historian, attorney. Author of Nixon’s FBI: Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis
© 2023 Jeff Stein
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing