William F. Buckley, Jr., CIA Spy

A new biography of the National Review founder explores his early role as an undercover CIA operative who later helped his one time agency boss Howard Hunt cover up Watergate

IN THE FALL OF 1951, a new book scandalized one of the country’s most elite universities and made its brash young author, William F. Buckley, Jr.,  an instant celebrity. God and Man at Yale was Buckley’s audacious debut, a withering attack on his alma mater for  supposedly indoctrinating its students with liberal nostrums taught by atheist professors who ridiculed Christianity.

There were ferocious counter attacks from inside academia. “A twisted, ignorant young man,” McGeorge Bundy, then a Harvard professor, later President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor, wrote of Buckley in a review in The Atlantic magazine. Life magazine was somewhat more charitable, likening him to “the brat who comes to the party and tells the guests that their birthday boy is secretly a drug addict.”  

But for all the attention it got, helping to propel God and Man at Yale on to the best-seller lists, the press coverage  left out one highly pertinent detail about this verbose new conservative author.  At  the time of the publication of his book, Buckley was secretly on the payroll of the CIA, an undercover officer working out of the agency’s Mexico City station, posing as a businessman trying to break into the import-export trade under the alias “Geoffrey T. Bolgiano.” 

Buckley’s brief stint as a CIA spy is perhaps the least known chapter in his more than half century long career on the public stage. But it gets its due in Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus. A former editor of the New York Times Book Review, Tanenhaus’s long awaited book—weighing in at 1018 pages with footnotes and index—is an illuminating and unflinching account of Buckley’s life as a journalist, magazine editor, TV raconteur, and political strategist, all told against the backdrop of the swirling political and intellectual controversies of Cold War America. But as Tanenhaus  makes clear, while Buckley’s time working for the CIA was short, lasting little more than eight months, his experience with the agency was a formative one, giving him access to contacts and secrets that he used for effect  years into the future. (It also formed the basis for a series of spy novels he wrote later in life in which a dashing young, sexually ravenous CIA operative, no doubt based on Buckley himself, seduces a future Queen of England and saves the West from the Communists.)  

“The CIA kind of led Buckley to a place where he becomes part of a secret club within the government,” Tanenhaus said on the SpyTalk podcast. Time and again, as the country’s most prominent conservative journalist—from 1966 to 1999 he had a much watched TV talk show as well—he would receive briefings and tips from agency operatives followed by Buckley  editorials and columns that largely tracked the agency’s perspective. “What Buckley was doing was giving the view of communism in the global chess game that came from the CIA,” Tanenhaus said. 

Most significant of all, it was working for the CIA in Mexico City  where Buckley began his long and fateful friendship with his boss, E. Howard Hunt, a reckless adventurer who would eventually become one of the agency’s most problematic characters. 

It was an unusually close relationship; Buckley was godfather and legal guardian to three of Hunt’s children. And 20 years later, their friendship drew him uncomfortably into the machinations surrounding America’s biggest political scandal when Hunt, facing prison for orchestrating the Watergate burglary, spilled his guts to Buckley about the true origins of the break-in as well as other dark secrets from inside Richard Nixon’s White House. Buckley knew so much about what Hunt was trying to conceal—and for months kept silent about it while publicly defending Nixon—that he effectively became, in Tanenhaus’ judgment, Hunt’s  “accessory after the fact” to the Watergate cover up.

Hunt at Federal Prison Camp, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, 1978. (Michael Brennan/Getty)

Buckley’s road to the CIA actually began with Hunt. The two first met at the Georgetown apartment of James Burnham, the former Trotskyite turned hardline anti-Soviet strategist with his own close ties to the CIA. Hunt, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War Two intelligence service, was soon looking to staff up the CIA’s new  Mexico City station with a fluent Spanish speaker who knew Mexican politics and shared his zeal for battle against the Communist enemy. Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley, an ardent America Firster and incorrigible anti-Semite,  had been an oilman in Mexico who, as an admirer of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, had moved his family to Spain where young William Jr. spent his first few years, speaking Spanish as his first language. In his hiring for the new station, “first on my list was Bill Buckley,” Hunt later said.

(Of course, this was at a time when Yalies, especially those like Buckley with Skull and Bones pedigrees and a zest for super secret skullduggery, were signing up in droves to work for the fledgling spy service.) 

Once in Mexico City,  Buckley and Hunt, two bon vivants, spent hours together over lunches with free flowing alcohol at a fancy French restaurant. As for actual ops, Buckley’s main, not especially glamorous assignment, was to seek out student activists and slip them envelopes stuffed with cash—one crude way in which the CIA plotted to win over the “hearts and minds”of  Mexico’s future ruling class. 

But Buckley was soon given a more critical mission that fit in with the agency’s larger “psywar”—psychological warfare—strategy. This was an era when the CIA, under the direction of its covert ops chief Frank Wisner, was setting up front groups around the world to promote U.S. causes while denigrating and smearing leftists aligned with the Kremlin. In Latin America, the CIA spotted an opportunity. Eudocio Ravines, a founder of Peru’s Communist Party, had grown disillusioned, and written  a memoir exposing the hand of Moscow in what he now called “the great scam” of world Communism. The CIA directed Buckley, with his literary talents, to “edit it,” or as Tanenhaus puts it, “smooth its politics into conformity with the CIA.” Buckley did his job, translating an English language version back into Spanish with the CIA’s approved language; the agency then secretly distributed Ravines’ anti-Communist book throughout the continent—a playbook it would repeat later in the decade when it secretly arranged to mass distribute banned copies of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago inside Russia.   

Buckley quit the CIA in 1952, having concluded that journalism, not spycraft, was his true calling. Three years later, he founded National Review, which quickly became the country’s premier conservative journal of opinion. Hunt, too, moved on to a more pressing mission—plotting a coup to overthrow the leftist government of Guatemala, complete with planting fake news stories and flooding the airwaves with CIA propaganda. It was another playbook that the agency, with Hunt in a lead role, would seek to repeat with the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba some years later, only that time with disastrous results. 

As for Buckley, he may have left the CIA, but the CIA had never quite left him.  His National Review magazine— whose original lawyer was William Casey, a future CIA director—frequently ran articles from CIA operatives and editorials defending  the agency, prompting one senior editor, Frank Meyer, to suspect that Buckley and Burnham, another top editor, were “running NR as a CIA operation.” 

Buckley knew so much about what Hunt was trying to conceal—and for months kept silent about it while publicly defending Nixon—that he effectively became Hunt’s “accessory after the fact” to the Watergate cover up.

Buckley resented the suggestion and there was no evidence of a financial relationship. But as Tanenhaus shows, Buckley was “functionally” one of the many journalists who served as reliable CIA “assets” over the years. When he travelled to Chile in 1971, he privately described it as a “special information mission” for President Nixon, a trip  that, according to Tanenhaus, “combined intelligence work and journalism.” Its purpose: for Buckley, armed with CIA briefings, to write newspaper columns smearing the newly elected government of the country’s leftist president Salvador Allende. (Allende’s supporters, Buckley wrote in one column, were “of the breed of the supporters of Hitler and Stalin.”) It was all part of a propaganda campaign launched by the agency’s Chilean Task Force that would help pave the way three years later for the agency-backed coup that overthrew Allende and installed the rightwing general Augusto Pinochet, resulting in years of  repression that included the arrests and torture of thousands of political prisoners and the assassination of opponents abroad, including in Washington, D.C. 

Buckley’s Mexico City days—with his ties to his old boss—came roaring back with a vengeance in the months after the June, 1972 Watergate break-in. On a snowy night the following December, a United Airlines Boeing 737 flight crashed outside Chicago, killing 45 of its 61 passengers. Discovered among the debris was a purse stuffed with $10,000 in cash. It belonged to one of the dead passengers, Dorothy Hunt, Hunt’s wife and herself a former CIA linguist. The cash was traced to “hush money,” one installment in the funds Hunt had demanded from the White House to stay silent about Watergate, a crime which had grown out of the “intelligence” operation he and G. Gordon Liddy had launched as Nixon’s leak-hunting “plumbers.” 

Silent Partners

After the break-in, and when he was publicly identified as a co-conspirator, Hunt had gone silent, refusing to respond to Buckley’s entreaties to tell him what was going on. Buckley was understandably miffed; after all, he had helped Hunt, having left the agency in 1970, land a job with a Washington public relations firm, the Mullen company, a CIA front providing cover for Hunt’s secret work for the White House. (Buckley had served as one of Hunt’s two character references. The other was the then-CIA director, Richard Helms.) “Goddammit, viejo,” Buckley wrote him out of frustration when Hunt still maintained his silence.

But two weeks after his wife’s death in the plane crash, Hunt showed up at Buckley’s front door in a “high emotional” state, and told all, Tanenhaus recounts. The revelations were indeed startling. As a “plumber” at the White House, Hunt had used his training in the CIA’s dark arts to forge cables implicating President Kennedy in the murder of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. He described how he and Liddy had overseen the Watergate break-in and brought in Cuban exiles from the CIA’s Bay of Pigs army to conduct it—an operation approved at the highest levels by Attorney General John Mitchell, he said. Hunt and Libby had conducted another earlier blatantly illegal operation, breaking into the office of the Los Angeles psychiatrist treating Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. There was even talk of them conducting  an assassination—of investigative columnist Jack Anderson. 

And what did Buckley do with this highly incriminating information, none of which was known at the time to the outside world? Pretty much nothing. He continued to defend Nixon and Hunt in his columns and magazine. He paid some of Hunt’s legal bills and set up a legal defense fund out of National Review’s offices. The president himself saw Buckley as an ally. “The man’s wife is dead,” Nixon said of Hunt in a conversation memorialized on a White House tape. “We’ll build that son of a bitch up like nobody’s business. We’ll have Bill Buckley write a column and say, you know, that he should have clemency.”

Buckley even had Hunt on his TV show, Firing Line, where the two of them portrayed Hunt’s escalating demands for money for him and his family not as “blackmail,” as White House counselor John Dean would famously describe it to Nixon, but as payments that should be expected for those who engage in “clandestine” missions for the government. After all, that is how they did things at the CIA. 

Had the Watergate break-in been done “in the spirit of a CIA operation?” Buckley asked Hunt. “Yes,” he replied. (Buckley, in what he called “full disclosure-wise,” told his audience that he and Hunt had been friends for 23 years, making no mention of the fact that they had actually worked together at the CIA.) 

What’s Old is New

It’s hard to imagine that there is something new about Watergate to be learned at this stage. But Tanenhaus’ deep dive into Buckley’s secret knowledge helps fill out one of the more intriguing, unexplored corners of the scandal. Buckley was protecting Hunt, and Nixon, but also arguably himself. 

“It was one thing to shield a source, as The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward shielded his crucial FBI source, Deep Throat; it’s quite another to protect powerful people from public scrutiny,” writes Tanenhaus. “Still graver were the facts Buckley had withheld from Congress and the Justice Department. He knew more than almost anyone else outside the White House about the extent of its crimes.”

Author Sam Tanenhaus (New York Times)

But there’s also a twist. If there is any consistent theme to Tanenhaus’ biography, it is the contradictions and paradoxes that run through Buckley’s life. On the one hand, as the scion of an unyielding and racist reactionary, Buckley inherited most of his father’s retrograde views, helping scuttle a relationship his sister had with a beaux who was Jewish (“We don’t want a Jew in the family,” his father had told him) and penning a notorious editorial for National Review in 1957 saying that the “South must prevail” in its fight to maintain racial segregation. But over time, his views evolved and progressed. 

By the 1970’s, he was inviting black civil rights leaders and activists like Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond and even Eldridge Cleaver for respectful discussions on his Firing Line TV show. A  radical right winger in his God and Man at Yale days, and a defender of Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, he turned into a canny political pragmatist, infuriating many of his allies, including some at National Review, when he expelled John Birch Society leader Robert Welch from the movement for his deranged conspiracy views. In 1968, he backed Nixon, rather than the hard right’s champion, Ronald Reagan, for the Republican nomination. Under Nixon, Buckley was rewarded: He was named to the board of the U.S. Information Agency, appointed a U.S. delegate to the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, and, most importantly, became the recipient of regular private briefings about just about everything from his good friend, Henry Kissinger.  

And yet, in the end, he turned on Nixon. The ordeal of protecting Hunt weighed on him. Hunt would call repeatedly from prison with bizarre instructions about what to do if he died in jail: Contact a mysterious “Mr. X” who supposedly had the key to a safe filled with secrets. By early 1974, after Nixon had fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox and refused to turn over his unedited White House tapes to prosecutors, Buckley decided the jig was up. That March, he reached out to his agent for overthrowing the president: his brother, James Buckley, who had been elected as a senator from New York on the Conservative Party ticket. As Tanenhaus reveals, Buckley and his trusted National Review colleague James Burnham sat down with  the freshman senator and reviewed a statement he was about to make, going over it “paragraph by paragraph.” On March 20, Sen. Buckley delivered it at a press conference in the stately Senate Caucus Room. To serve “the greater interests of the nation,” he said, and to spare the country the turmoil of seeing its leader become “a prisoner in the dock,” Nixon should resign.

“He brought conservative thought into the political mainstream...” President George W. Bush said when Buckley died in 2008. (PBS)

The impact was immediate and devastating. James Buckley had become the first conservative Nixon loyalist to abandon him, the clearest sign yet that the president’s support on Capitol Hill was crumbling and his days were very likely numbered. Inside the White House, blame was placed on brother Bill, who aides assumed had “egged Jim on.” William Buckley, to everyone’s shock, had turned Brutus. “There was a deep sense of betrayal,”  Patrick Buchanan, one of the last Nixon die-hards, told the author.  

In a way, it was William F. Buckley’s own covert op— and a successful one to boot. After all, notes Tanenhaus on the SpyTalk podcast, “he took the president down.” 

“Geoffrey T. Bolgiano” would have been proud. ###

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