The Moorer Spy Ring
Peter Schultz
Interesting passages from Ray Locker’s Nixon’s Gamble:
“No one was more vexed by Ladd’s curious role [in Cambodia] that Admiral Moorer, who resented his lack of control … and thought that running a major US military aid program through a retired army colonel made little sense. Moorer knew the White House alternated between denying the Chiefs information and using them to go around Laird…. That did not mean Moorer had forgotten about Ladd [after his trip to Cambodia where he tried to trick Ladd into doing what he, Moorer, wanted done] or the other times the White House had deceived him and other commanders. He resolved to find his own sources of information from the NSC. He had one at his fingertips – the Chief’s liaison office at the NSC, which had already started collecting White House documents and sending them back to Moorer. Soon, the office, which Laird warned Kissinger about in January 1969, started gathering information to show Moorer what Kissinger and Nixon were hiding from him.” [79-80]
“By going into Cambodia, Nixon widened the war in Vietnam while also expanding his fight with his own government.” [80] “Nixon’s plan for Ladd was typically deceptive. He wanted Ladd to coordinate the complicated details of helping the Cambodia government and military, but Ladd had to work off the books to enable Nixon to claim the United States was not opening another major front in the Vietnam War…. Ladd would report directly to Kissinger and through him to Nixon,” even while “both [the] State [Department] and the military thought he reported to them.” [78-79] So, Nixon’s decision not to pursue the Radford-Moorer spy ring had to do with the fact that Nixon was engaged in secret activities, secret operations in Cambodia about which very few people, both in government and out, knew of. If he were to expose that spy ring, he would expose his own secret, conspiratorial operations expanding the war in Vietnam in Cambodia. And such exposure he could not afford politically.
So, Nixon could not expose the conspiratorial Moorer and his spy ring without exposing his own conspiratorial politics. If you wanted to validate that “conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means,” this would be a good illustration, but only one of very many.
