Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley
Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley
With fresh reporting by intelligence historian Jefferson Morley, Scorpions' Dance reveals the Watergate scandal in a striking new light: as the culmination of a concealed, volatile power struggle between President Richard Nixon and CIA director Richard Helms.
Nixon and Helms went back decades; both were 1950s Cold Warriors, and both knew secrets about the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Kennedy administration's dangerous liaisons with organized crime, as well as off-the-books White House and CIA plots to remove Fidel Castro, and other Latin-American leaders from power. Both had enough information on each other to ruin their careers.
After the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972, Nixon was desperate to shut down the FBI's investigation. He sought Helms's support and asked that the CIA intervene -- knowing that most of the Watergate burglars were, after all, retired CIA agents, contractors, or long-term assets, with deep knowledge of the Agency's most sensitive secrets. Nixon and Helms then circled each other like scorpions, defending themselves with the threat of lethal attack. The loser would resign his office in disgrace; the winner, however, would face consequences of his own for the secrets he kept.
Rigorously researched and dramatically told, Scorpions' Dance uses long-neglected evidence to reveal a new perspective on one of America's most notorious presidential scandals.
St. Martin's Press, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2022.
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.