Not Poison, Just Some Drugs

It was as hairy and scary as assassination plots come, and the alleged target was one of the nation's most prominent muckrakers, Columnist Jack Anderson. Or so, at least, reported another top journalist, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Last week he wrote that Watergate Burglar E. Howard Hunt told some of his former CIA associates "that he was ordered in December 1971, or January 1972, to assassinate Anderson." Citing "reliable sources," Woodward said the order came from "a senior official in the Nixon White House." A poison was to be supplied by a former CIA physician, and it was guaranteed to leave no traces. The plan was eventually dropped, wrote Woodward, for reasons unknown.

The plot, he added, was devised because Anderson was widely hated in the Nixon Administration for printing stories based on national security leaks. Example: the disclosure that Nixon secretly favored Pakistan in the India-Pakistan war.

After the Post story ran, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence pressed to obtain Hunt's testimony to get to the bottom of the accusations. The CIA pledged its cooperation. Anderson himself expressed shock. He recalled that he had received threats from the Mafia, but "I just didn't believe anyone [in the Nixon Administration] would seriously suggest murder."

By Hunt's own account, nothing so serious as murder was ever considered--but a drugging of Anderson was indeed contemplated. In an interview with TIME Correspondent David Beckwith, Hunt, who is serving a 2 1/2-to 8-year sentence at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base prison camp for his role in the Watergate breakin, gave his version of the plot. According to him, former White House Counsel Charles Colson suggested that Anderson might be discredited if he appeared on his live radio program under the influence of a drug that would cause him to ramble incoherently. With another Watergate conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt set up a lunch with a physician who worked for the CIA.

Wild Ideas. Hunt and Liddy explored with him methods of drugging a man to make him incoherent. The three discussed placing on the steering wheel of the victim's car a drug that enters the body directly through the skin, but that idea was abandoned as too chancy. Then they considered slipping a pill or capsule filled with a hallucinogen into the victim's regular medicine bottles--but there was no telling when the pill would be taken. Finally, the three debated dropping a drug into the victim's drink at a cocktail party, but since Hunt knew that Anderson is a teetotaler, the proposal fell by the wayside. After the meeting broke up, Hunt decided the plan would not work.

"It was just another wild idea that never got beyond the proposal stage," said Hunt. "Liddy and I engaged in a fact-finding mission, not an operation." For his part, Colson angrily denied he had ever heard of such a plan. But Howard Hunt, busy last week assisting in the cleanup at the prison camp after Hurricane Eloise, tried for the last word. Said he: "I simply followed orders."

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