Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, Paperback/Jim Hougan

The exposé that reveals "a prostitution ring, heavy CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats, and plots within plots" ( The Washington Post ) Ten years after the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, Jim Hougan-then the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine -set out to write a profile of Lou Russell, a boozy private-eye who plied his trade in the vice-driven underbelly of the nation's capital. Hougan soon discovered that Russell was "the sixth man, the one who got away" when his boss, veteran CIA officer Jim McCord, led a break-in team into a trap at the Watergate. Using the Freedom of Information Act to win the release of the FBI's Watergate investigation-some thirty-thousand pages of documents that neither the Washington Post nor the Senate had seen-Hougan refuted the orthodox narrative of the affair. Armed with evidence hidden from the public for more than a decade, Hougan proves that McCord deliberately sabotaged the June 17, 1972, burglary. None of the Democrats' phones had been bugged, and the spy-team's ostensible leader, Gordon Liddy, was himself a pawn-at once, guilty and oblivious. The power struggle that unfolded saw E. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord using the White House as a cover for an illicit domestic intelligence operation involving call-girls at the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments. A New York Times Notable Book, Secret Agenda "present[s] some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past . . . The questions [Hougan] has posed here-and some he hasn't-certainly deserve an answer" ( The New York Times Book Review ). Kirkus Reviews declared the book "a fascinating series of puzzles-with all the detective work laid out." Jim Hougan is an award-winning journalist, a former Washington editor of Harper's Magazine , and the author of two investigative works of nonfiction: Spooks and Secret Agenda . Writing with his wife under the pseudonym John Case, he has published six thrillers, including New York Times bestsellers such as The Genesis Code and The First Horseman . Executive producer of the Emmy Award-winning Confessions of a Dangerous Man , Hougan worked with Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes and has produced investigative documentaries about the Jonestown massacre, the Russian Mafia, among other topics. Book specifications: Dimensions: 229 x 152 Author: Jim Hougan Cover type: Paperback Publishing Year: 2022 Publishing Month: 5 Pages: 366 Language: English Publisher: Open Road Media Weight: 535 g