Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, June 28, 1973 (2/2)
Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, June 28, 1973 (2/2)
[01.08.49-Sen. INOUYE continues to ask DEAN the questions prepared by the WHITE HOUSE, on the subject of DEAN'S relationship to WHITE HOUSE intelligence activities and the "HUSTON PLAN" for surveillance of domestic "subversives".] Senator INOUYE. Immediately after you were appointed counsel to the President, did you not take over the responsibilities of Mr. Tom Huston in connection with intelligence activities? Mr. DEAN. I think that you would have to know Tom Huston and my relationship -with Tom Huston to know that there was no way I would take over anything regarding Mr. Tom Huston. He is a very brilliant, independent man. He would not, I did not even know what he was doing half the time. In fact, it was some months after he had joined my staff that I learned he, had some sort of scrambler phone locked in a safe beside him and he made a lot of calls. Mr. Huston did an awful lot of things that I have -no idea what he was doing in the intelligence field. The only thing I know is that at that point, he was the liaison for receipt of FBI information regarding radical groups and he would be the distribution throughout the White House and he put me on a distribution list. Most of this material was not even to me, worth reading because, I was not particularly interested, unless it was a, very current demonstration. So I inherited Mr. Huston. Mr. Huston and I worked with a friendly relationship. As I say, he is a very- independent man and he and I think a little differently and handle memorandums a little. differently. I recall one rather interesting occasion when he prepared a rather strong and blunt memorandum for my signature to the Attorney General on a very minor request, for something. The memorandum was in my mail stack. I read it quickly and didn't think much about it; I was signing the mail. Two days later, I had a call from Mr. Kleindienst and he said, in short, who in the hell do you think you are writing a Memorandum like that to the Attorney General of the United States? Now that you are up at the White House, you think you are high and mighty. So I pulled the memorandum back out and realized that it is not the kind of memorandum I would send to Mr. Kleindienst. I apologized for the memorandum, because it was a rather strong and harsh memorandum for or me to send to anybody. [01.11.20] Senator INOUYE. You did testify, did you not, Mr. Dean, that political intelligence was routed to you in the White House? Mr. DEAN-. Political intelligence? I had requests for Political activities to embarrass people. I think I have turned over in exhibits 34-5, 34-6, 34-7, and 34-8 a fair sampling of the sort of things. If the committee would like to go through those at some point, I would like to explain that most of those ended up in my file, with no action. I did reefer to one yesterday with regard to commencing a tax audit on Mr. Gibbons, I did not start that tax audit. [00.12.00] Senator INOUYE,. Mr. Dean, I believe that you were the author of the memorandum to the Attorney General which led to the establishment of the Intelligence Evaluation Committee. Did you hold the first meeting of that committee in Your office? Mr. DEAN. Yes, I believe that is correct. Senator INOUYE. Were you not the one on the White House staff -who levied requirements on and received reports from the Intelligence Evaluation Committee? Mr. DEAN. That is correct--well. I didn't--I asked them to suggest areas they would like to go into. This would get into a couple of areas that they wanted to get into that directly relate to national security under the rulings of the Chair, so we will have to defer from those. But they would often suggest areas that they would like to be into and I would have to check them with others on the White House staff, particularly the foreign areas, which I didn't think was appropriate for this group, but they had domestic implications. I went to Mr. Haig and he in turn checked with Mr. Kissinger and he would decide there was nothing to be done in this area. We would receive regular calendars from them of events. I would have a man on my staff, initially, Mr. Caulfield and subsequently Mr. David Wilson, who would decide if there was a demonstration coming, based on these regular calendars they would send to us, was this a demonstration that we would need intelligence on, And then I would in turn either summarize or send a direct report to Mr. Haldeman or any other member of the staff that the IEC report would relate to. [01.13.38]