'Probably the most eye-opening and engrossing exposé to date of the bizarre 'power games' played by multinational corporations and tycoons.' —Publishers Weekly
A classic of investigative reporting, Spooks is a treasure trove of who-shot-who research on the metastasis of the United States intelligence community, whose practices and personnel have engulfed the larger society. Teeming with tales of wiremen, hitmen, and mobsters; crooked politicians and corrupt cops going about their business of regime-change, union-busting, wiretapping, money laundering, and industrial espionage, learn about: Richard Nixon's 'Mission Impossible' war on Aristotle Onassis; not-so-deep-fake porno films starring the CIA's enemies; the Robert Vesco heist, targeting billions in numbered Swiss accounts; Robert Maheu and the kidnapping of billionaire Howard Hughes; the murder-for-hire of a Columbia University professor; Bobby Kennedy's archipelago of private intelligence agencies—Intertel and the 'Five I's'; and 'The Friendly Ghost' and Nixon's secret account in the offshore Castle Bank & Trust.
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.
