When the Pentagon spied on Nixon

Richard Nixon in 1972 (public domain photo). 

Robert Anton Wilson used to rail about the national security state and how much power was held by unelected bureaucrats. You can see some of those comments if you search this blog for "National Security Act." See for example, this blog post on John  Barth, where Wilson writes about "the sense of uncertainty and dread that has hung over this nation since democracy was abandoned in the National Security Act of 1947 and clandestine government became official. Sometimes I find it astounding that we have lived under fascism for 40 years while continuing the rituals of democracy .... "

The New York Times recently published a piece by James Rosen (gift link) on the extensive spying the Pentagon carried out on Richard Nixon and his aides.  

The piece, "Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now," describes how Nixon finally found out about the spying. Nixon did not believe he could prosecute the people responsible and reveal the spying without discrediting the military and having his own secrets revealed, but the two people primarily responsible were sent far away from Washington, D.C., and were wiretapped.

Rosen writes, "The Joint Chiefs’ spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times. Declassified documents and scholarship published since 1974 have established that the F.B.I., under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, spied on Mitchell, the attorney general, and that the C.I.A. detailed its personnel to various units associated with Nixon, including the Watergate burglary team and 'components intimately associated with the office of the president,' as the agency admitted in 1975."