What Is the Moorer-Radford Espionage Affair?

Blaze TV host Liz Wheeler interviewed Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, “the investigative journalist who blew the lid off the deep state’s secret spying operation against Richard Nixon.” You can watch the interview at this site. 

President Donald Trump has often condemned the “deep state” and the “swamp” and drew only wrath from the general public. Many people considered the idea of the “deep state” to be a conspiracy theory. According to Wheeler, “seven recently declassified documents from Richard Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony are evidence that the deep state doesn’t just exist – it’s been forcefully active for decades.”

For clarification purposes, the article by the Blaze TV Staff defined the “deep state” as “the hidden network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence officials, military leaders, and other insiders who secretly control government policy regardless of who is elected.”

Rosen … has been digging into this story for over 30 years. He explains that the seven newly unsealed pages from Nixon’s secret 1975 grand jury testimony finally confirm one of the most explosive (and deliberately buried) scandals of the Nixon era: the Moorer-Radford espionage affair.

Back in 1971, top military leaders felt ignored by President Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger. They were upset that big foreign-policy decisions were being made without them.

In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff launched a secret spying operation inside the White House. They used a young Navy yeoman named Charles Radford to steal thousands of top-secret documents.

“He took a copy of every document that came across his vision. What he couldn’t copy, he memorized. He dove through waste baskets and burn bags. He literally rifled the briefcases of Henry Kissinger while he slept on overnight flights,” says Rosen.

“It’s estimated that this yeoman stole 5,000 classified documents from the National Security Council over a year’s time, 1970 to ’71, in wartime, and delivered those documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the admirals,” he adds.

When these ultra-sensitive documents Radford had stolen started appearing in newspaper columns just days after high-level meetings, Nixon’s “plumbers” – which Rosen describes as a White House “special investigative unit” – quickly traced the leaks back to Radford and the Pentagon spy ring.

The White House was stunned to discover that the U.S. military had been running an espionage operation against its own commander in chief during wartime.

“[The Senate Armed Services Committee] held classified closed-door hearings, but everybody involved had good reason to want to let the matter drop, and ultimately nothing was done,” says Rosen.

For starters, Nixon didn’t want to publicly “vilify” the military during the Vietnam era, when returning veterans were already facing widespread scorn and being labeled “baby killers,” Rosen explains. Further, Attorney General John Mitchell reminded Nixon of his own administration’s secret operations, making a full-blown scandal risky for everyone.

So the affair was hushed up. Radford and the involved admirals were quietly reassigned to remote posts; the Pentagon liaison office was dissolved; and no charges were filed. Brief classified Senate hearings in 1974 fizzled out amid the Watergate storm.

Rosen, who first detailed this from Nixon’s 1971 White House tapes in his 2002 Atlantic article “Nixon and the Chiefs,” says these seven newly declassified pages from Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony add the former president’s own sworn account of the betrayal.

It shows unelected military leaders actively undermining an elected president over policy disagreements – proof, he argues, that the deep state isn’t a modern myth but a decades-old “beast.”