Jefferson Morley discusses Scorpions Dance with guest Eddie Becker!
About Scorpions Dance:
For the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in: The untold story of President Richard Nixon, CIA Director Richard Helms, and their volatile shared secrets that ended a presidency.
Scorpions' Dance by intelligence expert and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley reveals the Watergate scandal in a completely new light: as the culmination of a concealed, deadly power struggle between President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms.
Nixon and Helms went back decades; both were 1950s Cold Warriors, and both knew secrets about the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as well as off-the-books American government and CIA plots to remove Fidel Castro and other leaders in Latin America. Both had enough information on each other to ruin their careers.
After the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972, Nixon was desperate to shut down the FBI's investigation. He sought Helms' support and asked that the CIA intervene—knowing that most of the Watergate burglars were retired CIA agents, contractors, or long-term assets with deep knowledge of the Agency's most sensitive secrets. The two now circled each other like scorpions, defending themselves with the threat of lethal attack. The loser would resign his office in disgrace; the winner, however, would face consequences for the secrets he had kept.
Rigorously researched and dramatically told, Scorpions' Dance uses long-neglected evidence to reveal a new perspective on one of America's most notorious presidential scandals.
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Jefferson Morley is a veteran Washington journalist and author whose novelistic non-fiction illuminate untold chapters in the history of the United States. He worked for 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New Republic, Slate, Salon, and Counterpunch. A skilled investigative reporter, Morley combines granular detail with storytelling verve. His 2012 book Snow-Storm in August tells the story of the first race riot in Washington DC in which white mobs attacked the free people of color while District Attorney Francis Scott Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner, defended the slave masters.
Morley’s new book Scorpions’ Dance (St. Martin’s , June 2022) will complete a trilogy of spies--three biographies which reveal the inner workings of the Central Intelligence Agency at the height of the Cold War. Morley’s first book Our Man In Mexico (2008), tells the story of Winston Scott, the agency’s top man in Mexico. His second book, The Ghost (2017), tells the story of counterintelligence chief James Angleton, an intellectual spy. Scorpions Dance tells the story of director Richard Helms, the spy as bureaucrats, who served his president right up until the Watergate scandal swamped them both.
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