James Rosen

He denied giving the documents to Anderson, which the FBI or the NSA, which conducted the polygraph, found to be deceptive.

But he admitted giving these documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the year 2000, Steve, October of 2000, the tape of President Nixon being informed of this development for the first time was released by the National Archives.

It was a rare nighttime session in the Oval Office, December 21, 1971.

And not until the year 2000 was that tape declassified.

And when it was, there was only one lonely researcher in America who showed up at the National Archives to hear that tape.

That was me.

And I listened to the tape of that meeting where it's Nixon, only the heavy hitters, Nixon, Haldeman, the chief of staff, Ehrlichman, who ran the plumbers, and John Mitchell, the attorney general, president's confidant and friend.

Henry Kissinger was excluded from the meeting because they saw him as a profligate leaker who was part of a problem in some way.

And it fell to Ehrlichman to explain to the president we've just discovered through using a polygraph and investigative means that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been spying on you, stealing documents from the National Security Council, delivering it to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for 13 months in wartime.

It was a unique crisis that no president had ever faced.

Nixon on the tape says this is a federal offense of the highest order.

And he demands that Admiral Moore, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, be prosecuted for espionage.

John Mitchell, the attorney general, says, in essence, we can't do that because all your secret operations around the world in Cambodia and elsewhere would leak.

But we're going to go see Tom Moore.

We're going to tell him this ballgame's over with.

And we're going to wiretap this yeoman.

And we're going to send them far out of town.

And they did all those things.

I published the contents of those tapes in the Atlantic Monthly in 2002.