In my novel, WORLD WAR NIXON: An Alternate History of the 1970s, I ask what would have happened if President Richard Nixon had gotten away with Watergate, and had not been forced to resign ahead of being impeached. It is also a world where Chairman Mao dies before there could be an opening to China, radically altering the course of the Cold War. The story is told in the form of an oral history, one where many characters caught up in the turmoil of an alternative world where history took a much different course than the one we know. In this excerpt, William Harlan Brady, a veteran of political espionage and “black bag” jobs is introduced to the reader when he details his back story, and why the Nixon White House would want to hire him during the 1972 Presidential campaign.



An excerpt from WORLD WAR NIXON:

How did I end up in a fancy suite in the Watergate complex on the first evening in August of 1972? By being willing to step forward and do the hard jobs, or shit jobs, a lot of others went out of their way to avoid. Like jumping out of a plane and landing behind North Korean lines when I was only 20 years old in 1953 or working for army intelligence in West Germany a few years later, where I slipped through the Iron Curtin in Berlin and spent 62 days gathering information on Warsaw Pact forces, all of which I committed to memory since my commanding officer thought it much too risky for me to carry any radio equipment because they didn’t want to risk having any of their technology fall into the hands of the KGB. I was thankful to the army for providing me with a place to live after my father divorced my mother and my new stepfather evicted me from the Marion, Indiana, home she owned the day after their marriage, but I didn't want to turn it into a career. I left the service in 1957, intent on making some real money, and as it turned out, the Central Intelligence Agency was paying well for people with my experience. No, I was never officially a Company man because I lacked the Ivy League pedigree necessary to get ahead in their little club. I was more of a gun for hire, and if I can’t go into specific detail as to what I did to earn a paycheck, let’s just say I saw the inside of many cargo planes flying back and forth across the Pacific in the late ‘50s. My last work for Langley took me to Cuba during Castro’s first year, an operation that ended when a boat was sunk out from under me in Cuban waters, and I very nearly ended up spending time in one of Fidel’s prisons.

That close call convinced me to seek other, less risky work. My next job was for a private investigator named Vance Harlow, a former FBI agent who worked in the Miami field office. Harlow also worked for the Senate Investigations Committee, where he made the acquaintance of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and his brother, Robert, the committee’s counsel. I thought I knew a thing or two, but I learned a lot from Harlow, especially about surveillance and black bag jobs and about how to make connections. His clients ranged from Howard Hughes to the Hollywood studios, insurance companies, and the Big Three in Detroit, but Harlow’s most consistently lucrative clients came from the political world, starting with the Kennedy brothers. Harlow once told me how, right after the Missile Crisis, he proposed to Bobby Kennedy a plan that would have guaranteed Castro’s removal before the ‘64 election.

I said it was a shame Bobby didn’t go for it, and Harlow replied, “Who says he didn’t go for it; sometimes things just don’t work out.”

I never could get him to tell me the whole story.

Most of my work from the mid 60’s was in the field of what is politely called “opposition research.” This meant that I was hired by political campaigns to get the dirt on their opponents, usually on a cash-only basis, as the candidate’s manager didn’t want any direct link to me in case things went south on my end. Picking locks and wall safes, opening mail and photographing documents, taking pictures of married men leaving motel rooms after spending time with a woman most definitely not their wife—that’s just the stuff I can talk about. I had a lot of meetings in parking lots in the wee hours of the morning where I handed over a stuffed envelope to some political operative who handed me one stuffed with hundred-dollar bills in return. Harlow got out of this side of the business after 1964, handing it off to me, and my name had a good reputation among Democrats running for state-wide office during the LBJ years.

But things got lean after 1968. It seems that after Bobby Kennedy was killed and Lyndon Johnson went back to Texas, there weren’t as many Democrats who wanted to play hardball anymore. I made some good money from the growers and ranchers out in California, giving them the lowdown on what the United Farm Workers were up to, which mainly meant screwing over some poor guy who just wanted to make more money so he could take care of his family. It was not my proudest moment, but I was married by then to a woman I’d met in the Philippines, and we had two small children, so I had bills to pay.



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