WASHINGTON -- It was a different era with new values. There were ongoing battles in Vietnam with heavy U.S. casualties. The Vietnamese communists were finding assistance in America from our homegrown revolutionaries -- the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and a large anti-draft movement posing as peace-at-any-price groups. June 17, 1972, fell on a Saturday. Two events took place that night in Washington. Together they set off reactions which culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon two years later. Five men -- one of them Jim McCord, a former employee of the CIA -- were arrested at the Watergate complex in what prosecutors described as a plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee. During July, the FBI added E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to their list of suspects. And an associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, began to dream about how he could best embarrass the Nixon administration. The Felt file Felt was bitterly angry for a number of reasons. On the death of John Edgar Hoover, he had been passed over for the top post; Nixon had appointed L. Patrick Gray as the new FBI boss. There were two main reasons. Hoover's choice of Felt was based on the belief that Mormon and Catholic factions were competing for power in the bureau. Felt listed no religious affiliation. But, according to a transcript of a presidential tape, he was Jewish. Nixon's choice of Pat Gray also was, in part, based on the president knowing that Mark Felt was passing information to the media. To challenge him, at that time, would have placed in jeopardy a White House source in the FBI. Second, Felt knew Nixon had battled with the CIA since, as vice president in 1958, he had been ordered by President Eisenhower to discipline the agency's top leadership for the failure of a heavily publicized mission in Indonesia. In early 1970, Nixon, realizing that even Hoover's FBI were failing to curb domestic unrest, riots and bombings by revolutionary groups and the anti-draft movement, began to back away from the bureau and looked for help from the CIA, led, since 1966, by the ultra-professional Richard Helms. Even worse for the Felts of the bureau was how the president was placing Nixon loyalists in rival agencies to the FBI such as in the Internal Revenue Service and the drug enforcement agencies. And, as a crowning insult to many in the FBI, Nixon, with the support of Richard Helms, began to implement the Huston Plan. Shared intelligence Tom Charles Huston was a young White House speechwriter in the 1960s. With the help of some FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Defense Intelligence Agency officers, he developed the plan that carries his name. It focused on encouraging the collection and sharing of intelligence information among all agencies in our government so as to achieve safety and security. The Huston Plan was put into effect by the president on July 14, 1970, but canceled by him within two weeks because of complaints from Hoover that the FBI had lost power. Until the Patriot Act of 2001, the Huston Plan was almost forgotten. Today, many of the programs envisaged by Tom Huston, now in his 60s and a distinguished attorney in Indianapolis, are contributing to our security from terrorism. If the Huston Plan had been in place and operating, the attacks on New York and Washington -- and the deaths of several thousand Americans -- might have been avoided. And if the Huston Plan had been operating in 1972, the Watergate break-in might not have taken place. Marge Tabankin, then the first woman president of the National Student Association -- later to become Jimmy Carter's head of VISTA, director of the ARCA Foundation and political guru to Barbra Streisand - was in Washington. She attended a party with leaders of the anti-war and draft movement in Vietnam, the National Lawyer's Guild and the Marxist think-tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Voluble about her then recent travels to Vietnam, Tabankin also talked about a letter from the North Vietnamese to Sen. George McGovern, a presidential candidate. Perhaps it was the hope of photographing that letter that led to the break-in. Inconsistencies At 91, Mark Felt is too old and befuddled to answer any questions. But some of the facts he presents are glaringly inconsistent. Why did a senior FBI official - Felt - exchange telephone numbers with young Naval officer Bob Woodward during a casual encounter in the White House cafeteria? Why was an off duty, plainclothes team of officers from the Intelligence Division of Washington's police department working with the CIA, already deployed at the Watergate, waiting for an assistance call from the security guard? And, why did none of the senior police officers recognize Jim McCord, the presidential campaign security manager, who had been meeting with them during the week? Perhaps Mark Felt and other "patriots" were so afraid of the Huston Plan that long-planned treachery was their last resort. Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer. Additional Information:

Coming Sunday

More than 400 charities are raising money for a left-liberal campaign timed to culminate in Scotland next month at the G8 heads-of-state meeting. Read about it in Sunday?s 'Dateline D.C.' column, a Tribune-Review exclusive.

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