Targeted
In 1972, Anderson was the target of an assassination plot in the White House. Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from a senior White House aide. White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in. Nixon had long been angry with Anderson, blaming Anderson's election eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election. Anderson remained a target of FBI investigation after his death; in February 2006, the FBI contacted Anderson's family to obtain his files and search for classified documents. The FBI agents claimed to be looking for documents pertaining to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as part of an espionage investigation. In November 2006, the FBI quietly gave up its pursuit of the archive. The archive, as revealed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, contains Anderson's CIA file, along with information about prominent public figures such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Dodd, and J. Edgar Hoover.
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