Ten years after the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, Jim Hougan--then the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine--set out to write a profile of Lou Russell, a boozy private-eye who plied his trade in the vice-driven underbelly of the nation's capital. Hougan soon discovered that Russell was "the sixth man, the one who got away" when his boss, veteran CIA officer Jim McCord, led a break-in team into a trap at the Watergate.

Using the Freedom of Information Act to win the release of the FBI's Watergate investigation--some thirty-thousand pages of documents that neither the Washington Post nor the Senate had seen--Hougan refuted the orthodox narrative of the affair.

Armed with evidence hidden from the public for more than a decade, Hougan proves that McCord deliberately sabotaged the June 17, 1972, burglary. None of the Democrats' phones had been bugged, and the spy-team's ostensible leader, Gordon Liddy, was himself a pawn--at once, guilty and oblivious.

The power struggle that unfolded saw E. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord using the White House as a cover for an illicit domestic intelligence operation involving call-girls at the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments.

A New York Times Notable Book, Secret Agenda "present[s] some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past . . . The questions [Hougan] has posed here--and some he hasn't--certainly deserve an answer" (The New York Times Book Review). Kirkus Reviews declared the book "a fascinating series of puzzles--with all the detective work laid out."