“He always had a secret side of things,” Wyatt’s daughter, Verona Scott, told me with a laugh in a recent interview. “He always had something going on, you know, some scheme. He just had his hands in a lot of pots.”
Half a century later, mysteries still linger about Wyatt. According to family lore, he used to run numbers in old D.C. Who knows? Yet some of the cabbie’s clandestine life can be pieced together by burrowing into congressional hearing transcripts and peeking into a box of mementos, tucked away for decades and shared publicly for the first time with The Washington Post.
It turns out that Elmer Wyatt was a spy in the scandal of the century: Watergate. And he was the best of spies, according to his handler in the recesses of Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign.
Wyatt’s involvement in Watergate tracks back to 1971 when he had a stroke that kept him from working as a cabbie for six weeks, according to a written statement he provided to congressional investigators in a closed-door interview. That fall, he was easing back to work and called his old friend John Buckley to seek help finding a part-time gig, according to the confidential statement, which was recently provided to The Post by Wyatt’s family.
Wyatt and Buckley had met years earlier when Buckley was an FBI agent. Wyatt was at a gambling establishment where Buckley made a bust, according to Buckley’s testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee. The authorities interviewed Wyatt as a witness, then released him.
When Wyatt called, Buckley had retired from the FBI and was working in the inspection division at the federal Office of Economic Opportunity. He’d been hired by its then-director, Donald Rumsfeld, who decades later served as defense secretary under President George W. Bush during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
