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His source on JFK was Rosselli. Rosselli was trying to pressure US authorities to drop legal action against him, so he threatened to leak info on the CIA's Cuban operations if the government didn't back off. The prosecution wouldn't back down, so Rosselli started leaking to Anderson about the assassination attempts against Castro. This is discussed in Rappleye and Becker's biography of Rosselli. This indirectly ended up putting Anderson in the middle of Watergate: he started investigating Howard Hughes' employee Robert Maheu's role in the assassination operations, which led him to discover a new assassination attempt against Castro and Allende that E. Howard Hunt was helping CIA set up near the time of Watergate, using Hughes assets in Mexico. Anderson did an expose on ITT's operations in Mexico that threatened to compromise this operation, and consquently the Plumbers were considering going after him as well as Ellsberg. However Anderson also happened to be friends with Frank Sturgis, a member of the Watergate break-in team. Anderson knew about the Watergate break-ins while they were still being planned and shared this info with friends in the intelligence community before the burglars were arrested (see below). I suspect this Watergate/Hughes-related stuff is one reason his papers are of interest, though I believe some of his later reporting is also involved in that.

Woodwardgate: Deep Throat or Shallow Reporting?:

. . .in February 1972 Hughes’ security man Bill Gay called Bennett to arrange for Mullen to suppress a story by journalist Jack Anderson. Anderson was a protege of muckraker Drew Pearson, who along with Anderson had helped put together a hit piece during the 1960 campaign on a Hughes bribe to Nixon’s brother Donald. More recently Pearson and Anderson had been investigating the CIA-Mafia assassination operation against Castro, a topic involving Hughes’ disgruntled former employee Maheu. Following an alleged new assassination plot against Castro in Chile in October 1971, Anderson reported in February 1972 that the CIA/Hughes-linked company International Telephone and Telegraph had paid $400,000 towards the 1972 Republican National Convention in return for favors from John Mitchell’s Justice Department in an antitrust suit. To discourage further reporting on this subject, Gay’s request was relayed by Bennett to CRP deputy director Jeb Magruder, who sent Hunt on March 15 to intimidate the source of Anderson’s story into repudiating Anderson’s report. Hunt and Liddy also considered murdering Anderson. Hunt later told Bernard Barker that he had been in touch with Hughes throughout the preparations for Watergate and that Hughes would provide him with a flight out of the country and employment after the job was done, Barker said in a 1992 taped interview with author Charles Higham. McCord also claimed that he was promised a job by Hughes.

But word of Hughes’ plans got back to O’Brien and Anderson through the Democrats’ contacts with Maheu’s associates. A former employee of Maheu’s security organization, British intelligence agent A.J. Woolston-Smith, had gone on to form his own security company, which did work for Democratic publisher William Haddad. Woolston-Smith’s secretary was the daughter of a partner in a detective agency which worked with private investigator Lou Russell, who in turn worked for both McCord and Anderson. In December 1971 Woolston-Smith began informing Haddad about information he was overhearing from meetings of the November Group, a New York group of Nixon supporters linked to Liddy and McCord. On March 23, 1972, Haddad wrote to O’Brien that “sophisticated surveillance techniques” were being used against the Democrats. On March 30 O’Brien sent a memo DNC communications director John Stewart telling him to follow up on Haddad’s information, and on April 26 Stewart met in New York with Haddad, Woolston-Smith, and others. At the meeting, Woolston-Smith recalled, Haddad took the floor and told Stewart of a plan involving Liddy, McCord, and some Miami Cubans to burglarize and bug DNC headquarters and collect information to prove Castro was contributing to the Democrats. Towards the end of the meeting Woolston-Smith produced what appeared to be a bugging device and demonstrated how the bugging operation would work. After the meeting Haddad gave his entire file on the subject to Anderson, Haddad later testified to a Senate subcommittee. Anderson testified that he had not been able to generate any further information from Haddad’s tip and did not do anything with it, a story Senate investigators familiar with Anderson’s muckraking proclivity found suspicious. Anderson did write after Watergate that he subsequently discovered McCord had confided his bugging plans to old FBI friends and from there the information had spread throughout the investigative community.