Watergate, page 13
To Mark Felt, who had been tasked with executing the urgent, full-field investigation on Schorr, the episode proved a cautionary tale: These Nixon folks seemed far too comfortable deploying the FBI as a political tool—and when it backfired, they were far too comfortable letting it take the blame.
* * *
G. Gordon Liddy’s official role at the White House focused on narcotics policy, so he split his time with the Plumbers along with work on firearms issues and heroin—never seeming too troubled by a role that involved law enforcement by day and lawbreaking by night. Liddy never seemed to doubt that fighting the nation’s enemies meant fighting Nixon’s enemies.
As Schorr faced Nixon’s wrath, Liddy penned a long update on the Ellsberg project, describing the CIA’s assistance so far as “disappointing” and how the FBI’s work on Ellsberg “has been characterized by a lack of a sense of urgency.” Shut out by the government’s normal security agencies, the Plumbers and the White House forged ahead with their own operation against Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Needing disguises to execute their plan, they turned to the government’s in-house burglary and concealment experts: Ehrlichman called the CIA’s deputy director and explained that Hunt was a security consultant for the White House and would need help from time to time. Hunt, the White House aide explained, should be given “pretty much carte blanche” by the agency.
“I’ve been charged with quite a highly sensitive mission by the White House to visit and elicit information from an individual whose ideology we aren’t entirely sure of,” Hunt told his old colleague Deputy Director Robert E. Cushman, Jr., in a follow-up meeting. “We’re to keep it as closely held as possible.”
Hunt and Liddy met a staffer from the CIA’s Technical Services Division at a safe house in southwest D.C. The tech went by the pseudonym “Steve,” while Liddy introduced himself simply as “George,” adopting his own operational pseudonym of “George F. Leonard.” Steve equipped the White House aides with new identities—for Liddy, that meant not only a Kansas driver’s license, but supporting “pocket litter” like a Social Security card and a lifetime membership card for the National Rifle Association, as well as a dark brown wig, new glasses, and a “gait-altering device” that slipped into his shoe.II Lastly, they were handed a concealed spy camera—a 35mm Tessina that slipped inside a compartment in a pouch of pipe tobacco, the underside of which had a special grill to allow easy photos.
On August 25, Hunt and Liddy took off for Los Angeles, flying on a government travel voucher, and checked into the Beverly Hilton, just a few blocks from the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding. The next day, they began surveillance in disguise; posing as tourists, they took photos of the building and the Volvo parked in the doctor’s reserved spot, surveyed the building entryway, plotted escape routes, and scoped out Fielding’s apartment, before returning to the office at the same time of night they planned to break in. Spotting cleaning equipment in the lobby, they waltzed in and found a Hispanic cleaning woman on the second floor; speaking Spanish, Hunt explained that they were doctors and needed to leave a message for their colleague. She unlocked the door to Fielding’s office, and Hunt distracted her as Liddy pretended to leave a note while surveying the suite layout and office door. He breathed a sigh of relief: The lock would be easy for him to pick using his old FBI skills. Back outside, they monitored police patrols and traffic patterns, checking the building every fifteen minutes through the evening until midnight, when the cleaning woman left. Reconnaissance complete, they hopped a red-eye flight back to Washington. “Steve” met them at Dulles Airport to take their film to be developed by the CIA.
At the White House, they created a more formal burglary plan. Bud Krogh took only a day to approve the operation, just cautioning Hunt and Liddy not to participate in the break-in themselves. Hunt suggested enlisting some Cuban-Americans that he’d worked with during his CIA days around the Bay of Pigs invasion; they were discreet and had been trained in clandestine operations. And, as luck would have it, he’d recently reconnected with them.
On the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion that April, he’d traveled to Miami and visited the memorial for the failed operation. Using his agency cover name of “Eduardo,” he’d set a meeting at the memorial with Bernard Barker, a former colleague. Barker, known as “Macho,” was a longtime CIA agent and World War II veteran—he had spent a year in a German prisoner of war camp after his B-17 was shot down on a bombing raid—who had joined Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s federal police as part of his CIA role after the war. Together, they lunched at a Cuban restaurant with another operation veteran named Eugenio Martinez. “[Hunt] was different from all the other men I had met in the Company. He looked more like a politician than a man who was fighting for freedom,” Martinez would recall later, using the unofficial reference for the CIA. “His motions are very meticulous—the way he smokes his pipe, the way he looks at you and smiles. He knows how to make you happy—he’s very warm, but at the same time you can sense that he does not go all into you or you all into him.”III
As conversations continued that summer, Hunt disclosed to the Cubans that he was working in the White House, putting together a team to operate where the CIA and the FBI couldn’t and investigate a “traitor of this country who had given papers to the Russian Embassy,” a reference to Ellsberg, who had been rumored—inaccurately—to have delivered a copy of the Pentagon Papers to the Soviets. Barker would be part of the team, and he needed two others: Was Martinez interested? “To me this was a great honor,” Martinez recalled later, seeing the new offer as a reward and validation of his years of service to the CIA. In late summer, Hunt telephoned Barker from the Plumbers’ office in Room 16 to officially recruit them into the Fielding burglary. They agreed on the upcoming three-day Labor Day weekend as the ideal date for the break-in.IV
Inside the White House, memos and conversations focused on what information gathered during what was obliquely called “Hunt/Liddy Project #1” might be weaponized against Ellsberg. On August 27, Ehrlichman wrote to Colson, “On the assumption that the proposed undertaking by Hunt and Liddy would be carried out, and would be successful, I would appreciate receiving from you by next Wednesday a game plan as to how and when you believe the material should be used.”
On September 1, a Wednesday, they met in Room 16, where Krogh gave Hunt and Liddy operational money; Colson had rounded up about $5,000 from an advertising firm that did work with the White House—monies that he would later repay out of campaign funds. From there, Hunt and Liddy were off to Chicago, where they intended to purchase the radio transceivers needed to coordinate the break-in. Krogh said goodbye with a simple request: “For God’s sake, don’t get caught!”
Given the green light, Barker passed the official word to Martinez: “Get clothes for two or three days and be ready tomorrow,” he said. “We’re leaving for the operation.” The two Cubans met up at the Miami airport, joined by Felipe De Diego, another Bay of Pigs veteran and longtime CIA asset who now worked in Florida real estate. Martinez, who had never left Miami before, learned that they were headed to Los Angeles only once he got to the airport.
Arriving in L.A. after their stop in Chicago, Hunt and Liddy checked back into the Beverly Hilton and then split up to purchase the additional sundry equipment they needed—new cameras, tools, opaque plastic to cover the office windows from the inside, and rope in the event of an emergency escape from the second floor. Then they met up with their trio of burglars.
That afternoon, the Cubans disguised themselves as deliverymen and arrived at Fielding’s office with a footlocker, addressed to Fielding, containing their burglary tools. The ever-obliging cleaning woman happily let them into his office, where they left the delivery before returning to Liddy’s car and waiting. After she left for the night, the men approached the building to discover she’d locked all the doors behind her; they instead identified for the break-in a rear window concealed by shrubs. The Cubans entered, while Liddy—ever prepared for drama—stood watch outside with a Browning knife at the ready.
The group all met back at the hotel, where Hunt had readied a bottle of champagne. Once the debriefing began, though, it became clear that the operation had been far from successful. The Cubans had not located any files pertaining to Ellsberg, and the file cabinets had been visibly damaged. To cover up the now obvious burglary, they’d ransacked the suite to look like they were junkies searching for drugs. “There was nothing of Ellsberg’s there,” Martinez said later. Despite the apparent failure, the group went ahead with a champagne toast anyway. Liddy called Krogh, who “was so relieved that nothing had gone wrong, he wasn’t concerned that we hadn’t found anything.”V
The next morning as the Cubans quickly left town, Liddy and Hunt took another trip to Fielding’s home. Thinking the doctor might be keeping Ellsberg’s papers there, Liddy snuck inside the building to photograph Fielding’s door lock and scout his back porch. It would be useful reference if another attempt was needed. Flying back to D.C. under their assumed names, Liddy and Hunt boasted to the flight attendants how they had just been involved in a big national security operation; they “fuzzed up” the story of the break-in, but when it broke eighteen months later, the flight attendants recognized it enough to report the encounter to the FBI.
* * *
Back in the White House on Tuesday, Hunt tried to discuss his weekend activities with Chuck Colson, but was met with a terse refusal. “I don’t want to hear anything about it,” Colson said.VI Liddy had more success reporting the operation to Krogh, showing him the Polaroids taken by the Cubans and the knife he’d carried to cover their entry. “To prove we had not spent the money on a party, we took photographs of the windows in Fielding’s office; of the drugs we had strewn about,” Liddy recalled. Krogh thought the whole presentation surreal—seeming to recognize for the first time the ethical and criminal line the president’s men had crossed—but in the end didn’t seem deterred. “Hang onto those tools and things, we may need them again,” he told Liddy.
Ehrlichman reported the failed operation, obliquely, to Nixon the next day. “We had one little operation—it’s been aborted—out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about,” he told the president in the Oval Office, but reassured him, “We’ve got some dirty tricks underway. It may pay off.” He’d experienced a brief flicker of doubt after the burglary, but quickly dismissed it—he recalled thinking, “Someone was betraying national secrets. Hunt and Liddy did what the FBI had been doing in such cases for years with the blessing of the attorney general and the president.”
While the idea of breaking into Fielding’s L.A. apartment was ultimately nixed—the risk versus reward seemed too great, given that no one even knew if the files were at the doctor’s home—the team stayed focused on undermining Ellsberg in the public eye. Everyone seemed to have ideas for additional plots: Ehrlichman suggested breaking into the National Archives to steal files related to the Pentagon Papers that Democratic aides had deposited there, while the Plumbers considered drugging Ellsberg with LSD during a gala dinner in Washington so his bizarre public behavior would discredit him—they went as far as to work out how to infiltrate Cuban waiters to serve him soup laced with LSD mid-meal. The White House approved the operation, but not in time to execute it.
Meanwhile, Colson revived Jack Caulfield’s plan to break into the Brookings Institution, giving Hunt and Liddy the go-ahead to formulate a plan. The problem, Liddy decided, wasn’t that the previous scheme was a bad idea—it just wasn’t ambitious enough. He and Hunt worked up a plan to purchase a used fire engine, outfit it with D.C. fire department logos, and staff it with the Cuban burglars disguised in uniforms and trained in basic firefighting. The fake engine would respond after a time-delayed firebomb exploded inside the think tank late at night; first on the scene, before the real D.C. firefighters arrived, the burglars would have time to enter the building, access the vault, and escape amid the confusion. The proposal was denied quickly—not because it was an insane, breathtakingly risky, and complicated illegal plot to be connected directly to the President of the United States. “Too expensive,” Liddy recalled. “The White House wouldn’t spring for a fire engine.”
Beyond Ellsberg, the Plumbers pursued their own side projects, an in-house skunk works targeting the White House’s enemies. Hunt continued his quest for evidence to pin the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem on the Kennedy administration, but remained unable to find any incriminating evidence as he excavated the State Department’s files—too many relevant diplomatic cables appeared suspiciously missing, Hunt concluded, so he forged his own cable, seeming to grant tacit permission for the assassination from Kennedy, and tried, unsuccessfully, to leak it to LIFE magazine.
* * *
That fall, the White House was increasingly concerned about the dysfunction at the FBI and asked Liddy to wade into its brewing internal cold war. The atmosphere of suspicion around the looming succession battle at the bureau had deteriorated rapidly through the summer and early fall and started to spill over into the media. “The appointment of W. Mark Felt has prompted much discussion within the agency and has raised speculation that Mr. Hoover has settled on the man he would like to replace him,” the New York Times reported in late August. Felt clearly wanted the job, standing out amid an executive leadership who looked as if they had walked out of central casting of a 1930s gangster movie. “He had this quite flamboyant hair,” recalled Nicholas Horrock, who covered the FBI for Newsweek at the time. “Mark dressed well and it was noticeable.”
Six ramrod-straight feet tall, Felt was not well liked by his peers, who saw him as both icy and untrustworthy. “Some had dubbed him ‘the white rat’ for his thick mane of white hair and tendency to squeal whenever he thought it would help his own agenda,” bureau historian Max Holland wrote. Angry over Felt’s elevation and his own demotion, Hoover’s longtime assistant director William Sullivan had been lashing out in a lengthy series of highly critical internal letters, laying out point by point and page after page how the bureau was falling short. In early September, Hoover had had enough. He instructed Sullivan to submit his application for retirement. Sullivan refused. On September 30, Hoover relieved the agent of his duties, pending his official retirement. In early October, Sullivan finally accepted defeat and left the bureau, pointedly leaving behind only his autographed picture of Hoover.
Days later, a column by Evans and Novak aired the long-building dirty laundry between Sullivan and Hoover, highlighting the “deterioration of the FBI” and saying the bureau was facing a “reign of terror.” Longtime officials, they reported, were “heartsick” at the state of the nation’s law enforcement agency and the drama “redouble[d]” a sense at the White House and Justice Department that Hoover “should go and go soon.” To Felt, it seemed clear Sullivan was a key source—perhaps the only source—for the syndicated columnists, but it didn’t bother him; as far as he was concerned, Sullivan’s ignominious departure removed his only rival for the directorship after Hoover.VII
As Sullivan imploded, Nixon continued to try to find the best way to encourage Hoover too to leave. He hosted Hoover for a breakfast on September 20—a rare event so private that it never even appeared on the White House’s daily diary. They spent the better part of two hours talking, Nixon hoping he could convince Hoover to retire on his seventy-seventh birthday on January 1, but Hoover didn’t take the bait and Nixon didn’t have the heart—or the will—to push. “No go,” Nixon told Haldeman later in the day. It surprised none of his staff that he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of “Edgar.” Nixon was awful at firing people. (“It was a little bit like killing the Thanksgiving turkey with a dull axe—hack away and back off and ask somebody else to do it,” Ehrlichman observed.) Frustrated, Nixon whined to Mitchell in October, “He oughta resign,” and enlisted Krogh to dig into the issue further.
Krogh, in turn, tasked Liddy with researching Nixon’s next move. The former agent spent weeks talking to people inside and outside government. He delivered on October 22 a ten-page memo that quoted Tennyson and outlined the bureau’s history, mission, and Hoover’s impact, concluding that “years of intense adulation have inured Hoover to self-doubt.” The need for change was obvious: “J. Edgar Hoover should be replaced as Director of the FBI. The question is when?”
While Liddy believed removing Hoover after reelection in ’72 would be “no real problem,” he argued for swifter action. “I believe it to be in the best interest of the Nation, the President, the FBI, and Mr. Hoover that the Director retire before the end of 1971,” he wrote. “Immediate removal would guarantee that the President would appoint the next Director of the FBI, something akin in importance to a Supreme Court appointment opportunity.” Yet the White House still couldn’t see a safe path. Angering either Sullivan or Hoover seemed to bring its own risks, and Sullivan already knew too much about Nixon’s behavior. “Sullivan was the man who executed all of your instructions for the secret taps,” Ehrlichman reminded the president.
“Will he rat on us?” Nixon wondered.
“It depends on how he’s treated,” Ehrlichman replied.VIII
