Watergate, page 21
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The Watergate wasn’t supposed to be Liddy’s first operation, but planting electronic surveillance inside the McGovern headquarters had been more difficult than the operatives had imagined. They’d schemed through the spring about how to access the building using their campaign mole, Thomas Gregory, and Gregory, Liddy, and Hunt surveilled the headquarters in Liddy’s green Jeep, discussing how best to sneak inside. Later, Gregory actually got McCord—posing as a visiting uncle—into the campaign offices to walk around and imagine the best opportunities for electronic bugs. McCord scouted the offices of campaign leaders Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart and determined he could be in and out in about five minutes.
On their first attempt, Liddy and Hunt had Gregory hide out in the building’s furnace room until nighttime so he could let McCord in to plant his bugs. Unfortunately, the hideout was discovered and Gregory only barely managed to escape with some quick talk. The close call worried Gregory (“The youth was becoming a bundle of nerves,” Hunt recalled), and so the team adjusted their plans, imagining instead how to break in through the campaign’s rear door, where there was no guard. Liddy, with Frank Sturgis standing watch one night, used an air gun pistol to shoot out the street floodlights near the back door.
Momentarily stymied by McGovern’s building, the team moved forward instead with targeting the DNC offices at the Watergate.III In late May, the six Cuban members of the GEMSTONE burglary team recruited by Hunt—Barker, Martinez, Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Felipe De Diego, and Reinaldo Pico—arrived in D.C. and spent four days touring the capital and familiarizing themselves with the area around the Watergate. One night they even went as a group into the building, signed in with the guard, and walked up to the door of the DNC offices to check them out; undetected, Hunt made a clay impression of the lock.
Their scouting determined that an underground corridor linked the hotel and the office complex, so they rented a hotel banquet room near the corridor for May 26 and planned to fake a corporate event that would last until the complex emptied out for the night. They believed they had a narrow window to execute a break-in: According to McCord and Hunt, an alarm on the corridor stairwell kicked in at 11 p.m. McCord and Baldwin’s observation post across the street would allow them to see when the DNC offices were empty for the night; after the entry, it would serve as a listening post once the bugs were installed.
On May 26, the team checked in as guests at the Watergate Hotel and proceeded to dinner.IV They dined in the Continental Room on shrimp cocktail and filet mignon, drank Cutty Sark Scotch, and smoked cigars. As the others left around 10:30 p.m., Hunt and Gonzalez stayed behind in a closet, but party staffers were still at work in the DNC at the 11 p.m. cutoff. Adding insult to injury, the night guard then locked the banquet room doors and trapped Hunt and Gonzalez inside overnight. Hunt, nevertheless, was in good spirits when he finally managed to escape the next day—arriving in Liddy’s Watergate Hotel room and laughing about how he’d urinated into a partially empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch. “I can see Larry O’Brien now, with a puzzled look on his face, saying, ‘Funny, if I didn’t know this was Scotch, I’d swear it was piss!’ ” Liddy laughed.V
The second night’s attempt didn’t go much better. Gonzalez struck out, unable to pick the lock at the DNC’s entrance; Barker reported that they’d tried unsuccessfully for forty-five minutes before aborting the mission. Gonzalez said he didn’t have the right tools, and Liddy, annoyed, ordered him to return to Miami, get the tools, and come straight back—amazingly, Gonzalez did just that, making a same-day round trip to Florida that enabled them to make a third, successful attempt Sunday night. Inside the offices, Barker photographed two rolls’ worth of film, documenting papers spread across O’Brien’s desk; McCord reported that he’d successfully installed the necessary bugs. On Monday morning, May 29, Liddy reported to Magruder that the Watergate had been successfully burgled.
The Keystone Kops nature of the mission continued in the next few days. The team’s local D.C. photography contact was away, so Hunt had to fly to Miami to have a Barker contact develop the prints—that “contact” ended up just printing the photos at a commercial photo store. As they waited for the prints to arrive, Hunt and Barker went over plans for their honey traps for Democratic politicians, plans to bug key locations, and efforts to rouse embarrassing protesters during the upcoming convention.
Back in D.C., Liddy and McCord realized as the week progressed that the bugs planted inside the Watergate had failed—one didn’t appear to be transmitting at all, and the other, while it could be heard in Al Baldwin’s observation post, appeared to be on a phone line filled with unimportant calls. Liddy reviewed each day’s logs with an increasing sense of dread; he dictated some edited, intercepted transcripts to his secretary Sally Harmony, passing the details on to the campaign leadership “for informational purposes only,” and Mitchell was furious when Magruder showed him Liddy’s transcripts. The intercepts, he said, were simply “shitty.” On Friday, June 9, Magruder called Liddy to complain. “Not to my surprise he said that the content of the logs to date was hardly worth the effort, risk, and exposure we had gone to,” Liddy recalled.VI What could they do about the broken bug?
To placate his boss, Liddy explained that he planned to hit the McGovern headquarters the weekend of June 17—perhaps while the team was in town, they could also go back to the Watergate and attempt to fix the faulty bugs. Hunt blanched at the new plan.
“Looks like high risk, low gain to me,” he told his partner.
“The Big Man wants the operation,” Liddy pleaded, implying it came from the former attorney general. “Look, we’re soldiers in this thing, Howard. If I’ve got a future, it’s in government, and when the Big Man tells me to do something, either I do it for him or he gets someone else who can.”
On Monday, June 12, Magruder summoned Liddy again, this time to insist that the burglary team prioritize photographing every document they could find. “Take all the men, all the cameras you need,” he said. The team was determined to do it correctly: McCord sent Baldwin to the DNC offices to ask for a tour, pretending to be the nephew of a former Democratic Party chair, John Bailey of Connecticut. Remarkably, he was able to get a tour that included “his uncle’s” old office, now Larry O’Brien’s. Afterward, Baldwin drew a detailed office floor plan for the burglars from memory.
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Looking back, the timing of the DNC operation appears uniquely odd. CREEP’s intelligence operation, dirty tricks, and espionage—begun in desperation and anxiety a year before when it seemed possible Nixon would face a serious Democratic challenge—seemed completely unnecessary by June 1972. Nixon’s presidency was soaring, from the reopening with China and the Soviet Union diplomatic victories overseas to the audacious economic moves at home. The Democratic candidates seemed to be collapsing, and the shooting of George Wallace had removed even that third-party electoral threat. Nixon had a full nineteen-point lead in polling, and his approval rating had climbed from 49 to 60 percent. At the beginning of June, he had returned from overseas in dramatic fashion, ending a trip to a Moscow summit, with secondary stops in Austria, Iran, and Poland, by flying from Warsaw to Andrews Air Force Base and then helicoptering directly to Capitol Hill to address a special joint night session of Congress.
The entire reelection apparatus was going strong. Martha Mitchell had kept up almost weekly campaign trips, making appearances in Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, Michigan, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania, as well as two trips to New York, eight social events in Washington, and hosting a cocktail party and a dinner at her own house. On June 14 she predicted to reporter Helen Thomas that Nixon would win big—there was nothing but sunshine and rainbows ahead for the campaign, she said. Her own GOP speaking schedule was already booked full, with three or more appearances every week through November. “I am going to rock and roll,” Martha told Thomas.
The next day, she appeared at a Flag Day gala, accepting the Distinguished Citizen’s Award from the Lions Club, and then she and John left for California. Both Mitchells planned to accompany Pat Nixon to a fancy Hollywood gathering of “Celebrities for Nixon,” while the president himself headed for Florida, where he’d deposit his aides in Key Biscayne, and then retreat to his friend Robert Abplanalp’s island.
Columnist Jack Anderson was headed out of town that day too, scheduled for a speech in Cleveland, and at D.C.’s National Airport he recognized an old face in the crowd. Years earlier Anderson had written about Frank Sturgis’s role in fighting Fidel Castro, a period during which Sturgis had introduced him to his colleague Bernard “Macho” Barker, and Anderson had listened as they regaled him with stories of “Eduardo,” their shadowy CIA boss. (“They were a collection of romantics, forever seeking adventure, forever misadventure,” the reporter recalled.) Now Sturgis introduced Anderson to his traveling companion, Eugenio Martinez. Anderson casually asked what brought them to Washington. “Private business,” Sturgis said, tersely. The interaction ended there—Anderson headed off to Cleveland, and Sturgis, Martinez, and the other Cubans headed to the Watergate to meet “Eduardo,” aka Howard Hunt.
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When Hunt and Liddy met up that night at the Watergate, they first discussed a small hiccup to the weekend’s plans: Earlier in the day, Thomas Gregory had informed Hunt and McCord that he had cold feet about participating further in the McGovern operation. “This is getting too deep for me,” he said. It was a hit, but they decided that losing their inside man shouldn’t be cause to abandon the operation. As soon as they wrapped up the Watergate, they would move ahead with the McGovern break-in.
That night, the burglar team managed to squeeze in a lobster dinner in the Watergate Hotel restaurant, before the Cubans returned to their hotel room. There, they created a makeshift command post and kept practicing their technique for photographing documents. Around 10 p.m., McCord reported that he’d taped open the entrance doors for the parking garage—a common technique used by maintenance and repair that wouldn’t draw much attention if discovered.
While they waited for the last lights at the DNC to go out, Sturgis fetched some Coca-Cola and Hunt and Liddy walked outside for a snack. When they got the all clear, McCord joined them in the hotel from the listening post. He told them that on the way over he’d stopped by the garage doors and noticed someone had removed his tape, so he’d reinstalled it. Warning bells went off for Hunt—“Let’s junk it,” he said—but Liddy and McCord were insistent. They needed to prove the team’s worth, and Liddy didn’t have an endless supply of money to keep paying the burglary team for more days and nights of work.
The team headed off, and Hunt and Liddy settled in to watch a movie on the TV; a car radio antenna sat on the balcony outside, a wire stretching back to their walkie-talkie to communicate with the burglars and with Al Baldwin, who manned the listening post across the street at the Howard Johnson’s.
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Frank Wills, a Savannah, Georgia, native, had bounced around a series of what he saw as deadbeat jobs—his asthma had ended his most promising one, on a Ford assembly line in Detroit—before landing a midnight-to-dawn shift as the lone overnight security guard at the Watergate for $80 a week. By June 1972, he’d been doing the job for a year and there had been a grand total of a single attempted burglary, so he carried nothing more potent than a can of Mace. As he patrolled the night of the 16th, the Black guard was already thinking about his next career move, as his employer had just promoted over him a white colleague at the security company who had started after Wills.
On his first pass that night through the complex, he noticed a garage door with a piece of tape holding it open. He removed it, unconcerned—assuming someone had been moving during the day and forgotten it. After, he headed across the street for a bite to eat. When he came back a half hour later, he noticed the piece of tape had been replaced. Someone else was inside the building, he realized in a panic, probably not far away. Wills rushed back to the lobby and called the D.C. Police’s Second Precinct for help.
In the classic movie version of All the President’s Men, the officer responsible for the corner of the city that included the Watergate was off refilling his squad car with fuel when the dispatch came through. The truth, however, uncovered in 2012 by historian Craig Shirley, is much more dramatic: Shortly after midnight, the officer in that car had taken a break at PW’s Saloon, on 19th Street NW, a new bar that had quickly become a favorite of on- and off-duty cops. One of the owners, Rich Lacey, was working the bar and poured the officer a bourbon and Coke; since it had been a quiet night, the officer lingered and had another. When the officer’s walkie-talkie finally squawked with the burglary report, he was in no condition to respond. “Tell them that you’re out of fuel and you got to go back and refuel before you can respond,” Lacey suggested. “Somebody else will take the call.”
That someone else turned out to be three undercover officers, dressed as hippies and driving a light blue 1972 Ford, Car 727. Sergeant Paul W. Leeper and Officers John B. Barrett and Carl M. Shoffler had also had a quiet night; the most excitement they’d seen was when they tried to warn two women in Georgetown about suspicious men nearby who might be purse-snatchers. (The women had responded “Narc!” and given them the middle finger.) They heard the dispatcher’s open plea, “Any detective car or any cruiser anywhere, [see] guard at the Watergate Hotel… in reference to the possible suspicious circumstances,” and drove to meet Wills and search the building. The ordinary blue Ford pulling up was unremarkable to Baldwin, still on lookout across the street.VII In fact, he didn’t note any unusual activity until the undercover officers had made it to the sixth floor. Finally seeing movement and lights, puzzled, he radioed McCord to ask how the burglary team was dressed.
“We’re wearing suits and ties,” McCord replied.
“Well, you’ve got a problem because there are hippie-looking guys who’ve got guns,” he reported back.
It was already too late.
“They’ve got us,” came a quick radio from inside the Watergate. The police officers were into the DNC offices.
“Hands up,” the undercover officers shouted—only to be shocked when five sets of hands popped up from behind desks across the floor.
“I must admit that when I saw those ten hands go up, I thought, Well, I expected one and I’ve got five; how do I know there isn’t a sixth one behind me with a .45 aimed at my skull?” recalled Sergeant Leeper. “I turned around very slowly, but there wasn’t.” The police were even more puzzled as they took in the full scene before them—a politically sensitive location, older-than-usual burglars wearing fancy attire and surgical gloves, carrying sophisticated surveillance equipment and rolls of $100 bills. They told the men they were all under arrest.
While Hunt and Liddy listened in growing horror as further on-scene narration came from the listening post (“… Police wagon pulling up at the entrance, also some marked police cars…”), they realized Barker had a key to the hotel room they were in and quickly packed up what they could; Hunt slipped the car antenna down his pant leg, and they retreated to his Firebird, parked on the street outside. Hunt drove Liddy four blocks, to his own Jeep. “I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” Liddy said.
Then Hunt doubled back to the Howard Johnson’s listening post and instructed Baldwin to evacuate. “It’s all over,” he said. “Pack up and get going.” As Hunt left, he saw the burglars being led out of the building. “It all seemed so damned final,” he recalled later.VIII He drove to the White House and put all the electronic equipment he could into his office safe. He took out $10,000 cash and phoned a former Mullen Company colleague, Douglas Caddy: “I hate to wake you up, but I’ve got a tough situation and I need to talk.” Next he raced to the Mullen offices to call Barker’s wife in Miami and explain that her husband had been arrested. Finally, he went to Caddy’s apartment. While the lawyer boiled water for instant coffee, Hunt explained that he’d had an operation at the DNC go bad and asked if Caddy would go represent the burglars and bail them out. “I’m not a criminal lawyer, Howard—you know that,” he said. “I don’t have the faintest idea where police take arrested men.” Caddy phoned his law firm partners to learn more about D.C.’s arrest procedures, and determined the burglars were probably at the D.C. jail.
Hunt went home as dawn lightened the sky, took a sleeping pill, and went to bed. In that moment, he was not particularly concerned; in the short term, he figured Caddy would successfully bail the men out and they could all disappear. If Caddy’s efforts failed, Liddy had likely already informed the White House leadership and they could intervene. The whole operation, he thought, had been authorized by Attorney General John Mitchell, so a quick telephone call from Mitchell’s successor, Kleindienst, to the D.C. police chief would surely spring the men, no questions asked.
Liddy, on the other hand, had gone straight home, knowing exactly how much trouble lay ahead. McCord was a former government employee; his fingerprints were on file. His alias wouldn’t hold. As he climbed into bed around 3 a.m. next to his sleeping wife, Fran, she stirred. “Anything wrong?” she asked.
“There was trouble,” Liddy answered bluntly. “Some people got caught. I’ll probably be going to jail.”
