Watergate, page 22
Across D.C., word of the strange events at the Watergate spread. The burglars initially identified themselves as Raoul Godoy (Gonzales), Gene Valdez (Martinez), Edward Martin (McCord), Edward Hamilton (Sturgis), and Frank Carter (Barker). The crew had thirty-nine rolls of film, a stand to photograph documents, bugging equipment, and twenty-four sequentially numbered $100 bills, as well as two keys for the Watergate Hotel, to Rooms 214 and 314. Realizing this would not be an ordinary case, the police summoned a top prosecutor from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Beyond simply the fact that the burglars were wearing suits, prosecutors raised their eyebrows when a lawyer named Douglas Caddy arrived at the precinct, saying he represented them. As far as the police knew, none of the burglars had made any phone calls noting they’d been arrested—so who had sent over a lawyer?
* * *
The puzzle that the arresting officers faced that morning—what were these well-dressed burglars doing inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee?—has never actually been satisfactorily answered. What were the burglars actually looking for? Who ordered them into the building? And who on the burglary team knew what? It’s still hard to know. The basic question of the burglary’s motive remained—and has remained—an open question that bothered even key players in the scandal: In 1979, John Ehrlichman and his wife, Christy, happened to run into James McCord in the Seattle airport, where Christy blurted out, “Why did you fellows break into the Watergate?” We still don’t know. No one was ever charged with ordering the break-in, nor has anyone ever confessed or presented conclusive evidence one direction or another about what the burglars hoped to accomplish that night.
There are generally five distinct theories that have coalesced around the events of June 17, though it is possible that more than one can be true at the same time. They are so different—conflicting in some directions, overlapping in others—that even with extensive research and parsing, the general motives are difficult to establish, especially when paired with the group’s tendency for sub-schemes and subterfuge. The decades of silence—and, in recent years, death—of participants mean it’s almost certain never to be fully explained.
The least complicated theory is the official one: The Watergate incident was a simple, stunningly incompetent burglary conducted by bumbling campaign aides with overeager imaginations and the end goal of bugging the office or telephone of Democratic Party Chair Larry O’Brien. The official version in some ways makes the most sense: It’s clear that the Nixon White House was deeply paranoid, expected the worst from its enemies, and often assumed that everyone else was engaged in the very dirty tricks it was doing itself. Liddy, Hunt, and McCord all had overeager imaginations and, at best, were poorly supervised by the Nixon operation, and it’s hardly a leap to imagine them launching an ill-conceived and poorly executed operation of dubious value.
Where it gets trickier is whether the burglars were trying to uncover dirt on the Democrats, or find out what dirt the Democrats had on Nixon and his team. While there’s no shortage of dirt the burglars may have hoped to uncover (if they had any specific ideas at all), speculation in the years since has generally focused on three separate theories—one about financial improprieties and the upcoming Democratic convention in Miami, another on sexual blackmail, and a third about illegal foreign campaign donations.
The most straightforward “hidden dirt” theory is that the burglars were looking for both financial improprieties on the Democrats, potentially stemming from the ITT controversy earlier that spring, as well as trying to uncover whether the Democrats might be plotting to disrupt the Republican convention—just as CREEP was planning to do to the Democrats.
Jeb Magruder and John Dean have both explained over the years that they believe the White House was motivated by anger at the ITT controversy and the sense that Democrats were cutting similar deals over funding their Miami convention. Dean outlined his theory as part of a new 93-page afterword when his memoir republished by a small publishing house in 2009 and pointed to a note Haldeman scrawled in March 1972 after a conversation with Nixon: “Do some [checking] on where the Democratic money for Miami is coming from.” In the days after, Nixon—much as he’d obsessed over the Brookings break-in during the Pentagon Papers—repeatedly asked for updates on what he called the “Miami investigation.” As Dean saw it, “The Nixon administration had been hammered, day in and day out, for months, and been badly stung by the Democrats’ charges” over the ITT financing. They were desperate to strike back and felt the Democrats surely had their own shenanigans to hide. Indeed, in later testimony, Hunt says he instructed the Cuban burglars to “photograph everything that was available with particular reference to any papers with financial figures and computations on them, anything that looked like contributors.”
This theory, at least, was the one later reported to Nixon himself. During a January 3, 1973, conversation in the Oval Office, when Nixon wondered aloud “what the Christ [were the burglars] looking for?” Haldeman replied, “They were looking for stuff on two things. One, on financial. And the other on stuff that they thought they had on what [the Democrats] were going to do to screw us up, because apparently a Democratic plot.” (Haldeman then added, cautiously, “I don’t know any of this firsthand—I can’t prove any of it, and I don’t want to know.”)
G. Gordon Liddy, though, later settled on a different motive and theory. According to Liddy’s telling, Magruder on June 12 asked Liddy to have his team reenter the Watergate, try to fix the bug, and photograph everything they could get their hands on. At that point, Magruder gestured to his own file drawer, where Liddy knew Magruder kept the campaign’s sensitive, derogatory information on Democratic candidates, and told Liddy, “I want to know what O’Brien’s got right here.”
Liddy, in his memoir, is under no misapprehension about the burglars’ mission that night—he even italicizes the mission for readers: “The purpose of the second Watergate break-in was to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.”
So what might the burglars be digging for? The sexual blackmail theory focuses on two of the enduring mysteries of the break-in—why the team was targeting the phone of Spencer Oliver, a relatively obscure official who worked with the party’s state chairs, and why burglar Eugenio Martinez was carrying a key that fit the desk of Ida Maxwell “Maxie” Wells, Oliver’s secretary at the DNC. Why Martinez had Wells’s key has never been explained—nor has anyone ever explained how the burglars procured the key in the first place. In fact, it would take weeks before the FBI even determined that the key Martinez was carrying opened Wells’s desk, and apparently no one ever asked the twenty-three-year-old secretary what would have been of interest inside her desk. “We wouldn’t be sitting around again with all the puzzling and all the mysteries had we taken the time to find out what that key was about,” one of the arresting D.C. police officers, Carl Shoffler, later said in an A&E documentary.
John Dean argues the Oliver bugging was a simple mistake: The burglars thought they’d targeted Larry O’Brien’s office because they didn’t understand the DNC office layout until after the first burglary. But in the 1991 book Silent Coup, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin offered their own answer, piecing together a new theory that the break-in was tied to a high-priced escort service linked to Democratic officials—one that may or may not have involved the woman John Dean ultimately married.IX The Colodny/Gettlin theory notes contemporaneous news reports of a ring of high-end escorts that involved a D.C. lawyer named Phillip Mackin Bailley, who was involved in a call-girl ring based at the nearby Columbia Plaza apartment complex and who faced his own legal peril that spring during the period just before and after the break-in, and claims that John Dean’s then girlfriend, Maureen Biner, was friends with a woman named Erika “Heidi” Rikan, a fetching blond German immigrant who Colodny and Gettlin maintain was a high-priced D.C. escort at the time. As a later court opinion summary explains, “the implication of Colodny and Gettlin’s narrative is that the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in was ordered by Dean so that he could determine whether the Democrats had information linking Maureen Biner to the Bailley/Rikan call-girl ring and whether they planned to use such information to embarrass him.”
Their theory holds that the Democratic National Committee was connected to the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring and that inside Wells’s desk was a photo portfolio of Rikan’s escorts that visiting Democratic officials could view before arranging liaisons using the phone in Spencer Oliver’s out-of-the-way office. Baldwin, who manned the listening post, would later explain that he had intercepted telephone calls that were “primarily sexual” and “extremely personal, intimate, and potentially embarrassing,” but prosecutors at the time suggested that such intimate calls were just DNC secretaries talking to their boyfriends.
When Silent Coup was published, it sparked enormous controversy. Both John and Maureen Dean vigorously denied any and all of the allegations and John Dean called the book “absolute garbage.” The Washington Post at various times called Silent Coup “a byzantine piece of revisionism” and one of “the most boring conspiracy books ever written” despite its “wild charges and vilifications.” Sam Dash, the later chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, called the book “a fraud… contradicted by everything on the White House tapes and by the evidence”—yet the book spent weeks on the bestseller lists and was embraced by Watergate figures like Liddy and Ehrlichman. The work spawned multiple, long-running libel and defamation lawsuits between the authors, Dean, Liddy, Wells, and others; the resulting claims, counterclaims, depositions, and trials stretched for years and eventually the Deans and the publisher reached an out-of-court settlement. Another lawsuit, by Wells against Liddy, ended in a mistrial in 2006.
A third theory about the secrets hidden inside the DNC centers around illegal foreign campaign finances. The Cuban burglars, some of whom spoke little English and seemed genuinely befuddled by the purpose of the whole mission, believed they had been recruited to uncover the Democratic Party’s links to Fidel Castro, but the evidence that has since emerged shifted instead toward shadowy contributions to Nixon’s own campaign. As it turns out, the Chennault Affair wasn’t the only foreign-influence subterfuge that the campaign had pulled off in the closing weeks of the ’68 election: There was also the “Greek Connection,” where the campaign accepted about a half million dollars from the brutal Greek military junta, money funneled from the Greek intelligence service KYP, providing a critically needed infusion of cash as Humphrey closed the polling gap through that fall.
Greek journalist Elias Demetracopoulos, who had been forced into exile by the military, had suspected something was fishy when in the fall of 1968 the Nixon campaign suddenly publicly embraced the junta, and he later uncovered how KYP had collected a total of $549,000, mostly in large-denomination bills, and funneled it in three tranches via Nixon’s vice finance chair Thomas A. Pappas, a Greek-American Boston businessman; one payment went to Mitchell, two to Maurice Stans. Demetracopoulos reported what he knew to Lawrence O’Brien in ’68.
While Lyndon Johnson decided not to make a public issue of the illegal donation in the closing days of the election, the ticking time bomb of the Greek donation “caused the most anxiety for the longest period of time for the Nixon administration,” wrote Watergate historian Stanley Kutler.X In 1971, a House committee tried to look further into the donations, prompting Nixon’s longtime backroom brawler Murray Chotiner to visit Demetracopoulos and demand that he lay off Pappas or risk deportation; John Mitchell delivered a similar ultimatum.XI Could it be that when Magruder asked Liddy to find out what derogatory information O’Brien kept hidden in his desk on the Nixon campaign, he was talking about the documentation of the “Greek Connection”? But if that’s what he meant, why didn’t he specifically explain that goal to Liddy?
Other longstanding questions and theories about the burglary center around whether some of those involved in the operation set out to torpedo it from the start. Some wonder if the CIA, whose presence loomed large over the entire escapade, purposefully sabotaged it—perhaps either to sink Nixon or to protect its own role in the Bailley call-girl ring. After all, there were two agency retirees involved, McCord and Hunt, and Hunt also worked for a PR firm known to be an agency cover, and Eugenio Martinez was actively on the CIA payroll, a $100-a-month asset who reported to his case officer through his year of hijinks with Liddy and Hunt—not to mention that the other burglars had their own involvement in past CIA plots. The agency also seemed at various levels and points to have had unique insight into what Hunt and the others were planning, given the photos it helped Hunt develop from the Fielding operation and the GEMSTONE charts it helped Liddy make.
Were Hunt and/or McCord still working for the agency, either formally or informally? Did one or both of them have their own secret agenda? Researchers digging into the burglary years after the fact found notable inconsistencies in Hunt’s telling of how the first attempts to break into the Watergate unfolded, details that initial investigators did not pay close attention to—the failed banquet dinner, for instance, almost certainly didn’t unfold the way Hunt told Liddy it did.XII
In particular, there are questions about James McCord’s movements the night of the burglary. The other burglars noted he seemed to disappear at odd moments from the group (“McCord did not come in with us [when we first entered],” Martinez would note later. “He said he had to go someplace. We never knew where he was going.”), and an associate of McCord’s, Lou Russell, a private detective and CREEP security guard who had once been the lead investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, may have been that evening across the street at the Howard Johnson restaurant—coincidentally, he maintained until his death in 1973. Did McCord have a “sixth man,” a hidden accomplice or lookout that night, unknown to his fellow burglars?
The FBI was never able to tie Russell to the burglary, but there were long rumors that he had been involved in the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring—or perhaps even that the call-girl ring was a CIA operation to amass blackmail material on prominent Washingtonians and visiting diplomats. As the Washington Post later—dismissively—summarized this “sixth man” theory, “This secret CIA operation involving the prostitutes was so sensitive that McCord and Russell set out to sabotage the break-in at Watergate to insure that the other Watergate burglars wouldn’t stumble across it.” Indeed, whether McCord, who demonstrated little skill in his operations, would have likely been the agent of a major CIA plot seems dubious. But questions about the CIA’s tense relationship with Nixon have lingered. In the heart of the scandal to come, Senator Howard Baker would say, “Nixon and [CIA Director Richard] Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.”
The final remaining theory claims that the Democrats and/or the D.C. police had advance knowledge of the burglary and sprung their own trap. That a squad of undercover vice officers responded to the burglary—a team that included Officer Carl Shoffler, who had been intimately involved in numerous cases about the D.C. prostitution scene—was quite the coincidence, and over the years, multiple sources of varying levels of credibility have come forward to say that Shoffler, who unexpectedly volunteered to work an unscheduled shift that evening, had been tipped off about the possibility of action at the Watergate. Was Shoffler in cahoots with McCord or Hunt in actively sabotaging and exposing the burglary? If so, to what end? Or perhaps the Democrats got wind of the operation themselves (after all, Jack Anderson had received a tip earlier that spring that such nefarious doings were underway) and sprung the D.C. police on the burglars to embarrass the president?
The evidence for and against each of these theories has filled entire books in decades since—not to mention thousands of pages of depositions and civil lawsuits—but all remain frustratingly inconclusive, each their own version of the “lone shooter” vs. “grassy knoll” debates around JFK’s assassination. It’s also possible (perhaps probable) that parts of multiple theories are all true at the same time: It could be a bungled burglary, designed either to facilitate or cover up improprieties, that the CIA wanted to sabotage by tipping off the D.C. police. And it could be true that Liddy thought the burglary had one purpose, while Hunt and/or McCord double-crossed him with a second mission, and all the while the Cubans were kept in the dark and told a third goal entirely. Or it might be exactly what White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler dubbed it soon thereafter: “a third-rate burglary.”
Regardless of the underlying motive or motives, one thing is clear: By the time dawn rose in Washington, the cover-up had begun.
Chapter 13 “A Crime That Could Destroy Us All”
As investigators and prosecutors rushed to uncover what they could about the bizarre break-in at the Watergate, Liddy and Hunt moved to hide everything they could. Around 7 a.m. Saturday, Liddy drove to a Texaco station to begin damage control; using a pay phone, he tried to call Magruder, but the White House switchboard informed Liddy that Magruder was in California with Mitchell. Realizing it would be several hours before he could speak to campaign leadership, he went to the CREEP offices. “I also had a lot of material in my office that was now white-hot and had to be destroyed immediately,” he recalled, and he began to feed his GEMSTONE files and the receipts from his various operations into the office shredder a few pages at a time. As the office filled up with other staff, he ran into Hugh Sloan between his office and the shredder. “Our boys got caught last night. It was my mistake, and I used someone from here—something I told them I’d never do,” Liddy told the campaign treasurer. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep my job.”
Mid-morning, Liddy learned that Mitchell was scheduled to speak imminently at a California press conference and raced to the White House Situation Room to use a secure phone. Operators located Magruder at breakfast in the Polo Lounge with the LaRues, Porters, and Mardians; Liddy explained that Magruder should hurry to the closest secure phone at a nearby missile base. The annoyed deputy campaign director protested, and instead called back from a pay phone outside. Then Liddy shared news of the arrests. “You used McCord?! Why, Gordon, why?!” Magruder sputtered. Later, Magruder called Liddy back at the CREEP offices and told him to have Kleindienst intervene.I
