by James Rosen
When McCord joined the Nixon reelection campaign, CRP was preparing to assume responsibility for the expensive round-the-clock security that John and Martha Mitchell had, for three years, received from the FBI. But by February 1972, two months before Liddy invited him to join the Watergate mission, McCord confided to FBI colleagues that he intended to move beyond his security role, the dreary stuff of camera installations and guard schedules. McCord’s true aims were recorded in a previously unpublished internal FBI memorandum: “He reiterated that he believes his position will be one of intelligence and that ultimately he will become more and more involved in Mr. Mitchell’s political activities and less involved in personal security.”
This memo offers the earliest glimpse into what investigators later termed McCord’s “secret agenda” at CRP. The wireman’s goal was to infiltrate Mitchell’s political circle and shift into an “intelligence” function. Clearly, the chief beneficiary of McCord’s “security” work was not to be Mitchell and CRP, but CIA. Liddy offered McCord an extra $2,000 in salary each month, plus $2,000 per surreptitious entry, to join the mission. Hardly surprised by Liddy’s offer—McCord later said Liddy’s repeated inquiries about electronics gear had made it “clearer and clearer” he was plotting a surveillance project—the new security chief readily accepted.12
Never did Liddy imagine, as he planned the Watergate break-in, that he had surrounded himself with men of such dubious loyalty. Faced with mounting evidence that officials in the White House and CRP had set up their own covert operations unit, with Liddy the central player, CIA acted as any intelligence organization would. After all, permitting Liddy’s little unit to operate unchecked, targeting anything and anybody in Washington, utterly beyond the watch or influence of the nation’s premier spy agency, would have violated every known principle of bureaucratic behavior, and the spy game especially. The Plumbers, quite simply, had to be monitored, infiltrated—neutralized.13
Howard Hunt and James McCord insinuated themselves into the Nixon White House and CRP, respectively, at crucial times: Hunt, shortly before the creation of the Plumbers, McCord, shortly after the Ellsberg break-in, the Plumbers’ first illegal break-in. There is persuasive evidence the two men, despite their disclaimers, first met each other long before Liddy supposedly introduced them in 1972. Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran, recalled meeting “dozens” of times with Hunt and McCord—together—in the years immediately after the failed invasion of Cuba. And in previously unpublished testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Felipe DeDiego, one of the Cubans who raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, told investigators he instantly recognized McCord as the same man who a decade earlier, in Florida, had helped organize “an infiltration group…of Cubans working for the CIA.”14
Finally, the CIA had one of Barker’s men—Eugenio Martinez, another Bay of Pigs veteran—on the payroll at the time of the DNC break-in. Martinez’s mission was, in part, to keep the Agency abreast of the Plumbers’ plans. Hunt admitted to the Senate, in previously unpublished testimony, that he had “learned…from Martinez at one point…that his case officer had been made aware that I was in the Miami area and had asked him for a report of my activities.” Of this Hunt professed to be unconcerned: “It was never made explicit to Mr. Martinez that I was no longer with the agency. I never said that I was or wasn’t. It was just not a matter of discussion. I was at the White House, obviously in a senior capacity of some sort, and I had been able to obtain CIA items of issue for the Fielding operation and so forth. And all of this certainly would suggest strongly to anyone on a clandestine relationship with me that I had some sort of authorized official relationship to the intelligence community in the United States government.”15
That Langley received Gemstone updates from Eugenio Martinez, independent of Hunt and McCord, was further confirmed in a previously unpublished memo dictated by CIA director Richard Helms on December 4, 1973. As the country braced for the coming impeachment battle, Helms learned that Alexander Haig, by then White House chief of staff, was trying to get an influential senator to allege that CIA “knew about the Watergate burglary thirty minutes before it occurred.” Mere mention of the agency’s foreknowledge of the break-in alarmed Helms, who fretted privately: “It is still not clear to me whether [Haig] would have been basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what.”16
The role of CIA in the collapse of the Nixon presidency was a subject of intense controversy during the Watergate era, and a mystery that bedeviled Mitchell to his grave. It reminded him of the spying conducted against the administration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I’m sure the CIA knew more about Watergate than it’s ever come out,” he told an interviewer in 1987; by the time he died, the former attorney general had concluded “the CIA was behind the whole thing.”17
With the Plumbers now firmly in CIA’s grip, Gordon Liddy unaware that control of Gemstone had been silently, effortlessly wrested from him, only one position on his DNC crew remained unfilled. It was the operation’s most important job: the wiretap monitor. Liddy asked McCord, the electronics expert, to find someone to man the headphones and log the results. This was Liddy’s biggest mistake, for it ceded to McCord complete control over the Watergate operation: It would be McCord’s man listening in on the intercepted conversations and furnishing the fruits directly to McCord, who would in turn heavily edit the data before submitting it to his superiors at CRP. Liddy, in short, never saw the raw intelligence produced by his own covert project.
McCord’s next move was explicable only as the product of a secret agenda. He chose for the DNC mission an undistinguished former FBI agent with barely two years in the Bureau, a lackluster career after leaving it, and zero experience in wiretapping. This was Alfred C. Baldwin III, a portly and affable thirty-five-year-old lawyer (West Hartford Law School class of ’63) and former instructor of police science (New Haven College). When McCord first contacted him, at home on the night of May 1, Baldwin was unemployed. Seducing his prey with talk of campaign “security work” and an annual salary of up to $20,000—“I wasn’t sure somebody wasn’t playing a joke on me,” an astounded Baldwin later recalled—McCord had Baldwin fly to Washington that night.18
Over breakfast the next day, Baldwin learned his first duty would be serving as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell, who was spending the spring barnstorming the country for the Nixon-Agnew ticket, its most popular and bankable surrogate. However, to accompany her on such trips—indeed, to deal with Martha Mitchell at all—was universally regarded by CPR staff as the campaign’s most thankless task. McCord minimized the unpleasantness to Baldwin, and less than twenty-four hours after their first conversation, Baldwin was driven to the Mitchells’ Watergate apartment, where he met Mrs. Mitchell and her personal assistant. By 4:00 p.m. the whole entourage was at Union Station—flying terrorized Martha—boarding Amtrak’s Broadway Limited to Chicago.19
Al Baldwin’s tour of duty with Martha proved brief and unpleasant, in large part because of his additional assignment as the procurer of Mrs. Mitchell’s liquor, the most incendiary ingredient in an already highly flammable personality. “There were several occasions where I had to actually take, say, a cup of what would be Scotch to her, in the guise [of] it being coffee,” Baldwin confessed. “A couple of times I thought it was unusual, because it was early…ten-thirty, eleven o’clock [in the morning], during a speech.” Martha, for her part, disliked Baldwin, thought him devious and “gauche.” The hapless aide was forced to sign a statement swearing he had not talked about Martha behind her back.
When the entourage arrived back at the Watergate, Baldwin helped unload Mrs. Mitchell’s luggage, then politely excused himself to wait for a ride back to CRP. Then word came: Mr. Mitchell wants to see you. Ushered into the Mitchells’ study, Baldwin found the former attorney general relaxing in a sweater and slacks, smoking his pipe. But instead of reprimanding him, as the unsophisticated former FBI man feared, Mitchell thanked him. �
�I’ve got good reports…about your work,” Mitchell said, “and I want to welcome you to the team.” Baldwin left stunned but relieved. What he hadn’t taken into account was that nobody knew better than John Mitchell how difficult Martha Mitchell could be.20
On May 11, at McCord’s direction, Baldwin moved his belongings into Room 419 at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, located directly across the street from the Watergate office complex. Over the next two weeks, Baldwin mingled in antiwar crowds and posed as a tourist in the Capitol offices of several members of Congress—Kennedy, Muskie, Jacob Javits, Bella Abzug, Chisholm, Ed Koch—selected by McCord. Then, on the afternoon of May 25, Baldwin opened the door to Room 419 to find, to his astonishment, James McCord positively awash in electronic equipment: portable shortwave radios, debugging devices, tape recorders, a Samsonite suitcase concealing a radio-frequency receiver.
“We’ve got this operation,” McCord announced. According to an account Baldwin gave, in presence of counsel and previously unpublished, McCord said “bugs had been installed on two phones across the way and that their job was now to monitor these phones.” This account is significant, for it confirms that McCord installed listening devices in the DNC at least three days before he and the Cubans made their first successful entry into the Watergate, following three failed attempts, over May 26–27. This means McCord deceived his confederates throughout the operation, pursuing a secret agenda.21
McCord demonstrated how to use the equipment by tuning in an actual conversation for Baldwin to monitor. Shortly after the Watergate arrests, Baldwin told the FBI this initial chatter had featured “a man talking with a woman and discussing their marital problem.” In March 1973, Baldwin told the Senate Watergate committee the man with the “marital problem” was Spencer Oliver. This set the tone for the highly personal conversations Baldwin was to monitor over the next three weeks, until the arrests of June 17 abruptly terminated his mission. In October 1972, Baldwin told the Los Angeles Times that many of the conversations he logged in May and June involved DNC staffers besides Oliver, who traveled frequently, and that the contents were often “explicitly intimate.” “We can talk,” the DNC secretaries would say. “I’m on Spencer Oliver’s phone.”22
Since January 1973, a gag order imposed by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has prevented the Watergate wiretap monitor from disclosing exactly what he overheard; but as the years reeled by, bits and pieces of the illegally intercepted conversations seeped out from other sources, and Baldwin himself, during an extraordinary seven-hour interview at his home in East Haven, Connecticut, in the summer of 1995, and in sworn testimony he subsequently gave in civil litigation, opened up considerably. By describing the contents of the conversations intercepted at the DNC, Baldwin helped solve the mystery of who ordered the wiretapping in the first place.23
“I don’t know who Mr. Spencer Oliver is,” John Mitchell testified in September 1972. And why should he have? The former attorney general operated on a political plane miles above that of Oliver and, and as far as Mitchell was concerned, he had rejected Liddy’s bugging plans three times.
To the Senate, Mitchell stated flatly he had “never seen or talked to” Liddy after February 4, 1972, the day of the second Gemstone meeting—with one exception. On June 15, 1972, Mitchell told the committee, he met with Liddy and others to review a letter Liddy had sent the Washington Post, defending CRP against arcane allegations involving the Corrupt Practices Act. “I looked at the letter and gave it [my] approval and that was the end of it,” Mitchell testified. “That was the only conversation I had with Mr. Liddy.”24
Mitchell’s story was false in two minor respects. First, he had indeed seen and spoken to Liddy between February and June: once, at a May 8 briefing on Vietnam at the White House, at which Liddy advocated the targeting of civilian population centers in North Vietnam and Mitchell rebuked him for offering “amateur military advice.” However, that encounter had occurred as part of a large gathering and was wholly unrelated to Liddy’s Gemstone intrigues. The other minor problem with Mitchell’s testimony was that the Washington Post letter was not his sole topic of discussion with Liddy on June 15.
According to Liddy’s memoir, he did indeed visit Mitchell in his office on that day to discuss “nonintelligence matters.” Because his interaction with Mitchell was so rare, and despite the fact that “intelligence wasn’t on the agenda,” Liddy brought with him a bulging, unmarked manila envelope containing a “thick sheaf” of material generated by the Oliver wiretap. Believing all along that Mitchell was the intended consumer of this data—the man who’d ordered the DNC operation—Liddy placed the envelope on a corner of Mitchell’s desk and said: “That’s for you, general.” To Liddy’s chagrin, the former attorney general scarcely acknowledged Liddy’s presence, just nodded and puffed on his pipe while reading other papers, and made no move at all to retrieve the envelope. “Indeed,” Liddy later recalled, “the entire time I was in his office, he never touched it.” When Mitchell did finally pay attention to Liddy on this occasion, it was, again, to chastise him: this time for plotting to have hippies urinate in a Miami hotel room soon to be occupied by Senator McGovern—and thereafter by Mitchell himself.
In his version of the June 15 meeting, Mitchell omitted his rebuke of Liddy over the never-executed McGovern prank, and made no mention of the bulging envelope, of whose existence Liddy thought the former attorney general totally oblivious. In all other respects, Liddy’s story confirmed Mitchell’s: They had not met, per se, between February 4 and June 15, and only then on “nonintelligence matters” most importantly, Liddy’s account offered no evidence that Mitchell ever touched, let alone consumed, the fruits of the Watergate operation, the wiretap data from the Oliver telephone.25
Jeb Magruder, however, testifying in exchange for leniency, told a very different story—or several of them, as was his habit. According to Magruder, in early June he received from Liddy two “worthless” packages of wiretap data. “The telephone calls told us a great deal more than we needed to know about the social lives of various members of the Democratic committee staff,” Magruder wrote in 1974, “but nothing of political interest.” After showing the logs to a disgusted Gordon Strachan (“This idiot is just wasting our time and money!”), Magruder claimed he brought the wiretap fruits directly to Mitchell, who angrily summoned Liddy for still another censuring, this time over the quality of the DNC wiretap data. It was after Mitchell’s reprimand, Magruder claimed, that Liddy vowed to send his men back into the Watergate to correct the problem. If such a meeting had occurred, it would have been of historic significance: the catalyst for the final, fateful Watergate break-in of June 17.26
Yet Magruder’s story was full of holes. For starters, Magruder told the grand jury his standard procedure was to withhold from Mitchell all material that held zero “interest” or “value.” Why, then, would Magruder have shoved the “worthless” DNC data under Mitchell’s nose? It was a question for which, at Mitchell’s trial, Magruder had no good answer. Second, Magruder had trouble supplying accurate details about this fateful meeting. He could never fix the date. In one early version, he claimed Mitchell delivered his rebuke to Liddy over the phone; elsewhere it was face-to-face, in Mitchell’s law office. Then there was the supposed substance. “Mitchell chewed out Liddy for the quality of the intelligence,” Magruder told the Watergate prosecutors in April 1973; later he remembered Mitchell having addressed Liddy in a “rather understated way.”27
Despite their many internal contradictions, Magruder’s multiple accounts all featured one common element: They all implicated Mitchell as the trigger man for the catastrophic events of June 17. The one major problem with all of these stories was that the evidence and testimony undermined them. Asked at the Senate hearings to respond, Mitchell coined one of the scandal’s most memorable phrases.
DASH: But do you recall Mr. Magruder testifying that he had taken these documents [the wiretap logs] and shown them to you?
&
nbsp; MITCHELL: I recall it very vividly, because it happens to be a palpable, damnable lie.
Mitchell said his secretary kept “very accurate” office logs, which reflected no record of any such session. Of course, the Senate, and later the Watergate prosecutors, also knew Magruder’s own calendar also showed no record of the meeting.28
Also available to the prosecutors was the testimony of a number of individuals who spoke to Gordon Liddy immediately after the arrests of June 17, all of whom recalled him specifying that it was Magruder—not Mitchell—who precipitated the final entry into the Watergate. Robert Mardian, the CRP lawyer who formally debriefed Liddy on June 21, reported to the Senate that Liddy “made the entry at the insistence of Mr. Magruder.” Fred LaRue, present for that debriefing, likewise told the Senate that Liddy felt “pressure from Magruder to improve the surveillance.”29
What was not available to Watergate investigators in the 1970s was Liddy’s testimony; not until he published Will in 1980 did his account emerge, and it demolished Magruder’s multiple versions. Liddy recalled no discussions with Mitchell at all about the quality of the DNC wiretap data. In fact, it was Magruder who admonished Liddy about the DNC data, who fretted over its cost, who urged the wiretaps be upgraded. “On Friday, June 9,” Liddy reported in Will, “Magruder called me in again…[and] said that the content of the logs to date was hardly worth the effort, risk, and expense we had gone to.” Three days later, Magruder impatiently ordered Liddy back into the Watergate: “Take all the men, all the cameras you need.”30