The Wars of Watergate (38 page)

The Watergate break-in eventually exposed a whole array of campaign practices designed to disrupt or embarrass the political opposition, all of which commentators later summarized as “dirty tricks.” Nixon recalled in his memoirs that he had “insisted to Haldeman and others … that in this campaign we were finally in a position to have someone doing to the opposition what they had done to us. They knew that this time I wanted the leading Democrats annoyed, harassed, and embarrassed—as I had been in the past.” The rationale always centered on retaliation: “I told my staif that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.” He acknowledged that he ordered “a tail on a front-running Democrat” (without saying for what purpose) and directed that federal agencies’ files be checked for suspicious or illegal behavior by Democrats. Again, Nixon’s involvement was admittedly intensive—with the usual qualification: the President claimed that he had tried to keep himself and his staff out of politics as long as possible in 1972.
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Nixon’s re-election organization and his management of it were firmly in place by 1971. The language of his memoirs inadequately conveys what became an obsession. Nixon always perceived himself as the victim in campaigns. He certainly had encountered rough opposition, but any implication that dirty tactics had been only on one side amounted to a new peak in self-pity. In fact, Nixon and Haldeman had been “convicted” of illegal campaign behavior long before. During the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, they had established a bogus organization called the Committee for the Preservation of the Democratic Party in California. The Nixon finance committee supported the dummy group and mailed postcards to registered Democrats expressing concern for the welfare of the party under Governor Pat Brown. The cards failed to state that they had been paid for by the Nixon for Governor Finance Committee. The Democrats sued, and nearly two years later a Superior Court ruled that the mail campaign had been deliberately misleading. The judge, a Republican, found that the postcard poll “was reviewed, amended and finally approved by Mr. Nixon personally,” and added that Haldeman similarly “approved the plan and the project.” Supporting roles had been played by Ron Ziegler and Maurice
Stans. Earlier in the campaign, the Nixon staff had circulated cropped photographs of Brown and Nikita Khrushchev.
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Some of the “tricks” used for the 1972 campaign were amusing, but perpetrators like Donald Segretti (whose name means “secrets” in Italian) apparently could not distinguish sophomoric stunts (ordering unwanted pizzas sent to a Democratic rally) from underhanded personal attacks (manufacturing libels about the sexual preferences of candidates or forging letters in their names). CREEP provided a haven for spinning fantasy plots as well as for mounting sophisticated intelligence operations in the name of re-electing the President. Senator Edmund Muskie’s chauffeur regularly reported to CREEP, which then transmitted the reports to Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan. Less than six months after the election, the nation listened to accounts of exotically named operations: Townhouse, Sedan Chair I, Sedan Chair II, Sandwedge, Gemstone, and other CREEP-inspired ploys, not knowing whether they offered parodies of bad spy novels or Keystone Kops at play.
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Sandwedge was a typical operation. Created by Ehrlichman’s “private detective,” John Caulfield, the plan involved creation of an organization to perform both “offensive intelligence and defensive-security” operations for the Nixon campaign. The former included penetration of the Democratic nominee’s headquarters and entourage, a “black-bag” capability, surveillance of Democratic primaries, conventions, and meetings, and investigation and dissemination of derogatory information on a worldwide basis; the defensive operations included selection and supervision of private security for the Republican Convention, the maintenance of security at CREEP headquarters, security for the campaign staff, and measures to initiate party- or campaign-oriented investigations. The Sandwedge operation was to have a private business cover and thus avoid direct involvement with CREEP.
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The Watergate break-in had its origins in a plan called Gemstone, supposedly devised by Gordon Liddy. It included conducting surveillance and wiretapping of the Democratic National Convention, the use of call girls to compromise Democratic candidates, sabotaging the air conditioning system at the convention, and running security squads to mug and kidnap radical leaders who might demonstrate at the Republican Convention. John Mitchell reportedly listened to the proposal of Gemstone, puffed on his pipe, and told Liddy that it was “not quite what I had in mind” and that he was to devise more “realistic” and less expensive plans. The entry and bugging of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee was the more realistic plan concocted by CREEP’S “security” forces. Mitchell later ruefully reflected that he should have thrown Gordon Liddy and his entire plan out the window. As Attorney General—which he was until March 1972—Mitchell might have done better to arrest Gordon Liddy for his proposed conspiracy.

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The Watergate break-in itself eventually diminished in importance as the nation discovered what John Mitchell labeled the “White House horrors” and the clear patterns of presidential abuses of power. The subsequent attempts by the White House to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate affair—the “cover-up,” which itself led to more abuses of power—further detracted from the significance of the break-in. But if they seemed to diminish with time, the events of June 1972 rekindled the mood of cynicism and distrust toward officialdom that the Nixon Administration had inherited in 1969.

Inevitably, the generally received version of the Watergate break-in has attracted its share of skepticism. Traumatic national events generally do so. “Official” versions of events such as the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb, for example, have evoked critical challenges, some verging on the paranoid, delusional, and absurd, others posing worthwhile questions for which there are no satisfactory answers.

At the time, the certainties of the Watergate break-in were three: the burglars were real; they had entered the office complex; they had bugging devices with them. The five perpetrators eventually were convicted for breaking and entering and for violating laws prohibiting unauthorized wiretaps. Hunt and Liddy were also found guilty. As the prosecutors developed their case, they discovered, as did subsequent investigations, that the seven men had important links to CREEP and the White House; in particular, all had received money from questionable campaign contributions. But what was the purpose of the break-in? Clearly, the operation was political. But what had been its end? For what specific gain had the break-in been planned?

One theory traces the break-in to a convoluted plot masterminded by Charles Colson. Colson involved Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in his scheme, so this account goes, but he later used them to take responsibility when the attempt failed.

Colson and his spymaster, Hunt, it is suggested, in effect usurped CREEP’S Operation Gemstone for their own purposes. The plan’s immediate objectives were Nixon’s re-election, the elimination of George Wallace, and the isolation of the Left. By this theory, Colson and Hunt worked in their own way, financing Wallace’s would-be assassin and planting left-wing literature in his apartment. With Wallace no longer a factor in the 1972 election and victory assured, Nixon’s other aides signed off on Gemstone, abandoning the plan to bug Democratic headquarters, but Colson and Hunt continued to pursue it, for their own reasons. They planned the initial, successful, Watergate break-in to find or plant evidence linking the Democrats to left-wing
radicals and to install phone taps. The second break-in, the one that was foiled, was to fix a faulty tap. Colson and Hunt also planned widespread violence for the Republican Convention which would be blamed on radical groups. Colson would use that violence as a pretext to persuade the President to call a state of emergency and declare martial law. When the second break-in failed, the plan collapsed. In the final scene of this suggested scenario, Colson and Hunt concealed their true objectives and managed to implicate the rest of the Nixon Administration.
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Arthur Kinoy, the lawyer who successfully challenged the Administration’s broad claims for inherent presidential powers to wiretap without warrants, offered a second hypothesis to account for the break-in. Earlier in the spring, Kinoy had represented federal judge Damon Keith, who had ordered the Administration to disclose wiretaps in a case involving alleged White Panther members. Throughout the proceedings, the Justice Department attorneys had pressed luxuriant claims of inherent executive powers to wiretap. If the Supreme Court had accepted the government’s position, the Administration would have had a perfect cover for wiretaps and “black” operations already underway or planned. The Watergate break-in occurred, Kinoy suggested, because the Administration was privy to the Court’s adverse decision and someone ordered that the phone taps be removed before the Court gave its ruling, scheduled for announcement the Monday after the break-in. Why were so many men caught at Democratic headquarters if their mission was only to repair one faulty tap? Kinoy theorized that the burglars were removing equipment.
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More vivid convolutions appear when other theories link the CIA to the break-in. Two key players, Hunt and McCord, had been employed by the CIA, and other figures connected to the affair had tenuous or alleged ties with the Agency. The CIA role was given a certain
cachet
by Haldeman’s endorsement. According to him, Nixon intensely disliked the CIA and its Director, Richard Helms. The animosity went back to the 1960 campaign. Nixon blamed the CIA for providing John F. Kennedy with inaccurate estimates of Soviet missile capabilities, thus enabling Kennedy to exploit a so-called “missile gap.” Nixon also blamed the Agency for Kennedy’s advocacy of armed intervention in Cuba after the CIA had briefed the Democratic candidate on its proposed Bay of Pigs invasion. When Nixon became President, according to Haldeman, the White House and the CIA often were at odds. Furthermore, the CIA, Haldeman believed, like the FBI, saw the proposed Huston Plan of 1971 as a “disembowelment” of its power and from that moment began to monitor the White House. Haldeman also endorsed Senator Howard Baker’s 1973 comment: “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.”
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Haldeman was no stranger to Nixon’s hostility toward the CIA. A month before the break-in, the President told him that the Agency needed a “housecleaning”;
its “muscle-bound bureaucracy” had “completely paralyzed” its brain. It had too many Ivy League and Georgetown types, Nixon claimed, rather than the kind of people recruited by the FBI. Nixon wanted a study made of how many CIA people he could remove through a reduction in force. Henceforth, in addition, he insisted that the CIA recruit applicants from schools whose presidents and faculty supported the war. Publicly, the Administration would rationalize the CIA dismissals as necessary budget cuts, but the President said, “you … know the real reason and I want some action to deal with the problem.”
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Haldeman later argued that the CIA and the Democratic National Committee knew about the first Watergate break-in and that, singly or together, they sabotaged the second. He claimed that the Cubans, Hunt, and McCord remained on the CIA payroll. The CIA’s animosity toward the Administration, its fear that after his re-election Nixon would move decisively to bridle its power, and its determination to protect an old ally, industrialist and financial manipulator Howard Hughes, Haldeman argued, explained the failure of the break-in.

Haldeman traced the initial motivation of the break-in to the obsession of Nixon and Colson with gaining derogatory information on Lawrence O’Brien, particularly regarding his ties to Hughes. Mitchell, Haldeman wrote in his memoir, was too cautious and politically astute to approve such an operation—implying, as Haldeman intended, that Nixon knew about the break-in in advance.
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Haldeman’s later solicitude for Mitchell was apparently not at work in April 1973, when he, with the President and Ehrlichman, connived to implicate Mitchell as solely responsible for Watergate. And for all the fascination with Haldeman’s projection of CIA mischief in the case, it is instructive to remember that he contended only that the CIA
sabotaged
the effort—in short, Haldeman acknowledged that the break-in originated from the President’s camp.

Jim Hougan’s book,
Secret Agenda
, fleshes out Haldeman’s claims for a pervasive CIA role in Watergate. Hougan has established the most thorough reconstruction of the crime. As evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the events of May–June 1972, Hougan traced the Agency’s dealings back to Howard Hunt’s roles in the Pentagon Papers case and the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Throughout this period, Hougan argues, Hunt was a CIA operative and regularly reported on Administration doings, particularly the sexual peccadillos of various politicians.

Hougan claims that the second Watergate break-in had nothing to do with the original one, but instead occurred because Haldeman and John Dean possessed information that the Democratic headquarters had something to do with a call-girl operation, curiously involving both Democratic and White House officials. Hougan suggests that the prostitution ring was a CIA operation
or was under the Agency’s surveillance. Consequently, he argues, McCord, like Hunt still a CIA operative, deliberately sabotaged the second break-in to prevent its uncovering the call-girl ring. Other undercover CIA agents then played a prominent role in leading journalists to various aspects of the White House involvement in the break-in and thereby successfully covered up the Agency’s role in the origins of the President’s downfall, Hougan concludes. Hougan has ventured the most revisionist account of the origins of Watergate; his story, he insists, proved the common understanding of Watergate to be one based on “fraudulent history.”
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