Ep. 01a: Big Questions from a Small Burglary

Was Watergate just a “third-rate burglary” or something more insidious? And was the Washington Post investigative journalism depicting the scandal entirely accurate? In this episode we will put a steady gaze to the timing of Watergate and take a deep dive into these two interrelated topics: who was truly responsible for the June 17, 1972 burglary of the DNC headquarters, and did the Washington Post withhold key information from the public about it? 
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The Mysteries of Watergate with John O'Connor
Ep. 01a: Big Questions from a Small Burglary

This is the first episode in a podcast series entitled, “The Mysteries of Watergate.”  Episode one is entitled, “Big Questions from a Small Burglary.” 

Let’s start at the beginning.  The most serious political scandal in United States history arguably in world history is called Watergate.  It began with the arrests on June 17, 1972 of five burglars in the headquarters offices of the Democratic National Committee, or DNC.  The scandal which unfolded over the next two years saw the only forcible removal ever of a United States President, Richard Nixon, as he faced articles of impeachment sure to cause his removal by the Senate. 

On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned his presidency.  Eventually, forty members of this administration would be convicted, and thirty more individuals as well.  Yes, Watergate may be called truly the mother of all scandals, yet the public has not yet been told what Watergate was really about. 

Because of the prominent role of the Washington Post in uncovering the scandal, especially through the stellar work of young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, this Pulitzer prize-winning reporting has been universally recognized as both the birth and the crowning achievement of modern investigative journalist.  This reporting advanced what had widely been understood to have been a “third-rate burglary” as presidential spokesman Ron Ziegler called it.  The reporting, after it concluded, advanced that third-rate burglary into a wholesale indictment of the entire presidential administration. 

In the past, reporting of scandal had been considered trashy.  Watergate reporting brought in aggressive investigative pieces out of these disreputable shadows, no longer considered largely second-rate tabloid fodder.  It was elevated not only into the mainstream, but into mythological status, and it inspires all investigative journalist today. 

So, if Watergate was the mother of all political scandals than the Post’s Watergate reporting was the mother of all investigative journalism.  Yet, that journalism failed to tell us what really occurred.  In effect, modern investigative journalism has been a powerful fourth branch of American government, accountable to no one.  Its major figures have been recognized as powerful political players.  More than one American president has eagerly read the latest offering of Bob Woodward, breathlessly anticipating how well or how poorly he would be portrayed by Woodward.  

Much of American democracy is today influenced by powerful media. It’s often criticized, but nonetheless it seems to be impervious to that criticism.  In any case, as meaningful as Nixon’s resignation was and is impactful as the Post journalism was, the odd timing of the scandal’s unfolding has cause little examination of the burglary itself, or its reporting.  The administration's role in the burglary and the accuracy of the Post’s reporting of it has not been examined.  How can that be, you might ask?  Hundreds of thousands of news articles, 3,000 in the Post alone, thousands of periodicals and hundreds of books have been written about Watergate.  Movies have been made and television documentaries presented, continuing for almost 50 years discussing the scandal and reporting by the Post.  But there has been precious little analysis of the event that began Watergate: the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office build. 

The reporting never examined in depth the details of the burglary itself, which seemed to be an open and shut case.  After all, the burglars were caught in the act. Why should anybody go further than that?

There was never a question about their participation. Rather, what excited the nation was, months later, the development of evidence that the Nixon administration's involvement was being covered up at the highest levels of the White House.  

And what about Watergate journalism? Every journalism school in the country studies Watergate’s reporting.  High school text praise it without qualification.  Communications and history courses taken by college students not majoring in journalism treat this matter very, very seriously.  Yet, like the burglary itself, this journalism, so universally praised, has never been scrutinized in any searching detail.  How can that be? 

First, let's look at this:  it's counterintuitive to believe either of these propositions, that is that neither the Watergate burglary nor the Post Watergate journalism about it has been deeply and critically studied.  Many decades after the scandal, we’re going to attempt here a deep dive into these two interrelated topics.  When we put a steady gaze to the timing of Watergate, we can begin to understand why the key facts as to both responsibility for the burglary and the accuracy of the reporting about it have been overlooked by posterity.  For a number of reasons, but mainly the initial excess of the White House cover-up followed by months of its slow ominous cracking, the country and the world's fascinated focus was on higher level criminal culpability, beyond the original seven defendants – that is, the five burglars and two nearby supervisors.  That didn't begin in earnest until around May of 1973, about a year after the burglary of June 1972. 

At this point in the scandal, April and May 1973, the White House counsel, John Dean and Jeb Magruder, the Deputy Director of the Committee to Reelect the President (that is, “CRP”) turned prosecution witnesses.  They bargained for immunity with both regular prosecutors and the Senate Watergate Committee.  However, their two main targets were not burglars and their supervisors.  They were already convicted.  They were looking for much bigger fish, as were the prosecutors and as was the Watergate Senate Committee. 

Most of the attention was in place on the possibility that the president might be guilty, along with his close associates of obstructing the burglary investigation.  For the next fifteen months, the obstruction drama played out both in Post headlines and in dramatic televised Senate testimony, largely following the Post reporting. 

After the resigning Nixon departed on his helicopter from the White House lawn on August 9, 1974, media attention quickly centered around the President Ford's pardon of Nixon, which roughly coincide with the trial of his inner circle lasting several months through the fall of 1974.  That inner circle were people like HR Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell.  Earlier in the spring of 1974, a spectacular best-selling book by Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men, featuring the mysterious super-source Deep Throat transfixed the country, followed in 1976 by an Oscar-winning movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. 

Jimmy Carter's 1976 election, influenced by public revulsion at the horrors of Watergate, seemed to end the Watergate chapter of our country's history.  So, throughout this heady, exciting time, there had never been intense media concentration on the peculiar facts of the burglary itself, or its motives. 

During the first year the scandal through May 1973, the Post enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the story, with no other paper or television network competing.  The White House spin machine was very effective at minimizing any impact in the early months of the scandal, but it ultimately proved artless.  Nixon's men were good mainly at downplaying, at distracting, but not at constructing a coherent counternarrative.  So, the public had fixed in its mind what really happened in this puzzling, odd burglary.  So, when the riveting testimony of John Dean was televised beginning June 1973, the viewers were filling in a blank slate.  

What exactly was Watergate about?  The public watched and waited with bated breath for what the young White House lawyer had to say. 

For these reasons, what otherwise were head-scratching puzzles about the burglary were put aside.  The presidential scandal had become too hot to worry about small unrelated details.  Subtle facts about the burglary and the burglars were ignored altogether. 

And certainly, after the Post won a Pulitzer Prize, after its reporters published a best-selling book, after they were featured in an Oscar-winning movie, other journalists, who are now elevated vicariously in stature by the Post’s reporting, would not seek to criticize these canonized patron saints, Woodward, Bernstein and the Post.  This is not say, however, that no one brought up some obvious questions about the burglary. 

Indeed, if you look at standard high school and college textbooks, they often note the lingering questions about why a president so far ahead in the polls would commission a risky program of spying and sabotage on a minor target, that is, the DNC which had no apparent campaign value.  But for years, no serious work had examined in depth the many mysteries which sprang from this initial question. 

Now let's turn to the burglary and the arrests on June 17, 1972.  Five men in business suits, wearing rubber gloves, were arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC at approximately 2:30 AM.  In addition to burglary equipment, the arrested men had cameras, had camera equipment, had electronic devices that appeared to enable wiretapping or other electronic surveillance.  They had sequentially numbered $100 bills, tear gas guns, flashlights, and a number of other operational accoutrements. 

Four of these five men were Cuban émigrés who had fled the United States after Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution and they were all living in Miami.  All four of the Cubans were veterans of the aborted CIA invasion of Cuba in 1961, attempting to wrest the island back from Castro.  It was known as the Bay of Pigs, intended to overthrow the communist regime that Castro had installed there.  

The fifth member of the burglary team, which is strange indeed, was James McCord, the Director of Security at the Campaign to Reelect the President, and a recently retired CIA agent.  McCord himself had been a part of the Bay of Pigs.  So, think about that: all five burglars related to the Bay of Pigs.  And, of course, to the CIA.

Soon after these arrests, the FBI also identified and arrested Howard Hunt.  He himself was an ostensibly retired CIA agent, like McCord, apparently working at the White House.  The FBI also arrested G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-FBI agent and former White House employee.  Liddy was now serving as a General Counsel to the CRP, or the Committee to Reelect the President. (We’ll use those terms interchangeably – CRP or Committee to Reelect the President – that’s Nixon’s campaign organ, which is a separate and different organization from the White House itself, although the two are often, of course, talked about together.)

As portrayed prominently in the book and the movie [All the President’s Men], the burglary was discovered by a security guard, Frank Wills who found tape on the locks of the garage level door leading to the office building.  This would allow entrance from the outside of the building.  Just one and a half hours earlier, the same guard Wills had discovered and removed tape from the same door lock, leaving him to conclude that the retaping likely meant that there was a burglary in process. 

Since all of the five burglars on the team had entered by the time of the guard’s second discovery of the tape, let's think about this:  there was no reason for that tape to have remained on the locks.  The burglars could now exit each door without any tape on the locks.   In other words, doors without tape allowed exit.  Now, they didn’t allow entrance where tape was required to retain the locking mechanism.  But one can walk out of an office door without the locks being taped.  Since these were seemingly professional burglars, their leaving the tape on the garage doors was inexplicable.  

Another quizzical finding was that there were locks still taped on the sixth floor where the burglary was taking place.  But even more oddly, there were tapes on the locks on the eighth floor as well, where tape seemingly was never needed in the first place.   The burglars, after all, had entered the building through the garage, then walked up the stairwell and arrived at the DNC offices through the sixth-floor door which had been taped.  They would exit through the same door.  Why would the eighth floor lock even need to be taped? They weren’t on the eighth floor. 

In the many works describing the conventional story of Watergate, no journalist or academic authority has ever adequately explained the eighth-floor tape or its lack of removal on any of the three taped doors, even though these were professional operatives. But the more critical question was: why this burglary at all? 

As we noted, Nixon was far ahead in the polls and needed no campaign intelligence.  Moreover, there was no campaign information to be had at the DNC headquarters well before the election season had yet been underway.  Accordingly, speculation actually turned to the Democratic National Committee Director Larry O'Brien.  O'Brien had knowledge of Nixon dirty secrets that may have gone far beyond the current campaign information.  

One postulate about O'Brien was that he may have possessed certain dark knowledge of the funding of Nixon from his longtime supporter, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.  Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy had been harmed by revelation of the $205,000 loan from Hughes to Nixon's brother Donald, widely thought to be a disguised bribe of Nixon himself.  Think about that:  $205,000 in 1960 was several million dollars today.  So, it had quite an effect on Nixon and that election.  O’Brien had always been a suspect in the public outing of this embarrassment to Nixon, that is to say, the $205,000 loan.  And, as we noted, Nixon thought it may have cost him the election.  So, speculation about O'Brien as being the burglary’s target naturally arose.  But the response to this speculation would be that Larry O'Brien had not been in Washington for weeks at the time of the burglaries and would not be returning for many more.  It seems, then, that there's no reasonable likelihood of gathering information possessed by Larry O'Brien since he would be speaking neither on a wiretapped phone nor a miked up room. 

And to make this operation even more head-scratching, there had been a prior burglary of the DNC and wiretapping by the same burglars.  But the bugging monitor for these two weeks previous had not been listening to Larry O'Brien’s line.  So, if he was not listing to O'Brien’s line, then to whom was he listening, and for what purpose?

And oddly, photographs recently developed from the prior burglary two weeks earlier, it was soon learned, showed depictions of stationary with DNC letterhead and the name of Larry O'Brien.  The documents did not appear to been photographed to read beyond the letterhead, but seemed to be some sort of a trophy or proof of entry.  The documents were spread on a carpet by two gloved hands and pictures were taken of the documents.  What was the point of such proof which was potentially harmful evidence of a crime with no apparent benefit to the criminal photographers?  Why did they do that?

Another oddity was the presence on the burglary team of James McCord.  McCord was readily identifiable as the Director of Security of the CRP, meaning that if arrested, the President's campaign would immediately become known as associated with the burglary.  The entire team, in short, was not composed of so-called “double blind” operatives, that is, individuals who could not be identified with their sponsors, and who hopefully themselves could not finger their sponsors.  So, the stupidity of a high CRP official being placed on the team was an unforgivable sin from a covert operational perspective, since the arrest of that operative would immediately identify one sponsor as being the CRP.   Yet both Hunt and McCord were trained CIA intelligence operatives with great experience and would know well not to do this unless it was necessary for some hidden purpose.  As a result of this blunder, the burglary supervisor G. Gordon Liddy immediately knew upon the arrest of the burglars, as he told his wife that night, he was sure to go to jail because James McCord was on the team.  Why this occurred is one of the many mysteries of Watergate which we will try to resolve in this series. 

Since this burglary was not rushed into operation, some form of break-ins having been under contemplation for least four months, since Liddy had first proposed some sort of a burglary program, the team had plenty of time to search for an operative other than McCord.  With thousands of retired government security technicians living in the Washington, DC area, and with the CIA having a retired employees placement section, was there no one in the area who could have filled McCord’s role and who could've been found in that for months? 

Soon after the arrests, the FBI began speaking with wiretapping monitor Alfred Baldwin, III, who had readily agreed to cooperate.  Baldwin told the FBI that he had been listening to what he termed “explicitly intimate” conversations between men and women.  And oddly, it was quickly learn by the FBI, the phone to which the monitor had been listening for the prior two weeks was the phone of a nobody, one Spencer Oliver, Jr., a person not even directly working for the DNC, but, rather, for the Association of Democratic Chairman, a group with ties to the DNC but not part of it.  So, the question immediately arose to the FBI, but not publicly raised, was why would the Nixon Administration be interested in listening to talk on the line of Spencer Oliver, Jr? In perhaps the biggest political scandal in world history, mainstream textbooks have not addressed why this obscure fellow's telephone line was targeted. 

All five of the burglars played some role of the CIA's 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, as we've discussed. And all five also trained together for our country's second naval guerrilla operation, a second planned invasion of Cuba.  These well-known facts necessarily pointed to the CIA.  These were publicized facts. 

One of the burglary supervisors was Howard Hunt, also recently retired from the CIA, hired part-time by the White House to perform “sensitive assignments.” He had also been in the past, a supervisor of the Cubans on both the Bay of Pigs and in the second naval guerrilla operation.  At the time the burglary, Hunt had worked contemporaneously full-time at a public relations firm located near the White House, Mullen and Company, which had offices worldwide.  

The only one of the seven defendants not associated with the CIA was one G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy was general counsel of the CRP with access to campaign funds. Liddy himself was a former agent of the FBI and most recently a White House Plumber, so called because the team was charged with plugging publicity leaks emanating from the White House on National Security matters.  These included the Vietnam War and the smoldering India-Pakistan rivalry.  There had been leaks on these matters and the White House was very upset about them.  

The five burglars made no telephone calls on the night of the arrests, yet they were represented in court by Joseph Rafferty, a criminal lawyer hired by a Mullen-associated corporate lawyer named Douglas Caddy, who was present in court at the arraignment the following morning. 

Once Hunt was identified as a burglary supervisor, it became clear that Hunt, also a Mullen employee, had called Caddy that night who then retain Rafferty.   So, the question was thereby raised:  if Mullen felt the need to obtain representation for the burglars, did Mullen have anything to do with the burglary?  A corollary question was: if Mullen was so deeply involved, would it be because of Hunt’s connection to the CIA?  So, was there a connection between the two entities?  Was Mullen a CIA front or cover company?  In other words, was Hunt still acting as a CIA agent after retirement under cover of Mullen? 

But if the burglars were acting on behalf of the CIA, we would pose the same question we put regarding the White House: what could possibly interest the CIA in calls on the line of the unprepossessing Spencer Oliver, Jr? 

One more bizarre oddity in a tableau filled with them:  as the lobby of the Watergate Offices was abuzz with the arrests that morning, a man emerged from the staircase.  He chatted with the guards and strolled out of the office building very calmly.  By the time the guards told the police about him, the individual was nowhere in sight.  He quickly became known as Watergate's “sixth burglar” but his presence has never been adequately explored or explained.   Why should this so called sixth burglar be of such special interest to us today, as we attempt to solve the Mysteries of Watergate? 

Let's ponder for a moment the likely presence of sixth man and his possible involvement in the burglary. We know that a sixth man was not in the DNC offices at the time of arrests.  And we know that none of the burglars has admitted to knowing of the sixth man in the office building that night.  None of the accounts of Watergate figures, including those of the arrested individuals, acknowledges him or his presence.  Woodward and Bernstein do not mention the sixth burglar in their best-selling book.  Finally, the sixth burglar was not on Liddy’s payroll which did include the five arrested men.  So, if there was a sixth man in the Watergate Office building, on the early morning of June 17, 1972, he was simply not there on the White House mission.  And even Mullen was in some fashion a cover contractor for the CIA, unlike Hunt, the sixth burglar was not acting under Mullen cover, nor was he ostensibly a CRP agent.  And whatever his task was, it would have been of a different kind from the task carried out by the acknowledged five burglars.  And if the sixth burglar had an agenda secret from the agenda of the five burglars, that would be highly significant, especially since the five burglars may have had an agenda secret from the White House.  So, if the five burglars had a secret agenda, the sixth burglar had an agenda yet secret from the other five burglars.  So, the possible sixth burglar presents one of Watergate's most intriguing and puzzling mysteries. 

So, we leave this episode with the overarching questions that presented themselves to the public on June 18, 1972 when the arrests were first reported.  Why would Nixon forces want to break into the DNC? What were the burglars after?  Was the CIA involved?  If the CIA was involved, what was it after? To be sure, most of the public intuited that the burglary had be connected to the upcoming presidential campaign but were simply puzzled as to how the burglary would advance the ball forward for the Nixon Administration.  

But the converse question also implicitly posed was if the burglary was not in any way directed to the campaign, what would be its purpose? And if not directed at the campaign, wouldn’t it make sense that Nixon and his inner circle likely had nothing to do with it? Why would they be involved with the burglary that had nothing to do with the campaign?  And if not really an Oval Office program, did we remove a President from office for technical obstruction of an investigation into a burglary which he neither authorized nor understood the origin?  

There's no doubt, of course, that Nixon technically obstructed justice on at least two occasions. But if this is so, why didn’t the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspapers tell us that? In addition to this large hole in the Post reporting, the hundreds of seemingly authoritative books and articles about Watergate do not satisfactorily address these core issues.  Luckily, however, there are sufficient bits and pieces of explanatory information which have been dug up by excellent researchers post-Watergate, which amount to illuminating needles in a massive haystack of otherwise intriguing but ultimately unnourishing information. 

In this series, we’re going to take you through these key but often ignored or misinterpreted facts and put them together in what we hope will be a coherent narrative that solves these mysteries.  I have written a book about Watergate called Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism.  My book is based on much of my own original research, especially into the Post reporting of the scandal.  But I as well cite several other works which contain bits of very solid information, helping us unlock the Mysteries of Watergate. 

In this series, I will not delve into all of the details underlying the facts of which I will speak.  For those wishing more detailed documentation of this story that will unfold in these podcasts, I would recommend referring to my book Postgate.  

This concludes Episode One of solving The Mysteries of Watergate, Big Questions from a Small Burglary.

Thank you for listening. If you like you've heard, please give me a five-star review on iTunes and share this podcast with your friends.  I truly enjoy being here and solving the Mysteries of Watergate with you.  If you have any questions about what we've discussed, please email me through the contact page of postgatebook.com or send me at tweet at @TheJohnDOConnor. We’ll meet back here during the next episode of The Mysteries of Watergate.