Duct Tape and Watergate (Watergate Part 5)

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the actual break-in, and the sad story of the man who discovered it.

On June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills apprehended Bernard Barker, Vergilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis, and James McCord inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building, a combination office, condominium, and hotel complex near the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The men were arrested and locked up until a preliminary hearing the next morning.

At the hearing, the judge asked each of the men their names, homes, and where they worked. James McCord mumbled his answer when it got to where he worked. The judge told him to speak up. “Where do you work?” the judge asked again.

 “I work for the Committee to Re-Elect the President,” McCord said. And with those words, the Watergate scandal officially began. As we’ve noted in previous installments of this story, a lot had already happened by this time — the Enemies List, the raid on the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and Operation GEMSTONE. The infamous “two-bit burglary” was the incident that unraveled the entire web.

The June 17 burglary, interestingly, was not the first. During the previous Memorial Day weekend, the Watergate team tried not one, but twice, and failed on both attempts, one because they couldn’t get to the staff elevator before the night alarm got turned on, and the second because Gonzales, a locksmith, failed to pick the lock to the DNC headquarters office door.

On the night of May 28, a third attempt succeeded. The burglars installed a wiretap and room mike in the office of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien, and photographed as many documents as they could. Across the street from the Watergate, in Room 419 of the Howard Johnson’s (now a George Washington University dorm), Hunt and the other mission commander, G. Gordon Liddy, monitored the bugs, but evidently they didn’t work that well. By June 5, they gave McCord new instructions: fixing the room monitoring bug and fixing a problem with one of the phone taps.

On June 17, the team went back in, using the door between the garage and the stairwell. To make sure it didn’t lock, they put duct tape over the latch bolt. Security guard Frank Wills, working the midnight to 7 am shift, spotted the tape on a routine patrol of the building, and removed it. He didn’t think anything else about it, and kept going.

But when he came back on his next round, he found that the tape had been replaced! And so he called the police.

Frank’s story didn’t turn out well. When the Watergate complex didn’t give him a raise for discovering the burglary, he quit. His fifteen minutes of fame lasted a year or so, and after that he wasn’t able to hold a steady job. In 1983 he was convicted of shoplifting. By 1993, he was so broke that he was washing his clothes in a bucket. He died in 2000 of a brain tumor.

Watergate Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (Watergate Part 4)

An expanded version of this article is part of my book Watergate Considered as an Organization Chart of Semi-Precious Stones, available in paperback and ebook versions.

This is the fourth installment of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal. Part 1, “Watergate and Me,” appeared last July. Part 2, “The Enemies List,” appeared in August. Part 3, “Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1” appeared in September. Some of the material in this installment is adapted from my book The Six Dimensions of Project Management (with Heidi Feickert)

These three installments covered some of the origins of Watergate: the founding of the Plumbers Unit, the establishment of the Enemies List, and the beginnings of covert operations. None of these had any direct bearing on the eventual Watergate break-in that began the official scandal, but because they involved many of the same cast of characters and the same resources, the unraveling of one led inexorably to the unraveling of the others.

The original “Plumbers Unit” was established to stop the leaking of classified information (most notably the Pentagon Papers) to the news media, but beginning some time after October 1971 (sources conflict on the exact date), G. Gordon Liddy was asked to move from the Plumbers operation to Nixon’s campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, but often abbreviated by its enemies as CREEP), with responsibility for establishing an intelligence operation for the campaign. He moved to his new offices in December, and shortly thereafter was being introduced as the man in charge of “dirty tricks.”

By January, Liddy was ready to present his plan, known as Operation GEMSTONE. Budgeted at $1 million (in 1972 dollars), it was quite extensive. Each element of the operation had its own gem subtitle:

• DIAMOND — Counterdemonstration activities
• GARNET — Recruit unpopular groups to put on pro-Democratic demonstrations
• RUBY — Infiltrate spies into the organizations of Democratic contenders
• SAPPHIRE — Establish a houseboat filled with prostitutes as a “honey trap” during the Democratic convention
• COAL — Funnel money to the campaign of African-American candidate Shirley Chisholm
• TURQUOISE — Commando raid to destroy the air conditioning for the Democratic convention
• QUARTZ — Microwave interception of Democratic telephone traffic
• EMERALD — Chase plane to eavesdrop on Democratic candidate aircraft
• CRYSTAL — Electronic surveillance of the Democratic convention
• OPAL — Clandestine entries to plant telephone bugs in the offices of Muskie, McGovern, and the DNC
• TOPAZ — Photograph documents during clandestine entries
• BRICK — Funding operation

Attorney General (and CRP chairman) John Mitchell rejected the plan as excessive, and sent Liddy back to the drawing boards. Liddy burned the charts, and prepared a second plan, this one capped at $500,000. He cut EMERALD (chase plane), QUARTZ (microwave interception), and COAL (funding Shirley Chisholm — Mitchell told Liddy that Nelson Rockefeller had already taken care of that.) SAPPHIRE lost the houseboat, but kept the prostitutes.

This too was rejected for cost, and Liddy tried a third time. He kept the four OPAL break-ins, the two RUBY agents, and two of the SAPPHIRE prostitutes, along with some of the DIAMOND capabilities. Mitchell and his team approved the smaller operation just before new campaign finance rules would make it harder to fund the program.

Interestingly, the actual Watergate break-in, although eventually part of the OPAL operation, was nowhere to be seen in the original plans.

Next week: the Break In.