Tape Worm (Watergate Part 6)

For previous installments of my irregular series tracing the history of the Watergate scandal, click here. This week, the revelation of the White House taping system.

Alexander Butterfield never planned to be part of a White House conspiracy, but by accident turned into one of the key figures in the scandal. A former Air Force pilot (he commanded reconnaissance aircraft during Vietnam), he retired from the USAF at the urging of college pal H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, and became Deputy Assistant to the President, responsible for the daily business of the White House ranging from visitor tours to overseeing Nixon's schedule.

In addition, Butterfield was responsible for maintaining Nixon's historical records, and in that role he oversaw a secret taping system that Nixon had installed in the White House. (Nixon, of course, was not the first president to do so. I've read transcripts of secret tapes made by FDR, and have downloaded for my iPod the JFK tapes covering the Cuban Missile Crisis. Eisenhower and Johnson also taped Oval Office conversations, but I haven't heard any of them personally.)

After Nixon's reelection in 1972, Butterfield became administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. In July 1973, members of Sam Ervin's Senate investigation team interviewed Butterfield about his time in the White House. Previously, John Dean had mentioned that he suspected White House conversations were being taped, and so the committee staff routinely asked witnesses whether they knew it was true. Although Butterfield avoided revealing the taping system voluntarily, he had decided to tell the truth if asked directly. Ironically, it was the minority Republican counsel, Donald Sanders, who put the direct question to Butterfield, who replied that "everything was taped ... as long as the President was in attendance. There was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped."

The significance of this was obvious, so the committee quickly scheduled Butterfield to appear before the full Senate committee on July 16, 1973, where chief minority counsel Fred Thompson (later part of the Law and Order television cast) asked the fatal question, "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"

There was, of course, no suggestion that Butterfield was part of the cover-up. He remained as FAA administrator until 1975. Butterfield, interestingly, was one of the few who guessed the real identity of "Deep Throat," telling the Hartford Courant in 1995, "I think it was a guy named Mark Felt."

Only about 200 hours of the 3,500 hours of conversation recorded on the Nixon tapes even mention Watergate, but eight of the tapes were subpoenaed by Special Watergate Counsel Archibald Cox. Citing executive privilege, Nixon refused. When Cox did not back off, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire him. Richardson refused and resigned, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. It fell to the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, to fire him.

That was hardly the end of the taping problems. Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, made a "terrible mistake" and erased five minutes of the June 20, 1972, recording. Strangely, the gap grew from five minutes to 18-1/2 minutes. Woods denied she had anything do to with the additional 13 minutes. While only the participants know for sure what was discussed in those missing 18-1/2 minutes, H. R. Haldeman's notes say that in that particular meeting, Nixon and Haldeman spoke about the arrests at the Watergate that had taken place three days previously.

Although various attempts were made to explain away the gap, the President's attorneys eventually decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer for the problem.

In any event, it wasn't the 18-1/2 minute gap from June 20 that was the problem, but rather the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, six days after the break-in. On that tape, Nixon agreed to pressure the CIA to ask the FBI to halt its investigation of the break-in on the grounds that it was a national security matter. That, according to the Watergate special prosecutor, constituted a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, a Federal — and impeachable — offense. That tape was released in late July 1974; Nixon resigned in early August.

Lord of the Instrumentality

July 11, 1913, is the birthday of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, known to science fiction fans by his nom de plume Cordwainer Smith.

If you haven’t read Cordwainer Smith, mere words cannot convey the beauty and mystery of his writing. His stories are like nothing else in science fiction. Written in a narrative style heavily influenced by Chinese storytelling, they tell the story of the Instrumentality of Mankind, a world nearly 14,000 years in the future, in which the servile classes (the “underpeople”) are evolved from animals: C’mell, half cat, half woman; D’Joan, a Joan of Arc figure of dog origin; and the mysterious E’Telekeli, an eagle who leads the fight for emancipation. The ruling class, the Lords of the Instrumentality, are Chinese mandarins, powerful and tradition-bound. The Instrumentality is held together by the immortality drug stroon, available only on the planet Norstrilia.

The real-life Paul Linebarger is as remarkable as the fictional creations of Cordwainer Smith. Paul’s father, a jurist, was recruited by no less than Sun Yat-Sen to help establish the legal system for the new Republic of China. Sun Yat-Sen became godfather to the young Paul, who grew up immersed in Chinese culture. He became fluent in six languages, and obtained his PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 23.

As World War II began, Linebarger organized the first psychological warfare unit in the US Army, and wrote the classic textbook on the subject: Psychological Warfare, published in 1948. Although officially an academic, Linebarger did undocumented work for the CIA and DIA, and advised John F. Kennedy. He referred to himself as “a visitor to small wars.”

There’s circumstantial evidence, but no solid proof, that Linebarger was the real life “Kirk Allen,” the psychological patient whose strange story was told in “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” in Robert Lindner’s well-known book The Fifty Minute Hour. “Kirk Allen” had created a far future world in which he believed completely. As part of Lindner’s attempt to cure him, Lindner himself became obsessed with that world.

Thanks to my friend Ralph Benko, I was elected to the exclusive Cordwainer Smith society, the Instrumentality of Mankind, whose limited membership includes the Linebarger daughters as well as a number of science fiction luminaries. Although the Instrumentality doesn’t do very much (I attribute this to the lack of stroon), it’s an honor I appreciate very much.

Paul Linebarger passed away in 1966, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Crisis in Outer Space! (The True Story of Apollo 13)

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, the true story of the the Apollo 13 mission, continuing last week’s brief history of rocketry and spaceflight. 


Thirteen

Although the United States officially “won” the space race with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, there would be five more missions to the Moon, during four of which astronauts walked on the lunar surface. The exception was Apollo 13, the seventh manned mission in the program.

Gordon Cooper and Donn Eisele, originally scheduled for Apollo 13, were passed over by NASA management. The flight crew operations chief selected Alan Shepard, the first American in space, to replace Cooper, but management turned him down because of recent surgery. As a result, NASA selected the backup crew for Apollo 11, who were scheduled for Apollo 14, for this mission. Jim Lovell, who had flown on two Gemini missions and one previous Apollo mission, was to be the mission commander. Fred Haise, a research test pilot, had been on two previous backup crews but had never flown in space. The command module pilot, who would stay in orbit while the other two crew members went down to the lunar surface, was Ken Mattingly. It would also be his first time in space.

Seven days before launch, Mattingly was exposed to measles (as it turned out, he didn’t get them), and was replaced by Jack Swigert from the backup team. It would also be Swigert’s first time in space.

The lead flight director, in overall command, was Gene Kranz.

Crisis in Outer Space

Liftoff for the Apollo 13 mission came on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 Central Standard Time. There was a small hiccup during the launch: the center engine in the second stage had to be shut down early because of a malfunction known as “pogo oscillation.” It had been seen in previous missions, but never so seriously. Automatic cut-offs stopped the problem before it could tear the ship apart; later missions had technical modifications to prevent a reoccurrence. In any event, the remaining engines burned longer, and the vehicle continued to a successful orbit.

Such a problem was hardly unusual. Given the complexity and inherent risk of any space mission, it would have been far more notable had the flight gone off without a hitch. Solving problems was all in a day’s work for NASA’s talented and experienced people.

But what happened next tested their capabilities to the maximum.

About 56 hours after takeoff, with Apollo 13 much closer to the Moon than to the Earth, Mission Control radioed Jack Swigert and asked him to turn on the stirring fans for the hydrogen and oxygen tanks. About a minute and a half later, there was a loud bang. The crew’s first thought was that the lunar module had been struck by a meteoroid.

What had happened was actually much worse. Number 2 oxygen tank had exploded. Later analysis would reveal damaged insulation on the wires to the stirring fan, allowing a short circuit. A large aluminum skin panel on the outside of the ship blew off, damaging an antenna and momentarily interrupting communication with Mission Control. The shock of the explosion caused a break in the number 1 oxygen tank as well. Over the next two hours, the entire oxygen supply of the service module was lost. Complicating matters even more, the fuel cells needed oxygen and hydrogen to generate electricity. The command module was left with backup battery power only.

The damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft

Landing on the Moon was no longer an option. The crew hastily shut down the command module to save its limited power and moved into the lunar module. The new project was how to get the crew back safely to Earth.

What saved the Apollo 13 mission?

The Kranz Dictum

It’s only in the movie version of Apollo 13 that Gene Kranz says the phrase, “Failure is not an option.” The real message came after the 1967 Apollo 1 disaster, in which astronauts Virgin “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee lost their lives, Gene Krantz addressed his flight control team, establishing what would become known as “The Kranz Dictum.”

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. 

We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!”
I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. 
 

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough and Competent.” Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. 

Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. 
 

When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.

The Apollo flight teams had prepared for disaster time and time again. Exercises, simulations, and extensive training all went into achieving the goal of “tough and competent.” This is an essential ingredient in effective crisis management. By preparing for different eventualities and maintaining a high level of readiness, you and your team are in the best possible position to handle a crisis.

However, no matter how good you are, failure is always an option.

Timeline of the events in the Apollo 13 crisis

Working the Problems

Crises differ from more general projects in several ways. First, they are often imposed on the project team with little or no notice. Apollo 13 was going well until suddenly it wasn’t. Crises normally have extreme constraints in time and resources. The clock was ticking with Apollo 13. If problems could not be solved in very short order, the consequences would take hold at once — with fatal results.

While NASA had an extensive supply of spare parts, machine shops, and trained engineers who could have fixed the ship easily, those resources were on Earth, and the problem was more than a hundred thousand miles away.

Evacuating and shutting down the command module was the first order of business, but there were many obstacles yet to be overcome before the crew of Apollo 13 would once again see home. There were plans for aborting an Apollo mission, but some of them were ruled out by the exigencies of the situation. The quickest way home required jettisoning the lunar module, but that was serving as the lifeboat for the crew. The service module integrity was in doubt, so they didn’t want to fire its engine except as a last resort.

That left a circumlunar option, using the Moon’s gravity as a slingshot to send the crippled ship back toward earth. To do that, they needed to make a minor course correction, but debris from the explosion made it impossible to use the onboard sextant device, requiring Jim Lovell to fly the spacecraft using the sun in the cockpit window as an alignment star.

The problems mounted. While there was plenty of oxygen in the lunar module, carbon dioxide removal required the use of lithium hydroxide canisters. While there were enough of them available, the square command module canisters wouldn’t fit in the round LM openings. An engineering team created a kludged-together system using plastic bags, cardboard, and tape, working on an extremely limited time span.

(As an aside, the duct tape and other supplies that made this possible were also part of planning for crisis management: there was a kit containing some basic utility items available for use. One can only imagine the planning that went into deciding exactly what would be part of that kit.)

Power supplies were limited. The LM was rated for two people for a day and a half, and now it would need to accommodate three people for four days. All nonessential power was shut down. Water and food were limited. The crew became dehydrated. Lovell lost 14 pounds.

The team managed to overcome one problem after another, but the toughest technical challenge came at the end of the mission. There had never been a case where the command module had to be powered up after a long sleep, and the flight controllers had to test and write new procedures to accomplish it. (In the movie, that’s the suspenseful scene in which Ken Mattingly, played by Gary Sinise, tries to find a start-up sequence that draws less than 20 watts.) The normal time for a project like that was three months; the team had three days.

By the time the Apollo 13 team reentered the command module, condensation had covered the interior with fine droplets of water. Water was inside the circuit panels as well, and the chance of a short circuit was all too real. Fortunately, the tragedy of Apollo 1 had led to various safeguards against short circuits; there was no problem.

Four hours before landing, the crew jettisoned the service module, and one hour before landing they jettisoned the LM that had served as their lifeboat. As they entered the atmosphere, the heat of reentry created rain inside the command module.

But that was the final hazard.

On April 17, 1970, Apollo 13 splashed down safely near American Samoa.

Apollo 13 Mission Control right after splashdown

Crisis Management and the Impossible Project

What distinguishes a crisis from other kinds of projects is the way it tightens the constraints. Time pressure is normally high, and the nature of the situation normally limits resources that would otherwise be available to the team. These revised constraints are normally established by the situation, not by the will or desire of the project team. In the case of Apollo 13, a procedure that would normally take three months had to be developed in three days, for the simple reason that three days was all they had. Modifying the carbon dioxide removal system would have been trivial on Earth; it was a nail-biting project in space, with only the resources available on the ship able to be used for the job.

Had the mission control team not been well prepared — had Gene Kranz not insisted on “tough and competent” — had simulations by the hundreds not taken place, it’s almost certain that the Apollo 13 mission would have ended in failure.

But that’s the point. To prepare for crisis, prepare early.

By the time the crisis occurs, it’s usually too late.

A Brief History of Rocketry and Spaceflight

Robert Goddard and his rocket

My 26th book will be Project: Impossible, an exploration of how people achieved goals any reasonable person would have thought impossible. This week, a brief history of rocketry and spaceflight.

Mercury astronaut John Glenn, asked how he felt during his three-orbit flight, is reputed to have replied, “As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: Every part of this capsule was supplied by the lowest bidder.”

The history of rocketry and spaceflight is also a history of risk-taking and risk management. New technology is inherently unstable, a product of its newness, and when you are using that technology to propel people into previously unexplored conditions, disaster is never more than a small step away.

To China…and Beyond!

The history of rocketry traces back to ancient China. Gunpowder, a Chinese invention of the 9th century CE, was a byproduct of the alchemical search for the elixir of life, and as is the case with so many discoveries, its accidental secondary uses turned out to be far more important than the original inventor’s intent.

Rockets were first used in fireworks displays, and only entered the battlefield in 1232 CE against the Mongol invasion. The Chinese even invented multi-stage rocketry by the mid 14th century, by which time the technology had spread to India, the Middle East and eventually to Europe. The "rockets’ red glare" appear in American history during the War of 1812 and in the US national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner."

According to legend, during the Ming Dynasty, a minor court official named 萬虎 (Wan Hu) attempted to become an astronaut by flying a chair with 47 rockets attached. He was never seen again.

In 1633, again according to legend, Lagâri Hasan Çelebi of the Ottoman Empire made a successful rocket flight to a height of 300 meters. His words before takeoff were, “O my sultan! Be blessed, I am going to talk to Jesus!” Upon landing, he told the sultan, “Jesus sends his regards to you.”

Somewhat better sourced are the achievements of car designer Fritz von Opel, who in the 1920s built a series of rocket-powered cars and a rocket-powered glider. One of his cars reached a speed of 254 km/h (157 mph). The rocket-powered glider was less successful: it exploded on its second test flight.

Modern rocketry owes its start to high school mathematics teacher Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, who worked in the final years of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Inspired by Jules Verne, Tsiolkovsky developed a philosophy of space travel as a means for perfecting the human race, and in the process worked out most of the formulas at the heart of modern rocketry, including the famous Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.

Beginning in 1912, the American Robert Goddard established that a rocket would work in a vacuum and proposed sending a solid-fuel rocket to the moon, an idea ridiculed by the New York Times in an editorial. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.

A young member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (German Rocket Society) named Werner von Braun developed long-range military rockets for the Wehrmacht, including the V-1 and the V-2. The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, was the war’s only operational rocket-powered fighter plane, though it was of little practical significance.

Following World War II, von Braun, along with 500 of his top scientists, surrendered to the Americans and established a new facility in Huntsville, Alabama, to build even more advanced rockets. Other German rocket scientists went to the Soviet Union — not all by choice.

Both in the United States and in the Soviet Union, the primary focus of rocketry continued to be military applications, particularly missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

But the rocket designers themselves had other ambitions.

“Before This Decade Is Out”

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Cпутник-1 (Sputnik 1), the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and in the process initiated the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the US, Sputnik was seen as a national humiliation. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered an acceleration of Project Vanguard, the US satellite launch program, but the first attempt ended in disaster when the rocket exploded on the launchpad on national television.

By the time the US managed to get a satellite in orbit, the Soviets already had two.

In 1961, the Soviets won another distinction when cosmonaut Ю́рий Гага́рин (Yuri Gagarin) became the first human in space. Three weeks later, American astronaut Alan Shepard completed a suborbital flight in the first Mercury mission.

In between Gagarin and Shepard, President John F. Kennedy asked his vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, to explore opportunities for the US to catch up in space, and Johnson recommended a piloted moon landing. Kennedy concurred, giving his blessing to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Apollo program and establishing its goal in a speech before a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union continued to set records, including the first dual-piloted flight and the first woman (and first civilian) in space. At the time, the Soviet program was shrouded in secrecy, so much so that the name of the head of their space program was classified — a mysterious figure known only as the “Chief Designer.” His real name, Серге́й Королёв (Sergei Korolev), would only be revealed publicly well after his death. Photographs of the Soviet launch complex, Байқоңыр ғарыш айлағы (Baikonur Cosmodrome), now located in Kazakhstan, were highly classified, but no more. (Here's a picture.)

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

The US Mercury program gave way to Gemini, a series of two-person missions. It was during Gemini that the US first crept ahead of the Soviet Union, setting records for length of flight, docking of spacecraft in orbit, and human extra-vehicular activity — better known as spacewalks.

Danger in Space!

By the middle of the 1960s, both nations were in a neck-and-neck race. The Soviet Union, under the leadership of the Chief Designer, planned a series of manned lunar flyby missions followed by a manned lunar landing planned for September 1968. In the United States, Gemini gave way to Apollo.

Both the Soviet and American programs experienced their share of disasters. In the Soviet Nedelin catastrophe, an exploding rocket at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan killed between 78 and 150 top Soviet personnel. Cosmonaut Валентин Бондаренко (Valentin Bondarenko) died in a training accident; the government erased his existence from their records to avoid embarrassment.

On the US side, almost everyone thinks that only three astronauts died in racing to the moon: Mercury and Gemini astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Gemini astronaut Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, who died in a cabin fire during a rehearsal of the launch sequence of Apollo 1. There were more: Theodore Freemann, Elliot See, Charles Bassett, and Clifton “C.C.” Williams all died in training accidents involving T-38 jet fighter trainers. Robert Lawrence, who would have been the first African-American astronaut, died in an F-104 Starfighter crash. Although their names were not erased from the history books, they have sadly been almost completely forgotten.

There were numerous near disasters. The Vostok 1 service module didn’t detach from the reentry module in time, sending the spacecraft into a spin. Grissom’s Mercury capsule hatch malfunctioned at splashdown, nearly drowning him. Voshkod 2, Gemini 8, Soyuz 5, and Apollo 12 all had failures or near disasters during their mission.

Even Apollo 11, in which US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, had a failure of the navigation and guidance computer during the lunar descent. Armstrong landed the lunar module (LM) manually. Aldrin accidently broke the circuit breaker for the main liftoff engine, which might have stranded the astronauts on the lunar surface, but the astronauts were able to flip the switch using a felt-tip pen. On the return flight, the Guam tracking station failed, jeopardizing communication during the final stages of the return flight.

Thirteen

Although the United States officially “won” the space race with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, there would be five more missions to the Moon, during four of which astronauts walked on the lunar surface. The exception was Apollo 13, the seventh manned mission in the program.

About Apollo 13, more next week…

Why We Need Hokum (Part Five)

Here's a bit more thinking on the subject of hokum.   Use the labels on the right to find more, or click here.


Fiction is a polite word for lying. If you pick up a novel or a short story, you know going in that it’s not true, at least not as a whole. Historical novels have some real history in them; science fiction novels have some real science in them — but characters, dialogue, and situations are made up.

And yet, for many of us, the world inside our favorite novels is at least as real to us as the actual world in which we live. I first read Lord of the Rings in the unauthorized Ace Books edition back in 1966 (sorry to say, I no longer have those copies) and have re-read it every couple of years since. There are any number of books about which I have the same feelings: the early Saint stories by Leslie Charteris, most of the oeuvre of Robert Heinlein, Pride and Prejudice, and many more.

I lose myself in these alternate and unreal worlds consciously, in a process known to writers as the “willing suspension of disbelief.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but we start to run a risk when we willingly suspend disbelief about stories that aren’t labeled as fiction. That’s when we fall completely into the world of hokum.

Some cases of hokum are relatively harmless. If you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, or Bigfoot, you probably aren’t going to live your life very differently. The basic idea — that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy — isn’t inherently silly. Occasionally, things once thought to be fanciful turn out to be real, as in the case of the once-mythical black swan. But that’s not the way to bet.

Some beliefs start out legitimate and turn into hokum. When respected psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky first proposed his theory that Old Testament legends reflected actual catastrophic close-contacts with other planets, he was attempting to perform legitimate science. Stephen Jay Gould said of him, “Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan — although, to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong.”

And wrong he was. His proposed celestial mechanics were physically impossible, violating the laws of conservation of energy and momentum, among others. There is no sin, however, in being wrong. But for anyone today to believe Velikovsky, the term “crank” becomes increasingly accurate.

Religion is a notorious breeding ground for hokum. Before you get offended, let me point out that even the most religious person doesn’t believe in the stories of all the other religions. If you’re a strong Christian, you tend to reject Hindu or Muslim stories as hokum — and, of course, they return the favor. But any religion is more than the stories told in its holy books. Religions provide moral and ethical codes, prescriptions for daily living, and in some cases suggestions on the proper ordering of society. One can accept a moral prescription without necessarily accepting the dogma that goes with it — although the reverse is not true.

Hokum becomes increasingly dangerous when it forces a rewrite of things known to be true. In science, evolution is merely the best known area of disagreement, but the website Conservapedia goes so far as to attack the theory of relativity! In Texas, there’s an attempt to modify American history itself, removing such dangerous figures as Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum.

The desire to embrace hokum — the need for hokum — seems baked into the human psyche. It can promote a sense of wonder and mystery, or simply be a harmless pastime. But hokum is a dangerous thing, both for those who embrace it, and those who must suffer under the yoke of those who do. Confining yourself to the self-aware hokum of fiction may be the safest course of action.

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.