Six Mistakes That Led the 1972 Watergate Robbers to Get Caught

Their mission was to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, bug the room and photograph documents. If everything had gone as planned, no one would ever know.

But instead, June 17, 1972 became an infamous day. The invasion triggered a series of actions that toppled Republican Richard Nixon – he was the only US president who resigned.

“Watergate is the biggest political scandal in American history,” said John Dean, who was a White House adviser to former President Nixon, for the documentary series. CNN of the United States “Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal”, on the 50th anniversary of the event.

The invasion and subsequent cover-up changed American politics forever, and “Watergate” became synonymous with government corruption. Crime is still referenced in current political discourse such as Bridgegate, Pizzagate and Deflategate.

Here are six mistakes that led to the Watergate investigation – the first dominoes to fall in the political scandal.

1) They used the ‘F Team’

As president, Nixon created a White House unit called “Plumbers.” This unit had two goals: to investigate leaks of confidential information and to discredit the enemies of the government.

Since the president could not use official organizations like the FBI and CIA for these illegal activities, the Nixon White House used what Tim Naftali, presidential historian of CNN and director of the undergraduate course in public policy at New York University, calls a “disorganized group”.

“The country was very lucky that the CIA and FBI refused to completely yield to Nixon’s will. So Nixon and his lieutenants opted out of established institutions to do their dirty work,” he said.

In 1971, Nixon’s plumbers broke into the office of a psychiatrist who was seeing military analyst Daniel Ellsberg to photograph the doctor’s notes on the patient, trying to smear him in the press. Ellsberg was leaked from the Pentagon Papers — a top-secret, multi-volume report that revealed that American leaders knew the Vietnam War could not be won.

The plumbers’ goal was to enter the office and leave undetected. But they were unable to open the door, which they secretly left unlocked earlier in the day, so they broke a window, creating an incident. They didn’t find any notes from the psychiatrist and left empty handed.

“So you’d think it would be the end of them, but it wasn’t. The same group ends up reconstituted,” said Naftali. For Watergate, “the leadership is the same and most of the team is the same”.

“It wasn’t like the White House was trusting the A team; they were trusting the F team,” he said. “So it’s no surprise that they screwed up.”

2) Failed attempts raised the stakes

The five men tasked with breaking into the Democratic National Committee made several attempts. The more attempts, the more likely they were to be caught.

“The first time, they completely failed because the door was locked and they didn’t have the right key fob with them,” Naftali said.

“The second time around, they didn’t seem to know where Larry O’Brien’s office was,” Dean explained. O’Brien was the campaign manager for Democratic Senator George McGovern, who was running for president against Nixon in 1972. “So they bugged an empty conference room.”

The third attempt aimed to correct the previous errors.

“They wanted to move a bug. They had three more bugs they wanted to plant. They were also going to put a listening device on a smoke detector,” Naftali said. “This would have been a massive spy operation if it had been successful.”

Afterwards, Dean remembered Gordon Liddy, the organizer of the Watergate burglary and former FBI special agent, telling him, “I shouldn’t have involved so many people. But we had to go back there. […] I know I screwed up terribly, and I can understand if you want to get rid of me.”

3) Door lock with tape was discovered

A simple mistake by James McCord, a former CIA officer who was one of the thieves, led a watchman to foil the crime of the century.

“McCord was the wiretapping expert on the team,” Naftali said. “And he insisted on putting duct tape on the doors. And they asked him, ‘did you remember to remove all the tape?’ He said yes. But I hadn’t done that.”

Staff had taped all the door locks — from the basement to the sixth floor, where the Democratic National Committee offices were — to prevent the self-closing doors from working.

Watergate security Frank Wills saw the tape taped to a door latch. He called the police at 1:47 am and reported the break-in.

Years later, one of the robbers, Eugenio Martinez, told Naftali in a report for the Nixon Library that he was surprised by all the mistakes and that the flaws were hard to understand.

4) Communication failure

A plan B was ready in case the police were notified, but that too was ruined.

A watchman, Alfred C. Baldwin, was across the street with a walkie-talkie to alert thieves if anyone was coming.

Naftali said: “McCord turned down the volume on the walkie-talkie. So when the watchman could see the police moving towards the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the thieves did not get the alert.”

When Baldwin finally managed to notify the group, it was too late: the police were already in the building. They spotted the five men, all wearing surgical gloves, crouching behind tables.

5) The thieves didn’t dress like thieves

After the men were arrested, Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary, dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate theft.”

Journalists assigned to cover the indictment assumed this was not a relevant story. Journalist Lesley Stahl joked with the CNN who initially appeared to be a “nothing hamburger” and said he got the assignment because the editor gave the story to “the newcomer”.

But quickly the signs that this story was significant became difficult to ignore.

The five intruders – Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis, Martinez and McCord – appeared in court hours after the arrest dressed in suits.

“In nine months on the patrol, I’ve never seen a thief who was well dressed,” said journalist Bob Woodward, who covered Watergate for the Washington Post.

What the police discovered in the men’s possession made them even more suspicious. The men had $100 bills (with the serial numbers in sequence), a master key, door-breaking equipment, cameras, a shortwave receiver that could pick up police calls, and three pen-sized tear gas weapons. , reported the Post in 1972.

“When the Washington DC police caught them, they had something like 35 rolls of undeveloped film and very advanced cameras with them. So they weren’t looking for just one file. They were looking for tons of information,” Naftali said.

Stahl said that’s when she knew it wasn’t just a local break-in. It was something much bigger.

“I was getting more and more excited about this story,” she said. “This was getting bigger.”

6) The jaw-dropping moment

With no plan B in case of arrest, the thieves were cornered into revealing some important information that morning in court: three key letters, to be exact.

Woodward recalls the jaw-dropping moment when one of the suspects was questioned: “The judge said, ‘Where did you work?’ And the main thief, McCord, said ‘CIA’. And when he said CIA, I think I blurted out, ‘P******.”

“Bob’s reaction was the right one: fuck shit,” said journalist Carl Bernstein, who worked with Woodward on publications about the Watergate scandal.

“CIA. Oh my God, OK. We are in whole new territory,” Stahl said.

McCord had retired from the CIA and was a security officer on Nixon’s committee to re-elect the president. The others were hired by Nixon’s campaign advisers: Liddy and Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent and campaign committee adviser.

“The White House immediately understands that this could get back to them,” Naftali said.

In the months that followed, FBI agents, journalists and congressional investigations began to piece together details of the scandal that pointed to White House involvement.

“Watergate is not the story of a break-in. It is the story of a presidential pattern of betrayal of trust,” concluded Naftali. “What’s really troubling about this story is that if Nixon had chosen more professional secret warriors, think about the damage that could have been done to our democracy.”

Source: CNN Brasil

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