Nixon's Secret (60 page)

McCord would be going to the eighth floor. It is still a mystery to me what he was doing there. At 2:00 a.m. I went up to tell him about our problems, and there I saw him talking to two guards. What happened? I thought. Have we been caught? No, he knew the guards. So I did not ask questions, but I thought maybe McCord was working there.
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In fact, McCord
had
worked at the Watergate building earlier that year to check Attorney General John Mitchell’s apartment for security breaches. John Mitchell’s wife, Martha, believed McCord actually used these opportunities to bug the attorney general’s apartment. This made sense for the purpose of information gathering.
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Vigilio Gonzalez, tasked with picking the locks, was sent to Miami for the correct tools. Upon his return on the evening of May 28, the first of two successful entries into the Watergate offices commenced. While in the DNC offices, pictures of documents were allegedly taken and a bug was allegedly planted, but according to Watergate burglars Rolando Martinez and Frank Sturgis, O’Brien’s office was never a target. Sturgis said he had not “been in or near O’Brien’s office” and was given no directive to do so.
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A source within the DNC close to investigators Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin revealed that “the actual bugging target was a phone in the office of the chairman of the Democratic State Governors association, noting that Spencer Oliver, among others, sometimes used a phone in that nearly always vacant office.”
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E. Howard Hunt also confirmed that a target of the break-in was the phone used by Oliver and his secretary, Ida “Maxie” Wells.
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G. Gordon Liddy, who ordered the burglars to raid O’Brien’s office, supplied the same account of the caper. “The FBI never found a listening device near the office of Larry O’ Brien,” said Liddy. “The burglars didn’t go near there, although those were the orders I gave. When they went in, they put a device on the telephone in the office right outside the office of R. Spencer Oliver.”
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Liddy maintained though, consistent with the hypothesis that Larry O’Brien was the concern of the Nixon White House, that he
had
received orders that the DNC chairman was their target. “The orders I received were to break into the office of Larry O’Brien . . . and to put in two bugs,” said Liddy. “One [bug was put on] his telephone to monitor those conversations and the other, a room bug to monitor any conversations in the room. And photograph anything lying about. Those are the instructions I gave to Mr. Hunt. Those instructions were not carried out. Someone countermanded them. They didn’t go anywhere near Mr. O’Brien’s office. In fact, they went to the four-button telephone that was in the office of Ida ‘Maxine’ Wells.”
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It was an office that O’Brien never made calls from. What could a bug on a phone used by Spencer Oliver reveal? A theory supported by considerable evidence, broke first by Anthony Summers in
The Arrogance of Power,
is that the information collected by Baldwin from the phone Oliver and Wells used was from a different operation; a CIA safe house set up as a brothel in a Columbia Plaza apartment where many high-profile pols, both Republican and Democrat, were being serviced. This theory was further substantiated books by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in
Silent Coup,
Phil Stanford in
White House Call Girl,
J.Anthony Lukas in
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years,
and Anthony Summers in
The Arrogance of Power.

While being deposed, Baldwin admitted that most of the phone calls he was tapped into concerned a dining arrangement with “sex to follow” and that “eight out of ten” people would have surmised that the calls regarded the scheduling of an escort for the evening.
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The calls made on this particular phone “apparently in the belief it was one of the more private lines,” Baldwin said, “were explicitly intimate.”
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Strangely, although two tape recorders were available for Baldwin’s use, and were more suitable for surveillance work, he chose to transcribe the phone conversations by hand, making them all but illegible to anyone but him.
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“Whoever McCord’s assistant was, he was no typist,” said Liddy. “The logs revealed that the interception was from a telephone rather than a microphone that relayed all conversation in the room, and that the telephone being tapped was being used by a number of different people, none of whom appeared to be Larry O’Brien.”
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Ehrlichman later said the transcripts from all the monitoring resulted in three “rather obscure synopses.”
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What was the point of monitoring a Columbia Plaza call-girl service being scheduled from the offices of the DNC? It is a theory we will return to.

“The Plumbers” took photographs of DNC office documents in this particular break-in. It was a job assigned to Bernard Barker, who shot two rolls of film and gave them to Howard Hunt, who said McCord “had been given the films . . . to develop. After a few days, Liddy asked him . . . where the developed prints were,” continued Hunt. “McCord apparently reported to Liddy [that] the photographer he knew was not in the vicinity, he was on vacation or something, and Mr. McCord could not get the films developed. Therefore, Mr. Liddy asked Mr. McCord to turn the films over to me . . . At about the same time Mr. McCord turned the films over to me, I was going down to Miami . . . I had called Barker to ask him if he had or knew what we call a ‘person of confidence’ to print the film. He said certainly. He met me at the airport within a day or so, I delivered the film cassettes to him . . . [and] within an hour or so . . . he came back to me and said the films were all set.”
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When developed, the photographs showed hands covered in surgical gloves holding DNC documents against a shag rug. There was no rug of that kind in either the DNC offices or in the hotel rooms where the burglars were holed up in.
These were not the same photographs that were taken inside the DNC
.
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The White House men, Magruder and Dean in particular, unhappy with the take from the first break-in and the useless phone transcripts, ordered another.

The burglars returned to the DNC on June 17 for their second and final break-in. Days before, on June 9, a frantic Jeb Magruder had called Liddy into his office. Liddy provided the account of the meeting in his autobiography,
Will
:

He swung his left arm back behind him and brought it forward forcefully as he said, “I want to know what O’Brien’s got right here!” At the word
here
he slapped the lower left part of his desk with his left palm, hard. “Take all the men, all the cameras you need.
That’s
what I want to know!”

There was a world of significance in Magruder’s gesture. When he said “here!” and slapped that particular portion of his desk, he was referring to the place he kept his derogatory information on the Democrats. Whenever in the past he had called me in to attempt to verify some rumor about, for example, Jack Anderson, it was from there that he withdrew whatever he already had on the matter.
The purpose of the second Watergate break-in was to find out what O’Brien had of derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.
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The final break-in was legendarily bush league. McCord and Baldwin, while attempting to fuse a pair of batteries together for a microphone transmitter that was to be concealed in a smoke alarm, melted them. In another suspicious move, McCord had
forgotten
the correct batteries.
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McCord signed into the Watergate building at 10:50 p.m. and, proceeding to the eighth floor, began to backtrack down the stairwell to the garage, stuffing latches with paper and covered them vertically with tape. Even in the estimation of Liddy (who was not a CIA man) this technique was amateurish. “Burglars don’t tape the locks,” Liddy wrote. “They wedge a matchstick in between the bolt and opening, then snap it off in a flush. I would not have approved that method; if discovered by a guard, it’s a dead giveaway; he knows immediately he has a burglary on his hands.”
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It
was
a dead giveaway. McCord finished taping the doors at 11 p.m. returned to Baldwin’s lookout at the Howard Johnson’s, and noticed that the DNC was still occupied. Security guard Frank Wills discovered the doors taped at midnight. Wills removed the paper and the tape, made note of the door tampering in his security log, and telephoned his superiors.

At 12:05 a.m. the last straggling worker, Bruce Givner, made his way out of the DNC, yet McCord told his coconspirators that the target was still occupied. After waiting forty minutes, McCord phoned Hunt at the Howard Johnson’s at 12:45 a.m. He told Hunt the headquarters were clear and that he was making his way over to Hunt’s room at the Watergate Hotel. To go from one hotel room to another took McCord fifteen minutes, arriving at 1:05 a.m. McCord said that in the interim time he had gone back across the street to verify that the locks were still jammed and the doors were still propped open. In McCord’s recollection “
the tape was still there.”
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Today, we know this is false. The tape had been removed an hour prior to the time McCord left the lookout. When McCord later returned to the doors with the burglars, he feigned disbelief that the tape had been removed. “They returned with a stunned look on their face,” McCord said. “The door was locked and the tape had been removed!”
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So where did McCord disappear for fifteen minutes, and more importantly, why did he delay the operation and lie about his whereabouts?

In the unaccounted for fifteen minutes, McCord rendezvoused with Lou Russell, a hard-drinking ex-FBI agent-turned-private-eye who became known as the sixth man of the Watergate break-in. Russell, a close associate of Carmine Bellino, the Kennedy operative who bugged Nixon’s hotel room before the 1960 debates, was employed by McCord’s security consulting firm, McCord Associates, while also working for Washington lawyer Bud Fensterwald. The loquacious Russell had revealed to Fensterwald and two of the lawyer’s associates that he had been making time with call girls at the Columbia Plaza apartments near the Watergate and was tape recording conversations between the call girls and their johns at the DNC offices.
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Prior to documenting the sexual liaisons of the call girls, Russell had acquired $3,000 worth of surveillance equipment from private detective John Leon, who surmised that the gear was for McCord.
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“I had three or four meetings with Russell,” said Robert Smith, a Russell associate, “and among other things he claimed—and I have no reason to doubt it—that there was a tape recorder operating against a couple of prominent Democratic leaders. They were picking up these conversations in which they were making dates with women over the phone . . . for sexual liaison purposes.”
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McCord testified that Russell “was not there the night of the break-in at the Howard Johnson Motel or anywhere in the vicinity.”
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This was yet another McCord lie. Russell and his daughter supplied a different story of his whereabouts. Russell, who had gone to visit with his daughter in Benedict, Maryland, on the night of the June 17 break-in, admitted to leaving her house when he found she was not there and drove to the Watergate Hotel to dine at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant. Russell told the FBI that he was eating at the HoJo restaurant as “a trip down memory lane” from 8:30–10:30 p.m. and drove back to Benedict to see his daughter upon finishing.
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Russell’s daughter recalled that at just past midnight Russell said he needed to return to Washington to do “some work for McCord.”
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This placed Russell’s arrival time at the Watergate in line with McCord’s disappearing act.

Why would McCord want to meet with Russell?

John Leon, who had helped the Kennedy operative Carmine Bellino bug Nixon, believed McCord told Russell to contact the authorities and the Democrats. Jim Hougan fleshed this theory out in his masterful history of the break-ins,
Secret Agenda
: “[John] Leon was convinced that Watergate was a set-up, that prostitution was at the heart of the affair, and that the Watergate arrests had taken place following a tip-off to the police; in other words, the June 17 burglary had been sabotaged from within, Leon believed, and he intended to prove it . . . In an investigative memorandum submitted to GOP lawyer Jerris Leonard, Leon described what he hoped to prove: that Russell, reporting to Bellino, had been a spy for the Democrats within the CRP, and that Russell had tipped off Bellino (and the police) to the June 17 break-in.”
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This claim has some merit. Following the arrest of the Watergate burglars, Russell was taken care of by Carmine Bellino through his friend William Birely, who supplied Russell with a new car, spending money, and a rent-free furnished apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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Russell’s new life would not last long. On May 9, the Watergate Committee subpoenaed Russell. On May 18, 1973, hours before his employer Jim McCord was to begin his testimony before the Watergate Committee, Russell suffered a heart attack. On the day of his release one month later, Russell confided to his daughter that he had been poisoned, that someone had entered the residence Bellino had secured for him, and “switched pills on me.”
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Only two weeks after his release from the hospital, Russell suffered his second major heart attack, this one fatal. His body was buried quickly the next day; an autopsy was never performed.
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John Leon was angered by the death of his friend. He believed Russell held many of the secrets of Watergate. Leon was prepared to reveal not just the secrets of Watergate, but also the pre-debate bugging of Nixon’s hotel room. On July 13, 1973, before a press conference exposed the 1960 wiretapping could be held—and only weeks after Russell died—Leon died of a similar, mysterious heart attack.
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