Watergate, page 16
In Miami, he and Hunt again tapped Barker and their Cuban network to build a squad of counterdemonstrators, interviewing a dozen men who impressed Liddy with their toughness. Between them, Hunt bragged to his partner, the men had killed twenty-two, including two hanged from a garage beam. At the end of their conversation, the leader spoke in Spanish to Barker, who laughed. “He called you a falcon—,” Barker translated back to Liddy, clutching his hands like talons, “the bird other birds fear.” (The name would become Liddy’s self-appointed code name for that year’s operations.) Hunt also recruited a locksmith who could serve as the team’s covert-entry specialist, a man who had once been part of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s secret police. Liddy was so pleased by the viciousness of his new colleagues that he pulled Bud Krogh aside when they crossed paths outside the White House and told him, “Bud, if you want anyone killed, just let me know.”
By the end of January, they had a plan and a budget totaling a million dollars. “I knew exactly what had to be done and why, and I was under no illusion about its legality,” Liddy recalled later. The radical left had declared war on his country.IX When it came time to present the plan to John Mitchell and top Nixon advisors, Liddy knew they couldn’t exactly turn to the local neighborhood office supply store, so instead, they turned to the CIA’s in-house graphics department. One January day at precisely noon, Liddy was told to stand on a certain street corner near the White House, and a CIA technician handed him a wrapped set of oversized charts.
On January 27, materials in hand, Liddy walked into the Justice Department. Inside the attorney general’s office, he set his charts up on an easel before Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean, and began to outline what he had dubbed Operation GEMSTONE.
First up was Operation DIAMOND, Liddy’s plan to undermine, attack, and defeat demonstrators attempting to target the Republican National Convention by kidnapping the leaders of the movement, drugging them, and holding them in Mexico until the event’s completion. Liddy labeled the kidnapping plot Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”), after a 1941 directive from Hitler to disappear resistance leaders, and explained that it would be carried out by, as he told Mitchell, “an Einsatzgruppe,” his special action group whose twenty-two kills Hunt had boasted about.
“Where did you find men like that?” Mitchell asked, removing his pipe from his mouth.
“I understand they’re members of organized crime,” Liddy replied.
“And how much will their services cost?”
“Like top professionals everywhere, sir, they don’t come cheap.”
“Well, let’s not contribute any more than we have to to the coffers of organized crime,” the attorney general said, returning his pipe to his mouth.
The gems and rocks kept unfurling as one CIA-designed chart after another described schemes and plots to upend the opposition party’s ability to compete in a free and fair election. There was Operation RUBY, an effort to seed spies into the Democratic campaigns, and Operation COAL, meant to stir up division in the primary campaign by laundering money to the campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination; Operation EMERALD would equip a jet airliner as a specially modified chase spy plane to follow the Democratic nominee across the country and eavesdrop on the campaign in the air, while Operation QUARTZ would do the same on the ground. CRYSTAL proposed outfitting a luxury houseboat at the Democratic National Convention in Miami with additional spy equipment, while prostitutes employed under Operation SAPPHIRE would seduce party power brokers and lure them back to the houseboat’s king-size bed.X Four different “black bag jobs” fell under Operation OPAL (known as OPAL I through OPAL IV), break-ins similar to the Ellsberg psychiatrist operation that would target the campaign offices of Democratic candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern, as well as the convention headquarters in Miami. GARNET proposed false-flag demonstrations on behalf of Democratic candidates, meant to provoke public outrage, as well as attempts to disrupt Democratic events, fundraisers, and generally spread disorder through the fall election. Lastly, there was TURQUOISE, an effort by Cuban operatives to sabotage the air-conditioning system in the main hall of the Democratic convention, forcing the nominee to address the packed delegates inside and the nation beyond in one-hundred-degree Miami summer heat.
The meeting marked a critical escalation for the ethically questionable administration; all of the dubious schemes, hijinks, and bad ideas until then had emerged seemingly from genuine—albeit clearly misguided—desires to protect national security. Now, in Mitchell’s office, a tide was turning: a dangerous new intensification and widening of Nixon’s war that would target domestic politicians as if they were true enemies of the state. It was as illegal as it was un-American.
After his initial comment on DIAMOND, Mitchell said nothing through the rest of the presentation, puffing steadily on his pipe and reacting only with a smile to the idea of the overheated convention hall. When Liddy had finished, the attorney general paused for a while, refilling and relighting his pipe. Finally, he spoke, but the man in charge of enforcing the nation’s laws didn’t exactly offer a resounding condemnation.XI “Gordon,” Mitchell began, “a million dollars is a hell of a lot of money, much more than we had in mind. I’d like you to go back and come up with something more realistic.”
As a heartbroken Liddy gathered his things, Mitchell spoke again: “And Gordon?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Burn those charts,” the attorney general commanded. “Do it personally.”XII
* * *
On February 4, just barely a week later, the men reconvened in Mitchell’s office. This time, Liddy presented a scaled-back plan on regular paper typed up by campaign secretaries. It cut some of the most expensive items—like the houseboat and the spy plane—and trimmed the number of illegal break-ins, but kept much of the rest of the program. Mitchell weighed the proposal and said he’d think about it. Dean, who had arrived late to the meeting, was shocked that Mitchell actually was willing to accept a scaled-down plan in some form—the attorney general’s objection to the January GEMSTONE presentation truly was only about its scale and cost, not a philosophical objection toward dirty tricks.
The White House lawyer spoke up. “Excuse me for saying this—I don’t think this kind of conversation should go on in the attorney general’s office,” he said. The meeting broke up awkwardly. Afterward, he recalls telling Liddy, “Gordon, I don’t think you and I should ever talk about this subject again.” It was an ambiguous comment—less a forceful repudiation of illegality than a potential precaution for operational security—and Dean would reflect later, “I left, annoyed by my weakness, but thinking positively about what I had accomplished.”
According to his later accounts, Dean filled Haldeman in on the concerning meeting, but the chief of staff seemed largely focused mentally on the upcoming, high-stakes trip to China. “Bob, this stuff is incredible, unnecessary, and very unwise,” Dean recalled saying. “No one at the White House should have anything to do with this.” Haldeman agreed, and according to Dean, that was the end of his own involvement in the political intelligence portfolio he’d worked so hard to gain.
When Dean first crossed paths with Liddy, he’d been put off. At that time, Krogh had offered advice. “Liddy’s a romantic,” he said. “Gordon needs guidance. Somebody should keep an eye on him.” Instead, as Liddy’s schemes got wilder, nearly everyone in the Nixon world seemed to draw further away from him.
Most importantly, nobody firmly told him no.
* * *
Perhaps one of the reasons that Liddy’s plan didn’t attract the eyebrow raises it should have is that the Nixon campaign already had a variety of dirty tricks and intelligence gathering operations underway. As Nixon himself recounted in his memoirs, “I wanted the leading Democrats annoyed, harassed, and embarrassed—as I had been in the past.”
Throughout the White House and the campaign, aides focused heavily on disrupting and raising questions about Ed Muskie, the Maine senator they saw as the most formidable Democratic opponent. One aspect of Liddy’s overall GEMSTONE project was what came to be known as RUBY I, a covert operation he’d inherited from Magruder when he arrived at CREEP in January. The previous August, Magruder—under pressure from the White House—had planted a spy in Muskie’s campaign under the guidance of John Buckley, a government employee at the Office of Economic Opportunity.
Elmer Wyatt “volunteered” as a cabdriver for the campaign, running menial errands and eventually becoming Muskie’s courier for interoffice mail between the campaign and his Senate office. For more than seven months, from September 1971 through April 1972, Wyatt and Buckley intercepted key documents, photographed them, and delivered them to CREEP and the White House; after first attempting to photograph the documents in the backseat of Wyatt’s car, they eventually rented an office at 1026 17th Street NW and purchased high-tech photographic equipment to more clearly capture the images. Some of the intercepted material—itineraries, draft press releases, and more—was used internally, but other items were retyped by CREEP secretaries on plain paper and leaked to reporters.
After Hunt started working with Liddy, he met Buckley on D.C. street corners more than a dozen times to hand off rolls of film; the two men never knew each other’s name—Buckley went by “Jack Kent,” and Hunt used his “Ed Warren” alias. Wyatt was paid $1,000 a month by the campaign, an expense both Magruder and Mitchell viewed as a low-stakes answer to the calls from the White House for more aggressive action. “Mitchell’s attitude struck me as ambivalent,” Magruder recalled later. “I think he saw $1,000 a month as a cheap way to get the White House off our backs.” (The RUBY operation was, in Magruder’s mind, a clear—and early—example of what he called the White House’s “slippage problem,” that rather than simply saying no to bad ideas, Nixon’s team cultivated a culture of answering with a “half-loaf.”)
Beyond the internal campaign spy, Magruder had sought through the fall more innovative ways to mess with Muskie and his fellow Democratic candidates. Most of all, he wanted Nixon to have his own Dick Tuck. Tuck, Nixon’s own “political hobgoblin,” as the Washington Post would call him, had first met then Congressman Nixon in 1950, when he was running for the U.S. senate and came to speak at UC Santa Barbara, where Tuck, a Democrat, was a student. Asked by a professor to organize Nixon’s speech, Tuck maneuvered the event into a large auditorium with a small audience, gave a long-winded and energy-draining speech of his own, and then impishly introduced Nixon by saying that the congressman would speak about the International Monetary Fund. Nixon, off-kilter and embarrassed throughout, afterward demanded Tuck’s name and promised, “Dick Tuck, you’ve done your last advance.”
Over the years ahead, though, Tuck had continued to pull all manner of low-grade pranks on Nixon and other Republican candidates. Tuck’s escapades, what William F. Buckley once called “glorious improvisations,” were mostly juvenile and harmless—arranging for garbage trucks with “Dump Nixon” on the side to drive by the 1956 Republican convention and for an elderly woman wearing a Nixon button to hug the candidate in front of TV cameras the morning after his 1960 TV debate with John F. Kennedy and tell him, “Don’t worry, son. He beat you last night, but you’ll do better next time.” His most famous stunt came at Nixon’s expense amid the gubernatorial campaign in 1962, as Nixon had been dogged by questions about a large loan from industrialist Howard Hughes to his brother Donald. The candidate appeared in San Francisco’s Chinatown among smiling children holding signs in English and Chinese, and Nixon’s team failed to realize that the Chinese characters spelled out, “What about the Hughes loan?” He posed, happily, with the signs until someone pointed out the Chinese meaning, at which point he tore one up on camera.XIII
To fight fire with fire, Magruder began a low-stakes and at first anodyne effort at CREEP to make life harder for the Democratic candidates on the trail. At campaign stops for Muskie and others, Magruder and his colleague Herbert Porter lined up crowds of Republican supporters to appear, chanting and carrying Nixon signs. They also recruited a man named Roger Greaves, code name SEDAN CHAIR, to engage in their own “dirty tricks,” enlisting him as a campaign gremlin to steal the keys from idling motorcade vehicles or the shoes that campaign workers left outside their hotel rooms overnight for a shine. “He is ready, willing, and most able. Any ideas?” Porter wrote Magruder on November 17, 1971. Greaves, who was paid a salary of $2,000 a month, recruited some hostile picketers for various Democratic rallies and then quit in early 1972. Magruder, though, told Porter that Mitchell wanted a full-time prankster.
They soon found Roger Stone, a young student at George Washington who talked Magruder into hiring him. Herb Porter enlisted Stone, who was working as a scheduler in the campaign office, to find someone who could work in “two or three of the primary campaigns as kind of an eyes and ears.” (Stone later recalled that he was told there should be a “prankster” element to the recruit as well.) After asking around the campaign, he identified a possible partner—a Kentucky campaign worker who had done similar work in a recent gubernatorial race.
Stone, adopting the alias Jason Rainer, traveled to Louisville and hired Michael McMinoway as a spy for $1,500 a month, telling him that “Rainer” represented “a group of concerned citizens that were interested in the outcome of the 1972 presidential election.” Over the months ahead, McMinoway worked for a variety of the Democratic challengers, pretending to be a volunteer and gradually advancing his responsibilities through what he called “hard work and seemingly helpful efforts.” He enthusiastically embraced assigned tasks—just happening to slightly screw them up: During one phone bank for Humphrey, he reversed the prepared call texts, so Black voters heard the messages meant for union voters and vice versa, and duplicated the day-shift phone bank lists with the evening shift, so voters became annoyed at the repeat calls. “Some [volunteer block] captains have already quit because of the repeated calls,” he reported to Stone. He told volunteers they weren’t needed when they were, and hired the least competent volunteers he could find. In Wisconsin, helping Muskie, McMinoway convinced his team that rather than distribute campaign literature, they should hit the bar and drink.
McMinoway—known internally to CREEP as SEDAN CHAIR II—provided Stone with a variety of internal campaign documents, from schedules to campaign finance records, which Stone passed onward to Porter, Magruder, Strachan, Haldeman, and Mitchell. His intelligence was referred to in CREEP memos only as coming from “a confidential source.”
In February, Hunt and Liddy picked up a rumor that the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, Hank Greenspun, possessed some dirt on Muskie. They began researching how to access the safe in the corner of Greenspun’s office, and teamed up with one of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes’s security men; they’d heard that Hughes was also interested in liberating some documents from Greenspun following a falling-out. The elaborate forced-entry plan fell apart when Hughes’s team refused to provide a required plane and Muskie’s political threat faded that spring.
One of the potential areas of concern about what might have been in Greenspun’s safe stemmed from his close association with Jack Anderson, the columnist whose December reporting on the India-Pakistan tensions had led the Plumbers to uncover the Joint Chiefs’ spying on the White House. Anderson was one of the nation’s most powerful journalists. In an age when syndicated newspaper columns carried enormous weight, pushing insidery Washington reporting far beyond the capital, Anderson reigned king. His daily column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” ran in a thousand newspapers nationally and was read by one in five Americans, and he led a team of eager muckraking assistants whose fingers seemed to extend into every office in the capital. “Whether it’s a peccadillo or a state secret, the Washington Merry-Go-Round is interested,” Anderson wrote.XIV
Nixon’s government had grown increasingly alarmed that winter about Anderson’s excellent sourcing. In a January column, he’d bragged about reading the CIA’s daily reports to the White House during the India-Pakistan tension. The CIA that month took the unprecedented step of starting what would ultimately be a three-month surveillance operation to identify his sources. As many as sixteen CIA officers—spread across eight cars as well as a fixed photographic observation post by his office—watched Anderson (code-named BRANDY in the agency’s operation) as well as his cowriter Les Whitten (code-named CORDIAL), his secretary Opal Ginn (SHERRY), and two of his reporters, Brit Hume (EGGNOG) and Joseph Spear (CHAMPAGNE).
What no one realized was that these eyes would be in place as one of Nixon’s largest scandals took shape, monitoring Anderson as he uncovered yet another secret the Nixon administration hoped to hide.
Chapter 10 The Dita Beard Memo
From the start of the administration, Nixon’s Justice Department had been different. The U.S. Justice Department is meant to occupy a unique role in the federal government—a cabinet department that simultaneously exists as part of the executive branch while also standing apart, beholden to the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Since its formation under Ulysses S. Grant, the department’s goal has been equal justice under the law, with prosecutions pursued without fear or favor, with an attorney general intended to serve not as the president’s top lawyer, but the nation’s. Traditionally, presidents tried hard to craft a department leadership that appeared free of routine politics.
