The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (46 page)

To line up trustworthy
operatives, Liddy relied on Howard Hunt, the acerbic and tweedy career CIA officer and author, under various pseudonyms, of more than forty pulp spy novels. Hunt turned to Bernard Barker, an old comrade from the Bay of Pigs days. Across Miami’s Cuban exile community, Barker maintained a small network of soldiers of fortune, fanatical anti-Castro
machismos
, Bay of Pigs veterans with old—and, in at least one case, ongoing—ties to CIA.
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Liddy felt fortunate to have a man like Hunt at his side. Obligingly, CIA supplied Hunt with all kinds of assistance: the multicolor Gemstone charts, fake identification documents, disguise items, even the camera used when Liddy and Hunt executed the messy, but as-yet-untraced, break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (a camera from which only CIA, a dismayed Liddy found, could extract the film). But there were aspects of Gemstone that required expertise beyond even Hunt’s wide swath of covert experience; for example, neither man knew the first thing about modern electronics equipment, the miniaturized radio-frequency transmitters, receivers, transceivers, and other hi-tech gear essential to a professional surveillance operation. For help in this area, Liddy spent the early months of 1972 picking the brain of the one character in the Watergate saga even stranger than himself: James W. McCord Jr.

Balding, soft-spoken, demure to the point of shyness, the Texas-born McCord had become CRP’s chief of security in January 1972, following an extraordinary—and still murky—career in clandestine service. An FBI agent who specialized in counterespionage missions, McCord crossed over to CIA in 1951 and spent much of his time with CIA working for the Security Research Staff, a shadowy branch of the agency’s larger Office of Security. An air force colonel recalled in 1973: “McCord was just not somebody’s little wiretapper or debugging man…. He’s a pro, he’s a master. Allen Dulles introduced him to me…and said: ‘This man is the best man we have.’” A former CRP employee close to McCord during Watergate said: “I could actually sense a
fear
of Richard Nixon with Jim McCord….[Hefelt] Richard Nixon wasn’t a team player, wasn’t an American, wasn’t, you know, ‘one of us.’”
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When McCord joined the Nixon reelection campaign, CRP was preparing to assume responsibility for the expensive round-the-clock security that John and Martha Mitchell had, for three years, received from the FBI. But by February 1972, two months before Liddy invited him to join the Watergate mission, McCord confided to FBI colleagues that he intended to move beyond his security role, the dreary stuff of camera installations and guard schedules. McCord’s true aims were recorded in a previously unpublished internal FBI memorandum: “He reiterated that he believes his position will be one of intelligence and that ultimately he will become more and more involved in Mr. Mitchell’s political activities and less involved in personal security.”

This memo offers the earliest glimpse into what investigators later termed McCord’s “secret agenda” at CRP. The wireman’s goal was to infiltrate Mitchell’s political circle and shift into an “intelligence” function. Clearly, the chief beneficiary of McCord’s “security” work was not to be Mitchell and CRP, but CIA. Liddy offered McCord an extra $2,000 in salary each month, plus $2,000 per surreptitious entry, to join the mission. Hardly surprised by Liddy’s offer—McCord later said Liddy’s repeated inquiries about electronics gear had made it “clearer and clearer” he was plotting a surveillance project—the new security chief readily accepted.
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Never did Liddy imagine, as he planned the Watergate break-in, that he had surrounded himself with men of such dubious loyalty. Faced with mounting evidence that officials in the White House and CRP had set up their own covert operations unit, with Liddy the central player, CIA acted as any intelligence organization would. After all, permitting Liddy’s little unit to operate unchecked, targeting anything and anybody in Washington, utterly beyond the watch or influence of the nation’s premier spy agency, would have violated every known principle of bureaucratic behavior, and the spy game especially. The Plumbers, quite simply, had to be monitored, infiltrated—neutralized.
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Howard Hunt and James McCord insinuated themselves into the Nixon White House and CRP, respectively, at crucial times: Hunt, shortly before the creation of the Plumbers, McCord, shortly after the Ellsberg break-in, the Plumbers’ first illegal break-in. There is persuasive evidence the two men, despite their disclaimers, first met each other long before Liddy supposedly introduced them in 1972. Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran, recalled meeting “dozens” of times with Hunt and McCord—together—in the years immediately after the failed invasion of Cuba. And in previously unpublished testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, Felipe DeDiego, one of the Cubans who raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, told investigators he instantly recognized McCord as the same man who a decade earlier, in Florida, had helped organize “an infiltration group…of Cubans working for the CIA.”
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Finally, the CIA had one of Barker’s men—Eugenio Martinez, another Bay of Pigs veteran—on the payroll at the time of the DNC break-in. Martinez’s mission was, in part, to keep the Agency abreast of the Plumbers’ plans. Hunt admitted to the Senate, in previously unpublished testimony, that he had “learned…from Martinez at one point…that his case officer had been made aware that I was in the Miami area and had asked him for a report of my activities.” Of this Hunt professed to be unconcerned: “It was never made explicit to Mr. Martinez that I was no longer with the agency. I never said that I was or wasn’t. It was just not a matter of discussion. I was at the White House, obviously in a senior capacity of some sort, and I had been able to obtain CIA items of issue for the Fielding operation and so forth. And all of this certainly would suggest strongly to anyone on a clandestine relationship with me that I had some sort of authorized official relationship to the intelligence community in the United States government.”
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That Langley received Gemstone updates from Eugenio Martinez, independent of Hunt and McCord, was further confirmed in a previously unpublished memo dictated by CIA director Richard Helms on December 4, 1973. As the country braced for the coming impeachment battle, Helms learned that Alexander Haig, by then White House chief of staff, was trying to get an influential senator to allege that CIA “knew about the Watergate burglary thirty minutes before it occurred.” Mere mention of the agency’s foreknowledge of the break-in alarmed Helms, who fretted privately: “It is still not clear to me whether [Haig] would have been basing his allegation on
information from Martinez
or just what.”
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The role of CIA in the collapse of the Nixon presidency was a subject of intense controversy during the Watergate era, and a mystery that bedeviled Mitchell to his grave. It reminded him of the spying conducted against the administration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I’m sure the CIA knew more about Watergate than it’s ever come out,” he told an interviewer in 1987; by the time he died, the former attorney general had concluded “the CIA was behind the whole thing.”
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With the Plumbers now
firmly in CIA’s grip, Gordon Liddy unaware that control of Gemstone had been silently, effortlessly wrested from him, only one position on his DNC crew remained unfilled. It was the operation’s most important job: the wiretap monitor. Liddy asked McCord, the electronics expert, to find someone to man the headphones and log the results. This was Liddy’s biggest mistake, for it ceded to McCord complete control over the Watergate operation: It would be McCord’s man listening in on the intercepted conversations and furnishing the fruits directly to McCord, who would in turn heavily edit the data before submitting it to his superiors at CRP. Liddy, in short, never saw the raw intelligence produced by his own covert project.

McCord’s next move was explicable only as the product of a secret agenda. He chose for the DNC mission an undistinguished former FBI agent with barely two years in the Bureau, a lackluster career after leaving it, and zero experience in wiretapping. This was Alfred C. Baldwin III, a portly and affable thirty-five-year-old lawyer (West Hartford Law School class of ’63) and former instructor of police science (New Haven College). When McCord first contacted him, at home on the night of May 1, Baldwin was unemployed. Seducing his prey with talk of campaign “security work” and an annual salary of up to $20,000—“I wasn’t sure somebody wasn’t playing a joke on me,” an astounded Baldwin later recalled—McCord had Baldwin fly to Washington that night.
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Over breakfast the next day, Baldwin learned his first duty would be serving as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell, who was spending the spring barnstorming the country for the Nixon-Agnew ticket, its most popular and bankable surrogate. However, to accompany her on such trips—indeed, to deal with Martha Mitchell at all—was universally regarded by CPR staff as the campaign’s most thankless task. McCord minimized the unpleasantness to Baldwin, and less than twenty-four hours after their first conversation, Baldwin was driven to the Mitchells’ Watergate apartment, where he met Mrs. Mitchell and her personal assistant. By 4:00 p.m. the whole entourage was at Union Station—flying terrorized Martha—boarding Amtrak’s Broadway Limited to Chicago.
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Al Baldwin’s tour of duty with Martha proved brief and unpleasant, in large part because of his additional assignment as the procurer of Mrs. Mitchell’s liquor, the most incendiary ingredient in an already highly flammable personality. “There were several occasions where I had to actually take, say, a cup of what would be Scotch to her, in the guise [of] it being coffee,” Baldwin confessed. “A couple of times I thought it was unusual, because it was early…ten-thirty, eleven o’clock [in the morning], during a speech.” Martha, for her part, disliked Baldwin, thought him devious and “gauche.” The hapless aide was forced to sign a statement swearing he had not talked about Martha behind her back.

When the entourage arrived back at the Watergate, Baldwin helped unload Mrs. Mitchell’s luggage, then politely excused himself to wait for a ride back to CRP. Then word came:
Mr. Mitchell wants to see you
. Ushered into the Mitchells’ study, Baldwin found the former attorney general relaxing in a sweater and slacks, smoking his pipe. But instead of reprimanding him, as the unsophisticated former FBI man feared, Mitchell thanked him. “I’ve got good reports…about your work,” Mitchell said, “and I want to welcome you to the team.” Baldwin left stunned but relieved. What he hadn’t taken into account was that nobody knew better than John Mitchell how difficult Martha Mitchell could be.
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On May 11, at
McCord’s direction, Baldwin moved his belongings into Room 419 at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, located directly across the street from the Watergate office complex. Over the next two weeks, Baldwin mingled in antiwar crowds and posed as a tourist in the Capitol offices of several members of Congress—Kennedy, Muskie, Jacob Javits, Bella Abzug, Chisholm, Ed Koch—selected by McCord. Then, on the afternoon of May 25, Baldwin opened the door to Room 419 to find, to his astonishment, James McCord positively awash in electronic equipment: portable shortwave radios, debugging devices, tape recorders, a Samsonite suitcase concealing a radio-frequency receiver.

“We’ve got this operation,” McCord announced. According to an account Baldwin gave, in presence of counsel and previously unpublished, McCord said “bugs had been installed on two phones across the way and that their job was now to monitor these phones.” This account is significant, for it confirms that McCord installed listening devices in the DNC at least three days
before
he and the Cubans made their first successful entry into the Watergate, following three failed attempts, over May 26–27. This means McCord deceived his confederates throughout the operation, pursuing a secret agenda.
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