The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (47 page)

McCord demonstrated how to use the equipment by tuning in an actual conversation for Baldwin to monitor. Shortly after the Watergate arrests, Baldwin told the FBI this initial chatter had featured “a man talking with a woman and discussing their marital problem.” In March 1973, Baldwin told the Senate Watergate committee the man with the “marital problem” was Spencer Oliver. This set the tone for the highly personal conversations Baldwin was to monitor over the next three weeks, until the arrests of June 17 abruptly terminated his mission. In October 1972, Baldwin told the
Los Angeles Times
that many of the conversations he logged in May and June involved DNC staffers besides Oliver, who traveled frequently, and that the contents were often “explicitly intimate.” “We can talk,” the DNC secretaries would say. “I’m on Spencer Oliver’s phone.”
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Since January 1973, a gag order imposed by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has prevented the Watergate wiretap monitor from disclosing exactly what he overheard; but as the years reeled by, bits and pieces of the illegally intercepted conversations seeped out from other sources, and Baldwin himself, during an extraordinary seven-hour interview at his home in East Haven, Connecticut, in the summer of 1995, and in sworn testimony he subsequently gave in civil litigation, opened up considerably. By describing the contents of the conversations intercepted at the DNC, Baldwin helped solve the mystery of who ordered the wiretapping in the first place.
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“I don’t know who
Mr. Spencer Oliver is,” John Mitchell testified in September 1972. And why should he have? The former attorney general operated on a political plane miles above that of Oliver and, and as far as Mitchell was concerned, he had rejected Liddy’s bugging plans three times.

To the Senate, Mitchell stated flatly he had “never seen or talked to” Liddy after February 4, 1972, the day of the second Gemstone meeting—with one exception. On June 15, 1972, Mitchell told the committee, he met with Liddy and others to review a letter Liddy had sent the
Washington Post
, defending CRP against arcane allegations involving the Corrupt Practices Act. “I looked at the letter and gave it [my] approval and that was the end of it,” Mitchell testified. “That was the only conversation I had with Mr. Liddy.”
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Mitchell’s story was false in two minor respects. First, he had indeed seen and spoken to Liddy between February and June: once, at a May 8 briefing on Vietnam at the White House, at which Liddy advocated the targeting of civilian population centers in North Vietnam and Mitchell rebuked him for offering “amateur military advice.” However, that encounter had occurred as part of a large gathering and was wholly unrelated to Liddy’s Gemstone intrigues. The other minor problem with Mitchell’s testimony was that the
Washington Post
letter was not his sole topic of discussion with Liddy on June 15.

According to Liddy’s memoir, he did indeed visit Mitchell in his office on that day to discuss “nonintelligence matters.” Because his interaction with Mitchell was so rare, and despite the fact that “intelligence wasn’t on the agenda,” Liddy brought with him a bulging, unmarked manila envelope containing a “thick sheaf” of material generated by the Oliver wiretap. Believing all along that Mitchell was the intended consumer of this data—the man who’d ordered the DNC operation—Liddy placed the envelope on a corner of Mitchell’s desk and said: “That’s for you, general.” To Liddy’s chagrin, the former attorney general scarcely acknowledged Liddy’s presence, just nodded and puffed on his pipe while reading other papers, and made no move at all to retrieve the envelope. “Indeed,” Liddy later recalled, “the entire time I was in his office, he never touched it.” When Mitchell
did
finally pay attention to Liddy on this occasion, it was, again, to chastise him: this time for plotting to have hippies urinate in a Miami hotel room soon to be occupied by Senator McGovern—and thereafter by Mitchell himself.

In his version of the June 15 meeting, Mitchell omitted his rebuke of Liddy over the never-executed McGovern prank, and made no mention of the bulging envelope, of whose existence Liddy thought the former attorney general totally oblivious. In all other respects, Liddy’s story confirmed Mitchell’s: They had not met, per se, between February 4 and June 15, and only then on “nonintelligence matters” most importantly, Liddy’s account offered no evidence that Mitchell ever touched, let alone consumed, the fruits of the Watergate operation, the wiretap data from the Oliver telephone.
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Jeb Magruder, however, testifying in exchange for leniency, told a very different story—or several of them, as was his habit. According to Magruder, in early June he received from Liddy two “worthless” packages of wiretap data. “The telephone calls told us a great deal more than we needed to know about the social lives of various members of the Democratic committee staff,” Magruder wrote in 1974, “but nothing of political interest.” After showing the logs to a disgusted Gordon Strachan (“This idiot is just wasting our time and money!”), Magruder claimed he brought the wiretap fruits directly to Mitchell, who angrily summoned Liddy for still another censuring, this time over the quality of the DNC wiretap data. It was after Mitchell’s reprimand, Magruder claimed, that Liddy vowed to send his men back into the Watergate to correct the problem. If such a meeting had occurred, it would have been of historic significance: the catalyst for the final, fateful Watergate break-in of June 17.
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Yet Magruder’s story was full of holes. For starters, Magruder told the grand jury his standard procedure was to withhold from Mitchell all material that held zero “interest” or “value.” Why, then, would Magruder have shoved the “worthless” DNC data under Mitchell’s nose? It was a question for which, at Mitchell’s trial, Magruder had no good answer. Second, Magruder had trouble supplying accurate details about this fateful meeting. He could never fix the date. In one early version, he claimed Mitchell delivered his rebuke to Liddy over the phone; elsewhere it was face-to-face, in Mitchell’s law office. Then there was the supposed substance. “Mitchell chewed out Liddy for the quality of the intelligence,” Magruder told the Watergate prosecutors in April 1973; later he remembered Mitchell having addressed Liddy in a “rather understated way.”
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Despite their many internal contradictions, Magruder’s multiple accounts all featured one common element: They all implicated Mitchell as the trigger man for the catastrophic events of June 17. The one major problem with all of these stories was that the evidence and testimony undermined them. Asked at the Senate hearings to respond, Mitchell coined one of the scandal’s most memorable phrases.

DASH:
But do you recall Mr. Magruder testifying that he had taken these documents [the wiretap logs] and shown them to you?

MITCHELL:
I recall it very vividly, because it happens to be a palpable, damnable lie.

Mitchell said his secretary kept “very accurate” office logs, which reflected no record of any such session. Of course, the Senate, and later the Watergate prosecutors, also knew Magruder’s own calendar also showed no record of the meeting.
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Also available to the prosecutors was the testimony of a number of individuals who spoke to Gordon Liddy immediately after the arrests of June 17, all of whom recalled him specifying that it was Magruder—not Mitchell—who precipitated the final entry into the Watergate. Robert Mardian, the CRP lawyer who formally debriefed Liddy on June 21, reported to the Senate that Liddy “made the entry at the insistence of Mr. Magruder.” Fred LaRue, present for that debriefing, likewise told the Senate that Liddy felt “pressure from Magruder to improve the surveillance.”
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What was not available to Watergate investigators in the 1970s was Liddy’s testimony; not until he published
Will
in 1980 did his account emerge, and it demolished Magruder’s multiple versions. Liddy recalled no discussions with Mitchell at all about the quality of the DNC wiretap data. In fact, it was Magruder who admonished Liddy about the DNC data, who fretted over its cost, who urged the wiretaps be upgraded. “On Friday, June 9,” Liddy reported in
Will
, “Magruder called me in again…[and] said that the content of the logs to date was hardly worth the effort, risk, and expense we had gone to.” Three days later, Magruder impatiently ordered Liddy back into the Watergate: “Take all the men, all the cameras you need.”
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It was, then, this sharply worded order from Magruder—and not any prodding from Mitchell—that sparked the final Watergate break-in. That Magruder gave the order on June 12—the one specific date he used when attributing the directive to Mitchell—was more than a coincidence. Liddy’s belated account begged the question of why the “agitated” Magruder issued this order when he did—and on whose authority. What had happened prior to June 12 to make Magruder push Liddy so hard—
take all the men, all the cameras you need
—to go back into the Watergate?

On June 9, three
days before Magruder’s order to Liddy, John Dean summoned two federal prosecutors to his White House office to brief him on their investigation into what had been dubbed, in that morning’s
Washington Evening Star
, a Capitol Hill call-girl ring. At one point in the meeting he asked to keep portions of the evidence in the case, a request the prosecutors, though awed by their surroundings, properly refused.
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The prostitution rings servicing Washington in the freewheeling early 1970s tended to share key players; this was certainly true of the outfit described in the
Evening Star
story and the Columbia Plaza call-girl ring, so dubbed because its personnel operated, as police records confirmed, out of the fashionable apartment complex of that name, two blocks southeast of the Watergate. There was, in turn, a connection between Columbia Plaza and DNC. One of the federal prosecutors summoned to Dean’s office that day subsequently testified he had developed evidence that “employees at the DNC…were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza,” but that his investigation was “shut down” in the summer of 1972 by the district’s U.S. attorney, who felt “the DNC should not be pursued, that it was a political time bomb.”
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Al Baldwin testified years later that eight of ten people—laypeople, not attorneys or law enforcement officers—if exposed to the same chatter he overheard at the DNC, “would have said, ‘That’s a call-girl ring. This is a prostitution ring.’” He told an interviewer in 1995 he had monitored “a lot of conversations of a sexual nature” asked to elaborate, he grew terse, saying only they were “in line with [people making] arrangements and things.”
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As Earl Silbert suggested, the conversations monitored on Spencer Oliver’s telephone could conceivably be used as “blackmail…to compromise Oliver and others.”

Such racy activity was the only thing that made the DNC, with Chairman O’Brien in Miami, worth bugging at all.
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In the 1990s it was alleged in lengthy civil depositions—conducted, ironically, at Dean’s own instigation—that Dean’s wife, Maureen, had her own ties to Columbia Plaza.
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Dean always denied ordering the break-in. “I wasn’t even aware of the Watergate until after it happened,” he reaffirmed in 1999. Yet Dean’s knowledge of the players and their complex interconnections, documented in the civil litigation he initiated to try to suppress the “call-girl theory” of Watergate, arguably makes him the final answer to the three-decades-old question of who ordered the Watergate operation, who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder to send Liddy and his team back into the DNC.
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Though he later professed not to have “a disposition or a like for this type of activity,” it was Dean who acknowledged in
Blind Ambition
that he saw intelligence as his way “upward” in the Nixon White House, the means by which to make himself “more valued by the policy-makers” Dean who intervened on Liddy’s behalf, and devised new assignments for him; Dean who requested that White House gumshoe Jack Caulfield place Senator Kennedy under twenty-four-hour surveillance; Dean who ordered Caulfield to probe Senator Muskie’s connections to the sugar lobby; Dean who directed Caulfield to investigate Senator McGovern’s fund-raising sources; Dean who dispatched Caulfield to New York to identify the clients of Xaviera Hollander’s “Happy Hooker” call-girl ring; and Dean who reportedly asked Anthony Ulasewicz, Caulfield’s sidekick, to case the Watergate complex prior to the DNC mission. Kenneth Tapman, a long-haired Department of Interior employee who had sat alongside Dean in negotiations with antiwar groups, remembered Dean once inviting him to lunch at the White House and asking if he “was interested in spying, basically, on anti-Republican groups prior to the 1972 convention.”
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