One Man Against the World by Tim Weiner

Author:Tim Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627790840
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“We have produced a horrible tragedy”

AT 12:45 A.M. on Saturday, June 17, CREEP’s security chief, James McCord, and his crew of four Cuban Americans tiptoed into the offices of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

The air hung thick and heavy in Washington. The skies started trembling from the faraway force of Hurricane Agnes, which passed by Florida and began sweeping up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States that weekend, killing 119 people and inflicting billions of dollars in damage—at the time, the most devastating storm in American history.

The president and his men were far-flung: Nixon was in the Bahamas, and Haldeman in Key Biscayne, where both felt the hurricane’s lashing wind; Mitchell and his CREEP chieftains were in California, gathering millions at a campaign fund-raiser; John Dean was somewhere over the Pacific, flying back from a junket in the Philippines. Only Ehrlichman stood watch at the White House.

All these men told so many lies in the weeks and months ahead that it took two years of federal investigations, congressional hearings, and criminal trials to establish the essential elements of the Watergate story. But Nixon knew in a matter of days that the break-in would afflict him and his closest aides. He began trying to stop the wheels of justice from turning.

The four Cuban Americans accompanying McCord had been anticommunist activists for years: Bernard “Macho” Barker, a longtime Miami real estate agent; Eugenio Martinez, a legendary sea captain still on a CIA stipend; Virgilio Gonzales, a locksmith who ran the Missing Key Company in Miami; and Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune. All four were recruited by the CIA veteran Howard Hunt, all had played bit parts alongside Hunt in the Agency’s attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro, and all believed the Watergate job was part of the effort by the United States to stop the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.

The burglars, under the command of CREEP counsel Gordon Liddy, had rented rooms at the Watergate hotel and office complex and at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street. Liddy and Hunt had a clear line of sight out their windows at the Howard Johnson to the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate office. They had bugged the DNC’s telephones three weeks earlier; one of the bugs malfunctioned, and the information gathered from the other was all but worthless.

Their objective on June 17 was to enhance the electronic surveillance and to photograph or steal as many files as possible at the DNC. Had all gone smoothly, their second target that night would have been George McGovern’s campaign headquarters.

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., a squad of plainclothes police officers, alerted by a Watergate security guard, entered the DNC with guns drawn and arrested McCord and the Cubans, all neatly dressed in business suits and wearing thin rubber gloves. Hunt and Liddy, hearing urgent walkie-talkie warnings from McCord that the jig was up, fled as fast as they could.

McCord was carrying electronic eavesdropping gear. Wiretapping was a federal crime; the police called in the FBI.

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