American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [54]
Early in 1972, Hunt’s Plumbers and McCord’s CREEP security unit had merged into the Gemstone plan, a wide-ranging series of illegal White House-based projects. Then, sometime on the night of May 1-2, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep. Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, immediately ordered Hoover’s office sealed. Then the search for Hoover’s secret files began. His personal secretary, Helen Gandy, later told Congress she destroyed many files marked “personal” at his home over the next few weeks. At Hunt’s urgent request, Bernard Barker brought the Miami crew of Cuban exiles to Washington, where they made plans to break into Hoover’s residence. But what happened to Hoover’s trove remains unknown to this day.
Around this same time, in a conversation about the shooting that paralyzed Alabama governor George Wallace, Nixon suddenly flashed back to the Kennedy assassination and called the Warren Commission “the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.” Somebody might have been able to ask what the president meant by that, except the tape transcript wasn’t released by the National Archives until 2002!
Meantime, plans for a break-in to Lawrence O’Brien’s office at Democratic National Committee headquarters moved ahead. One of the burglars, Frank Sturgis, said Hunt told him they were looking for “a thick secret memorandum from the Castro government, addressed confidentially to the Democrats ... a long, detailed listing [of the] various attempts made to assassinate the Castro brothers.”14 The burglars were also coached to look for “anything that had to do with Howard Hughes.”
On the night of June 17, five men, all using aliases, were caught red-handed inside the Watergate complex. McCord, the White House’s “Security Chief,” was booked at the jail along with Sturgis, Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez. Hunt’s name was in two of the burglars’ address books and his link to the operation became known within 24 hours. He quickly left Washington.
In later years, evidence came to light that McCord had likely botched the break-in intentionally. First, he went back and re-taped a garage-level door, which served as a telltale sign to the cops. McCord claimed to have removed the tape from all the doors, but actually several had been taped to stay unlocked. A few days later, all of McCord’s papers were destroyed in a fire at his home, while a CIA contract agent stood by.15 Hunt made a whole series of “mistakes,” too, surrounding the Watergate burglary. Nixon, in his Memoirs, suggested—referring to the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—that Hunt could have been “a double agent who purposely blew the operation.”16
There was also the matter of a $25,000 cashier’s check that had been deposited into the bank account of a Miami real estate company owned by burglar Barker. This check, laundered through a fund-raiser for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, was the first link connecting the burglars to the CREEP—after Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post broke the story about it. Well, it turns out the check wasn’t deposited by the CREEP. Liddy had given it to Hunt, who put it in Barker’s account. So, money that should have stayed anonymous and untraceable then became an easy “mark” to track.
Three days after the break-in, Nixon called Haldeman, instructing him to “tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.... Ehrlichman will know what I mean.” Six days after the break-in, Hunt sent word through his boss at the Mullen Company that he wanted the White House to find him a lawyer. That same day, June 23, came Nixon’s “smoking gun” conversation with Haldeman. When the presidential tape was released two years later, it became proof positive that Nixon had been involved in trying to cover up the burglary—and this led to his resigning before he could be impeached.
“Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said on the tape, referring to the CIA director.