But on June 17, 1972, it became an infamous day. The robbery sparked a series of actions that toppled Republican President Richard Nixon, the only president of the United States to resign.
Here are six mistakes that led to the Watergate investigation: the first pieces of dominoes that fell into the political scandal.
They used the ‘F team’
While president, Nixon created a White House unit called the “Plumbing.” This unit had two objectives: to investigate leaks of sensitive information and to discredit the enemies of the administration.
Since the president could not use official organizations such as the FBI and the CIA for such illegal activities, the Nixon White House used what Tim Naftali, CNN’s presidential historian and director of public policy, New York University calls it a “messy group.”
“The country was very fortunate that the CIA and the FBI refused to completely bow to Nixon’s will, so Nixon and his lieutenants chose to leave the established institutions to do their dirty work.” , he said.
In 1971, plumbers burst into the office of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to photograph the psychiatrist’s notes on Ellsberg in an attempt to defame him in the press. Ellsberg was a target for leaking the Pentagon Papers – a top-secret report in several volumes that revealed that major American leaders knew the Vietnam War was not won.
The aim of the plumbers was to enter the office and leave undetected. But they could not open the door, which they had secretly left open in the early hours of the day, so they broke a window, creating a scene. Then they found no note from the psychiatrist, so they left empty-handed.
“So one would think it would be the end, but it wasn’t like that. The same group is reconstituted,” Naftali said. For Watergate, “the leadership is the same and the thickness of the team is the same.”
“It wasn’t like the White House trusted Team A; they trusted Team F,” he said. “So it’s no wonder they hooked him up.”
Failed attempts increased the stakes
The five men in charge of entering the DNC made multiple attempts at this task. The more you try, the more likely you are to get caught.
“The first time they failed completely because the door was closed and they didn’t have the right locksmith with them,” Naftali said.
“The second time they didn’t seem to know where Larry O’Brien’s office was,” Dean said. O’Brien was the campaign chairman of Democratic Sen. George McGovern, who ran for president against Nixon in 1972. “So they bothered an empty conference room.”
The third attempt was intended to correct the above errors. But the third time was not the charm.
“They wanted to move an insect. They had three more insects, which they wanted to plant. They were also going to put a listening device on a smoke detector,” Naftali said. “This would have been a massive espionage operation if it had been successful.”
Dean then recalled Gordon Liddy, the organizer of the Watergate assault and a former FBI special agent, who said, “‘I shouldn’t have had so many people. But we had to go back “I know I’ve fucked up terribly, and I can understand if you want to get me out.”
The engraved door latch was discovered
A simple mistake by James McCord, a former CIA officer who was one of the thieves, led a watchman to thwart the crime of the century.
“McCord was the team’s wiretapping expert,” Naftali said. “And he insisted on closing the doors. And they asked him,” Did you remember to remove the whole tape? And he said yes. And he hadn’t. “
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The crew had placed tape on each latch of the doors, to prevent the self-locking doors from sticking, from the basement to the sixth floor, where the DNC offices were located.
Watergate security guard Frank Wills saw the tape plastered over a door latch. He called police at 1:47 a.m. and reported the entry. Years later, one of the thieves, Eugenio Martínez, told Naftali in an oral story for the Nixon Library that he had been surprised by all the mistakes and that the mistakes of the trade were difficult to understand.
Poor communication
There was a security plan in case the police were notified, but it also failed.
A guard, Alfred C. Baldwin, was across the street in a walkie-talkie to warn thieves if anyone was coming.
Naftali said, “McCord turned down the volume on the walkie-talkie. So when the watchman could see DC police advancing toward the DNC headquarters, the thieves did not receive the alert.”
When Baldwin was finally able to notify the crew, it was too late: the police were already in the building. They saw the five men, all wearing surgical gloves, crouched behind their desks.
Thieves did not dress as thieves
After the men were arrested, Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary, downplayed the assault as a “third-class robbery.”
Journalists assigned to cover the indictment assumed it was not a story. Journalist Lesley Stahl joked on CNN that she initially looked like a “nothing burger” and said she had received the commission because the editor gave the story to “the new girl.”
But quickly, the signs that this story was significant were hard to ignore.
The five intruders – Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis, Martinez and McCord – appeared in court hours after the arrest dressed in business suits.
“Nine months into the police, I’ve never seen a well-dressed thief,” journalist Bob Woodward, who covered Watergate for The Washington Post, told CNN. What the police discovered in the hands of the men made them even more suspicious. The men had one-hundred-dollar bills (serial numbers in sequence), padlocks, door maneuvers, cameras, a shortwave receiver that could pick up police calls, and three tear gas the size of of a pen, the Post reported in 1972.
“When DC police caught them, they had something like 35 rolls of undeveloped film and very advanced cameras with them. So they weren’t just looking for a file. They were looking for tons of information,” Naftali said.
Stahl said that’s when he learned it wasn’t just a local intrusion. It was something much bigger.
“I was getting more and more excited about this story,” she said. “That was going to go higher.”
The moment of “sacred shit.”
Without a security plan in case of an arrest, the thieves were cornered to reveal some key information that morning in the courtroom: three key letters, to be exact.
Woodward recalls the startling moment when one of the suspects was questioned: “The judge said, ‘Where did you work?’ And the main thief, McCord, said “CIA.” And when the CIA said, I think I said, “Holy shit.”
“Bob’s reaction was right: holy shit,” journalist Carl Bernstein, who worked with Woodward to uncover the Watergate scandal, told CNN.
“CIA. My God, all right. We’re in completely new territory,” Stahl said.
McCord had retired from the CIA and was a Nixon Committee security officer to be re-elected president. The others had been hired by Nixon’s campaign assistants: Liddy and Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer and campaign committee adviser.
“The White House immediately understands that this could bring them back,” Naftali said.
In the months that followed, FBI agents, reporters, and congressional investigators began gathering details of the White House scandal.
“Watergate is not the story of a run-in. It’s the story of a pattern of betrayal of presidential confidence,” Naftali concluded. “What’s really troubling about this story is that if Nixon had chosen more professional secret warriors, think about the damage that could have been done to our democracy.”