part 1

Thank you Kioumars Aghezadeh for providing this informative
article for publication on WatergateNotes.Net.
Your contribution is greatly appreciated.

The DNC headquarters were on the sixth floor of the Watergate Office Building. The burglaries and wiretaps were monitored from across the street, in room 723 of the 9-story Howard Johnson Motor Lodge. This political scandal and constitutional crisis led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. This is an account of corruption in a democratic society. It is also the scandal that made our home, Watergate, a recognized name worldwide.

The Burglary

On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard working at the office complex of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., noticed a piece of tape on the door between the basement stairwell and the parking garage. It was holding the door unlocked. Wills removed it, assuming the cleaning crew had put it there. Later, he returned and discovered that the tape had been replaced. Wills then contacted the D.C. police.

The police discovered and arrested 5 men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

The men apparently broke into the office to fix wiretaps they had dropped in three weeks earlier that were not working. And, according to some, they had planned to photograph documents.

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McCord, one of the men arrested for burglry, was Chief of Security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). Later, the police found the telephone number of a prior White House employee, Howard Hunt, in McCord's notebook. At the time of the break-in, Frank McCord was serving as Chief of Security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), later commonly referred to as CREEP. His association with CRP suggested a link between the burglars and someone close to the President, some said.

But, Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press secretary, dismissed the affair as a "third-rate burglary."

And, most Americans initially believed that no President with Nixon's advantage in the looming presidential campaign would be so foolhardy or unethical as to risk association with such an affair.

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In fact, the burglary, along with other "dirty tricks" were directed by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy and undertaken on behalf of CRP. They too had been White House employees. They worked in a Special Investigations unit informally referred to as the "Plumbers"; Their specialty was to investigate unauthorized leaks of information.

Special Investigations had a second focus: to conduct various operations against the Democrats and anti-war protestors. It was the Plumbers who had broken into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Hunt and Liddy ran that operation. They found nothing useful, however, and trashed the office to cover their tracks. Ellsberg, you may recall, was the former Pentagon and State Department employee who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and as a result was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy.

The break-in was only linked to the White House much later, but at the time it caused the collapse of Ellsberg's trial due to evident government misconduct.

Chap Stick microphones used by E. Howard Hunt
and G. Gordon Liddy during the burglary.

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