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| G Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary - on a Debate Tour - people would buy a ticket to hear them speak. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone_File
How G. Gordon Liddy Bungled Watergate With an Office-Supply Request
The story of Operation Gemstone, his totally bonkers, Nazi-themed dirty tricks wish list.
Even now, 50 years later, it’s hard to identify the moment when the burglary and arrests at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, tipped from an odd sideshow to the main event. As inevitable and foregone as President Richard Nixon’s fall might seem in hindsight, what’s remarkable looking back at the events of 1972 to 1974 is how close he came to getting away with the whole thing — how well the cover-up held for so long and how narrowly he came to barreling right past the embarrassment of what his press secretary called a “third-rate burglary.” Months later, after all, he was reelected by the largest presidential landslide in American history.
Lost in our memory of Watergate is that the DNC burglary — itself one of the most bizarre moments in American politics — was actually the least zany (and illegal) plan the Nixon campaign had contemplated. The written record is replete with forgotten primary and secondary sources, from which this account is drawn, that reveal how the break-in wasn’t some rogue operation but part of a much larger playbook. Liddy, a reelection campaign operative, started out with a series of proposals, from which the plan that would lead to the Watergate was selected; those plans involved specially equipped surveillance planes, kidnappings, illegal, laundered campaign donations, sex workers sent to lure Democratic powerbrokers back to a king-sized bed on a houseboat and wiretaps and spies galore — not just at the Watergate but inside the Democratic presidential campaign’s headquarters as well.
But first, to present the plans, Liddy had prepared a series of professional graphics outlining the options — and for that, he needed an easel.
George Gordon Battle Liddy, who died last year at age 90 after having reinvented himself as a syndicated radio host — helping to launch in the 1990s the soon-to-be-archetypal right-wing talk show that wrapped him in patriotic motifs and positioned him as one of last bulwarks standing athwart a nation gone soft — had no business being anywhere close to the American presidency.
Journalist Fred Emery would later describe Liddy as “an exceptionally articulate man with rambunctious right-wing views.” A self-styled tough guy, Liddy’s recollections of his childhood in Hoboken emphasized the bad — from beatings by his grandmother by day to fears of ravenous giant moths out to get him while he slept by night — but he was hardly a hard-luck case; he came from a wealthy family who even amid the Depression employed a maid and grew up with fencing lessons. He had long sought to prove himself tough and worthy on life’s fields of honor. Fourteen-year-old George, as he was known then, had been disconsolate for a month following Japan’s surrender in 1945 because World War II came to an end before he was old enough to fight. He later found his dreams of combat glory similarly frustrated by a Korean War assignment to an Army anti-aircraft gun unit in New York City, where action came in the form of ogling passing women using the high-powered gun sights meant to track incoming Soviet bombers.
He eventually pursued law school and followed into the FBI his uncle, a distinguished federal agent who according to family lore was present at the shooting of John Dillinger (there’s no sign in FBI records that he actually was). Liddy loved the work, but not the pay, which stretched his large family — he and his wife had five children under the age of five before they reconsidered the rhythm method — and he left the bureau, eventually settling into work for a New York district attorney. Later, he tried politics, unsuccessfully running for Congress, and ended up at Nixon’s Treasury Department working on law enforcement issues after serving loyally on the presidential campaign.
That first chapter of his D.C. career demonstrated his unique willingness to fudge ethical lines: Upon starting as a political appointee, he used a special set of department badges — intended for use by CIA officers working undercover — to mock up his own “Treasury agent” credentials and grant himself permission to carry a gun.
With an outsized ego and sense of his own capabilities, he tried for numerous senior law enforcement roles before finally winning a transfer to the White House in the summer of 1971 to work on a portfolio the Nixon administration described as “narcotics, bombings and guns.” His timing proved fortuitous; he arrived at the White House the day after the Pentagon Papers broke in June 1971, and soon found himself assigned to work with the oddball team assembled to root out leaks and undermine the president’s enemies, men like RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who was behind the Pentagon Papers revelations. “[Liddy] projected a warrior-type charisma and seemed to possess a great deal of physical courage,” recalled Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., an aide who initially led what was known as the Special Investigations Unit. When they first met and shook hands, Liddy crushed Krogh’s hand with his vise-like grip, and it didn’t take long for outlandish stories about the new colleague to start circulating — like the time Liddy as a prosecutor fired a pistol in a courtroom to emphasize a point. He liked to boast to White House secretaries about how to kill someone with a pencil.
Krogh’s SIU introduced Liddy to E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer and pot-boiler espionage novelist who had also been assigned to the team. Hunt himself seemed an unlikely clandestine operator — a father of four with a large house in suburban Maryland, complete with horses and stables, he split his time between being vice president for Mullen & Company, a boutique D.C. PR agency, and consulting work with the White House, where he had a small office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building.
A World War II veteran and early employee of the CIA, Hunt had turned intrigue into not just a career, but an all-encompassing passion: Writing under three different pen names, he’d published nearly 40 espionage novels — sometimes as rapidly as twice a year — while working for the agency in assignments like helping to overthrow the Communist government of Guatemala and assisting with the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Unlike his fellow practitioners Ian Fleming and David Cornwell (who wrote under the pen name John le Carré), who defined for the world the esprit de corps of British intelligence and the great game of espionage, Hunt’s books existed largely in obscurity — solid sellers, but rarely memorable and never a lasting commercial success.
His agency career experienced the same middling success that his writing did; he never reached either the upper ranks of the agency nor held any major or high-profile postings. In fact, lost in the later shorthand biographies of Hunt was the crucial distinction that he’d never actually been a true covert operator for the CIA, only on the political side of the house — operating under State Department cover to work dissidents, assess political parties and spread propaganda.
But Hunt and Liddy hit it off immediately. Liddy appeared to have wandered right out of the pages of one of Hunt’s novels. “He seemed decisive and action-oriented, impatient with paperwork and the lucubrations of bureaucracy,” Hunt recalled. They lunched together in the White House cafeteria and drank together after work at one of Hunt’s two social clubs: the Army and Navy Club, just north of the White House, or the City Tavern Club in Georgetown. “They were narcissists in love with the romance of espionage,” one Watergate chronicler said. Hunt especially loved his new role and hardly tried to hide it; he updated his own entry in the 1972-73 edition of Who’s Who to list the White House as his office address.
Liddy later recalled the unit’s mission in grandiose terms for something where most of the staff were part-time: “Our organization had been directed to eliminate subversion of the secrets of the administration.” He nicknamed their team the “Organisation Der Emerlingen Schutz Staffel Angehörigen” — ODESSA, for short, a confounding moniker that pleased Liddy greatly despite (or perhaps because) it was the name of a long-rumored secret network of German SS officers after World War II. Even while Liddy marked the group’s papers with the ODESSA name, the group would be known to history by a label given off-hand by the grandmother of another aide, David Young: When she asked him what he was doing in the White House, Young explained, simply, he was helping the president stop some leaks. She replied, proudly, “Oh, you’re a plumber!”
The name stuck.
Through the summer and fall of 1971, Hunt and Liddy’s overeager imaginations ran wild in Room 16 of the Old Executive Office Building, across West Executive Avenue from the White House. There they schemed to target Ellsberg and even organized and executed a burglary of his psychiatrist’s office in California, hoping to find incriminating records they could use to undermine Ellsberg’s credibility in the media. At another point, they plotted how to firebomb the Brookings Institution as part of a plot to steal documents from the think tank’s safe.
Liddy’s antics worried some in the White House, but rather than shut him down or block his wildest schemes, he was instead foisted on the president’s reelection campaign as 1971 ended, to head up intelligence gathering efforts. There wasn’t a great deal of mystery to Liddy’s new secret mission on the campaign. A few days after he started on the reelection effort, Liddy stopped back at the White House to complain to White House counsel John Dean: The deputy campaign director, Jeb Stuart Magruder, was going around introducing Liddy as the “our man in charge of dirty tricks.” As Liddy said, “Magruder’s an asshole, John, and he’s going to blow my cover.” As Dean later recalled, he, annoyed, called Magruder: If you’ve hired someone to carry out your dirty tricks, it’s best if you don’t advertise that fact.
Over several weeks that winter of 1972, Hunt and Liddy criss-crossed the country trying to build a covert campaign dirty-tricks team. The two men treated themselves well on the road — traveling first-class, staying in the nicest rooms at the fanciest hotels and recruiting over meals at top restaurants, justifying the lavish expenses because, as Liddy would explain, “[Potential recruits] must believe that money is no object to their employers if they are to accept the risk of that kind of employment.” Beyond the money, though, Liddy wanted to signal that he would weather whatever was necessary to protect the identities of those who joined his team. At dinner in California with a woman he hoped to recruit as a potential plant in the Democratic campaign, he asked her to hold out her lit cigarette lighter, then placed his palm over the flame, locking eyes with her as his flesh blackened and smoked. Shaken by the demonstration of loyalty, the woman declined Liddy’s offer.
In Miami, he and Hunt tapped Bernard Barker, a onetime undercover CIA operative Hunt met while the two were helping to plan the Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and Barker’s network of Cuban émigrés to build a squad of counter-demonstrators, interviewing a dozen men who impressed Liddy with their toughness. Between them, Hunt bragged to his partner, the men had killed 22, including two hanged from a garage beam. At the end of their conversation, the leader spoke in Spanish to Barker, who laughed. “He called you a falcon —,” Barker translated back to Liddy, clutching his hands like talons, “— the bird other birds fear.” (The name would become Liddy’s self-appointed code name for that year’s operations.) Hunt also recruited a locksmith who could serve as the team’s covert-entry specialist, a man who had once been part of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s secret police. Liddy was so pleased by the viciousness of his new colleagues that he pulled Bud Krogh aside when they crossed paths outside the White House and told him, “Bud, if you want anyone killed, just let me know.”
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