Even before G. Gordon Liddy held his hand to a flame as a party trick, he was an FBI legend. Liddy once ran a background check on his fiancée (he called it a ‘routine precautionary measure’) and was arrested - the first time - in Kansas City during a black bag job. And that was even before Liddy moved to the White House where he boasted to secretaries about how to kill someone with a pencil.

Operation Gemstone‍

Was it any surprise then, that Liddy had a Nazi-themed list of dirty tricks and a master plan for Operation Gemstone - many of his ‘jobs’ intelligence-related break-ins to gather intel for President Richard Nixon?

Liddy once summed up his life’s philosophy by explaining how he held his hand over a candle flame until it burned: “Suffering. That was the key. Whatever the consequences of what I do, I must accept and endure them - outlast suffering to achieve my goals…”

With the 2023 debut of HBO’s White House Plumbers series, SPYSCAPE ran its own background check on George Gordon Battle Liddy, the FBI’s spectacularly bonkers special agent. Was Liddy off the rails or actually as clever as a fox? We’ll let you decide. 

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Liddy's unique moral compass

Born in Brooklyn, Liddy was a law graduate, US Army artillery officer during the Korean War, and FBI Special Agent under J. Edgar Hoover.

After Pentagon Papers’ whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the US government was lying about the Vietnam War, Liddy was assigned to a Nixon White House special investigations unit alongside former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Liddy codenamed their operation Odessa, but the unit was known as “the Plumbers” because they aimed to plug leaks by covert means that included breaking into offices to gather intelligence.

Liddy saw it as a dual role: “One was, in my judgment, legal. It involved national security and not politics, and that was the activities of the Odessa Group when we were, for example, trying to determine whether Daniel Ellsberg was a romantic loner of the left or whether he was an agent of the KGB,” Liddy said. “On the other hand, when I was no longer with the Odessa Group and we were engaging in a political campaign and seeking political intelligence, clearly what was done was illegal but not wrong - morally wrong.”
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Hunt’s take on Liddy‍

When former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt met Liddy for the first time it was an immediate meeting of the minds - two very eccentric minds. Hunt saw Liddy as a taut, wisecracking extrovert, a former prosecutor who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress and landed a job with the Nixon administration in payment of that political debt.

“Liddy and I liked each other at once,” Hunt recalled in Undercover. “Liddy provided comic relief for us that was much in contrast to the grim ‘miens’ encountered elsewhere in the White House. Instead of using the pat ‘John Doe’ to refer to an unknown person, Liddy energized the identification with ‘Tondelayo Schwarzkopf’.”

A flying enthusiast, Liddy had photographs of himself taken in the classic barnstormer poses of an earlier time. In one of their earliest jobs together, Liddy and Hunt led the burglary of the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but they couldn’t find any intel to smear the whistleblower.

Liddy had ambitious plans for the Plumbers under Operation Gemstone. He wanted to sabotage the air-conditioning at the Democratic National Convention in Miami to make delegates uncomfortable and gaff-prone, then hire prostitutes to entrap Democratic politicians with hidden cameras and honey trap stings.

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The Watergate break-in

In light of Nixon’s infamous ‘enemies list’, Liddy also punted the idea of murdering syndicated journalist Jack Anderson, who Liddy saw as a national security threat. (FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called Anderson “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures”.)

Most of Liddy’s criminal plans remained on the drawing board, although the infamous Watergate burglaries pushed ahead. Unfortunately for the plumbers, a security guard spotted tape over a lock and called the police. Liddy and Hunt were leading the D.C. break-in from a hotel room across the street using walkie-talkies that soon crackled with fear:  “It looks like… guns!” one burglar whispered. “They’ve got guns. It’s trouble.”

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Liddy: shooting his mouth off? ‍

It seemed the game was up when Liddy was convicted in 1973 of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping after the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee HQ. Liddy was sentenced to 20 years but served just over four. He was unrepentant. “I’d do it again for my president,” Liddy said years later. 

After prison, Liddy turned to acting, appearing as a recurring character on Miami Vice as a drug smuggler named Captain Real Estate. Despite his screwball antics, Liddy found fame later in life as a radio talk-show host with a right-wing bent. Liddy, who once oversaw the Treasury Department’s firearms policy, had a syndicated program on WJFK-FM (106.7) in Fairfax, Va., where he enjoyed ranting about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).

He was heavily criticized for telling listeners to take a shot if they were confronted by an ATF agent but Liddy stressed he was talking only about self-defense, not unprovoked shooting. “If they smash in unannounced, screaming at you and assault you with lethal force, you have two choices,” Liddy said. “You can die under their bullets, or you can shoot back and try to defend your wife and family.”

Liddy recommended listeners aim for the head or groin, noting the federales wore body armor.

Liddy died, age 90, in 2021, still unrepentant: “I was serving the president of the United States and I would do a Watergate again - but with a much better crew.”