Howard Hunt Unleashed, Part 2: Watergate - Project Gemstone

True Spies, Ep 186 - Howard Hunt Unleashed: Watergate

+++Disclaimer - This podcast is a dramatization based on a true story and real events. It was created after research from various sources, including E. Howard Hunt’s own writings. For dramatic purposes, the podcast contains fictionalized scenes, including imagined dialogue. The views and opinions expressed in the podcast are those of the characters only and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions held by individuals on which those characters are based. This story also contains strong language throughout.+++

NARRATOR: This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you’ll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You’ll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? This is True Spies.

HOWARD HUNT: Everything about the second break-in screamed ‘walk away’. All my experience as a CIA operative told me I should have said no. 

NARRATOR: I’m Daisy Ridley and this is True Spies, from SPYSCAPE Studios. On the evening of June 17th, 1972, E. Howard Hunt was having dinner with his eldest son, Saint, and his youngest daughter, Lisa. Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, had taken Kevan, their eldest daughter, and David, the baby of the family, to Paris on a long-planned trip. Hunt was meant to accompany them, but at the last minute, he had pulled out, citing work commitments. 

HOWARD HUNT: It was around 9 pm. I kissed Saint and Lisa goodnight and told them I had some work to catch up on with Gordon. They were used to me keeping unusual hours and they knew I had this White House contract, but that was the extent of it.

NARRATOR: Until that day, none of Hunt’s children suspected their father was a former CIA operative. They had always believed whatever the cover story was at the time. Stories that Dorothy always corroborated. What happened in the next few hours would change the family’s fortunes forever. It would plunge them into a crisis from which none of them would fully recover. The nightmare began at around 2.30 am when Saint was suddenly woken from a deep sleep. His father was standing over him, wild, agitated in a way that Saint had never seen him before. It was blind panic, mixed with unstoppable determination.

HOWARD HUNT: I told him to get dressed and to meet me in my bedroom. And to ask no questions.

NARRATOR: Heart racing, the bleary-eyed Saint staggered into his parents’ room. Hunt was fumbling with a large green suitcase. Saint peered inside and saw that it was stuffed with microphones, walkie-talkies, cameras, wires, and a transmitter. In other words: surveillance equipment. Hunt turned to his son, his eyes red and fierce.

HOWARD HUNT: I sent him to the kitchen to get dishwashing gloves and cleaning products. 

NARRATOR: Father and son then loaded it all into Hunt’s Pontiac Firebird. Hunt gunned the engine and they roared off, away from their beautiful Washington home and out towards the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. When they reached the bridge, Hunt slammed the brakes. The car screeched to a halt. Instead of feeling scared, Saint was having the time of his life. He later confessed that this was the closest he’d ever felt to his father. In reality, he was taking part in what would become one of the most notorious conspiracies in US political history.

HOWARD HUNT: We cleaned everything and then hauled the gear over the barrier and tossed it into the canal. Tens of thousands of dollars of equipment junked forever. A few hours later I took Saint to Riggs Bank in Georgetown and opened up my safety deposit box. I took out nearly a hundred grand and stuffed it down the kid’s trousers and then sent him home on the bus. 

NARRATOR: Just a few hours previously, Hunt had been with his partner, a man called G Gordon Liddy. The two of them had watched helplessly as, across the way from their observation post, their five-man team had been arrested by plainclothes DC Police detectives. The five men - three of them Cubans - were planting wiretaps and photographing documents in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC offices were housed in a large collection of buildings known as the Watergate Complex. The ensuing fallout would not only bring about the arrest and convictions of Hunt and Liddy.

HOWARD HUNT: It destroyed the integrity of the Nixon administration in the eyes of the American people. 

NARRATOR: And forced the President to resign in a blaze of scandal two years later. In Part 1 we saw how Howard Hunt helped to run the CIA’s propaganda operations. Now we’ll hear how he helped orchestrate the political scandal of the century. Welcome back to Howard Hunt: Unleashed. Part 2: Project Gemstone.

HOWARD HUNT: My time as a full-time CIA employee came to an end rather abruptly. Someone had the bright idea that we should create a fictional character to boost the public image of the CIA. In the same way that James Bond had lifted the public profile of MI6 in Great Britain. The Cambridge Five scandal there had somewhat tarnished the reputation of the secret services. James Bond had kind of rescued them. I was still doing agency work, but the writing served as a good cover. 

NARRATOR: It’s 1964. With four young children and a good marriage, it was time to concentrate on family.

HOWARD HUNT: So I was posted out to Madrid in ‘64 where I was charged with forging post-Franco alliances that could be useful after the General died. Continuity candidates, I guess you’d call them. 

NARRATOR: Hunt would later reflect on this as one of the happiest periods of his life. He had always held a strong affinity for Spanish culture and was fluent in the language. 

HOWARD HUNT: But most of my time was spent working on the Peter Ward books. 

NARRATOR: Hunt’s Peter Ward novels, while failing to rouse the kind of enthusiasm Ian Fleming’s 007 had captured around the world, were commercially successful enough to garner Hunt a series of book deals. But this idyllic time was short-lived. Hunt’s fiction work was traced back to him - and the CIA - via a copyright registration at the Library Of Congress.

HOWARD HUNT: The higher-ups at the agency panicked, as they were strictly forbidden from running domestic operations, and this kind of Mockingbird stuff - ie, paying me to write pro-CIA thrillers - could be classified as a domestic propaganda exercise.

NARRATOR: Listeners will recall that the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was an elaborate strategy to wield influence, manipulating US domestic media on a massive scale. It was also top-secret and would have been a major problem for the agency if exposed. The CIA’s official remit was still very much international intelligence gathering, not domestic operations.

HOWARD HUNT: So in ‘66 I was ordered to resign my full-time position and get re-hired as a contract worker. Which definitely felt like a demotion. A CIA contract worker, however, experienced, is regarded differently from a full-time spook.

NARRATOR: Hunt’s frustrations were compounded when his daughter Lisa was badly injured in a car accident. With mounting medical bills, Hunt and his wife Dorothy looked at their options. It was decided that Hunt would seek better-paid work in the private sector. But he didn’t exactly stray far from the agency. Through his network, Hunt secured a job working as a consultant for the Robert Mullen Company. Mullen and Co had close ties to US intelligence and even carried out contract work for the CIA on occasion. But officially, Hunt was now working in PR. The family left Spain and resettled themselves in the Washington area, in a ranch-style home with horses and beautiful grounds. Life seemed calm and, despite Lisa’s injuries, mostly happy.

HOWARD HUNT: But I never did quite shake off the Agency mindset. You can take the man out of the Agency, but not the Agency out of the man, y’know. There was an itch I needed to scratch, and one day the opportunity came.

NARRATOR: It was 1971. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, had been in office for two years. The United States had been in the throes of civil unrest since the mid-sixties. A succession of political assassinations shook the nation. Civil Rights protests and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, all drenched in a new vision of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, pitted young against old as never before. To conservatives like Hunt, it felt like the end of times.

HOWARD HUNT: And all those kids getting naked, getting high, and banging their tambourines singing about how we’d entered the Age of Aquarius. Give me a break. 

NARRATOR: President Nixon swept into office on a strong-man ticket. Born into poverty, Nixon was a political outsider, a straight-talking tough guy who was going to get the job done. He had courted the white Southern votes shed by Democrat Lyndon Johnson after he pushed through long-overdue Civil Rights reforms. In addition, Nixon promised to win in Vietnam, a conflict that had opened up a gaping wound in American Society.

HOWARD HUNT: It was clear to me the longhairs were agents of a Soviet mindset that was destined to destroy our nation. For those of us who considered ourselves patriots - an unfashionable idea suddenly - it had become obvious that we were fighting for the soul of America. Yeah, we were at war. With ourselves. 

NARRATOR: But Nixon’s political agenda had been derailed by a series of sensational leaks. Most damaging was a massive information breach that became known as the Pentagon Papers. This was a huge cache of files analyzing the country’s role in the Vietnam War, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert Mcnamara. The files contained incendiary revelations. First, that the government had lied about the extent of US military operations at the start of their intervention. But worse, the Pentagon Papers showed that the government had suppressed reports indicating that this was a war that could never be won. Instead, they had escalated hostilities, resulting in massive US and Vietnamese casualties.

HOWARD HUNT: Which is when I got a call from Chuck Colson. Chuck was an old Brown University man, like myself. He was now working for the administration as a political advisor. He told me the White House was setting up something called the Special Investigations Unit – the SIU. Nixon wanted these leaks shut down by any means necessary. Those were his words. And Colson thought I’d be just the guy to help.

NARRATOR: The old spirit was instantly reignited in Hunt. He could keep his ‘respectable’ PR job, but now he had the chance to earn some extra money doing what he loved most: covert operations. And he’d be working for an administration way more politically aligned with Hunt’s conservative worldview than Lyndon Johnson’s ever was.

HOWARD HUNT: I didn’t think twice about it. I said yes immediately.

NARRATOR: Hunt was summoned to the White House to meet the other agent who would be running this operation. Enter G Gordon Liddy, one of the most extraordinary - and dangerous - characters Hunt was ever to meet in his long career.

HOWARD HUNT: Liddy was this short-ish, jet-black mustachioed ex-FBI guy who was running the SIU. I mean, on paper you couldn’t fault him. Loyal, fanatical even. There was literally nothing this man wouldn’t do. You could’ve asked him to go home and assassinate his wife and kids, and if you told him the order had come from the President himself, he’d have done it. Which, looking back, is why they should never have gone near him.

NARRATOR: And it’s not as if other warning signs weren’t there.

HOWARD HUNT: Liddy had this horribly scarred palm on his right hand. Dorothy made the mistake of asking him how he got it. Without saying a word, he just raised the hand and held it, palm down, over a lit candle. And he kept it there. I promise you, we could hear the skin sizzling. The whole thing was… it was insane. And kind of revolting. And he’d do it every time someone challenged his resolve. Anyway, this went on for about a minute, skin sizzling. The guy never blinked. With his wife Frances watching, like this was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. Eventually, Dorothy shouted at him to stop. She never did trust him after that. And she told me I shouldn’t either.

NARRATOR: Instead, Hunt and Liddy became fast friends. 

HOWARD HUNT: It’s not like Gordon was goose-stepping around the place. We had work to do.

NARRATOR: Indeed they did. The Special Investigations Unit was soon given a nickname - The Plumbers. 

HOWARD HUNT: We were fixing leaks after all.

NARRATOR: And it was time for their first mission: Project Gemstone. The Pentagon Papers had been leaked by a man called Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former Marine officer turned government adviser turned anti-war activist. When the Nixon administration learned of the Washington Post’s decision to publish the leaks, they’d ordered a federal injunction on the grounds of National Security. The dispute went all the way to the highest court in the land, but the Supreme Court wouldn’t play ball. The Pentagon Papers entered the public domain.

HOWARD HUNT: The CIA was asked to conduct what’s called an Assessment Report.

NARRATOR: The CIA report stated that there was a strong likelihood that The Pentagon Papers had reached the KGB.

HOWARD HUNT: Needless to say, the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan. I had strong suspicions myself that Ellsberg was being funded by the Soviets. This felt like the KGB’s work to me. 

NARRATOR: There is no evidence to back this claim. But when Hunt expressed his suspicions to his superiors at the White House, no one disagreed with his assessment. The decision was made by those closest to the President to switch tactics and go after Ellsberg himself. 

HOWARD HUNT: Gordon was ready to assassinate him. He thought that’s what the mission was, initially. Honestly, if I hadn’t set him straight, he probably would have done it. Liddy was the kind of guy who could interpret insinuation, just a nod even, as a direct order.

NARRATOR: Hunt used his contacts in the CIA to obtain a psychological profile of Ellsberg. He hoped it would dredge up some salacious detail that could be used to blackmail Ellsberg.

HOWARD HUNT: But there was nothing juicy there. Nothing we could use to undermine him publicly. So Gordon and I were asked to do a feasibility study regarding a potential break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. We would photograph the files and use the evidence to bring this asshole down once and for all.

NARRATOR: An elaborate scheme was hatched to fly Hunt and Liddy to Los Angeles to case the premises of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and determine the feasibility of a break-in. 

HOWARD HUNT: It was routine spook stuff for us. We got wigs, aliases, and some cash and hopped on a flight to LA. 

NARRATOR: The White House higher-ups dishing out the orders were referred to by Hunt and Liddy as ‘The Principals’. They were adamant that Hunt and Liddy were not to break into the psychiatrist’s office themselves. They made their way to LA undercover, but for the break-in, they needed to put together a team.

HOWARD HUNT: We needed people who were unwaveringly loyal, tough, and not caught up in the nitty-gritty of legalities. So naturally I went to the Cubans.

NARRATOR: The “Cubans” Hunt is referring to were a small team of veterans from his Bay of Pigs days. 

HOWARD HUNT: I flew out to Miami where most of these guys were based and knocked on some doors. I have to admit it was good to see them again. We’d been through a lot together back in April of ‘61. We were brothers. 

NARRATOR: Brothers they were: united in their willingness to mount illegal operations. But the mission also established a new pattern in Hunt and Liddy’s working methods. Despite their combined years of experience, The Plumbers started to display worrying levels of practical ineptitude. Why, is hard to tell. Certainly, their desperation to fulfill the remit of working directly under the president was adding pressure. As a consequence, the Ellsberg project was fraught with unintentionally comic details. From the faulty bargain-basement walkie-talkies they used to the fact that the burglars sprinkled high-dosage painkillers onto the wrecked office to make the break-in look like it had been carried out by a drug addict, it all suddenly started to look amateurish. Worse still, the robbery failed to yield any meaningful results. Ellsberg’s file was missing from the office, and the other papers the burglars photographed offered nothing of real value. But the mission had cemented Hunt and Liddy’s relationship. The men were now closer than ever, united in the thrill of being ‘the guys Nixon had turned to to carry out his nefarious business. 

HOWARD HUNT: Look, maybe we were all a bit rusty. But these were men who’d do anything for this country, and that meant everything.

NARRATOR: By now the atmosphere had shifted inside the Oval Office. With his first term coming to a close and the threat of losing the next election looming over him, Nixon’s paranoia and taste for destroying his enemies had taken on an even more sinister tone. The Plumbers’ remit was about to change, dramatically. And with it, the fortunes of everyone involved.

HOWARD HUNT: It was clear to both Gordon and myself that we’d become the guys who were prepared to do the things no one else wanted to do. In many ways, you could argue we’d become indispensable to the White House.

NARRATOR: As the Spring of 1972 turned to Summer, President Nixon turned his attention to his shot at a second term. But according to Hunt, within the secretive, paranoid world of Nixon’s closest confidantes, it had become clear that the democratic process was the last thing the President was going to rely on for re-election.

HOWARD HUNT: Dorothy and I were invited to an event called An Evening At The White House. The President stood receiving people, as is the way with those things. I shook hands with him and told him about Chuck Colson hiring me to work for him, and Nixon looked at me for a moment. There was a barely perceptible flicker in his eyes and he just said, yes, he knew all about that. It was as much as he could do to say I know what you guys are doing, and honestly, it felt like a thank you. I was elated.

NARRATOR: As we have already laid out in part one, Hunt was drawn to what he described as ‘Men of Action’. One doesn’t need to be a trained psychologist to see them as projections of his father, a distant man whom Hunt idolized nonetheless. We need look no further than the fact that his personal nickname for Liddy was ‘Daddy’ to get the sense that Hunt’s personal baggage was clouding his judgment.

HOWARD HUNT: That ‘Daddy’ business was a shortening of the expression ‘you’re the daddy’. You’ve never heard that? No, instead we have to all agree that Colson, Nixon, and Liddy were all father figures.

NARRATOR: Whatever Hunt’s motivations, the tide of his luck had turned. The Plumbers had morphed into henchmen for a new outfit: the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Otherwise known by its unfortunate acronym, ‘CREEP’. The name was fitting in more ways than one. Things got moving when Hunt was visited by Liddy one morning in the late Spring of 1972. Liddy informed Hunt that CREEP had a new mission. At that time, anti-Communist sentiment was at its peak. The Nixon White House had become fixated on the idea that Nixon’s rivals had been receiving campaign funds from sources linked to Soviet Russia. Even Nixon himself was convinced that North Vietnam and even Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba were funneling cash into the Democrat’s campaign for the Presidency.

HOWARD HUNT: So the mission was to break into the offices of the DNC and find the evidence we needed to pin this on them.

NARRATOR: Not only that but with the White House’s obsession with wire-tapping already out of control, the Plumbers were also charged with the task of installing bugging devices. The DNC - the Democratic National Committee - had its headquarters in the vast Watergate Complex in the so-called Foggy Bottom district, located on the Western edge of Washington DC, bordering the Potomac River. Watergate’s distinctive curves were soon to become known the world over. The complex also housed a luxury hotel.

HOWARD HUNT: We put the team back together and once again, we had to recon the building so we could put together a credible plan.

NARRATOR: The Plumbers needed sophisticated surveillance equipment. So Liddy recruited an electronics expert named James McCord. Which was when they ran into their first problem.

HOWARD HUNT: McCord was a weirdo. He never seemed to stand in the light. He was always hovering, literally, in the shadows. 

NARRATOR: McCord overestimated how quickly he could get the specialist equipment made. The project immediately started to incur delays, something that put the ‘Principals’ - the higher-ups who’d ordered the break-in - on edge. There was also the issue of cost. McCord had demanded $30,000 for the equipment, which was a lot of money back then. There were a ton of other fees involved, all of which had to be approved. And with McCord’s reliability in question, this added even more pressure for Liddy and Hunt to get the job done.

HOWARD HUNT: Luckily we had a man on the inside.

NARRATOR: Tom Gregory, an employee of the DNC, had been convinced by Hunt and Liddy that this operation was a matter of national security. Gregory agreed to get McCord into the building so he could do a tour of the offices on the 6th floor and make an accurate map for the break-in.

HOWARD HUNT: We had our first attempt all lined up. I suggested we go in as delivery men – that seemed the best way to arouse the least suspicion and get us the access we needed.

NARRATOR: Security at the DNC was quite lax at this stage. But when there was a completely unrelated attempt at a break-in around the same time, the DNC recruited a security company to watch the offices at night. 

HOWARD HUNT: So then we came up with plan number two.

NARRATOR: Hunt and his team decided to pose as businessmen visiting Washington for their annual conference. They created a fake company called ‘Ameritas’ and, with Dorothy Hunt’s help, booked the Watergate’s Continental Room, which was close to the DNC offices, for a banquet dinner. Hunt and his team would hold their banquet, and then, once the catering staff had gone home, would head to the DNC offices to carry out the operation. At first, everything went according to plan.

HOWARD HUNT: We had a great evening. Whiskey, cigars, tipped the staff well. We waited in the Continental Room till we had the all-clear that the DNC people had all gone home. It was getting late, we were ready to make our move. But someone heard the security guard coming to check over the place, so we hid in the store room. 

NARRATOR: But unfortunately for Hunt and his crew, the guard also locked the door to the Continental Room. They slept the night there, and slid out, bleary-eyed, the next day, back to the drawing board.

HOWARD HUNT: I knew Gordon liked his Scotch. I warned him against drinking it at the Watergate though, as we’d had to use the whisky bottles to piss in.

NARRATOR: It was now May of 1972. Pressure from the Principals to finish the job had not abated. So Hunt and Liddy hatched a new plan. The only way that they hadn’t tried to break in was through the underground carpark that linked the various sections of the Watergate complex. They could park and unload in one area and then travel across to another and gain entry through the service lift. Just a locked door stood between them and the sixth floor, where the DNC offices were Hunt and Liddy, once again advised by their ‘Principals’, had been instructed to run the operation from a separate, rented room in the complex. In the run-up to this break-in, Liddy had asked Hunt to stash over $100,000 of ‘emergency funds’.

HOWARD HUNT: It was standard knowledge in the special ops areas of the CIA that if a mission went bad, the agency would take care of you. The emergency funds were there for immediate use if, I don’t know, someone got arrested and needed bail or travel money. We always used cash so it couldn’t be traced.

NARRATOR: The cash, supplied through redirected campaign funds, was not as untraceable as it should have been. But for now, the thought of the operation failing still felt remote to both Hunt and Liddy.

HOWARD HUNT: In the background, things were starting to happen. Like warning signs. Premonitions. But we were too determined to get the job done to see them for what they were.

NARRATOR: Remember Frank Sturgis, who’d been recruited to the Plumbers by Hunt? He had attained a certain public notoriety for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. When he showed up at LAX airport for his transfer to Washington, Sturgis bumped into Jack Anderson, a well-known investigative reporter. Anderson knew exactly who Sturgis was. He was instantly suspicious to find a known black ops agent heading to the nation’s capital. Anderson had been a thorn in Nixon’s side for years. He’d relentlessly pursued every single lead he could to expose the rotten core at the heart of Nixon’s politics.

HOWARD HUNT: Colson and I had already discussed having Anderson assassinated. He thought I’d be the right person to do it with my CIA background. I mentioned it to Liddy, and we contemplated a range of options, most of them involving poison. Then Liddy proposed he just stab Anderson to death and make it look like he’d been mugged. We took this final suggestion back to Colson but the plan was shelved. I don’t know who canned it, but maybe they’d started to realize how crazy Liddy was.

NARRATOR: Sturgis bumping into Anderson, and trying awkwardly to fob him off (and thereby arousing further suspicion), was not good news for the Plumbers. On May 26th, 1972, the five men attempted to break into the DNC offices once again. The team comprised: Frank Sturgis, Bernie Barker, Eugenio Martinez - who were to photograph the documents, lock-picker Virgilio Gonzalez, plus tech wizard James McCord. But they hit another snag when Gonzalez couldn’t pick the lock. The mission was aborted - again. The team assembled for another attempt on May 28th. This time Gonzalez had the correct equipment and the break-in was successful.

HOWARD HUNT: We were elated. Even Liddy, who was not known to show these kinds of feelings, was visibly relieved.

NARRATOR: But the celebrations didn’t last long. McCord, after installing the wiretap, got spooked and insisted they all vacate the office before the others had finished taking pictures of the confidential documents. And then, when they tried to activate the wiretap, it transpired that McCord had bugged the wrong phone. But that wasn’t the only thing he’d failed to deliver on...

HOWARD HUNT: McCord told us he’d get the photos developed. He said he had a contact. But after a couple of weeks, nothing. So I took the rolls of film off him and got Bernie Barker to get them processed. I don’t know how but he somehow misunderstood my instructions. Rather than take them to an off-radar joint, he took them to just your everyday photo shop. So we had to pay the guy off, the guy who developed them, to keep him quiet. The photos were good, though. They were well received by the Principals.

NARRATOR: So good that the White House Principals issued new orders. The burglars were to return to the DNC, fix the bug, take more photos, and install a new wiretap. This time in the office of the emerging front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination, George McGovern.

HOWARD HUNT: Liddy showed up at my office and told me we’d been ordered to go back in. My heart sank. Going back another time felt all wrong. I couldn’t say why, but it just did. I told Liddy, and I insisted he take my sentiments back to the Principals. Their response? You’re going back.

NARRATOR: For the rest of his life, Hunt would ruminate on what he could have spared himself, his family, and even the nation if he’d listened to his gut and called it quits there and then.

HOWARD HUNT: Wild Bill Donovan used to say, if it don’t feel right, it ain’t. 

NARRATOR: But Hunt stayed on board the project. 

HOWARD HUNT: Orders were orders, and these came from the President himself. And that was Liddy’s power too, y’know. He’d locked in, and nothing, I mean nothing was going to stop him. I think, if I’m honest, I was frightened of what he’d do if I resisted him.

NARRATOR: And as if they needed it, there was one more omen that should have made them wonder about whether to proceed. Tom Gregory, their inside man at the DNC, had suddenly resigned. The accumulating pressure of assisting the Plumbers had overwhelmed him. We return, then, to where we began this story: the evening of June 17th, 1972. Dorothy Hunt was in Paris with Kevan and David. Howard Hunt had just said goodbye to Saint and Lisa and met with Gordon Liddy near the Watergate building.

HOWARD HUNT: We approached the underground car park to find our five guys waiting for us.

NARRATOR: To get in through the door in the underground car park, the Plumbers had taped the latch on the door. But when they checked later, the tape had been removed. He told Hunt in passing that he’d replaced it. Hunt shrugged it off. The five burglars headed for the sixth floor. Hunt and Liddy went to their rented room. But without Gregory’s inside information, they had no idea who was going to be in the office. It turns out there were a couple of workers staying late. The burglars had no option but to wait. 

HOWARD HUNT: A voice in my head was screaming ‘abort’. But every time I looked at Liddy, something in his eyes said ‘Don’t you dare.’ So we waited. And waited…

NARRATOR: Eventually, at 12.45 am on June 18th, the offices were vacated and the men could break in. But unbeknown to Hunt and the other Plumbers, a security guard had spotted that the tape he’d already removed once from the door latch downstairs, had been replaced. Instantly suspicious, he called the police.

HOWARD HUNT: The thing you need to remember is that taking those photos took forever. You had only 24 shots on a roll of film, so one of the guys had to be reloading while the other was photographing the papers. It was agonizing.

NARRATOR: Three undercover officers, who just happened to be a few minutes away from the Watergate building, had picked up the dispatcher’s broadcast that a possible burglary was underway. 

HOWARD HUNT: Just after 2 am one of the guys calls me to say that he’d seen flashlights. But they were on the 8th floor. Liddy and I rushed to the window and watched in horror as the lights descended to the 7th and then the 6th floor. 

NARRATOR: The police were more than a little surprised to find not one, but five men, in suits, in the DNC offices. The men were found to have a lot of cash on them and in the case of Bernie Barker, a notebook full of addresses, including Hunt’s phone number. The police immediately arrested them all. Each of the men gave aliases instead of their real names. A strategy that worked until McCord - who seemed to have the worst luck of anyone on the team - was recognized by someone at the police station as a member of the Campaign to Reelect the President. The cat, as they say, was out of the bag.

HOWARD HUNT: Gordon and I cleared out of there as fast as possible. We took everything, all the gear. We agreed to split up, and Gordon then instructed me to get the rest of the emergency cash. 

NARRATOR: In truth, the Plumbers had not rehearsed a scenario in which they got caught. All Hunt and Liddy could hope for was that the White House would step in and shut the thing down as quickly as possible. But in fact, the Principals had only one objective: to cover up their involvement and to hang the Plumbers out to dry. Realizing that the money they had put aside was traceable to misappropriated campaign funds, Liddy shredded it.

HOWARD HUNT: It was pretty much downhill from then on. Twenty-five years of loyal service to my country was about to disappear in a puff of smoke.

NARRATOR: The eventual trials and scandals that followed are well documented. After trying to first get the FBI to shelve the investigation, the Nixon administration sought to distance itself from Project Gemstone. But due to the persistence of the media and the eventual turning of six of the seven Plumbers against their bosses, Nixon was forced to hand over the White House tapes. The recordings were full of incriminating evidence. The resulting impeachment forced his resignation. 

HOWARD HUNT: The trial judge was known as ‘Maximum John’. And I found out why when he initially handed me a 35-year sentence. Thirty-five years for doing the bidding of my president. 

NARRATOR: Hunt’s loyalty to ‘men of action’ had finally had its day of reckoning. His sentence was eventually commuted. He served just three and half years in prison. Only Liddy, that loyal soldier, that fanatical admirer of Hitler, refused to turn against the Principals. He ended up serving eight years. But there was one more, tragic, consequence of the break-in.

HOWARD HUNT: While our worlds collapsed around us, we needed money. We all had families to support. And we’d gone into this thing on behalf of some very powerful people. The least they could do was make sure we were looked after. And in truth, they needed to keep us quiet. Looking after us was also buying our silence.

NARRATOR: They needed cash and they needed it fast. Hunt reached out to his superiors but to no avail. Hunt’s wife, Dorothy had stuck by him through the hell of the media and police frenzy that followed the break-in. One day she received instructions from a mysterious ‘Mr Rivers’ to collect the money that would support the Plumbers while they awaited trial. She was asked first to calculate all of their monthly expenses and then sent to a nominated collection point at a certain time to pick up the cash. Hunt and Dorothy would then make sure the money reached its intended recipients.

HOWARD HUNT: She was incredible. Never questioned it. Just got on with the job. Only the money wasn’t enough, and it started to dry up. I called Colson again and warned him of the consequences of us being left out to dry. And lo and behold, the money started to reappear. But it still wasn’t enough. I just didn’t know what these people were playing at.

NARRATOR: With their funds dwindling, the Hunts were forced to face the very real prospect of bankruptcy.

HOWARD HUNT: So we decided to invest the remaining capital we had - about ten grand - in a string of Holiday Inns owned by Dorothy’s cousin-in-law. We hoped it would act like an insurance policy, that there’d be a job waiting for me after the trial.

NARRATOR: Dorothy decided to fly the money out to her relative herself. It would also be a welcome break from the intensity of everything that had happened to her family in the six months since the Watergate break-in. But Dorothy’s plane crashed on landing, killing nearly everyone onboard.

HOWARD HUNT: I got straight on a flight to Chicago. They couldn’t confirm or deny her death at first. Then I was shown into a room and some jewelry mixed up with some black ash was laid out in front of me. I spotted Dorothy’s signet ring. And then I knew. Then the attendant says “That takes care of body eighteen”. And right away, a voice in my head whispered: this was your fault. You did this. 

NARRATOR: The loss devastated Hunt and, many say, contributed to his decision to testify against the Principals.

HOWARD HUNT: With Dorothy gone, I had nothing left to lose.

NARRATOR: Wild speculation followed Dorothy’s death. Many suggested foul play. And the sum of money she was carrying - money that was retrieved from her handbag from the wreckage of the crash - was rumored to be as much as $2 million. Way more than the ten thousand Hunt knew she was carrying. Some have argued it was money the Hunts were going to use to disappear. Others say it was yet more hush money, designed to buy the Plumbers’ silence. Either way, Hunt refused to be drawn on the subject.

HOWARD HUNT: What does any of it matter? Dorothy was the finest woman I’d ever known. She was a damn good mother, a good wife, and she was as smart as anyone. Was she involved in something I didn’t know about? I have no idea. All I can say is she would have only done so for the good of our family. She accepted me for who I was, but she wasn’t like me. She was one of the good ones. No one could say that of me. 

NARRATOR: Everette Howard Hunt died on January 23rd, 2007. He was survived by his second wife, Laura, and his six children. And what of Hunt himself? How does an idealistic young man, full of patriotic fervor, get sucked into a dark vortex of clandestine operations, where right and wrong become twisted by the agendas of those seeking power at any cost? How does a man who thought he was fighting on behalf of the country he loved, to protect it from the threat of communism, end up undermining the very democratic process he had sworn to uphold? Was the approval and camaraderie of these ‘men of action’ too powerful to resist?

HOWARD HUNT: You know what I think? I think intelligence work is like drug addiction. You do it first because it feels good. Then you take a little more, and you tell yourself you’re in control. Then, by the time it stops feeling good, and you realize what the hell is going on, it’s too late. You can’t get out. And you’ve destroyed everything and everyone around you. Everyone you hold dear. That was my experience anyway.

NARRATOR: I’m Daisy Ridley, join us next time for another thrilling installment of True Spies. If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating, or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a few friends?