IN WASHINGTON, A FEW DAYS LATER, the first recruit to the Special Investigations Unit entered Egil Krogh’s office. G. Gordon Liddy, attorney and former FBI agent, stepped forward and crushed Krogh’s hand in a vicelike shake. Forty years old, with a thick mustache and the posture of a flagpole, Liddy was known around Washington as intelligent, fiercely loyal, and something of a loose cannon.
“I could kill a man with a pencil in a matter of seconds,” he was known to brag.
Krogh, Liddy, and David Young moved into room 16 on the ground floor of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. The suite had several offices and a reception area. A window, behind steel bars, looked out at Seventeenth Street.
Kathy Chenow, a White House secretary, sat at the front desk. Chenow arranged for a secure phone to be installed and, to prevent whatever was going to happen in room 16 from being traced to the White House, had the phone bill sent to her home address.
The fifth and final member of the team showed up later that week.
“A short, dapper man,” Krogh later said of Howard Hunt. “He could blend easily into any group without drawing undue attention to himself, a valuable characteristic for a spy.” Hunt, formerly of the CIA, had been assigned to the group by Charles Colson.
The Secret Service put a new lock on the outer door and gave each team member a key. One of the team taped up a sign with a single handwritten word: Plumbers—a joking reference to their mission of finding and fixing leaks. The name stuck. The Special Investigations Unit would become known to history as “the Plumbers.”
* * *
“A mood of manic resolve to carry out our duties drove us forward,” Krogh recalled. “The unit had been given a critical responsibility by the president.”
In an office with a conference table and a blackboard, the Plumbers dissected Daniel Ellsberg. They sifted through all available records on him, from recent FBI files to security checks that had been done over the years. They read about the many women he’d dated, going back to his college years, wondering if any of them might actually have been Soviet agents. Of particular interest were details that could be used to humiliate and discredit Ellsberg—tales of recreational drug use, and rumors that Daniel and Patricia enjoyed visiting nudist camps.
Liddy summarized his view of Ellsberg: “Unstable, self-righteous, egotistical.”
“The picture that emerged,” concurred Hunt, “was that of a brilliant, unstable man.”
The most enticing tidbit was that, sometime in 1968, soon after returning from Vietnam, Ellsberg had begun seeing a psychiatrist. He must have told his doctor, Lewis Fielding, all sorts of intimate and potentially embarrassing details.
“The more Liddy and I discussed both the problem of, and the opportunity presented by, Dr. Fielding’s file,” Hunt recalled, “the more apparent it became that the file should be photographed by surreptitious means.”
Liddy proposed a late-night visit to Fielding’s office—a “black bag job,” he called it. He assured Egil Krogh he’d learned such skills in the FBI.
Krogh had no experience with this sort of thing. On August 11, he drafted a memo to John Ehrlichman recommending: “A covert operation be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst.” Below the proposal, Krogh typed two words:
Approve ____ Disapprove ____
Ehrlichman dashed the initial “E” in the Approve slot. Underneath, he handwrote: “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.”
* * *
A few days later, Howard Hunt led Gordon Liddy into a Washington, D.C., apartment building. A man they knew only as “Steve” let them into a small studio, nearly empty of furniture.
Hunt and Liddy had promised a very nervous Egil Krogh to use “good tradecraft”—expert spying techniques, in other words. This is what had brought them to the CIA safe house. Steve, a specialist with the agency’s Technical Services Division, had agreed to prepare a false identity and disguise for Liddy. Hunt was set; he had these things from previous operations.
Steve handed Liddy a Kansas driver’s license in the name of George F. Leonard. Liddy got a Social Security card with this name, club membership cards, and other “pocket litter”—ordinary things like torn train tickets and scribbled notes that make a wallet look real. Steve also gave Liddy a sheet of paper with basic facts about Kansas. Liddy promised to memorize the information.
Next, Steve fit a wig of long, dark brown hair over Liddy’s head and snipped the edges to make it look natural. He gave Liddy a pair of glasses with lenses as thick as bottle bottoms.
Then Steve demonstrated a miniature 35mm camera that could be hidden in the bottom of a tobacco pouch, with a tiny hole in the pouch for the lens. He also gave Liddy something he called a “gait-altering device,” a lead insert placed in the shoe that caused the wearer to limp. The limp, in theory, would distract witnesses from noticing other details.
“It was a rather unsophisticated item,” Hunt conceded. “A pebble would have done as well.”
* * *
“I am not guilty.”
Standing in a Los Angeles courtroom on August 16, speaking in a firm voice, Daniel Ellsberg repeated his plea after each charge against him was read. Outside the courthouse, reporters gathered around Daniel and Patricia. Ellsberg, now facing up to thirty-five years in prison, insisted that the contents of the Pentagon Papers justified his actions.
“The public agrees with me that they have a right to know,” he told reporters.
He said he was looking forward to his trial, because it would raise issues the country needed to confront. “They are issues of life and death, war and peace. They’re incomparably more important than what happens to me.”
Several observers commented on Ellsberg’s intensity, the fire in his eyes. “It was almost like he glowed with this fervor,” noted one reporter.
With the trial set to begin early the next year, Daniel and Patricia flew to New York and stayed at the apartment she still owned in Manhattan. Any time her husband started to discuss the case in the apartment, Patricia would say, “Shhhhh.” She was convinced the government had her place bugged. If it was important, she and Daniel would step onto the balcony, where the noise of the traffic fourteen floors below drowned out their whispered words.
Patricia was not being paranoid. She knew for a fact that FBI agents were questioning her friends and family. She found out that agents had interviewed her financial advisor and doctor, and had even gone to her dentist and asked to see her X-rays. The agents were searching for evidence of disloyalty, or anything else to use against the Ellsbergs—though what they hoped to discover on Patricia’s teeth is difficult to say. Anyway, the dentist had refused to cooperate.
In California, agents interrogated Carol Cummings and many of Ellsberg’s friends. “They asked me a whole lot of weird questions,” one friend recalled, “‘What kinds of emotional troubles is he having? What kinds of wild things is he doing?’ They were really looking for dirt.”
From top to bottom: “Plumbers” G. Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, and White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh, who coordinated Liddy and Hunt’s investigation of Daniel Ellsberg.
The manager of the Sandstone Ranch, a nudist retreat, remembered two men showing up and asking questions about Ellsberg. Even though the men were, as the manager recalled, “in a naked state,” there was something about them that screamed government agent.
“Psychologically, it’s not so bothersome, because we believe in what we’re doing,” Patricia Ellsberg said about the feeling of being watched by one’s own government. “But I think it’s troublesome for the country that there is surveillance of citizens, and that the right of privacy is being threatened.”
* * *
In late August, traveling as George Leonard and Edward Warren, Liddy and Hunt flew to California to conduct a feasibility study for the Ellsberg job. Wearing their disguises, they photographed the entry and exit points of Dr. Fielding’s office building. Liddy tried out the gait-altering device once, then threw it away. He was not much happier with the CIA’s tobacco-pouch camera. “First your guys give me this heel lift that crippled me for life,” he grumbled to Hunt, fiddling with the gadget’s tiny buttons, “and now a camera I can’t even see.”
At night, posing as friends of the doctor, they returned to the building and convinced a cleaning woman, Maria Martinez, to unlock the door to Fielding’s office. Liddy snapped pictures while Hunt stood in the hall, chatting with Martinez in Spanish.
“Steve” met Hunt and Liddy at Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia to pick up the film. The operatives then went home and grabbed a few hours of sleep. When they got to the White House that afternoon, the photos were ready. They presented the images, along with their report, to Egil Krogh.
“Very few of the pictures turned out,” Krogh remembered. The only really clear photo showed Liddy beaming in front of Fielding’s building.
Krogh gave the go-ahead, with one change—Hunt and Liddy were not to perform the job themselves. People working directly for the White House, Krogh explained, could not risk getting caught in a break-in.
That killed it, as far as Liddy was concerned. But Hunt suggested they contact Bernard Barker, a Cuban American living in Miami who had done clandestine work for the CIA in the past. Barker agreed to put together a team.
Hunt and Liddy set the operation for Labor Day weekend, when Fielding’s building should be quiet and empty. Krogh asked Charles Colson, the White House lawyer, for money to cover expenses.
* * *
On September 1, the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, there was a knock on the rarely used back door of Egil Krogh’s office. Krogh opened the door partway. A man’s hand held out an envelope. Krogh took it and shut the door. He looked in the envelope. Fifty crisp hundred-dollar bills, as requested.
Krogh hurried from his office to room 16. Hunt and Liddy were there, bags packed. Krogh handed over the cash, enough to cover airfare, hotel, two rental cars, special equipment, and payment for Barker’s crew. He reminded the men to exchange the hundred-dollar bills at a bank, to ensure that any purchases they made could not be traced back to a White House account.
“Now for God’s sake,” Krogh said, “don’t get caught.”
“We won’t,” Liddy assured him.
Krogh nodded nervously. “I’m going to give you my home phone number. As soon as the operation’s over—whatever happens—call and let me know. I’ll be waiting.”
Liddy tucked the slip of paper with the number in his pocket. He promised to make the call.
“I’ll be George,” he said, grinning, “honest George Leonard.”