FRIDAY NIGHT, IN LOS ANGELES, Howard Hunt stood in a phone booth with the receiver to his ear, listening to the rings. There was no answer in Dr. Fielding’s office. He dialed Fielding’s home number. A man answered. Hunt hung up. So far so good.
He drove one of the rental cars to Fielding’s apartment house, a walkie-talkie on the seat beside him. He parked on the dark street. He got out and walked past the driveway to make sure Fielding’s Volvo was there. It was. The lights in Fielding’s apartment were on.
“All was as it should be,” Hunt later said.
Liddy drove the other car to Fielding’s office. With him were Bernard Barker and the two men Barker had brought, Felipe DeDiego and Eugenio Martinez. Like Barker, they were Cuban-born anti-communists, trained in covert operations by the CIA.
Liddy parked in the lot behind Fielding’s building. Barker and DeDiego, wearing black delivery uniforms purchased the day before, and the wigs and glasses issued to Hunt and Liddy, got out and entered the building through the unlocked back door. Barker carried a suitcase with stickers labeled “Rush” and “Air Express” stuck to the side. They met the cleaning woman, Maria Martinez, in the corridor. In Spanish, they told her they had a delivery for Dr. Fielding. It was late for deliveries, she said.
“Well, we’d like to get this thing done,” Barker said, trying to sound casual.
Martinez unlocked Fielding’s door and watched the deliverymen set their cargo down. She may have noticed one of them unlocking the knob from the inside. In any case, after they left, she relocked the door.
* * *
Hunt paced the dark sidewalk in front of Dr. Fielding’s apartment building. He was tempted to contact Liddy to see how things were going, but the walkie-talkies were to be used only in case of emergency.
At the doctor’s building, Liddy and the entry team waited in the car. Maria Martinez finally left a little after midnight. Barker and his men got out and walked to the back door. To their surprise, it was locked.
The men returned to the car for a consult. Liddy didn’t want them to break the glass door—that might attract attention. But there was a first-floor window behind a clump of shrubbery. Near the window, a central air-conditioning unit put out a steady rumble. Good sound cover. This was the way in, they agreed.
Liddy knew he couldn’t go inside, but refused to leave the men exposed. He got out and positioned himself in the bushes beside the building. He pulled a Browning knife from the holster on his belt and unfolded the big blade.
Barker’s team put on gloves and scurried to the low window. Martinez lifted the glass cutter given to him by Liddy and pressed the edge to the window. Nothing happened; it was too dull to cut glass. They went to plan B, laying strips of masking tape across the window and then cracking it with a crowbar. The tape muffled the sound of breaking glass.
Liddy, from the bushes, barely heard it over the hum of the air conditioner.
Martinez reached in, unlocked the window, and slid it up. All three men climbed into a dark office.
The Beverly Hills building containing the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, which Hunt and Liddy burglarized in an attempt to obtain Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatric records.
They hurried through the office to the hall, and up the stairs to Dr. Fielding’s door. It was locked. They pried it open with a crowbar, cracking the door’s wooden frame. Inside, they opened the suitcase they’d delivered earlier and took out tools: camera and film, spotlights, rope, and a roll of black plastic. They taped the plastic to the windows. The rope was set aside, to be used only if an emergency exit from the second-floor window became necessary.
Following standard procedure for covert operations, Barker had held back key information until the last moment. Now he explained what they were looking for.
“We are here because we are doing a great job for the country,” he said. “We have to find some papers of a great traitor to the United States.”
“Who’s the guy?” asked DeDiego.
“Daniel Ellsberg.”
They started the search.
Outside, Liddy returned to his car to wait. He slouched down in the driver’s seat, angling the rearview mirror to give him a view down the alley to the street in front of the building. All was quiet.
* * *
Hunt relaxed when he saw the lights go out in Fielding’s apartment. He walked back to his car and sat for a few minutes. Then he started the engine and cruised past for a final look.
Fielding’s car was not in the driveway.
Fear flashed through Hunt’s mind: Was the doctor on his way to his office? Had Barker’s men tripped an unseen alarm? Were the police already there?
He pulled to the curb and stuck the antenna of his walkie-talkie out the car window.
“George, this is Edward,” Hunt said. “Report. Repeat: George, this is Edward. Report.”
No response. He tried again. Nothing but static.
Hunt sped toward the office, hoping it wasn’t too late. There were no police cars in sight. He rolled through the alley and saw Liddy’s parked car. The windows of Fielding’s office were dark, thanks to the black plastic. The team had been inside for about half an hour.
He jogged to Liddy’s car and slipped into the passenger seat. Liddy could see that Hunt was in a panic.
“What’s happened?” he asked, sitting up.
“I put Fielding to bed, but fifteen minutes ago his car disappeared.”
“What?”
“Where are the boys?” Hunt asked.
“Hell, they’re inside.”
“I thought they’d be out by now.”
“Well, the goddamn cleaning woman,” Liddy explained. “She locked both doors, so the boys had to break into a ground-floor window so they could get upstairs. That’s what took so long.”
“Any word from them?”
“No.”
Liddy picked up his walkie-talkie. “George to Leader, George to Leader. Come in. Come in.”
No answer.
He looked at Hunt. “What the hell’s going on?”
“We’d better get them out of there.”
“This goddamn Mickey Mouse gear!” Liddy shouted, collapsing the antenna of his walkie-talkie. “Let’s go get them.”
They got out of the car and had just reached the alley when they heard footsteps approaching. It was Barker and the team. They had the suitcase.
“Okay, back to the plan,” Hunt whispered. “I’ll head for the hotel room, and we’ll all meet there.”
* * *
In his room at the Beverly Hilton, Hunt slid a bottle of champagne into a bucket of ice. He got out five glasses.
Liddy came in smiling, and threw his jacket on the bed.
“I bet Krogh’s pissing his pants!”
A few minutes later Barker’s team arrived, dripping with sweat.
“Eduardo,” Barker said, using the Spanish version of Hunt’s cover name, “there was nothing there.”
“Nothing?”
“We went through every goddamn file in that office,” Barker said. “There was nothing there. Nothing with the name Ellsberg on it.”
Hunt and Liddy looked at each other.
“You’re absolutely sure?” Liddy asked.
Barker nodded. “I’m sorry, George, but that’s how it was.”
While the men pulled off their wigs and wiped their heads with towels, they explained that they’d pried open the filing cabinets and gone through everything. They’d ransacked the place, purposely leaving it a mess to make it look as if some junkie had broken in looking for drugs. As an added touch, Martinez swiped Fielding’s prescription pads. They’d used a Polaroid camera to document everything.
“Well,” Hunt said, “I guess it’s time for champagne.”
He popped open the bottle and poured five glasses.
“This isn’t the kind of victory celebration I figured we’d have,” Liddy said. “But at least nothing went wrong.”
It was three o’clock in the morning; six on the East Coast. Liddy went out to a pay phone to update Krogh. The Cubans walked to their rooms. Hunt started packing.
Liddy came back a few minutes later and sat on his bed. Krogh was so relieved, Liddy reported, he’d nearly wept.
They turned out the lights. They had a few hours before their flight home.
“Do you think there is an Ellsberg psychiatric file?” Hunt asked from his bed.
“There has to be one,” Liddy said, “unless Fielding destroyed it.”
He was wrong—Dr. Fielding simply didn’t take the types of detailed notes on his patients they were looking for. Not knowing this, they figured Fielding must have taken the Ellsberg file home. When they got back to Washington, Liddy said, he’d suggest a bag job at Fielding’s apartment.
Laughing, he added, “Krogh’ll go bananas.”
* * *
Back in the White House after the long weekend, Liddy reported in person to Egil Krogh, showing him photos of the damage done to Dr. Fielding’s office. He took pleasure in showing Krogh the Browning knife he’d carried on the operation.
“Would you really have used it,” Krogh asked. “I mean, to kill somebody?”
“I would, if necessary, to protect my men.”
Over the next few days, Liddy and Hunt prepared a proposal for a visit to Fielding’s apartment. They submitted the plan to Krogh, who asked John Ehrlichman for guidance.
“Get them away from there, and never send them back,” Ehrlichman ordered.
Good call, Krogh thought. “The White House Plumbers,” he recalled, “were not the most rational group of people.”
He watched the Los Angeles newspapers for anything about the Fielding break-in. There was nothing. The Beverly Hills police thought it looked like the work of a drug addict, and accused a well-known local crook named Elmer Davis. Under questioning, Davis confessed to the crime, but was not prosecuted; he was already facing several other burglary charges.
It later emerged that Davis had been in jail the night of the break-in.
The Fielding operation was over. But the impact of Nixon’s determination to destroy Daniel Ellsberg was still to be felt.
“A botched break-in, evidenced in a few Polaroids, didn’t seem to represent much,” Krogh would say in retrospect. “In practice, however, it was the first irreversible step by which a presidency ran out of control.”