The Bugs at the Watergate

IT was just a strip of masking tape, but it is fast stretching into the most provocative caper of 1972, an extraordinary bit of bungling of great potential advantage to the Democrats and damage to the Republicans in this election year.

Walking his late-night rounds at Washington's Watergate office building, a security guard spotted the tape blocking the bolt on a basement door. He removed it--but on his return a few minutes later he found the lock taped open again. He called police, and a three-man squad found two more taped locks--as well as a jimmied door leading into the shadowy offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor. Just outside Chairman Larry O'Brien's inner sanctum, they flushed five men wearing fingerprint-concealing surgical gloves and laden with a James Bondian assortment of cameras, tools, intricate electronic bugging gear and $6,500 in crisp, new bills, most of which were serially numbered.

O'Brien promptly accused the Republicans of "blatant political espionage," adding that the event raises "the ugliest questions about the integrity of the political process that I have encountered in a quarter century." Former Attorney General John Mitchell, who heads up Nixon's campaign Committee for the Re-Election of the President, retorted that this was "sheer demagoguery." The White House, through Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, at first tried to dismiss the incident as a "third-rate burglary attempt." That it was considerably more serious became clear when the five arrested men were identified. One was in the pay of Mitchell's committee; several had past links to the CIA. Beyond that, shadowy trails reached close enough to the White House, as one Republican admitted privately, to shake the G.O.P. with fears that another ITT scandal--or worse--was in the making.

The man on the Republican payroll was James W. McCord, Jr., 53, the $1,209-a-month chief security coordinator and electronics expert of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. (In the best Mission: Impossible tradition, he was promptly disavowed by Mitchell and fired.) He had retired in 1970 as a CIA security specialist and been recommended to the Republicans by Al Wong, a Secret Service officer.

Also captured in the Watergate were Bernard Barker, 55, a key liaison between the CIA and the Cuban exiles who participated in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and Frank Sturgis, 37, another Bay of Pigs operative, who has since built a ripe career as a soldier of fortune. The other men arrested were anti-Castro Cubans: Eugenio Martinez, 49, a Miami real estate broker employed by Barker's firm, and Virgilio Gonzalez, 46, a barber before he fled Castro's Cuba who is now, interestingly enough, a locksmith. It was suspected that two lookouts escaped. Late in the week McCord was freed on bail. but the other four remained in jail.

Among papers found on two of the men were some bearing the name Howard Hunt and the notation "W. House" or "W.H." with his name. Hunt turned out to be a sometime journalist, a longtime CIA agent and an occasional novelist (when first arrested, the five offered aliases resembling names of characters in his books). More recently Hunt has been a special White House consultant; he served for several months in 1971 and 1972 on narcotics intelligence work. He was recommended for the job by Nixon's Special Counsel Charles W. Colson, admired and feared in Washington as the Administration's chief hatchetman and master of its dirty-trick department. Colson and Hunt are alumni of Brown University and friends. Lately Hunt has been working for a private public relations firm that does some Government business. One coup: he persuaded Julie Eisenhower to star in a 30-second HEW spot for TV on opportunities for handicapped children. Hunt has managed to keep in close touch with his old friends; in fact, he and Barker had at least one recent get-together in Miami.

On advice of counsel, Hunt refused to talk with FBI agents about that meeting or anything else, but they had better luck elsewhere. Thanks to those crisp new bills the gang was carrying, the financing of the operation was soon traced to accounts controlled by Barker in Miami's Republic National Bank. The money was part of $89,000 that Barker had received from an as yet unidentified source in Mexico City in April. Recently all was withdrawn and an estimated $30,000 was then spent for the costly eavesdropping equipment as well as the group's living and operational expenses.

At first it was thought that the men had been attempting to install the bugs in O'Brien's office. In fact, the devices may have been there for some time; the men may have been removing them for replanting in the Democratic headquarters in Miami Beach. Diagrams were found of the key hotel suites that the Democrats have reserved for the convention. But did the Democrats really have any secrets worth all that trouble? There might be some tactical advantage in monitoring the opposition's strategy, but it would hardly seem worth the expense and high risk.

Some think that the Administration, if it did indeed set up the operation, was after something else. There is, says one insider, "almost a paranoia" in the Government about all of the leaks of confidential papers and memoranda to Jack Anderson and others; someone trying to find the source of the leaks might have figured that O'Brien would know. (Oddly, Frank Sturgis is a longtime Anderson source.) The trouble with both theories is that they ascribe slightly sophomoric motives and methods to presumably serious men.

Suspicion. At his press conference, President Nixon himself reiterated that "the White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident." Inevitably the FBI's investigation was being watched closely to make sure there was no White House effort to whitewash the case. The first suspicion arose when Mitchell and Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray were both at the Newporter Inn in California's Newport Beach the day after the arrests. But both denied seeing the other man there. "The hotel is a big place," says Gray. "I was in Room 331, the Mitchells were in a villa. One of my agents told me the Mitchells were there." The FBI checks telephone records routinely--was it looking into Colson's recent telephone calls from his home? No, Gray says, but the FBI had talked with Colson about the case. His agents had, however, inquired at the White House about Howard Hunt's telephone calls while working there. "We were told that no records are kept of any calls made by the people with the White House."

To keep the heat on the investigation and gain all the political mileage possible from what Washington wiseacres were calling "the Second Bay of Pigs," O'Brien and the Democrats filed a $1 million damage suit in the U.S. District of Columbia Court, charging Mitchell's committee, the five snoops and assorted John Does with conspiracy to violate civil rights. Hard-driving Criminal Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams was signed on as the Democrats' lawyer and began efforts to speed the case into court. "It is likely," said Williams pointedly, "that we can at least have all the facts developed by November."

Meanwhile, at the beleaguered offices of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, someone with his sense of humor intact put up a sign proclaiming FREE THE WATERGATE FIVE.

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