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"Suppose," said Hunt, "my principal doesn't think it wise to entrust so sensitive a matter to them?"
I thought of that U.S. agent abroad, dead or about to die. If Hunt's principal was worried, I had the answer. "Tell him," I said, "if necessary, I'll do it." [Hunt later told Liddy to "forget" the Anderson plot.]
Near the end of April, Magruder sent word that he wanted to see me. "Gordon, do you think you could get into the Watergate?" I said, "Yes. It's a high-security building, but we can do it." "How about putting a bug in [Democratic National Chairman Larry] O'Brien's office?"
"All right, we can do that."
"The phones too?"
"That's easy."
"Get in there as soon as you can, Gordon. It's important."
The First Watergate Break-In
The plan to break into Democratic national headquarters in an office in the Watergate Hotel complex was worked out by Liddy and Hunt, who recruited five Cuban Americans to help. Liddy also enlisted James McCord, chief of security at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, as the electronics expert. A break-in attempt in May 1972 succeeded, but the key listening device planted by McCord and the Cubans did not seem to be working. Liddy's superiors grew impatient.
On Monday, 12 June, Magruder called me up to his office again. He suddenly became agitated and exclaimed, "Here's what I want to know." He swung his left arm back behind him and brought it forward forcefully as he said, "I want to know what O'Brien's got right here!" At the word here he slapped the lower left part of his desk with his left palm, hard. "Take all the men, all the cameras you need. That's what I want to know!"
When Magruder said "Here!" he was referring to the place he kept his derogatory information on the Democrats. Whenever he had called me in to verify some rumor about, for example, Jack Anderson, it was from there that he withdrew whatever he already had on the matter. The purpose of the second Watergate break-in was to find out what O'Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats.
Gordon Strachan [assistant to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff] called me to the White House and told me that the original submissions from the electronic surveillance were unsatisfactory. I assumed he was speaking for Haldeman, so I repeated what McCord had told me of the technical problem and that we intended to correct it by going back in shortly.
On Thursday, 15 June, I went to the meeting with Mitchell.* At one point, I told him: "General, we've identified the exact suite McGovern's going to be using during the convention, and we've got a little surprise cooked up for him. Just as the press arrives for one of his interviews, we're gonna have a bunch of really filthy zonked-out hippies swarm in there, all wearing McGovern buttons and carrying