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Another break-in is arranged for June 17. But shortly after 1 a.m., Private Security Guard Frank Wills spots a door in the Watergate with its lock taped open. He summons the police, who catch McCord, Barker, Sturgis, Gonzalez and Martinez in the D.N.C. The police confiscate surveillance equipment and find 32 sequentially numbered $100 bills, which Barker has withdrawn from the $89,000 in Miami.
II The Cover-Up
Begins Two days after the arrest, White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler dismisses the affair as "a third-rate burglary attempt," adding that "certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is." But others are less blase. Within hours of the breakin, FBI agents find Hunt's name in the address books of Barker and Martinez. Administration officials are also worried because Hunt and Liddy were involved in another secret operation, the White House plumbers, set up in mid-1971 to stop security leaks and investigate other sensitive security matters.
The cover-up begins. On June 20, Dean cleans out Hunt's safe, discovering files on the Pentagon papers case and a forged diplomatic cable that implicates the Kennedy Administration in the assassination in 1963 of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Dean later testifies that Nixon's chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman subsequently tells him to "deep six" a briefcase full of surveillance equipment and other evidence.
On June 23, Nixon orders Haldeman to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation into the source of Watergate funding. That day Haldeman and Ehrlichman meet with CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters. Helms says that no CIA operations will be endangered by the FBI probe. Haldeman insists that it is the "President's wish" that Walters ask the FBI not to pursue the investigation into Mexico. A tape transcript of a conversation with Haldeman (released last week in the move that finally forces Nixon's resignation) shows that Nixon hopes to hide White House and C.R.P. involvement in the break-in by getting the CIA to limit the FBI's activities. Nixon's personal attorney Herbert Kamibach gets $75,000 from Maurice Stans, chairman of the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President—the first of more than $400,000 distributed to the Watergate defendants and their lawyers.
The cover-up holds through the summer. On Aug. 29, Nixon tells a news conference that Dean has conducted a thorough investigation and "I can say categorically that . . . no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident." Dean never made such an investigation, according to his testimony months later. On Sept. 15, in a recorded Oval Office conversation, Nixon congratulates Dean: "The way you, you've handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you—putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there."