What Did the Plumbers Do in Watergate?
What Did the Plumbers Do
The burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate complex in 1972 was the most famous of all robberies. The break-in and subsequent political scandal became an iconic part of American history, and it’s one that looms over the nation still today. During the Nixon administration, the White House Special Investigations Unit, or “Plumbers,” was formed to prevent information leaks like Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. The Plumbers were a feared unit that specialized in black-bag jobs, and their activities were often illegal.
Hunt was a senior member of the plumbers and he served as a liaison between the unit and the CIA. His phone number was found in the address books of the burglars, linking the Watergate break-in to President Nixon’s re-election campaign and the Oval Office.
His role in the Plumbers essentially started with an incident in September 1971, when he was assigned to break into the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg to look for blackmail material. The Plumbers then joined forces with the CIA to carry out several other break-ins, bugging foreign embassies and the DNC offices at the Watergate Complex.
What Did the Plumbers Do in Watergate?
On June 17 of that year, Hunt arranged for a team of CIA agents to break into the DNC’s offices, planting listening devices and taking pictures of documents. The team’s actions were immediately linked to the White House and Nixon’s re-election campaign, leading to investigations that ultimately led to the Watergate scandal and the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.
According to court records, Hunt and his co-conspirators used sophisticated technology to penetrate the DNC’s office. Among the devices they placed were microphones, cameras and tape recorders. McCord was a seasoned electronics expert who worked for the White House and for CREEP, an infamous secret White House spy agency. He was also a former agent for the FBI. Liddy was another CIA operative who was also a Plumber. He was tasked with coordinating the burglary, and he was also responsible for the team’s operation of the listening devices in the DNC’s offices.
In 2001, Liddy claimed that the Plumbers’ real goal was not to find more evidence about George McGovern’s presidential campaign but to discover evidence of communist campaign funding in the DNC office. This claim has stayed a powerful force in some of the Plumbers’ minds decades after the events at Watergate, and it remains a central point of contention for many people who believe that the break-in was meant to damage McGovern’s campaign.
Other convicted Watergate burglars had similar claims, including John Dean, who in a private conversation told Nixon that he had a meeting with one of the Plumbers. The Plumbers were all eventually convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping.
It was only after the Watergate scandal that most of the Plumbers began to cooperate with investigators. They did this, in part, because they knew their cases were losing momentum, and in part because they wished to avoid the hefty prison sentences they would have faced had they been convicted of the crimes. This was a smart move because it allowed the team to avoid prison for long enough that they could start rebuilding their lives.