Watergate’s lost source

It was a peculiar sort of start to the century’s greatest political scandal, 50 years ago.

Initially dismissed as a ‘thirdrate caper’, the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate building mushroomed into a full-scale constitutional crisis. Two years later, it saw the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The problem lay not so much in the original offence as in the bungled attempt to cover it up. An immediate apology from the White House and a few tactical firings might have saved Nixon.

The burglary attempt was botched when an unarmed security guard bumped into five men, three of whom turned out to be anti-Castro Cuban refugees, prowling around the building after midnight. They were wearing dark clothes and rubber surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

The crew stood there quietly while the guard called the police. They had walkie-talkies, miniature cameras and pen-sized tear-gas guns. One had a phonebook listing a contact at the White House. The men also had a ‘spotter’ on duty in a hotel room across the street, but this individual had become engrossed in a film called Attack of the Puppet People on TV and had failed to raise the alarm.

What exactly were the Watergate five after? The answer connects the greatest political scandal of the 20th century with its greatest literary hoax.

In early 1971, a 40-year-old minor American novelist named Clifford Irving approached his publisher with an intriguing proposal for a new book.

Irving claimed to have made contact with the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, then living in near-total isolation in a hotel in the Bahamas. Hughes had chosen him to write his as-told-to autobiography, Irving announced. In short order, he produced a somewhat generic three-page synopsis, and in return was handed a whopping $765,000 advance, he claimed.

The whole thing was a scam. Irving was a clever fantasist, hoping Hughes would keep quiet rather than come forward to expose him. His plan very nearly worked.

In January 1972, Hughes arranged a telephone conference call to deny all knowledge of the book, but Irving countered this with the classic ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ defence.

The story fell apart a few weeks later, when investigators learnt that Irving’s wife had been using a fake passport to deposit the publisher’s cheques in a Swiss bank account she had opened in the name HR Hughes. Irving came clean – and served 17 months in prison for fraud.

Howard Hughes may not have known Irving, but he did have a connection to Richard Nixon. Some years earlier, Hughes had given the president’s friend ‘Bebe’ Rebozo a bag stuffed with $100,000 in small-denomination banknotes. This may have been a political-campaign contribution, or it may have been to ensure favourable treatment for Hughes’s casino and airline businesses. According to the White House’s dirty-tricks supremo G Gordon Liddy, Nixon spent the money on installing a putting green and a pool table at his Florida estate.

Liddy also remarked on an unintended aspect of Irving’s hoax: it led indirectly to the Watergate burglary. In early 1972, the press gleefully reported Irving’s boast that his book would reveal certain facts about Hughes’s financial connections to the top levels of the US administration. Such stories would have caught the attention of a far less paranoid individual than Richard Nixon.

‘Larry O’ Brien [the Democratic party chairman] had at one time worked as Howard Hughes’s lobbyist in Washington,’ Liddy told me. ‘The [Irving] book was coming out and would be a sensation, we knew. So part of the equation was, “What did O’Brien know? Could he embarrass the President?” The answer had to lie in those filing cabinets at the Watergate.’

There was quite enough there to disturb the brilliant but troubled mind of America’s 37th president – leading ultimately to the Watergate break-in.

As Proverbs 28:1 reminds us, ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’

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