Political espionage and sabotage

Political espionage and sabotage was not an isolated campaign sideshow but part of a covert operation that shifted from monitoring perceived threats to the administration toward targeting political opponents. The evidence traces a chain from earlier White House wiretapping, through the movement of personnel and money into the campaign, to the Watergate break-in and efforts to keep insiders silent. Its history emerges through fragments: a cashier’s check, a series of phone authorizations, frightened employees, and accounts that gradually connected the operation to officials at the top.

Definition and Scope

The operation encompassed intelligence gathering and disruptive activity carried out in the political arena. Its scope was larger than the Watergate break-in: the investigation of political espionage and sabotage included contacts associated with Donald Segretti, separate sabotage incidents, and a fund used for sensitive political projects. By the closing weeks of the 1972 campaign, however, reporters were finding that fresh leads had become scarce. The Washington Post had mounted an investigation involving more than a dozen reporters, but despite new contacts and isolated examples of sabotage, little new information emerged. The reporting also found the course followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and federal prosecutors narrow, a limitation that left the operation’s wider context incompletely explored.

The operation was presented in the investigation as part of a broader program directed by Richard Nixon’s men against people they considered threats to the administration. In that account, the Watergate break-in was one part of an election-year campaign of espionage and sabotage; the campaign’s covert effort, in turn, belonged to an earlier and wider program. This nested structure changed the meaning of the burglary: it was not simply a freestanding crime, but a point where a larger system of surveillance and political action became vulnerable to exposure.

Wiretapping and the Shift to the Campaign

Deep Throat described the operation’s earlier development as a series of changing targets. The first aggressive wiretapping, beginning in 1969, focused on reporters and administration personnel suspected of disloyalty. Attention later shifted toward radical political opposition during antiwar protests. As the election approached, Democrats became targets. Deep Throat said the arrests at the Watergate complex sent the administration into alarm because the break-in could expose the larger program.

The campaign connection was not merely a matter of parallel activity. At an election strategy session, H. R. Haldeman pressed John Mitchell to establish a wiretapping operation for the campaign. Mitchell was reluctant, but Haldeman insisted and instructed him to move part of the existing vigilante operation from the White House to the campaign. E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were among those associated with that transfer. This account supplies a mechanism linking the White House program to campaign operations, while distinguishing the movement of people and activity from the separate question of who authorized each later act.

Money, Authority, and the Campaign Fund

The financial trail made the campaign’s covert activity more concrete. In records examined by investigators, four Mexican checks matched the description previously reported by The New York Times. A fifth check stood out: a $25,000 cashier’s check drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida, payable to Kenneth Dahlberg. It was deposited on April 20 with the four other checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check and withdrawals provided a specific transaction trail, although the reporting had yet to establish who Dahlberg was or, by themselves, all the uses of the money.

A subsequent Washington Post account reported that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants of John Mitchell, the former manager of Richard Nixon’s campaign, and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The fund contained more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, and G. Gordon Liddy was among its recipients. Records relating to the account had been destroyed. Hugh Sloan’s resignation, the story reported, had followed his suspicions about Watergate. Together, those details connected the fund, the operation, and the loss of records without suggesting that the published account had resolved every question about individual transactions.

Sloan later described how authority over the fund had worked. In a campaign with a budget exceeding $50 million, he said, requests had seemed routine and insignificant. When first approached for money, he telephoned Mitchell at the United States Department of Justice, and Mitchell told him to disburse it. Such calls had begun in 1971. Sloan said Mitchell had initially been the sole person authorizing expenditures and later passed that authority to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. The account placed Mitchell’s approval of campaign expenditures for apparently illegal activity against political opponents in the period when he was serving as Attorney General. It also showed how a covert operation could be administered through ordinary-seeming campaign procedures rather than a conspicuous formal order.

Internal Silence and the Cost of Leaving

The reporters’ attempts to reconstruct the operation ran into a climate of fear inside the committee. Studying the committee roster allowed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to infer who worked near whom and, by comparing telephone extensions, who reported to whom. In mid-August, they began evening visits to committee employees’ homes after their first-edition deadline. At one door, an employee trembled and pleaded with Bernstein to leave before others saw him, describing the pressure employees were under. Another employee said she wanted to help and then burst into tears. These encounters did not immediately yield a complete account, but made the silence itself part of what the investigation had to explain.

One recurring lead concerned Sally Harmony, G. Gordon Liddy’s secretary at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. A Justice Department attorney told the reporters that prosecutors distrusted her testimony but lacked evidence to charge perjury. The account of her alleged lack of candor was common knowledge at campaign headquarters, yet employees could not say what she had concealed beyond protecting others. Separately, several employees spoke secondhand of wholesale destruction of records in the days after the Watergate break-in, without identifying specific records or participants.

The committee bookkeeper told Bernstein that people had already lied when the grand jury began asking questions, and said that Sally Harmony and others had lied. She had worked for Hugh Sloan and, after he quit, was promoted to work for Maurice Stans. She added that several employees about whom the organization was worried had received promotions. Her statement placed silence, testimony, and advancement within the same institutional setting, though it did not by itself establish the reasons for each promotion.

Sloan’s own departure and subsequent caution showed a different form of resistance. He told Bernstein that he had left because he suspected the worst. He wanted to speak publicly, but his lawyers warned that statements could be used against him in civil suits connected to his role as campaign treasurer. Sloan said no one had explicitly ordered him not to talk; instead, the message had been to maintain unity and keep the organization together. He acknowledged that taking such language to mean people should lie was not an unreasonable conclusion. His account describes pressure without turning an implicit instruction into a documented direct order.

Exposure, Concealment, and Significance

As the investigation widened, Deep Throat rejected efforts to separate the Watergate break-in from the espionage and sabotage operation, arguing that investigation of the other activity would have uncovered illegal conduct. The distinction mattered: treating Watergate as a self-contained burglary could leave the larger political operation and its chain of responsibility beyond scrutiny. Deep Throat also warned that a congressional investigation would struggle without someone inside to describe what happened at the top, while the White House was preparing to invoke executive privilege to block access to White House and Justice Department records.

Later disclosures linked the operation to the effort to silence the Watergate defendants. After James McCord testified that payoff money had come directly from the Committee for the Re-election of the President, Woodward and Bernstein revisited Sloan’s earlier account that the surviving secret fund had been transferred from Maurice Stans’s safe to Fred LaRue. McCord’s testimony identified Kenneth Parkinson and Dorothy Hunt as conduits for payments. A committee official, reacting to the disclosures, said the White House’s handling of the affair had undermined the Presidency. The testimony gave the reporters an inside link between campaign funds and the payoffs, while earlier information about the fund had remained unpublishable because they could not confirm how the money had been spent.

Jeb Stuart Magruder’s statements to federal prosecutors supplied another direct account. According to three sources in the White House and the committee, Magruder said John Mitchell and John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation, and later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted conspirators. The disclosures made the relationship between political espionage and its cover-up more specific: campaign operations, financial channels, and silence were not simply adjacent strands but claims tied to named participants and reported testimony.

The evidence also extended the pattern of concealment beyond the campaign. Deep Throat described files connected to the operation as politically dangerous and said H. R. Haldeman had pressed Mitchell to transfer part of the White House wiretapping activity into the campaign. In a later account of the handling of E. Howard Hunt’s files, Deep Throat said John Ehrlichman and John Dean had urged L. Patrick Gray to keep them from public view; Gray reportedly retained them for about a week before putting them in a burn bag. The episode echoed the earlier reports of destroyed campaign records, but involved a distinct set of files and a separate chain of reported actions.

Political espionage and sabotage therefore names both a set of covert tactics and the investigative problem those tactics created. The operation was difficult to see as a whole because its pieces were dispersed among a campaign fund, White House surveillance, political intermediaries, damaged or missing records, and employees reluctant to speak. The reporting’s significance lies in the gradual assembly of those pieces—and in the growing evidence that the effort to conceal Watergate could not be understood apart from the political operation that preceded and surrounded it.