CRP secret fund

The CRP secret fund was a pool of campaign cash kept outside ordinary accounting, in a special account and in Maurice Stans’s safe, whose undocumented disbursements became a central link in The Washington Post’s investigation of the Watergate espionage operation. The fund’s history emerged not as a single ledger or confession but through checks, fragments of testimony, a destroyed record, and a changing public explanation. Those pieces established both the flow of money and the harder question of who had authority to release it.

Origins and Cash Trail

The fund’s existence first took shape in the reporters’ work on cash flowing through Mexican checks. Among the checks was a distinct $25,000 cashier’s check dated April 10, drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida, payable to Kenneth Dahlberg. On April 20, it was deposited with four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check linked a specific contribution to cash later associated with the fund, though the transaction alone did not identify who authorized the wider operation.

As a General Accounting Office investigator described hundreds of thousands of dollars in unaccounted cash, Bob Woodward compared that account with the convention-security money that Carl Bernstein had heard about earlier. The investigator said the fund totaled at least $100,000 and included money from Barker’s account, obtained by cashing Kenneth Dahlberg’s check. A former administration official separately told Bernstein that Gordon Liddy had supervision over a large fund and that the emerging account of convention security would conceal its real purpose by making Liddy the fall guy. These were reported assessments at an early stage, not yet a complete accounting of the fund or proof of every participant’s knowledge.

The figures widened as the inquiry progressed. On August 26, the General Accounting Office released a report listing eleven apparent or possible violations of the new law and referring the matter to the United States Department of Justice for possible prosecution. It stated that Stans maintained a secret cash fund of at least $350,000 in his office; at one point, that fund included the money derived from Dahlberg’s check and the four Mexican checks totaling $89,000. The different reported sums reflected different accounts and points in the investigation: reporters and investigators were tracing a particular stream of cash within a larger, more extensive pool.

The Fund’s Records and Scale

The account’s ordinary working record was strikingly slight: a single lined sheet of paper, with roughly fifteen names and a distribution amount beside each. The committee bookkeeper said she updated it whenever money was disbursed and had seen the sheet more than once. It was eventually destroyed, leaving no surviving record of the withdrawals. Hugh Sloan, who had worked as treasurer, had handed out the money. The ledger’s disappearance turned the bookkeeper’s recollection and the reporters’ reconstruction into essential evidence of how the pool operated.

The bookkeeper had been called before the grand jury early, when, she said, people had already lied and investigators did not yet know which questions to ask. She said Sally Harmony and others had lied, while acknowledging that she and Harmony had not discussed the matter. She also described a special account predating April 7. Before June 17, the expenditures had seemed to her like an all-purpose political fund, not a fund for a specific operation; after the Watergate break-in, the figures, recipients, and absence of receipts made their significance much harder to miss. Liddy was among those who received money. She believed he would remain loyal to the President and accept the blame rather than implicate others.

Sloan’s account gave the fund a longer history and larger scale. It had existed for more than eighteen months and represented cash contributions to Richard Nixon’s campaign. Money arriving at committee headquarters was placed in Stans’s safe, where Sloan estimated that about $700,000 might be present at a given time. He put the fund itself closer to $300,000, while the General Accounting Office report described a secret fund of at least $350,000. Sloan said no one had told him of any specific purpose for the cash before June 17. His account made clear that the fund was not simply a discrete payment connected to the break-in: it was a standing cash system within the campaign.

Authorization and the Security Explanation

Sloan described authorization as an informal routine. When first asked to provide money, he telephoned John Mitchell at the United States Department of Justice; Mitchell told him to release it. The calls began in 1971. Mitchell initially had sole authority to approve expenditures, Sloan said, and that authority was later passed to others, including Jeb Magruder. In the reporters’ reconstruction, some people received cash while others could authorize its release. The distinction matters: receiving money, approving payments, and knowing the ultimate purpose were related but separate questions.

After the break-in, the public explanation characterized withdrawals by Liddy, Hugh Porter, and Magruder as convention-security spending, with Liddy accused of diverting his portion to pay for the bugging. Sloan said he had heard neither of the labels security fund or convention security before the break-in. He also rejected the explanation as inconsistent with ordinary committee practice: legitimate security expenses were budgeted, paid by check, and reported to the General Accounting Office. As treasurer, he would have expected to know if the cash had been spent that way.

The explanation became an explicit attempt to shift responsibility. On August 16, Clark MacGregor publicly said that Liddy had spent campaign funds on his own initiative to prepare for a possible attack on the President at the Republican convention. The previous account from a former administration official had anticipated a story about convention security and Liddy taking the fall. MacGregor later told Woodward that he had never met Liddy and did not know why he wanted cash. The contrast between that public account, Sloan’s description of how expenditures were authorized, and the absence of receipts made the security rationale a contested explanation rather than a verified account of the money’s purpose.

Exposure, Silence, and Consequences

The fund’s disclosure depended on employees willing to speak despite evident pressure. During Bernstein’s nighttime visits to committee workers, one employee trembled and pleaded for the reporter to leave before others saw him; another began to cry and said the situation was awful. The bookkeeper, too, worried that people were watching her and believed her telephone was tapped. Her fear was not incidental to the investigation: a destroyed ledger and a climate of enforced silence meant that evidence had to be recovered from people who risked exposure by describing what they had seen.

Sloan also described pressure to remain silent. He said no one had expressly ordered him not to talk, but the repeated message was to hold ranks and keep the ship together. He was reluctant to go on the record because his lawyers warned that public statements could be used against him in civil litigation. When Bernstein suggested that the situation was worse than the newspaper had reported, Sloan answered that it was, and said his suspicion of the worst had led him to leave. His guarded testimony supplied important detail, but he still would not identify who had ordered him to make the secret payments.

The Washington Post’s resulting report stated that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants to Mitchell and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. It reported more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, Liddy among the recipients, the destruction of records, and Sloan’s resignation after he became suspicious about Watergate. The story’s significance was larger than any one amount: the indictments of the Watergate burglars had not exhausted the conspiracy, and campaign employees might know how the remaining connections worked.

Later reporting sharpened the distinction between the fund’s financial mechanism and the allegations about the operation it supported. Jeb Magruder told federal prosecutors that Mitchell and John Dean had approved and helped plan the Watergate bugging operation, and that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the convicted conspirators. A source who said Dean had told him the same account added that H. R. Haldeman had approved virtually every aspect of the cover-up, including payments to the conspirators. Those allegations expanded the account of responsibility, but they should not be collapsed into proof that every hush payment came from the CRP secret fund. The fund’s strongest evidentiary force lay in showing a sustained, concealed cash system, a chain of authorization reaching Mitchell, and a paper trail deliberately reduced to a sheet that no longer existed.