Alleged plan to attack the Doral Beach Hotel

The alleged plan to attack the Doral Beach Hotel was a reported political provocation scheme tied to Donald Segretti and contacts he was believed to have had with Dwight Chapin and Howard Hunt. According to information passed from Larry Young through Robert Meyers, Segretti was asked to organize Cubans for an assault in Miami, Florida and make it look as if they were acting for the McGovern campaign. Young said Segretti refused because he considered the proposal blatantly illegal and violent; the account does not identify who made the request, and it distinguishes the alleged plan from the assault that later took place.

Reported Contacts and Proposal

The account came to Bob Woodward through Robert Meyers, who relayed Young’s understanding of Segretti’s political contacts. Young was convinced that Segretti had met with Chapin and Hunt. Segretti had spoken of going to Miami to meet the key people with whom he had previously communicated by telephone, and had told Young that Hunt was involved and Chapin was the general organizer. Segretti’s repeated reference to meeting with “DC” had first led Young to think he meant the District of Columbia; Young later became convinced that he meant Dwight Chapin.

Young’s account also placed Segretti among people with connections to the USC Mafia, but it did not establish that those contacts directed the proposed hotel operation. That distinction matters: the reporting connected Segretti to Chapin and Hunt through Young’s belief, while leaving the identity of whoever proposed recruiting the Cubans unknown.

The Alleged Operation and Refusal

As relayed by Meyers, Young believed that in Miami Segretti met with Chapin and Hunt and was asked by someone whose identity Young did not know to recruit and organize Cubans for an assault on the Doral Beach Hotel. The proposed deception was to make the participants appear to be working for the McGovern campaign. The plan therefore joined physical disruption with political attribution: the apparent perpetrators would be made to look like the opposition’s supporters.

Young said that Segretti refused. As Young understood it, Segretti considered the proposal blatantly illegal and violent. The account does not establish that Segretti organized the assault, accepted the assignment, or knew who originated the request. Its significance lies instead in the reported proposal and refusal, which suggested that the political operation could contemplate provoking an incident and falsely assigning responsibility for it.

The Assault and the Wider Pattern

The reporters had spent months collecting information suggesting that Nixon forces routinely used provocateurs at demonstrations and that such operations had been planned for the political conventions. After the Watergate break-in, they had assumed that the possibilities for such activity had narrowed. The assault on the Doral Beach Hotel unsettled that assumption: it had occurred, and there was some evidence that provocateurs had been present in the crowd. The reported recruitment proposal and the assault were related in the investigation, but the evidence presented does not prove that the alleged plan caused or organized the event.

Woodward considered the apparent bungling in light of what it implied about the operation’s reach. He recalled that the Watergate burglars had retaped the stairwell doors on June 17, leading a security guard to call the police, and that Hunt had used pay phones. Those mistakes seemed reassuring in one respect, yet they sharpened the underlying question: how far might the Nixon forces have gone if their operations had been carried out more carefully? The Doral Beach report broadened the story from a particular alleged scheme to a concern about political provocation at the conventions.