FINAL WARNING: The Council on Foreign Relations
immediately to arrest the White House ‘plumbers’ (Special
Investigations Unit). To top it off, McCord and Shoffler were friends.McCord had entered the Watergate while it was still open, and put
some tape on one of the doors so it wouldn’t lock. The tape was put on
horizontally, so that it could be seen between the doors. When the
‘plumbers’ arrived hours later, instead of the doors being open, they
were locked, which indicated that the piece of tape had been
discovered. They left, since there was no longer any assurance of a
successful operation. McCord told them to go back and pick the lock,
since the police had not been called. E. Howard Hunt and his Cuban
accomplices, did this, and left tape on the door for McCord to get in.
About five minutes later, he joined them. He was supposed to remove
the tape from the door, but he didn’t; however, he told the other
‘plumbers’ that he did. He also instructed them to shut-off their walkie-
talkies, so the static wouldn’t be heard, which means they were inside
the office without being able to hear any outside communications
taking place. They were caught, when Wills discovered the door taped
for a second time.Afterward, on March 19, 1973, McCord wrote a letter to Judge John J.
Sirica, which turned the Watergate affair into a national crisis, by
saying that Attorney General John Mitchell was involved, that
campaign money was used to pay the ‘plumbers,’ and that the White
House was trying to blame the CIA; when in fact the White House had
engineered the entire operation, and Nixon covered it up. This came
after Nixon held a press conference to say: “There is no involvement
by the White House.”In the years since Watergate occurred, one simple fact seems to have
emerged, and that is, that Nixon probably had no prior knowledge of
the break-in. White House Counsel John Dean III ordered it and
“deceived the President of the United States into joining a conspiracy
to obstruct justice in order to cover up a crime that Nixon had not
committed.”If it wouldn’t have been for the discovery of the Watergate tapes, Nixon
may very well have survived the scandal. Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,
an aide to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who later
became Nixon’s Chief of Staff, controlled the vault where the tapes