Thursday, July 20, 2023
The Tapes That Doomed Nixon’s Presidency (50th Anniversary)
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
White House Plumbers...
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
The White House Plumbers, or The Buttcrack Buggers
From the producers of Succession and Veep...White House Plumbers comes to HBO Max on May 1, 2023. more
Thursday, September 8, 2022
Greece Wiretap and Spyware
Friday, June 17, 2022
The Hero of Watergate - Security Guard, Frank Wills ...his sad story.
The Hero of Watergate
A native of Savannah, Georgia, Wills moved to Washington D.C. in 1971. He took an $80. per week job as a security guard with a company called GSS manning the midnight-to-7 a.m. shift at the Watergate office complex.
Wills (24 years old) stumbled upon a "third-rate burglary" taking place in an office leased to the Democratic National Committee.
In the early morning of June 17, 1972, while making rounds, he noticed a piece of adhesive tape covering the door latch on a door between the basement stairwell and the parking garage. Wills suspected the cleaning crew (they left earlier) had taped over the door latch to prevent it from locking. He removed the tape and went on with his duties.
Meanwhile… James McCord, the leader of the buglers and a former CIA employee, noticed the tape was missing. Rather than calling off the intrusion, he just re-taped the door.
Wills made his rounds again – at approximately 1:55 am – and saw the tape had been replaced. It was not the cleaning crew! Wills called the police.
If Wills had not performed his security guard duties diligently, there probably would not have been a Watergate scandal.
The result... Eavesdropping alters American history, and a president resigns.
Washington DC police arrested five men wearing surgical gloves and carrying bugging equipment in the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee.
Recognized...
Wills received recognition for his efforts. He received an awards from the Democratic Party and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the Martin Luther King Award - its highest honor). He played himself in the movie "All the President's Men" starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman - written by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
For a while, he was sought after by the Washington press corps. Attorney Dorsey Evans was his agent. Reporters were charged as much as $300 for interviews. Some paid. Plans were made for him to lecture, but were abandoned as his 15 minutes of fame waned.
Forgotten...
In 1973 - he left GSS due to their unwillingness to provide paid vacations. He had trouble finding full-time employment after that. In the Washington Post he was quoted as saying... "I don't know if they are being told not to hire me or if they are just afraid to hire me." By the late 70's, he had moved in with his ailing mother.
In 1983 Wills was sentenced to a year in prison for shoplifting – a pair of sneakers.
On the 25th anniversary of the break-in (1997) Wills was bitter. In a Boston Globe interview, he said: "I put my life on the line. If it wasn't for me, Woodward and Bernstein would not have known anything about Watergate. This wasn't finding a dollar under a couch somewhere."
Gone...
Frank Wills died broke on September 27, 2000 at age 52 in a hospital in Augusta, Georgia. Brain tumor.
Bob Woodward said, "He's the only one in Watergate who did his job perfectly."
50 Years Ago Today – Watergate
Watergate Break-In 50th Anniversary Video
Former Counsel and staff of the Senate Watergate Committee, along with the special prosecutors, lawyers and journalists who played a role in the political scandal, mark the 50th anniversary of the break-in. video
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Watergate-style Scandal Rocks Bulgaria Ahead of Election
Bulgaria's National Security and Technical Operations agencies eavesdropped on opposition politicians in the run-up to last month's parliamentary elections, caretaker Interior Minister Boyko Rashkov said on Friday.
Why it matters: Rashkov was echoing echoing claims from
a leading opposition politician, who said 32 politicians from three
parties had been wiretapped. All three parties are opponents of the
long-term ruling party, GERB, and former prime minister Boyko Borissov,
who dominated Bulgarian politics for the past decade. more
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate conspirator, dies at 90
Liddy's family said in a statement that he died Tuesday morning at his daughter's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. It did not give a cause of death. His son, James, said that the cause was not related to Covid-19, and that he had been dealing with Parkinson's disease.
Liddy was one of the organizers of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the office building with the name that would forever be linked to one of the biggest political scandals in American history...
Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in 1973 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Years later, he declared, "I'd do it again for my president."...
In an interview with WHYY "Fresh Air" in 1980 after the publication of his autobiography, Liddy described unusual ways of overcoming fears as a child, including rats.
He
went to the waterfront to confront the rats, but they would swim away.
When his sister's cat killed a rat, he decided to eat it. "And so I
cooked and consumed part of the rat. And thereafter, I had no fear of
rats," Liddy said. more
Monday, April 22, 2019
James McCord, 93 - RIP
McCord served in the CIA for 19 years, including as security chief at the Langley, Va., headquarters, before his supporting, at times sensational role in the events that precipitated the first resignation of a U.S. president.
He had retired from the spy agency and was privately employed as head of security for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President — commonly called CREEP — when he became entangled in a scheme to burglarize and bug the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington.
McCord had once taught a college course on how to protect buildings from intrusions, and he helped lead the operation. more
Friday, August 10, 2018
Eavesdropping and Wiretapping History
The result of Dash's efforts was The Eavesdroppers, a 483-page report co-authored with Knowlton and Schwartz. Rutgers University Press published it as a standalone volume in 1959. The book uncovered a wide range of privacy infringements on the part of state authorities and private citizens, a much bigger story than the PBAE had anticipated. more (long, in-depth and very interesting)
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Nixon Watergate Era Poster
Thursday, December 1, 2016
The Martini Olive Bug, or who was Hal Lipset?
Francis Ford Coppola considered the implications of the professional eavesdropper when he made The Conversation... It should come as no surprise that Hal Lipset was hired as technical consultant for the picture.
Lipset spoke in Congress using the famous "bug in the martini olive" and other secret surveillance devices that he and his staff pioneered...
In 1964, Time Magazine wrote, "Hal Lipset, a seasoned San Francisco private eye, maintains a laboratory behind a false warehouse from where his eavesdropping ‘genius,' Ralph Bertsche, works out new gimmicks such as a high-powered bug that fits into a pack of filter-tip cigarettes..."
His first chance to go public on the national scene occurred the previous year when he was invited to testify before the Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee... "First I thought I’d dazzle them with an array of miniature devices they had never seen before; then I would surprise them by playing back my own testimony from a recorder I had hidden before the hearing."
The great idea worked too well. Lipset’s appearance was seen as a clever but ominous sign of snooping running amok.
... the next time he was invited to Washington to speak before a Senate subcommittee - this one in 1965 to hear testimony specifically on eavesdropping - he renewed his efforts...
"We came up with the "bug in the martini olive" idea, it didn’t seem all that unusual. The martini glass was simply another example of how ingenious these devices could be."
The glass held a facsimile of an olive, which could hold a tiny transmitter, the pimento inside the olive, in which we could embed the microphone, and a toothpick, which could house a copper wire as an antenna. No gin was used - that could cause a short.
It was the bug in the martini olive that made Lipset "the real star of the day," as UPI reported. Hardly an ominous indication of private snoopers taking over the world, this little olive with its toothpick antenna became a "playful" and charming toy.
---
This is the very condensed version of his story. The full story is here, as excerpted from his biography, "The Bug in the Martini Olive," by Patricia Holt, Little Brown, 1991 ~Kevin
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Relive Watergate by Living in Watergate
That’s the asking price of the four-bedroom residence where then-Attorney General John Mitchell lived when planning the infamous break-in of 1972. The apartment, located in one of the Watergate’s three residential towers, measures 3,150 square feet and includes a private elevator entrance.
The buildings that make up the Watergate complex have a long list of A-list residents influential in politics, public policy, the arts and business. Current owners include Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former Sens. Bob and Elizabeth Dole, and Jacqueline Mars, heiress to the Mars candy fortune. We take you behind the scenes in the Washington landmark. more
Fun Facts
• John Mitchell was the person who evaluated the results of the first Watergate burglary and ordered the five men to return to fix wiretaps and photograph more documents.
• "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell,
there'd have been no Watergate."
~Nixon
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
The DNC Hack — Worse than Watergate
What’s galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That’s not what happened here.
The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible.
This is trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy. more
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Four Textbook Business Espionage Case Histories
Walter Liew vs. DuPont – “titanium dioxide”
In July 2014, Walter Liew, a chemical engineer from California, pleaded guilty to selling DuPont’s super secret pigment formula that makes cars, paper, and a long list of other everyday items whiter to China.
Starwood vs. Hilton
In 2009, Starwood Hotels accused Hilton Hotels of recruiting executives out from under them and stealing confidential materials... Starwood alleged that the ex-employees had stolen more than 10,000 documents and delivered them to Hilton – the worst part being that Starwood didn’t even notice that the documents were missing until after the indictment.
Microsoft vs. Oracle
In June 1999, Oracle hired a detective agency called Investigative Group International (IGI) to spy on Microsoft – it was headed by a former Watergate investigator, if that says anything... IGI, following Oracle’s orders, sifted through Microsoft’s trash (a practice also known as Dumpster Diving)...
The following May, the same happened. This time, IGI focused its investigations on the Association for Competitive Technology, a trade group; IGI arranged for a random woman to bribe ACT’s cleaning crew with $1,200 in exchange for bringing any office trash to an office nearby – of course, the office was a front for IGI.
Steven Louis Davis vs. Gillette
In 1997, Steven Louis Davis, an engineer helping Gillette develop its new shaving system, was caught faxing and emailing technical drawings to four of Gillette’s competitors...
Sadly, these economic espionage cases aren’t shocking to most corporate executives; it’s not uncommon for rivalry companies to dumpster dive, hack, bribe, and hire away key employees. In a rush to push out new products, major corporations will do just about anything to defame their competitors. And, although a few of these cases stem from the 1990s, their spirit still holds today – as the FBI has noted that corporate espionage is no where near slowing down. more
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Tapes Released - Eavesdropping on Henry Kissinger's Telephone Conversations
Speaking on the phone with McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Kissinger referred to Colby as a “psychopath.”
[A film by the son of CIA spymaster William Colby has divided the Colby clan]
The two men were chatting about congressional investigations into the CIA activities post-Watergate and worried about leaks and misinformation.
“On top of it you have the pysopath(sic)/running the CIA. You accuse him of a traffic violation and he confesses murder,” Kissinger said in the June 1975 telephone conversation. Colby, Loop fans will recall, was replaced soon after as director of CIA by George H.W. Bush.
That conversation is part of 900 final Kissinger phone transcripts from the Gerald Ford administration released Wednesday by the National Security Archive, which sued the State Department in March to have them released. For history buffs the tapes are precious gold... more
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Watergate - Ben Bradley Dies at 93
He was 93.
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Lawmaker Lunacy Comes Off Half Cox'ed
It was exposed recently that Assembly Republicans, led by Oswego County's Assemblyman Will Barclay, had a private investigator put a GPS tracking device on a car driven by Assemblyman Edward Hennessey, D-Suffolk County to track his whereabouts.
They admitted to it in court...
Cox, who was in Syracuse Wednesday, said the two investigations are not the same.
First of all, Assembly Republicans admitted to bugging the car.
Secondly, it was legal, he said (although he admits he doesn't know any more about the law than what he's been told by a reporter.)
He talked about bugging the car as if it was the Republican Party's responsibility. He said it is part of the "self-policing, democratic process" for one party to investigate the other party's candidate before the election.
"Watergate was using illegal means - breaking and entering and illegal bugging - in order to find out what was legal political conversation. It's just the opposite," he said.
Cox said politics in New York is a competitive sport. "It ain't bean bag," he said...
What would he say if someone bugged his car?
Under the same circumstances, he said, "Sure that would be fine with me." (more)
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Nixon Tapes Released for 40th Anniversary of Resignation
A decade later, he sat down with former White House aide Frank Gannon to share his own account of his final days in the Oval Office. Segments culled from those 30 hours of interviews were aired publicly just once, on CBS News. This week, The Richard Nixon Foundation and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum are releasing a series of clips of those interviews in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the resignation.
In the first installments of the video series entitled “A President Resigns,” the disgraced president recalls learning that the infamous tape that became known as “the smoking gun” had been released. The tape revealed that Nixon had been aware of the break-in at the Watergate, despite his repeated denials. (more)
Friday, May 16, 2014
Watergate Figure - Deputy Director of CREEP - Magruder Dead at 79
Magruder, 79, joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as special assistant to the president for domestic policy development. He joined Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign and was involved in the campaign's efforts to gather intelligence on its political opponents.
In that job, Magruder helped authorize the unsuccessful June 17, 1972, break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate office complex. The arrest of the five burglars that night triggered a coverup by the campaign, which spread to the White House and was enthusiastically embraced by Nixon. Nixon resigned in August 1974 after continued revelations about his role in the scandal and other issues. (more)
Fun Facts:
Magruder's first major political job was managing the successful 1962 primary campaign of Donald Rumsfeld for the Republican nomination, preparing for the congressional election in the 13th district of Illinois, to the United States House of Representatives.
After his fall from grace, became a Presbyterian minister.