Watergate Burglars: Nixon, Dirty Tricks, and the CIA

Fifty years after Watergate, researcher Shane O’Sullivan reveals the true story of the break-in in this chilling tale of political espionage and deception.

The victory of Richard Nixon in the US presidential election of 1968 swung on an “October Sur­prise”—a treasonous plot engineered by Anna Chennault and key figures in the Republican Party to keep the South Vietnamese government away from peace talks in Paris, costing thousands of American lives. The Nixon campaign got away with election “dirty tricks” in 1968, but four years later, they were caught.

Drawing on the CIA’s recently declassified history of Watergate and thousands of previously un­published documents, The Watergate Burglars (previously published as Dirty Tricks) is the definitive account of the men behind the break-in. O’Sullivan documents their ties to the CIA in unprecedent­ed detail, and how they implicated the Agency and the White House in three break-ins targeting Daniel Ellsberg and the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, ultimately leading to Nixon’s downfall.

How did tapping the wrong phone with a bug that didn’t work lead to the burglars’ capture? Why was the bug on DNC official Spencer Oliver’s phone only found three months after the break-in? And why was the CIA agent inside the plot sent to Cuba on a double agent mission by American intelligence after he got out of prison? Now available for the first time in paperback just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Watergate, this updated edition answers these questions and includes a wealth of new material: burglar James McCord’s final testament to his family about his role in the break-in, new revelations from whistleblower Alfred Baldwin, FBI case agent Angelo Lano, and the police officer who first identified McCord after his arrest and debriefed him in jail.