Operation Gemstone: The Bizarre Dirty-Tricks Plan That Led to Watergate
Watergate is remembered as a burglary that went catastrophically wrong.
That rather undersells the planning.
Months before five men were arrested inside Democratic National Committee headquarters on 17 June 1972, G. Gordon Liddy had presented senior Nixon campaign officials with something called Operation Gemstone: an intelligence programme so extravagantly disreputable that the eventual Watergate break-in looks almost restrained by comparison.
The proposals involved electronic surveillance, burglary, kidnapping, political sabotage and sexual entrapment. They were given gemstone-inspired code names and presented by a former FBI agent who apparently saw no reason political intelligence gathering should lack theatrical ambition.
The story behind Hellwood’s G. Gordon Liddy T-Shirt therefore begins before Watergate, when one of America’s greatest political scandals still resembled an extremely ill-advised brainstorming session.
The Man Asked to Gather Intelligence
Liddy had an unusual résumé for campaign work. A lawyer and former FBI agent, he joined the Nixon administration before becoming part of the covert White House unit popularly known as the Plumbers, established amid concern over leaks of sensitive information.
As the 1972 presidential election approached, he moved to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President and was tasked with developing political intelligence operations.
Liddy did not think small.
In January 1972 he presented Attorney General John Mitchell, White House counsel John Dean and campaign official Jeb Magruder with an elaborate proposal eventually known as Operation Gemstone.
The price was reportedly around a million dollars.
Apparently democracy was expensive even when approached from the wrong direction.
Kidnapping, Spies and a Very Strange Houseboat
The original Gemstone proposals read less like conventional opposition research than discarded plots from a paranoid thriller.
Plans included electronic surveillance and burglaries aimed at obtaining political intelligence. One proposal contemplated kidnapping anti-war demonstrators who might disrupt the Republican National Convention and holding them in Mexico until proceedings had finished.
Another involved using prostitutes to lure Democratic officials into compromising situations aboard a boat, where hidden cameras could record them.
Other schemes proposed surveillance of Democratic candidates and disruption of opposition activities.
The important historical qualification is that these more spectacular proposals were proposed, not carried out. Mitchell regarded Liddy’s initial scheme as excessively expensive and ordered it reduced.
The problem was that trimming Gemstone did not make it respectable.
How Gemstone Became Watergate
The reduced intelligence operation retained burglary and electronic surveillance.
Liddy and former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt oversaw an operation targeting Democratic National Committee offices inside Washington’s Watergate complex. A first entry in May 1972 succeeded in placing listening equipment, although one device subsequently malfunctioned and the intelligence gathered proved disappointing.
That led to the return visit.
Shortly after 2 a.m. on 17 June, police arrested five burglars inside the DNC offices. Hunt and Liddy were operating nearby rather than physically inside the headquarters, but the trail connecting the burglars to the Nixon campaign began emerging almost immediately.
One remarkably mundane piece of evidence helped.
An address book belonging to burglar Bernard Barker contained the initials “HH” beside a telephone number. Investigators established that the number led to the White House and Hunt. The National Archives preserves the book today as part of the Watergate court records.
The supposedly covert operation was developing paperwork problems.
The Burglary Was Only the Beginning
Watergate eventually consumed the Nixon presidency not simply because campaign operatives had burgled an office, but because investigations uncovered attempts to conceal connections, obstruct inquiries and misuse presidential power.
Liddy refused to cooperate.
He was convicted for his role in Watergate-related offences and served roughly four and a half years in prison — longer than any of the other Watergate conspirators, according to the Ford Library’s account.
Richard Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.
What makes Operation Gemstone fascinating fifty years later is how clearly it shows that Watergate did not emerge from one spontaneous bad decision. Before the famous burglary there were meetings, budgets, proposals and revisions. Political espionage was being discussed as a project to be managed.
For more of the less reassuring chapters of American public life, browse Hellwood’s American History T-Shirts, True Crime T-Shirts and Conspiracy Theory T-Shirts.
Watergate became a word ending countless later scandals with “-gate”. Operation Gemstone deserves remembering because it shows what existed before the suffix.
A plan.
And quite an astonishing one.
G. GORDON LIDDY T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to the former FBI agent, White House Plumber and political operative whose extraordinary intelligence schemes helped turn a Washington office burglary into Watergate.