Operations
The Plumbers' first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The operation was reportedly unsuccessful in finding Ellsberg's file and was so reported to the White House. However, Fielding himself stated the file was in his office; he found it on the floor on the morning after the burglary and quite clearly someone had gone through it. In a September 1971 conversation, Ehrlichman advised Nixon, “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about." Eventually, the case against Ellsberg was dismissed due to government misconduct.
Aside from the Fielding burglary there are few other activities the Plumbers were known to have been engaged in. Hunt reportedly looked into the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident and Liddy reported purported Kennedy administration involvement in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.
After the California break-in, Liddy was recruited by White House Counsel John Dean to perform an intelligence gathering operation for Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). Liddy was transferred to CRP and involved Hunt in the operations which would later include the Watergate burglary.
Read more about this topic: White House Plumbers
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)