McCord, the Mullen Company and Helms

Start with the men. McCord was the CIA’s former security man until 1970. Hunt retired the same year and went to the Robert R. Mullen Company, a Washington public-relations firm that had provided cover for CIA officers abroad. TIME counted five of the seven burglars as having been involved with the Agency. [1]

Then the conduct. After the arrests, McCord’s wife burned papers with a CIA officer, Lee Pennington, on hand; Baker’s report charged that Pennington destroyed documents that might show a link between McCord and the CIA. The Agency did not tell the FBI or the Senate. In January 1973, just before Richard Helms left as director, the CIA destroyed tapes that included his phone calls with Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, days after the Senate had asked it to keep Watergate evidence. [1]

Add Hunt’s CIA help for the Ellsberg operation, criticized by the Rockefeller Commission, and the theory says the Agency knew more, and did more, than it ever admitted. [2]

Nearly everything in the case above is on the record. Baker’s report raised, in TIME’s words, “disconcerting questions about CIA participation”, but it “provided no evidence that the agency either planned or executed the Watergate operation.” Baker himself said he had no conclusions. Sam Ervin, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said the CIA “made some foolish mistakes, but Watergate came directly out of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, with the assistance of certain White House aides.” [1]

The Rockefeller Commission found no evidence that the CIA planned, carried out or knew in advance of the burglary. [2] McCord, the burglar with the strongest CIA ties, wrote to Judge Sirica in March 1973 that “the Watergate operation was not a CIA operation,” that the Cubans may have been misled into thinking it was, and that he knew “for a fact that it was not.” [3]

The chain of command is documented, and it ran through the campaign. Liddy’s plan was approved and paid for by the Committee to Re-elect. When the White House wanted to stop the FBI, it tried to use the CIA as a pretext, and the CIA did not go along for long. [4][5]

The destroyed tapes and the burned papers remain real reasons for distrust. Concealment can protect embarrassing contacts as well as a plot. What they hid is unknown. That is not evidence of what it was.