G. Gordon Liddy, mastermind of Watergate burglary, dies at age 90
- Liddy proposed a series of illegal acts to weaken the Democratic Party’s chances of electoral victory by gathering intelligence and catching officials in compromising situations
- For his part in organising a break-in of the Watergate building, Liddy received a 20-year jail sentence, which was later commuted by President Jimmy Carter
G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent and White House staffer imprisoned for organising the 1972 Watergate burglary that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon, has died. He was 90.
He died March 30 at his daughter’s home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, according to The New York Times, citing his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.
Liddy was a member of the Committee to Re-Elect the President and the former chief operative of the “plumbers” unit, created by the Nixon administration to stop information leaks to journalists.
He proposed a series of illegal acts, known as Operation Gemstone, to weaken the Democratic Party’s chances of electoral victory by gathering political intelligence and catching officials in compromising situations.
“I saw Democrats as being dangerous to the country,” Liddy said in a 2014 radio interview. “I wanted to prevent them from being able to damage the country further. So I chose to make use of the special knowledge that I had as a result of the FBI and so forth. That was it.”
The bugging of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex in Washington was part of a plan that he had discussed in 1972 with Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Counsel John Dean and Nixon aide Jeb Magruder.
On June 16, 1972, five men broke into the Watergate building to fix wiretaps planted weeks earlier in the Democratic headquarters. The burglars were arrested by police, acting on a tip from security guard Frank Wills.
