Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard, noticed tape holding a stairwell door latch open at the Watergate office complex at 2:30 a.m. He removed it. On his next round, he found it retaped. He called the police. Officers found five men in business suits and surgical gloves, equipped with walkie-talkies, cameras, and lock picks, inside the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee. One burglar, James McCord, was a former CIA agent and the current security coordinator for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.
The White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, later dismissed the event as a “third-rate burglary.” The description was technically accurate for the clumsy execution. It was profoundly misleading about the operation’s origin and purpose. The men were there to repair a failed wiretap installed three weeks earlier and to photograph documents. They acted on orders from G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent and White House aide, whose espionage plan had been approved by Attorney General John Mitchell. The break-in was not freelance political espionage. It was a sanctioned intelligence operation run from the Oval Office.
The arrests set in motion a chain of subpoenas, cover-up payments, and grand jury investigations that journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein traced using a source known as “Deep Throat.” The Senate Watergate Committee hearings, beginning in May 1973, revealed the existence of a secret White House taping system. Those tapes provided the evidence of President Richard Nixon’s direct involvement in the obstruction of justice.
The event mattered because it provided a physical crime scene for a vast, shadowy campaign of political sabotage. The burglars’ arrest created a tangible legal thread that investigators could pull. It unraveled a presidency. The break-in demonstrated that the administration viewed the democratic process itself as an enemy to be monitored and subverted. The system corrected the crime, but the distrust it seeded became permanent.