Convicted Watergate conspirator’s death was not announced for 2 years
WASHINGTON — James McCord, a retired CIA employee who was convicted as a conspirator in the Watergate burglary and later linked the 1972 break-in to the White House in revelations that helped end the presidency of Richard Nixon, died June 15, 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pa. He was 93.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to his death certificate obtained at the Berks County Register of Wills office in Reading, Pa.
McCord’s death was first reported in “Dirty Tricks,” a 2018 history of the Watergate investigation by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan. But the news did not appear in local or national media outlets and surfaced online in March, when the website Kennedys and King published an obituary referencing his Pennsylvania gravesite.
McCord served in the CIA for 19 years before his supporting and at times sensational role in the events that precipitated the first resignation of a U.S. president.
He had retired from the spy agency and was privately employed as head of security for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President — commonly called CREEP — when he became entangled in a scheme to burglarize and bug the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington.
McCord had once taught a college course on how to protect buildings from intrusions, and he helped lead the operation. Preparing for the break-in, the conspirators rigged door latches at the Watergate complex with adhesive tape to prevent the doors from locking.
The tape caught the attention of a security guard who alerted the police to suspicious activity. In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, plainclothes officers entered the Democratic headquarters and found five burglars, McCord among them, clad in suits and surgical gloves.
His arraignment, covered by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for one of the newspaper’s first articles about the events now collectively known as the Watergate scandal, was memorably dramatized in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.”
In September 1972, a federal grand jury indicted McCord, the other burglars, and Nixon aides Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy on charges stemming from the bugging attempt.
Facing a possible 45 years in prison, McCord submitted to the judge a letter that The Post described years later as a “bombshell.”
McCord continued to deliver allegations of misconduct at high levels. In a May 1973 memorandum to Senate, he wrote that he and the other burglars were pressured to falsely testify that the Watergate scheme was executed at the behest of the CIA — an account that would have exculpated the re-election committee and one that he refused to give.
Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974.