Alfred Baldwin, chief Watergate eavesdropper and lookout, dies

Alfred C. Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who served as the chief eavesdropper and lookout for the Watergate burglars, but then became a key government witness in the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, died Jan. 15, 2020 at a care center in New Paltz, N.Y. He was 83.

Like Watergate conspirator James McCord Jr., whose death in 2017 was not widely reported for two years, Baldwin did not want his death publicized. Both men’s deaths were first reported by London-based writer and filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan, who noted Baldwin’s passing in the updated paperback edition of his book “The Watergate Burglars,” which came out on Tuesday.

His death was independently confirmed by his friend and longtime lawyer, Robert C. Mirto, who said Baldwin had cancer.

A gregarious Marine Corps veteran from a prominent Connecticut family, Baldwin reinvented himself as a schoolteacher and lawyer in the years after Watergate, working as a state prosecutor in Hartford for nearly a decade until his retirement in 1997. But he remained best known as a supporting player in the cast of petty crooks, dirty tricksters, FBI veterans and former spies involved in the plot to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington.

“You’d think after 25 years, it would be over,” he told the Hartford Courant in 1997, after he was subpoenaed as part of a defamation lawsuit against Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy. “There are other things in life.”

When McCord and four others broke into the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972, Baldwin was watching from across the street, keeping an eye on the DNC’s sixth-floor headquarters from his room at a Howard Johnson hotel. He became the only member of the burglary team not charged with a crime, agreeing to cooperate with federal investigators in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

According to a 1992 report in The Washington Post, Baldwin’s testimony gave prosecutors enough evidence to indict the five burglars as well as two other conspirators, White House operatives Howard Hunt and Liddy. “He gave us some very valuable evidence,” prosecutor Earl Silbert said in an oral history. “He became a critical government witness.”

Before testifying at trials and congressional hearings, Baldwin also went public with his story, helping to show that the break-in was far more than a “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler initially called it.

Agreeing to an exclusive interview with Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson, he implicated Nixon associates and gave a vivid, richly detailed account of the burglary scheme - while also making one request of Nelson, asking the journalist to describe him in print as “a husky ex-Marine” in a bid to impress a girl he was seeing. Nelson obliged.

Published in October 1972 and picked up by newspapers across the country, the interview and accompanying articles became “perhaps the most important Watergate story so far, because it was so tangible, it had an eyewitness, and it brought Watergate to the very door of the White House,” wrote David Halberstam in his media history “The Powers That Be.”

Baldwin publicly revealed that the June break-in was actually the second Watergate burglary, occurring after McCord and his team bugged two phones at the Democratic office over Memorial Day weekend. One was believed to belong to DNC chairman Larry O’Brien, although the listening device never worked. The other belonged to R. Spencer Oliver, the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen.

Over the next three weeks, Baldwin monitored some 200 conversations on Oliver’s phone, taking notes that were passed to McCord and shared with Nixon campaign officials. He said that McCord was especially interested in conversations related to political strategy, O’Brien or Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“I never questioned McCord’s orders,” Baldwin told the Los Angeles Times. “I felt he was acting under orders and with full authority. After all, his boss, was John Mitchell,” the former U.S. attorney general and the head of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, commonly known as CREEP.

“There was no set time for monitoring,” Baldwin added. “The Democrats worked weird hours, like on Sundays and some days until 3 or 4 in the morning. And when I was in the room, I was monitoring from the time I got up until I went to bed.”

In the lead-up to the second burglary, McCord assigned him to cross the street and visit the Democratic headquarters in person, to determine O’Brien’s whereabouts as well as the exact location of his office. Pretending to be the nephew of John Moran Bailey, the Connecticut state party chairman and former DNC leader, he was able to get a tour of O’Brien’s office and draw a detailed floor plan upon his return.

By one account, he was far less attentive on the early morning of June 17, as plainclothes police entered the Watergate building and closed in on the burglars. Stationed in hotel room 723, he “was glued to the TV, watching a horror movie, ‘Attack of the Puppet People,’ on Channel 20 - oblivious to the situation developing across the street,” author Craig Shirley wrote in an article for Washingtonian magazine.

Baldwin later called that claim “a blatant fabrication,” saying the TV had been on to obscure the sound of a walkie-talkie he was using to communicate with his team. As he told it, he was looking out the window when he saw the lights flicker on across the Democratic office. He was not worried until a few armed men stepped onto the balcony, and he radioed to ask what the burglars were wearing.

“Our people are dressed suits,” a voice replied.

“Well,” Baldwin recalled saying, “we’ve got problems. We’ve got some people dressed casually, and they’ve got guns.”

Police had been tipped off by Frank Wills, a Watergate security guard who noticed that a strip of tape was holding one of the office doors unlocked. He removed the tape, returned later to find it back in place and phoned D.C. police, who took the burglars into custody as Baldwin watched from his hotel room balcony.