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Alfred C. Baldwin


John Simkin

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I'll read back through my Watergate books and testimony and slap you down big time.

I've got every single reference that exists on the alleged "cables" right here at my fingertips. So you go start a new topic about your precious Hunt "cables," and you make your case for the "cables" in that appropriate topic, and I'll see you there.

If you continue to try to sabotage the Alfred Baldwin thread with it, the only thing I'm going to do is report it to the admins, and wash my hands of you permanently. Your choice.

So go start an appropriately named topic, and then bring it all on. Lay it all out there in as much detail as you can muster, with cites, in the dusty street of your new thread at high noon.

I'll be there.

I'm calling you out.

Ashton Gray

If you have it the material on the cables at your disposal, go ahead and start the thread and I'll see you there.

:D I thought so. :D

I accept your capitulation and your stipulation that the "cables" are yet another fiction, Mr. Speer.

Never mind that Ford was not a friend of the CIA, but a friend of their political rival, the FBI, and that Ford's regime oversaw the most exhaustive investigation of the intelligence agencies in our history, spurred on in part by his own big mouth.

Utter codswollop.

Learn history before you start trying to teach it, especially to me. The only things that Ford and his cronies at the CIA "exposed" in those "exhausive investigations" were the exact things they wanted to "expose," for which Ford's cronies Helms and Gottlieb and friends already had shredded every scrap of evidence at the very beginning of 1973—immediately after their Watergate hoax, and immediately after CIA had started its top secret remote viewing program, which they never revealed at any relevant time, and which they ran in secret for well over 20 years. And Ford was absolutely key to helping them keep that secret throughout the entire dog-and-pony-show "congressional investigations" you're braying about.

Explain that one in your apologist rants at me. It was the absolute highest priority black operation the CIA had going throughout all of these so-called "exhaustive investigations" that your hero Ford set up (impaneled using all his cronies, including Rockefeller, of whose offices Caddy is an alumnus), and they all made sure that not a single syllable ever saw the light of day about this secret program that the CIA was running at that very moment in back rooms just a few miles away from these flashy "exhaustive investigations."

So all it really amounted to was yet another CIA cover-up, showily put on as "confessions" for which the actual evidence had been destroyed.

There's not a pattern here or anything, is there? This wouldn't be the exact same M.O. as the Watergate "first break-in" hoax, run by the exact same crew, would it, Mr. Speer? I mean, we wouldn't be looking at yet another big production congressional "investigation" where the paper trail has been erased, and where we have to rely entirely on the word of the perjuring perpetrators and a few measly scraps of planted "evidence" to know what they have or have not done, would we?

If not, how did these Ford-puppeted congressional "investigators" (with intelligence oversight powers) miss the biggest black program that the CIA and DIA had going right then, right under their own lying, two-faced noses? How? How is it possible? Apologize that away. But tell your apologies to somebody who's gullible enough to listen.

When you picked me, you picked the wrong boy.

Ashton Gray

I hope you chain yourself down at night, because you're about as out there as one can be. First you say that Watergate was a MASS ongoing conspiracy containing such diverse figures as Daniel Ellsberg and Neil Sheehan all the way down to relatively minor figures like Mr. Caddy and Mr. Baldwin, and that the purpose of this conspiracy was to remove Nixon from power and give the presidency to--gulp--Gerry Ford. Now you seem to be saying that the Church Committees was part of the plan!!! LUDICROUS. It is only through the Rockefeller Commission--which did discuss MKULTRA, by the way, and acknowledged that the CIA had experimented with LSD, and the Church Committee, which exposed the CIA's role in a number of assassinations, that we know anything about what was going on. So was it all a big lie? Were the Church Committee transcripts written by Hunt and Liddy from their prison cells? And what was the point of this hoax? To cover up the government's involvement in mind-control and remote viewing? What? It's only through the government's acknowledgement that the CIA participated in assassination, MKULTRA and CHAOS etc, that the government's involvement in mind control and remote viewing became public. Your contention that the government would obscure the fact they experimented with psychics and mind-control by readily admitting they'd put mafia hit-men on retainer to murder foreign leaders is about the most bizarre thing I've ever heard.

Dawn, John G., are you really falling for this nonsense?

You said you had every bit of information on the cables. I'm waiting for you to post this information so I can educate myself.

In the meantime, please humor me by answering a few of my questions...

I repeat...JUST WHO IS IT who was so badly harmed by Mr. Baldwin? And WHY, pray tell, would the CIA, the most public of secret agencies, concoct a scenario ensuring that the public's trust in its institutions, INCLUDING THE CIA, would be irreversibly damaged? It simply makes no sense. If this conspiracy was as evil as you claim, and as insidious as you claim, wouldn't the conspirators have better served their purported higher power, the CIA, by simply killing Nixon and making it look like an accident?

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Carl Shoffler was the policeman who arrested the Watergate burglars. Shoffler should not have been on duty that night. Shoffler’s shift ended at 10.00 pm on 16th June, 1972. He volunteered for an extra shift and then parked his car close to the Watergate building. He was therefore in a good position to take the call and arrest the burglars.

Shortly after the Watergate break-in, Shoffler told his former commanding officer, Captain Edmund Chung, that the Watergate arrests were the result of a tip-off. He also revealed that he knew Alfred Baldwin. It was implied that Baldwin was the one who tipped him off about the break-in. Shoffler also told Chung that if he ever made the whole story public, “his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel”.

Did you know Shoffler? Did you tip him off about the break-in?

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Carl Shoffler was the policeman who arrested the Watergate burglars. Shoffler should not have been on duty that night. Shoffler’s shift ended at 10.00 pm on 16th June, 1972. He volunteered for an extra shift and then parked his car close to the Watergate building. He was therefore in a good position to take the call and arrest the burglars.

Shortly after the Watergate break-in, Shoffler told his former commanding officer, Captain Edmund Chung, that the Watergate arrests were the result of a tip-off. He also revealed that he knew Alfred Baldwin. It was implied that Baldwin was the one who tipped him off about the break-in. Shoffler also told Chung that if he ever made the whole story public, “his life wouldn’t be worth a nickel”.

Did you know Shoffler? Did you tip him off about the break-in?

John - never knew him - but did meet and talk to him during trail phase, Also, I didn't "tip" him.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Mr. Baldwin, isn't it true that E. Howard Hunt followed you in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972 as you drove the van full of incriminating "evidence" to McCord's house and planted it there, Hunt having already planted his set of incriminating "evidence" at the White House? And isn't it true that Douglas Caddy knows this completely, that Hunt never went to Caddy's apartment, and that Caddy has been providing an alibi for Hunt for 34 years to cover this up—which accounts entirely for all the contradictions in their stories?

Ashton Gray

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Mr. Baldwin, isn't it true that E. Howard Hunt followed you in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972 as you drove the van full of incriminating "evidence" to McCord's house and planted it there, Hunt having already planted his set of incriminating "evidence" at the White House? And isn't it true that Douglas Caddy knows this completely, that Hunt never went to Caddy's apartment, and that Caddy has been providing an alibi for Hunt for 34 years to cover this up—which accounts entirely for all the contradictions in their stories?

Ashton Gray

1. I did not "plant" anything at McCord's house. I took what was in the room at the HJ and did what I was told to do, which was to deliver all of it to Jim's house. Those were the instructions I had been given and that I followed.

2. No it is not true. I know for a fact no one followed me that AM to McCord's house. If you have Hunt saying that he followed me then it would have been said as a "figure of speech" in that at some point of time he drove to McCord's house after my trip. I don't believe that anyone else, other than myself or Hunt, would have made that statement since they would not have been there, and I know for a fact that I never made any statement about "anyone following me". I can not speak for Hunt.

3. As to what Caddy knew or didn't know I can not address. You would have to direct those questions to Mr. Caddy.

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Hi, Mr. Baldwin. Thanks for your response. You wrote:

1. I did not "plant" anything at McCord's house. I took what was in the room at the HJ and did what I was told to do, which was to deliver all of it to Jim's house. Those were the instructions I had been given and that I followed.

All right. Thanks. Here is what E. Howard Hunt has said in his autobiography about the instructions he gave you immediately after the "arrests." He claims this is the first time he had ever seen you in his life, that he didn't even know your name, and that you didn't even know who he was when he came to the door of the "listening post." This is just after he purportedly had dropped Liddy off at Liddy's jeep, then driven to the Howard Johnson's while the arrests were in progress:

  • From the [Howard Johnson's] motel lobby I took the elevator to the seventh floor and knocked on the L/P [Listening Post] door. It opened a crack and I saw a man with a crew cut indistinctly against the dark background [Alfred Baldwin]. "Are you—?" he asked, but I handed him the W/T [Walkie-Talkie] and went inside, locking the door behind me. Offering me binoculars, he said, "Hey, take a look; the cops are leading them out."
    "Listen," I said, "it's all over. Pack up and get going."
    He looked around uncertainly. "Lotta heavy gear here. What do I do with it?"
    "Load the goddamn van and shove off."
    "Where should I go—McCord's house?"
    I stared at him incredulously. "That's the last place to go. I don't care if you drive the van into the river; just get the stuff out of here. Understood?" Turning, I strode toward the door.

NEW QUESTION 1. How would you reconcile what you said above with what Hunt says about what your instructions were?

2. No it is not true. I know for a fact no one followed me that AM to McCord's house. If you have Hunt saying that he followed me then it would have been said as a "figure of speech" in that at some point of time he drove to McCord's house after my trip. I don't believe that anyone else, other than myself or Hunt, would have made that statement since they would not have been there, and I know for a fact that I never made any statement about "anyone following me". I can not speak for Hunt.

Okay. I understand. Then we'll have to let Hunt speak for himself again. This is his description of the same events as above, but in sworn Congressional testimony. I'm picking up his testimony where he's describing a discussion he says he had with McCord during July of 1972, after McCord had gotten out on bail, and the testimony swings back to the instructions Hunt says he gave you, and what you did after the arrests:

  • MR. HUNT: ...Mr. McCord said that he, himself, Mr. McCord, was short on funds. I suggested that he sell the van which Mr. Baldwin had, for some reason, driven to Mr. McCord's home in the wake of the operation against my instructions to take it elsewhere.
    MR. THOMPSON: Pardon me. You say against your instructions?
    MR. HUNT: Yes, Following the break-in...I did not go directly on the White House. I went over to the Howard Johnson Motel and spoke with a man whom I had not previously seen or met, but whom I knew to be an employee of Mr. McCord's, and told him to load all of his equipment into the van that McCord had and to drive away, get away from the premises. He said; "Where shall I go, shall I take it to Mr. McCord's home?' I said: "No, any place but that, I do not care where you take it. Drive it into the river, I do not care." In any event, it developed that Mr. McCord— Mr. Baldwin took the van to Mr. McCord's house and left it there.
    MR. THOMPSON: Do you know how far his house was from the Howard Johnson's Motel? Was it close by?
    MR. HUNT: Mr. McCord's home?
    MR. THOMPSON: Yes.
    MR. HUNT: No, it was a substantial drive. I would guess 15 or 16 miles.

So many questions arise from the above, such as how would Hunt know the distance if he hadn't followed you, given that there is no record at all of Hunt ever knowing anything about where McCord lived or ever going to McCord's house (but just ignore this question—consider it my "note to self").

The obvious questions directly for you, Mr. Baldwin, are:

NEW QUESTION 2. If Hunt didn't follow you, and if, as you say, no one followed you, and given that you left the van full of equipment at McCord's house in the wee hours of the morning, how did you leave McCord's house 15 or 16 miles outside of the city, and where did you go?

NEW QUESTION 3. How did you know where McCord lived and how to get there?

Thanks again.

3. As to what Caddy knew or didn't know I can not address. You would have to direct those questions to Mr. Caddy.

Heh. Now, why didn't I think of that?

Ashton Gray

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Guest John Gillespie

"3. As to what Caddy knew or didn't know I can not address. You would have to direct those questions to Mr. Caddy."

__________________________________

Well, speaking of our dear Mr. C., he seems to have swum with a lot of psyop/CIA types over the years:

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01/XZ

(refers to Alex Constantine and Mae Brussell when Caddy's name is entered into 'social network' search)

Here IS Mr. Caddy's social network:

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb06?_CADDY_DOUGLAS_

Mae Brussell's name came up in an unrecalled context when I found a 'counterpunch.org' piece

by Jim Hougan on the Jonestown massacre. I've attached the piece here once before, but that elicted virtually zero on the feedback meter even though the Jonestown saga probably was the most significant CIA mind control op and subsequent coverup in decades. Anyone who wants it can send me an email.

John Gillespie

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Guest John Gillespie

[quote name='John Gillespie' date='Jun 23 2006, 10:54 PM' post='66311']

[

When you get that reaction you know, you just know) that you're on to them. So please don't relent.

Yours Truly,

JG

Hi John

Great to see you here.

I agree with your posts and I have the feeling

that our new "Columbo" is NOT about to "relent".

In fact I have the feeling he's only warming up

and look forward to more of the same.

If people "can't take the heat....."

Tho, these are two men who went before

COngressional committees, and other questioning by

attorneys...so what's the problem answering some

questions? Ashton is a bit confrontrational, but he is also 100% SINCERE,

and after now 34 years of lies on these matters, I for one am damn glad

someone is finally asking some very relevent questions.

As for Pat Speer: He once posted that he believed what James McCord wrote in

his book "A piece of Tape". Pleeeeease!!!. (There's a bridge in Brooklyn that may still be for sale :)

Dawn

________________

Thanks, Dawn, very nice to catch up with you as well. As I mentioned in a dispatch earlier this week, I was away for awhile but have settled back into the things that keep us sane: routines.

The reasons that there is a shadow government - or governments - and what amounts to a kind of parallel universe in manipulation of us - is that it continues to succeed. Why does it succeed? Because, for the most part, we are fundamentally decent people who respect and revere our heritage and believe and trust our government. Unfortunately, a significant part of our history contains one example after another of how it is a very bad idea to trust or, especially, empower the government. We also practice denial real well.

If you've read Hougan's "Secret Agenda..." you know that some of the very best stuff lays in the appendix, including the Shoffler overtime story, the Shoffler/Chung debacle and the utterly fascinating John Paisley section. Also, we learn of Carl Bernstein's association with a D.C. pimp, his membership in a 'social' club frequented by said pimp and of Mr. Paisley's own membership along with other Langley types. Oh, we also learn that The Post covered Bernstein's and their own posterior by doing an internal investigation of a kind worthy of Stalinist Russia. They assigned it to someone named Woodward who found nothing untoward. The back section of that book alone would comprise an absolutely delightful and informative tome.

But the Shoffler/Chung contradiction (sounds like Ludlum, eh?) that Hougan relates is a wonderful example of the kind of thing that Ash has been trhing to get people to understand. We see in the on-and-off-the-record body of Watergate so many contradictions as to singular/plural, disjointed timelines, value differentials and other psy op techniques of obfuscation. The human tendency is simply to throw one's hands in the air and conclude that something is irreconcilable. NOT! Someone is a xxxx, probably each, maybe both, maybe exclusively mutual, yada, yada, yada.

Ash is trying to point out that the contradiction(s) are in fact created fo that purpose where impasse takes hold and the scoundrels are off to the next dirty deed (I just posted Mr. Caddy's 'social' web, by the way, as seen on the 'namebase' site). But, quite a nice little thing they have going, this deceit thing, no? It's a simple trick that few people have either used or would recognize. Ashton's revelations are simply put and remind us that these grand deceits are so often hidden in plain sight but can be found if we want to take a look.

Thanks for your support.

JohnG

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  • 1 year later...

Robert Mirto and John Cassidento also arranged for Baldwin to talk to the press. He was interviewed by Jack Nelson and the article was published in the Los Angeles Times on 4th October, 1972.

Ahh...Jack Nelson, the L.A. Times' long-time Washington bureau chief. He knew a thing or two.

Jack Nelson and Ronald Ostrow.

James

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  • 5 years later...

I'd like to jump in with some questions. Howard Hunt in his biography said he ordered Alfred Baldwin to load McCord's van with the Watergate surveillance equipment and dispose of it. He never said what finally happened to it. One of Hunt's sons said in an interview that he helped his father dump the equipment in the river. Does anyone know what really happened?

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  • 2 years later...

There are still a lot of inaccuracies. The original plot to infiltrate the White House started in Miami with Hunt. Hunt was able to seize a seat and desk in the White House. Hunt recruited Frank Sturgis, Barker and McCord. These three men never really got over the BOP invasion. In-fact, McCord who was head of Security in the CIA was in charge of Security at Langley and JMWAVE and who was responsible for heading up counterintelligence against FPCC.

Frank recruited Eugenio Martinez and Ed Kaiser who went to the first break-in only who by the way was among the 30 frogmen stationed in Cuba when Nixon shut it all down, Eugenio volunteered after losing his position with the CIA Eugenio brought in Virgilio Gonzalez as the locksmith who could unlock doors and help break-in.

McCord brought in Alfred Baldwin and Gordon Liddy, Baldwin's job was to record the conversation at the DNC. This information if any incriminating evidence could be found by Hunt, McCord or Barker would be used for entrapment by way of extortion for funding another run into Cuba.

These guys didn't know why they were recruited other then they were told the operation was sanctioned by the White House and because Baldwin was Mathia Mitchell's bodyguard, Baldwin could be the guy who is the go between from John Mitchell and having the law on your side as Mitchell was the United States Attorney General. This is why Sturgis was not worried about spending too much time in jail. Sturgis wasn't worried about because he believed that Jack Anderson would testify on his behalf and Frank believed he would only spend a few months in prison in exchanged for the freedom of Cuba. It would have been worth it for Frank.

Than there were the Chilean Embassy break-ins that Frank said he was not involved in, that too is false. Elias Chajet's brother "LEE" who worked with my father also worked at the Embassy, he was the inside man who assisted in those break-ins. Then there was the attempted break-in at Daniel Ellsburg's office which failed, so they tried to discredit him instead, there were also plans to break-in at other democratic senators offices including Ted Kennedy.

These guy's, Baldwin and Mitchell really had no idea what Watergate was about other than they were told it was an operation approved by the White House, after it was all said and done, and if they received the money they needed to recapture Cuba, Frank told Anderson to make sure he got a full page press release.

During Watergate, Frank and my father were both planning the "Sunward Plan", and because they didn't recruit enough men for the job, the plot was scrubbed.

I will be on a national radio talk show explaining why Watergate had to happen, and what Watergate was truly about. And, there was no "Deep Throat" that was a fictional character made up by Bernstein and Woodward to sell their books.

I have become good friends with Eugenio Martinez who told me that their other cover story to break-into Watergate was to find information that Fidel Castro was financing the DNC, but even Eugenio knew it wasn't true.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Given that this is "the thread that would not die," and given that there seems to be continuing interest in The Amazing Mr. Baldwin—and especially given that Mr. Kaiser seems to be certain of "what Watergate was truly about"—I am posting here Chapter 2, "The Amazing Mr. Baldwin Warps Time and Space," from my upcoming book, Watergate: The Hoax, which currently is in editorial review for final additions and revisions.

=========Begin excerpt from unpublished work, "Watergate: The Hoax"============

Senator Weicker. Did you believe at that time that your employer was the Committee To Re-Elect the President?

Mr. Baldwin. Absolutely.
Senator Weicker. Do you have any documents in your possession which you believe to be supportive of that opinion?
Mr. Baldwin. No, I have documents in my possession that are contradictory of that position.
Please do not laugh—any more than you have to.
Senator Sam Ervin
Part I: Hide a Secret In a Secret
2. The Amazing Mr. Baldwin Warps Time and Space
When Georgianne Baldwin got a divorce from Alfred Carleton Baldwin III in the superior court of New Haven, Connecticut, on 5 February 1970—a little over two years before Alfred’s starring role in Watergate—it was for “intolerable cruelty.”1
One of Alfred Baldwin’s former employers at an insurance company refused to give him a favorable employment recommendation in November 1971—just months before Baldwin would become embroiled in Watergate—because the former employer felt that Baldwin was “a nut.” Another former employer gave a poor recommendation because he had suspected Baldwin in the disappearance of “numerous documents” at the firm, but never could prove conclusively that Baldwin had taken them.2 Yet another former employer, at Interstate Security Systems, withheld a favorable recommendation for Baldwin in January 1972 “due to a drinking problem,” saying that Baldwin was “considered a very heavy drinker.”3
Baldwin was described by a former Special Agent of the FBI as an “immature individual who never found himself following employment with FBI,” and another Special Agent characterized Baldwin as “a ne’er-do-well type of person.”4
An officer with the police department in Orange, Connecticut, told the FBI of an incident in which Baldwin, while Security Manager at the Adley Express Co. in Orange, had broken into a police automobile as a “demonstration to Adley employees.” Police in the town wanted to prosecute Baldwin, but the state attorney inexplicably requested that the charges be dropped. The officer, Sergeant Blackman, said Baldwin was “a wise-guy who thought he was much better than the average policemen.”5
A one-time neighbor said that Baldwin had built a dog pen that went partially over onto the neighbor’s property, built to contain Baldwin’s two German Shepherds after three neighborhood children had been bitten by them. When the neighbor complained and had the property lines surveyed, Baldwin moved the stakes—which the neighbor saw—then denied having moved them. The neighbor told the FBI that Baldwin had been described as “a habitual xxxx and one who claims to have done things that he has not actually done.”6
[Edit to add: I just noticed with some amusement that the forum has put "xxxx" where the FBI report has the word "l*i*a*r"—without the asterisks. I had no idea the place had gotten so hoity-toity that we can't quote the FBI. I wan't to assure everyone that I am holding my pinkies in the air while typing this. —Ashton]
Out of uncounted thousands of former FBI agents, many of them right in Washington, D.C., this was the man James McCord selected for “security” purposes—first, ostensibly, as a bodyguard, then as a bumbling incompetent excuse for a secretary to monitor and take down records of illegal wiretaps. He was a very odd choice for that task, indeed, since Baldwin has publically demonstrated literacy skills that could be described as iffy, at best.7
Regardless of anything anyone might have thought of him, after the arrests of his co-conspirators inside DNC headquarters on 17 June 1972 Alfred Baldwin couldn’t seem to get enough of confessing about his role in Watergate. He confessed to his lawyer friends in Connecticut right after the arrests. He confessed to the Watergate grand jury. He confessed to the FBI. He confessed to reporters Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow of the Los Angeles Times. He confessed to the criminal court in U.S. vs. Liddy et al. He confessed to the Ervin committee in the Senate hearings on Watergate.
If only his confessions made sense or weren’t so contradictory.
The first problems in his confessions come in his claims about the very day he started working under the direction of James McCord. Both men acknowledge that McCord called Baldwin out of the blue on the night of 1 May 1972—the date when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been found dead in his home early in the day. According to their stories, McCord called saying he had gotten Baldwin’s name from a list supplied by a society in New York of ex-FBI agents, and that he wanted Baldwin for some work in the nation’s capitol the next day. Baldwin agreed to get on a plane that night for Washington, D.C., on no more than McCord’s mere say-so.
James McCord’s career in the CIA, including service in the notorious Office of Security, had once earned him an accolade from the then-Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, as “the best man we have.” McCord was no dummy when he picked out Alfred Baldwin; he knew exactly who and what he was getting.
Both men have consistently claimed that the nighttime phone call from McCord was the their first contact, but in 2005 Alfred Baldwin made a statement in a public forum that was almost stupefying in its implications. When asked if he had known James McCord before McCord “recruited” him in 1972, Baldwin answered: “Prior to 1972 I did not know James McCord, but I was aware of the fact that he was a former Special Agent with the FBI.” There’s no reason or way that Alfred Baldwin would know about McCord’s pre-CIA employment with the FBI unless Baldwin had been briefed on it by someone who knew James McCord’s government history. Who that briefer might have been, or why Baldwin would have received such a briefing, has never been answered.
The circumstances of Alfred Baldwin’s being “hired” by James McCord stands as one of the stranger exhibits in Watergate’s hall of bizarre exhibits. There is evidence in FBI reports of McCord having contacted and personally interviewed a small number of other former FBI agents before calling Baldwin late one night, and McCord had gone all the way to New York City to get a list. He went there on 24 April 1972, a little over a month before the purported “first break-in” at the Watergate. First he visited the Society of Former SAs, telling the secretary of the society, Francis Keogh, that he wanted to hire “several” former agents. It’s clear that this was not ordinary traffic for the society because Keogh sent McCord to see the Executive Chairman, Scudder D. Kelvie, at Kelvie’s office at the Franklin National Bank. Supposedly Kelvie supplied a list of 11 names that included the name of Alfred Baldwin.
The event is odd on its face—obviously, McCord could have gotten such a list without traveling to New York City, so obviously his trip had other purposes—but what makes the event entirely odd is that 24 April 1972 is the same date as the purchase order from McCord Associates ordering four Kelcom III walkie-talkies that later will play such a major role in Watergate. To pile on the oddities, those walkie-talkies had to be assigned specific frequencies at the time of the order, which are written in pencil on the order form: the frequencies are specifically for use in Washington, D.C.. That’s “smoking-gun” proof that McCord already was planning for the walkie-talkies to be used in some kind of operation in the nation’s capitol, not for security purposes at the upcoming Republican National Convention.8 The face value of the purchase order was $3,883.20, but that’s $22,185.45 in 2015 dollars, so this was no minor commitment McCord was making.
McCord subsequently interviewed a number of other former FBI agents from the list before calling Baldwin, but he arranged in-person interviews with them, and each one turned down whatever he was offering. Of course he interviewed them in person, given that his ostensible purpose was to hire a bodyguard for key Republican personnel. But nobody knows what these interviews consisted of, or what McCord was telling the “candidates.” For example, McCord had a former agent named Paul F. Dair come to McCord’s office to interview as part-time bodyguard for “highly placed member of the Republican party.” Dair told the FBI that following the meeting with McCord, Dair “met Republican party member at McCord’s office but declined offer.” The FBI report also says that Dair, when questioned about the interview, was “evasive and vague in certain areas and declined to identify Republican party member and answer some questions.”
Indeed. Yet with Baldwin, McCord reportedly did nothing but pick up the phone—at night, no less—and “hire” him on the spot, with Baldwin agreeing to get on a plane that night to fly to D.C. and take the job. The story is absurd enough to make a rational person spit. It also suggests strongly that at least one of McCord’s real reasons for flying to New York City on the same day as he ordered the walkie-talkies was to meet Baldwin and brief him on what was coming up. And the sum of other evidence to come supports the conclusion that Baldwin had been hand-selected well in advance by CIA.
So on the evening of 1 May 1972, McCord made his fateful phone call, and on 2 May 1972, within hours of Baldwin having arrived in D.C., McCord sent Baldwin on a trip to the Midwest and to New York as bodyguard for Martha Mitchell, wife of former Attorney General John Mitchell. By then, John Mitchell had resigned as Attorney General and was head of Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Baldwin told the FBI the story of his “hiring” on the day of his arrival this way, quoted from the FBI report:
That day he [baldwin] traveled with Mr. McCord to the fourth floor of the building housing the Committee to Re-Elect the President and met Mr. LaRue in his office. Mr. McCord furnished Mr. LaRue with Baldwin’s resume. Mr. LaRue directed a few questions to Mr. Baldwin . . . Baldwin advised that this meeting with Mr. LaRue was quite brief and that he and Mr. McCord left Mr. LaRue’s office together. However, upon leaving Mr. LaRue’s office, Mr. McCord and Mr. LaRue exchanged some conversation which was inaudible to Baldwin. Upon leaving the office Mr. McCord advised Mr. Baldwin that everything looked good.
Yes, invisible contracts created by inaudible conversations almost always “look good.” And, yes, that’s the same shadowy Fred LaRue who later would hand out massive wads of cash, constituting the very cover-up that ultimately would bring down Richard Nixon and all of his closest staff.
However Baldwin came by it, his invisible contract was for one thing and one thing only: a six-day trip as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell. Even in his temporary role as bodyguard, he was not hired as staff of the Committee to Re-Elect the President; he was “hired” as an independent contractor, only for that trip, later paid by check from the committee only for expenses from that trip.
Baldwin told the FBI and Congress and the Los Angeles Times that McCord handed him a .38 revolver to take with him on the trip, and that LaRue later told Baldwin that it once had been his gun. McCord swore under oath in Congress that he had not given a revolver to Baldwin, saying that LaRue must have given it to Baldwin, but that the gun belonged to John Caulfield. LaRue denied having given it to Baldwin, and said McCord must have done it. The number of different stories told about that revolver are so convoluted that the gun has earned its own chapter, “McCord, Baldwin, LaRue, Caulfield, Arthur Bremer, and the Revolving .38 Revolver.”
Baldwin departed D.C. that day by train with Martha Mitchell and her retinue. When Mrs. Mitchell returned to D.C. from the trip on Monday, 8 May 1972, she told her personal secretary, Kristin Forsberg, that she considered Baldwin “pushy, vocal, and someone who would not stay in the background.” She concluded, “That’s it, I’m not taking any more recommendations from McCord.”9
McCord likely couldn’t have cared less what Martha Mitchell thought about his bodyguard recommendations. While Baldwin had been away, McCord had rented room 419 at the Howard Johnson motel across from the Watergate, on Friday, 5 May 1972. When Baldwin returned on 8 May, McCord told him to stay in the room at the Howard Johnson, and there can be no question that Baldwin was there specifically to carry out the Watergate operations. Everything that ensued militates toward a conclusion that at all relevant times, Baldwin was “hired” by McCord, and was put up in accommodations paid for by McCord, and was handed wads of cash by McCord, primarily for Baldwin to play the exact role he played in the hoax of Watergate.
That role effectively began on the date when Baldwin traveled from Washington, D.C., by plane to his home in Hamden, Connecticut—or, more accurately, to his mother’s home, because he had been living with her—for the express purpose of getting his car and driving it back to D.C. Trying to determine what that date was, though, runs immediately into Alfred Baldwin’s inability to get a story straight, even if it’s been scripted for him.
He told the FBI that he had traveled to Connecticut by plane on “May 22 and 23.” Then he told the Senate Watergate Committee that it had been on 23 May 1972, but his story in the L. A. Times said that he had gone there on 24 May.
Whatever date he traveled there on, Alfred Baldwin entered a warp of space and time that made Watergate a stranger fiction than any fantasy ever dreamed up by Rod Serling or Lewis Carroll. There’s nothing to do but turn it over to the claims of Baldwin himself, this quote from the L. A. Times:
On May 24, after about two weeks of covering demonstrations, I visited my home in Hamden. When I returned to Washington the next day, I found Jim McCord in Room 419 surrounded by an array of electronic equipment.
If Baldwin returned to D.C. “the next day” after going to Hamden on Wednesday, 24 May, then he returned on Thursday, 25 May, driving his car from Connecticut, about six hours away. That’s also what he told the FBI: that he “returned to Washington, D.C., on May 25, 1972,” and “parked his vehicle in the basement of the Howard Johnson’s motel.”10 According to Baldwin’s story to the L.A. Times, on that same night, the night of 25 May:
From the balcony outside Room 419, I watched McCord walk across Virginia Ave. and enter the Watergate complex. Subsequently he appeared at a window of the Democratic offices and I could see at least one other person and perhaps two with him.
McCord later returned to the motel room and said, “We’ve got the units over there.” He began adjusting the monitoring unit.
This is all very exciting spooky spy Watergate break-in stuff—but there’s a major problem: According to interviews conducted by the FBI, Alfred Baldwin dropped his car off for servicing at Branhaven Chrysler-Plymouth, just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, “early in the morning of May 25.” The company’s vice president, John LaVallee, told the FBI that Baldwin didn’t pick the car up until “approximately 9:00 p.m.” on Thursday evening, 25 May.11
It therefore is categorically impossible for Alfred Baldwin to have seen or done any of the things he says he saw or did in Room 419 of the Howard Johnson motel on 25 May, because he was over 300 miles away, in Connecticut. It is categorically impossible for him to have been in D.C. at all that day.
As if any more problems were needed with Baldwin’s fiction, E. Howard Hunt claims in his autobiography that on the night of 25 May, James McCord was with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and “the Miami men” at McGovern headquarters in D.C.12 Hunt doesn’t name the date, but he does say it was when Liddy shot out a street light (Liddy says four security lights, not a street light), and Liddy, in his autobiography, does name the date of that event as the night of 25 May.13[see chapter 6, “McGovern Headquarters and the Terrible Twosies.” —Ed.]
By the time Baldwin got around to sworn testimony in Congress, perhaps he’d realized just how ludicrous his claims were to the L. A. Times and to the FBI of having returned to D.C. on 25 May, so in his Congressional testimony he changed the date of his return to 26 May 1972. Surely this will be better.
He laid it on thick before the Ervin Committee, and nobody does it quite like Baldwin himself—especially with his fellow citizen of Connecticut, Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., giving him script prompts:
SENATOR WEICKER: Now, Mr. Baldwin, to keep on giving the continuity here, you interrupt me or state if I am incorrect, you returned to Connecticut on May 23 and came back to Washington on May 26, is that correct?
ALFRED BALDWIN: That is correct, Friday.
SENATOR WEICKER: And you returned to room 419 of the Howard Johnsons on May 26. Now, when you entered room 419 on May 26, what did you see?
ALFRED BALDWIN: When I entered the room, there were numerous items of electronic equipment in the room. When I entered the room, it was approximately 2 in the afternoon, I believe, about that hour. Mr. McCord was in the room and operating one of the receiver units. At that time, I did not know what it was. He explained it.
SENATOR WEICKER: In other words, this was the first time that you had seen electronic equipment in room 419 of the Howard Johnsons?
ALFRED BALDWIN: This particular piece of equipment that he was working on, that was the first time I had seen that. On the couch there was a piece of electronic equipment which was containing the briefcase that had been described to me, that I had previously seen at the Committee To Re-Elect the President headquarters. This was called the debugger, had a monitoring unit.
SENATOR WEICKER: In other words, you had seen a portion of the equipment?
ALFRED BALDWIN: A portion I had seen previous.
SENATOR WEICKER: At the Committee To Re-Elect the President?
ALFRED BALDWIN: That is correct. But the equipment he was working on when I entered the room, I had never seen that before.
SENATOR WEICKER: And as you entered the room, Mr. McCord was in the process of what—experimenting with this equipment? What did he indicate to you at the time you entered the room?
ALFRED BALDWIN: He was tuning this equipment. The unit was operating and he was working the tuning dials. There are several tuning dials on the piece of equipment.
SENATOR WEICKER: Did you have any questions of him as to exactly what was going on at that time?
ALFRED BALDWIN: No, I had just driven approximately six hours and he said, “As soon as you get unpacked and relaxed, I will explain this.” I said, “All right, I will take a shower and shave and join you.” . . . I was instructed to monitor all telephone conversations that were being received over these units that were in the Howard Johnson room and to make a log of all units.
Now the spy story is really on a roll, and the whole problem of 25 May has gone away by Baldwin moving his return to D.C. to the next day, 26 May—except now there’s something odder still, also from FBI interviews that no other coverage of Watergate ever seems to have bothered with.
To find the odd thing about all of this, it’s necessary to go back in time just a bit, to Saturday, 20 May 1972, the weekend before Baldwin left for Connecticut to get his car. Perhaps he was sitting around Room 419 of the Howard Johnson a little bored that day, and he was longing for a little companionship. On that Saturday, he placed a call to a woman named Veronica Walsh in New Jersey. The FBI found out about the call when they later traced all the calls that had been made from the room.
According to Ms. Walsh’s interview with the FBI, Al Baldwin called her that day to invite her to an event “to be held in Connecticut during the Memorial Day weekend and the wedding photos were to be presented to the Dantschers at that time.”14
Wedding photos? What wedding photos? It seems that photography was a hobby of Baldwin’s, and on 29 April 1972—just five days after James McCord had ordered walkie-talkies and had flown to New York City, and just a few days before that nighttime call from James McCord to Alfred Baldwin—Baldwin had taken photos at the wedding in New York City of John and Donna Dantscher.
Ms. Walsh told the FBI that she had declined Baldwin’s invitation. The FBI also interviewed the Dantschers. Here comes that Alfred Baldwin space and time warp again:
John S. Dantscher . . . said on the evening of May 26, 1972, he and his wife attended a social gathering at the home of Walter Walsh, 126 Bedford Avenue, Hamden, Connecticut, which was also attended by Walsh’s mother, Alfred Baldwin and John Dantscher’s mother. During this social affair Baldwin presented Dantscher and his wife with photographs taken at their wedding. Dantscher said that he had had no contact with Baldwin from the time of their wedding on April 29, 1972, until the social affair on the evening of May 26, 1972. Dantscher said he was aware that Baldwin was residing In the Washington, D.C., area, however, did not know his exact address. He also recalled that during the social affair on May 26, 1972, Baldwin Indicated that he might be at the “Miami Convention.”15
To quote Art Bell: “Ohhhh, my.”
It’s not like the Dantschers could be presumed to have had a sudden spasm of mistaken identity, right there in the hamlet of Hamden, where Baldwin lived with his mother. It was, after all, the Dantscher’s wedding photos that Baldwin was bringing to the event. According to the same FBI report, Baldwin had done a stint in real estate during his checkered career, and had been involved with the sale of the home of John Dantscher’s mother, who also was at the event. John Dantscher once had gone on a cruise with Baldwin and a mutual friend, Robert Mirto—who later would represent Baldwin in relation to Watergate. The Memorial Day weekend started on Friday, 26 May 1972, and less than a week earlier Baldwin had invited Veronica Walsh to an event on Memorial Day weekend. As if the identification of Baldwin there in Hamden that night needed any further confirmation, the event was held at the home of Walter Walsh, who had known Alfred Baldwin since childhood.16 (Here we have yet another infamous “twosie,” though, because Veronica Walsh was a friend of John Dantscher’s new wife, Donna, but was not related to Walter Walsh.)
The evidence from the Connecticut witnesses interviewed by the FBI was conclusive and dispositive: On Thursday, 25 May 1972, Alfred Baldwin had dropped his car off at Branhaven Chrysler-Plymouth, just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, very early in the morning. He had picked it up late in the evening of 25 May. Therefore, what he told the FBI and the L.A. Times about 25 May was patently false.
Then he showed up at a social gathering in nearby Hamden, Connecticut, the following evening, Friday, 26 May, so that would mean that what he told Congress under oath about 26 May was false, and that all the tales Baldwin told about a trip with McCord to McGovern headquarters on the night of Friday, 26 May were false [see chapter 6, “McGovern Headquarters and the Terrible Twosies” —Ed.]—except for yet another wrinkle in the fabric of time and space surrounding the Amazing Alfred Baldwin.
Remember Robert Mirto, Baldwin’s friend who became his attorney throughout the Watergate saga? Well after the Watergate arrests, and well after Baldwin had told his tale to the FBI, somehow—and that “somehow” matters a great deal—Mirto got wind of what John Dantscher had told the FBI about Baldwin having been in Hamden on Friday, 26 May 1972, and began tampering with witnesses in ways that are so astonishing that to this day it stands as one of the greatest scandals in the whole affair, one that makes other spectacular failures of the FBI and federal prosecutors pale by comparison. That whole tale is spelled out in "Part V, The Break-In That Was and the Aftermath."
Mirto’s meddling has no bearing on the real fun: considering the claims of Baldwin and some of his co-conspirators about the fabulous invisible logs he supposedly made while eavesdropping on private conversations. It’s impossible to consider Baldwin’s snooping logs, though, without at least attempting to figure out how many electronic “units” the man was supposed to be checking when doing his eavesdropping. Not one investigator or analyst of Watergate ever seems to have gotten around to even noticing the central importance of the question: How many units could a unit checker check if a unit checker could check units?
1 FBI Report of 29 June 1972 by SA William C. Hendricks, Jr., New Haven office
2 Ibid.
3 FBI Report of 18 July 1972 by SA Daniel F. Ryan, Baltimore office
4 FBI Report of 12 July 1972 by SA William C. Hendricks, Jr., New Haven office
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Baldwin’s public postings in The Education Forum, of all places, are fraught with tortured syntax and repetitive misspellings, even of common words, such as “trail” being typed uniformly for “trial.” See the thread at http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5670et seq., accessed February 2015.
8 At the time of the order the Republican National Convention was planned for San Diego. Within a few weeks of the order, on 5 May 1972, it was changed to Miami. It’s irrelevant because McCord specified D.C. as the location of use for the walkie-talkies.
9 FBI Report of 30 June 1972 by Robert E. Lill and Donald E. Stukey II, Washington, D.C.
10 FBI Report of 19 July 1972 by SA Angelo J. Lano, Washington, D.C., Field Office File No. 139-166, Bureau File #139-4089, Section A, “Alfred Carleton Baldwin, III.”
11 FBI Report of 22 June 1972 by SAs George S. Phillips and Stephen J. Slifka, at Branford, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74
12 Hunt, E. Howard. Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1974.
13 Liddy, G. Gordon. Will. New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1991.
14 FBI Teletype of 21 June 1972
15 FBI Report of 23 June 1972 by SA Emmett J. Michaels and SA Robert C. Puckett/RCP at Hamden, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74
16 FBI Report of 27 June 1972 by SA Edward P. O’Connor and Robert A. Willhide at Bridgeport, Connecticut, File # NH 139-74
Edited by Ashton Gray
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  • 1 year later...
On 6/19/2006 at 10:28 AM, Alfred C. Baldwin said:

Pat - never spoke with anyone named Robert Jackson. He was not the reporter from the Los Angeles Times.

I figured I would quote Mr. Baldwin in hopes that he may still be receiving notifications when replies are mad to his posts. I have a couple questions for him if he responds.

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  • 8 months later...
On 12/26/2015 at 11:52 AM, Ashton Gray said:

And the sum of other evidence to come supports the conclusion that Baldwin had been hand-selected well in advance by CIA.

A very interesting post. Could Baldwin have met with Liddy, McCord William F. Buckley, and possibly Hunt in NY or at the Buckley estate in Connecticut? Could Baldwin have been recruited by Liddy or Hunt in the summer of 1963?

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