9 Principals and the Silence of Richard Nixon
By Desmond Okafor ·
For years, the legal machinery of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force focused on the men who carried out the orders while the man who gave them remained outside this specific circle of defendants.
The cost of the Nixon administration's paranoia was measured in broken locks, ruined lives, and the systematic dismantling of the American legal shield. It was a betrayal that turned the halls of power into a crime scene, proving that the people hired to protect the law were the ones most eager to break it.
This report is based on an archival scope-and-content description—a catalogue of what survives rather than the pages themselves—which indexes the files of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the body established to investigate the 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex, a group of six buildings in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. that housed both luxury apartments and the Democratic National Committee.
Hatchet Men and House Counsel
The records focus on a select group of men who operated as the perimeter of the Nixon White House. The record states that this series consists of "records pertaining to nine of the most significant witnesses or defendants involved in the Watergate case." These nine were not merely employees; they were the instruments of a president's will. Among them were Charles Colson, the Special Counsel to Richard Nixon known as the administration's "hatchet man" who eventually served seven months in Alabama's Maxwell Prison for obstruction of justice, and John Dean, the disbarred attorney who served as White House Counsel before his guilty plea landed him at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.
The trajectory of the cover-up is visible in the transition of power. The public record establishes that Dean succeeded Colson as Nixon's primary legal counsel in July 1970. This was not a simple personnel change; it was a passing of the torch in the art of the fix. While Colson handled the early, aggressive attempts to silence critics, Dean became the primary architect of the cover-up's internal logic. Both men, however, end up in the same archival folder, their roles reduced to "memorandums of interview" and "correspondence with defense attorneys."
Beside them in the file are the managers of the machine: John Ehrlichman, the lawyer who managed Nixon's domestic policy as Assistant to the President, and Harry Robbins Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff who controlled every single minute of the president's schedule. These two were the gatekeepers, the ones who ensured that the dirty work never touched the Oval Office in a way that could be recorded. Their presence in this file, alongside the men who actually broke the laws, reveals the seamless integration of policy and criminality.
Kalmbach's Secret Payroll
The muscle of the conspiracy required a payroll, and the records identify the man who managed the cash. Herbert Kalmbach, the personal attorney to the president whose fundraising activities funded the Plumbers, is listed as a principal. The public record shows that Kalmbach provided the financial support for the undercover operations that targeted political enemies. He was a lawyer by trade, but in the context of Watergate, he functioned as a laundromat for illicit funds.
This financial line connects Kalmbach directly to the operatives: Everette Howard Hunt and George Gordon Liddy. Hunt was a career CIA officer who had already helped orchestrate the 1954 Guatemalan coup and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Liddy was a former FBI agent and lawyer whose specialty was the hard-hit approach. Together, they formed the "Plumbers," a unit tasked with stopping leaks and engaging in political espionage.
There is a sharp irony here. Hunt and Liddy were trained in the methods of the intelligence community—tradecraft, surveillance, and the use of cut-outs—yet the record treats them as mere "witnesses or defendants." The record states that the files include "documentary evidence" and "prosecution memorandums" regarding their activities. The pattern suggests that the government was treating the use of professional intelligence assets for domestic political hits as a common criminal conspiracy rather than a systemic failure of the intelligence community's boundary between foreign and domestic operations.
Filter at the Deputy's Desk
One of the most revealing details of the record is not who is in the file, but who managed it. The record states that these documents "were maintained by the Office of the Executive Assistant to the Deputy Special Prosecutor because the individuals concerned were of interest to more than one task force."
This is not a trivial administrative detail. By funneling the records of the most significant defendants through a single executive assistant to a deputy, the prosecution created a bottleneck. If this file is shaped the way it looks, it represents a containment strategy. Rather than allowing various task forces—such as the one investigating the International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) scandal—to operate with full transparency, the evidence was centralized. This ensured that the dots were connected only by a very small number of people.
Within this filter, we find the remaining principals: Richard Kleindienst, the Attorney General who resigned in disgrace for his role in the cover-up, and John Mitchell, the former Attorney General and campaign director. Their involvement proves that the corruption was not limited to a few rogue aides; it had reached the very top of the Department of Justice. Yet, even with the Attorney General in the folder, the list remains incomplete.
A Legal Liquidation
The most glaring gap in the series is the absence of Richard Nixon. The records list the "most significant witnesses or defendants," including his Chief of Staff, his Domestic Affairs head, his personal lawyer, and his Special Counsel. Every single person who took an order from Nixon is present. The man who gave the orders is not.
The desk's reading is that this file was designed to isolate the instruments from the architect. By categorizing the inner circle as the "principals," the prosecutorial record effectively framed the conspiracy as a series of crimes committed by aides on behalf of a president, rather than a crime committed by a president through his aides. The record documents the legal liquidation of the conspiracy—the plea bargains, the defense memos, the sentencing—but it carefully avoids treating the conceptual origin of the conspiracy as a subject for the same "principal" folder.
Furthermore, the pattern suggests that intelligence community operational support was scrubbed from the prosecutorial record. Hunt and Liddy were not just "witnesses"; they were active CIA and FBI assets. The fact that their files are mixed with those of disbarred lawyers and fundraiser-attorneys suggests a deliberate effort to depoliticize the operational nature of the Plumbers. It transforms a state-sponsored intelligence operation against U.S. citizens into a simple case of "burglary and conspiracy."
The desk's reading is that this archival series is a record of containment. It shows a government attempting to surgically remove the cancer of the Nixon administration while ensuring the scalpels never cut too deep into the institutional foundations of the CIA or the presidency itself. A full release of the withheld pages would likely reveal that the "interest to more than one task force" was not a matter of administrative convenience, but a coordinated effort to ensure that the evidence against the subordinates never became an indictment of the system that enabled them. The men in this file paid the price in prison time and disbarment, but the machinery that allowed a president to treat the U.S. government as a private spy agency remained largely intact.