The actual answer about the number of bugs placed by McCord in DNC headquarters is exquisitely simple, as soon will be demonstrated conclusively: the number of bugs was zero. The claim by McCord, though, was that he had planted two telephone bugs.

As for the number of monitoring/receiving units in the Howard Johnson motel room, Liddy says in his autobiography that McCord took him up to the room to explain a “difficulty with the equipment used.” Here is an excerpt from that account, emphasis and notes added:

McCord showed me an elaborate receiver [singular; only one monitor/receiver] with an oscilloscope and band-spreader . . . The transmitters [plural; more than one bug] were designed to send weak signals on a very narrow wave band . . . In order even to find the signals, McCord had to tune the ultrasensitive receiver [singular; only one monitor/receiver], which alone, he said, cost $8,000 [$45,705.50 in 2015 dollars], with the aid of the oscilloscope. The band-spreader operated to broaden the sensitivity of the receiver to that frequency. McCord said that he had found the signal for one of his transmitters, but that the other one had so far eluded him.

In his deposition, though, Liddy almost lost himself, saying about going to visit the motel room: “There were the— was a receiver.”

“Were,” plural? Or “was,” singular? It’s a good thing that Liddy checked himself, even though his inclination to claim multiple receiving units—as Baldwin had done—is understandable, for reasons that may already be becoming apparent, like a fresh wind blowing away the toxic fog of CIA psyops.

According to the FBI reports, there indeed was one, and only one monitor/receiver unit that possibly could have had any relevance at all to the claims of the Watergate hoaxers. It is the “sophisticated and complex” receiver that McCord identified in Congressional testimony. It was a “surveillance receiver” sold by Communications Electronics Incorporated (CEI). According to the records of the company that had sold it, it had been ordered by James McCord on Monday, 1 May 1972, and had been picked up by him on Wednesday, 10 May 1972. The unit was a CEI Type RS-111, 1B-12, serial number 132. It was a used unit, so the price was not the $8,000 that Liddy claimed, but still a respectable $3,500—$19,996.16 in 2015 dollars.

Baldwin, in his fiction about returning from Connecticut to the Howard Johnson motel on Friday, 26 May 1972, made an effort to litter the landscape with as much electronics as he could, and mentioned another receiver of sorts:

ALFRED BALDWIN: When I entered the room, there were numerous items of electronic equipment in the room . . . On the couch there was a piece of electronic equipment which was containing the briefcase [sic] 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.

It’s amusing that Baldwin slipped up and almost told the truth—that he’d never seen any such equipment and had only had it described to him—but it doesn’t really matter. There was indeed such a debugging unit, and it was, indeed, kept at the Committee to Re-Elect the President, but it was housed in a brown suitcase from the factory, and it is extremely unlikely that Baldwin would have seen it open on his one brief visit to those offices, when he was hired as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell. It was a Mason Engineering A2 receiver, ordered by McCord on 1 March 1972 for his firm McCord Associates, shipped two days later. It would have been ridiculous for it ever to have been at the HoJo at all— unless it was like an animated suitcase from a Pixar movie, sprouting legs and walking back and forth from there to the CREP offices for exercise. If there is even an iota of doubt about the Mason A2 debugger having been useless for anything to do with Watergate, James McCord himself lays all doubt to rest in A Piece of Tape (emphasis added):