Confessio facta in judicio omni probatione major est.

(A confession made in court is of greater effect than any proof.)

Black’s Law Dictionary

“Watergate” is a code word.

William Colby—Director, Central Intelligence Agency, 3 January 1975

Confessions. Confessions, confessions, and more confessions. Watergate may have set the world record for number of confessions to a crime, ever. The perpetrators lined up to confess. They confessed to prosecutors, and to the FBI, and to the press, and to Congress, and to everyone around the world. Many of them confessed in their own articles and books.

The problem that every analysis of Watergate has slammed into like a runaway freight train is that none of the “confessions” lines up with any of the other “confessions” in any way that any rational human being possibly could make sense of. That’s why every book about Watergate, and even the Congressional hearings, have ended up as a tangled, smoking train wreck, torn to shreds trying desperately to make sense of the utterly nonsensical.

The reason that the confessions contradict each other is simple: All of the “confessions” are largely fiction. They are so fantastically contradictory that they form a grotesquely surreal maze of mirrors—distorted mirrors, cracked mirrors, shattered mirrors, reflecting each other only in jagged or deformed bits and pieces. There is no way out of that maze of mirrors unless and until you realize its only purpose:

The “confessions” exist solely to give James McCord, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy alibis for their whereabouts on Memorial Day weekend 1972—beginning on the evening of Friday, 26 May, and continuing through part of Monday, 29 May, which was the actual Memorial Day holiday.

Those are the dates when those men claim in their “confessions” to have been in Washington, DC, involved in a purported “first break-in” of DNC headquarters, during which James McCord claims in his “confessions” to have successfully planted two “bugs.” Part I already proved that there never were any such “bugs” in DNC headquarters at any relevant time. That’s because there was no “first break-in” at all, and those men were not in Washington, DC, that weekend—or even in the United States. An elaborate and costly fiction had to be created to “prove” that they had been in Washington, DC. That fiction, held together in a framework of verifiable facts, is the mirror maze of “confessions.”

Of course they didn’t have to “confess” to the so-called “second” break-in, when five of them were caught inside the DNC headquarters and arrested three weeks after Memorial Day weekend—on 17 June 1972. There was nothing to confess to about that because they had been caught in the act and arrested, exactly as they had intended. They had gone in there in the wee hours of 17 June with the full intention to get “caught” solely so they could then start building this maze of mirrors, this horror house of “confessions” about where they had been and what they had been doing three weeks earlier, on Memorial Day weekend.

It’s helpful to run the newsreel in reverse again:

17 June 1972, approximately 2:30 a.m.

Five men are arrested inside DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex. All of them are using aliases, but they are James McCord, Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis. They are carrying electronic equipment purportedly suitable for planting “bugs” in the premises. This is what is mistakenly called the “second break-in;” it was the only break-in. A sweep that day by the DC telephone company finds no bugs anywhere in DNC headquarters. Through a gold mine of obvious “evidence” (all planted by the perpetrators to be found), the FBI soon link E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to the break-in, although they had not been arrested. The only reason for the break-in, ever, was so they all could get “caught,” and ultimately make their claims about events weeks earlier, over Memorial Day weekend. Very soon after the arrests, Alfred Baldwin begins “confessing” to federal prosecutors about events he claimed had taken place in the month of May 1972, leading up to and including . . .

26, 27, 28 and 29 May 1972, Memorial Day weekend

According to Baldwin’s and the other perpetrators’ “confessions,” they had carried out a “successful” break-in at DNC headquarters in the Watergate over Memorial Day weekend, during which James McCord supposedly had planted two telephone bugs, only one of which purportedly worked. The claim by the perpetrators is that they broke in “again” —on 17 June, when they were arrested—to replace the “faulty” bug (which never existed in the first place).

The entire story of Memorial Day weekend, and the events leading up to it, is a lie, a miserable hoax, a cheap, tawdry spy story not worthy of E. Howard Hunt’s worst ever pulp fiction potboiler—and “worst ever” would be hard to pick. The entire fiction, the entire maze of mirrors, consists of made up “confessions” that won’t stand up to a moment’s direct gaze by anyone with an ounce of probity—at least, anyone who is not already completely prejudiced by the “confessions.”

Confessio facta in judicio omni probatione major est. “A confession made in court is of greater effect than any proof.” That’s why even the Watergate prosecutors and all the Congressional committees threw out fact after fact after fact that did not fit into their preconceived, and fatally flawed, major premise: that there had to have been a “first break-in” at DNC over Memorial Day weekend. No, there wasn’t. The Watergate maze of mirrors, constructed of hopelessly irreconcilable “confessions,” is an alibi machine. It is a group of CIA-controlled liars attempting to tell the “same” lies about where they were and what they were doing on those crucial dates, and on days bookending those dates, before and after.

With that knowledge, you can safely walk right through the Watergate maze of mirrors and out the other side without getting blinded or going into a hypnotic coma from the lies.

They didn’t all confess at once. The first to confess—not just for himself, but for all the others—was clown-prince Alfred Baldwin. Watergate judge John Sirica, in a ruling on a pretrial motion in the Watergate case, opined that Baldwin would be “a key Government witness at the trial.” It should be kept in mind that after his brief trip as a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell, Baldwin had been working for no one but CIA veteran James McCord, who not only was paying Baldwin’s room and board, but also was handing him wads of cash.

No one, it seems, ever has bothered to add up how much cash McCord gave to Baldwin, even though there’s sufficient record in the Watergate FBI files to do just that, and it’s worth doing the math. On 2 May 1972, McCord handed Baldwin $800 cash—$4,570.55 in 2015 dollars—for “expenses” before Baldwin left for the trip with Martha Mitchell. (This was curious, because Baldwin later would collect a check from the Committee to Re-elect the President for his trip expenses.)

When Baldwin returned on Tuesday, 9 May 1972, McCord handed Baldwin an additional $500 in cash—$2,856.59 in 2015 dollars. So far, McCord had given Baldwin $1,300 in eight days, which works out to $7,427.14 in 2015 dollars, or the equivalent of nearly $1,000 a day.

Four weeks later, on Tuesday, 6 June, Baldwin had received from McCord “$900 in cash for salary,” which is $225 per week for the four weeks. In 2015 dollars, that equates to about $1,285 per week, a little over $5,140 for the four weeks. That means that in less than six weeks, the CIA lifer James McCord had doled out $2,200 cash to Baldwin, which in modern dollars is a little over $12,567. Of course, that’s just the amount that Baldwin “confessed” to. There’s no way to know how much cash McCord actually gave him. Fictional alibis don’t come cheap.

The next person to start coughing up confessions to Watergate prosecutors and the FBI was a young Mormon college student named Thomas Gregory, who CIA operative E. Howard Hunt had “hired,” supposedly to “infiltrate” the headquarters of Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Edmund Muskie. Later, when Muskie’s campaign began to sink, Hunt had Gregory go over to the campaign headquarter of Senator George McGovern, about 14 April 1972, to be a “student coordinator.” Because of Gregory’s “confessions,” he soon “shot to the top of the government’s case as a star witness.” After that, he shot himself in the foot repeatedly with his “confessions,” then stuck the foot in his mouth for good measure.

Thomas Gregory was a close friend of the nephew of CIA hand-puppet Robert Bennett—the Robert Bennett who the year before Watergate had bought the CIA-front Mullen Company where Douglas Caddy had worked and Hunt had been hired under special CIA clearances. Gregory certainly had an invisible contract. Beginning on 1 March 1972 and continuing for a little more than 15 weeks, until 16 June 1972, E. Howard Hunt handed Thomas Gregory an envelope every week containing $175 cash. In 2015 dollars, that’s pennies shy of $1,000 per week, coming to a total of almost $15,000 handed over to Gregory in cash.

For what? Essentially nothing. According to the Washington Post, “Gregory told federal investigators that his spying did not appear to be overly successful because the information he obtained regularly appeared in the newspapers one or two days later.” Nobody ever seems to have asked where E. Howard Hunt got that kind of money to hand out, but he sure wasn’t handing it out for nothing; he was handing it out to buy an alibi. Thomas Gregory, along with Baldwin, would get effective immunity from the government for his “confessions.”

Consider: two “confessing” participants, both paid absurd amounts of cash by career CIA agents, both granted immunity from prosecution as star government witnesses, both on invisible contracts, one of them “hired” by CIA operative James McCord, the other “hired” by CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. But Watergate had nothing to do with the CIA, don’t-cha know.

Ultimately, Gregory and Baldwin would be heavily featured in Assistant US Attorney Earl Silbert’s opening statement in the Watergate trial. Here’s how author James Robenalt put it in his book about events of January 1973:

Silbert spent the balance of his opening focusing mainly on the twin stories of Tom Gregory and Alfred Baldwin. Gregory would tie McCord, Hunt, Liddy, and the Cubans to the failed attempt at planting devices at McGovern headquarters. Baldwin would tell his story of the operations at the Howard Johnson listening post and the multiple Watergate break-ins.

You just stepped into the Watergate maze of mirrors. Don’t take another step yet or you’ll be lost forever. The so-called “twin stories” are anything but. They are so grotesquely twisted and contradictory that there would have had to have been parallel universes for them to have happened at all.

As for “the failed attempt at planting devices at McGovern headquarters,” the “confessions” by both Baldwin and Gregory absolutely pale any phantasmal fantasy ever dreamed up by Lewis Carroll or Jonathan Swift.

And then there’s the sign just inside the entrance, quoted by Robenalt above, that points down a corridor of mirrors and says: “Howard Johnson Listening Post and the Multiple Watergate Break-Ins. Right This Way.”

That’s the path in the mirror maze that Robenalt and every other chronicler of Watergate has turned to go down, and every last one of them has gotten hopelessly lost. They all start with the exact same fatally flawed premise: There had to have been a “first break-in” on Memorial Day weekend 1972, with bugs planted in the DNC during that break-in, because Baldwin confessed to it, and then all the others confessed to it.

Yes, they certainly did ultimately confess. But the “confessions” are fiction. They are lies. They are the efforts of a gang of amoral CIA operatives (but I repeat myself) trying the best they can, within the scope of their various levels of stupidity, to recite a scripted CIA fiction of planned confusion and contradiction, the sole purpose of which was to provide an alibi that no one would question, an alibi for the whereabouts, over Memorial Day weekend 1972, of James McCord, E. Howard Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy.

We’re not turning down that path, because that way madness lies. Every person who has ever written a word on Watergate, whether government mouthpiece or so-called journalist or private individual, has parroted the fictions of the perpetrators, peddling them as “fact,” and even written new fiction, peddling that as “fact,” when unable to reconcile the wholly irreconcilable fictions of the perpetrators of the hoax.

We’re going to walk the only path there is that will take us through this madhouse mirror maze of the month of May 1972, and out the other side, to breathe in the fresh and invigorating air of finally understanding what Watergate really was—and on this path, we’re going to see sights that have been hidden behind the mirrors, through the looking glass, never before seen by any Watergate wanderer.

The path through the maze starts a little before May, in late April 1972 with several documented and inarguable facts, the framework that soon will fill in with the reflected and refracted confusion of confessions, confessions, and more confessions.