Forty years ago this Sunday, in the pre-dawn darkness of June 17, 1972, the late Carl Shoffler and two other plainclothes Washington, D.C. police officers, Paul Leeper and John Barrett, were sitting in police cruiser 727, an unmarked vehicle parked at the intersection of 30th and K Streets N.W. At 1:47 a.m., a Metropolitan Police dispatcher issued an urgent call for officers to respond to a burglary in progress at 2600 Virginia Avenue N.W., the Watergate office complex in Foggy Bottom.

Guns drawn, the lawmen started their search on the eighth floor, home to offices of the Federal Reserve, itself the site of a recent break-in. Finding no trouble there, the policemen checked the ninth floor, then meticulously made their way down until they reached the sixth. That entire floor, all 16,000 square feet of office space, was occupied by the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

It