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remains unsettled as to whether any of the policemen knew in advance what they would find on the sixth floor: the doomed team of five burglars, wearing business suits and rubber gloves, with traceable ties to the Committee to Re-Elect the President and the Central Intelligence Agency. Leeper and Shoffler, for example, had already put in two hours of overtime, and each had forsaken personal obligations to continue working that night. And when the dispatcher's call rang out, it just happened their car was parked less than four-tenths of a mile from the Watergate - about a minute away.

We do know the cops were not moving about undetected. Observing them from a perch across the street, at the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge - and with rising alarm - was an ex-FBI agent named Alfred C. Baldwin III. Portly and unexceptional, Baldwin had been hired by the Watergate burglars to wear headphones 'round the clock, to monitor the wiretap they had installed, three weeks earlier, in the telephone used by Ida "Maxie" Wells.

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