Ready for this? In the latter part of the 60s-early 70s I worked with the FBI for a bit. On the morning that the Watergate breakin was in the papers, I was in a meeting with one of the upper ranks of the FBI and he told us that it was an operation to catch someone who was working in the Democratic Party headquarters who was passing sensitive diplomatic information on our position with the North Vietnamese in Paris to the Cuban legation at the UN for further passing to the KGB/Soviets. He implied that the whole thing was an FBI op and that L. Patrick Gray and John Dean had met early that morning at Gray's house and that they destroyed some papers.
If what I heard was true, then Nixon never had anything to do with what went on and everyone who did covered their tracks quite successfully.
Ah, the Dems haven’t changed much!