The Watergate scandal, to outsiders at least, is remembered 51 years later as one of the biggest news stories to bring down a president, but little is understood about the bumbling spy operation led by men hired by the White House was not immediately the stuff of comedy. Over the years, films, books, and series have highlighted the political plot, and the involvement of President Nixon’s men and rarely gave credit to the women who were also victims or active voices in the fact.

The most famous of all was Martha Mitchell, whose story has spawned a synonym for the term gaslighting and was singled out as the link that ruined the Republican government’s attempt to stifle the scandal. Julia Roberts starred in the series Gaslit which is somewhat the seed of HBO’s The White House Plumbers. Here I need to make a mea culpa because the timing of the launch of this series was terrible by HBO Max and this excellent content was practically hidden in the grid and on the platform, during the final seasons of Barry and Succession, losing the attention it deserved. I left aside to analyze each episode myself and it was a mistake.

The connection between Gaslit and The White House Plumbers begins because 50 years later, there is no way to stop laughing at the circus-like incompetence of the men involved with the simple operation of listening and spying, something that the Starplus series, although a drama that shows how Martha Mitchell was mistreated and abused when she revealed the backstage of the conspiracy, it was the clash between the men that left us astonished at how anyone ever thought it would work. But, what none of the good content about the story showed, and even in The White House Plumbers is a supporting character, is the story of Dorothy Hunt – lived by the wonderful Lena Headey – the wife of E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson), one of the leaders of the operation and even suspected of having been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Along with G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration’s “plumbers,” a team of agents tasked with identifying government sources of “leaks” of national security information to third parties. Honestly, the series was amazing but it would have been even more if it had been with Dorothy at the center of the plot.

Dorothy Wetzel Hunt was a CIA agent, that is, a career spy, who started working at a young age. At the end of World War II, she worked for the US government helping to locate Nazi treasures, then transferred to China before returning to Europe, where she met and married E. Howard Hunt, a writer and government agent. The two had three children and moved to Washington D.C., where they continued to work. Everyone agrees that Dorothy was the brains of the marriage, an intelligent woman who skillfully navigated a macho universe. Dorothy died in an ultra-suspicious plane crash – at the height of the Watergate scandal!

How has an air crash with more than 40 deaths, including the wife of one of the main accused and investigated in the Watergate Case, never gained prominence? Well, because the defense has always been a tragic coincidence, something that the HBO series discards, embracing the plot version. After all, there was an FBI agent on United Airlines Flight 553, as well as a journalist from CBS, and Dorothy’s purse held an ultra-suspicious $10,000. In addition, shortly before boarding, she paid for a $250,000 life insurance policy, payable to her husband should anything happen to her. It is believed, as we see in the series, that Dorothy was revealing to the press the details of what happened at Watergate when the Boeing 737-222 crashed during an aborted landing and was trying to return to Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

The accident, which happened in December 1972, is cited as the point where the story changed for the accused. At the time, presumably supported by Dorothy, E. Howard Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. In addition, it is known that in the months prior to her death, she was publicly upset with the lack of payment to her husband and associates of the criminal action and that she would have told lawyer William O. Buttmann that her husband had information that “would explode the White House”. Everything that helps to leave a shadow of doubt about the providential accident that silenced her forever.

After the crash of UA Flight 553, Hunt remained silent and refrained from denouncing other participants, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. What makes supporters of the conspiracy version even more certain of what happened is that, despite the reports indicating human error by the pilot, witnesses claim that moments after the crash, the region was taken over by plainclothes FBI and CIA agents, who combed the wreckage looking for something.

Another suspicion that some bet on as fact is that Dorothy Hunt would have had a meeting with the CBS reporter, Michelle Clark, who was on the same fateful flight. Michele, by the way, also deserved a series about her brief life. She is from the class of 1972 of the Journalism Course at Columbia University (where I studied) and is considered the first African-American television presenter. She was also investigating the Watergate scandal when she took the flight between Washington and Chicago.

Only eighteen passengers survived the crash, which was attributed to equipment malfunctions and pilot error. The next day, Nixon aide Egil Krogh was named Undersecretary for Transportation, overseeing the agencies tasked with investigating the plane crash, which was quickly terminated. And it only gets worse. There has always been a suspicion that Dorothy Hunt was murdered, not least because, in addition to her and the reporter, two lawyers who were working on an investigation of suspected corruption actions by Attorney General John N. Mitchell (Martha’s husband) were also on the same flight.

With so much revision of how History was written, these ‘silent’ and never explored voices could bring a new look to the facts. I would watch it!

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