The Nixon administration spends $8,400 on fake telegrams and advetisements to create a false impression of public support for the US mining of Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor. This will not come to light until March 1973, when a disaffected official of the Nixon campaign (CREEP) tells Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward of the operation. The false telegrams are sent to the White House and publicly presented by press secretary Ron Ziegler and other Nixon officials. In addition, CREEP purchases an advertisement in the New York Times purporting to be from a group of “concerned citizens” that attacks the Times for its opposition to the mining operation. “The [Times] ad was paid for by CREEP with 40 of those $100 bills in [CREEP finance director Maurice] Stans’s safe,” the official will say (see Before April 7, 1972). Another CREEP official will tell Woodward that the Haiphong public relations offensive “put the entire staff in overdrive for two weeks,” between creating false telegrams, busing supporters to Washington, organizing petition drives and phone campaigns, and getting supporters to call Congress. After the Post prints the story, Woodward learns that CREEP also rigged a poll conducted by Washington television station WTTG. The poll was based on sample ballots printed in the local newspapers. CREEP has ten people working for days purchasing newspapers, filling out ballots in different handwriting, and mailing them in. The fake ballots radically skew the poll in favor of the mining operation. A CREEP spokesman will confirm the ballot-stuffing operation and say, “We assumed the other side would do it also.” Frank Mankiewicz, a senior campaign aide for the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate George McGovern, will respond incredulously: “It didn’t occur to us, believe me. Those guys are something. They assume we have the same sleazy ethics as them.” [Bernstein and Woodward, 1974, pp. 265-267; GlobalSecurity (.org), 2008]