The proposals were put together by Nixon's Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman and staffer Jack Caulfield in 1971.

Control of Sandwedge was passed to G. Gordon Liddy, who abandoned it in favor of a strategy of his own devising, Operation Gemstone, which detailed a plan to break into Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex.

In 1968, Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee, won the presidential election, defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey, the incumbent Vice President.

[1][2] Nixon had previously contested the 1960 election, narrowly losing to Democrat John F. Kennedy by a margin of less than 118,000 votes, which amounted to less than two-tenths of a percent of the total.

[10] In late 1971, John Dean, the White House Counsel, pushed to expand the existing intelligence program ahead of the 1972 re-election campaign.

[13] Fred Emery, a journalist for The Times and BBC, disputes this, claiming in his book Watergate: The Corruption & Fall of Richard Nixon that the idea of a private sector security firm was simply a front for a committed campaign of surveillance working for Nixon and the Republican Party, with political donations to the re-election campaign able to be diverted through the company as though they were unrelated transactions.

[14] John Ehrlichman, who was a long-time friend of Haldeman[8] and had also served as White House Counsel, had been part of the operation's inception; by 1971 he was Nixon's domestic affairs assistant.

Caulfield noted that this firm had the potential to employ "formidable and sophisticated" intelligence-gathering techniques, and Sandwedge was his attempt to create a Republican counterpart.

[21] Electronic surveillance was also an element of the proposal, with plans to scrutinize the private lives of the targets, including their tax records and sexual habits.

[16] The Sandwedge proposal also included a list of people willing to work with Caulfield on the project, among them several investigators and officials of the Internal Revenue Service and a former sheriff of Cook County, Illinois.

Strachan directly questioned whether Caulfield was capable for the role in a memo dated from October 1971, while Haldeman, wishing for a project on a larger scale, pressed Mitchell for a budget of $800,000 (equivalent to $6,018,735 in 2023) for surveillance and "miscellaneous" activities.

McCloskey was a Republican congressman for California, who was running for the party's presidential nomination against Nixon on a platform opposing the Vietnam War.

Operation Diamond covered breaking up protest demonstrations, Ruby involved undercover infiltration and honeypot traps, Crystal concerned electronic surveillance and wiretaps, and Sapphire proposed the sabotage of rival political campaigns.