published erroneous information for which he issued retractions. During the 1972 presidential race, Anderson retracted a story accusing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton of multiple drunk driving arrests. But Eagleton's campaign was already severely damaged, and he was dropped from the ticket. Targeted for assassination In 1972 Anderson was the target of an assassination plot conceived by senior White House staff. Two Nixon administration conspirators admitted under oath that they plotted to poison Anderson on orders from senior White House aide Charles Colson. White House "plumbers" G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt met with a CIA operative to discuss the possibilities, including drugging Anderson with LSD, poisoning his aspirin bottle, or staging a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the plotters were arrested for the Watergate break-in. Nixon had long been angry with Anderson. He blamed the fallout from Anderson's election-eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother for Nixon's loss of the 1960 presidential election. Project Mudhen Beginning in February 1972, Anderson was the subject of a CIA project called Project Mudhen (also referred to as Operation Mudhen) aiming to find the sources of his articles. Over the course of three months, ending April 12, 1972, the CIA actively spied on Anderson, whose code name in the project was "Brandy". The CIA ended Mudhen after being unsuccessful at finding his sources and believing that Anderson was beginning to suspect he was being spied on by the CIA, which was able to collect a large file on his personal movements, his family, and the fact that he drove too fast occasionally. He later used documents he had been given about the project as part of a lawsuit against Richard Nixon and other government officials in 1977 claiming "that the agencies and officials committed various illegal acts and violated his constitutional rights to free speech and privacy". Glomar Explorer Anderson has been credited as breaking to a nationwide audience in 1975 the story of the Glomar Explorer, a ship constructed under tight security by the CIA to recover the lost nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129. Rejecting a plea from the Director of Central Intelligence William Colby to suppress the story, Anderson said he published the story because "Navy experts have told us that the sunken sub contains no real secrets and that the project, therefore, is a waste of the taxpayers' money." JFK conspiracy allegations In