Legacy of Secrecy (142 page)

[and] when they want to issue . . . what looks like an anti-Communist

contract, they contact us. We’re reliable, intelligent, professional. And

we’re learning to keep our mouths shut [because] we fear the [CIA] . . .

the [CIA] can drop a word and change your life.”7

However, the real reasons Hunt used primarily Cuban exiles, and

former anti-Castro operatives like Frank Fiorini (then using the name

“Frank Sturgis”), was to protect the secrets Hunt and Helms wanted

to stay hidden. For example, when Hunt heard that a female Cuban

exile had information about Castro’s reaction to JFK’s assassination, he

made sure that he, Fiorini, Hunt’s former assistant Bernard Barker, and

Cuban exile Eugenio Martinez (the CIA’s top “boatman” for getting into

Cuba in 1963, and still on a monthly CIA retainer) conducted their own

investigation of the matter. Hunt gave his JFK assassination report to

the White House and the CIA, but it was apparently one of several files

taken from a White House safe and destroyed after Hunt’s arrest. The

Watergate committee was never told about it, though later Congres-

sional investigators confirmed in 1978 that Hunt’s JFK assassination

report had existed.8

The White House dirty tricks operation had grown quite large by early

1972, as Nixon and his men targeted moderate Democratic presidential

hopefuls like Edmund Muskie and Scoop Jackson. But with the support

of Nixon, Hunt and Helms also focused on troublesome journalists like

Jack Anderson. According to a 1975 memo prepared by Dick Cheney

when he was President Ford’s chief of staff (under Nixon, Cheney was

deputy to White House Counsel Donald Rumsfeld), the CIA admit-

ted that “from February 15 to April 12, 1972, ‘personal surveillances’

were conducted by the CIA on Jack Anderson and members of his staff

[including] Brit Hume . . . the physical surveillances were authorized

by Helms.”9

That surveillance apparently didn’t produce the desired result,

because in March 1972, G. Gordon Liddy said that he and E. Howard

Hunt talked about assassinating Jack Anderson. Liddy said they spoke

with a former CIA doctor about getting a drug for “neutralizing” Ander-

son. The same doctor had provided the poisons for the Cubela and CIA-

Mafia plots, and the
Washington Post
said Hunt’s order from a senior

White House official “to assassinate [columnist] Jack Anderson . . . was

cancelled at the last minute.”10

Just weeks earlier, Attorney General John Mitchell had asked Liddy

if Hunt and his Plumbers could break into the office of
Las Vegas Sun

publisher Hank Greenspun. Journalist J. Anthony Lukas pointed out

that one day before Mitchell’s request, the
New York Times
had published

an article saying “that Greenspun had (Howard) Hughes memos in his

safe.” Greenspun was friends with Anderson, Maheu, and Rosselli, and

had been the first to publish a brief article hinting at Rosselli’s story of

the CIA-Mafia plots.11

Other break-ins linked to the CIA-Mafia plots—and thus potentially

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

to JFK’s assassination—were carried out by Hunt, his Cuban exiles, and

Fiorini in May and June 1972. By that time, Hunt’s group included a total

of ten Cuban exiles, though only those soon to be arrested at the final

Watergate break-in (Barker, Martinez, and locksmith Virgilio Gonzalez)

are remembered today.12 Three of Hunt’s group were also working for

Santo Trafficante: Fiorini, Artime, and an individual involved in JFK’s

assassination. Carl Shoffler, one of the officers who arrested Fiorini at

the Watergate, told us that Fiorini later talked “off the record” about

“knowing and working with Trafficante.” Shoffler also said that Traf-

ficante was very close to the reputed godfather of Washington, D.C., Joe

Nesline, enabling Trafficante to monitor and even influence develop-

ments there.13

The Cuban exiles were motivated to help Hunt and the White House

by being told their actions would help to defeat Castro, with the impli-

cation being that if Nixon won reelection, he could take stronger action

against Fidel. George McGovern looked like the likely Democratic

nominee—and McGovern’s professed desire to negotiate with Fidel

made his possible victory anathema to the conservative exiles. Hunt lied

to the exiles, telling them McGovern was getting money from Fidel and

that they needed to break into the Watergate offices of the Democratic

National Committee to get proof.

The real goal of Hunt, Helms, and Nixon for the Watergate break-ins

was to learn what DNC chairman Lawrence O’Brien knew about the

CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel, which is also why Cuban exiles—and

Fiorini, who’d been involved in the plots—had to be used. Aside from

the fact that O’Brien was friends with Robert Maheu and might have

notes of what he’d been told, the reason for the break-ins was for the

Watergate burglars to find a specific document about the plots to kill

Castro. Two years after the break-ins, Frank Fiorini described the docu-

ment to journalist Dick Russell, saying what

they were looking for in the Democratic National Committee’s files,

and in some other Washington file cabinets, too, was a thick secret

memorandum from the Castro government, addressed confiden-

tially to the Democrats . . . we knew that this secret memorandum

existed—knew it for a fact—because the CIA and the FBI had found

excerpts and references to it in some confidential investigations . . .

But we wanted the entire document [which was] a long, detailed

listing [of the] various attempts made to assassinate the Castro

brothers.14

Fiorini described the document to Russell, saying it was more than a

hundred pages long and had “two main parts,” including information

about “espionage and sabotage [by] the CIA and the DIA.” Fiorini’s

information—obtained from Hunt, who likely got it from the CIA—

would later be confirmed as fairly accurate.

Though Fiorini had a reputation as a braggart, there is good reason

to believe him on this point: He described the document in print, in an

interview published in
True
magazine in August 1974, one year before

anyone else had ever publicly talked about such a document, or shown

it to the world. That exposure didn’t occur until July 30, 1975, when

George McGovern issued a press release about the thick document he’d

just received from Fidel Castro, following his May 1975 visit to Cuba.15

The Castro-McGovern document is very much as Fiorini described

almost a year earlier, and is filled with detailed accounts of US-backed

assassination attempts against Fidel. Almost a hundred pages long, it has

the dates, names and photos of those captured, and photos of the some-

times quite sophisticated arms and explosives used in the attempts.16

The 1975 version of the document lists familiar names and shows

why Nixon, Helms, Hunt, and Trafficante would have been worried in

1972 about the report becoming public: Those named include Johnny

Rosselli, Tony Varona (three times, the first during the CIA-Mafia plots),

Manuel Artime (and several of his associates), Rolando Cubela, his CIA

contact Carlos Tepedino, and Trafficante henchman Herminio Diaz.

The account begins with a mid-1960 attempt (involving “a gangster . . .

equipped by the CIA”), at the time when Vice President Nixon and Hunt

were involved in CIA Cuban operations. The report ends with the 1971

attempt to assassinate Fidel in Chile, listing twenty-eight attempts in all.

It included two attempts that Rosselli had hinted at in his disclosures to

Jack Anderson: Helms’s unauthorized plots to kill Fidel on March 13,

1963 (at the University of Havana), and April 7, 1963 (at Latin American

Stadium).17

A couple of pages appear to have been added in 1975, reflecting then-

ongoing Congressional hearings, but otherwise the detailed report is

likely similar to the one Hunt described to Fiorini in 1972, which Fiorini

then revealed in Dick Russell’s 1974 article. The fact that Hunt (and

Helms and Nixon) were willing to risk several break-ins to photograph

a copy of it in 1972 indicates that while Hunt knew generally about the

report, he and his patrons couldn’t be sure exactly what was in it. The

fact that Lawrence O’Brien might have a copy, or other information from

Maheu about Rosselli and the CIA-Mafia plots, made O’Brien’s office

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

at the Watergate an irresistible and critical target for Nixon, Helms, and

Hunt.

Jack Anderson’s handful of articles over the past five years had gener-

ated no follow-up in the mainstream press, but more detailed or wide-

spread news coverage of the CIA-Mafia plots from 1960, 1963, or 1971

could have cost Richard Nixon the election. To the majority of Americans

in 1972, it was inconceivable that the CIA would try to assassinate a

foreign leader, let alone use the Mafia to do it. Richard Helms knew that

exposure of the CIA-Mafia plots and the other assassination attempts

would cost him his career and reputation. Hunt likely realized it could

also focus suspicion on him for matters related to JFK’s assassination.

The possibility that the JFK-Almeida coup plan was listed in the

document gave Helms and Hunt a thin reed of National Security

justification—or rationalization—for their actions. But in trying to obtain

a copy of the document and learn if O’Brien had it, Nixon would cost

himself the presidency, Helms his career, and Hunt his freedom. While

Trafficante would suffer no personal consequences for having his three

men help with the operation, it would lead the godfather to order the

murder of Rosselli four years after the break-in.

Confirmation of Fiorini’s story came from Washington attorney Les-

lie Scheer, who would represent Johnny Rosselli when he testified in a

closed hearing to Watergate investigators. Scheer told Rosselli’s biogra-

phers that based on questions asked by the Congressional investigators,

“the reason the break-in occurred at the Democratic Party headquarters

was because Nixon or somebody . . . suspected that the Democrats had

information as to Nixon’s involvement with the CIA’s original contact

with Rosselli [and] felt that a document existed showing Nixon was

involved with or knew what was going on with the CIA and the assas-

sination of Castro and Rosselli’s involvement. [The Watergate burglars]

wanted to try to get this information that Nixon suspected [the Demo-

crats] were going to use against him.”18

Hunt used Cuban exiles (and Fiorini) to look for the document during

the May and June 1972 break-ins because when going through files they

would immediately recognize relevant names like Varona, Cubela, and

Artime. Their anti-Castro backgrounds would also ensure their silence

if they learned details of CIA assassination operations directed at Fidel.

In early April 1972, two months before the final Watergate break-in, the

CIA’s Inspector General looked into the “activities of Howard Hunt

and Manuel Artime in Miami and Nicaragua, Barker, Mrs. Hunt, [Tony]

Varona [and Carlos] Prio,” as part of an “Internal Review.”19

Frank Fiorini told Dick Russell that he and the others “were looking

for” the document not just at the Watergate, where they were arrested,

but also “in some other Washington file cabinets, too.” J. Anthony Lukas

wrote that later government “investigators suspect that some of the

Cuban-Americans may have been involved in burglaries at the” offices

of Ambassador Orlando Letelier and others at the “Chilean embassy in

Washington and the Chilean Mission to the United Nations that spring

[as well as] a May 16 [1972] burglary of a prominent Democratic law

firm in the Watergate.”20

A June 28, 1972, memo by Deputy CIA Director General Vernon Wal-

ters (who replaced General Cushman) says that John Dean “believed

that Barker had been involved in a clandestine entry into the Chilean

embassy.” A writer friend of Fiorini’s confirmed that Fiorini told him

“he took part in the Chilean embassy break-in,” and a researcher for

Bob Woodward wrote that one of the former CIA men arrested at the

Watergate “expressed a belief that the Chilean embassy was bugged by

the Administration, a belief then shared by officials of the embassy, and

strengthened by the intruders’ apparent knowledge of the [targeted]

diplomats’ movements.”21 Given Fidel’s support for Allende’s Chilean

government, Hunt might have worried that Ambassador Letelier had

been given a copy of the Castro assassination document to pass along

to others in Washington. Fiorini said that in one of their non-Watergate

break-ins, “we found a piece of” the Castro assassination document,

but not “the entire thing,” so it’s possible that portion was found at the

Chilean Embassy, prompting the next break-in, at the Watergate.