Nixon's Secret (59 page)

One of the Bay of Pigs veterans who broke into the Watergate, Eugenio Martinez, was still on the CIA payroll while working with “The Plumbers.” Like Hunt, Martinez had “retired” yet was still reporting to his case officer and collecting his CIA compensation. Hunt was known to Martinez by his Bay of Pigs pseudonym “Eduardo.”

“We went to a Cuban restaurant for lunch and right away Eduardo told us that he had retired from the CIA in 1971 and was working for Mullen and Company,” wrote Martinez years later. “I knew just what he was saying. I was also officially retired from the Company. Two years before, my case officer had gathered all the men in my Company unit and handed us envelopes with retirement announcements inside. But mine was a blank paper. Afterward he explained to me that I would stop making my boat missions to Cuba but I would continue my work with the Company. He said I should become an American citizen and soon I would be given a new assignment. Not even Barker knew that I was still working with the Company. But I was quite certain that day that Eduardo knew.”
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Nixon had come to believe that a Cuban Dossier that outlined the CIA-Mafia compact and the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro was in the possession of the Democrats and, in particular, in the office of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien. This was the information some of “The Plumbers” were looking for at the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate Hotel headquarters. “I believe Nixon told Colson to get the goods on O’Brien’s connection with Hughes,” wrote Haldeman. “I believe Colson then passed the word to Hunt who conferred with Liddy who decided the taps on O’Brien and Oliver, the other ‘Hughes phone,’ would be their starting point.”
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This was confirmed by Mafioso Johnny Rosselli, who participated in the CIA plots to kill Castro, and by “Plumber” Frank Fiorini.

“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,” said Fiorini. “But we wanted the entire document [which was] a long, detailed listing [of the] various attempts made to assassinate the Castro brothers.”
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Hunt and the Cubans were the most capable and appropriate candidates for the mission. They had training and experience with an intelligence agency that excelled in covert operations; they would be able to aptly identify the document as they had been on the ground in the Bay of Pigs and in Dallas. They also had as much reason as Nixon to keep quiet about the contents.

Lamar Waldron, in his exhaustive, investigative recap of the Watergate break-ins, does an exceptional job of providing the motives of Nixon, Helms, and Hunt in getting their hands on the Cuban Dossier:

The Cuban Dossier lists familiar names and shows why Nixon, Helms, and Hunt—as well as godfather Santo Trafficante—would have been worried in 1972 about the report becoming public: Those named include these CIA assets, all linked to Trafficante: Tony Varona (named three times, the first during the CIA-Mafia plots), Hunt’s best friend Manuel Artime (and several of his associates), Rolando Cubela as well as his CIA contact Carlos Tepedino, and Trafficante henchman Herminio Diaz. The Dossier begins with a mid-1960 attempt (involving “a gangster . . . equipped by the CIA”), at the time when Vice President Nixon and Hunt were involved with the CIA’s anti-Castro operations. The Dossier lists twenty-eight attempts in all, ending with the December 1971 attempt to assassinate Fidel in Chile. 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 on April 7, 1963 (at the Latin American Stadium). Johnny Rosselli’s name is in the few pages added to the 1975 version of the Cuban Dossier, but there is no way to know if he was named in the original 1972 version.
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While there is no solid evidence of Nixon ordering the break-ins at the DNC, it can be assumed that the president wanted this dossier found and destroyed
by any means necessary
. O’Brien was a likely candidate to be in possession of such a document. Early in the Nixon administration, O’Brien had been a consultant to the Howard Hughes organization and had contact with the eccentric business magnate’s closest aide, ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu. Maheu, whose services were occasionally tapped by the CIA, was directed by then-Vice President Nixon to reach out and make contact with mobster Johnny Rosselli.

The paranoid Nixon believed that his old Operation 40 associates were likely involved in the ‘63 Dallas coup. He would have been tearing his hair out over the possibility that O’Brien, once a part of JFK’s intimate nucleus of aides dubbed the “Irish Mafia,” knew about Nixon’s role in the CIA-Mafia plots. Nixon had already been burned twice by loans from O’Brien’s employer, Howard Hughes. To say that Nixon was obsessed with Hughes, and thus with O’Brien, would be an understatement.

Like a bad penny, Nixon’s hapless brother Donald resurfaced. According to a 1976
Playboy
article, John Meier, a former Hughes associate, worked with former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and others to feed misinformation to Donald that they hoped he would tell the president. Their plan worked; Donald told his brother that the Democrats had a lot of previously unreleased information on his illicit dealings with Hughes and that Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien had the documents.
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If the Democrats hoped the Nixon campaign would do something foolish with the information even though Nixon was far out in front in the polls, they were right. Nixon bought it and Watergate unfolded.

CIA Director Helms monitored the Watergate break-in after James McCord or Hunt assuredly made him aware as a security measure for the agency. In the summer of 1973, Helms testified at the Erwin Committee investigation that the CIA had no involvement in the Watergate affair. However, he was forced to testify that Eugenio Martinez was still active on the CIA roster.
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In May 1973, McCord had written in a memorandum to the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee that the CIA feared the Nixon White House would gain “complete political control over . . . CIA” to make the agency conform to White House policy.
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In hindsight, it is evident that some of “The Plumbers,” and those they recruited, remained employed by the CIA, each working with different levels of actionable information. Hunt was on the mission to find out if there was a Cuban Dossier and follow subsequent CIA orders. The Cubans were to follow the orders of Hunt. McCord, hired by Liddy, was chosen by the CIA to monitor and, if necessary, sabotage the mission.

H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, who was heavily involved in the Watergate cover-up, correctly surmised that the CIA monitored the break-ins with “plants” and had at least one agent, McCord, sabotage the operation.
52

A year after the break-ins, in an article for
National Review
, former CIA station chief and Glenn Miller Orchestra trumpeter Miles Copeland
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also concluded that Watergate turned into a CIA trap led by McCord.
54

Who was James McCord? According to Richard Helms, McCord was a “serious, straitlaced staff security and counter-audio specialist. He had retired with a good record.”
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McCord spent a good portion of the ‘50s and ‘60s working for the CIA’s Office of Security.
56
In the words of
Secret Agenda
author Jim Hougan, the Office of Security “is an action component of the CIA, with hands-on responsibility for some of the agency’s most sensitive matters. Accordingly, and unlike most other sections of the CIA, the Office of Security reports directly to the Director of Central Intelligence. In effect, the OS is an extension of the director’s office in a way that other CIA components are not . . .”
57

There was a photograph on the wall of McCord’s office at CRP, where he worked as security director. The photograph was inscribed by CIA Director Richard Helms: “To Jim/With
deep
appreciation.”
58
James McCord’s “retirement” from the CIA on August 30, 1970, was similar to Hunt’s. He was going into
deep
cover.

McCord, like Hunt, was likely a double agent, who intentionally botched the surreptitious entry into the Watergate. The many errors and strange movements of McCord during both the unsuccessful and successful break-ins at the DNC are indicative of an ulterior plan. Recently released 1973 Bureau of Prisons evaluations of the burglars state, “James McCord is said to have taken his orders directly from Gordon Liddy and while he too was a technician, he operated somewhat independently from the others.” While it is true McCord took his orders from Liddy, he did not follow them. McCord, it was later revealed, also had two ex-FBI men working for him, Alfred Baldwin and Lou Russell. Both were virtually unknown to the other burglars, both played featured roles in the break-ins.

* * *

The break-in team was experienced, but the operation was amateurish—a strange paradox. The errors made by the Watergate burglars are so manifest that it is clear that the burglars purposely botched the job with one more target in their sights. Consider how the conspirators expertly left a trail of mistakes as evidence for law enforcement:

•   The team had a meeting the night before the break-in in a Howard Johnson room booked on the stationery of a Miami firm, which employed Watergate burglar and Operation 40 member Bernard Barker. When Barker was later arrested, he had his hotel room key in his pocket. There, investigators found materials that further incriminated the group.

•   James McCord booked his room opposite the Watergate Hotel, at the Howard Johnson, in the name of his company.

•   Neither Hunt or Liddy made any effort through their many contacts to spring McCord from prison before it was revealed that he was linked with the CIA.

•   Before the break-in, each of the burglars were given $100 bills, equaling between $200 and $800. All the bills had serial numbers that were close in sequence. When Hunt and Liddy found out that the burglars had been caught, they cleared their hotel room of evidence, but left a briefcase holding $4,600, which by serial number, directly linked it to the money given to the burglars.

•   Address books taken from Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez linked them directly to E. Howard Hunt.

•   After the burglary, Hunt locked a wealth of incriminating evidence in his White House safe, including electronic gear from the burglary, address books, and notebooks with information tying the men involved directly to the break-in.

•   Break-in surveillance man Alfred Baldwin subsequently leaked the story of the burglary, with names, to a lawyer named John Cassidento, a supporter of the Democratic Party.

•   On May 22, 1972, McCord and former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin booked Room 419 at the Howard Johnson Motor Inn using the name of McCord’s company. The Howard Johnson was opposite the Watergate Hotel. McCord hired Baldwin to monitor electronic bugs McCord had planted in the DNC headquarters.

McCord very clearly had his own agenda. “We never knew where he was going,” Martinez would remember.
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The double agents involved in the Watergate break-in were not lazy criminals. They were seasoned professionals, skilled in covert operations. The Watergate break-in was simultaneously a botched job and a successful cover-up.

There were two important pieces of information Baldwin let slip in the aftermath of Watergate to slightly tip McCord’s hand. Baldwin maintained to the FBI, Congress, and the
Los Angeles Times
that he began monitoring calls from the DNC as early as Friday, May 26—two days before the first successful break-in and the alleged planting of a listening device.
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The night of May 26 was the first of two unsuccessful attempts to get into the DNC offices, but Baldwin, in another absent-minded confession, offered up a revelation to the
Los Angeles Times
—McCord was in the DNC. McCord was the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen in Spencer Oliver’s office.

According to Baldwin, McCord “turned on a light in [Oliver’s] office, came over to the window, pulled the drapery and shut the light off . . . I saw McCord. I can specifically say I saw McCord. His features are distinguishable, and he came right over to the window and pulled the drapery. He had the light on.”
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What was McCord doing alone in Spencer’s office? One can assume that McCord was bugging a specific phone in the DNC for Baldwin to begin monitoring.

McCord’s suspicious behavior continued during the second unsuccessful break-in attempt at the Watergate on May 27, when the burglars went into the Watergate through the front door of the office building, all wearing suits, and all checked in with the security guard.

The situation was strange to Eugenio Martinez. Like the break-in at Dr. Fielding’s office, “There wasn’t a written plan, not even any mention of what to do if something went wrong.”
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Martinez, regardless of his misgivings, went along with the slipshod mission.

“Anyway, all seven of us in McCord’s army walked up to the Watergate complex at midnight,” wrote Martinez. “McCord rang the bell, and a policeman came and let us in. We all signed the book, and McCord told the man we were going to the Federal Reserve office on the eighth floor. It all seemed funny to me. Eight men going to work at midnight. Imagine, we sat there talking to the police. Then we went up to the eighth floor, walked down to the sixth—and do you believe it, we couldn’t open that door, and we had to cancel the operation.”
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It is strange that expert clandestine operators, equipped with rubber gloves, the electronic surveillance equipment to bug the DNC, cameras to snap pictures of the important documents, and falsified identification to get them by the security guard had brought the wrong tools to jimmy the same door that McCord had presumably entered through two nights prior. Even more unusual, while the burglars were attempting to bust into the DNC offices on the sixth floor, McCord disappeared once again. Martinez, concerned about McCord’s whereabouts, located him two floors above: