Authors: Lamar Waldron
[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.