Legacy of Secrecy (141 page)

didn’t want the CIA officially involved in, but also in dealing with Cuban

matters, especially now that he was outside the chain of command that

included Nixon’s man General Cushman. The Mullen Company had

previously handled “the public relations effort of a covert Agency activ-

ity known as the Free Cuba Committee.”41

James McCord retired from the CIA four months after Hunt, estab-

lishing his own security firm before becoming Security Director for

Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), in September

1971. McCord has indicated in testimony and his own writing that his

resignation from the CIA was genuine and has declined to comment (to

us and to
Vanity Fair
) on Harry Williams’s statements to William Turner

that he worked with McCord and Hunt on Cuban matters in 1963.42 A

CIA memo says that on July 19, 1971, two months before McCord joined

CREEP, E. Howard Hunt “joined the White House staff as a Consultant

to President Nixon.” However, Charles Colson says that Hunt was hired

for his White House position on July 1, 1971.43

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Hunt had been pursuing the White House position for quite some

time. An Agency memo confirms Hunt’s statement that when he

“retired” from the CIA, the original plan was for Hunt to eventually

head the Mullen Company. From that position, Hunt would have been

able to perform and direct work for both the CIA and the Nixon White

House. However, when Robert Bennett purchased the firm, those plans

changed. Charles Colson told H. R. Haldeman that “early in 1971, Hunt

and Bennett began visiting me from time to time to offer their services on

a volunteer basis to help the White House in outside efforts or in political

matters.” Those activities could be characterized as dirty tricks, such as

faking cables to look as if JFK had ordered the assassination of South

Vietnam leader Diem just weeks before his own murder, then trying to

leak the phony cables to
Life
magazine.44

After Watergate, Colson would realize that “all the time Hunt was on

the White House payroll . . . Hunt’s secretary was on the CIA payroll,”

leading Colson to ask, “Was Hunt, supposedly a retired CIA agent, actu-

ally an active agent while in the White House?” Richard Nixon harbored

similar suspicions after Watergate, asking Haldeman, “[Did you know]

that Helms ordered Bennett to hire Howard Hunt? Did you know that

Hunt was on the payroll of the Bennett firm at the same time that he

was on the White House payroll?”45 Then again, Nixon likely had his

own reasons to have originally approved the hiring of Hunt in 1971,

since Hunt had been involved in many of the same Cuban operations

leading up to the Bay of Pigs as Nixon had. John Ehrlichman—the only

aide Nixon apparently confided in about what came to known as “the

Bay of Pigs thing”—was the only White House official who interviewed

Hunt before he was hired.46

By the fall of 1971, Nixon was again concerned about those opera-

tions, and on September 18, he ordered Ehrlichman to tell Helms he

wanted “the full file [on the Bay of Pigs] or else.” This time, Helms gave

Nixon “three thin files,” but not the IG Report about the CIA-Mafia plots,

or the CIA’s internal Kirkpatrick Report on the Bay of Pigs. Gus Russo

notes that “Nixon and everybody else knew there was much more, but

Helms never delivered.”47 This left Nixon in the dark on exactly how

much Helms knew about his role with the CIA-Mafia plots, with Prio’s

associates in November 1963, and any ties those had to JFK’s murder.

Nonetheless, in 1970 Nixon continued some US efforts against Fidel

Castro. Hunt’s friend Manuel Artime had met with Nixon about reviv-

ing his Central American camps, but wound up just helping Hunt with

sensitive jobs.48 Exile attacks on Cuba in March, April, and May of 1970

so worried Cuba that Castro had the Soviet Ambassador ask the US to

reaffirm JFK’s pledge not to invade Cuba. Nixon agreed, not realizing

that Fidel had never complied with JFK’s condition that Cuba allow UN

inspections for weapons of mass destruction.49

Nixon’s bigger concern in 1970 and 1971 was Chile, which would lead

to its own scandal and to a little-known precursor to Watergate. Chile

was about to elect its first socialist president, Salvador Allende, and to

help prevent that Helms promoted David Atlee Phillips from head of

Cuban operations to head of Latin America operations, putting him in

charge of the CIA’s Chile Task Force.

US efforts against Allende would be like a twisted version of the

JFK-Almeida coup plan, involving some of the same people. JFK had

wanted to overthrow a dictator and establish a democracy, while Nixon

wanted a coup to replace Chile’s democracy with a dictator. Working

with Helms and Phillips on the coup was Artime’s former case officer,

Henry Heckscher, the CIA Chief for Chile. Ex–CIA Director John McCone

was on the board of ITT, a US company that offered Helms and the CIA

$1 million to block Allende’s election. General Alexander Haig was

involved as the aide to Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kiss-

inger. Even David Morales was soon deployed in Chile, to deadly effect.

The general effort was code-named “Project Camelot.”50

Unlike Commander Almeida in 1963, Chile’s most admired Gen-

eral, Rene Scheinder, refused to be part of the coup plan and was killed

by CIA-supported officers. Allende was elected, and praised by Fidel

Castro, who planned to visit him in Chile. This led to a new CIA assas-

sination attempt on Castro in 1971, involving Antonio Veciana and Luis

Posada, and apparently also David Atlee Phillips. One aspect of the plan

involved “a scheme to blame the assassination [of Fidel] on certain Rus-

sian agents.” However, the plot failed, leading to a rift between Phillips

and Veciana. Two years later, Phillips would end their relationship by

giving “Veciana a suitcase [with] $253,000 in cash” as a reward for his

years of service to the CIA.51

Chapter Sixty-two

Much of the conventional history about Watergate is incomplete, wrong,

or continues the spin begun at the time to minimize Richard Nixon’s

crimes. The latter includes claims that the Watergate scandal was only

about “a third-rate burglary” and that “the cover-up was worse than the

crime.” Countering these is a growing barrage of evidence, including

Nixon White House tapes released in recent years (hundreds of hours

remain unreleased). Many newer Nixon tapes are available as transcripts

and in books, and it is almost impossible to read more than a few pages

of Nixon’s remarks—from the taping’s start in 1971 until it stopped on

July 12, 1973—without hearing him either planning a crime or talking

about one that was actually committed. Nixon frequently talked with his

aides about bribery, obstruction of justice, and illegal retaliation against

perceived enemies—tax audits were a favorite, but break-ins were also

discussed and used. And those are just the remarks Nixon made while

he knew he was being taped—he was careful not to record even more

sensitive conversations and documented criminal acts.1

There were actually numerous burglaries besides Watergate, and

more than one break-in at that facility. Dozens of high officials—from

Nixon’s attorney general to his chief of staff—were prosecuted, and

many sent to prison, for crimes that had nothing to do with the Water-

gate burglaries. Though dozens of books have detailed Watergate in

depth, none has been able to document exactly what the burglars were

really looking for. While we have room to cover Watergate only briefly,

we finally answer that question, by focusing on something not covered

in other books: the participation of a dozen people in various aspects of

Watergate who were also involved in the events surrounding the JFK-

Almeida coup plan and AMWORLD. They include several members of

organized crime, who were also linked to JFK’s assassination.

For a time in the early 1970s, the mainstream press reported on Nixon’s

Mafia ties, until they were overshadowed by the tidal wave of Watergate

coverage that culminated with Nixon’s resignation. Thus, while the
Los

Angeles Times
would run a lead editorial entitled “Nixon, the Team-

sters, the Mafia” a year after the final Watergate break-in, within a few

years—and continuing today—political commentators and historians

rarely mentioned Nixon’s mob associates.2

One of the best examples of Nixon’s work with the Mafia was his

release of Jimmy Hoffa from prison, shortly before Christmas 1971.

Most Mafia bosses were happy with new Teamster president Frank

Fitzsimmons and had little desire to see Hoffa released, since Hoffa

had favored Marcello’s and Trafficante’s Mafia families in the South.

However, Teamster expert Dan Moldea found that large Teamster loans

made to associates of Marcello and Trafficante (including Frank Ragano)

yielded a compromise. Hoffa would be released—but would be prohib-

ited from holding any Teamster office until 1980, leaving Fitzsimmons

in control.3

Hoffa was furious when he learned of the condition, but there was

little he could do at that time. He would have to wait for any type of

revenge until January 1974, when his tip to government investigators

would drag the CIA-Mafia plots and the Kennedy assassination into the

Watergate investigation.

Nixon was careful not to document his illicit dealings with the Team-

sters and the mob, but years later the
New York Post
described the FBI’s

discovery of a diary belonging to a New Orleans associate of Carlos

Marcello’s. An entry for January 5, 1973, said: “Fitz OK Al Dorfman chi

ok.—Tony Pro Jersey ok ($500—to C. C. = nix OK).” According to A. J.

Weberman, this showed “a payment [possibly $500,000] was made to

Nixon through Charles Colson and had been okayed by Teamsters Allen

Dorfman, Tony Provenzano [also a New Jersey mob boss], and Frank

Fitzsimmons.”4 Former Nixon aide Chuck Colson later told journalist

Dick Russell a theory he’d heard, that the Mafia “owned Bebe Rebozo,

they got their hooks into Nixon early, and of course, that ties into the

overlap of the CIA and the mob.”5

As the broad range of White House crimes leading to the final Watergate

break-in unfolded, Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt took advantage

of some of those operations to protect themselves. In the wake of Jack

Anderson’s early-1971 articles about the CIA-Mafia plots, Helms and

Hunt had to be sure their problematic 1963 Cuban operations remained

hidden. At the same time, Santo Trafficante had some of his men infil-

trate Hunt’s operation, just as he’d done for the JFK-Almeida coup plan

714

LEGACY OF SECRECY

in 1963. Trafficante’s initial goal was probably to protect his narcotics

network, since Hunt’s operatives were also targeting certain drug traf-

fickers. The three Trafficante criminals who became part of Hunt’s drug

unit could also monitor, and help to prevent the exposure of, material

that could uncover Trafficante’s role in the CIA-Mafia plots.

The White House “Plumbers” unit was created in 1971, ostensibly

to plug leaks, not just within the administration but also from people

like Daniel Ellsberg, the former RAND analyst who was trying to leak

the Pentagon Papers (a massive Defense Department account of how

the America public had been misled about the war in Vietnam). Most

Watergate accounts list the first major break-in for Hunt’s Plumbers as

the September 1971 entry into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, con-

ducted by Cuban exiles working for Hunt and his comanager, former

FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy.

However, Nixon’s Oval Office tapes show the President had been

considering Hunt for another break-in well before that and seemed to

know that Hunt was right for such a task. On June 17, 1971, Nixon

had begun talking about wanting to “blow the safe” of the Brookings

Institute, a moderate Washington think tank, to see what material they

had. On June 30, the day before Hunt officially joined the White House

staff, Nixon ordered Haldeman to talk to “Hunt. I want the break-in.

Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring

them in.”6

Even before Hunt officially joined the White House, he had begun

preparing to use Nixon’s operations to help protect his and Helms’s

secrets, by resuming contact with some of his former exile associates

during the April 1971 tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. Prior to that,

Hunt had continued to maintain his close friendships with exiles like

Artime.

Overtly, Hunt was using Cuban exiles in his Plumbers unit because—

as explained by a Cuban exile to a later government investigating com-

mittee—“When Bay of Pigs operatives like Hunt moved [on] to Water-

gate, they sent for their old Cubanos. They work a little like a Mafia