Legacy of Secrecy (144 page)

were also the ongoing Watergate investigations and prosecutions, as

well as Schlesinger’s own unpopularity (he would leave in less than

two months and be replaced by William Colby). Most important, key

officials and operatives knew how well Helms had essentially buried,

or destroyed, the biggest secrets.13

It was perhaps poetic justice for Richard Helms that on February 7,

1973—five days after he finished destroying files and stepped down as

CIA Director—Helms found himself testifying to Congress when the

subject of Chile came up. Helms lied when asked if the CIA had pro-

vided help to those who opposed Allende in Chile, a false statement that

would eventually bring him a criminal conviction.14

By fall 1972, Hunt had been making constant demands for hush money

for himself and the others, which the White House supplied, using

Manuel Artime as a conduit. Artime—who would never be charged for

Watergate or drug trafficking—used his protégé Milian Rodriguez to

help launder the Watergate hush money. On December 8, 1972, Hunt’s

wife Dorothy was killed in an airline crash while carrying $10,000 in

cash in her purse. After that, Hunt and the other defendants agreed to

plead guilty, just as the Senate Watergate Committee was beginning its

investigation.15

The White House’s cover-up looked like it was going to hold—until

James McCord wrote his famous letter to Judge John Sirica on March 19,

1973, saying the defendants had lied and that high officials, like Attorney

General John Mitchell, were involved. For a time, Bernard Fensterwald

represented McCord, until McCord says Fensterwald “introduced me

to Tad Szulc, and the two men . . . sought to solicit information from me

concerning CIA and concerning E. Howard Hunt.”16

Nixon’s position had looked strong in the fall of 1972, but by the

spring of 1973, his situation was more difficult. The Senate Watergate

investigators were starting to dig in, and McCord’s letter to Sirica caused

new prosecutions to be considered. Now that Hunt faced a long prison

sentence, he demanded even more money, for himself and the others.

When Dean told Nixon they might need a million dollars, Nixon replied,

“we could get that . . . you could get it in cash. I know where it could be

gotten [with] no problem. The money can be provided.”17 Where could

Nixon get a million in cash?

According to the
Washington Star
, one answer came the following

year, when “Alexander Haig”—by then Nixon’s final chief of staff—

ordered “a secret investigation of any Nixon connections with huge cash

contributions from countries in the Far East [or] organized crime.” The

“Army’s Criminal Investigation Command [found] strong indications of

a history of Nixon connections with money from organized crime” and

reports of multimillion-dollar contributions from top South Vietnamese

officials.18 Based on those findings, it’s possible that some of Nixon’s

hush money came from associates of Santo Trafficante—and was being

paid to (and distributed by) some of Trafficante’s other associates, like

Fiorini and Artime.

In the spring and into the early summer of 1973, the Senate Watergate

Committee pressed forward while criminal prosecutions and the Demo-

crats’ civil suit continued. The committee chairman, North Carolina

Senator Sam Ervin, was a conservative Southern Democrat who would

ordinarily have been expected to support Nixon. However, the previous

726

LEGACY OF SECRECY

year, Ervin had tried to look into domestic surveillance by the US mili-

tary, only to be stonewalled by the White House.19

Ervin was determined not to be obstructed again, with Watergate. His

chief investigator, Carmine Bellino, was the same man Bobby Kennedy

had recommended to Richard Goodwin as the ideal person to investi-

gate JFK’s assassination. In delving into Watergate, some of Bellino’s

investigators would actually interview several of those involved in JFK’s

murder.

Bellino and Ervin got the break they’d been hoping for when John

Dean agreed to testify in open hearings against Nixon (on June 25, 1973)

and when Alexander Butterfield revealed Nixon’s taping system to the

world in his testimony on July 16, 1973. From that time forward, despite

all the issues with Special Prosecutors and matters of impeachment, it

was simply a matter of time before Nixon would have to face some type

of justice.

The Nixon tapes now available show that he was thinking of resign-

ing as early as spring 1973, but it would take more than a year after

the explosive Butterfield and Dean revelations for Nixon to finally step

down. Descriptions of the prosecutions, battles over the tapes, and the

“Saturday Night Massacre” resignation of Attorney General Elliot Rich-

ardson, are available in countless books and articles. Our focus is on

the important events overlooked in those accounts, many of which had

effects well beyond Watergate, such as several murders of Congressional

witnesses in the mid-1970s.

Of all the millions of words written about Watergate at the time, only

one largely ignored article mentioned an important part of Hunt’s back-

ground that Helms had withheld from investigators: Hunt’s work on

the plots to assassinate Castro in the mid-1960s. Tad Szulc’s February

1973
Esquire
magazine article briefly described those operations (primar-

ily the Cubela plots), saying they involved Hunt, Artime, and some of

the other Plumbers. No mainstream journalist followed up on Szulc’s

1973 revelations, so he expanded on them the following year in a short

biography of Hunt, saying that in the mid-1960s Hunt was “helping to

coordinate [an] assassination plot” against Castro, which would be fol-

lowed by Artime’s arrival in Cuba. But Szulc couldn’t write too much

about the subject without drawing attention to his own covert work for

JFK on AMTRUNK.20

Two interviews conducted in 1973 could have dramatically changed

the course of Watergate events and possibly even exposed the JFK-

Almeida coup plan. But neither made it into print at the time, so they

remained unknown to Watergate investigators and Almeida’s secret

remained safe.

Researcher Richard E. Sprague interviewed Haynes Johnson on Janu-

ary 12, 1973, and the following quotes come from Sprague’s handwritten

notes. Aside from a few lines that appeared in a small newsletter in 1975,

this is their first publication. According to the notes, Haynes said, “CIA-

backed plans for [a] second Cuban invasion were going on in 1963.”

Haynes “knew RFK very well. He and Harry Williams called RFK a lot

in 1963, because RFK had the CIA reporting to him and JFK.” Harry was

“the prime contact with the Cubans and other Florida groups by 1963

[and] knew and met all of the CIA people in Wash[ington] & Miami.”21

Haynes Johnson told Sprague that “A meeting was held on Nov. 22,

1963 in Wash[ington] D.C. to discuss plans for Cuban operation . . . it

was the most important meeting they had . . . at meeting were [CIA

Executive Director Lyman] Kirkpatrick, Helms, Hunt, and Williams.

Word of [JFK’s] assassination came in [during the] meeting.” Haynes

knew something big was about to happen with Cuba, but hadn’t been

told about Almeida or the coup plan—though he did know that “RFK

conducted his own investigation” into JFK’s murder.22 If any of this infor-

mation involving Hunt and Helms had become widely known during

the Watergate investigation, it would have changed American political

history. Instead, when it was finally published in a small newsletter in

1975, it passed without notice.23

Journalist and former FBI agent William Turner interviewed Harry

Williams on November 28, 1973. Harry told us later that he was shocked

when the Watergate scandal erupted and he recognized former associ-

ates from 1963 like Hunt and Barker. Commander Almeida was still

unexposed, but Harry had come to realize that one of Trafficante’s men

had used part of the coup plan for JFK’s murder, so Harry tried to tell

Turner as much as he could without endangering Almeida.24

In his long interview with Turner, Harry confirmed much of what

Haynes Johnson had told Sprague. Without mentioning Almeida or a

specific coup plan, Harry provided a wealth of additional information

about Bobby’s control of Cuban operations, their work together, and

Harry’s activities with Cyrus Vance, Joseph Califano, Alexander Haig,

E. Howard Hunt, James McCord, and Bernard Barker. The names of

Hunt, McCord, and Barker were still hot news items in November 1973,

as Watergate continued to unfold, and an article about them by Turner

at that time would have been big news. However, the 1973 interview

wasn’t published until 1981, when parts appeared in Turner’s book
The

Fish Is Red
, about the covert US war against Castro.25

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

As Watergate played out, AMWORLD veterans helped Nixon and Kiss-

inger finally bring down Allende in Chile. David Atlee Phillips had

become Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division and Henry Heck-

scher was still the Station Chief in Chile when General Augusto Pinochet

led a US-backed coup against Allende. Though the CIA says Allende

committed suicide on September 11, 1973, Allende’s family and support-

ers say he was murdered—a claim supported by David Morales, who

boasted to a close friend that he helped to kill the Chilean president.26

Due to political intervention from an unknown Washington official,

Johnny Rosselli had been moved to a much more comfortable prison

before he was finally released on October 5, 1973. At sixty-eight, Rosselli

faced a relatively bleak future. Giancana was still in Mexico—primarily

concerned with the drug network and gambling—and the mob pow-

ers in Chicago had Rosselli officially turn over his Las Vegas role to

Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. With no part left to play in Las Vegas or Los

Angeles, Rosselli moved to Florida, where he had family—and Santo

Trafficante.27

Two months after Rosselli walked out of prison, his old compatriot

from the CIA-Mafia plots, Richard Cain, was gunned down in Chi-

cago. Eight months earlier, Cain had probably been involved in the

murder of Sam DeStefano, the gangster who helped frame Secret Ser-

vice agent Abraham Bolden in 1964, before he could talk to the Warren

Commission.28

By Christmas 1973, Jimmy Hoffa had been out of jail for almost a

year, but he still chafed at not being able to hold any Teamster office.

Instead, he had to sit at home in Michigan, frustrated, while his replace-

ment, Frank Fitzsimmons, rode in Air Force One with President Nixon.29

Hoffa felt that he’d been betrayed, and someone had to pay. To get back

at Nixon and add fuel to the slow-burning Watergate fire, Hoffa told a

contact with the Senate Watergate Committee about the CIA-Mafia plots

that had begun under Nixon’s tenure. He also gave them the name of

the man who could tell the investigators more: Johnny Rosselli.30 Despite

Bellino’s past partnerships with Rosselli associates Robert Maheu and

Guy Banister, Bellino wanted his men to grill the Mafia don.

Deportation proceedings against Rosselli had mysteriously stopped

while he was in prison, but now Helms was out of the CIA, and by

January 4, 1974, the INS was again targeting Rosselli. The INS pres-

sure seemed designed to ensure Rosselli’s cooperation when he was

subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee in February 1974. Set-

ting a pattern that would last until his death, as long as Rosselli answered

subpoenas, he wouldn’t be deported.31

Johnny Rosselli’s appearance had little impact on Watergate, but it

triggered a series of events that would lead to his own murder, as well

as those of Hoffa and Giancana. In late February 1974, Rosselli went

to Washington to testify in secret. Thwarting Hoffa’s intent, Rossel-

li’s attorney said the Mafia don “offered nothing that would confirm

Nixon’s involvement in the CIA plots [with the Mafia] or shed any light

on the motivations of the Watergate burglars.” When Rosselli returned to

Miami on February 25, 1974, he no doubt told Santo Trafficante he hadn’t

given investigators Trafficante’s name or anything of importance.32

Three days after Rosselli returned to Miami, seventy-two-year-old

Joseph Milteer died in a fire at his home. According to reporter Dan

Christensen, “a gas heater in his home exploded” and “several days

later, a small cache of arms and ammunition was uncovered in his car.”

The man who had informed on Milteer, William Somersett, had died in

1970. While Joseph Milteer was alive, Milteer’s name was never linked

in the press to Martin Luther King’s murder in Memphis, and the same is

true for all the FBI files discovered so far. The first time Milteer had been

mentioned by name regarding JFK’s murder had been in a small-press