American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  During these same early months of Nixon’s presidency, the Howard Hughes empire was imploding in Las Vegas. Hughes had gotten billions in secret contracts from the CIA over the years, and let his Medical Institute serve as one of their front companies. Hughes also gave Nixon, among other politicians, plenty of under-the-table funds. At the end of 1970, suddenly Hughes disappears. His top aide, Robert Maheu, thinks the billionaire has been kidnapped. Maheu gets forced off the Hughes Tool Company board, and he stashes a bunch of documents and tapes in the safe of his pal Hank Greenspun, the editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

  What might have been in those documents and tapes? One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, later said he’d been part of a plot to steal some stuff from Greenspun’s safe. When the Senate Watergate Committee demanded that Greenspun show them those documents, the publisher got a court order to stop it. We still don’t know what they contained, but one clue emerged in a column by Jack Anderson early in 1971 that tracked right back to the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.”6

  “Locked in the darkest recesses of the CIA is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro,” the article began. It went on to detail how Hughes’s man Maheu had teamed up with mobster Johnny Rosselli to work with the CIA on a “hush-hush murder mission.” Anderson speculated that, after the CIA-Mob plots supposedly stopped in the spring of 1963, Castro had sought revenge on JFK. This was the first time any details such as these had hit the news.

  Hughes had brought Rosselli into his own organization when he moved into the Mob’s Las Vegas territory. Rosselli was tight with Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante Jr., a couple of the gangsters who have since been linked to JFK’s assassination. And a friend of Rosselli’s, Jimmy Starr, later told the mobster’s biographers: “What I heard about the Kennedy assassination was that Johnny was the guy who got the team together to do the hit.” We know today that certain people in the CIA wanted to pin the blame for JFK’s murder on Castro, to take the heat off themselves. We also know today that Nixon, while he was Vice President under Eisenhower, was the liaison to the CIA in the first assassination attempt against Castro. But that secret, like the others, was still way below the radar when Nixon was in office.

  So, on the very day that column by Jack Anderson came out, Haldeman asked John Dean (the White House counsel) to make an inquiry into the relationship between Maheu, Hughes, and a guy named Lawrence O’Brien. Remember that name? It was O’Brien’s office that the burglars broke into at the Watergate. At the time, he headed the Democratic National Committee, so people presumed Nixon’s team were looking for dirt on the dems. But O’Brien was not only a former staff assistant to the Kennedy brothers, but also an old friend of Robert Maheu’s. Two weeks after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Maheu had arranged for O’Brien to hire on as a consultant to the Hughes organization. Then when Hughes vanished and Maheu got purged, O’Brien went with him. As a White House aide wrote to John Dean on February 1, 1971: “Mayhew’s [sic] controversial activities and contacts in both Democratic and Republican circles suggest the possibility that forced embarrassment of O’Brien ... might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.”7 What kind of skeletons? Could the interest in O’Brien, all the way to the Watergate break-in, have concerned what he might know about Maheu, Rosselli, and the intrigue around “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”?

  In February 1971 came another Jack Anderson column about Rosselli.8 The story was sketchy, but tantalizing. It said: “Confidential FBI files identify him as ‘a top Mafia figure’ who watched over ‘the concealed interests in Las Vegas casinos of the Chicago underworld.’” Also that he’d been recruited by Maheu and “had handled undercover assignments for the CIA.” The story concluded: “Rosselli’s lawyers are now trying to get clemency for their client, citing our stories about his secret CIA service.”

  Sure looks like somebody was putting out a message through Anderson, doesn’t it. Rosselli was facing time, and hinting he might squawk if he got convicted. So what happens next? Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, phoned Maheu, who caught the next flight to D.C. and told Mitchell everything he knew about the CIA-Mob plots. Mitchell was “shaking” by the time Maheu ended his story, and after that helped Maheu avoid a grand jury.9

  What happens to Anderson after he does these stories? He’s targeted by Nixon’s infamous Plumbers Unit, the guys who liked to “plug leaks” by breaking into various places. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt Jr. later admitted during the Watergate hearings that they met with a CIA operative in 1972 to talk about slipping the columnist LSD, or putting poison in his aspirin bottle, or concocting a fatal mugging. The plot was aborted when the Watergate break-in occurred.

  Howard Hunt had supposedly retired from the CIA in April 1970, but he’d immediately landed a job with a CIA front outfit called the Mullen Company. They’d been instrumental in setting up the CIA’s “Cuban Freedom Committee” that helped disseminate the Castro-did-it rumors after the Kennedy assassination. Their cover specialty was PR, and now they were representing the Hughes Tool Company. “I am sure I need not explain the political implications of having Hughes’ affairs handled here in Washington by a close friend,” Nixon’s hatchet man, Charles Colson, wrote in a memo.

  On the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs in 1971, Hunt flew to Miami and got back in touch with two Cuban exiles he’d worked with during the anti-Castro battles of the early Sixties. The exiles knew Hunt as “Eduardo.” Their names were Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez. Hunt took them along when he did a little “private investigation” visiting a woman who “claimed to have been in the Castro household with one of Fidel’s sisters at the time that John Kennedy was assassinated.” The woman said the “reaction was one of moroseness because he [JFK] was dead.”10 That may not have been what Hunt wanted to hear, but he said he sent reports to both the CIA and to the White House, although each denied ever getting such. Hunt said that, after he went to work as a White House “consultant” in June 1971 (he also kept his job with the Mullen Company), he kept a copy of his report in his safe there, only to see it destroyed after the Watergate break-in by the FBI. So, I guess we’ll never know what was really in it. Meantime, Hunt became chief operative of the Plumbers. As John Ehrlichman later described it, “The Unit as originally conceived was to stimulate the various departments and agencies to do a better job of controlling leaks and the theft or other exposure of national security secrets from within their departments.” National security secrets like who killed JFK, maybe?

  Early that same summer of ’71, columnist Anderson met with Bernard Barker and another of Hunt’s recruits, Frank Sturgis, in Miami. Anderson and Sturgis went back to 1960, when they “collaborated on magazine articles about plans to overthrow Fidel Castro.” Sturgis also knew a lot of secrets, including the CIA’s formation of an assassination squad of Cuban exiles called Operation 40, just before the Bay of Pigs. After the Kennedy assassination, Sturgis had played a key role in spreading the rumors that Castro was behind it. Now Anderson was told the old crew was “back in business” with the legendary “Eduardo,” E. Howard Hunt. But for whatever reason, the columnist wrote nothing about it.

  Things were happening thick and fast. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media, secret policy documents about the Vietnam War build-up, and Nixon went ballistic. That’s what first spawned the Plumbers, who mounted a covert “op” to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, with assistance from the CIA’s Office of Security. Except, it wasn’t only the Pentagon Papers that worried the CIA. “Their concern—indeed what seems to have been their panic,” focused around Ellsberg’s friendship with Frances FitzGerald, “the talented author of Fire in the Lake [who] was the daughter of the late Desmond FitzGerald, a former deputy director of the CIA. ... The CIA saw his liberal daughter’s friendship with Ellsberg as a threat, and worried that it might lead to the exposure of operations that the CIA hoped would remain state secrets.”11

  We know t
oday—but it wasn’t public knowledge back then—that Desmond FitzGerald, who died of a sudden heart attack on the tennis court in 1967, had ended up in charge of all the anti-Castro plots in 1963. And he’d had his CIA Special Affairs Staff keeping tabs on a fellow named Lee Harvey Oswald.

  A few days before the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, the CIA called John Ehrlichman to say that their own assistance to Hunt was being terminated. Ehrlichman says he hadn’t realized the CIA was aiding Hunt in the first place. Hunt told Ehrlichman that the latest operation was a failure: the Ellsberg dossier had not been found—even though one of the Cuban exiles involved in that break-in remembered photographing the psychiatrist’s notes on Ellsberg. The film taken by the Minox spy camera was passed along to Hunt, who apparently turned it over as part of his regular deliveries to Richard Helms at the CIA. This tells me that Hunt was misleading the White House, at the same time that he was still playing ball with the Agency.

  Soon after this, Nixon renewed his pursuit of the CIA’s records. He sent an order to Ehrlichman: Tell Helms to fork over “the full file [on the Bay of Pigs] or else.” So Ehrlichman went to see Helms, twice within four days. At the second meeting, Helms asked to see Nixon privately once again. A transcript of their tape-recorded session in the Oval Office on October 8, 1971, was released by the National Archives in 2000. Would somebody tell me why a potential bombshell like this had to wait thirty years for us to know about, after all of the participants are dead? Before Helms came into the room, Ehrlichman briefed Nixon on the CIA director’s latest excuse for not turning over the documents:

  “[Helms] said that his relationship with past presidents had been such that he would not feel comfortable about releasing some of this very, very dirty linen to anyone without first talking it through with you, because he was sure that when you become a former president you would want to feel that whoever was at the agency was protecting your interests in a similar fashion. This is incredibly dirty linen.” Ehrlichman then continued: “Helms is scared to death of this guy Hunt that we got working for us because he knows where a lot of the bodies are buried. And Helms is a bureaucrat first and he’s protecting that bureau.”

  When Helms arrived, Nixon pounded his desk and shouted: “The president needs to know everything! The real thing you need to have from me is this assurance: I am not going to embarrass the CIA! Because it’s (certainly?) important. Second, I believe in dirty tricks.” (Ehrlichman’s notes quote Nixon as saying to Helms: “Purpose of request for documents: must be fully advised in order to know what to duck; won’t hurt Agency, nor attack predecessor.”)

  Helms, at least pretending to be contrite, responded: “I regard myself, you know, really, as working entirely for you. And everything I’ve got is yours.” He held up a file folder and continued, “Should I turn this over to John [Ehrlichman]?” Nixon said, “Let me see it.”12 It was a slim report by a Marine colonel who’d been assisting the CIA during the Bay of Pigs planning. In his memoirs, Nixon would complain that what Helms gave him was “incomplete ... The CIA protects itself, even from presidents.”

  The day after the meeting with Helms, Ehrlichman sent a staffer to Las Vegas for a four-hour chat with Hank Greenspun. It wasn’t long after that when Hunt and his team of Cuban exiles began their discussions about burglarizing Greenspun’s safe. The CIA’s Office of Security already had 16 agents shadowing columnist Jack Anderson, who then was invited by Helms to a long lunch. Ostensibly Helms wanted to try to dissuade Anderson “from publishing certain sensitive classified material in his forthcoming book.” A week after that, Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy started drawing up plans to “neutralize” Anderson. The CIA Office of Security was using another “retired” agent, James McCord, to keep tabs on the columnist. McCord also began working part-time at the White House for the CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President). Nixon would be gone when, in 1975, the CIA admitted to Congress its “practice of detailing CIA employees to the White House and various government agencies,” including “intimate components of the Office of the President.” And we thought double agents only worked against foreign elements!

  Hunt and McCord had been acquainted since the mid-Fifties, although Hunt lied under oath that they didn’t meet until April 1972. McCord, according to the New York Times, was “believed to have played a role in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.” The CIA denied that, but recently released documents show that in early 1961, “James McCord and David (Atlee) Phillips ... launched a domestic operation against the FPCC.” That’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the same organization that Oswald suddenly joined in 1962. And David Phillips was not only involved in the anti-Castro plots, but was also said to have met with Oswald in the summer of’ 63 in Dallas.13

  Early in 1972, Hunt’s Plumbers and McCord’s CREEP security unit had merged into the Gemstone plan, a wide-ranging series of illegal White House-based projects. Then, sometime on the night of May 1-2, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep. Nixon’s attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, immediately ordered Hoover’s office sealed. Then the search for Hoover’s secret files began. His personal secretary, Helen Gandy, later told Congress she destroyed many files marked “personal” at his home over the next few weeks. At Hunt’s urgent request, Bernard Barker brought the Miami crew of Cuban exiles to Washington, where they made plans to break into Hoover’s residence. But what happened to Hoover’s trove remains unknown to this day.

  Around this same time, in a conversation about the shooting that paralyzed Alabama governor George Wallace, Nixon suddenly flashed back to the Kennedy assassination and called the Warren Commission “the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.” Somebody might have been able to ask what the president meant by that, except the tape transcript wasn’t released by the National Archives until 2002!

  Meantime, plans for a break-in to Lawrence O’Brien’s office at Democratic National Committee headquarters moved ahead. One of the burglars, Frank Sturgis, said Hunt told him they were looking for “a thick secret memorandum from the Castro government, addressed confidentially to the Democrats ... a long, detailed listing [of the] various attempts made to assassinate the Castro brothers.”14 The burglars were also coached to look for “anything that had to do with Howard Hughes.”

  On the night of June 17, five men, all using aliases, were caught red-handed inside the Watergate complex. McCord, the White House’s “Security Chief,” was booked at the jail along with Sturgis, Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez. Hunt’s name was in two of the burglars’ address books and his link to the operation became known within 24 hours. He quickly left Washington.

  In later years, evidence came to light that McCord had likely botched the break-in intentionally. First, he went back and re-taped a garage-level door, which served as a telltale sign to the cops. McCord claimed to have removed the tape from all the doors, but actually several had been taped to stay unlocked. A few days later, all of McCord’s papers were destroyed in a fire at his home, while a CIA contract agent stood by.15 Hunt made a whole series of “mistakes,” too, surrounding the Watergate burglary. Nixon, in his Memoirs, suggested—referring to the break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—that Hunt could have been “a double agent who purposely blew the operation.”16

  There was also the matter of a $25,000 cashier’s check that had been deposited into the bank account of a Miami real estate company owned by burglar Barker. This check, laundered through a fund-raiser for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, was the first link connecting the burglars to the CREEP—after Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post broke the story about it. Well, it turns out the check wasn’t deposited by the CREEP. Liddy had given it to Hunt, who put it in Barker’s account. So, money that should have stayed anonymous and untraceable then became an easy “mark” to track.

  Three days after the break-in, Nixon called Haldeman, instructing him to “tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.... Ehrlichma
n will know what I mean.” Six days after the break-in, Hunt sent word through his boss at the Mullen Company that he wanted the White House to find him a lawyer. That same day, June 23, came Nixon’s “smoking gun” conversation with Haldeman. When the presidential tape was released two years later, it became proof positive that Nixon had been involved in trying to cover up the burglary—and this led to his resigning before he could be impeached.

  “Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said on the tape, referring to the CIA director. “Of course, this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”17

  On details of the Watergate burglary, the president seemed confused. Who ordered it? he asked Haldeman. Who was so stupid as to have given a CREEP check for $25,000 to Barker? Then Nixon instructed his aide to tell Helms: “The President’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because ah these people are playing for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and we feel that ... that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!”

  That afternoon, Helms and his deputy were summoned to the White House, where Haldeman passed on Nixon’s message. In his memoirs, Haldeman wrote: “Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair, leaning forward and shouting, ‘The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.’ Silence. I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’s violent reaction.” Haldeman reported back to Nixon that there was “no problem,” any leads “that would be harmful to the CIA and harmful to the government” would be ignored.