American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [52]
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 today—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