2014
January
Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2370-74 | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:32 AM
In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2374-79 | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:33 AM
Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2452-53 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:56 AM
Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2468-71 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:58 AM
The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2477-80 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:59 AM
Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2491-93 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:02 AM
Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2518-20 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM
In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2500-2503 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM
In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2618-21 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:19 AM
Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2640-44 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:21 AM
With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2692-94 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:27 AM
Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2701-4 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:35 AM
Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2725-26 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:38 AM
As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2739-41 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:39 AM
Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2774-77 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:45 AM
Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2777 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:46 AM
and because the exile community is based in FL... they have disproportionate influence over national politics
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2786-89 | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:48 AM
Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2864-67 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:23 AM
the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2876-77 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:26 AM
If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2908-9 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:35 AM
With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2943-47 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM
The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2951-52 | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM
The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2956-58 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM
Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2958-60 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM
Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2981-85 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:36 AM
they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3061-64 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:08 PM
In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Bookmark on Page 187 | Loc. 3079 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3078-83 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM
The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3086-88 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:11 PM
As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3107-10 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:14 PM
Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3133-35 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:16 PM
Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3205-6 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:35 PM
After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3246-48 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:42 PM
Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3249-51 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:43 PM
these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3265-68 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM
through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3270-71 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM
while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3293-97 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:49 PM
When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3319 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM
while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3321-24 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM
With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization,
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3330-32 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:53 PM
Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3364-65 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:57 PM
With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3501-2 | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 08:13 PM
Though some in the Bush administration dismissed these changes as simply “cosmetic,” other reforms are far less susceptible to this charge.
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February
Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 566 | Loc. 11753 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:02 AM
antiwar emonstrations
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 565 | Loc. 11726 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM
hoovers deathand his files
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 564 | Loc. 11710 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM
espionage and anti narcotics plans
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11693 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM
helms nixon reationship warms
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11677 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM
hels pursues spy movies for hunt and cia pr
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 562 | Loc. 11660 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM
helms and hunt
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11628 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:05 AM
mccord security cia exiles involve.emt bay of pigs
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 559 | Loc. 11613 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM
fiorini sturgis knew hunt from bay of pigs well before wqatergate
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11619 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM
sturgis met hunt during cia almeida assassination plot
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 561 | Loc. 11647 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:07 AM
martinez cia reorting on hunt white house connections activities
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 569 | Loc. 11803 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:08 AM
fall and rise o jimmy hoffa book
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 571 | Loc. 11857 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:09 AM
chilean embassy plumbers burglary numero uno
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 573 | Loc. 11898 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:10 AM
mccrd still oyal to cia. said wh was bugging embassy. knewwhen to burgle and whre.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 575 | Loc. 11931 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:11 AM
fiorini and rosselli both say chilean embassy burglary was abt cuban dosier
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 576 | Loc. 11960 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:12 AM
dossier mid 1960-71
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12000-12003 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM
All Helms would have needed to do initially was to communicate to Nixon that he needed to see him about “the Bay of Pigs thing”—meaning the CIA-Mafia plots—and that would have gotten the President’s immediate attention. That also helps to explain why that term came up on Nixon’s tapes when Hunt’s name surfaced in the Watergate affair, and the term was then thrown back at Helms, to get him to force the FBI to back off on the Watergate investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12007-10 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM
It’s not hard to imagine Hunt’s reaction when he heard about the Cuban Dossier, since he’d been involved in attempts to kill Fidel from 1960 to 1965. The same is true for his assistant, Bernard Barker—and for Barker’s longtime boss, Santo Trafficante. The godfather would not only have no objection to Barker and Fiorini’s involvement in trying to get a copy of the Dossier, but would probably have encouraged their participation as a way to know what was going on.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12019-22 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:15 AM
Nixon would still privately be insisting that legitimate “national security” concerns were behind the Watergate break-ins and the cover-up. Nixon was specifically talking about the highly incriminating “Smoking Gun” tape, in which the President talked about the Watergate cover-up and the “Bay of Pigs thing,” and the fact that “Hunt, ah, he knows too damn much, and he was involved.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12029-33 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:16 AM
Nixon never explained—to his aides or in public—just what those “national security reasons” were, and how they related to Hunt and the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Ongoing CIA operations are exempt from some disclosure requirements to Congress, an important consideration since both houses were controlled by the Democratic Party. (Ongoing operations only have to be disclosed to four members, two leaders from each party in each house of Congress, and the CIA’s descriptions can be so vague and general as to be virtually meaningless.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12035-43 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:17 AM
But there was an important, ongoing CIA operation that could have been endangered if it were listed in the Cuban Dossier, or if it were uncovered because public exposure of the Dossier led to more investigations. That ongoing operation had involved Richard Helms since its inception, and had also involved E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or, rather, what was left of the operation, which was the CIA’s ongoing support for Commander Juan Almeida’s wife and at least two children outside of Cuba. Plus the fact that Commander Almeida—in some ways the No. 3 official in Cuba—could still be favorably disposed to helping the United States if anything should happen to Fidel Castro (who had already ruled longer than most Latin American dictators). There was also the fact that Almeida could always be blackmailed into helping the United States (because of his work for JFK), even if he didn’t want to do so willingly. Hunt and Barker had even handled the $50,000 payment to Almeida in 1963, when they had helped arrange for his wife and two children to first leave Cuba under a seemingly innocent pretext.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12068-70 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:22 AM
The search for the Cuban Dossier explains why the burglars at the Chilean embassy and the Watergate were all former CIA agents, officers, or assets experienced in anti-Castro operations. The only exception was G. Gordon Liddy, who helped Hunt supervise the Watergate break-ins from across the street.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12077-78 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM
Memos concerning Rosselli’s 1974 Watergate Committee staff interview about the CIA-Mafia plots were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret for decades, and are published in this book for the first time.57
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12079-86 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM
Richard Nixon’s national security rationale/excuse for the Chilean embassy and Watergate break-ins would initially be effective in forcing CIA Director Richard Helms to ask the FBI not to fully investigate the final Watergate break-in. It also kept Nixon’s taped admission about his knowledge of the Chilean Embassy break-in secret until 1999. That was good for Nixon, since in 1976, he provided a written answer to the Senate Church Committee denying any such knowledge, saying that I do not remember being informed while President, that at any time during my Administration an agency or employee of the United States Government, acting without a warrant, engaged in a surreptitious or otherwise unauthorized entry into the Chilean Embassy in the United States.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12112-15 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:27 AM
in May 1972, just prior to the initial unsuccessful Watergate break-in, Hunt and Barker’s team cased and made plans to bug “the offices of McGovern’s two top aides, Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.” (Five years earlier, Mankiewicz had secretly investigated JFK’s assassination for Robert Kennedy, while Hart would soon be part of the Senate Church Committee that first exposed the CIA-Mafia plots.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12115-19 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM
Mankiewicz’s and Hart’s offices on Memorial Day 1972 and told him that photographing documents would be part of the mission. Lukas also pointed out that Barker and the other Watergate burglars were “mentioned in connection with a May 16 burglary of a prominent Democratic law firm in the Watergate, whose members included . . . Sargent Shriver, [Senator Edward] Kennedy’s brother-in-law.” That burglary was discovered when an early-arriving employee “noticed the entry door was . . . taped so the door would not lock,” similar to what happened on the final two Watergate burglaries.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 12123-29 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM
After the Plumbers failed to obtain a complete copy of the Cuban Dossier at the Chilean embassy, there would be a significant change in mission for the upcoming burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. No longer would it be primarily a small bugging operation; now, having a larger crew photographing documents would become its primary goal. One can only imagine the reaction of Nixon, or Helms, if they heard that the Cuban Dossier started in 1960 with a CIA plot to kill Fidel involving a “gangster,” or that the Dossier continued until the December 1971 attempt to kill Fidel in Chile. Hunt had told Fiorini the Dossier was approximately one hundred pages long, yet they only had a piece of it, so they had no way of knowing what was on the other pages that could harm the CIA’s reputation or Nixon’s reelection campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 586 | Loc. 12143-46 | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:29 AM
Some writers have speculated that Watergate was all about the $100,000 cash contribution from Howard Hughes to Nixon, via Bebe Rebozo, and what DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien might have known about the payment. But there had already been two Jack Anderson articles about the $100,000, and it would have been hard—if not impossible—for Larry O’Brien to use that issue against Nixon without opening himself up to charges about his own lucrative work for Hughes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The fact that Nixon, Helms, and Hunt were willing to risk several break-ins in the span of just a few weeks shows a level of desperation missing from most Watergate accounts. However, the possibility of the CIA-Mafia plots becoming public during the campaign was simply too great to ignore. Ultimately, in trying to obtain a full copy of the Dossier and learn what the Democrats knew, Nixon would cost himself the Presidency, Helms would end his career, and Hunt would go to prison.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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There were several reasons for targeting Spencer Oliver’s Watergate office and phone. Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry pointed out that Oliver’s father “worked with Robert R. Mullen, whose Washington-based public relations firm [still officially] employed Hunt,” even as most of Hunt’s time was consumed by his work for Nixon. The Mullen firm, and new owner Robert Bennett, worked extensively for Howard Hughes, and “Oliver’s father had represented Hughes.” That meant in addition to the secret Cuban Dossier, Oliver could have information damaging to Nixon that his father could have gotten from Hughes or his representatives.8
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The first break-in wasn’t scheduled until May 26—so why did Hunt have the men fly into Washington on May 22? It’s possible the extra time was needed to get their cover stories straight, and to make sure the men knew what additional information to look for at the Watergate and McGovern headquarters. As Fiorini told St. George, in addition to their main goal of looking for the Cuban Dossier, they were also keeping their eyes open for other material to photograph, some related to the Dossier and some not: “any document with money on it . . . anything that had to do with Howard Hughes . . . damaging rumors about Republican leaders [and] everything that could be leaked to the press with a damaging effect to the McGovern people.” Those items would be icing on the cake, but they weren’t the kinds of things for which Nixon would have risked his Presidency.15
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The “cover” for the burglary was going to be a supposed “board meeting” banquet and film screening for Ameritas, a real estate company affiliated with Barker. The small banquet would be held in the basement of the Watergate Hotel, which had access—via a corridor and a courtyard—to a garage and stairwell in the Watergate office building where the DNC headquarters was located.17
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The next night, the Plumbers tried a different approach: going in through the main Watergate office building entrance, signing the register (using aliases) indicating they were going to the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, then walking down two flights of stairs to the DNC offices. McCord was with Fiorini and the exiles, while Hunt and Liddy waited with Baldwin across the street. Eugenio Martinez thought the plan strained credibility—what were so many men doing going to the Federal Reserve office at midnight, on Saturday, during the Memorial Day weekend? Still, all went according to plan, until Virgilio Gonzalez was unable to open the doors to the DNC offices with the lock-picking tools he had brought.21 Hunt was furious when he learned of the failure, and he demanded that Gonzalez fly back to Miami, get his tools, and return by Sunday night, for a third attempt. Martinez thought that Hunt was being too hard on Gonzalez, but when he complained, Barker relayed a blunt message from Hunt: “You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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On Sunday night, May 28, 1972, the burglars tried a different route into the Watergate, and they finally were successful. While Hunt, Liddy, and Baldwin waited in the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street, this time the burglars entered the Watergate office building through the garage, with McCord taping open “the basement stairwell door.” Emery wrote that “once on the sixth floor, Gonzalez . . . used a pressure wrench to twist the lock on the rear door to the DNC and they were in.” As McCord placed the bugs, “Barker and Martinez started photographing documents, while . . . Pico and De Diego served as corridor lookouts.”24
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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either McCord’s sense of caution or the former CIA security officer’s possible growing reluctance to be part of such clearly illegal political spying. The break-in at the Chilean embassy was standard CIA fare; in some ways it was a typical CIA security operation to ensure that Agency secrets weren’t in the wrong hands. But the DNC break-in was something else, a grossly illegal political operation with a thin national security cover of protecting CIA secrets and Agency assets like Commander Almeida. After the successful May 28 break-in, Liddy