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10/30/09 - Political Affairs - I Thought it was a Promotion

By Manuel E. Yepe

An example of the moral and political qualities of some "Cuban-Americans"
who have placed themselves at the service of the enemies of the land of
their birth is offered in an interview in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo
with one of the so-called "plumbers" who became famous as participants in
the Watergate scandal that led to the ouster of President Richard Nixon.

The interview, which appeared on July 19, 2009, was conducted by journalist
Manuel Aguilera Cristóbal with Eugenio Rolando Martínez who, "at 86 years of
age does not regret his past as a Watergate plumber although he laments
having lost this and many other battles."

"I wanted to overthrow Castro and unfortunately I overthrew the president
who had been aiding us, Richard Nixon," the mercenary told the journalist.

On June 17, 1971, at 2:30 in the morning, Martínez was arrested inside the
offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building
complex in Washington, D.C., along with James McCord, head of security for
the Committee to Re-Elect the President [Richard M. Nixon], and three other
plumbers hired, as Martínez had been, in Miami: Virgilio González, Bernard
Baker, and Frank Sturgis. All had previously worked for the CIA.

Exactly two months earlier, on April 17, 1971, Bernard Baker, Martínez's
best friend, found a note on the door of his house: "If you are still the
man that I knew, come and see me." The note was signed Howard Hunt, whom
both had know for a long time through his role as the CIA's principal
organizer of the Playa Girón landing. The day marked the tenth anniversary
of that unsuccessful attempt to invade Cuba through that point at the Bay of
Pigs, on the island's south coast, using 1500 counter-revolutionary exiles,
a large portion of whom were identified with the bloody Batista dictatorship
that had recently been defeated on the island. Already in Hunt's criminal
dossier was the key role that he had played in the 1954 overthrow
Guatemala's president, Jacobo Arbenz.

"We are going to be active again," Hunt said tersely when they all met. The
proposal was to form part of a White House unit personally directed by
Richard Nixon. Hunt assured them that the CIA was in on the creation of this
group of agents working on the president's orders.

After 12 years working for the Agency doing infiltration, sabotage,
kidnappings, espionage, and other terrorist misdeeds, Rolando Martínez felt
flattered: "I thought it was a promotion for me."

Initially, the group's job was to investigate people who wanted to interview
Nixon. But then other much dirtier missions came along, like when they broke
into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg (former military
analyst at the RAND Corporation), "who had leaked to the New York Times
documents from the Pentagon about the Vietnam war and we wanted his
psychiatrist's notes to corroborate if he had also passed information to the
Soviet embassy and to learn what his motives were," the miscreant stated.

On May 2, 1971, a month before the break-in at the Democrats' office, the
body of J. Edgar Hoover, who had been director of the FBI since 1935, was
laid out in the Capitol rotunda. It was feared that left-wing groups opposed
to the war in Vietnam would demonstrate nearby. Fifteen Cubans were hired in
Miami to dissuade the demonstrators. Martínez recalls with a smile how they
broke up the demonstration, in which the actors Jane Fonda and Donald
Sutherland took part: "I remember how we provoked them. We took a Vietcong
flag from them and broke it up."

At the Watergate building "we went to steal documents that would show that
Fidel Castro was financing the campaign of the Democrat McGovern, who
everyone knew sympathized with Castro, had traveled to Cuba on various
occasions, and had been seen together with him attending baseball games. We
were looking for evidence of a foreign country's interference in the
election of a president of the United States."

Martínez maintains that he and his comrades were victims of a trap sprung by
James McCord, the only one of the five plumbers who was not an undercover
agent but was rather a formal part of the CIA. "He betrayed us!"

In January 1973, the four plumbers pleaded guilty in order to avoid a trial
and so as not to have to testify about the details of the operation. They
were convicted of conspiracy, robbery, and violation of federal
communications laws. Two months later, McCord wrote a letter to the judge
and with that he precipitated the political scandal that ended with the
resignation of President Nixon. McCord received immunity and Martínez served
only 15 months of the 40 years he had been sentenced to.

Yes, justice in the United States is generous, for some!