THE WATERGATE'S CUBANS--BURGLARS WITH A CAUSE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180028-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: August 9, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180028-9
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 1/4
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
9 August 1984
The Watergate's Cubans
- burglars with a cause
By Ashley -Halsey 3d
Inquirer Sell Wnie,
MIAMI - It began simply, two
hours past midnight in the dark re-
cesses of an office building on the
Potomac.
They got us."
That calm whisper inside the Wa-
tergate -office building began what
mushroomed into a scandal that
swept Richard M. Nixon from the
presidency 10 years ago today.
"I shall leave this office with re-
gret," Nixon said in resigning on
Aug. 9, 1974.
Watergate ended with a torrent of
regrets and recriminations' as the
men around the President sought to
save themselves from total disgrace
- or worse, from prison.
But the Watergate burglars, the
men who turned up in the glare of
police officers' flashlights in Demo-
cratic Party headquarters that morn-
ing in 1972, were without regret 10
years ago and they will have none of
it today.
"Am I gonna cry about it?" said
Frank Sturgis. "I do not feel one bit
ashamed. I felt I was serving my
country."
"We'd do it again," said Virgilio
Gonzalez. "Because we protect this
country. I don't regret for one min-
ute the things I do."
"I thought it was consciously
right," said Eugenio Rolando Marti-
nez. "I never thought that carrying
out orders from the White House
could lead me to become a criminal."
"When you're in the intelligence
community," said Bernard L. Barker,
"and you're sent out on a mission
and you get caught, you take your
medicine and you keep your mouth
shut."
Sturgis, Gonzalez, Martinez and
Barker did just that and were
shipped off to prison. But the revela-
tions of the fifth man arrested inside
the Watergate, James B. McCord,
linked higher-ups in Nixon's re-elec-
tion campaign to the break-in.
All but forgotten
The four men who kept their si-
lence were all but forgotten amid the
enormity of Nixon's fall, consigned
to history as a quartet of burglars
caught in what Nixon press secretary
Ron Ziegler initially sought to dis-
Miss as "a third-rate burglary
attempt."
-:But here in Miami, in the sprawl-
ing Cuban colony called Little Ha-
vana, no one mistakes them for
ebmmon criminals. Because here, if
nowhere else, perhaps, people under-
stand what they did and why.
*Here they are cast larger than
tteir roles in Watergate - remem-
bered as heroes in the struggle to
oust Fidel Castro from Cuba so that
tens of thousands of their fellow ex-
patriates could return home.
_All four men were deeply involved
in covert CIA actions against Castro
long before they were recruited by E.
Howard Hunt to work for the Nixon
administration.
"Remember, Howard Hunt was one
of the chiefs in the Bay of Pigs inva-
sion," said Gonzalez. "Everybody re-
spected him. He called us and said
let's go. And after we found out be
was working for the White House, be
got a connection with the CIA, with
the FBI, we trusted that man all the
Bey."
They say they were told of a need
to determine whether Democratic
presidential candidate George S. Mc-
Govern was receiving funds from
Havana. But Runt's call alone was
sufficient inducement.
-My motivation was that we fig-
ured we were going to help the Unit-
ed States government, so maybe we
could get more help overthrowing
`Castro," Gonzalez said.
?
Eugenio Rolando Martinez plucked
a fat berry from a basket at an open-
air market in Little Havana and
chewed slowly as he mulled over the
uq estion.
"Remember that I was in the CIA
and everything that I did was against
the law if you go by the book." he
said. "It was lawful only because I
was working for a national-security
a enc As far as I wad cog, =2i,
Tate?-gate was ike~ tty_pth
action."
Martinez, now 62, had 354 CIA mis-
sions to his credit at that time, and
he said he never doubted thAt this
~Oew set OF-orders coming through
,Hunt had originated with the CIA as
well.
"For anyone who was not connect-
ad with my operation, it could be
.surprising, but for me it was just
another operation," he said.
" G. Gordon Liddy, In his au:obiogra-
phy, Will, described Martinez as
".afraid of absolutely nothing" and
recalled him as saying, "Use us.
Please use us. We want to help!"
Directed by Liddy and Hunt, the
`team first broke into Democratic
headquarters at the Watergate in
May, planting concealed micro-
phones, taking photographs and es-
caping unnoticed. Three weeks later,
Ion June 17, they were ordered back
to fix a faulty "bug" and to photo-
graph hundreds of documents.
"In all my experience as la CIA]
.operatioe, I never saw so many well-
organized errors as we made in Wa-
tergate that night, Martinez said,
-shaking his head. "To begin with, we
'never put tapes on the door before
and they decided to put tapes on the
.door....
Those tapes, used to keep doors
from locking automatically, twice
were discovered by a security guard,
who alerted, police.
Handsome, white-haired and in-
tense, Martinez has been a manager
-at a huge Chevrolet dealership since
serving a 15-month federal prison
term after pleading guilty to charges
of burglary, wiretapping and con-
spiracy. He was pardoned by Presi-
dent Reagan in May 1983.
"I believed so much in the law in
this country that I believed every-
thing was properly authorized," he
said. "I thought, something will
come out and we will be cleared."
COUtdrued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180028-9