A NEW WATERGATE REVELATION: THE WHITE HOUSE DEATH SQUAD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00845R000100460002-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 11, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: March 5, 1979
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT..
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hcUIRY
5 March 1979
Ane}r~tia{f~PBtP TPVelation
BY JONAHAN MARSHALL
UGGLVG SQUADS, KID-
napping, sabotage, the use of
prostitutes for political black-
mail, break-ins to obtain and
LL"nntno-ranh rdnruments and
various forms of electronic surveillance
and wiretapping." These were some of
the elements of G. Gordon Liddy's
million-dollar plan-described by Jeb
Magruder-to win the 1972 presiden-
tial election for Richard Nixon, as he
presented it toJohn Mitchell. "It's not
quite what I had in mind," said the
attorney general, as he sent Liddy back
to the drawing board to come up with
something less ambitious and costly.
What Mitchell maynot have realized
-and what Nixon may have meant
when he said, "did Mitchell know
about this?"-was that Liddv and his
coconspirator E. Howard Hunt had
already begun to implement an even
more sensitive and dangerous opera-
tion: the recruitment of a secret army
of Cuban exiles, answerable only to the
White House, and equipped to assas-
sinate foreign leaders.
On August 15,1973, President Nixon
told a press conference that upon learn-
ing of a justice Department investiga-
tion of the "plumbers' squad" burglary
of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psy-
chiatrist, he became "gravely con-
cerned that other activities of the Spe-
cial Investigative Unit might be dis-
closed, because I knew this could
seriously injure the national security."
Nixon never identified these "other
activities," and at the time his words
seemed to be no more than a lame
JO.VATHAV MARSHALL is an associate
editor of I,?:QJIRt. He gratefully aekrowledges
the arsis!anct of Helier Jertereh of American
Cititensfor Honesty in Government, Andrew
St. George, Alike Euing, Jim Hougan,
"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.
Well what the hell, did
Mitchell know about
this?"--President Nix-
on, White House conver-
sation, June 23, 1972.
justification for his cover-up of Water-
gate. But a new investigation of this
clandestine White House unit reveals
that Nixon may have had a much big-
ger cover-up in mind: Specifically, had
the arrests at Watergate not disrupted
their plans, Hunt and Liddy were pre-
pared to carry out at least one assassi-
nation plot - against Panamanian
leader Omar Torrijos.
The plot against Torrijos was a prod-
uct of the twin preoccupations with
political enemies and drugs that were
the hallmark of Nixon's Special Inves-
tigations Unit. Formed in mid-1971,
when John Ehrlichman ordered his
aide Egil Krogh to probe the leaking
of the Pentagon papers, the unit oper-
ated out of Room 16 of the Executive
Office Building. There Gordon Liddy
and Walter Minnick helped Krogh co-
ordinate the administration's "war on
drugs,"a struggle that Nixon described
in his message to Congress of June 17,
1971, as nothing less than "a national
emergency." It was this "war on
drugs" that provided the Plumbers
with their ostenc;ble rationale for the
conspiracy against Torrijos: The White
House suspected the Panamian leader
of aiding and abetting known narcotics
traffickers. But the plot against Torri-
jos was more than justlawenforcement
gone wild. Like so many of the other
secret operations of the Nixon White
House, it was an effort to destroy a po-
litical enemy who dared to challenge
the White House's definition of the na-
tional interest.
Nixon's Brn War
Lion's suspicion that leading
Panamanian officials were in-
volved in the drug traffic was by
no means unjustified. By 1970-
1971, the Customs Bureau and the Bu-
reau ofNarcotics andDangerousDrugs
(BNDD) were busy smashing the enor-
mously successful Corsican-Latin
American drug networks of Auguste
Ricord. With Ricord and many of his
associates arrested or on the run, B`DD
and Customs began focusing on Pana-
ma as a key transshipment point for
Latin American narcotics destined for
the U.S. market.
On February 6,197 1, American po-
lice arrested Joaquin Him Gonzales,
chief of air traffic control at Panama's
international airport, in the Canal
Zone. They had lured him onto Amer-
ican-controlled territory to watch a
softball game; after the arrest he was
flown in a military plane to Tex4s,
where a sealed indictment awaited
him. The Panamanian government ex-
pressed outrage at the kidnapping of
an important government official; the
Department of State deplored the
straining of relations with Panama.
Joaquin Him got five years for the Ili
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narcotics charge.
Six months later, Rafael Richard,
Jr., son of Panama's ambassador to
Taiwan, was arrested in New York
with 154 pounds of heroin. Richard
carried a diplomatic passport and tried
unsuccessfully to claim immunity. U.S.
officials noted with interest that Pana-
ma's Foreign Minister Juan Tack had
signed the passport and that Moises
Torrijos, brother of the Panamanian
strongman, had helped obtain it for
young Rafael.
On the basis of this arrest and other
intelligence reports,BNDD and Customs
officials now suspected that the Pana-
manian government had been cor-
rupted at its highest levels. As Jack An-
derson confirmed on March 14, 1972,
and Drug Abuse, "the entire heroin
refining operation can be thrown into
chaos." Krogh himself admitted that
assassinations took place in Southeast
Asia, and John Dean, in a recent inter-
view, revealed that Krogh once asked
him to help resolve a dispute between
the BNDD, the Pentagon, and the State
Department over the legality of kid-
napping drug traffickers in Latin
America.
On January 10, 1972, undoubtedly
in response to White House pressure
for more action on the narcotics front,
Ingersoll asked his staff to consider the
possible "immobilization and/or neu-
tralization" of Colonel Manuel Nori-
ega, chief of intelligence for Panama's
Guardia National, whom the BNDD
Nixon urged that $100 million be
spent on a secret program to kidnap
and wipe out narcotics traffickers.
"American narcotics agents have im- suspected of involvement in the heroin
plicated the foreign minister of Pana- trade. According to a still-secret report
ma and the brother of Panamanian of the Senate Select Committee on In-
dictator Omar Torrijos in a scheme to telligence, the options outlined in the
smuggle hundreds of pounds of heroin five-page report included:
into the United States." Sometime in
the spring of 1972, according to recent-
ly obtained justice Department docu-
ments, a federal grand jury handed
down a sealed indictment against
Moises Torrijos. As long as Panamani-
an officials stayed off U.S. soil, how-
ever, there was little the administra-
tion could do through normal legal
channels.
But then, the administration had
never committed itself to working
solely through normal legal channels.
In May 1971, the White House asked
John Ingersoll, director of the BNDD,
to draft a plan for "clandestine law en-
forcement" in the drug field-includ-
ing assassination. By May 27, 1971,
Nixon, John Ehrlichman, and Egil
Krogh had agreed to secretly budget
$100 million for a covert BNDD kidnap
and assassination program. "This de-
cisive action," read the minutes of the
meeting, "is our only hope for destroy-
ing or.immobilizing the highest level
of drug traffickers." BNDD officials be-
gan talking openly of the need to estab-
lish "hit squads": With only "150 key
assassinations," several BNDD officials
told Dr. J. Thomas Ungerleider of the
National Commission on Marijuana
Linking the official [N'oriegaI to a fictitious
plot against General Torrijos .... leaking
information on drug trafficking to the press;
linking his removal to the Panama Canal
negotiations; secretly encouraging power-
ful groups within Panama to raise the issue;
and `total and complete immobilization.'
It has also been alleged that two
leading BNDD officials, Phillip Smith
and William Durkin, took part in dis-
cussions of whether to assassinate Omar
Torrijos. These allegations are con-
tained in a secret 1975 Justice Depart-
ment report-known as the DeFeo re-
port, after one of its coauthors-that
outlined to the attorney general "alle-
gations of fraud, irregularity, and mis-
conduct in the Drug Enforcement Ad-
ministration," the agency that suc-
ceeded the BNDD. (The Justice Depart-
ment, by the order of Attorney General
Edward Levi, closely guarded the con-
tents of this report. Even the Senate
Intelligence Committee, although
granted access to the report, was not
given a copy.) According to the DeFeo
report, Smith denied any such plot-
ting,but claimed instead that he passed
on to the CIA information he had re-
ceived about a conspiracy to kill the
Panamanian general. However, the
DeFeo report also mentions charges
corroborated by the existence of the
Ingersoll option paper-that "a dis-
cussion concerning assassinations in-
volved the possibility of killing ?dlr.
Noryago [sic], the principal assistant to
the President of Panama, and that
Smith and William Durkin actually
proposed that he be killed." (Durkin,
then chief of criminal enforcement, re-
tired from the DEA in December 1978.
Smith, now head of security for the Re-
sorts International casino in Atlantic
City, was chief of special projects.)
A follow-up justice Department re-
port found "no evidence that any overt
acts occurred which could be charac-
terized as criminal violations of law."
In other words, Noriega is still alive.
However, as the Senate report states
without further elaboration, "some"
of the options presented to Ingersoll
"were put into action." Thus, the
BNDD waged a successful campaign of
press leaks, through Jack Anderson
and the anti-Torrijos press in Latin
America, to encourage Torrijos's op-
ponents and to shame the regime into
cracking down on official corruption.
The BNDD was probably behind the de-
tailed and informed charges printed in
La Hora in Panama on January 29,
1972, accusing Omar Torrijos of pro-
tecting the drug "mafia." Before Torri-
jos could shut down the presses, several
thousand copies of the newspaper had
been circulated. Arid four days after
the arrests at Watergate, Ingersoll vis-
ited Panama to warn Torrijos, accord-
ing to transcripts of their meeting, that
"narcotics enforcement is in your gov-
ernment's best interest. Failure to do so
effectively could result in further em-
barrassment to your government."
The chastened general in turn "prom-
ised full cooperation with BNDD" in
"stopping the traffic."
The Torrijos Plot
RILE THE WHITE
House pressured the BNDD
to use any means to elimi-
nate Panama's drug traf-
fickers, it was secretly
mounting its own deadly campaign
against General Torrijos. The top op-
erators in this theater oi;the "war on
drugs" were Gordon Liddy and E.
Howard Hunt.
Liddy, a former district attorney
from New York, had joined the Nixon
administration in 1969 as special as-
sistant to the secretary of the treasury,
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tv for!-w. enturcement
he Customs Bureau. the
Internal Revenue Servic:, and the Al-
co.:o!, Tobacco. and Firearms Bureau.
In that capacity. he organized in 1969
the "Operation Intercept,"
a cl:>r.:p::?J- of traffic at the southern
-der that bludgeoned the Mexican
overnir.ea- into accepting U.S. de-
:nancs for create- participation in the
narco:ics "?.ar.'' Liddy lost his job at
the Treasury Department for making
an unauthorized speech against gun
control, but he soon went to work for
Egil Keog:'t in the White House. There
he began recor nrnending formation of
a Wtite House-controlled drug en-
forcement unit to free Nixon from the
bureaucratic resistance of entrenched
agencies in the justice and Treasury
departments.
E. Howard Hunt, a retired career
CIA agent then working for the Mullen
Agency, a CI A-connected PR firm, went
to work for the White House on July 7,
1971, as a 5100-a-day consultant. Hunt
was known around the White House as
an adviser on the Far East narcotics
trafc, but secretly he began working
with Liddy on clandestine political
operations. His fees-and other ex-
penses of the Special Investigations
Unit (sru)-were paid out of a secret
S1.5 million White House Special
Projects Fund.
Hunt was in a particularly good
position to recruit loyal agents to carry
out \Vhite House orders. As the CIA's
political chief for the Bay of Pigs inva-
sion, Hunt was on intimate terms with
literally hundreds of anti-Castro Cu-
ban exiles whose personal loyalties to
Hunt, conservative politics, and clan-
destine skills would make them ideal
stu operatives.
Hunt visited Miami in the summer
of 1971 to contact his old CIA friend
Bernard Barker. Barker, who revered
his former boss, had been the CIA's pay-
master to the various exile groups. He
had also served the agency as a secret
informant during the 1950s, while a
member of Batista's secret police, and
later he helped establish the Nicara-
guan and Guatemalan bases from
which the exiles launched their inva-
sion of Cuba.
Hunt had already sought out and
met Barker that spring at a reunion of
Bay of Pigs veterans in Miami. Now
he asked Barker to join a new "nation-
al security organization. .. above both
the CIA and FBI." The ever-loyal Barker
jumped at the chance. Hunt gave
Barker the task of recruiting CIA-
trained anti-Castro exiles to be put at
the disposal of the White House. Bar-
ker ultimately put together a secret
army of 120 Cuban exiles; as he later
described it, they were trained in ev-
ery conceivable clandestine skill, in-
cluding killing. One of their targets, it
is now clear, was White House enemy
Omar Torrijos.
(becoming ,godfather to one of Hunt's
children) and of Barker (who smu.g-
gled Artitne out of Cuba after Castro's
takeover). Artirne, in secret testimony
before the Watergate grand jury in
1973, revealed that Hunt had asked
him to join in disrupting the Panama-
nian narcotics traffic, saying "some-
thing had to be taken care of in the
The White House directed its huge
army of Cuban exiles to "hit the mafia
using the tactics of the mafia."
HERE HAVE BEEN SUGGES-
tive accounts of the White House
campaign against Torrijos, but
the full story has never been
pulled together. On June 18,
1973, Newsweek offered an informed
glimpse of those plots, and predicted
John Dean would reveal their exist-
ence in his forthcoming Watergate.
testimony. "Dean's story is that the
Administration suspected high Pana-
manian officials of being involved in
the flow of heroin from Latin America
into the U.S., and were also concerned
about strongman Omar Torrijos's un-
cooperative attitude toward renego-
tiating the Panama Canal treaty,"
wrote Newsweek. "Thus, in Dean's
telling, some officials found a Torrijos
hit doubly attractive. The contract, he
said, went to E. Howard Hunt, later a
ringleader in the Watergate break-in;
Hunt, according to Dean, had his
team in Mexico before the mission was
aborted." When his turn came to
testify in public, Dean did not men-
tion Panama, and in a recent inter-
view he denied ever learning of Hunt's
plans. The Newsweek reporter respon-
sible for the story, however, while now
admitting that his sources erred in
assuming Dean's knowledge, insists
that those sources accurately described
the plot on the basis of first-hand
knowledge.
Corroboration for the story has come
from the participants themselves.
Sometime after July 1971, Hunt ap-
proached Manuel Artime, who had
headed the Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion
force under Hunt's direction. In 1963
and 1964, Artime participated at a
high level in CIA plots-said to include
both Hunt and Barker-to kill Castro
and invade Cuba anew. Artime re-
mained a close friend both of Hunt
Central American country. That mis-
sion, scheduled to take place after the
election, was obviously aborted by
Watergate, but not before Hunt intro-
duced Artime to "a friend of the White
House" named G. Gordon Liddy.
Artime, questioned by the grand
jury for four hours about the Panama
assassination project, denied having
joined Hunt or recruiting other Cu-
bans. But on November 3, 1974, for-
mer Cuban exile leader Carlos Rivero
Collado, son of a former Cuban presi-
dent, told a press conference: "Artime,
approximately two years ago, was
plotting to assassinate the chief of the
Panamanian state, General Omar Tor-
rijos. Artirne had active, direct par-
ticipation in the Watergate affair;
however, his name has never been
mentioned." (Artime was publicly
identified only as a backer of the Miami
Watergate Defendants' Fund.)
Whether or not Artime did join
Hunt, Barker had no difficulty- in re-
cruiting a large number of other Cu-
bans. Barker admits that the White
House envisioned using his secret army
in an all-out drug war: in Barker's
words, "to hit the Mafia using the
tactics of the Mafia."
Gordon Liddy must have relished
the thought of commanding his Cuban
troops. "He was a nut about guns and
silencers and combat daggers and so
on," recalls anti-Castro activist and
Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis,"and
he was always talking about `disposal'
-about killing people."
Nor was Hunt a stranger to such tac-
tics. In his book on the Bay of Pigs in-
vasion, Give Us This Day, Hunt tells of
urging his superior in the clandestine
division of the CIA to assassinate Castro
"before or coincident with the inva-
sion." All the CIA's Castro plots failed,
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of course, but Hunt's fellow Plumber
Frank Sturgis claims, "Howard was in
charge of a couple of other CIA opera-
tions that involved `disposal,' and I
can tell you, some of them worked."
Sturgis admitted, after his arrest for
the Watergate burglary, that he had
joined Hunt in an "investigation" of
the drug traffic from Mexico, Para-
guay, and Panama. Sturgis was an old
hand at clandestine activity. He claims
to have worked variously for Israeli
intelligence, Castro's air force, the
U.S. Army Security Agency, and the
CIA, devoting himself since 1959 to the
overthrow of Communism in Cuba.
In 1961, he joined Operation 40, a se-
cret political and intelligence team
charged by the CIA with forming a
new government in Cuba following
Castro's overthrow. Howard Hunt and
Manuel Artime had used this "Cuban
CIA" to purge the Bay of Pigs exile
force of most of its liberal, anti-Batista
elements. One branch of Operation 40
consisted of an elite murder squad,
made up primarily of experienced
killers from Batista's secret police. Sev-
eral years ago Sturgis told an inter-
viewer, "the assassination section,
which I was a part of ... would, upon
orders naturally, assassinate either
members of the military in the foreign
country, members of the political par-
ties of the foreign country that you
were going to infiltrate, and if neces-
sary some of your own members, who
were suspected of being foreign
agents." Sturgis says he took part in
several pre-Operation 40 attempts
against the life of Castro in 1959 and
1960, and claims to have engaged in
subsequent plots in Central America.
When Frank Sturgis was caught in-
side the Democratic National Com-
mittee headquarters in the Watergate
building, he was carrying a Mexican
visa made out in the name of Edward
J. Hamilton. That name, it soon be-
came clear, was E. Howard Hunt's
old CIA alias; indeed the whole Water-
gate team carried phony identifications
prepared by the CIA. Hunt had ob-
tained the Mexican tourist card on
January 7, 1972, valid for three
months. Rumors began to circulate in
Washington that the visa was obtained
in connection with a task force Hunt
had sent into Mexico for a "national
security" operation against Torrijos.
Sturgis has been extremely reticent
in recent years about his Watergate
operations with Hunt and Liddy, tell-
ing interviewers only, "There are some
things that I could never discuss." But
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shortly after the Watergate break-in he
talked with Andrew St. George, an old
friend of his, about the Panama plots.
Sturgis apparently believed "the fix
was in" on the Watergate job and that
the Cubans would be released to con-
tinue on some of their other sensitive
projects. "The White House has de-
cided that dead or alive, Torrijos must
case did his agents not consider a less
drastic fate for Torrijos?
Revulsion toward narcotics traffic
can hardly explain the enthusiasm of
Hunt's friends for the planned "hit,"
since most of them tolerated or even
worked with organized crime when
confronted by what they saw as the
infinitely greater evil of Castro. CIA
Hunt says, "I think the feeling was
that if Torryos didn't shape up and
cooperate he was going to be wasted."
go," St. George recalls Sturgis say-
ing. "We must use terror."
Fortunately, we now have public
confirmation of the plot from E. How-
ard Hunt himself. Shortly after Hunt
was released from prison in February
1977, he was interviewed by a Boston
television station. Asked whether he
knew "anything about a project to
eliminate Panama dictator Torrijos,"
Hunt for the first-and last-time
made a startling admission. "Pana-
ma," he said, citing CIA reports, "was
a drug trafficking area where drugs
could move easily ... with the blessing
of the Panamanian government.There
was a great deal of concern on the part
of the drug officials and certainly on
the part of some of the Latin American
drug informants. I think the feeling was
that if Torryos didn't shape up and cooper-
ate he was going to be wasted. That never
happened. I don't know any of the
people asked to participate other than
the people in the Plumbers unit. They
had that as part offtheir brief."
The Politics of Murder
Hr WAS THE WHITE
House so anxious to "waste"
the Panamanian dictator?
After all, many other U.S.
allies, particularly in South-
east Asia, also condoned narcotics
trafficking, yet as far as we know, no
one talked of bumping off French Pres-
ident Georges Pompidou just because
his intelligence service was implicated
in the "French Connection." For all
the rhetoric about a "national emer-
gency," the Nixon administration's
"war on drugs" was as much an expe-
dient political campaign as it was a
sincerely held conviction. Why in any
Director Richard Helms, for example,
told the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in executive session that
the CIA had released Bernard Barker
from service in the mid-1960s because
of his association with "gambling and
criminal elements."
An FBI memo on Frank Sturgis pre-
pared only two days after the Water-
gate arrests cited Miami sources who
said "he is now associated with organ-
ized crime activities ." Sturgis's In-
ternational Anti-Communist Brigade,
active back in the early 1960s, was de-
scribed by the attorney for one of its
other leaders as being "financed by
dispossessed hotel and gambling own-
ers who operated under Batista."
Many of these same interests, ofcourse,
had a stake in the pre-Castro Cuban
heroin and cocaine traffic. We know
also that Operation 40, of which Stur-
gis was a member, remained active as
a CIA counterintelligence operation un-
til 1970, when federal narcotics author-
ities arrested several of its leading
members on charges of having master-
minded the nation's largest heroin and
cocaine ring.
Finally, we have the example of
Manuel Artime, the "golden boy of
the CIA," who received millions of dol-
lars from the CIA to mount a second in-
vasion of Cuba from Costa Rica in
1964-only to have a Miami Herald
reporter poke around and discover
that "a government cloak of secrecy
over Cuban exile training was being
used as a cover for smuggling."
Moreover, other known targets of
the Room 16 team had always been
political enemies of the White House.
The Plumbers had originally organ-
ized under Egil Krogh to gather infor-
mation to blackmail Daniel Ellsberg.
whom the White House suspected of
M.4 R C H 5, 1979
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Ins woollt its puns for l'scalating wuicn anu-~.uxl~ n~uVnLNJuulCU III- ~~??"' ~?.-. ...~t., JJ Il
;;ie war. V% hen that mission failed, must be understood at least in part as a Murpli}'s (D Y.) plans to have his
l'resic'.~r.t Nixon the next spring or-
Cered Ellsber gsilenced by other means.
Or. May 3, shortly before the mining
Haiphong harbor, J. Edgar 1-Ioo-
s body lay in state in the Rotunda of
-'.e Capitol, and Ellsberg was expected
attend an unrelated antiwardemon-