Tuesday, July 5, 2022

WATERGATE @ 50 Years After

  WATERGATE @ 50 YEARS AFTER

On June 18, 1972 I was sitting in the University of Dayton, Ohio cafeteria in the JFK Student Union, having coffee with my friend John Judge and reading the Dayton Daily News paper. As most of the students had left for the summer, it was pretty much deserted, and I had stayed behind to take a required class on linguistics.

While reading the paper, buried on an inner page, was a one column eight inch wire service report from Washington about the Watergate burglary, that I read to Judge after saying, “Get a load of this.” He grabbed the paper to read it for himself, and said, “These are the same motherfuckers who killed JFK!”

We then went over to the law school library and in a Whose Who in Government, found profiles of E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord.

Now, 50 years later we are still feeling the reverberations from that incident, a covert intelligence black bag operation that would have remained a clandestine secret had not the suit and tie burglars been caught red handed.

Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda remains one of the best books on the subject.

Amazon.com: Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA: 9781504075282: Hougan, Jim: Books

And we now have a new book, Jeff Morley’s Scorpion’s Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate    ( St. Martin’s Press, 2022)

https://www.amazon.com/Scorpions-Dance-President-Spymaster-Watergate-ebook/dp/B09CNF7DZL?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=b4f2f3d0-fa2d-441f-bb7d-aca512dfab7c

While I have ordered Morley’s book I haven’t read it yet, but was impressed with his interviews with Carl Jenkins, one of the Bay of Pigs and JMWAVE trainers and case officers who acknowledges their attempts to kill Castro.

Morley and Jenkins: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2022/06/jeff-morley-with-carl-jenkins.html

 

S. T. Patrick also devoted an entire issue of Garrison Magazine to Watergate, 

https://www.lulu.com/shop/midnight-writer-news-publications/garrison-the-journal-of-history-deep-politics-issue-010-ebook/ebook/product-vd4pdv.html?page=1&pageSize=4


While he has previously asked me to contribute to his publication, this time he didn’t. If he had, I would have write about one of the Cuban Watergate burglars – Eugenio Martinez, but not for his role in the burglary, but his role as a Maritime boat captain in the CIA’s JMWAVE fleet out of Florida.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/us/politics/eugenio-martinez-dead.html

In an interview with Taylor Branch Martinez relates how he deposited CIA trained anti-Castro Cuban commandos on infiltration missions to Cuba, left arms and weapons and picked up commandos after their missions were over.  “I dropped off assassins with high powered rifles and scopes,” Martinez said, “that weren’t going to be used hunting rabbits.”

On November 1, 1963 the New York Times reported on a mission by the CIA mother ship Rex, that deposited a team of assassins with high powered rifles and scopes, that were captured and paraded on Cuban TV.

In his book Red Friday, Carlos Bringuier lists the names of these men, that I would like to get if you have the book.

In his Congressional testimony and to Jack Anderson, Mafia boss John Roselli, the last of the Mafia players to remain in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, related how a team of Cuban Commandos he helped train at Point Mary off Key Largo, were inserted into Cuba and captured. Roselli claimed that he believed Castro turned them and sent them back to kill JFK in Dallas.

While I don’t believe that Castro turned them and sent them back, I do believe that one of the teams that the CIA trained to kill Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode by in an open jeep (The Pathfinder Plan), that was “disapproved by higher authority,” was turned around on the higher authority in Dallas.

Those CIA agents who trained the Cuban commandos out of JMWAVE were Rip Robertson, Carl Jenkins, John I.F. Harper, and two US Army Rangers Captains Ed Roderick and Bradley Ayers, who were cross posted to the CIA by General Brute Krulak, who was responsible for military support of CIA covert operations.

Ayers wrote about his experiences in two books, The Zenith Secret and The War that Never Was, the latter of which was published by an Indiana book company whose attorney was William Harvey, the retired CIA officer who ran the Cuban Task Force W, until he was fired by RFK for sending unauthorized commando teams into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those JMWAVE commandos were major players, not only at the Bay of Pigs, Mongoose, JMWAVE and Watergate, but in the Dealey Plaza operation that we are still trying to piece together today. 

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