information. What exactly were the "very strange" stories being told bu this Cuabn woman? What was Hunt's interest in Fidel Castor's reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy? (Again, as will be seen Barker mistakenly identified the Robert Kennedy assassination as the subject of the Hunt probe, rather than the John Kennedy murder). And why did Hunt think the Central Intelligence Agency would want the results of the probe? 

The exact motives and purposes behind Hunt's decision to have his men investigate this Cuban woman's story about the Kennedy assassination can only be specualted upon. It has been reported that both E Hoard Hunt and Frank Sturgis have, at various times, privately voiced suspicion over whether the Castro government could have been involved in the Kennedy assassinatio. The large anti-Castro Cuabn exile community in Miami has long been filled with such suspicions about its hated enemy, Fidel Castro. Indeed, Hunt seemed to eb pointing in Castro's direction when, in his memoir of the Bay of Pigs, he scoffed at those who blamed the rightwing climate of Dallas for the President's murder. In the memoir, GIVE US THIS DAY, Hunt wrote that,

...it became fashionable to hold the city of Dallas collectively responsible for his murder. Still, and let this not be forgotten, Lee Harvey Oswald was a partisan of Fidel Castro, and an admitted Marxist who made desparate efforts to join the Red Revolution in Havana. In the end he was an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. 

But for Castro and the Bay of Pigs disaster there would have been no such "committee." And perhaps no assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Fidel Castro of course would disagree wiht Hunt's assessment. For over ten years it has been reported that Castro personally believes that rightwing elements in the United States were behind the JFK murder, most recently stating that, "I am under the impression that Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy organized in the United States by reactionaries with possile connections to the CIA."

Whether Hunt and his men were motivated by a desire to establish some kind of Castro conncetion to the assassintion, or whether they were more interested in possibly determining why Castro thought rightwing forces (with "possible connections" to the CIA) were behind it, can only be guessed at. Perhaps a more likely explanation behind Hunt's decision to probe (and tape record) the Cuban woman's information about Castro and the Kennedy assassination, is that he was ordered to so by superiors. 

After Bernard Barker first gave his brief sketchy account of the secret probe in April of 1974, at least one interested Senate investigator speculated about the possiblity of whether Hunt's tapes and report from the probe had been amont the material taken from Hunt's safe and later mysteriously destroyed by Acting FBI Director L Patrick Gray, following the Watergate break-in. Hunt's secret White House safe would of course have been the logival depository for such material. This theory however, could only be classified as sheer speculation - until about five months ago. 

In later November of 1975, two reporters for the Providence Journal, Jack WHite and Randall Richard, conducted a lengthy interview with E Howard Hunt, who was once again on his way back to federal prison. After asking Hunt whether it was truw that he had conspired to murder columist Jack Anderson (Hunt answered that Charles Colsonhad merely suggested that Anderson be drugged) the two reporters asked whether the Watergate conspirator had any information about the Kennedy assassination. While denying recent allegations by various conspiracy theorists that he was somehow involved in the Dallas assassination, Hunt suddenly brought up another point. 

Hunt proceeded to tell the two reporters about the probe which Bernard Barker had originally spoken of a year and a half earlier. Only this time, Hunt provided quite a bit more detail, in addition to identifying the John Kennedy assassination as the real subject of the probe, rather that the Robert Kennedy assassination.

Hunt disclosed that another one of the future Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez, was also involved in the secret probe, in addition to Frank Sturgis and Bernard Barker. This was all the more interesting due to the fact that Martinez was then still actively employed by the CIA on a retainer basis, and was reporting on his activities to his CIA superiors every two weeks. Hunt said that his taped interrogation of the Cuban woman, regarding her knowledge of Castro's reaction to the Kennedy assassination, had been conducted in a room at the Ambassador Hotel in Miami, sometime between July 1971 and June 1972. Martinez had helped translate the woman's conversation during the interrogation by Hunt.

According to reporters White and Richard, Hunt informed them that this Cuban woman "claimed to have been in the Castro household wiht one of Fidel's sister" at the time of the assassination in Dallas. Hunt staed that the woman claimed that either Castro or his brother Raul had informed the Castro familiy of hte Knnedy murder and the "the reaction was one of morosenness because he was dead. Because Castro had counted upon John Kennedy to reestablish diplomatic relations, and there had been some sort of understanding."

That Kennedy may have been reaching "some sort of understanding" with Castro was only recently documented by the Church Committee's report on foriegn assassinations. The Senate committee reported that Kennedy and Castro were indeed engaged in some quiet out-of-channel negotiations a short time before the President's death. The Church report noted that an informal "emissary" from President Kennedy was meeting with Castro on the very day that Kennedy was assassinated. The "emissary," French journalist Jean Daniel, was in fact with Castro at the exact moment that Castro heard the news of the Kennedy shooting in Dallas.

Daniel has stated that Castro's immediate reaction to the shooting seemed to be a mixture of sadness and suspicion, with the Cuban leader repeatedly saying, "This is bad news." According to Daniel, Castro expressed foreboding over the potential change in policy that would accompany Kennedy's death, a change that Castro felt would be more conservative and "anti-Cuba" in nature. According to Daniel, Castro also seemed wary of the man who would be suceeding Kennedy as President, asking of Lyndon Johnson, "what authority does he exercise over the CIA?"

Daniel also report that upon being notified of the Dallas shooting, Castro was immediately apprehensive over whether Cuba would be blamed for it. Daniel reports that Castro went on to claim, 

Now, they will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly, otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing...You know, when we were hiding out in the Sierra there were some (not in my group, in another) who wanted to kill Batista. They thought they could do awawy with a regime by decapitating it. I have always been violently opposed to such methods. 

Whether Fidel Castro's reaction to and comments on the Kennedy assassination, as set forth by Jean Daniel, correspond to any degree with the account of the mysterious Cuban woman tape recorded by E Hoaward Hunt and his tfuture Watergate burglar associates, cannot of course be determined. In the abscence of Hunt's actual report and tapes, there is no way of knowing what the exact focuses of the Hunt probe were. 

In his interview with the two Providence Journal reporters, while not supplying any further details about the actual report he prepared on this limited probe of the Kennedy assassination, Hunt did disclose further information about what he did with it. Hunt told the two reporters that he sent a copy of the report to the CIA (as Barker had originally stated) and further, that he had also given the report to his own White House friend and patron, Charles W Colson. Whether Colson in turn referred the mysteroius findings of Hunt's report to President Nixon himself (who shared Hunt's longtime interest in Kennedy's handling of Castro and Cuba) can only be conjectured. Interestingly, as will be seen later, President Nixon on at least one occasion (and John Mitchell's Assistant Attorney General, Robert Mardin, on another0 seemed to raise some question as to whether Lee Oswald might have either been receiving some guidance from some source or possibly confiding his plans to someone.

Hunt also did not indicate who exactly he sent his report to in the CIA. Director Richard Helms, however, would appear to be a likely recipient. Not only were Helms and Hunt a good deal closer than Helms has wanted to admit (with Helms reportedly even once arranging a substantial personal loan to Hunt) a ley document received by the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment staff carries the relationship further.

The heavily censored affifavit of a key "CIA employee" states that on "frequent" occadions, HUnt "passed 'gossip' items to Mr Helms" thorugh various CIA channels - in "sealed envelopes." According to informed sources, the key "CIA employee" who desclosed this previously unknown Hunt-Helms contact is Richard Ober, who then served as the top deputy to CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton. 

In his interview with the two Providence Journal reporters, Hunt went on to disclose what happened to the copy of the report which he had kept for himself. And it is ther ethat the wtory widens even further. Hunt stated that his copy of the report was indeed contained in his secret White House safe at the time of the Watergate break-in. This, Hunt concluded, the report must have been among the secret papers taken from his safe on June 19th and given by Ehrlichman and Dean to Patrick Gray - who only recently received immunity from the Watergate Special Prosecutors for burning them in later Decemeber of 1972.

Though the brief and generally unnoticed Providence Journal account of Hunt's remarks only touched upon the significance of what was in Hunt's safe, the implications of the matter are serious. 

ANd, as one might expect, the story becomes even murkier. Colson, Gray, Dean, Ehrlichmand, and Hunt to this day are still at each other's throats as to what happened with various materials taken from Hunt's safe on June 19th. What remains obvious is that someone is clearly lying. 

John Dean testified that he learned that "Hunt and Colson spoke on the telephone over the weekend of June 17-18, and that Hunt had told Colson to get the materials out his - Hunt's - office safe." Colson fired back that "contrary to Mr Dean's testimony I had no communication from Hunt that weekend; no one suggested that I remove anything from the safe. I never saw the safe nor was I aware of the contents of the safe." 

Hunt who was long alluded to toehr undisclosed materials takedn from his safe, seemed to back up Dean's account. Hunt says he warned Colson about hte safe on June 19th, the very day it was drilled open: "Before I left the White House for the last time, I stopped by Mr Colson's office, not to see him but simply to inform Mrs Hall, whom I knew held the combination to my safe, that it contained sensitive material. I simply said to her, 'I just want you to know that that safe is loaded.'" As can be seen, Hunt further implicates Colson as haning had the comnbination to the safe all along, thereby suggesting that Colson withheld knowledge of the combination during the discussions about drilling it open.

Though Colson and Dean disagree on whether Hunt warned Colson about the safe's contents, they do agree that they jointly decided that Dean should take custody of the material. Dean states that at a 4:00 om meeting in Ehrlichman's office on June 19th, "Colson raised the matter of Hunt's safe. Colson, without getting specific, said it was imperative that someone get the contents of Hunt's safe. Colson suggested, and Ehrlichman concurred, that I take custody of the contents of the safe." Ehrlichmand, as might be expected, seeks to place a little distance between himself and the safe's contents: "I did not know the contents of Mr Hunt's safe...I had no occasion to look at them, I never saw them..."

As scrambled as the testimony is at this point, a couple of things are clear. The Hunt report relating to the Kennedy assassination is missing. No copy of it has ever surfaced, not have the tapes that Hunt, Barker, Martinez, and Sturgis made during the probe ever been found. 

Director Pat Gray by Ehrlichmand Dean on June 28, Gray prepared what he later clained was a "detailed inventory" of all the material. There is no such report or tapes lised in it. Gray, Ehrlichman, Colson, and Dean have given various descriptions of what they claim was found in Hunt's safe; none of them have ever spoken of any such report regarding the Kennedy assassination. 

The possibility that this secret Hunt report was either hidden or destroyed following the opening of his safe on June 19th is obviously strong. Not only did Gray burn (in late December) "politically sensitive" Hunt documents that he received from Ehrlichman and Dean, Ehrlichman and Dean themselves had discussed much the same "gameplan" shortly after Hunt's safe was drilled open. The members of the Ervin Committee and a nationwide television audience had listened intently in June of 1973 when John Dean gave his dramatic account of the orders he received from John Ehrlichman. According to Dean, Ehrlichman had a plan for handling the secret papers and briefcase taken from the Hunt safe:

He told me to shred the documents and "deep six" the briefcase. I asked	him what he meant by "deep six." He leaned back in his chair
and said:	"You drive across the river on your way at night don't
you?" I said,	yes. He said, "Well, when you cross over the bridge
on your way home,	just toss the briefcase into the river."

Ehrlichamn of course denied ever having given Dean such orders, jauntily replying that "deep six" was not "a familiar part of my lexicon." 

When the GSA drilling was finished and the heavy steel door of Hunt's White House safe swung slowy open, late that afternoon of June 19th, perhaps Ehrlichman, Colson, and Dean's reaction to what was in it was predictable. With the city of Washingotn already then consumed by various rumors regarding the mysterious actions of the Cuban burglars and their White House friend, E Howard Hunt, it is not too difficult to imagine the degree of apprehension that was already gripping the Nixon circle at that time. 

The last thing in the world the Nixon men needed at that point was a secret report about the Kennedy assassination coming out of Hunt's safe - written and produced by Hunt and his burglar friends Barker, Martinez, and Sturgis. 

The apprehension and panic the Nixon men felt at that point, may have been made immeasureably greater by another development that in all probablility occurred sometime earlier that some day - June 19th - or possibly the day before. ANd here again, the story widens further. As if the secret Hunt report about the Knnedy assassination coming out of a White House safe and falling into their laps was not enough, the Nixon men were soon also faced with some additional startling information - this time from the FBI - regarding burglar Frank Sturgis and his possible knowledge of Lee Harvey Osald's activities. As will be seen, this information about Sturgis was not something to be taken lightly.

The history behind the FBI's information about burglar Frank Sturgis is an interesting one - as is the story of how a good deal of the FBI's watergate files ended up in the hands of the Nixon men at the White House. The various Watergate investigations long ago revealed the rather unique "process" by which Ehrlichman, Haldman, and Dean (and of course Nixon himself) obtained copies of FBI investigative files pertaining to the early Watergate probe. Nixon's "loyal old friend" Pat Gray, the Acting FBI Director, was coming through with just about eveything. In one noteworthy instance, John Dean somehow acquired a copy a sabatour Donald Segretti's 302 (interview report) from the FBI, less that twenty four hours after it was transcribed. "I still wonder if the ink was dry on that one," a Senate investigator later remarked.

In any event, on June 19th, the Nixon circle's friends in the FBI were preparing to turn over to the Nixon White house a good deal of secret FBI material on the initial watergate investigation and background of the five arrested burglars. The sworn testimony of those involved is every bit as scrambled and contradictory as the testimony regarding the Nixon circle's decision to drill open Hunt's safe later that same day. 

Patrick Grave himself has stated that a compilation of early FBI investigative information was indeed prepared for delivery to the White House, early on the 19th. Gray staes tht the information was to be contained in a confidential memorandum to be sent to HR Haldeman himself. Gray further staes however, that he decided later that same day not to send the information over after all. Gray's actions and testimony regarding this and other points remains unclear and unresolved, partly as a result of his never having stood trial. A copy of the draft of that FBI LHM (letterhead memorandum) of June 19th, which was to have been a confidential Gray-to-Haldeman communication, includes a brief summary of some information regarding Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini Sturgis: 

Frank Anthony Fiorini, also know as Fred Frank Fiorini, Attila F Sturgis, Anthony Sturgis and Edward Joseph Hamilton, was arrested on July 30, 1958, for illegal possession of arms in Florida. Prosecution was declined in the matter. Sources in the Miami area report he is a "soldier of fortune" and allegedly was a gun runner to Cuba prior to the Castro regime. Sources in Miami say he now associated with organized crime activities, the details of which are not available. 

The involvement of Frank Fiorini Sturgis in "organized crime" in Maimi (which is of course to say the Mafia) provides an interesting and little know sidelight to the collective mysteries knwo as Watergate. The fact that not just one, but two of the five actual Watergate burglars were apparently associated with the Mafia, has escaped the attention of even many of the most astute Watergate affifianados. In executive session testimony before the senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 1973 (testimony that would remain sealed for over thirteen months) CIA Director Richard Helms disclosed that burgular Bernard Barker (a former CIA employee) had also apparently been involved with orgranized crime -"gambling and criminal elements" - in Miami. Apparantly this was at least one CIA-Mafia connection which the Agency chose not to continue. According to Helms' testimony, the CIA "fired", Barker, due to this organized crime involvement, "sometime in the middle '60s."

Though in his intended confidential memo to Haldeman, Pat Gray was saying the "details" about the "organized crime activities" of Frank Fiorini Sturgis were "not available" to the FBI as of June 19th, an interesting file of other Sturgis information definitely was. And this information had been originally compiled in the same Miami FBI Filed Office that was now supplying most of the FBI's data on the other burglars as well. 

"LEE HARVEY OSWALD INTERNAL SECURITY - R," Field Office File # 105-8342: a lengthy FBI report that Warren Commission didn't include in their 26 volumes of published hearings and exhibits. The subject of the report? An article published by the Pompano Beach, Florida "Sun Sentinel" three day after the assassination of President Kennedy. An excerpt from the FBI report reads:

The article stated that FRANK FIORINI, Head of an Anti-Communist Brigade, said the LEE H OSWALD had telephone conversations with the Cuban Government G-2 during November, 1962. 

The FBI report sets forth the details of a Bureau investigation into Frank Fiorini Sturgis's alleged knowledge of Lee Oswald's activities. The Sun Sentinel article was apparently viewed by the FBI with a good deal of seriousness, not only because of the nature of the allegation, but also die to the fact the the reporter who wrote it was a personal friend of Frank Sturgis. The reporter, Jim Buchanan, was in fact a memeber of the Frank Fiorini Sturgis "Anti-Communist International Brigade." The FBI report, which included an interview with Sturgis, went on to not that "FIORINI claimed BUCHANAN misquoted him..."

This was one FBI report that would have immediately been "put on the track" as soon as the standard FBI name check was conducted for Frank Fiorini Sturgis, following his arrest inside Watergate. The FBI entered the case less than seven hours after the arrest of the burglary team. 

Frank Sturgis - the one invariably referred to as "that big guy," whenever someone was describing the five Watergate burglars. Sturgis was of course also a "big guy: in the Miami jungle of anti-Castro Cuban exhile "zealots." Not only was Sturgis "associated with organized crime activities," (as was noted in the information that Gray claims he finally deceided not to send to Haldeman on June 19th) Sturgis had also long been a leading figure in various CIA and DIA covert Cuban operations. 

conti.