Sorry about having to parts but computer just wouldn't take anymore. AMKW 

conti.
With the web of Cuban intrigue that had long surrounded Sturgis, perhaps it was just a matter of time before, as Bernard Barker recalled, "Mr Sturgis said...he had some information about some lady that had been at the home of the Castro family at the time of the death of...Kennedy..." With his background, perhaps it was inevitable that Frank Sturgis would be the one who triggered the secret Hunt probe into aspects of the Kennedy assassination, and the "very strange stories" he had heard about Castro's reaction to it. Whether the missing Hunt report on the probe made any mention of the informaiton about Sturgis's reported knowledge of Oswald's Cuban activities (as set forth in the 1963 FBI report) cannot of course be determined.

What can be determined, however, is that there were a couple of other FBI reports on Frank Fiorini Sturgis which would have also been quickly "put on the track" to Gray's office, and preseumbly the White House, as soon as the FBI ran their name checks on the five arrested burglars on June 17th. Again, the most likely time for hte delivery of the information from the FBI to the Nixon White House would seem to be June 19th, the same day that Hunt's safe was drilled open and the now missing Kennedy assassination reoprt in it disappeared.

No sooner had the first FBI report on Sturgis been completed, less than two weeks after the Kennedy assassination, than a second one was set in motion. Once again, the FBI investigation centered around an article in which Frank Fiorini Sturgis was quoted as saying that he had some new firsthand information regarding Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, this second article (which was written by the same reporter and Sturgis friend who wrote the first) stated that Sturgis had actually jad some contact with the alleged assassin of President Kennedy.

This second FBI report on Sturgis (Bureau File #105-82555) sets forth the details of an investigation into the allegations contained in the second article. The article staed that Oswald tried to infiltrate several Cuban groups, sometime in 1962:

Oswald also tried to infiltrate several other major organizations in Miami, including the Anti-Communist International Brigade, which is headed by Maj Frank Forini...

Fiorini said his outfit turned down Oswald's application because they	could not find out anything about his background.

The twenty three page FBI report also included an evaluation of Frank Fiorini Strugis by a Bureau informat, "MM T-1," whom FBI files indicate "has furnished reliable information in past." An excerpt from the report reads: 

Noting the reference to FRANK FIORINI in the article, MM T-1 stated he	guessed FIORINI was the source of the material set out in the
article,
and that there was no other spokesman. MM t-1 stated FIORINI represents	himself as "the inside man" with all the Cuban
organizations in Miami."

The report goes on to state that upon being interviewed by the FBI for the second time, Frank Fiorini Sturgis claimed that he had once again been completly misquoted by his friend, the reporter. Sturgis stated that he had never had any contact with Oswald: "FIORINI said the statements concerning OSWALD as attributed to him the article are false." 

The FBI's files on Sturgis didn't end there either. There was still more to come. A third FBI report, titled "LEE HARVEY OSWALD INTERNAL SECURITY - R - CUBA," was completed in early June of 1964 and forwarded to the warren Commission. This third report dealt with an investigation into allegations that Lee Oswald had been involved in some kind of fight with key memebers of the Frank Fiorini Sturgis "Anti-Communist International Brigade." The report produced no solid information to support the allegations, and Sturgis denied any knowledge of such a fight. As with the first two FBI reports on Sturgis, this third one was also prepared by the Miami Filed Office - the same FBI office which would supply the great bulk of FBI information on the Watergate burglars in those first days after the break-in. 

How soon after the break-in did these FBI reports on Sturgis and his possible knowledge about Lee Oswald reach the Washington office of Pat Gray? How fast did these reports then travel to the Nixon men in the White House? Was the information sent over on the 19th There are, at this point, no sufficient answers. No one in talking. At least not yet. 

Nor can we know for sure whether these FBI reports reached the Nixon circle before or after they decided to drill open Hunt's safe, late that afternoon of the 19th. It doesn't really matter though at this point. For as with the cloudy circumstances surrounding the missing Hunt report on the Kennedy assassination, the whole area is in an embryonic stage. Something is clearly there - but the ferreting out is only just beginning. 

However, a few reasonable inferences (one hesitates to use the word conclusions) can be drawn from this sequence of events. Indeed, E Howard Hunt's recent brief disclosure to the two Providence Journal reporters of what he and three of his future Watergate burglar associates were up to, may in fact open up a whole new area of Watergate. 

One of the more pressing questions arising from the matter would of course center on who ordered Hunt and his mysterious men to investigate these aspects of the Kennedy assassination. Of course with the abscence of the actual report and tapes that resulted from the probe, the exact details of the investigation remain unknown. Yet, with Hunt now disclosing that he sent the secret report to both Charles Colson at the White House and also someone) possible Director Richard Helms) at the CIA, it would seem likely that either one - or both - of those parties were behind the Hunt probe. 

Then CIA Director Helms did in fact have more than a passing interest in the Kennedy assassination. Helms had been the Agency's key man, as Deputy Director of plans in 1964. in dealing with the Warren Commission's investigation of the Dallas murder. Commission transcripts released late last year have revealed the extent of discontent among the actual Warren Commission memebers over the amount of "cooperation" they ewre receiving from the CIA, with even pro-CIA member Gerald Ford at one point exploding over hte Agency's apparent attempts to ridgily control the amount of CIA data available to the COmmission. Richard Helms' interest in the Kennedy assassination, however, seems to reach beyond his work as CIA liaison to the Warren Commission.

Former CIA executive Victor Marchetti has recently elaborated on some information that he originally became ware of during his service as Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA. Marchetti states that in January or February of 1969, Director Rochard Helms repeatedly voiced concern over District Attorney Jim Garrison's controversial prosecution of new Orelans businessman Clay Shaw, on charges of conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. Marchetti states that Director Helms and several aides (including CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston and Helms deputy Thomas Karamessines) discussed the Garrison investigation with great concern on several occasions during which Marchetti was present. 

While Marchetti reports that he heard no information at these meeting that would indicate any CIA connection to the assassination, he does state that Helms said that several of the people being investigated by Garrison (including Caly Shaw and the late David Ferrie) had "at one time or another worked for the CIA." According to Marchetti, in addition to making this somewhat startling disclosure about Garrison's suspects, Helms also cryptically indicated that "other meetings" were being held regarding the Garrison investigation. Though Marchetti states that he is unaware of who these other Helms meetings were with, other people high in the government were also apparantly concerned over the Kennedy assassination at various times. 

Convicted Watergate conspirator Robert Mardian, who was then serving as John Mitchell's Attorney General and heas of the Justice Department's Internal Secutiy Unit, once voiced some degree of suspicion as to whether Lee Oswald's activities had been properly investigated by the FBI, prior to the assassination. On April 27, 1971, in a Law Day Address prepared by his staff several days earlier, Mardian spoke of what the Nixon Administration regarded as a critical threat to the nation;s internal security - the lack of an adequately concentrated police and intelligence capacity for dealing with civil unrest. Mardian went on to claim, according to the New York Times, that "the assassintion of President Kennedy moight have been made possible by what the Warren Commission called the Federal Bureau of Investigation's restrictive view of its duty to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald." 

Needless to say, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover must not have been very pleased with Mardian's speech. Senate intelligence committee investigators have in fact been trying to determine whether Director Hoover may possibly have done more than just blow his stack over Assistant Attorney General Mardian's questioning of the thoroughness of the FBI's probing of Oswald. Interesting, on April 27, the same day as Mardian's speech, FBI Director Hoover - in a move that jolted and alarmed the Nixon circle - suddenly ordered the cancellation of all FBI COINTELPRO operations, the secret counterintelligence program run by the FBI's filed offices around the country, and primarily trageted against radical groups. 

By methodicaly reconstructing the chronology of events within the FBI and Justice Department on that day, Senate investigators are seeking to determine whether Hoover and his aides may have ordered the abrupt COINTELPRO cancellation in retaliation over Mardian's remarks about the Kennedy assassination.

President Nixon himself, in press conference remarks that seemed to confuse members of the Washington press corps (as weeel as a nationwide television audience) also once spoke of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. The President's remarks were viewed at the time as cryptic by some, intriguining to oterhs. Nixon made the staement on August 22, 1973, as the Watergate scandal was reaching an early highwater mark. It was to be Nixon's first televised press conference in over fourteen months, and mroe inportantly, his first since the Watergate conspiracy began to unravel with the testimony of James McCord and John Dean. 

The President was answering a reporter's question about the recent disclosure that Nixon had approved the admittedly illegal "Houton Plan" for domestic intelligence activities. At the tail end of his response to the question, Nixon somwhat clumsily brought up the subject of wiretaps during the Kennedy Administration. The President stated that, 

...I understand the heights of the wiretaps was when Robert Kennedy was	Attorney General in 1963. I don't cirticize him, however....But
if he	had had 10 more and as a result of wiretaps had been able to
discover	the Oswald plan it would have been worth it.

While the President went on to another question, various murmurs of puzzlement wafted through the assembled press corps. Reporter Peter Lisagor, fo rone, turned to a collegue and exclaimed, "What the hell is he talking about? Is he saying that Oswald was discussing his plans with someone onthe telephone?" Minutes later, another puzzles reporter asked the inevitable follow-up question reagarding the President's remark about Oswald. Nixon was asked to explain himself. In what some regarded as a departure from his usual precisely worded responses, Nixon answered, 

...I said if 10 more wiretaps could have found the conspiracy, it it was	a conspiracy, or the individual, then it would have been worth
it. As	far as I'm concerned, I'm no more of an expert on that
assassination	than anybody else, but my point is that wiretaps in
the national	security area were very high in the Kennedy
Administration for a very	good reason.

Because there were many threats on the President's life, because there	were national security problems...

...I was only suggesting that in terms of those times that to have the	Oswald thing happen just seemed so unbelievable that it - with
his	record, with his record, that it, with everything that everybody
had on	him, that that fellow could have been where he was in a
position to	shoot the President of the United States...

While there may be various bits and pieces of information suggesting an interest in (or indeed suspicions about) the Kennedy assassination by both Nixon and his men, as well as Richard Helms, there still seems to be no solid basis for determining who ordered E Howard Hunt and his men to probe various aspects of the Dallas murder. The exact motives and purpose of Hunt and his future burglar friends Barker, Sturgis, and Martinez, in this matter, remain as mysterious and unsolved as the actual purpose of their later break-in at Watergate.

Where exactly Frank Sturgis and his alleged "knowledge" of Lee Oswald's activities fits in, also cannot presently be determined. To what extent, if any, Hunt Drew upon this possible Sturgis information is unclear. However, if Hunt's White House superiors - notably Colson - were indeed behind the secret Hunt probe of the assassination, there was at least one other man working with the Plumbers who also could have lent some personal expertise to the assignment. FBI documents submitted to the Warren Commission, some of which have only recently been declassified and released, reveal that New York police detective John Caulfield - who would later go on to become Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman's secret White House investigator - was also connected to the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Unlike Frank Fiorini Sturgis, however, Caulfield was among the investigators - rather than the investigated. 

The FBI documents show that "Detective John Caulfield, Bureau of Special Services," was assigned by the NYPD to invesitgate the recent activities of the DRE, the Cuban Student Directorate, which was a militant anti-Castro Cuban exile group. Caulfield reported that several members of the DRE had been arrested in the spring of 1963 for an illegal protest in New York against Kennedy Administration actions taken against anti-Castro exile groups. The Warren Commission's interest in the DRE was primarily a result of the fact that evidence had established that Lee Oswald had tried to join or "infiltrate" the DRE in New Orleans, later during the summer of 1963. Oswald had in fact subsequently been arrested during a fistight involving the leader of the DRE in Louisiana.

Interestingly, the Warren Commission's FBI documents indicate that Detective Caulfield was investigating the DRE's activities at the same time ("during Decemebr, 1963") that the FBI was investigating Frank Fiorini Sturgis and his alleged knowledge of Oswald's Cuban activities. The previously mentioned FBI reports on Sturgis had in fact contained numerous references to the DRE and the relationship that Sturgis had with its member in Miami. 

John Caulfield's future role in Watergate, while amply documented, is still a source of mystery to most Watergate investigators. Caulfield, and his partner TOny Ulasewicz, conducted various secret White House investigations, acting under the direct oreders of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, and Dean. Caulfield and Ulasewicz thus functioned as a kind of parallel operation to the Plumbers. Caulfield had, for instance, emerged as the key courier of President Nixon's hush money to the actual Watergate burglars. White House investigator Caulfield had on occasion also delivered something besides money. James McCord reports that shortly before he decided to break open the Watergate cover-up by sending his famous letter to Judge Sirica, Caulfield delivered what McCord took to be a threat on his life from the White House. McCord states that he told Caulfield in response that, "I had had a good life, that my will was made out, and that I had thought through the risks and would take them when I was ready." 

As with just about everything else relating to the secret probe of aspects of the Kennedy assassination, undertaken by Hunt, Sturgis, Barker, and Martinez, the possibility of Caulfield also being involved is something that cannot presently be determined.

Nor of course is there a solid basis yet for determining what role the secret Hunt probe of the Kennedy assassination may have had in the mysterious June 23rd conversations of Richrad Nixon and H R Haldeman. In reviewing the June 23rd transcripts, however, one does see some awfully intriguing possibilites - in passages that could mesh somewhat neatly with the secret Hunt probe:

(Nixon) "...this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that	scab there's a hell of a lot of things...This involves these
Cubans,	Hunt and a lot of thing..."

(Nixon) "...just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt,	ah he know too damed much...If it gets out that this is all
involved,	the Cuba thing it would be a fiasco. It would make the
CIA look bad,	its going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to
blow the whole Bay	of Pigs thing which we think would be very
unfortunate - both for the	CIA and for the country..."

A closer look at the chronology of events immediately following the opening of E Howard Hunt's safe, provdies even more interesting possibilites. As was shown, the Nixon circle had the safe drilled open late on the afternoon (or early evening) of June 19th, after most White House employees had left for the day. While the exact movements of the secret Hunt report (and tapes) about hte Kennedy assassination cannot be determined (following their removal from the safe) it does seem reasonable to assume that they would have been an important subject for discussion (and possibly destruction) in the Oval Office on the following day, June 20th. 

June 20th, 1972, also happens to be the day that some of the stranger things began to happen with the Nixon circle. At about 11:30 that morning, President Nixon met with HR Haldeman for a long discussion of the events of the preceding several days. It was to be their first meeting since Nixon's return from his weekend in the Bahamas, and would have also been their first meeting following the removal of Hunt's report on the Kennedy assassination from his safe, the night before. It would be almost a year and a half later before Richard Nixon would have to turn over to the authorities the tape of this meeting with Haldeman. And then would come the bombshell revelatio that 18 minutes of it had been erased. Woodawrd and Berstein now report that serveeral of those closest to Nixon (including speechwriter Patrick Buchanan) were convinced that Nixon himself had erased the tape. 

Sometime that same morning of June 20th, according to his aide Gordon Strachan, Hr Haldeman ordered that various confidential files from his own office be destroyed. Strachan testified that he then shredded several "politically sensitive" documents from the Haldeman files. Later, during the early evening of the same day, President Nixon places a phone call to JOhn Mitchell to discuss the Watergate crisis. Over a year later, Nixon would inform the Special Prosecutors that the tape recording of this call to Mitchell was missing. The President subsequently claimed tha it had never been recorded in the first place - that it had been made on one of the "family quarters" phones outside the Lincoln bedroom that wasn't bugged. 

Sometime later that same evening of June 20th, Mitchell's two top deputies, Robert Mardian and Fred LeRue, secretly met with G Gordon Liddy, who, like Hunt, was still in hiding to avoid [cut of half sentence on page]...burglary team.

According to LaRue, Liddy told he and Mardian that he would "keep his mouth shot," and further, that "if we would instruct him to be on any street corner at any time, he would be there and we could have him assassinated." 

Later that same night, shortly before midnight, Nixon made a dictabelt recording for his "personal diary" before going to bed. And it is this Nixon dictabelt (that closed out the long day of June 20th) that ranks with that morning's subsequent 18 minute gap on the tape recording of the Nixon/Haldeman meeting and that evening's "unrecorded" Nixon call to Mitchell, as probable victims of what Fred Buzhardt would later call "some sinsiter force." For when Nixon was finally forced to turn over the late night dictabelt to the COngree and the courts, another "gap" was discovered; this time the erasure covered about 42 seconds. 

Fortunately for the nation, the still mysterious June 23rd Nixon/Haldeman tape of three days later was never erased. It took the combined threats of Nixon lawyers James St Clair, Fred Buzhardt, and Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, to quit their posts, whoever, before Nixon would agree to release the "smoking gun" of the June 23rd tape.

Whether E Howard Hunt's missing report on the Kennedy assassination can yet be found - or whether the circumstances surrounding his and his strange burglar associates probe of the Dallas murder can be cleared up - can only be hoped for at this time. Until the whole ara becomes the subject of renewed questioning and investigation, one is left with the inevitable suspicion - an awful suspicion - that the "smoking gun" of Watergate may indeed date back in some direct or indirect way to another smoking gun: the gun that fired the bullet that tore off the upper third of President Kennedy's head, on November 22, 1963. - Mike Ewing