Researcher Dory Wiley Says Watergate Crew Involved in JFKA

[Benjamin Cole]

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2193664/m1/

That is the University of Texas Digital Library

• Main Title: The JFK Assassination Trial You Never Heard About: E. Howard Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby

 

As noted by many, E. Howard Hunt was likely in Dallas on 11/22, and was definitely at the Watergate, and was a CIA'er all through. 

At the 1:08 mark, 

"Hunt had extensive contacts in organized crime.
01:08:26Oh, remember when we said we were looking for connections to the mob and the assassination?
01:08:31That's going to be interesting.
01:08:33The Cubans involved in Watergate had killed 22 men.
01:08:36He (Hunt) testified to that.
01:08:40By the way, the Cubans involved in Watergate are all involved in the CIA assassination.
01:08:44We'll get to that."

Well, who knows. 

I may report more on this presentation. 

On first take, Wiley gives too many people credibility, although Rob Reiner does the same thing. Tosh Plumlee's name comes up, same as Reiner. 

It may be the intel-state state has deposed four presidents in the postwar era, by means violent or otherwise. 

Edited August 28 by Benjamin Cole

[Robert Reeves]

I think the Watergate 'plumbers' were so obviously used to implicate Nixon in the assassination of JFK. To prevent him ever speaking out

That Nixon was set up by E. Howard Hunt.

I think there could be some interesting names sealed in the 30 granted immunity from prosecution, in particular, those participating in Ellsberg's psychiatrist office break in. 

[Benjamin Cole]

41 minutes ago, Robert Reeves said:

I think the Watergate 'plumbers' were so obviously used to implicate Nixon in the assassination of JFK. To prevent him ever speaking out

That Nixon was set up by E. Howard Hunt.

I think there could be some interesting names sealed in the 30 granted immunity from prosecution, in particular, those participating in Ellsberg's psychiatrist office break in. 

RR-

My take or guess, is--

1. Nixon wanted the BoP files, aka the JFK Records. This is heavily documented. That is the third rail, from the CIA's, or intel-state viewpoint. 

2. Elements within the intel establishment were unhappy with Nixon's and Kissinger's detente overtures to Moscow and Beijing. To the point of spying on the pair. This is also documented. 

3. The intel state was easily able to leverage partisan bias and sentiments to weaponize a Congressional inquiry, following the curiously botched Watergate break-in, with every lead...well, leading back to the White House. Yet the entire Watergate crew was CIA, with the possible exception of Gordon Liddy. 

I always have to state, for those rabid rigid partisans among the EF-JFKA, that none of this makes Nixon an admirable guy.

Nixon and Kissinger both concluded the VW was un-winnable nearly from Day One, but extended the gory catastrophe until after the 1972 election. Nixon left behind 200 million cluster-bombs in Laos alone, just one of 100 horrible acts. His administration was garden-variety corrupt in any number of events, such as the milk-price scandal.  And who could forget Spiro Agnew? 

I am only saying that the intel-state will depose presidents that it does not like.

Partisan politics is for chumps. 

 

[Pat Speer]

10 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

RR-

My take or guess, is--

1. Nixon wanted the BoP files, aka the JFK Records. This is heavily documented. That is the third rail, from the CIA's, or intel-state viewpoint. 

2. Elements within the intel establishment were unhappy with Nixon's and Kissinger's detente overtures to Moscow and Beijing. To the point of spying on the pair. This is also documented. 

3. The intel state was easily able to leverage partisan bias and sentiments to weaponize a Congressional inquiry, following the curiously botched Watergate break-in, with every lead...well, leading back to the White House. Yet the entire Watergate crew was CIA, with the possible exception of Gordon Liddy. 

I always have to state, for those rabid rigid partisans among the EF-JFKA, that none of this makes Nixon an admirable guy.

Nixon and Kissinger both concluded the VW was un-winnable nearly from Day One, but extended the gory catastrophe until after the 1972 election. Nixon left behind 200 million cluster-bombs in Laos alone, just one of 100 horrible acts. His administration was garden-variety corrupt in any number of events, such as the milk-price scandal.  And who could forget Spiro Agnew? 

I am only saying that the intel-state will depose presidents that it does not like.

Partisan politics is for chumps. 

 

Oh my. The "official story" of Watergate is incredibly damaging to the reputation of the U.S. and the elevation of a secret plot to get Nixon only makes us look a lot more competent than we are. 

1. Nixon's people got drunk on their ability to do sneaky stuff off the books.

2. They got caught breaking into the Watergate.

3. The Nixon Administration pressured the justice department into covering it up.

4. But McCord was unwilling to rot while Nixon's people escaped punishment. He was also upset that 1) they were trying to pin the break in on the CIA when he knew for a fact it had nothing to do with it, and 2) the justice department was clearly in the bag for Nixon and uninterested in fully investigating the case. So he blew the whistle.

5. And he wasn't the only one upset by the cover-up. Mark Felt was in line to run the FBI but was pushed aside so Nixon could have someone personally beholden to him in charge. So he fed stuff to Woodward to keep the story alive. 

6. If you wanna call disgruntled people leaking info that they know may lead to the end of a presidency a "coup," well then have at it. But the argument can be made that they were doing their patriotic duty and the country was better off as a result.  

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Pat Speer said:

Oh my. The "official story" of Watergate is incredibly damaging to the reputation of the U.S. and the elevation of a secret plot to get Nixon only makes us look a lot more competent than we are. 

1. Nixon's people got drunk on their ability to do sneaky stuff off the books.

2. They got caught breaking into the Watergate.

3. The Nixon Administration pressured the justice department into covering it up.

4. But McCord was unwilling to rot while Nixon's people escaped punishment. He was also upset that 1) they were trying to pin the break in on the CIA when he knew for a fact it had nothing to do with it, and 2) the justice department was clearly in the bag for Nixon and uninterested in fully investigating the case. So he blew the whistle.

5. And he wasn't the only one upset by the cover-up. Mark Felt was in line to run the FBI but was pushed aside so Nixon could have someone personally beholden to him in charge. So he fed stuff to Woodward to keep the story alive. 

6. If you wanna call disgruntled people leaking info that they know may lead to the end of a presidency a "coup," well then have at it. But the argument can be made that they were doing their patriotic duty and the country was better off as a result.  

PS--

Thanks for commenting. Certainly, there are varying opinions on Watergate, as there are on the JFKA/RFK1A. 

We disagree.

I would not call Hunt or McCord "Nixon's people." 

Hunt was sending sealed pouches by courier to the CIA, while working inside the Nixon WH. 

McCord, popularly depicted as a technician and building-security guy, actually had a very elevated career inside the CIA. 

James Hougan's book "Secret Agenda" is worth reading, even if you disagree.  

For fun, you could watch this, just posted by Mark Groubert. 

I do not agree with every last word of Groubert. or any other commentator. Groubert is fun to listen to, if you have a chore like sweeping a large porch, driving a car, etc., and need some background conversation. 

 

 

Edited August 28 by Benjamin Cole

[Joe Bauer]

49 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

 

 

Gene Hackman in "Enemy Of The State." McCord look-a-like.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

18 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

Gene Hackman in "Enemy Of The State." McCord look-a-like.

 

JB-

Thanks for commenting. Gene Hackman was one of my fave actors, I do not know really why. But then I am a guy who likes Edward G. Robinson. 

[Dave Chrisman]

4 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

PS--

Thanks for commenting. Certainly, there are varying opinions on Watergate, as there are on the JFKA/RFK1A. 

We disagree.

I would not call Hunt or McCord "Nixon's people." 

Hunt was sending sealed pouches by courier to the CIA, while working inside the Nixon WH. 

McCord, popularly depicted as a technician and building-security guy, actually had a very elevated career inside the CIA. 

James Hougan's book "Secret Agenda" is worth reading, even if you disagree.  

For fun, you could watch this, just posted by Mark Groubert. 

I do not agree with every last word of Groubert. or any other commentator. Groubert is fun to listen to, if you have a chore like sweeping a large porch, driving a car, etc., and need some background conversation. 

 

 

Please refrain from the USUAL POLITICAL BASHING in regards to the following links. If you listen/watch throughout, you will learn all claims are backed by government documents and the multiple prosecuting lawyer's handwritten notes that have been "unearthed" in the past 5 or 6 years. 

https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-geoff-shepard

https://watergatesecret.com/ 

If you can part with $9, the professional production of Watergate Secrets is very good.

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Dave Chrisman said:

Please refrain from the USUAL POLITICAL BASHING in regards to the following links. If you listen/watch throughout, you will learn all claims are backed by government documents and the multiple prosecuting lawyer's handwritten notes that have been "unearthed" in the past 5 or 6 years. 

https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-geoff-shepard

https://watergatesecret.com/ 

If you can part with $9, the professional production of Watergate Secrets is very good.

DC-

No political bashing from me!

I welcome all points of views, from Trumpers to Harris'ers, from Marxists to libertarians, LN'ers to CT'ers.

A forum is for exchanging views, not denigrating people with different views. 

I have watched Geoff Shepard on Mark Groubet's shows a few times, but I tend to get lost in the weeds of his presentations. Maybe because I watch late at night, or when doing work with my hands. 

My take, and I should do more research and give Shepard a more-fair hearing (Shepard has a formidable website), is that Shepard recognizes the weaponization of the Congressional hearing process in the Watergate episode.

I am not sure Shepard contends that the national security-state was triggering partisan biases and efforts, in coordination with media, especially, of course, the WaPo. (Home to the dubious and possible intel-plant Bob Woodward). I do make this contention. 

All that said, I welcome Shepard's contributions to Watergate literature, and IMHO he deserves a respected seat at the table of Watergate storytellers.  

I should devote some time to figuring Shepard a little more. 

I trust the establishment version of Watergate about as much as I do the WC. 

 

[Dave Chrisman]

32 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

DC-

No political bashing from me!

I welcome all points of views, from Trumpers to Harris'ers, from Marxists to libertarians, LN'ers to CT'ers.

A forum is for exchanging views, not denigrating people with different views. 

I have watched Geoff Shepard on Mark Groubet's shows a few times, but I tend to get lost in the weeds of his presentations. Maybe because I watch late at night, or when doing work with my hands. 

My take, and I should do more research and give Shepard a more-fair hearing (Shepard has a formidable website), is that Shepard recognizes the weaponization of the Congressional hearing process in the Watergate episode.

I am not sure Shepard contends that the national security-state was triggering partisan biases and efforts, in coordination with media, especially, of course, the WaPo. (Home to the dubious and possible intel-plant Bob Woodward). I do make this contention. 

All that said, I welcome Shepard's contributions to Watergate literature, and IMHO he deserves a respected seat at the table of Watergate storytellers.  

I should devote some time to figuring Shepard a little more. 

I trust the establishment version of Watergate about as much as I do the WC. 

 

My humble advice is to at least purchase the 1 hour production and watch it. Shepard made this for the exclusive reason of making a concise, clear cut story of what his research has discovered. The Tucker Carlson interview is a bit more in depth and does provide a little more background on those involved. It's free to view, but is 2+ hours long.

Like the JFKA, the media fed this country a made up story. Watergate prosecutors' actions, along with the judge's actions, were all worthy of disbarment & impeachment, if not criminally punishable. For those who blindly disagree or have partisan views distorting this, I suggest you watch Watergate Secrets.

So BC, we are in agreement about the establishment versions of both Watergate and the JFKA. After watching Shepard's production, I ask myself, who put the prosecutor's up to going after Nixon at all costs? You are talking about very established, high-up people putting their reputations and careers on the line. Or were they? In addition, this seems to be a very good example of lawfare to remove a sitting president.

BC, if you do watch either or both, I look forward to your review(s).

[Keven Hofeling]

14 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

PS--

Thanks for commenting. Certainly, there are varying opinions on Watergate, as there are on the JFKA/RFK1A. 

We disagree.

I would not call Hunt or McCord "Nixon's people." 

Hunt was sending sealed pouches by courier to the CIA, while working inside the Nixon WH. 

McCord, popularly depicted as a technician and building-security guy, actually had a very elevated career inside the CIA. 

James Hougan's book "Secret Agenda" is worth reading, even if you disagree.  

For fun, you could watch this, just posted by Mark Groubert. 

I do not agree with every last word of Groubert. or any other commentator. Groubert is fun to listen to, if you have a chore like sweeping a large porch, driving a car, etc., and need some background conversation. 

 

 

In the following excerpt from his autobiography, Constitutional law attorney Danny Sheehan tells the story of how in 1973, after he was recruited by F. Lee Bailey to assist in the representation of Watergate burglar James McCord, he learned that F. Lee Bailey had come to represent McCord due to being on 'Index Four,' a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. In that context, Sheehan was exposed to the highly confidential attorney-client privileged account of mafia don, Santo Trafficante, detailing the origins of the S-Force, a CIA trained and funded assassination squad formed to kill Fidel Castro and his top lieutenants. According to Sheehan, Trafficante indicated it had been Richard Nixon, while serving as Vice-President in 1960, who had initiated the creation of the S-Force, which was later redeployed to assassinate President Kennedy; and due to DNC Chairman, Larry O'Brian's, close association with Robert Mayheu -- who had performed an integral role originally assembling the S-Force -- Richard Nixon in 1972 suspected that the Democratic National Committee possessed and intended to put to political use information revealing Nixon's role in the creation of the team that would ultimately assassinate President Kennedy, and that it was Nixon's desire to collect intelligence about this that served as his true motivation for ordering the Watergate break-in.

From Danny Sheehan's autobiography, "The People's Advocate":

"...It took [Bill Taylor, Sheehan's investigator] two days to get back to me. I was in the conference room at the Gold Key Motel, at a briefing of Kenneth Michael Robinson, the new attorney Lee had retained to represent Glenn W. Turner so I could work on the Watergate case. Bill came quietly into the back of the room and worked his way over to me. He asked me to step outside to speak with him.

 

Bill told me that he had spoken the night before with Andy Tunney to get Andy to tell us what was going on behind the scenes in our Watergate burglary case. Andy had said to Bill, "You two boys are nice boys. You don't want to get involved in something like this."

 

Bill had pushed back, insisting that we really wanted to know what was going on-that we needed to know-because Lee had assigned us to work on the case.

 

But Andy had refused to budge. "You two boys should just get out of Dodge," he said, even going so far as to suggest that Bill and I should consider leaving Bailey's firm entirely, to avoid becoming involved in "something like this." But he wouldn't tell Bill what the "this" was all about.

 

Bill persisted and finally got Andy to go out for a few drinks with him, knowing that that would loosen Andy up. They went to a bar far enough away that neither of them would be recognized, and Bill began buying Andy drinks. Then he started asking Andy, again, to tell him what he knew about the Watergate case. Bill told me that Andy was on the brink of tears, pleading for Bill to stop asking him what was really going on in the case. But after another couple of drinks, Andy finally began to open up.

 

Andrew J. Tunney, the former commander of the Massachusetts State Police Special Task Force on the Boston Strangler, told Bill Taylor, on the night of May 26, 1973, that F. Lee Bailey was on “Index 4." Bill and I had never heard of Index 4 before. Andy explained to Bill that Index 4 was a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. Two of the other attorneys on Index 4 were Edward Bennett Williams and Henry Rothblatt. Rothblatt in fact ended up representing Watergate burglary co-conspirators Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Barker­ all of whom had histories of working directly for the CIA.

 

I was shocked because it was-and still is-totally illegal for agents of the Central Intelligence Agency to engage in any form of covert operation inside the United States. Such action is expressly prohibited by the National Security Act of 1947, pursuant to which the CIA was created on July 26, 1947.1 was also shocked that Lee would have agreed to this without informing any of his associates in the firm. And finally, I was shocked to be confronted by the very real possibility that our firm's representation of James McCord might therefore, indeed, be some kind of covert operation itself, and that we were unknowingly being dragged into such a covert operation without ever having been informed of this fact by Lee.

 

Andy then told Bill that when Lee had been contacted to represent James McCord, he had reached out to Santo Trafficante, the don of the Mafia in southern Florida, who was also the don in Cuba. As I would later learn, Trafficante was also a CIA asset, so Lee was convinced that Trafficante would be able to brief him on what was actually going on behind the scenes in the Watergate case. I remember being especially surprised when Bill told me this because neither Bill nor I had any idea that Lee had a line of com­munication to Santo Trafficante. We also had no idea why Lee had reason to expect that Trafficante, an organized crime figure of that magnitude, would know anything about the Watergate break-in, or that Trafficante would, in any event, have had any reason to agree to brief Lee Bailey about whatever he did know. Bill had asked Andy about this and was told that Lee Bailey was, in fact, Santo Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney. Henry "Hank" Gonzales of Florida, who held himself out to the public to be Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney, was nothing more than a front, disguising the fact that Bailey was the real attorney for Trafficante­ and therefore for the Mafia.

 

Both Bill and I knew that Lee was the attorney for the Angiulo Brothers, a major Italian Mafia family in the North End of Boston. But this was the first time either of us had heard anything of this magnitude about Lee.

 

Andy explained to Bill that, in fact, he was the person Lee had assigned to debrief Santo Trafficante about the Watergate burglary. This was surprising because 1 thought, at the time, that Lee would have wanted as few people as possible to know whatever it was Trafficante was willing to say about that. I remember wondering why Lee would not have wanted to debrief Trafficante himself. We later learned the reason: Andy had lived in Henry Gonzales's guest house in Miami for months and had become personally familiar with Trafficante during that time. Andy had kept this a secret, for obvious reasons. He didn't want anybody to know that he even knew Santo Trafficante.

 

All these revelations were a total surprise to me, but that wasn't the most important or alarming information that Andy told Bill that night. The following is a summary of what Trafficante told Andy in 1972 about the Watergate break-in.

 

Santo Trafficante, Andy said, knew all about what had happened in the Watergate burglary because the anti-Castro Cuban types involved in the burglary-Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis were both direct former mob associates of Trafficante in his capacity as the don of the Mafia in Havana. Trafficante had remained very dose to these men after they had fled Cuba together when Castro took control in January of 1959. Trafficante's close relationship with these anti-Castro Cubans had continued even when these men became operatives of the CIA in Miami, working on a secret project code-named Operation 40, designed by the CIA to undermine the stability of the new Cuban revolutionary government. Trafficante had maintained contact with the anti-Castro Cubans who had fled with him, particularly with Bernard Barker when he went to work for E. Howard Hunt in 1971, when Hunt operated directly out of the White House.

 

Santo Trafficante had told Andy, during this debriefing in 1972 following the burglary, that two of the Watergate codefendants, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had helped plan and supervise the Watergate break-ins, were former CIA "case officers" for Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and dozens of other former Trafficante Cuban Mafia associates from Havana who had fled Cuba with Trafficante in January 1959. Some of these former Trafficante associates had become covert operatives in that same Operation 40.

 

However, Trafficante then told Andy that he had personally recruited a dozen former anti-Castro Cuban Mafia associates, who had earlier been recruited as members of Operation 40 by the CIA, to become members of a team to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and five other leaders of the Cuban revolutionary government. This select group was codenamed the S-Force by Trafficante. He told Andy that the S-Force had been organized in July 1960 by then Vice President Richard Nixon.

 

During his eight years as vice president, Nixon had been the chairman of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council, which oversaw all covert operations of the U.S. government. As chairman of the 5412 Committee, Nixon had developed a close personal relationship with bil­lionaire Howard Hughes, who had become a "special consultant" to the National Security Council. Hughes created a business called the Summa Corporation that produced clandestine technology, such as the Glomar Explorer for the NSC, which could pick crashed Russian submarines off the bottom of the ocean so that Russian technology could be analyzed and the all-important codebooks in any such Russian submarine could be recovered from the submarine. According to Trafficante, once Nixon was confident he was going to secure the Republican Party nomination for the presidency in July 1960, he called Howard Hughes on the ultra-secure phone through which Nixon and Hughes communicated and said that he wanted Hughes to set up a team to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders of the new Cuban government. Nixon solicited Hughes's help to get this done in a manner that would keep the responsibility for such an operation completely away from the White House.

 

Trafficante informed Andy that Hughes turned that task over to one of his new attorneys, a former FBI agent by the name of Robert Maheu. Maheu then reached out to Johnny Roselli, the liaison in Las Vegas for Mafia boss Sam Giancana of Chicago. Johnny Roselli was Giancana's "bag man" in Vegas for Giancana's casinos. Maheu explained to Rosselli that it was Richard Nixon who wanted this done, but Maheu raised the fact that Castro had shut down all the Mafia's gambling casinos and prostitution houses in Cuba and had shut off the all-important supply of heroin coming through Cuba from Southeast Asia. So the Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to get rid of Castro. After hearing Maheau’s proposal for the creation of this assassination team, Roselli had flown back to Chicago and set forth this request from Nixon to Sam Giancana.

 

Giancana said that any decision like that was within Santo Trafficante's jurisdiction within the Familia. Even though Trafficante had left Cuba, he was still the Mafia boss of Havana, so Trafficante had to be the one to make such a decision. So Giancana, Roselli, and Maheu all flew down to Miami and had three strategic meetings with Santo Trafficante in July 1960 at the Fontainebleau Hotel. During the second of these three meetings, they agreed in principle that they were open to doing "this thing," but Trafficante wanted to be absolutely certain that the direction was coming from Nixon himself and that a decision of this magnitude was not simply some pipe­ dream on the part of Maheu or Howard Hughes. So Trafficante had insisted on receiving some kind of direct signal from Nixon himself for confirmation.

 

So, when they convened their third meeting, a man who used the nom de guerre of Mr. Ed joined them. This man, according to Trafficante, was Sheffield Edwards, the chief of security of the Central Intelligence Agency under Richard Nixon. Trafficante told Andy that Sheffield Edwards personally gave him the green light to go forward with this project, which satisfied Trafficante, who agreed to move forward and do what Nixon had asked.

 

However, Trafficante, being the wise guy that he was, wanted to use his old gunmen who had now been recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency to make up this special assassination team. That way, if his gunmen were caught, the trail would lead straight back to the CIA, and the agency would then have to step in and help cover up the involvement of the team. So Trafficante selected fifteen men from among his former Cuban gunmen who were then working for the CIA in Operation 40. To finance that team, Trafficante and the Mafia skimmed cash off casinos in Las Vegas. They drove the cash all the way to Miami, where it was deposited into the Miami National Bank, owned by Meyer Lansky.

 

The fifteen men were periodically picked up by a private plane from paramilitary bases throughout the Southeast and flown directly to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. They would "sign in" there but then would immediately disappear. Trafficante said these fifteen men were flown directly from Fort Huachuca down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to a large private ranch owned by Clint Murchison Jr., who owned the Dallas Texans professional football team. At the ranch in Oaxaca, these men were trained in triangular fue team assassination techniques using high-powered rifles. Funds from the Las Vegas skim that had been deposited into the Miami National Bank were wired from the Miami National Bank to the International Credit Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, and from there to Banco Internationale in Mexico City. The account in Mexico City was handled by an attorney named Manuel Ogarrio, and money drawn from that account financed the private planes, equipment, and additional expenses of the S-Force.

 

However, Richard Nixon had not been elected in November of 1960, as he and all of his associates in this assassination enterprise had assumed he would be. Instead, John F. Kennedy had been elected. But the S-Force was continued, since it had now been established to run independently from the White House-or from any other official government agency. It did, however, have CIA "handlers" made up of its former CIA trainers.

 

By the spring of 1972, Howard Hughes had become a veritable vegetable, with long fingernails and hair down his back, and a power struggle for control broke out inside his empire. Lawrence O'Brien, his longtime D.C. lobbyist evidently lost this power struggle. Within weeks of leaving the Hughes organization, O'Brien was named head of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon became terrified that Larry O'Brien, in his capacity as chief lobbyist for Howard Hughes for so many years, might have come to know about Nixon's direct involvement in putting together the S-Force assassination team, which essentially combined elements of organized crime, the anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami, and the CIA. Nixon felt that the public revelation of his direct involvement with that team was the only thing that could generate any conceivable possibility that he might lose the upcoming presidential election to George McGovern, and he wanted to find out what Larry O'Brien knew about this very sensitive issue.

 

Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and Sturgis were therefore personally selected by Nixon to burglarize the Democratic national headquarters, because they already knew about Nixon's involvement. The Watergate burglary operation was to be run by E. Howard Hunt because he had been the CIA liaison officers who had overseen and coordinated the activities of the S-Force--so they too knew about Nixon's involvement in that sensi­tive operation. To put in the wiretaps, however, they had had to secure the expertise of a former CIA specialist in that field: James McCord. Nixon then ordered the Watergate burglars to go into Larry O'Brien's office in the Watergate building, wiretap his telephones, and search for documents that might reveal the fact that O'Brien knew about Nixon's involvement in creat­ing the S-Force.

 

DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel' had in fact been burglarized more than once by that team. The wiretaps and bugs were first placed in late May. But one of those wiretaps had stopped working, so on June 17, when the team went in to replace that wiretap and to photograph documents, they were caught red-handed by a night watchman. Hunt and one G. Gordon Liddy (a high-risk-taking former FBI agent who had become part of the White House "Plumbers' Unit"), who were outside on radios, were arrested later.

 

On June 23rd, within one week of the break-in, Nixon got word that Patrick L. Gray, the new director of the FBI, was being pressured by other high-level FBI officials to investigate the origins of a check found in Bernard Barker's sports jacket pocket when he was arrested inside the Watergate headquarters of the DNC. The check had been cleared through the very same bank account in Mexico City where funds had been previously directed to the S-Force. Gray was calling to find out whether an investigation of that bank account was going to cause any trouble for the White House. When Nixon learned of Gray's inquiry, he ordered his White House chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, to go with John Ehrlichman over to the CIA and to tell Richard Helms and Vernon A. Walters, the director and deputy director of the agency, that if they didn't get the FBI out of that particular investiga­tion immediately, all "the Mexico stuff about the Bay of Pigs guys" could come out. That was the famous "smoking gun conversation" that resulted in the House Judiciary Committee's returning an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice.

 

However, when Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman went over to the CIA and personally delivered that message, Richard Helms became furious. Still, he called Patrick L. Gray that very afternoon and ordered the FBI to stand down from that part of the investigation. Pat Gray then refused to authorize FBI deputy director Mark Felt to go down to Mexico City to investigate the Ogarrio bank account.

 

After Bill Taylor's meeting with Andy Tunney, in which Andy conveyed all the politics and corruption behind the Watergate scandal, neither I nor Bill Taylor had any difficulty in deciding that Lee Bailey's firm was not the place for us.

 

However, I still had to return to Bailey's office in Boston. As soon as I arrived, Lee called me in to see him.

 

When I stepped into his office, he was all smiles.

 

"I understand you were out in South Dakota for your short vacation, at that occupation thing going on out there. Is that right?"

 

"Yes, I was," I replied.

 

"Well, which side of it were you on?"

 

I was puzzled by Lee's question. "Well, actually, I wasn't on either side." I told him that I was there on behalf of the ACLU and one of my good law school friends.

 

Lee wrinkled his brow. "Well, like what, for example, were you doing for them?"

 

Trying to put a moderate spin on what Joe and I were doing for the ACLU and AIM, I explained some of the negotiations that had been conducted with FBI and ATF officers on the site near Wounded Knee about getting food and medical supplies to the natives occupying the village.

 

After a few additional exchanges, during which Lee seemed to grow more and more frustrated with my answers, he finally said, "Jesus! Why weren't you more directly involved in helping the FBI or the Justice Department officials out there? At least that way you could have been earning some goodwill for our office there that we could translate later into helping get a better plea bargain or other deal for one of our clients."

 

We were like two ships passing in the night. Here I was, trying to get F. Lee Bailey, the most famous and most accomplished criminal defense attorney in our country, to open himself up to doing something in the public interest realm. And there was Lee Bailey, trying to see how he could extract from a historical tragedy and from an avalanche of personal suffering being heaped upon the Native American people of our country some short-term advantage that might enable him to make a further hundred grand getting some gangster a lighter sentence.

 

That was it for me. I proceeded to press Lee on why he was a lawyer at all. What was it he hoped to accomplish by doing what he did, and why didn't he seem to be more interested in justice or truth? But when I asked him these questions, he was genuinely puzzled. It was hard to believe, but he didn't seem to understand what I was even talking about.

 

He then launched into what seemed to me to be an almost rehearsed rant about why it wasn't up to us, as lawyers, to determine what was true or not true. That was up to a jury. "My job," he said, "my responsibility is to do everything I possibly can-everything that I can get away with-to get my guy off. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do. And I am paid pretty goddamned well too," he pointed out. "And I do it pretty goddamned well-better than anybody else, to hear some people tell it."

 

There it was-the absolute relativist! I knew I was done working for F. Lee Bailey...."

 

In a very recent interview, published 8/22/2024, Danny Sheehan discussed what he learned about Watergate from Santo Trafficante (starting at 38:15 of the video) :

Here's a summary of the key points from the transcript in 5 bullet points:

• The assassination of JFK was carried out by a 15-man "S Force" originally created by Richard Nixon in 1960 to target Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders. This force was later repurposed to assassinate Kennedy when he planned to dismantle nuclear warheads with Khrushchev.
• The Watergate break-in was connected to the JFK assassination. The burglars included members of the S Force, and Nixon was paranoid about information on the assassination team being exposed through the Democratic National Committee.
• Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment firm, played a significant role in establishing the CIA and had connections to both World Wars and the rise of Nazi Germany. They were part of a powerful group of "robber barons" influencing U.S. policy.
• The MK-Ultra program, run by the CIA, experimented with LSD and other methods for interrogation and potentially creating "programmable" killers. This program had connections to high-profile cases like Charles Manson and possibly Sirhan Sirhan.
• The motivations behind Watergate were complex, involving Nixon's paranoia about the JFK assassination being exposed, personal vendettas within the FBI, and CIA operatives feeling betrayed. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's downfall.

Edited August 28 by Keven Hofeling

[Kevin Balch]

1 hour ago, Keven Hofeling said:

In the following excerpt from his autobiography, Constitutional law attorney Danny Sheehan tells the story of how in 1973, after he was recruited by F. Lee Bailey to assist in the representation of Watergate burglar James McCord, he learned that F. Lee Bailey had come to represent McCord due to being on 'Index Four,' a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. In that context, Sheehan was exposed to the highly confidential attorney-client privileged account of mafia don, Santo Trafficante, detailing the origins of the S-Force, a CIA trained and funded assassination squad formed to kill Fidel Castro and his top lieutenants. According to Sheehan, Trafficante indicated it had been Richard Nixon, while serving as Vice-President in 1960, who had initiated the creation of the S-Force, which was later redeployed to assassinate President Kennedy; and due to DNC Chairman, Larry O'Brian's, close association with Robert Mayheu -- who had performed an integral role originally assembling the S-Force -- Richard Nixon in 1972 suspected that the Democratic National Committee possessed and intended to put to political use information revealing Nixon's role in the creation of the team that would ultimately assassinate President Kennedy, and that it was Nixon's desire to collect intelligence about this that served as his true motivation for ordering the Watergate break-in.

From Danny Sheehan's autobiography, "The People's Advocate":

"...It took [Bill Taylor, Sheehan's investigator] two days to get back to me. I was in the conference room at the Gold Key Motel, at a briefing of Kenneth Michael Robinson, the new attorney Lee had retained to represent Glenn W. Turner so I could work on the Watergate case. Bill came quietly into the back of the room and worked his way over to me. He asked me to step outside to speak with him.

 

Bill told me that he had spoken the night before with Andy Tunney to get Andy to tell us what was going on behind the scenes in our Watergate burglary case. Andy had said to Bill, "You two boys are nice boys. You don't want to get involved in something like this."

 

Bill had pushed back, insisting that we really wanted to know what was going on-that we needed to know-because Lee had assigned us to work on the case.

 

But Andy had refused to budge. "You two boys should just get out of Dodge," he said, even going so far as to suggest that Bill and I should consider leaving Bailey's firm entirely, to avoid becoming involved in "something like this." But he wouldn't tell Bill what the "this" was all about.

 

Bill persisted and finally got Andy to go out for a few drinks with him, knowing that that would loosen Andy up. They went to a bar far enough away that neither of them would be recognized, and Bill began buying Andy drinks. Then he started asking Andy, again, to tell him what he knew about the Watergate case. Bill told me that Andy was on the brink of tears, pleading for Bill to stop asking him what was really going on in the case. But after another couple of drinks, Andy finally began to open up.

 

Andrew J. Tunney, the former commander of the Massachusetts State Police Special Task Force on the Boston Strangler, told Bill Taylor, on the night of May 26, 1973, that F. Lee Bailey was on “Index 4." Bill and I had never heard of Index 4 before. Andy explained to Bill that Index 4 was a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. Two of the other attorneys on Index 4 were Edward Bennett Williams and Henry Rothblatt. Rothblatt in fact ended up representing Watergate burglary co-conspirators Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Barker­ all of whom had histories of working directly for the CIA.

 

I was shocked because it was-and still is-totally illegal for agents of the Central Intelligence Agency to engage in any form of covert operation inside the United States. Such action is expressly prohibited by the National Security Act of 1947, pursuant to which the CIA was created on July 26, 1947.1 was also shocked that Lee would have agreed to this without informing any of his associates in the firm. And finally, I was shocked to be confronted by the very real possibility that our firm's representation of James McCord might therefore, indeed, be some kind of covert operation itself, and that we were unknowingly being dragged into such a covert operation without ever having been informed of this fact by Lee.

 

Andy then told Bill that when Lee had been contacted to represent James McCord, he had reached out to Santo Trafficante, the don of the Mafia in southern Florida, who was also the don in Cuba. As I would later learn, Trafficante was also a CIA asset, so Lee was convinced that Trafficante would be able to brief him on what was actually going on behind the scenes in the Watergate case. I remember being especially surprised when Bill told me this because neither Bill nor I had any idea that Lee had a line of com­munication to Santo Trafficante. We also had no idea why Lee had reason to expect that Trafficante, an organized crime figure of that magnitude, would know anything about the Watergate break-in, or that Trafficante would, in any event, have had any reason to agree to brief Lee Bailey about whatever he did know. Bill had asked Andy about this and was told that Lee Bailey was, in fact, Santo Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney. Henry "Hank" Gonzales of Florida, who held himself out to the public to be Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney, was nothing more than a front, disguising the fact that Bailey was the real attorney for Trafficante­ and therefore for the Mafia.

 

Both Bill and I knew that Lee was the attorney for the Angiulo Brothers, a major Italian Mafia family in the North End of Boston. But this was the first time either of us had heard anything of this magnitude about Lee.

 

Andy explained to Bill that, in fact, he was the person Lee had assigned to debrief Santo Trafficante about the Watergate burglary. This was surprising because 1 thought, at the time, that Lee would have wanted as few people as possible to know whatever it was Trafficante was willing to say about that. I remember wondering why Lee would not have wanted to debrief Trafficante himself. We later learned the reason: Andy had lived in Henry Gonzales's guest house in Miami for months and had become personally familiar with Trafficante during that time. Andy had kept this a secret, for obvious reasons. He didn't want anybody to know that he even knew Santo Trafficante.

 

All these revelations were a total surprise to me, but that wasn't the most important or alarming information that Andy told Bill that night. The following is a summary of what Trafficante told Andy in 1972 about the Watergate break-in.

 

Santo Trafficante, Andy said, knew all about what had happened in the Watergate burglary because the anti-Castro Cuban types involved in the burglary-Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis were both direct former mob associates of Trafficante in his capacity as the don of the Mafia in Havana. Trafficante had remained very dose to these men after they had fled Cuba together when Castro took control in January of 1959. Trafficante's close relationship with these anti-Castro Cubans had continued even when these men became operatives of the CIA in Miami, working on a secret project code-named Operation 40, designed by the CIA to undermine the stability of the new Cuban revolutionary government. Trafficante had maintained contact with the anti-Castro Cubans who had fled with him, particularly with Bernard Barker when he went to work for E. Howard Hunt in 1971, when Hunt operated directly out of the White House.

 

Santo Trafficante had told Andy, during this debriefing in 1972 following the burglary, that two of the Watergate codefendants, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had helped plan and supervise the Watergate break-ins, were former CIA "case officers" for Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and dozens of other former Trafficante Cuban Mafia associates from Havana who had fled Cuba with Trafficante in January 1959. Some of these former Trafficante associates had become covert operatives in that same Operation 40.

 

However, Trafficante then told Andy that he had personally recruited a dozen former anti-Castro Cuban Mafia associates, who had earlier been recruited as members of Operation 40 by the CIA, to become members of a team to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and five other leaders of the Cuban revolutionary government. This select group was codenamed the S-Force by Trafficante. He told Andy that the S-Force had been organized in July 1960 by then Vice President Richard Nixon.

 

During his eight years as vice president, Nixon had been the chairman of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council, which oversaw all covert operations of the U.S. government. As chairman of the 5412 Committee, Nixon had developed a close personal relationship with bil­lionaire Howard Hughes, who had become a "special consultant" to the National Security Council. Hughes created a business called the Summa Corporation that produced clandestine technology, such as the Glomar Explorer for the NSC, which could pick crashed Russian submarines off the bottom of the ocean so that Russian technology could be analyzed and the all-important codebooks in any such Russian submarine could be recovered from the submarine. According to Trafficante, once Nixon was confident he was going to secure the Republican Party nomination for the presidency in July 1960, he called Howard Hughes on the ultra-secure phone through which Nixon and Hughes communicated and said that he wanted Hughes to set up a team to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders of the new Cuban government. Nixon solicited Hughes's help to get this done in a manner that would keep the responsibility for such an operation completely away from the White House.

 

Trafficante informed Andy that Hughes turned that task over to one of his new attorneys, a former FBI agent by the name of Robert Maheu. Maheu then reached out to Johnny Roselli, the liaison in Las Vegas for Mafia boss Sam Giancana of Chicago. Johnny Roselli was Giancana's "bag man" in Vegas for Giancana's casinos. Maheu explained to Rosselli that it was Richard Nixon who wanted this done, but Maheu raised the fact that Castro had shut down all the Mafia's gambling casinos and prostitution houses in Cuba and had shut off the all-important supply of heroin coming through Cuba from Southeast Asia. So the Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to get rid of Castro. After hearing Maheau’s proposal for the creation of this assassination team, Roselli had flown back to Chicago and set forth this request from Nixon to Sam Giancana.

 

Giancana said that any decision like that was within Santo Trafficante's jurisdiction within the Familia. Even though Trafficante had left Cuba, he was still the Mafia boss of Havana, so Trafficante had to be the one to make such a decision. So Giancana, Roselli, and Maheu all flew down to Miami and had three strategic meetings with Santo Trafficante in July 1960 at the Fontainebleau Hotel. During the second of these three meetings, they agreed in principle that they were open to doing "this thing," but Trafficante wanted to be absolutely certain that the direction was coming from Nixon himself and that a decision of this magnitude was not simply some pipe­ dream on the part of Maheu or Howard Hughes. So Trafficante had insisted on receiving some kind of direct signal from Nixon himself for confirmation.

 

So, when they convened their third meeting, a man who used the nom de guerre of Mr. Ed joined them. This man, according to Trafficante, was Sheffield Edwards, the chief of security of the Central Intelligence Agency under Richard Nixon. Trafficante told Andy that Sheffield Edwards personally gave him the green light to go forward with this project, which satisfied Trafficante, who agreed to move forward and do what Nixon had asked.

 

However, Trafficante, being the wise guy that he was, wanted to use his old gunmen who had now been recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency to make up this special assassination team. That way, if his gunmen were caught, the trail would lead straight back to the CIA, and the agency would then have to step in and help cover up the involvement of the team. So Trafficante selected fifteen men from among his former Cuban gunmen who were then working for the CIA in Operation 40. To finance that team, Trafficante and the Mafia skimmed cash off casinos in Las Vegas. They drove the cash all the way to Miami, where it was deposited into the Miami National Bank, owned by Meyer Lansky.

 

The fifteen men were periodically picked up by a private plane from paramilitary bases throughout the Southeast and flown directly to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. They would "sign in" there but then would immediately disappear. Trafficante said these fifteen men were flown directly from Fort Huachuca down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to a large private ranch owned by Clint Murchison Jr., who owned the Dallas Texans professional football team. At the ranch in Oaxaca, these men were trained in triangular fue team assassination techniques using high-powered rifles. Funds from the Las Vegas skim that had been deposited into the Miami National Bank were wired from the Miami National Bank to the International Credit Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, and from there to Banco Internationale in Mexico City. The account in Mexico City was handled by an attorney named Manuel Ogarrio, and money drawn from that account financed the private planes, equipment, and additional expenses of the S-Force.

 

However, Richard Nixon had not been elected in November of 1960, as he and all of his associates in this assassination enterprise had assumed he would be. Instead, John F. Kennedy had been elected. But the S-Force was continued, since it had now been established to run independently from the White House-or from any other official government agency. It did, however, have CIA "handlers" made up of its former CIA trainers.

 

By the spring of 1972, Howard Hughes had become a veritable vegetable, with long fingernails and hair down his back, and a power struggle for control broke out inside his empire. Lawrence O'Brien, his longtime D.C. lobbyist evidently lost this power struggle. Within weeks of leaving the Hughes organization, O'Brien was named head of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon became terrified that Larry O'Brien, in his capacity as chief lobbyist for Howard Hughes for so many years, might have come to know about Nixon's direct involvement in putting together the S-Force assassination team, which essentially combined elements of organized crime, the anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami, and the CIA. Nixon felt that the public revelation of his direct involvement with that team was the only thing that could generate any conceivable possibility that he might lose the upcoming presidential election to George McGovern, and he wanted to find out what Larry O'Brien knew about this very sensitive issue.

 

Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and Sturgis were therefore personally selected by Nixon to burglarize the Democratic national headquarters, because they already knew about Nixon's involvement. The Watergate burglary operation was to be run by E. Howard Hunt because he had been the CIA liaison officers who had overseen and coordinated the activities of the S-Force--so they too knew about Nixon's involvement in that sensi­tive operation. To put in the wiretaps, however, they had had to secure the expertise of a former CIA specialist in that field: James McCord. Nixon then ordered the Watergate burglars to go into Larry O'Brien's office in the Watergate building, wiretap his telephones, and search for documents that might reveal the fact that O'Brien knew about Nixon's involvement in creat­ing the S-Force.

 

DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel' had in fact been burglarized more than once by that team. The wiretaps and bugs were first placed in late May. But one of those wiretaps had stopped working, so on June 17, when the team went in to replace that wiretap and to photograph documents, they were caught red-handed by a night watchman. Hunt and one G. Gordon Liddy (a high-risk-taking former FBI agent who had become part of the White House "Plumbers' Unit"), who were outside on radios, were arrested later.

 

On June 23rd, within one week of the break-in, Nixon got word that Patrick L. Gray, the new director of the FBI, was being pressured by other high-level FBI officials to investigate the origins of a check found in Bernard Barker's sports jacket pocket when he was arrested inside the Watergate headquarters of the DNC. The check had been cleared through the very same bank account in Mexico City where funds had been previously directed to the S-Force. Gray was calling to find out whether an investigation of that bank account was going to cause any trouble for the White House. When Nixon learned of Gray's inquiry, he ordered his White House chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, to go with John Ehrlichman over to the CIA and to tell Richard Helms and Vernon A. Walters, the director and deputy director of the agency, that if they didn't get the FBI out of that particular investiga­tion immediately, all "the Mexico stuff about the Bay of Pigs guys" could come out. That was the famous "smoking gun conversation" that resulted in the House Judiciary Committee's returning an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice.

 

However, when Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman went over to the CIA and personally delivered that message, Richard Helms became furious. Still, he called Patrick L. Gray that very afternoon and ordered the FBI to stand down from that part of the investigation. Pat Gray then refused to authorize FBI deputy director Mark Felt to go down to Mexico City to investigate the Ogarrio bank account.

 

After Bill Taylor's meeting with Andy Tunney, in which Andy conveyed all the politics and corruption behind the Watergate scandal, neither I nor Bill Taylor had any difficulty in deciding that Lee Bailey's firm was not the place for us.

 

However, I still had to return to Bailey's office in Boston. As soon as I arrived, Lee called me in to see him.

 

When I stepped into his office, he was all smiles.

 

"I understand you were out in South Dakota for your short vacation, at that occupation thing going on out there. Is that right?"

 

"Yes, I was," I replied.

 

"Well, which side of it were you on?"

 

I was puzzled by Lee's question. "Well, actually, I wasn't on either side." I told him that I was there on behalf of the ACLU and one of my good law school friends.

 

Lee wrinkled his brow. "Well, like what, for example, were you doing for them?"

 

Trying to put a moderate spin on what Joe and I were doing for the ACLU and AIM, I explained some of the negotiations that had been conducted with FBI and ATF officers on the site near Wounded Knee about getting food and medical supplies to the natives occupying the village.

 

After a few additional exchanges, during which Lee seemed to grow more and more frustrated with my answers, he finally said, "Jesus! Why weren't you more directly involved in helping the FBI or the Justice Department officials out there? At least that way you could have been earning some goodwill for our office there that we could translate later into helping get a better plea bargain or other deal for one of our clients."

 

We were like two ships passing in the night. Here I was, trying to get F. Lee Bailey, the most famous and most accomplished criminal defense attorney in our country, to open himself up to doing something in the public interest realm. And there was Lee Bailey, trying to see how he could extract from a historical tragedy and from an avalanche of personal suffering being heaped upon the Native American people of our country some short-term advantage that might enable him to make a further hundred grand getting some gangster a lighter sentence.

 

That was it for me. I proceeded to press Lee on why he was a lawyer at all. What was it he hoped to accomplish by doing what he did, and why didn't he seem to be more interested in justice or truth? But when I asked him these questions, he was genuinely puzzled. It was hard to believe, but he didn't seem to understand what I was even talking about.

 

He then launched into what seemed to me to be an almost rehearsed rant about why it wasn't up to us, as lawyers, to determine what was true or not true. That was up to a jury. "My job," he said, "my responsibility is to do everything I possibly can-everything that I can get away with-to get my guy off. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do. And I am paid pretty goddamned well too," he pointed out. "And I do it pretty goddamned well-better than anybody else, to hear some people tell it."

 

There it was-the absolute relativist! I knew I was done working for F. Lee Bailey...."

 

In a very recent interview, published 8/22/2024, Danny Sheehan discussed what he learned about Watergate from Santo Trafficante (starting at 38:15 of the video) :

Here's a summary of the key points from the transcript in 5 bullet points:

• The assassination of JFK was carried out by a 15-man "S Force" originally created by Richard Nixon in 1960 to target Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders. This force was later repurposed to assassinate Kennedy when he planned to dismantle nuclear warheads with Khrushchev.
• The Watergate break-in was connected to the JFK assassination. The burglars included members of the S Force, and Nixon was paranoid about information on the assassination team being exposed through the Democratic National Committee.
• Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment firm, played a significant role in establishing the CIA and had connections to both World Wars and the rise of Nazi Germany. They were part of a powerful group of "robber barons" influencing U.S. policy.
• The MK-Ultra program, run by the CIA, experimented with LSD and other methods for interrogation and potentially creating "programmable" killers. This program had connections to high-profile cases like Charles Manson and possibly Sirhan Sirhan.
• The motivations behind Watergate were complex, involving Nixon's paranoia about the JFK assassination being exposed, personal vendettas within the FBI, and CIA operatives feeling betrayed. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's downfall.

Interesting that the book appears to be out of print yet a used copy sells for $400 dollars.

https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Advocate-Americas-Fearless-Interest/dp/1619021722/ref=sr_1_2?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.QQ30JgdDP_C5OA-sAcKFkdQjRCeEyrmHHe-lDiVN-BXSa0VzXMJnVccmvmvinQWo1tVi0lTWI6WbswaeOrcNHOe1IQXy7xyq8Dr33xS_lE3RQ1pSM_sfqd-c2w1JSw8xhOSApCTAPNzfK2fyqlO3CobGw0h3ZCwIdTSm88mRKsFHxgJLaray-hzcKxJX5pc_f4rx3KbWm03L9dNvsi8cJQ.3qy-9T9RNrgs44CBoxdXlFFM5ViC4b3y6PzNUgZIbP4&dib_tag=se&qid=1724886881&refinements=p_28%3Athe+peoples+advocate&s=books&sr=1-2&unfiltered=1

[Jean Ceulemans]

Question on the side, as I´m always looking for good books ON PAPER, at a fair price. Read : like the  prices were, when the books entered the market.

Now, I see some getting very expensive, when sold out.  In Europe you´ll see a re-print in no time, when the market is still hot for these books.  

Is the cost for a re-print too high in the US ? I have seen very good results from reprints from all over the world. It goes very fast, simple binding, fairly good paper, and UK (or US editors). Pictures can be a little tricky I have to say.

I understand when the writer is deceased, this will complicate things (family, taxes ,...). But in general?

Convincing a publisher can  be a pain in the  .ss as well, but one can still publish it privately.

[Kevin Balch]

2 hours ago, Keven Hofeling said:

In the following excerpt from his autobiography, Constitutional law attorney Danny Sheehan tells the story of how in 1973, after he was recruited by F. Lee Bailey to assist in the representation of Watergate burglar James McCord, he learned that F. Lee Bailey had come to represent McCord due to being on 'Index Four,' a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. In that context, Sheehan was exposed to the highly confidential attorney-client privileged account of mafia don, Santo Trafficante, detailing the origins of the S-Force, a CIA trained and funded assassination squad formed to kill Fidel Castro and his top lieutenants. According to Sheehan, Trafficante indicated it had been Richard Nixon, while serving as Vice-President in 1960, who had initiated the creation of the S-Force, which was later redeployed to assassinate President Kennedy; and due to DNC Chairman, Larry O'Brian's, close association with Robert Mayheu -- who had performed an integral role originally assembling the S-Force -- Richard Nixon in 1972 suspected that the Democratic National Committee possessed and intended to put to political use information revealing Nixon's role in the creation of the team that would ultimately assassinate President Kennedy, and that it was Nixon's desire to collect intelligence about this that served as his true motivation for ordering the Watergate break-in.

From Danny Sheehan's autobiography, "The People's Advocate":

"...It took [Bill Taylor, Sheehan's investigator] two days to get back to me. I was in the conference room at the Gold Key Motel, at a briefing of Kenneth Michael Robinson, the new attorney Lee had retained to represent Glenn W. Turner so I could work on the Watergate case. Bill came quietly into the back of the room and worked his way over to me. He asked me to step outside to speak with him.

 

Bill told me that he had spoken the night before with Andy Tunney to get Andy to tell us what was going on behind the scenes in our Watergate burglary case. Andy had said to Bill, "You two boys are nice boys. You don't want to get involved in something like this."

 

Bill had pushed back, insisting that we really wanted to know what was going on-that we needed to know-because Lee had assigned us to work on the case.

 

But Andy had refused to budge. "You two boys should just get out of Dodge," he said, even going so far as to suggest that Bill and I should consider leaving Bailey's firm entirely, to avoid becoming involved in "something like this." But he wouldn't tell Bill what the "this" was all about.

 

Bill persisted and finally got Andy to go out for a few drinks with him, knowing that that would loosen Andy up. They went to a bar far enough away that neither of them would be recognized, and Bill began buying Andy drinks. Then he started asking Andy, again, to tell him what he knew about the Watergate case. Bill told me that Andy was on the brink of tears, pleading for Bill to stop asking him what was really going on in the case. But after another couple of drinks, Andy finally began to open up.

 

Andrew J. Tunney, the former commander of the Massachusetts State Police Special Task Force on the Boston Strangler, told Bill Taylor, on the night of May 26, 1973, that F. Lee Bailey was on “Index 4." Bill and I had never heard of Index 4 before. Andy explained to Bill that Index 4 was a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. Two of the other attorneys on Index 4 were Edward Bennett Williams and Henry Rothblatt. Rothblatt in fact ended up representing Watergate burglary co-conspirators Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Barker­ all of whom had histories of working directly for the CIA.

 

I was shocked because it was-and still is-totally illegal for agents of the Central Intelligence Agency to engage in any form of covert operation inside the United States. Such action is expressly prohibited by the National Security Act of 1947, pursuant to which the CIA was created on July 26, 1947.1 was also shocked that Lee would have agreed to this without informing any of his associates in the firm. And finally, I was shocked to be confronted by the very real possibility that our firm's representation of James McCord might therefore, indeed, be some kind of covert operation itself, and that we were unknowingly being dragged into such a covert operation without ever having been informed of this fact by Lee.

 

Andy then told Bill that when Lee had been contacted to represent James McCord, he had reached out to Santo Trafficante, the don of the Mafia in southern Florida, who was also the don in Cuba. As I would later learn, Trafficante was also a CIA asset, so Lee was convinced that Trafficante would be able to brief him on what was actually going on behind the scenes in the Watergate case. I remember being especially surprised when Bill told me this because neither Bill nor I had any idea that Lee had a line of com­munication to Santo Trafficante. We also had no idea why Lee had reason to expect that Trafficante, an organized crime figure of that magnitude, would know anything about the Watergate break-in, or that Trafficante would, in any event, have had any reason to agree to brief Lee Bailey about whatever he did know. Bill had asked Andy about this and was told that Lee Bailey was, in fact, Santo Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney. Henry "Hank" Gonzales of Florida, who held himself out to the public to be Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney, was nothing more than a front, disguising the fact that Bailey was the real attorney for Trafficante­ and therefore for the Mafia.

 

Both Bill and I knew that Lee was the attorney for the Angiulo Brothers, a major Italian Mafia family in the North End of Boston. But this was the first time either of us had heard anything of this magnitude about Lee.

 

Andy explained to Bill that, in fact, he was the person Lee had assigned to debrief Santo Trafficante about the Watergate burglary. This was surprising because 1 thought, at the time, that Lee would have wanted as few people as possible to know whatever it was Trafficante was willing to say about that. I remember wondering why Lee would not have wanted to debrief Trafficante himself. We later learned the reason: Andy had lived in Henry Gonzales's guest house in Miami for months and had become personally familiar with Trafficante during that time. Andy had kept this a secret, for obvious reasons. He didn't want anybody to know that he even knew Santo Trafficante.

 

All these revelations were a total surprise to me, but that wasn't the most important or alarming information that Andy told Bill that night. The following is a summary of what Trafficante told Andy in 1972 about the Watergate break-in.

 

Santo Trafficante, Andy said, knew all about what had happened in the Watergate burglary because the anti-Castro Cuban types involved in the burglary-Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis were both direct former mob associates of Trafficante in his capacity as the don of the Mafia in Havana. Trafficante had remained very dose to these men after they had fled Cuba together when Castro took control in January of 1959. Trafficante's close relationship with these anti-Castro Cubans had continued even when these men became operatives of the CIA in Miami, working on a secret project code-named Operation 40, designed by the CIA to undermine the stability of the new Cuban revolutionary government. Trafficante had maintained contact with the anti-Castro Cubans who had fled with him, particularly with Bernard Barker when he went to work for E. Howard Hunt in 1971, when Hunt operated directly out of the White House.

 

Santo Trafficante had told Andy, during this debriefing in 1972 following the burglary, that two of the Watergate codefendants, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had helped plan and supervise the Watergate break-ins, were former CIA "case officers" for Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and dozens of other former Trafficante Cuban Mafia associates from Havana who had fled Cuba with Trafficante in January 1959. Some of these former Trafficante associates had become covert operatives in that same Operation 40.

 

However, Trafficante then told Andy that he had personally recruited a dozen former anti-Castro Cuban Mafia associates, who had earlier been recruited as members of Operation 40 by the CIA, to become members of a team to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and five other leaders of the Cuban revolutionary government. This select group was codenamed the S-Force by Trafficante. He told Andy that the S-Force had been organized in July 1960 by then Vice President Richard Nixon.

 

During his eight years as vice president, Nixon had been the chairman of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council, which oversaw all covert operations of the U.S. government. As chairman of the 5412 Committee, Nixon had developed a close personal relationship with bil­lionaire Howard Hughes, who had become a "special consultant" to the National Security Council. Hughes created a business called the Summa Corporation that produced clandestine technology, such as the Glomar Explorer for the NSC, which could pick crashed Russian submarines off the bottom of the ocean so that Russian technology could be analyzed and the all-important codebooks in any such Russian submarine could be recovered from the submarine. According to Trafficante, once Nixon was confident he was going to secure the Republican Party nomination for the presidency in July 1960, he called Howard Hughes on the ultra-secure phone through which Nixon and Hughes communicated and said that he wanted Hughes to set up a team to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders of the new Cuban government. Nixon solicited Hughes's help to get this done in a manner that would keep the responsibility for such an operation completely away from the White House.

 

Trafficante informed Andy that Hughes turned that task over to one of his new attorneys, a former FBI agent by the name of Robert Maheu. Maheu then reached out to Johnny Roselli, the liaison in Las Vegas for Mafia boss Sam Giancana of Chicago. Johnny Roselli was Giancana's "bag man" in Vegas for Giancana's casinos. Maheu explained to Rosselli that it was Richard Nixon who wanted this done, but Maheu raised the fact that Castro had shut down all the Mafia's gambling casinos and prostitution houses in Cuba and had shut off the all-important supply of heroin coming through Cuba from Southeast Asia. So the Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to get rid of Castro. After hearing Maheau’s proposal for the creation of this assassination team, Roselli had flown back to Chicago and set forth this request from Nixon to Sam Giancana.

 

Giancana said that any decision like that was within Santo Trafficante's jurisdiction within the Familia. Even though Trafficante had left Cuba, he was still the Mafia boss of Havana, so Trafficante had to be the one to make such a decision. So Giancana, Roselli, and Maheu all flew down to Miami and had three strategic meetings with Santo Trafficante in July 1960 at the Fontainebleau Hotel. During the second of these three meetings, they agreed in principle that they were open to doing "this thing," but Trafficante wanted to be absolutely certain that the direction was coming from Nixon himself and that a decision of this magnitude was not simply some pipe­ dream on the part of Maheu or Howard Hughes. So Trafficante had insisted on receiving some kind of direct signal from Nixon himself for confirmation.

 

So, when they convened their third meeting, a man who used the nom de guerre of Mr. Ed joined them. This man, according to Trafficante, was Sheffield Edwards, the chief of security of the Central Intelligence Agency under Richard Nixon. Trafficante told Andy that Sheffield Edwards personally gave him the green light to go forward with this project, which satisfied Trafficante, who agreed to move forward and do what Nixon had asked.

 

However, Trafficante, being the wise guy that he was, wanted to use his old gunmen who had now been recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency to make up this special assassination team. That way, if his gunmen were caught, the trail would lead straight back to the CIA, and the agency would then have to step in and help cover up the involvement of the team. So Trafficante selected fifteen men from among his former Cuban gunmen who were then working for the CIA in Operation 40. To finance that team, Trafficante and the Mafia skimmed cash off casinos in Las Vegas. They drove the cash all the way to Miami, where it was deposited into the Miami National Bank, owned by Meyer Lansky.

 

The fifteen men were periodically picked up by a private plane from paramilitary bases throughout the Southeast and flown directly to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. They would "sign in" there but then would immediately disappear. Trafficante said these fifteen men were flown directly from Fort Huachuca down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to a large private ranch owned by Clint Murchison Jr., who owned the Dallas Texans professional football team. At the ranch in Oaxaca, these men were trained in triangular fue team assassination techniques using high-powered rifles. Funds from the Las Vegas skim that had been deposited into the Miami National Bank were wired from the Miami National Bank to the International Credit Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, and from there to Banco Internationale in Mexico City. The account in Mexico City was handled by an attorney named Manuel Ogarrio, and money drawn from that account financed the private planes, equipment, and additional expenses of the S-Force.

 

However, Richard Nixon had not been elected in November of 1960, as he and all of his associates in this assassination enterprise had assumed he would be. Instead, John F. Kennedy had been elected. But the S-Force was continued, since it had now been established to run independently from the White House-or from any other official government agency. It did, however, have CIA "handlers" made up of its former CIA trainers.

 

By the spring of 1972, Howard Hughes had become a veritable vegetable, with long fingernails and hair down his back, and a power struggle for control broke out inside his empire. Lawrence O'Brien, his longtime D.C. lobbyist evidently lost this power struggle. Within weeks of leaving the Hughes organization, O'Brien was named head of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon became terrified that Larry O'Brien, in his capacity as chief lobbyist for Howard Hughes for so many years, might have come to know about Nixon's direct involvement in putting together the S-Force assassination team, which essentially combined elements of organized crime, the anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami, and the CIA. Nixon felt that the public revelation of his direct involvement with that team was the only thing that could generate any conceivable possibility that he might lose the upcoming presidential election to George McGovern, and he wanted to find out what Larry O'Brien knew about this very sensitive issue.

 

Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and Sturgis were therefore personally selected by Nixon to burglarize the Democratic national headquarters, because they already knew about Nixon's involvement. The Watergate burglary operation was to be run by E. Howard Hunt because he had been the CIA liaison officers who had overseen and coordinated the activities of the S-Force--so they too knew about Nixon's involvement in that sensi­tive operation. To put in the wiretaps, however, they had had to secure the expertise of a former CIA specialist in that field: James McCord. Nixon then ordered the Watergate burglars to go into Larry O'Brien's office in the Watergate building, wiretap his telephones, and search for documents that might reveal the fact that O'Brien knew about Nixon's involvement in creat­ing the S-Force.

 

DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel' had in fact been burglarized more than once by that team. The wiretaps and bugs were first placed in late May. But one of those wiretaps had stopped working, so on June 17, when the team went in to replace that wiretap and to photograph documents, they were caught red-handed by a night watchman. Hunt and one G. Gordon Liddy (a high-risk-taking former FBI agent who had become part of the White House "Plumbers' Unit"), who were outside on radios, were arrested later.

 

On June 23rd, within one week of the break-in, Nixon got word that Patrick L. Gray, the new director of the FBI, was being pressured by other high-level FBI officials to investigate the origins of a check found in Bernard Barker's sports jacket pocket when he was arrested inside the Watergate headquarters of the DNC. The check had been cleared through the very same bank account in Mexico City where funds had been previously directed to the S-Force. Gray was calling to find out whether an investigation of that bank account was going to cause any trouble for the White House. When Nixon learned of Gray's inquiry, he ordered his White House chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, to go with John Ehrlichman over to the CIA and to tell Richard Helms and Vernon A. Walters, the director and deputy director of the agency, that if they didn't get the FBI out of that particular investiga­tion immediately, all "the Mexico stuff about the Bay of Pigs guys" could come out. That was the famous "smoking gun conversation" that resulted in the House Judiciary Committee's returning an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice.

 

However, when Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman went over to the CIA and personally delivered that message, Richard Helms became furious. Still, he called Patrick L. Gray that very afternoon and ordered the FBI to stand down from that part of the investigation. Pat Gray then refused to authorize FBI deputy director Mark Felt to go down to Mexico City to investigate the Ogarrio bank account.

 

After Bill Taylor's meeting with Andy Tunney, in which Andy conveyed all the politics and corruption behind the Watergate scandal, neither I nor Bill Taylor had any difficulty in deciding that Lee Bailey's firm was not the place for us.

 

However, I still had to return to Bailey's office in Boston. As soon as I arrived, Lee called me in to see him.

 

When I stepped into his office, he was all smiles.

 

"I understand you were out in South Dakota for your short vacation, at that occupation thing going on out there. Is that right?"

 

"Yes, I was," I replied.

 

"Well, which side of it were you on?"

 

I was puzzled by Lee's question. "Well, actually, I wasn't on either side." I told him that I was there on behalf of the ACLU and one of my good law school friends.

 

Lee wrinkled his brow. "Well, like what, for example, were you doing for them?"

 

Trying to put a moderate spin on what Joe and I were doing for the ACLU and AIM, I explained some of the negotiations that had been conducted with FBI and ATF officers on the site near Wounded Knee about getting food and medical supplies to the natives occupying the village.

 

After a few additional exchanges, during which Lee seemed to grow more and more frustrated with my answers, he finally said, "Jesus! Why weren't you more directly involved in helping the FBI or the Justice Department officials out there? At least that way you could have been earning some goodwill for our office there that we could translate later into helping get a better plea bargain or other deal for one of our clients."

 

We were like two ships passing in the night. Here I was, trying to get F. Lee Bailey, the most famous and most accomplished criminal defense attorney in our country, to open himself up to doing something in the public interest realm. And there was Lee Bailey, trying to see how he could extract from a historical tragedy and from an avalanche of personal suffering being heaped upon the Native American people of our country some short-term advantage that might enable him to make a further hundred grand getting some gangster a lighter sentence.

 

That was it for me. I proceeded to press Lee on why he was a lawyer at all. What was it he hoped to accomplish by doing what he did, and why didn't he seem to be more interested in justice or truth? But when I asked him these questions, he was genuinely puzzled. It was hard to believe, but he didn't seem to understand what I was even talking about.

 

He then launched into what seemed to me to be an almost rehearsed rant about why it wasn't up to us, as lawyers, to determine what was true or not true. That was up to a jury. "My job," he said, "my responsibility is to do everything I possibly can-everything that I can get away with-to get my guy off. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do. And I am paid pretty goddamned well too," he pointed out. "And I do it pretty goddamned well-better than anybody else, to hear some people tell it."

 

There it was-the absolute relativist! I knew I was done working for F. Lee Bailey...."

 

In a very recent interview, published 8/22/2024, Danny Sheehan discussed what he learned about Watergate from Santo Trafficante (starting at 38:15 of the video) :

Here's a summary of the key points from the transcript in 5 bullet points:

• The assassination of JFK was carried out by a 15-man "S Force" originally created by Richard Nixon in 1960 to target Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders. This force was later repurposed to assassinate Kennedy when he planned to dismantle nuclear warheads with Khrushchev.
• The Watergate break-in was connected to the JFK assassination. The burglars included members of the S Force, and Nixon was paranoid about information on the assassination team being exposed through the Democratic National Committee.
• Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment firm, played a significant role in establishing the CIA and had connections to both World Wars and the rise of Nazi Germany. They were part of a powerful group of "robber barons" influencing U.S. policy.
• The MK-Ultra program, run by the CIA, experimented with LSD and other methods for interrogation and potentially creating "programmable" killers. This program had connections to high-profile cases like Charles Manson and possibly Sirhan Sirhan.
• The motivations behind Watergate were complex, involving Nixon's paranoia about the JFK assassination being exposed, personal vendettas within the FBI, and CIA operatives feeling betrayed. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's downfall.

Peopl’s Advocate is available on archive.org.

I am very familiar with the theft of 98% enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant near Pittsburgh, PA in 1964-65. Here is Sheehan’s account:

page 372

” … [congressman John Dingell] established contact with some of his people in the NSA and arranged for an NSA satellite to place real-time surveillance on the NUMEC facility in Pennsylvania. NUMEC reprocessed spent enriched uranium-238, so it too had highly fissionable material. The NSA satellite’s real-time caught personnel at NUMEC loading enriched uranium-238 into containers and putting them on a Charter Oil vessel. The satellite then tracked this vessel out into the Atlantic Ocean where the satellited then photographed this vessel being boarded by crew members of an Israeli vessel. The NSA videotaped these activities and tracked these containers all the way to Israel.”

There are several problems with this account.

1. The NUMEC theft is known to have taken place in 1964-1965. The first satellite capable of real-time surveillance was the KH-11 in 1977.  In 1964-65, the best resolution was from satellites that had to physically return their film to earth which took several hours at least.

2. The NUMEC facility took highly enriched uranium (meaning a mixture of uranium isotopes 235 and 238 with the amount of 235 above it’s natural concentration of 0.7%). In the NUMEC theft case, 98% U-235 and 2% U-238. This material was fabricated into fuel elements for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. There was no reprocessing at NUMEC and the term “spent enriched uranium-238” makes no sense.

3. It would be impossible for continuous satellite surveillance of the NUMEC facility or vehicles transporting material from it because of the orbits of the satellites which might only cover a particular spot for a few minutes a day.

4. It’s doubtful that satellites of 1965 or even 1977 had the resolution to determine what is claimed.

5. If there was foreknowledge of the theft, why not send FBI agents to stop it?

6. Discovery of the NUMEC theft was a result of careful accounting of the material sent to NUMEC against what was contained in what NUMEC delivered to the Navy. The NUMEC plant had more missing material than the rest of all the other similar facilities combined.

7. By 1977, Zalman Shapiro had sold the NUMEC facility to Antlantic Richfield Corp. so the Israelis lost their supplier.

I now question the thoroughness of the research and conclusions of the book.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

3 hours ago, Keven Hofeling said:

In the following excerpt from his autobiography, Constitutional law attorney Danny Sheehan tells the story of how in 1973, after he was recruited by F. Lee Bailey to assist in the representation of Watergate burglar James McCord, he learned that F. Lee Bailey had come to represent McCord due to being on 'Index Four,' a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. In that context, Sheehan was exposed to the highly confidential attorney-client privileged account of mafia don, Santo Trafficante, detailing the origins of the S-Force, a CIA trained and funded assassination squad formed to kill Fidel Castro and his top lieutenants. According to Sheehan, Trafficante indicated it had been Richard Nixon, while serving as Vice-President in 1960, who had initiated the creation of the S-Force, which was later redeployed to assassinate President Kennedy; and due to DNC Chairman, Larry O'Brian's, close association with Robert Mayheu -- who had performed an integral role originally assembling the S-Force -- Richard Nixon in 1972 suspected that the Democratic National Committee possessed and intended to put to political use information revealing Nixon's role in the creation of the team that would ultimately assassinate President Kennedy, and that it was Nixon's desire to collect intelligence about this that served as his true motivation for ordering the Watergate break-in.

From Danny Sheehan's autobiography, "The People's Advocate":

"...It took [Bill Taylor, Sheehan's investigator] two days to get back to me. I was in the conference room at the Gold Key Motel, at a briefing of Kenneth Michael Robinson, the new attorney Lee had retained to represent Glenn W. Turner so I could work on the Watergate case. Bill came quietly into the back of the room and worked his way over to me. He asked me to step outside to speak with him.

 

Bill told me that he had spoken the night before with Andy Tunney to get Andy to tell us what was going on behind the scenes in our Watergate burglary case. Andy had said to Bill, "You two boys are nice boys. You don't want to get involved in something like this."

 

Bill had pushed back, insisting that we really wanted to know what was going on-that we needed to know-because Lee had assigned us to work on the case.

 

But Andy had refused to budge. "You two boys should just get out of Dodge," he said, even going so far as to suggest that Bill and I should consider leaving Bailey's firm entirely, to avoid becoming involved in "something like this." But he wouldn't tell Bill what the "this" was all about.

 

Bill persisted and finally got Andy to go out for a few drinks with him, knowing that that would loosen Andy up. They went to a bar far enough away that neither of them would be recognized, and Bill began buying Andy drinks. Then he started asking Andy, again, to tell him what he knew about the Watergate case. Bill told me that Andy was on the brink of tears, pleading for Bill to stop asking him what was really going on in the case. But after another couple of drinks, Andy finally began to open up.

 

Andrew J. Tunney, the former commander of the Massachusetts State Police Special Task Force on the Boston Strangler, told Bill Taylor, on the night of May 26, 1973, that F. Lee Bailey was on “Index 4." Bill and I had never heard of Index 4 before. Andy explained to Bill that Index 4 was a highly classified list of four accomplished American criminal defense attor­neys who had been covertly retained by the Central Intelligence Agency to defend active agents of the CIA if they were ever arrested in the midst of conducting a CIA covert operation inside the United States. Two of the other attorneys on Index 4 were Edward Bennett Williams and Henry Rothblatt. Rothblatt in fact ended up representing Watergate burglary co-conspirators Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzales, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Barker­ all of whom had histories of working directly for the CIA.

 

I was shocked because it was-and still is-totally illegal for agents of the Central Intelligence Agency to engage in any form of covert operation inside the United States. Such action is expressly prohibited by the National Security Act of 1947, pursuant to which the CIA was created on July 26, 1947.1 was also shocked that Lee would have agreed to this without informing any of his associates in the firm. And finally, I was shocked to be confronted by the very real possibility that our firm's representation of James McCord might therefore, indeed, be some kind of covert operation itself, and that we were unknowingly being dragged into such a covert operation without ever having been informed of this fact by Lee.

 

Andy then told Bill that when Lee had been contacted to represent James McCord, he had reached out to Santo Trafficante, the don of the Mafia in southern Florida, who was also the don in Cuba. As I would later learn, Trafficante was also a CIA asset, so Lee was convinced that Trafficante would be able to brief him on what was actually going on behind the scenes in the Watergate case. I remember being especially surprised when Bill told me this because neither Bill nor I had any idea that Lee had a line of com­munication to Santo Trafficante. We also had no idea why Lee had reason to expect that Trafficante, an organized crime figure of that magnitude, would know anything about the Watergate break-in, or that Trafficante would, in any event, have had any reason to agree to brief Lee Bailey about whatever he did know. Bill had asked Andy about this and was told that Lee Bailey was, in fact, Santo Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney. Henry "Hank" Gonzales of Florida, who held himself out to the public to be Trafficante's principal criminal defense attorney, was nothing more than a front, disguising the fact that Bailey was the real attorney for Trafficante­ and therefore for the Mafia.

 

Both Bill and I knew that Lee was the attorney for the Angiulo Brothers, a major Italian Mafia family in the North End of Boston. But this was the first time either of us had heard anything of this magnitude about Lee.

 

Andy explained to Bill that, in fact, he was the person Lee had assigned to debrief Santo Trafficante about the Watergate burglary. This was surprising because 1 thought, at the time, that Lee would have wanted as few people as possible to know whatever it was Trafficante was willing to say about that. I remember wondering why Lee would not have wanted to debrief Trafficante himself. We later learned the reason: Andy had lived in Henry Gonzales's guest house in Miami for months and had become personally familiar with Trafficante during that time. Andy had kept this a secret, for obvious reasons. He didn't want anybody to know that he even knew Santo Trafficante.

 

All these revelations were a total surprise to me, but that wasn't the most important or alarming information that Andy told Bill that night. The following is a summary of what Trafficante told Andy in 1972 about the Watergate break-in.

 

Santo Trafficante, Andy said, knew all about what had happened in the Watergate burglary because the anti-Castro Cuban types involved in the burglary-Bernard Barker and Frank Sturgis were both direct former mob associates of Trafficante in his capacity as the don of the Mafia in Havana. Trafficante had remained very dose to these men after they had fled Cuba together when Castro took control in January of 1959. Trafficante's close relationship with these anti-Castro Cubans had continued even when these men became operatives of the CIA in Miami, working on a secret project code-named Operation 40, designed by the CIA to undermine the stability of the new Cuban revolutionary government. Trafficante had maintained contact with the anti-Castro Cubans who had fled with him, particularly with Bernard Barker when he went to work for E. Howard Hunt in 1971, when Hunt operated directly out of the White House.

 

Santo Trafficante had told Andy, during this debriefing in 1972 following the burglary, that two of the Watergate codefendants, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, who had helped plan and supervise the Watergate break-ins, were former CIA "case officers" for Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and dozens of other former Trafficante Cuban Mafia associates from Havana who had fled Cuba with Trafficante in January 1959. Some of these former Trafficante associates had become covert operatives in that same Operation 40.

 

However, Trafficante then told Andy that he had personally recruited a dozen former anti-Castro Cuban Mafia associates, who had earlier been recruited as members of Operation 40 by the CIA, to become members of a team to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and five other leaders of the Cuban revolutionary government. This select group was codenamed the S-Force by Trafficante. He told Andy that the S-Force had been organized in July 1960 by then Vice President Richard Nixon.

 

During his eight years as vice president, Nixon had been the chairman of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council, which oversaw all covert operations of the U.S. government. As chairman of the 5412 Committee, Nixon had developed a close personal relationship with bil­lionaire Howard Hughes, who had become a "special consultant" to the National Security Council. Hughes created a business called the Summa Corporation that produced clandestine technology, such as the Glomar Explorer for the NSC, which could pick crashed Russian submarines off the bottom of the ocean so that Russian technology could be analyzed and the all-important codebooks in any such Russian submarine could be recovered from the submarine. According to Trafficante, once Nixon was confident he was going to secure the Republican Party nomination for the presidency in July 1960, he called Howard Hughes on the ultra-secure phone through which Nixon and Hughes communicated and said that he wanted Hughes to set up a team to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders of the new Cuban government. Nixon solicited Hughes's help to get this done in a manner that would keep the responsibility for such an operation completely away from the White House.

 

Trafficante informed Andy that Hughes turned that task over to one of his new attorneys, a former FBI agent by the name of Robert Maheu. Maheu then reached out to Johnny Roselli, the liaison in Las Vegas for Mafia boss Sam Giancana of Chicago. Johnny Roselli was Giancana's "bag man" in Vegas for Giancana's casinos. Maheu explained to Rosselli that it was Richard Nixon who wanted this done, but Maheu raised the fact that Castro had shut down all the Mafia's gambling casinos and prostitution houses in Cuba and had shut off the all-important supply of heroin coming through Cuba from Southeast Asia. So the Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to get rid of Castro. After hearing Maheau’s proposal for the creation of this assassination team, Roselli had flown back to Chicago and set forth this request from Nixon to Sam Giancana.

 

Giancana said that any decision like that was within Santo Trafficante's jurisdiction within the Familia. Even though Trafficante had left Cuba, he was still the Mafia boss of Havana, so Trafficante had to be the one to make such a decision. So Giancana, Roselli, and Maheu all flew down to Miami and had three strategic meetings with Santo Trafficante in July 1960 at the Fontainebleau Hotel. During the second of these three meetings, they agreed in principle that they were open to doing "this thing," but Trafficante wanted to be absolutely certain that the direction was coming from Nixon himself and that a decision of this magnitude was not simply some pipe­ dream on the part of Maheu or Howard Hughes. So Trafficante had insisted on receiving some kind of direct signal from Nixon himself for confirmation.

 

So, when they convened their third meeting, a man who used the nom de guerre of Mr. Ed joined them. This man, according to Trafficante, was Sheffield Edwards, the chief of security of the Central Intelligence Agency under Richard Nixon. Trafficante told Andy that Sheffield Edwards personally gave him the green light to go forward with this project, which satisfied Trafficante, who agreed to move forward and do what Nixon had asked.

 

However, Trafficante, being the wise guy that he was, wanted to use his old gunmen who had now been recruited to work for the Central Intelligence Agency to make up this special assassination team. That way, if his gunmen were caught, the trail would lead straight back to the CIA, and the agency would then have to step in and help cover up the involvement of the team. So Trafficante selected fifteen men from among his former Cuban gunmen who were then working for the CIA in Operation 40. To finance that team, Trafficante and the Mafia skimmed cash off casinos in Las Vegas. They drove the cash all the way to Miami, where it was deposited into the Miami National Bank, owned by Meyer Lansky.

 

The fifteen men were periodically picked up by a private plane from paramilitary bases throughout the Southeast and flown directly to Fort Huachuca in Arizona. They would "sign in" there but then would immediately disappear. Trafficante said these fifteen men were flown directly from Fort Huachuca down to Oaxaca, Mexico, to a large private ranch owned by Clint Murchison Jr., who owned the Dallas Texans professional football team. At the ranch in Oaxaca, these men were trained in triangular fue team assassination techniques using high-powered rifles. Funds from the Las Vegas skim that had been deposited into the Miami National Bank were wired from the Miami National Bank to the International Credit Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, and from there to Banco Internationale in Mexico City. The account in Mexico City was handled by an attorney named Manuel Ogarrio, and money drawn from that account financed the private planes, equipment, and additional expenses of the S-Force.

 

However, Richard Nixon had not been elected in November of 1960, as he and all of his associates in this assassination enterprise had assumed he would be. Instead, John F. Kennedy had been elected. But the S-Force was continued, since it had now been established to run independently from the White House-or from any other official government agency. It did, however, have CIA "handlers" made up of its former CIA trainers.

 

By the spring of 1972, Howard Hughes had become a veritable vegetable, with long fingernails and hair down his back, and a power struggle for control broke out inside his empire. Lawrence O'Brien, his longtime D.C. lobbyist evidently lost this power struggle. Within weeks of leaving the Hughes organization, O'Brien was named head of the Democratic National Committee. Nixon became terrified that Larry O'Brien, in his capacity as chief lobbyist for Howard Hughes for so many years, might have come to know about Nixon's direct involvement in putting together the S-Force assassination team, which essentially combined elements of organized crime, the anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Miami, and the CIA. Nixon felt that the public revelation of his direct involvement with that team was the only thing that could generate any conceivable possibility that he might lose the upcoming presidential election to George McGovern, and he wanted to find out what Larry O'Brien knew about this very sensitive issue.

 

Barker, Gonzales, Martinez, and Sturgis were therefore personally selected by Nixon to burglarize the Democratic national headquarters, because they already knew about Nixon's involvement. The Watergate burglary operation was to be run by E. Howard Hunt because he had been the CIA liaison officers who had overseen and coordinated the activities of the S-Force--so they too knew about Nixon's involvement in that sensi­tive operation. To put in the wiretaps, however, they had had to secure the expertise of a former CIA specialist in that field: James McCord. Nixon then ordered the Watergate burglars to go into Larry O'Brien's office in the Watergate building, wiretap his telephones, and search for documents that might reveal the fact that O'Brien knew about Nixon's involvement in creat­ing the S-Force.

 

DNC headquarters in the Watergate Hotel' had in fact been burglarized more than once by that team. The wiretaps and bugs were first placed in late May. But one of those wiretaps had stopped working, so on June 17, when the team went in to replace that wiretap and to photograph documents, they were caught red-handed by a night watchman. Hunt and one G. Gordon Liddy (a high-risk-taking former FBI agent who had become part of the White House "Plumbers' Unit"), who were outside on radios, were arrested later.

 

On June 23rd, within one week of the break-in, Nixon got word that Patrick L. Gray, the new director of the FBI, was being pressured by other high-level FBI officials to investigate the origins of a check found in Bernard Barker's sports jacket pocket when he was arrested inside the Watergate headquarters of the DNC. The check had been cleared through the very same bank account in Mexico City where funds had been previously directed to the S-Force. Gray was calling to find out whether an investigation of that bank account was going to cause any trouble for the White House. When Nixon learned of Gray's inquiry, he ordered his White House chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, to go with John Ehrlichman over to the CIA and to tell Richard Helms and Vernon A. Walters, the director and deputy director of the agency, that if they didn't get the FBI out of that particular investiga­tion immediately, all "the Mexico stuff about the Bay of Pigs guys" could come out. That was the famous "smoking gun conversation" that resulted in the House Judiciary Committee's returning an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon for obstruction of justice.

 

However, when Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman went over to the CIA and personally delivered that message, Richard Helms became furious. Still, he called Patrick L. Gray that very afternoon and ordered the FBI to stand down from that part of the investigation. Pat Gray then refused to authorize FBI deputy director Mark Felt to go down to Mexico City to investigate the Ogarrio bank account.

 

After Bill Taylor's meeting with Andy Tunney, in which Andy conveyed all the politics and corruption behind the Watergate scandal, neither I nor Bill Taylor had any difficulty in deciding that Lee Bailey's firm was not the place for us.

 

However, I still had to return to Bailey's office in Boston. As soon as I arrived, Lee called me in to see him.

 

When I stepped into his office, he was all smiles.

 

"I understand you were out in South Dakota for your short vacation, at that occupation thing going on out there. Is that right?"

 

"Yes, I was," I replied.

 

"Well, which side of it were you on?"

 

I was puzzled by Lee's question. "Well, actually, I wasn't on either side." I told him that I was there on behalf of the ACLU and one of my good law school friends.

 

Lee wrinkled his brow. "Well, like what, for example, were you doing for them?"

 

Trying to put a moderate spin on what Joe and I were doing for the ACLU and AIM, I explained some of the negotiations that had been conducted with FBI and ATF officers on the site near Wounded Knee about getting food and medical supplies to the natives occupying the village.

 

After a few additional exchanges, during which Lee seemed to grow more and more frustrated with my answers, he finally said, "Jesus! Why weren't you more directly involved in helping the FBI or the Justice Department officials out there? At least that way you could have been earning some goodwill for our office there that we could translate later into helping get a better plea bargain or other deal for one of our clients."

 

We were like two ships passing in the night. Here I was, trying to get F. Lee Bailey, the most famous and most accomplished criminal defense attorney in our country, to open himself up to doing something in the public interest realm. And there was Lee Bailey, trying to see how he could extract from a historical tragedy and from an avalanche of personal suffering being heaped upon the Native American people of our country some short-term advantage that might enable him to make a further hundred grand getting some gangster a lighter sentence.

 

That was it for me. I proceeded to press Lee on why he was a lawyer at all. What was it he hoped to accomplish by doing what he did, and why didn't he seem to be more interested in justice or truth? But when I asked him these questions, he was genuinely puzzled. It was hard to believe, but he didn't seem to understand what I was even talking about.

 

He then launched into what seemed to me to be an almost rehearsed rant about why it wasn't up to us, as lawyers, to determine what was true or not true. That was up to a jury. "My job," he said, "my responsibility is to do everything I possibly can-everything that I can get away with-to get my guy off. That's my job. That's what I get paid to do. And I am paid pretty goddamned well too," he pointed out. "And I do it pretty goddamned well-better than anybody else, to hear some people tell it."

 

There it was-the absolute relativist! I knew I was done working for F. Lee Bailey...."

 

In a very recent interview, published 8/22/2024, Danny Sheehan discussed what he learned about Watergate from Santo Trafficante (starting at 38:15 of the video) :

Here's a summary of the key points from the transcript in 5 bullet points:

• The assassination of JFK was carried out by a 15-man "S Force" originally created by Richard Nixon in 1960 to target Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders. This force was later repurposed to assassinate Kennedy when he planned to dismantle nuclear warheads with Khrushchev.
• The Watergate break-in was connected to the JFK assassination. The burglars included members of the S Force, and Nixon was paranoid about information on the assassination team being exposed through the Democratic National Committee.
• Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment firm, played a significant role in establishing the CIA and had connections to both World Wars and the rise of Nazi Germany. They were part of a powerful group of "robber barons" influencing U.S. policy.
• The MK-Ultra program, run by the CIA, experimented with LSD and other methods for interrogation and potentially creating "programmable" killers. This program had connections to high-profile cases like Charles Manson and possibly Sirhan Sirhan.
• The motivations behind Watergate were complex, involving Nixon's paranoia about the JFK assassination being exposed, personal vendettas within the FBI, and CIA operatives feeling betrayed. The scandal ultimately led to Nixon's downfall.

Thanks for posting.

An interesting version of the JFKA/Watergate miasma. 

My only comment is that I doubt the JFKA team was as large as 15 members, or even much more than three.