Shane O'Sulllvan first burst on the scene of JFK Research with remarkable footage of people walking around the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after the assassination of RFK
Sullivan showed the film to a number of people who were knowledgeable about the CIA's JMWAVE station, including one of the US Army Ranger assigned to the JMWAVE station to train the anti-Castro Cuban commandos in paramilitary tactics Captain Bradley Ayers, and a former State Department officer who served at the American Embassy in Havana when Castro took power.
Both men, and I believe someone else who should have known better, identified two of the men in the Ambassador film as former JMWAVE CIA officers Gordon Campbell - head of Maritime Operations, and David Morales, head of covert operations against Cuba.
Two respected journalists David Talbot and Jefferson Morley were assigned by a major mainstream media publication out of New York to investigate, and they found Gordon Campbell had died in 1962, so he couldn't have been at the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1968.
I don't think this was just a simple mistake, and I want to know where Shane got the film in the first place?
And why he thought two men from Bouliva Watch company were former CIA JMWAVE officers?
I think it was a determined effort by the Dealey Plaza Clean-Up Crew (DPCU) to disgrace and marginalize both men, especially Ayers, who fills in many of the details of JMWAVE and names names
US Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers, in his book "The Zenith Secret," distinctly recalls Campbell meeting with him in early 1964, directing him how to shut down the covert commando operations that he had trained the Cubans to undertake, that LBJ had called off. If that wasn't Gordon Campbell, who was it?
Ayers first arranged to have his first book - "The War that Never Was," to an Indiana publisher whose legal attorney was former CIA officer William Harvey, who RFK had fired as director of the Cuban Task Force W, and replaced him with Desmond FitzGerald, who took over the anti-Castro Cuban covert operations. When I asked Ayers what he wrote that was edited out of his first book (ostensibly by Harvey), he said all references to his boss Gordon Campbell - head of Maritime operations, were removed.
Which is much like the removal of all references to Jack Crichton, except the Index, in Roger Stone's 2013 book The Man Who Killed JFK (LBJ).
After the murder of JFK, the anti-Castro Cuban commandos at JMWAVE, paid and trained to kill Castro, were slowly - and quietly moved into other operations in the Congo, Vietnam and Central America
In the late 1970s, Eugenio Martinez was quoted by Taylor Branch (in Esquire) that "I took many guns to Cuba, high powered rifles with scopes that were not to be used for hunting rabbits."
And its amazing that Martinez is still alive and won't talk about his role in Watergate or his 300 plus infiltration missions to Cuba, delivering teams of commandos and assassins, some of whom we now know redirected their fire to JFK in Dallas.
AND NOW DIRECT FROM THE WASHINGTON POST:
Shane O’Sullivan is a documentary
filmmaker, senior lecturer in film making at Kingston University, London and
author of the new book, “Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA."
|
The Cuban spy and Watergate burglar who won a
presidential pardon
How Cuba and the Kennedy assassination led to the
pardon of Rolando Eugenio Martínez
By Shane O’Sullivan
December 3 at 6:00 AM
In anticipation of the Mueller report, political
commentators and historians have drawn numerous parallels with Watergate and
the impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon. A month after
Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned him. But
history has forgotten the only other man granted a presidential pardon for his
role in the Watergate crimes, and why the pardon was given.
Watergate burglar Rolando Eugenio Martínez was a
veteran of more than 300 infiltration missions into Cuba for the CIA during the
secret war on Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. He was also the only Watergate
burglar still on the agency’s payroll at the time of the break-in.
He was recruited for the Watergate operation by E.
Howard Hunt, the former CIA liaison to the Cuban “government in exile” in Miami
before the Bay of Pigs invasion. By the summer of 1971, Hunt had retired from
the agency and taken up a new job as a security consultant for the Nixon White
House.
Incensed by the publication of the Pentagon Papers,
Nixon ordered a smear campaign against whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, so Hunt
recruited Martínez and two other Cubans to break into the office of Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, Calif. Their goal? To find embarrassing secrets
that could destroy Ellsberg’s reputation in the press. Hunt subsequently
employed an expanded Cuban team to break into the Watergate offices of the
Democratic National Committee in May and June 1972.
Amid rumors that Democratic presidential candidate
George McGovern had financial support from Cuba, Hunt sent Martínez into DNC
headquarters to find and photograph documentary evidence of collusion between
Democrats and Castro. Martínez believed the Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins
were “national security” operations being run through Hunt at the White House
with the blessing of the CIA. After all, the agency was still paying Martínez a
retainer of a hundred dollars a month to report on Cubans of intelligence
interest arriving in Miami, and he had repeatedly told his case officer about
his contact with Hunt.
After serving 15 months in jail for his part in the
break-in, Martínez returned to Miami on parole in 1974 and was warned by former
CIA colleagues that Cuban intelligence might try to recruit him. Three years
later, in May 1977, the Cuban pitch came. Thinking Martínez was embittered by
his Watergate experience, the Cuban intelligence service (Direccion General de
Inteligencia — DGI) requested a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica.
Martínez, however, remained loyal to the U.S.
government and reported the approach to the CIA through agency veteran Felix
Rodriguez. He was told to contact the FBI, who approved a double-agent mission
to infiltrate Cuban intelligence. After meetings in Mexico and Jamaica,
Martínez sailed to Cuba on Castro’s Bluebird yacht and met Interior Minister
José Abrantes. He was debriefed for several days in Havana and given a sum of
money. According to Rodriguez, the Cubans wanted Martínez to use his heroic
status in the Cuban exile community in Miami to support the joint efforts of
Cuban exile banker Bernardo Benes and the new Carter administration to
reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Instead, Martínez shared the Cuban plans with the
FBI, securing himself a presidential pardon from Ronald Reagan in 1983. Reagan
denied similar requests from Hunt and Nixon’s deputy campaign chief, Jeb
Magruder, causing many to suspect that Martínez’s pardon was a political move
intended to strengthen Reagan’s popularity with Cuban voters in Miami ahead of
his 1984 reelection campaign.
Only those closest to Martínez in intelligence
circles knew the role his secret mission to Cuba had played in Reagan’s
decision to grant clemency. And Martínez’s mission had an intriguing subplot that
threatened the CIA’s very existence at the time. The agency initially suspected
that the Cuban pitch to Martínez was part of a broader propaganda campaign to
implicate the CIA in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and further
damage its morale and reputation after a series of scandals.
Kennedy had initiated his own back-channel diplomacy
with Castro in the final months of his life, and his death was being
reinvestigated by the House Select Committee on Assassinations at the time of
the Cuban approach to Martínez. One of the committee’s key witnesses was Cuban
exile leader Antonio Veciana, who told investigators that he and his CIA case
officer, Maurice Bishop, had met Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas two months before
the Kennedy assassination.
In April 1977, one month before approaching
Martínez, Cuban intelligence had met another FBI double agent in Mexico City:
Felix Zabala Mas, Veciana’s close friend and business partner. Together, the
Cuban exiles had previously mounted two unsuccessful assassination attempts
against Castro — with a bazooka in Havana in 1961 and with a gun hidden in a
camera in Chile 10 years later. Cuban intelligence thought they had “turned”
Zabala Mas against his friend. They hoped that their former enemy could give
them the inside track on Veciana’s congressional testimony, Castro
assassination plots and current anti-Castro terrorist activity.
Declassified FBI and CIA documents reveal, however,
that the Cubans had been deceived by an elaborate plot, designed by Veciana to
sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s push to restore relations with Cuba. Veciana
scripted Zabala’s approach to Cuban intelligence and what he divulged in
subsequent meetings, aiming to incite Castro to publicly rail against the CIA
assassination plots, damage relations with the United States and establish
Veciana’s name as a CIA agent. Castro refused to take the bait, however, and
while efforts at detente floundered in 1977, Castro lived to see the
restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba in 2015.
Veciana survived a Cuban assassination attempt in
1979, and both he and Martínez lived to see the death of Castro. Martínez is
now 96 and rues that his covert operations failed to free Cuba and resulted in
the “loss of two presidents” — the assassination of Kennedy, which he believes
was an act of revenge by Castro, and the resignation of Nixon.
A genial character, Martínez refuses to discuss
anything that didn’t “come out” during his CIA-approved Watergate testimony,
like the key to a DNC secretary’s desk drawer that he tried to hide from
arresting officers in the early hours of June 17, 1972. When I asked him
recently why he had the key that night, he told me with a chuckle, “I don’t
remember and I don’t want to remember. I want to be consistent with what I said
before. I don’t want it to come out, I’m sorry.” His undiminished loyalty to
the intelligence community has repaid the trust shown in him by Reagan 35 years
ago. The file detailing who recommended his pardon remains classified, and beyond
what he told Watergate prosecutors, his secrets remain sealed.
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