Cuban exile took part in disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and Watergate break-in

Some time after midnight on June 17, 1972, Eugenio Martinez and four other men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate complex to search for evidence to use against George McGovern, President Nixon’s opponent in that November’s presidential election.

As the burglars went about their business, a security guard noticed tape across the locks of several doors to keep them open. He called the police. The burglars were caught redhanded with cameras, door jimmies, lock picks, walkietalkies, US$2300 in cash and three pen-sized teargas guns. ‘‘There was no way out,’’

Martinez recalled. ‘‘We were caught. The police were very rough with us, pushing us around, tying our arms.’’

All five received prison sentences, but they were collateral damage. The break-in triggered the Watergate scandal that eventually led to Richard Nixon becoming the first and only US president to resign.

For Martinez, who has died aged 98, Nixon’s disgrace was a double disaster. As a Cuban exile he shared Nixon’s desire to overthrow Fidel Castro. He had helped to mount the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and carried out many other dangerous missions against the Cuban leader for the CIA. ‘‘I wanted to topple Castro, and unfortunately I toppled the president who was helping us,’’ lamented Martinez, the last of the five Watergate burglars to die.

Eugenio Rolando Martinez Careaga was born in Pinar del Rio, in the far west of Cuba. In the 1950s he was exiled for criticising Fulgencio Batista, the US-backed Cuban dictator. He returned home after Castro toppled Batista in the Cuban revolution, but in 1959 he was exiled again for opposing Castro’s new regime.

After settling in Miami, he became a militant member of its Castro-hating Cuban community and was recruited by the CIA. He helped to marshal the attempted invasion of Cuba by more than 1400 CIA-backed exiles in April 1961, only for them to be met and rounded up by Castro’s troops in the Bay of Pigs. ‘‘I can’t help seeing the whole Watergate affair as a repetition of the Bay of Pigs,’’ he wrote in Vanity Fair magazine in 1974. ‘‘The invasion was a fiasco for the United States and a tragedy for the Cubans.’’

Nevertheless, he continued to get agents into Cuba by boat throughout the 1960s, and to help Cubans escape. ‘‘Everyone who went to Cuba on the infiltration teams wanted [Martinez] to bring them in because they knew he would never leave them behind,’’ Felix Rodriguez, a former CIA officer and Cuban-American activist, said.

Martinez claimed to have carried out more than 350 covert missions, but he never extricated his own parents. ‘‘My bosses in the Company – the CIA – said I might get caught and tortured, and if I talked I might jeopardise other operations,’’ he explained. ‘‘So my mother and father died in Cuba. That is how orders go. I follow the orders.’’

In 1969 the CIA disbanded Martinez’s team, but kept him on a retainer and secured him US citizenship. Two years later he was summoned to meet a pipe-smoking man called ‘‘Eduardo’’ at the monument to the Bay of Pigs’ dead in Miami.

Eduardo turned out to be Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent working in the Nixon White House. Hunt recruited Martinez and three other Cuban exiles to an investigations unit nicknamed ‘‘the Plumbers’’. Their first operation was to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles in September 1971. Ellsberg was the former government official who leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War to the New York Times, and the White House wanted to discredit him.

In May 1972 Hunt told the Plumbers that

Castro was financing McGovern’s presidential campaign. He ordered them to break into the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters to search for evidence and install listening devices. They did so on the night of May 28. On June 16 Hunt ordered them to break in again to repair a listening device and seek more evidence.

The burglars all pleaded guilty so they would not have to reveal details of their operation. Martinez was sentenced to 40 months in prison for conspiracy, theft and wiretapping. He served 15 before being released on parole.

After his release he found work as a car salesman and real estate agent in Miami. In 1977 the Plumbers were each awarded $50,000 from the long-defunct Nixon campaign in an out-of-court settlement. In 1983 Ronald Reagan awarded Martinez a presidential pardon – the only Watergate figure to receive one apart from Nixon himself.

When the pandemic erupted he went to live with one of his four children in central Florida. She survives him along with two other daughters and a son. It was not where he wanted his life to end. ‘‘I want to die in Cuba, the land where I was born,’’ he said. –

‘‘I wanted to topple Castro, and unfortunately I toppled the president who was helping us.’’