Bernard Barker

Bernard Leon Barker (alias: Macho ; born March 17, 1917 as a US citizen in Cuba , † June 5, 2009 in Miami , Florida ) was an American agent .

Life

Bernard L. Barker volunteered for the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor in 1941 . He spent 16 months in German captivity during the Second World War. Then he was a member of the Cuban secret police under Fulgencio Batista . The Cuban secret police at the time were notorious for torture and murder (approx. 20,000 victims). After Fidel Castro came to power in 1958, Barker was recruited by the American Embassy in Havana for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

He worked under the code name "Macho" for E. Howard Hunt (who in turn under the code name "Eduardo") for Cuban fighters against Castro. In this context, he was also involved in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 .

On April 16, 1971, Hunt enlisted Barker for the illegal "plumbers" force of the White House. Barker, along with two other Cubans, Eugenio Martínez and Felipe DeDiego, under the supervision of Gordon Liddy and Hunt, took part in the break-in in the practice of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist , Dr. Lewis Fielding, part. In Fielding's practice, however, they only came across Ellsberg's name in a notebook. Therefore the break-in did not bring anything.

Barker's role in the Watergate affair

Barker was one of five men at breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington Watergate complex were taken. He was also a paid CIA agent during the break-in.

In April and May 1972 , G. Gordon Liddy, serving as Counsel to the Finance Committee of the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP), used Barker's private bank account to collect five disreputable election donation checks totaling $ 114,000 that the committee received had to redeem. This included a $ 25,000 donation from Dwayne Andreas, chief executive of Archer Daniels Midlands, that Andreas had given to CRP through his middleman, Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Liddy then used the cash withdrawn from Barker's account to fund his illegal activities such as the two Watergate break-ins on May 28 and June 17, 1972.

After Barker's arrest at the second Watergate break-in, the FBI came across suspicious transactions on Barker's personal account during a routine financial review of the arrested. The FBI then wanted to interrogate Dahlberg, whose name was on the cashed check. Dahlberg, who had no idea what the money coming over him had been used for, had himself denied to the FBI, but alerted the CRP to the ongoing investigation. These investigations aroused great concern among the initiated staff of President Richard Nixon in the CRP and the White House , who feared that a connection between the Watergate intruders and the president's re-election campaign could be drawn through Barker and Dahlberg.

Personally, on the morning of June 23, 1972 , his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, briefed Nixon of this danger and reported on a joint proposal by CRP Director John N. Mitchell and Nixon's legal advisor, John Dean , aimed at completing the FBI investigation into Dahlberg / Andreas - Prevent checks. Mitchell and Dean suggested that the CIA should be made to signal to the FBI that these financial transactions touched on "national security" issues and were therefore taboo from an investigative point of view. Nixon, who quickly responded to this simulation game, suggested that Barker's role in the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion should be used to convince the CIA leadership around Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters that she actually had a lot to lose in the Watergate investigation. Although Helms asserted that the CIA had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in, he and Walters initially got involved in the charade and actually asked the FBI to stop an interrogation of Dahlberg. The tape recording of Nixon's and Haldeman's conversations in the Oval Office became Nixon's most incriminating piece of evidence in the entire Watergate affair . When they were released in the summer of 1974, the tapes of these conversations soon became known as the “smoking gun” to discriminate against the President who was guilty of obstruction of justice. A few days later, Richard Nixon was the first and so far only US president to step down from office.

Meanwhile, FBI chief L. Patrick Gray accepted the CIA interdict of June 23, 1972 to investigate the Dahlberg check cashed in Barker's account, while his deputy Mark Felt (whom the White House ironically misjudged as particularly cooperative) made himself the advocate of that FBI agents who continued to press for questioning Dahlberg. Since nothing more happened in this regard for a few weeks, Felt, as an informant "Deep Throat", passed on corresponding, but only very vague, information to his contact Bob Woodward of the Washington Post , which in the film version The Untouchables in the catchy ( but probably unhistorical) command “Follow the money!”. Woodward took Felt's tips seriously and was now busy trying to find out more about the finances of the Watergate burglars. His colleague, Carl Bernstein , was given the name of Dahlberg, whose check had landed on Barker's account , through the Miami District Attorney's office , where Barker lived. Called by Woodward, Dahlberg admitted after some hesitation that he had given the check in question to Maurice Stans , head of the finance committee for the re-election of the president, but by no means to Barker. This admission was a major breakthrough in the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate affair .

Barker died of lung cancer in Miami in 2009 at the age of 92 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The recordings of the three "Smoking Gun" conversations by Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972 can now be heard online. See: Richard M. Nixon - The Watergate Tapes . lib.berkeley.edu. Retrieved June 5, 2012.
2. ^ Bernard Barker dies at 92; Watergate burglar was a CIA operational. In: latimes.com. June 6, 2009, accessed February 16, 2014 . 

Sources and literature

• Fred Emery. Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon . New York: Touchstone, 1990.
• Stanley L. Kutler. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon . New York: Knopf, 1990.
• G. Gordon Liddy. Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980.
• J. Anthony Lukas. Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years . New York: Viking, 1976.
• Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The Watergate Affair . Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1974. Original edition: Id. All the President's Men . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.