Eugenio Rolando Martínez, Watergate burglar and CIA asset, has died
Minneola, Florida – Eugenio Rolando Martínez, one of five men whose arrest while burglarizing the Watergate complex in Washington ultimately led to president Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, died on Saturday surrounded by family in his daughter's home in the Central Florida city of Minneola. He was 98.
Martínez, a CIA contract agent who ran hundreds of covert missions from Miami to his homeland, was among four Miami Cuban exiles recruited by top Nixon aides to break into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters in May and June of 1972 along with a security coordinator for Nixon’s re-election campaign.
They were told to tap phones and look for financial connections between Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and George McGovern, Nixon's opponent in his re-election bid.
While in the Watergate office building on June 17, the men were discovered by a security guard who called police after noticing tape they had placed over door latches. Their arrests – they were caught with film, cash, gloves, lock picks, and a radio – set off a series of investigations that ultimately brought down Nixon, who resigned rather than face impeachment and was pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford.
All five burglars were convicted in the scheme, as were two of Nixon's senior aides, E Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy. Martínez, perhaps the most mysterious of the Watergate burglars, served 15 months in prison.
In a column he penned in 1974, Martínez described the scheme as a bungled affair that reminded him of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba – an ill-fated, poorly planned attempt by the CIA to spur revolution by attacking communist dictator Castro's troops with Cuban exile troops.
"I can't help seeing the whole Watergate affair as a repetition of the Bay of Pigs," he wrote. "The invasion was a fiasco for the United States and a tragedy for the Cubans. All of the agencies of the US government were involved, and they carried out their plans in so ill a manner that everyone landed in the hands of Castro – like a present."
Martínez was still on the CIA's payroll at the time of his arrest
Martínez, born in July of 1922 in Artemisa, Cuba, was a prolific asset for the CIA in the 1960s, running hundreds of missions to Cuba from Miami. Martínez’s granddaughter, Michelle Díaz, said on Monday that he conducted 365 missions in all.
Martínez, who would go on to earn his US citizenship, helped coordinate the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. And, though he denied it for years, he was still on the CIA's payroll at the time of his arrest, a fact revealed in 2016 when the CIA declassified its own 155-page report on the involvement of CIA assets in Watergate.
Two of the other three men from Miami had past ties to the CIA, and the document showed that prosecutors investigating the break-in believed Martínez was an agency spy keeping the agency abreast of Nixon’s political subterfuge.
"Martínez was still on a 100.00 [dollar] monthly retainer as an informant on the Cuban exile community in the Miami area" at the time of the break-in, stated the CIA's declassified report, obtained by Judicial Watch.
Felix Rodríguez, a former CIA officer and Cuban-American exile who was tasked in the 1960s with tracking down Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, said on Monday that Martínez was actually being paid by the CIA in case the agency needed him to captain a CIA boat kept in Miami for travel to Cuba.
"They were paying him to keep a skeleton crew in case the agency needed a quick trip to Cuba to get somebody out. That was his relationship at the time," said Rodríguez, who lives in Miami. "Everybody who went to Cuba on the infiltration teams wanted him to bring them in because they knew he would never leave them behind. He always stayed there no matter what the instruction was, risking himself to bring people out. He did that every single time. He was a friend of mine and a hero to me."
It was his work with the CIA in Cuba that introduced Martínez to Hunt, a former CIA agent who went to work for Nixon's White House in the 1970s. Martínez wrote that Hunt traveled to Little Havana in 1971 on the 10th anniversary of the invasion to meet with him at the Bay of Pigs monument and discuss an upcoming assignment.
Hunt and Liddy – another of Nixon's "plumbers" who carried out covert investigations for the president – also had Martínez break into a psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills, California, to search for dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.
Martínez received an early pardon for helping the FBI after his arrest
After his own release from prison, Martínez worked as a car salesman for Anthony Abraham on Southwest Eighth Street. He was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, becoming the only person embroiled in the Watergate scandal other than Nixon to receive a presidential pardon.
Rodríguez, the former CIA officer, said Martínez’s pardon was due to yet another covert mission he ran in Cuba for federal agents following his release from prison.
As Rodríguez tells it, Martínez, iced out by the CIA after Watergate, informed the FBI that Cuban authorities – assuming he'd be angry following his imprisonment – had approached him as a possible emissary to broker a change in diplomacy with the US and improve relations with the Miami exile community. Rodríguez said Martínez agreed to work as a double agent, meeting Cuban authorities in Mexico, Jamaica, and Cuba before returning with intelligence and cash to hand over to the FBI.
While Martínez will be known first in history books as one of the Watergate burglars, it was this work – his efforts to topple the Castro regime and end a mass exile of Cubans in Miami – that earned Martínez his reputation in his hometown.
Martínez was known by his friends in Miami as "Musculito," an endearing term for a man who still had exercise equipment in his South Beach apartment into his 90s. He was often stopped for pictures and conversation when he would go out to eat, especially in Little Havana, said his granddaughter. She said in recent years she would sometimes find him at Versailles late at night, dressed sharply and talking with friends.
"We could have 20 interruptions while we were eating and he would have a smile on his face," she said. "Whoever would call him, he would answer their questions. That's why when you Google him you see so many pictures of him."
Díaz said Martínez moved to Minneola to live with his daughter, Yolanda Martínez Toscano, after the coronavirus pandemic emerged last year. Díaz said Martínez, an avid reader, brought his books with him.
Martínez is survived by his daughter, granddaughter, and grandson, Antonio Toscano Jr.
Cover photo: IMAGO / ZUMA Wire