Bernard Barker was one of the notorious team of Cuban-American Watergate “plumbers” whose botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington led directly to the resignation of Richard Nixon as US President.
Barker was found crouching under a desk at the Democrats’ Watergate office building at 2am on June 17, 1972, with four colleagues wearing blue surgical gloves, surrounded by electronic bugging and burglary equipment. His address book, seized by the police, contained a notation “W. H. H. H.” — a reference that directly incriminated a White House CIA consultant, Howard Hunt, with the break-in. Hunt was working for Creep, the committee to re-elect President Nixon.
Barker, born in Havana to an American father and a Cuban mother, was a steadfast enemy of the Cuban President Fidel Castro and was selected by Hunt to perform illegal clandestine operations for the Nixon Administration. He in turn recruited three anti-Castro colleagues who became known as the “plumbers” — a hapless group whose incompetent operations led to America’s biggest political scandal.
The members of the group were originally recruited to stop the leaking of information from the Nixon Administration at the time of the Vietnam War. They were formed in response to the publication of the secret Pentagon Papers that detailed US involvement in Vietnam, and their task was to discredit a former Pentagon official, Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the papers to The New York Times.
In an attempt to find unsavoury information about Ellsberg they conducted a clumsy, criminal and highly unsuccessful burglary of the office of the Los Angeles psychiatrist treating Ellsberg. They left empty-handed. Despite this failure they next turned their attention to Watergate, where they and a fifth member of the group — James McCord, a security chief for Nixon’s re-election campaign — were caught red-handed trying to wiretap the Democrats’ headquarters.
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A piece of tape used by the “plumbers” to cover the lock of a door leading to the Democrat headquarters office was spotted by a security guard. He called the police who arrested the five burglars. Despite the “plumbers’ ” links with the White House, officials of the Nixon Administration were unable to free them and attempts to cover up the scandal eventually led to the downfall of the President. Barker spent 18 months in jail for his role in the affair, along with his colleagues, and many senior Nixon officials involved in the cover-up were sentenced or disgraced.
Barker was born in Havana in 1917. His father was a wealthy American industrialist. He was sent to school in Long Island and after high school he returned to Cuba to study civil engineering at Havana University. After Pearl Harbor he joined the US Air Force and, as a bombardier on a B17 Flying Fortress, was shot down over Germany and spent 18 months as a prisoner of war.
Back in Havana he became a member of the Cuban secret police under the Batista regime and after the Castro revolution he escaped to Miami. In 1961 he became an undercover operator for the CIA. He helped to recruit and organise an exile Cuban military force in Miami known as Brigade 2506, and was involved with Howard Hunt in masterminding the disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs, a CIA attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. Barker landed on a beach southeast of Havana where the brigade came under heavy fire and sustained big losses but he escaped uninjured and returned to Miami.
A decade later his old CIA colleague Hunt turned up in Miami to recruit him for the Special Investigation Unit for the Nixon White House. Apart from his involvement in the “plumbers” unit, Barker’s Miami bank account was also used to funnel illegal contributions to Creep.
After his release from prison in 1974 Barker worked as a Miami building inspector but was fired for slacking on the job. He then became a city zoning consultant but was charged with perjury in 1983 although he was acquitted at trial.
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In July 1945 Barker married the daughter of a prominent Havana newspaper publisher and two years later his daughter, Marielena, was born. They moved to Miami in 1960 and according to his daughter he became a hero to the fervently anti-communist Cuban ?migr? community after his role in the Bay of Pigs. “Everywhere he went in Miami, women chased him,” she said. Barker left his wife — who died last year — and married three more times.
At his Miami home, Barker kept a picture of Hunt on the wall. Interviewed in 1997 about his role in Watergate, Barker said: “I think it’s time that people forgot the whole damn thing. That was a sad time.”
Barker was unrepentant about his role in Watergate, asserting: “I was doing my duty”, but he conceded to one reporter that “Washington was a place to stay away from. Cubans don’t do very well there”. Barker outlived all the “plumbers” with the exception of Eugenio Martinez.
He is survived by his daughter and his fourth wife, Dora Maria Barker.
Bernard Barker, CIA operative and Watergate burglar, was born on March 17, 1917. He died on June 5, 2009, aged 92