Watergate Read Free

years ago he’d been overthrowing a government in Guatemala, and here he was now, overmanned and overfinanced for an operation to bug the phone of a party hack.
    Barker opened the driver’s door of the car, which was idling on Virginia Avenue.
    “
No hay lugar en el mesón
, Bernie,” said Hunt, getting in behind the wheel. “But I’ve got a backup plan.”
    “Any place will be fine, Eduardo,” replied Bernard Barker, who always preferred English.
    Hunt turned toward the backseat and looked at three of the men he’d just collected at the airport. Two of them were Cubans recruited by Bernie. They merely nodded. He’d heard of Sturgis, the American, but not met him. It was with Barker that he felt well acquainted and
simpático
, going back as they did all the way to Operation Zapata. He hated dragging him into this penny-ante crap, the same way he’d dragged him into the break-in last year in L.A. Now, like then, he’d be deluding Bernie—and himself!—into believing this burglary had some purpose and importance outside of whatever was in Liddy’s head, and Colson’s.
    “Bernie,” he said, as he drove the car down Virginia, “this will be a nice little piece of revenge.” He pointed to the letters, aglow with moonlight and fluorescence, affixed to the boxy white building beyond the Watergate: JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS .
    From the backseat, Sturgis followed Hunt’s pointing finger before raising a fist and shouting, too loudly for a closed car full of people,
“Brigada Dos Cinco Cero Seis!”
    Barker pursed his lips, needing no further reminder of Kennedy’s failure to support Brigade 2506 with adequate arms, air cover, or even a decent place to come ashore. More than a decade had passed since the Bay of Pigs, and even more time than that since Barker had first met Everette Howard Hunt. “Eduardo”—Barker still used the old codename—had been trying to organize a Cuban government-in-exile in Coconut Grove.
    “Coño!”
cried Sturgis from the backseat, in his Americano’s Spanish.
“Sólo ocho aviones!”
    “Yes,” Barker replied in a soothing near whisper. “We know. Only eight fucking planes.” That’s all they’d been given—plus a zero hour that fell during darkness instead of light. As Eduardo used to put it, dryly, “They apparently wanted the populace to rise in support of an invasion that wouldn’t attract any notice.”
    The car angled eastward, and Hunt continued his motivational tour. “The architecture gets even worse,” he said, pointing to the right. He was indicating, Barker realized, the State Department.
    Hunt decided to say nothing more; he was starting to feel guilty about stoking Bernie’s long grief and confusion over his adopted country’s half-hearted anti-Castroism. He was also trying to conceal the fact that he was slightly lost, unsure how to find Pennsylvania Avenue.
    He’d been lost for ten years, really, as unmoored as Bernie since the April of the invasion, his career shot down like the unsupported freedom fighters. It had been the same for anyone in the Agency associated with Operation Zapata. In his own case, what had followed were too many deskbound days at Langley writing Fodor’s travel guides for East Bloc tourism, and too many nights at home composing his Peter Ward novels, into which he displaced the derring-do that might have kept filling his own career had there been more than those eight planes in the air.
    It had been two years since he left the CIA, and God knew how many more would pass before the Agency let him publish
Give Us This Day
, his impassioned manuscript about the invasion’s promise and betrayal. Like Bernie, he had real grievances, ones that burned off stomach lining, not the pseudo-resentments of the preposterous, swaggering Liddy, who was plenty of fun when he told his tall tales amidst the carelessly stacked and more-or-less useless top-secret documents in room 16 of the EOB but who increasingly