BERNARD BARKER, an unrepentant Watergate burglar whose arrest at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17th, 1972, helped set in motion the chain of events that led to the resignation of US president Richard Nixon in 1974, died last Friday of lung cancer at a Miami veterans hospital. He was 92.
Barker, who was born in Cuba, was a one-time undercover operative for the CIA and helped organise the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, an ill-fated attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
During the planning for the Bay of Pigs, he met Howard Hunt, a CIA officer who later became a central figure in the Watergate conspiracy. In 1971 Hunt hired Barker and others to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who released documents known as the Pentagon Papers, divulging secrets about US involvement in Vietnam.
A year later, Barker recruited three Miamians for the Watergate caper, in which they planned to place eavesdropping devices in phones at the Democratic headquarters. Plainclothes police officers found them hiding behind a desk at 2.30am. Barker was carrying $5,000 in crisp $100 bills.
A fifth man arrested with them, James McCord jnr, was a security consultant to Nixon’s campaign organisation, the committee to re-elect the president. Barker served 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to wiretapping and theft. “It’s the only felony I was ever convicted of,” he later said.
After his release, investigators learned that Barker had deposited more than $100,000 in his Miami bank account from Nixon fundraisers. He spent 33 days in jail for misusing his notary public’s seal in cashing one of the cheques.
Barker, who served in the US army air forces during the second World War, never apologised for his Watergate involvement. “I see no difference between this and being a bombardier,” he said in 1992. “I was doing my duty.”
After Watergate, Barker worked as a housing inspector and zoning consultant in Miami.
In 1983, he was acquitted of perjury on a technicality after being charged with making payoffs to zoning commissioners.
– ( Washington Postservice)