The Spy in the Cold

"Well, I'm sorry but I don't believe you," said Federal Judge John J. Sirica. He was addressing four of the Watergate defendants, and what he did not believe was their claim that they could not remember who had supplied them with money. Even sums as high as $114,000, they said, simply turned up in brown manila envelopes from none knew where. Despite the judge's sharp questioning, the four insisted last week on pleading ignorance-and guilt. That reduced the number of defendants from seven to two and also reduced the likelihood that the trial would ever disclose who sanctioned the conspiracy to bug Democratic Party headquarters last June.

The four-three of whom are Cubans from Miami-were talked into pleading guilty, TIME has learned, by the same man who recruited them into the conspiracy in the first place: E. Howard Hunt, the former CIA official who had pleaded guilty himself a week earlier. Hunt promised his four confederates that unidentified "friends" would offer each defendant up to $1,000 for every month he spent in prison, with more money to be paid at the time of his release (TIME, Jan. 22).

The guilty plea by the four defendants staved off a prospective courtroom uproar-testimony that Hunt had told them the Watergate bugging had been approved by the White House, specifically by two presidential advisers

former Attorney General John

Mitchell, then head of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and Charles W. Colson, who at the time was on the White House staff as special counsel to the President.

Castro. Hunt's influence over the four dates back to 1961, when Hunt was a leading CIA official engaged in planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. At that time, the four men were convinced that Hunt spoke secretly for the U.S. Government; apparently they still are. In 1972, when Hunt recruited them into the Watergate conspiracy, he grandly told them: "It's got to be done. My friend Colson wants it. Mitchell wants it." Colson is in fact an old friend of Hunt's; it was he who got Hunt onto the White House staff in 1971 as a $100-a-day consultant. Hunt also told the four that their old enemy Fidel Castro was sending money indirectly to the Democratic Party in the hope that a McGovern victory would soften the U.S. attitude toward Cuba.

After the Watergate arrests, Hunt became more cautious, referring to Administration officials merely as "my people." He insisted that his people were prepared to put up plenty of money for the defense of the arrested men.

Of the $35,000 Hunt is known to have received from his people, however, only about $8,000-or $2,000 apiece-has reached the four defendants. Yet the four men do not appear to be displeased with the arrangement. To have worked with Hunt, one of them told the court, had been "the greatest honor." —"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me." In an interview with TIME Correspondent David Beckwith, E. Howard Hunt quoted those mocking lines from George Orwell's 1984, and then he added defensively: "There was none of that in any operation I ever ran. Nobody above or below me was ever sold out. I protect the people I deal with."