The last surviving Watergate burglar, whose actions ultimately resulted in President Richard Nixon’s resignation, has died.
Eugenio Martinez, a Cuban exile who worked for the CIA, died at the age of 98 on Jan. 30 at his daughter’s home in Minneola, Florida, according to the Children of the Brigade 2506. A cause of death was not revealed.
Martinez was a part of the five-man team who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. He ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping charges the following January. He served about 15 months in prison, which is about as long as the other burglars.
“I can’t help seeing the whole Watergate affair as a repetition of the Bay of Pigs,” he told Harper’s magazine in 1974. “The invasion was a fiasco for the United States and a tragedy for the Cubans.”
In Martinez’s recounting, he was tricked into participating in the burglaries by E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who helped coordinate the Bay of Pigs invasion and later became a White House fixer for Nixon’s administration.
A few months after they met in 1971, Hunt enlisted Martinez in a “national security” job that allegedly involved a traitor, but it was actually an attempt to break into the office of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding. The objective was to dig up dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, one of the doctor’s patients, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Martinez was also found guilty of conspiracy for his role in the Fielding break-in, but that charge was overturned on appeal.
Hunt recruited him and Bernard L. Barker, a fellow Bay of Pigs veteran who participated in the first break-in, for a second job a year later, this one at the Watergate office building. The men were arrested by plainclothes police officers that night.
“There was no floor plan of the building; no one knew the disposition of the elevators, how many guards there were, or even what time the guards checked the building … There weren’t even any contingency plans,” Martinez told Harper’s.
Martinez received a pardon in 1983 from President Ronald Reagan. He was the only person involved in the Watergate scandal to receive a pardon other than Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford.
He and three other of the burglars sued former Nixon campaign officials, accusing them of tricking the men into believing they were working to ensure national security, and they reached a $50,000 apiece out-of-court settlement in 1977.
