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City adjoining Miami that was the headquarters of the Wackenhut Corporation and the site of an ITT public relations office about which the Watergate special prosecutor questioned the CIA in 1973. | Florida, United States | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
Coral Gables is a city in Dade County, Florida, adjoining Miami.
The Wackenhut Corporation, founded in 1954 by George R. Wackenhut and three other former agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had its headquarters there until it moved to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. The Central Intelligence Agency used the company from 1961 to 1967 to give cover to officers of its Western Hemisphere Division stationed in the Miami area. On May 3, 1967, George Walker (Wackenhut) of the Coral Gables office handed the FBI a letter from a Miami man who said that before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy a Cuban in his boarding house had remarked that to kill Kennedy one had only to excite a Cuban with a high-powered rifle.12
On July 26, 1973, the office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force asked the CIA whether it had any working relationship with "the ITT Public Relations Office located at 495 Biltmore Way, Coral Gables, Florida," and whether Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy had done undercover work for ITT Corporation. The agency's Cover and Commercial Staff answered on August 7 that it had no relationship with or information on the Coral Gables office and had never discussed ITT with the Robert R. Mullen Company. ITT's public relations man for Latin America, Hal Hendrix, a former Miami journalist, pleaded guilty in 1976 to withholding information from a Senate subcommittee about his CIA contacts.3
Footnotes
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Central Intelligence Agency, "Wackenhut Corporation, SF# 493 364," memorandum for the record, July 28, 1975, JFK record 104-10130-10454; The Wackenhut Corporation, annual reports and Forms 10-K, Securities and Exchange Commission. ↩︎
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Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, memorandum of May 10, 1967, headquarters file 62-109060, section 129, p. 166. ↩︎
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Ruth, Henry S., Jr., Watergate Special Prosecution Force, letter to John S. Warner, July 26, 1973, with the reply of August 7, 1973, CIA Reading Room document C01367838; House Committee on Armed Services, Special Subcommittee on Intelligence, Inquiry into the Alleged Involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Watergate and Ellsberg Matters, 1973. ↩︎