Coral Gables, Florida

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 FBI, had its headquarters there until it moved to Palm Beach Gardens. The CIA 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 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 prosecutor 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. 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