Remember that group of hardcore CIA agents? We know who some of them were: James McCord, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and others. If those names sound familiar, it’s because they were all Watergate burglars—the “plumbers”—in the infamous scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. Even if you disbelieve every other theory about the JFK assassination, you have to concede this is one of the oddest facts of all.

In the 1950s, many of the characters in this tale worked together in the most secretive areas of the CIA. As vice president, Nixon was a close liaison to the agency. So how did Hunt and Sturgis come to be recruited by Nixon’s re-election committee to break into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building? [Watch Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura on truTV]

Coincidence?

True to the CIA code, Nixon maintained plausible deniability about any of its operations. But many researchers believe he was intimately involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. After his razor-thin margin of victory in the 1968 election, Nixon—or the forces around him—wanted to make sure that any nasty facts about his past would stay buried. It was believed that the Democratic National Committee had documents pertaining to Nixon and the Bay of Pigs, so the burglary was hatched to retrieve them. Whether Nixon knew about the caper in advance is in question.

CIA agent and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt
(Getty)In 2007, a man named Saint John Hunt gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine. He said his father had made a startling deathbed confession, which Saint John tape recorded. His father was E. Howard Hunt, CIA spy and convicted Watergate burglar. The elder Hunt told his son he had knowledge of the plot against Kennedy, and revealed the operation was code-named “The Big Event.” Once again, no matter how you feel about the myriad theories of the assassination, you have to ask yourself: Why would an 88-year-old man, dying in a hospital bed, lie to his son? To this day, the mass media ignore the story and the direct evidence of E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession. And so, even as the evidence grows, the mystery remains.