Hal Hendrix

Hal Hendrix was a newspaperman who became director of public relations for Latin America at International Telephone and Telegraph. By his own testimony he began as a reporter on the Kansas City Star, was Latin American editor of the Miami News and then Latin American correspondent for Scripps-Howard, and joined ITT in September 1967. He worked from Buenos Aires until the middle of 1970, when he moved to New York. He reported to Keith Perkins and through him to the senior vice president Edward Gerrity. Robert Berrellez, in Buenos Aires, reported to him.¹

The Memoranda of 1970

On September 17, 1970, two weeks after Salvador Allende won a plurality in Chile, Hendrix and Berrellez sent headquarters a memorandum recommending that ITT and other companies "pump some advertising into Mercurio," bring back onto the payroll some twenty radio and television propagandists formerly supported by "the Matte and Edwards groups," pay for a relocation center in Mendoza or Buenos Aires for the families of "key persons involved in the fight," and press the U.S. Information Service to distribute the editorials of El Mercurio abroad. Gerrity informed the chairman, Harold Geneen, that the strategy in the Hendrix memorandum was the best course. The columnist Jack Anderson published the company's internal papers in March 1972.¹

Watergate

On July 26, 1973, the deputy Watergate special prosecutor, Henry Ruth, wrote to the acting general counsel of the CIA, John Warner, that "several questions have arisen in the course of our investigation of Watergate related matters concerning International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and the persons who were employed by Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Bernard Barker." The first asked whether six men had "been employed by or associated with the CIA": Felipe de Diego, Pablo Fernandez, Angelo Ferrer, Hiram Gonzalez, Humberto Lopez, and Hal Hendrix. The others asked whether the agency knew of undercover activities by ITT against the Chilean government in the United States, of "any type of arrangements between ITT and the Mullen Company," of any working relationship with "the ITT Public Relations Office located at 495 Biltmore Way, Coral Gables, Florida," and of any intelligence or undercover work performed for ITT by Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy. Warner sent the letter to William Colby with a note that the questions would go to Bill Nelson and be cross-checked with the Office of Security. The agency's Cover and Commercial Staff answered the third and fourth questions on August 7: it had never discussed ITT with the Mullen firm, whose brochures did not list ITT as a client, and had no relationship with or information on the Coral Gables office. No answer to the questions about Hendrix, about ITT and Chile, or about Hunt and Liddy has been released.²

The Senate Testimony

Hendrix testified to the Senate subcommittee on multinational corporations on March 21, 1973. Asked the source of his report to ITT that Ambassador Edward Korry had been given "the green light" to act in President Richard Nixon's name against Allende, he said it was "a Chilean who was a professional acquaintance of mine," highly placed in the Christian Democratic Party. CIA cables later showed that the information came from the agency's station chief in Santiago and in part from the ambassador. A CIA officer, Jonathan Hanke, recorded on March 22 after talking with an ITT official that Hendrix had been asked whether he worked in any way for the agency and "denied such a relationship three times."³

On November 30, 1976, in the federal court in Miami, Hendrix pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of withholding information from the subcommittee. He was fined 100 dollars and given a suspended sentence of one month in return for his cooperation. The Department of Justice lawyer Walter May told the court, on the basis of CIA files and interviews with agency officials, that Hendrix had "informed the CIA about his intention to withhold from the committee the fact that he had been in contact with the CIA." The Washington Post described him as a Pulitzer Prize winner, then 54, living in Miami.³

When the department charged Gerrity and Berrellez on March 20, 1978, with perjury and obstruction of that inquiry, one count against Gerrity was that he had encouraged Hendrix, named as an unindicted co-conspirator, to testify falsely. The government abandoned both prosecutions in early 1979 after the defense demanded classified material.¹⁴