E. Howard Hunt

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Everette Howard Hunt (born October 9, 1918 in East Hamburg, New York, United States) worked for the CIA and later the White House under President Richard Nixon. Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, had engineered the Watergate first break-in. He subsequently was fingered in the ensuing Watergate Scandal and was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.

Hunt, with Liddy and others, was one of the White House's "plumbers" — a secret team of operatives charged with fixing "leaks." Information disclosures had proved an embarrassment to the Nixon administration when defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent a series of documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times.

During World War II, Hunt served in the U.S. Navy, United States Army Air Forces and finally, the Office of Strategic Services. An employee of the CIA from 1949 to 1970, in 1949 he established the first post-war CIA station in Mexico City. During this period he wrote several novels under his own name [East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949) and The Violent Ones (1950)] and, more famously, several spy novels under an array of pseudonyms.

Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy's lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us this Day, he wrote: "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away." (p.13-14)

Hunt organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building and was also found to be responsible for a break-in at the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

JFK's assassination

The Rockefeller Commission of the U.S. Congress in 1974 regarded Hunt and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis as suspects in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Support for this claim came from a figure from the 1960s counterculture, Kerry Thornley, who believed he had on several occasions from 1961-63 conversed with Hunt (whom Thornley claimed used the alias "Gary Kirstein") regarding plans to assassinate John F. Kennedy while Thornley had been living in New Orleans. Newsweek magazine reported and printed photographs of two men bearing the likeness of Hunt and Sturgis who were detained at the grassy knoll shortly after the assassination. The Newsweek article stated the official reports that the men were released and were only "railroad bums" who would find shelter sleeping in the boxcars of the trains located near the grassy knoll. According to Newsweek the men were released without further inquiry. The Newsweek article asks the reader to make their own judgement from the pictures published.

Hunt's wife Dorothy was killed in the December 8, 1972, plane crash of United Airlines Flight 533 in Chicago. Congress, the FBI, and the NTSB investigated the crash but did not find any basis for determining that the crash was not purely accidental. $10,000 was found in Dorothy Hunt's handbag, and was generally regarded as part of the "hush money" paid to Watergate defendants in an attempt to procure their silence regarding White House involvement.

In 1981, Hunt won $650,000 in a libel suit against Liberty Lobby, a right-wing organization, after it published an article accusing him of being involved in the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. The suit was overturned on appeal. The author, Mark Lane, defended Liberty Lobby in a second trial in 1985, and he successfully overturned the original libel award. Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

In addition to his work at the CIA—which included nontrivial roles in the Guatemala coup and the Bay of Pigs Invasion—Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lives in Miami, Florida.

A fictionalized account of Hunt's role in the Bay of Pigs operation appears in Norman Mailer's 1991 novel, Harlot's Ghost.

External links

• Slate interview
• CNN interview
• interview
• Video of Nixon discussing Hunt in the Watergate tapes
• Remote Viewing Timeline