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E. Howard Hunt

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Everette Howard Hunt, Jr.
File:Huntred.jpg
StatusDeceased
Occupation(s)CIA agent, author
Spouse(s)Dorothy Louise Wetzel, Laura E. Martin
ChildrenSaint John Hunt, David Hunt
Parent(s)Everette Howard Hunt Sr. and Ethel Jean Totterdale
Criminal chargeConspiracy, burglary, illegal wiretapping
Penalty33 month imprisonment

Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. (October 9 1918 - January 23 2007) was an American author and spy. He worked for the CIA and later the White House under President Richard Nixon. Hunt, with G. Gordon 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.

Hunt, along with Liddy, engineered the first Watergate burglary. In the ensuing Watergate Scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.

Early life and career

Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States. A 1940 graduate of Brown University, Hunt during World War II served in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo, United States Army Air Forces, and finally, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which he worked for in China [1] . During and after the war, he also wrote several novels under his own name—East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949) (with a hero named "Hank Sturgis"), and The Violent Ones (1950)—and, more famously, several spy novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davies and David St. John.

CIA and anti-Castro efforts

Warner Bros. had just bought rights to Hunt's novel Bimini Run when he joined the CIA in October 1949. He became station chief in Mexico City in 1950. He brought along fellow rookie officer William F. Buckley, Jr., working within the Mexican student movement. Buckley and Hunt remained life-long friends.

There, Hunt helped devise Operation PBSUCCESS, the covert plan to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the elected president of Guatemala. Following assignments in Japan and Uruguay, Hunt was assigned to create a provisional government to take over after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The failure of that project damaged his career.

After the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a personal assistant to Allen Dulles.[2] Tad Szulc states that Hunt was asked to assist Dulles in writing a book, The Craft of Intelligence, that Dulles wrote following his involuntary retirement in 1961.[3] The book was published in 1963.

According to Tad Szulc, Hunt was assigned to temporary duty as the acting CIA station chief in Mexico City for the period of August and September 1963, at the time of Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged visit there.[4] In his 1978 testimony, however, Hunt denied having been in Mexico at all between 1961 and 1970.[5]

Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy's lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime.[6] 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)

Disillusioned, he retired from the CIA on May 1 1970. But the following year, he was hired by Charles Colson, chief council of Nixon, and joined the President's Special Investigations Unit (alias White House Plumbers) [1].

Watergate

Main article: Watergate scandal
Hunt Testifies Before Watergate Committee

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.[7]

A few days after the break-in, Nixon was recorded saying "This fellow Hunt, he knows too damn much."[8]

Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at the Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later.

Hunt's wife, Dorothy, was killed in the December 8 1972 plane crash of United Airlines Flight 553 in Chicago. Congress, the F.B.I., and the NTSB investigated the crash, and found it to be an accident caused by crew error.[9] Over $10,000 in cash was found in Dorothy Hunt's handbag in the wreckage.[10]

Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign.

Later life

On November 3 1978, Hunt gave a security-classified deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The Assassination Records Review Board released the deposition in February 1996..[11]

In 1981, Hunt was awarded $650,000 in a libel lawsuit against Liberty Lobby, after it published an article by Victor Marchetti in its newspaper The Spotlight accusing the HSCA of having a 1966 CIA memo that revealed E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. However, this decision was overturned on appeal in 1983.[12] Mark Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby by using depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a cross-examination of Hunt following which the jury decided that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel by suggesting that Kennedy had been assassinated by CIA agents. Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.[13]

Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels.[14] He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lived in Biscayne Park, Florida. [15]

File:Americanspyjacket.jpg

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

Hunt died on January 23 2007 in Miami, Florida of pneumonia, [16][17] and is buried in Prospect Lawn Cemetery, Hamburg, NY. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.[18] Eulogy - E. Howard Hunt

JFK assassination allegations by family member

Main article: Kennedy Assassination Theories

The April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone contained an extensive article on Hunt, based in large part on an interview with his eldest son, Howard (nicknamed Saint John by his mother). It describes Hunt's alleged deathbed confessions of his supposed knowledge and indirect complicity in the JFK assassination.[1]

Among other things, the article claims that Hunt, in hand-written notes and a voice recording to Saint John, implicated Lyndon B. Johnson, and CIA operative Cord Meyer as the key players in the JFK assassination conspiracy.

According to Hunt's son, Hunt claimed the other assassin was a French gunman on the grassy knoll, often identified in other assassination theories as Lucien Sarti.

Among the materials provided by Hunt to his son, are several handwritten documents detailing the participants and chronology of events involved with the assassination plot, including a Chain of Command indicating the involvement of several C.I.A. agents and placing then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson as the head of command.

Audio-taped testament

On the April 28th, 2007 edition of Coast to Coast AM hosted by Ian Punnett, an audio tape sent by Saint John Hunt containing his father's January 2004 recounting of activities of several of fellow operatives played on-air for the first time. In the tape, Hunt named Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, David Sánchez Morales, and David Atlee Phillips as participants in the assassination with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson apparently approving the assassination for political gain.

A clip of this tape can be heard here.

The following is a transcript of Hunt's testament on the audio tape clip:

I heard from Frank that LBJ had designated Cord Meyer, Jr. to undertake a larger organization while keeping it totally secret. Cord Meyer himself was a rather favorite member of the Eastern aristocracy. He was a graduate of Yale University and had joined the Marine Corps during the war and lost an eye in the Pacific fighting.

I think that LBJ settled on Meyer as an opportunist, paren-(like himself) paren-and a man who had very little left to him in life ever since JFK had taken Cord's wife as one of his mistresses. I would suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course could not number Cord Meyer among JFK's admirers—quite the contrary.

As for Dave Phillips, I knew him pretty well at one time. He worked for me during the Guatemala project. He had made himself useful to the agency in Santiago, Chile where he was an American businessman. In any case, his actions, whatever they were, came to the attention of the Santiago station chief and when his resume became known to people in the Western hemisphere division he was brought in to work on Guatemalan operations.

Sturgis and Morales and people of that ilk stayed in apartment houses during preparations for the big event. Their addresses were very subject to change, so that where a fellow like Morales had been one day, you'd not necessarily associated [sic] with that address the following day. In short, it was a very mobile experience.

Let me point out at this point, that if I had wanted to fictionalize what went on in Miami and elsewhere during the run up for the big event, I would have done so. But I don't want any unreality to tinge this particular story, or the information, I should say. I was a benchwarmer on it and I had a reputation for honesty.

I think it's essential to refocus on what this information that I've been providing you—and you alone, by the way—consists of. What is important in the story is that we've backtracked the chain of command up through Cord Meyer and laying [sic] the doings at the doorstep of LBJ. He, in my opinion, had an almost maniacal urge to become President. He regarded JFK, as he was in fact, an obstacle to achieving that. He could have waited for JFK to finish out his term and then undoubtedly a second term. So that would have put LBJ at the head of a long list of people who were waiting for some change in the executive branch.

While of great interest to investigators, Hunt quite clearly stops short of explicitly stating that the above mentioned persons participated in a conspiracy to kill JFK. Saint John Hunt maintains that his father provided more specific information related to the asssassination during other sessions[19] however these apparently were not taped.

Trivia

Books

Nonfiction

  • Give Us This Day (1973)
  • Undercover : memoirs of an American secret agent / by E. Howard Hunt (1974)
  • American spy : my secret history in the CIA, Watergate, and beyond / E. Howard Hunt ; with Greg Aunapu ; foreword by William F. Buckley, Jr. (2007)

Novels published as Howard Hunt or E. Howard Hunt:

  • East of Farewell (1943)
  • Limit of darkness, a novel by Howard Hunt (1944)
  • Stranger in town (1947)
  • Calculated risk : a play / by Howard Hunt (1948)
  • Maelstrom / Howard Hunt (1948)
  • Bimini run / by Howard Hunt (1949)
  • The Violent Ones (1950)
  • Berlin ending; a novel of discovery (1973)
  • Hargrave deception / E. Howard Hunt (1980)
  • Gaza intercept / E. Howard Hunt (1981)
  • Cozumel / E. Howard Hunt (1985)
  • Kremlin conspiracy / E. Howard Hunt (1985)
  • Guadalajara / E. Howard Hunt (1990)
  • Murder in State / E. Howard Hunt (1990)
  • Body count / E. Howard Hunt (1992)
  • Chinese Red / by E. Howard Hunt (1992)
  • Mazatlán / E. Howard Hunt (1993) (lists former pseudonym P. S. Donoghue on cover)
  • Ixtapa / E. Howard Hunt (1994)
  • Islamorada / E. Howard Hunt (1995)
  • Paris edge / E. Howard Hunt (1995)
  • Izmir / E. Howard Hunt (1996)
  • Dragon teeth : a novel / by E. Howard Hunt (1997)
  • Guilty knowledge / E. Howard Hunt (1999)
  • Sonora / E. Howard Hunt. (2000)

As Robert Dietrich:

  • Cheat (1954)
  • Be My Victim (1956)
  • Murder on the rocks : an original novel (1957)

As P. S. Donoghue:

  • Dublin Affair (1988)
  • Sarkov Confession: a novel (1989)
  • Evil Time (1992)

As David St. John

  • Hazardous Duty (1966)
  • Mongol Mask (1968)
  • Sorcerers (1969)
  • Diabolus (1971)
  • Coven (1972)

As Gordon Davies:

  1. ^ a b c Hedegaard, Erik (April 5, 2007). The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt Rolling Stone
  2. ^ HSCA Deposition (November 3, 1978), Part II, p. 6:10–17
  3. ^ Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 95
  4. ^ Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy
  5. ^ HSCA Deposition (November 3, 1978), Part I, p. 7:14–16
  6. ^ Rosenberg, Carol (June 28, 2001). Plotter of Bay of Pigs, Watergate conspirator: 'File and forget' Castro. Miami Herald
  7. ^ Reynolds, Tim (January 23 2007). Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies. Associated Press
  8. ^ Weiner, Tim (January 24 2007). E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88. The New York Times
  9. ^ NTSB report
  10. ^ CNN Live Today, "Deadly Plane Skid in Chicago" Aired December 9 2005.
  11. ^ HSCA Deposition (November 3, 1978)
  12. ^ "Libel Award for Howard Hunt overturned by appeals court." New York Times. December 4, 1983
  13. ^ Isaacs, Jeremy (1997). Cold War: Howard Hunt interview excerpts and full transcript. CNN
  14. ^ Vidal, Gore (December 13 1973), The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt. New York Review of Books
  15. ^ Bardach, A.L. (Oct. 6, 2004). Scavenger Hunt. slate.com
  16. ^ Cabron, Lou ((January 25, 2007),20 Secrets of an Infamous Dead Spy. 10 Zen Monkeys
  17. ^ Cornwell, Rupert (January 25, 2007). E. Howard Hunt obituary. The Independent
  18. ^ Reed, Christopher (January 25, 2007). E Howard Hunt obituary. The Guardian
  19. ^ Saint John Hunt, Chain of Command
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