E. Howard Hunt

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E. Howard Hunt
Born	October 9, 1918(1918-10-09) Hamburg, New York, U.S.
Died	January 23, 2007 (aged 88) Miami, Florida, U.S.
Penalty	33 month imprisonment
Status	Deceased
Occupation	CIA agent, author
Spouse	Dorothy Louise Wetzel, Laura E. Martin
Parents	Everette Howard Hunt Sr. and Ethel Jean Totterdale
Children	Saint John Hunt, David Hunt

Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. (October 9, 1918 - January 23, 2007) was an American author and spy. He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (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. In 2007 his son released audio tape of Hunt naming President Lyndon B. Johnson and others as the orchestrators of the John F. Kennedy assassination.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 CIA and anti-Castro efforts 3 Watergate 4 Later life 5 JFK assassination allegations by family member 6 Audio-taped testament regarding the JFK assassination plot 7 Books 8 Notes 9 Trivia 10 External links

[edit] Early life and career

Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States, of English and Welsh descent.[1] An alumnus of Nichols School in Buffalo, New York and 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 and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis and David St. John.

[edit] 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, and supervised William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked for the CIA in Mexico during the period 1951-1952. Buckley and Hunt remained life-long friends.^[2]

In Mexico, 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 forge Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a provisional government to take over Cuba.^[3] The failure of the invasion damaged his career.

After the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a personal assistant to Allen Dulles.^[4] 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.^[5] The book was published in 1963.

Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he served as the first Chief of Covert Action for the CIA's Domestic Operations Division. He told the New York Times in 1974 that he spent about four years working for the division, beginning shortly after it was set up, in 1962, over the "strenuous opposition" of Richard Helms and Thomas H. Karamessines. He said that the division was assembled shortly after the Bay of Pigs operation, and that "many men connected with that failure were shunted into the new domestic unit." He said that some of his projects from 1962 to 1966, which dealt largely with the subsidizing and manipulation of news and publishing organizations, "did seem to violate the intent of the agency's charter."^[6]

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,^[7] at the time of Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged visit there.^[8][9] In his 1978 testimony, however, Hunt denied having been in Mexico at all between 1961 and 1970.^[10]

Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President John F. Kennedy's lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime.^[11] 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."^[12] Disillusioned, he retired from the CIA on May 1, 1970. The following year, he was hired by Charles Colson, chief counsel to President Richard Nixon, and joined the President's Special Investigations Unit (alias White House Plumbers) ^[1].

[edit] Watergate

Main article: Watergate scandal

Hunt's first assignment for the White House was a covert operation to break into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding.^[13] In July 1971, Fielding had refused an FBI request for psychiatric data on Ellsberg.^[14] Hunt and Liddy cased the building in late August.^[15] The burglary, on September 3, 1971, was not detected, but no Ellsberg files were found.^[16]

Also in the summer of 1971, Colson authorized Hunt to travel to New England to seek potentially scandalous information on Senator Edward Kennedy. Hunt sought and used CIA disguises and other equipment for the project.^[17]

Hunt's White House duties included assassinations-related disinformation. In September 1971, Hunt forged and offered to a Life magazine reporter top-secret State Department cables designed to prove that President Kennedy had personally and specifically ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.^[18] Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that that he had fabricated the cables to show a link between President Kennedy and the assassination of Diem, a Catholic, to estrange Catholic voters from the Democratic party, after Colson suggested he "might be able to improve upon the record."^[19]

According to Seymour Hersh, writing in the The New Yorker, Nixon White House tapes show that after presidential candidate George Wallace was shot on May 15, 1972, Nixon and Colson agreed to send Hunt to the Milwaukee home of the gunman, Arthur Bremer, to place McGovern presidential campaign material there. The intention was to link Bremer with the Democrats. Hersh writes that, in a taped conversation, "Nixon is energized and excited by what seems to be the ultimate political dirty trick: the FBI and the Milwaukee police will be convinced, and will tell the world, that the attempted assassination of Wallace had its roots in left-wing Democratic politics." Hunt did not make the trip, however, because the FBI had moved too quickly to seal Bremer's apartment and place it under police guard.^[20]

Hunt organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building.^[21]

A few days after the break-in, Nixon was recorded saying, to H. R. Haldeman, "This fellow Hunt, he knows too damn much."^[22]

[V]ery bad, to have this fellow Hunt, ah, you know, ah, it's, he, he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. And that it gets out that the whole, this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it's a fiasco, and it's going to make the FB, ah CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy, and he just better tough it and lay it on them.^[23]

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 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the crash, and found it to be an accident caused by crew error.^[24] Over $10,000 in cash was found in Dorothy Hunt's handbag in the wreckage.^[25]

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.

[edit] Later life

Give Us This Day, Hunt's book on the Bay of Pigs Invasion, was published late in 1973. In the book's foreword, he commented on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as follows:

Once again it became fashionable to hold the city of Dallas collectively responsible for his murder. Still, and let this not be forgotten, Lee Harvey Oswald was a partisan of Fidel Castro, and an admitted Marxist who made desperate efforts to join the Red Revolution in Havana. In the end, he was an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But for Castro and the Bay of Pigs disaster there would have been no such "Committee." And perhaps no assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.^[26]

On November 3, 1978, Hunt gave a security-classified deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released the deposition in February 1996..^[27]

Two newspaper articles published a few months before the deposition stated that a 1966 CIA memo linking Hunt to the assassination of President Kennedy had recently been provided to the HSCA. The first article, by Victor Marchetti—author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974)—appeared in the Liberty Lobby newspaper The Spotlight on August 14, 1978. According to Marchetti, the memo said in essence, "Some day we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963."^[28] He also wrote that Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Gerry Patrick Hemming would soon be implicated in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.

The second article, by Joe Trento and Jacquie Powers, appeared in the Wilmington, Delaware Sunday News Journal six days later. It alleged that the purported memo was initialed by Richard Helms and James Angleton and showed that, shortly after Helms and Angleton were elevated to their highest positions in the CIA, they discussed the fact that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that his presence there had to be kept secret. However, nobody has been able to produce this supposed memo, and the Rockefeller Commission determined that Hunt had been in Washington, DC on the day of the Assassination.^[29]

Hunt sued Liberty Lobby—but not the Sunday News Journal—for libel. Liberty Lobby stipulated, in this first trial, that the question of Hunt's alleged involvement in the assassination would not be contested.^[30] Hunt prevailed and was awarded $650,000 damages. In 1983, however, the case was overturned on appeal because of error in jury instructions.^[31] In a second trial, held in 1985, Mark Lane made an issue of Hunt's location on the day of the Kennedy assassination.^[32] Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby by producing evidence suggesting that Hunt had been in Dallas. He used depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner, and Marita Lorenz, plus a cross-examination of Hunt. On retrial, the jury rendered a verdict for Liberty Lobby.^[33] In spite of Lane's claim that he convinced the jury that Hunt was a JFK assassination conspirator, most of the jurors who were interviewed by the media said they disregarded the conspiracy theory and judged the case (according to the judge's jury instructions) on whether the article was published with "reckless disregard for the truth."^[34] Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.^[35]

Many conspiracists have believed that two of the three tramps marched through Dealey Plaza in the wake of the assassination to be Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, although several other men, Charles Harrelson for example, were also identified as tramps.The mystery was apparently solved in the early 1990s when researcher Mary LaFontaine discovered documents identifying the men as Harold Doyle, John Forester Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams. Both the F.B.I. and independent researchers confirmed the identifications.^[36]

Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels.^[37] He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lived in Biscayne Park, Florida. ^[38]

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

Canadian journalist David Giammarco interviewed Hunt for the December 2000 issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine.^[39] Writing later in Controversy magazine,^[40] Giammarco related an interview with a "former high-ranking CIA officer" in Miami who was "intrinsically involved in the CIA's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the many plots to kill Castro." The subject, whose description closely resembles Hunt's, is not identified by name. He reportedly told Giammarco that "he would confess to his part in the JFK assassination for a price tag of $14 million."^[41]

Hunt died on January 23, 2007 in Miami, Florida of pneumonia^[42][43] and is buried in Prospect Lawn Cemetery, Hamburg, New York. His son Saint John delivered a eulogy at a memorial service.^[44] Hunt's memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.^[45]

[edit] 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 CIA agents and placing then Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson as the head of command.

[edit] Audio-taped testament regarding the JFK assassination plot

On the April 28, 2007 edition of Coast to Coast Live hosted by Ian Punnett, a portion of 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 favored 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.

This is only a portion of the tape, and Saint John Hunt states that his father provided more specific information related to the assassination during this and other sessions.^[46] These other sessions, however, were not taped, and the totality of this particular audio tape has yet to be aired or publicly disclosed.

[edit] Books

Nonfiction

• Give Us This Day: The Inside Story of the CIA and the Bay of Pigs Invasion—by One of Its Key Organizers (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 Davis:

• I Came to Kill (1953)
• House Dick (1961)
• Counterfeit Kill (1963)
• Ring Around Rosy (1964)
• Where Murder Waits (1965)

As John Baxter:

• A Foreign Affair

[edit] Notes

[edit] Trivia

• Hunt was portrayed by Ed Harris in the 1995 biopic Nixon.

[edit] External links

• "The secrets and lies that a Cold-War warrior took to his grave" — Erik Hedegaard's Rolling Stone article, as republished in The Sunday Times (April 15, 2007)
• Don Fulsom, Blowing Smoke From the Grave: E. Howard Hunt and the JFK Assassination, Crime Magazine (June 6, 2007)
• Don Fulsom, Richard Nixon's Greatest Coverup: His Ties to the Assassination of President Kennedy, Crime Magazine (May 28, 2007)
• "Howard Hunt's Final Mission" — Review of American Spy by James Rosen in The Politico (February 7, 2007)
• "Watergate plotter may have a last tale" Los Angeles Times (March 20, 2007)
• "E. Howard Hunt - Testament" — Audio of E. Howard Hunt's Testament regarding CIA agents' involvement in JFK Assassination.
• "Chain of Command" — Handwritten document, provided by Hunt to his eldest son Saint John Hunt, purporting to reveal the JFK assassination "Chain of Command"
• "The Eulogy for E. Howard Hunt" — Presented at Hunt's Memorial Service
• "The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt" 1973 review by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books
• "Literary Agent" Review essay by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 18, 2007)
• E. Howard Hunt at the Internet Movie Database
• Video of Nixon discussing Hunt in the Watergate tapes
• Deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978) — Released in 1996
• Hunt's Ties to JFK & Nixon
• "Howard Hunt and the JFK Assassination" — Discussion of the 1978 Spotlight and Sunday News Journal articles
• "If This Is Hunt Are There Any Other Photos?" — Discussion of proposal identifying Hunt in photographs of Dealey Plaza