Everything about Howard Hunt totally explained
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.
Early life and career
Hunt was born in
Hamburg, New York,
United States, of
English and
Welsh descent.
(External Link
) 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 . 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.
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.
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. The failure of the invasion damaged his career.
After the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a personal assistant to
Allen Dulles.
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. 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."
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. In his 1978 testimony, however, Hunt denied having been in Mexico at all between 1961 and 1970.
Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President
John F. 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."
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) In July
1971, Fielding had refused an FBI request for psychiatric data on Ellsberg. Hunt and Liddy cased the building in late August. The burglary, on September 3, 1971, wasn't detected, but no Ellsberg files were found.
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.
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. Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in
1973 that that he'd 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."
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 151972, 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 didn't make the trip, however, because the FBI had moved too quickly to seal Bremer's apartment and place it under police guard.
Hunt organized the bugging of the
Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building.
A few days after the break-in, Nixon was recorded saying, to
H. R. Haldeman, "This fellow Hunt, he knows too damn much."
[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.
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. Over $10,000 in cash was found in Dorothy Hunt's handbag in the wreckage.
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
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.
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..
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'll have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963." 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.
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 wouldn't be contested. Hunt prevailed and was awarded $650,000 damages. In 1983, however, the case was overturned on appeal because of error in jury instructions. In a second trial, held in 1985,
Mark Lane made an issue of Hunt's location on the day of the Kennedy assassination. 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. 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." Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book,
Plausible Denial.
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.
Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. He declared
bankruptcy in
1995 and lived in
Biscayne Park, Florida.
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. Writing later in
Controversy magazine, 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, isn't 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."
Hunt died on
January 23 2007 in
Miami,
Florida of
pneumonia and is buried in Prospect Lawn Cemetery,
Hamburg, New York. His son Saint John delivered a eulogy at a memorial service. Hunt's memoir
American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.
JFK assassination allegations by family member
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.
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.
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'd suggest that Cord Meyer welcomed the approach from LBJ, who was after all only the Vice President at that time and of course couldn't 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'd wanted to fictionalize what went on in Miami and elsewhere during the run up for the big event, I'd 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'd 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. These other sessions, however, were not taped, and the totality of this particular audio tape has yet to be aired or publicly disclosed.
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 AffairFurther Information
Get more info on 'Howard Hunt'.
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