E. Howard Hunt
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he was a central figure in U.S. regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration's so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties.
Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. After his release, Hunt lived in Mexico and then Miami until his death in January 2007. Hunt was the subject of pervasive conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with his sons taping a disputed deathbed confession.
Early life and education
Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, the son of Ethel Jean and Everette Howard Hunt Sr., an attorney and Republican Party official.He attended Hamburg High School in Hamburg, N.Y., where he graduated in 1936 along with fellow classmate Howard J. Osborn. He then attended Brown University, an Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated in 1940.
Career
U.S. military and OSS
During World War II, Hunt served in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo and the U.S. Army Air Corps. He also served in China with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.Author
Hunt was a prolific author, publishing 73 books during his lifetime. During and after World War II, he wrote several novels under his own name, including East of Farewell, Limit of Darkness, Stranger in Town, Maelstrom, Bimini Run, and The Violent Ones. He also wrote spy and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis, David St. John, and P. S. Donoghue.Some parallels exist between Hunt's writings and his experiences during the Watergate scandal and espionage. He continued his writing career after he was released from prison, publishing nearly twenty spy thrillers between 1980 and 2000.
In 1946, Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing.
Economic Cooperation Administration
Prior to 1949, Hunt served as an officer in the Information Division of the Economic Cooperation Administration, a predecessor of the Mutual Security Agency.Central Intelligence Agency
Shortly following the end of World War II, the OSS was disbanded. In 1947, with the Cold War emerging and intensifying, the absence of a central intelligence organization was seen as a national security deficiency, and the Central Intelligence Agency was formed. In October 1949, just as Warner Bros. acquired the rights to Hunt's novel Bimini Run, Hunt joined the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination. He was assigned as a covert action officer specializing in political action and influence in what later came to be the CIA's Special Activities Center.Mexico City
In 1950, Hunt was appointed OPC Station Chief in Mexico City, where he recruited and supervised William F. Buckley Jr., who worked under Hunt in his OPC Station in Mexico from 1951 to 1952. Buckley and Hunt remained lifelong friends, and Buckley became godfather to Hunt's first three children.In Mexico, Hunt helped lay the framework for Operation PBFortune, later renamed Operation PBSuccess, the successful covert operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Hunt would later say, "What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign, to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland."
Hunt was then assigned as Chief of Covert Action in Japan, and later as Chief of Station in Uruguay, where he was noted by American diplomatic contemporary Samuel F. Hart for controversial working methods.
Bay of Pigs invasion
Hunt was subsequently assigned responsibility for organizing Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a suitably representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a pro-American government that could replace Fidel Castro.Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began during the Eisenhower administration, but Hunt was later bitter about what he perceived as President John F. Kennedy's lack of commitment to the operation, which was designed to attack and overthrow the Castro government. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us This Day, Hunt wrote, "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of José Martí, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away."
In 1959, Hunt helped CIA Director Allen W. Dulles write The Craft of Intelligence. The following year, in 1960, Hunt established Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed to attempt the military overthrow of the Castro's government in Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion commenced on April 17, 1961, but was quickly aborted and viewed as a fiasco. Hunt was then reassigned as executive assistant to Dulles.
In 1961, President Kennedy fired Dulles for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Hunt then served from 1962 to 1964 as the first Chief of Covert Action for the CIA's Domestic Operations Division.
In 1974, Hunt told The New York Times that he worked for DODS for approximately four years, beginning in 1962, shortly after the agency's establishment by the Kennedy administration over the objection of Richard Helms and Thomas H. Karamessines. Hunt 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 dealt largely with subsidizing and manipulating news and publishing organizations in the United States, which he said "did seem to violate the intent of the agency's charter."
In 1964, John A. McCone, then deputy chief of intelligence at the CIA, directed Hunt to take a special assignment as a Non-official cover officer in Madrid, Spain, tasked with creating an American answer to Ian Fleming's British MI-6 James Bond novel series. While in Spain, Hunt was covered as a recently retired U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer who moved his family to Spain in order to write the first installment of the nine-novel Peter Ward series, On Hazardous Duty, published in 1965.
After a year and a half in Spain, Hunt returned to his assignment at DODS. Following a brief tenure on the Special Activities Staff of the Western European Division, he became Chief of Covert Action for the region in July 1968, and was based in the Washington metropolitan area. Hunt was lauded for his "sagacity, balance and imagination", and received the second-highest rating of Strong signifying "performance ... characterized by exceptional proficiency" in a performance review from the Division's Chief of Operations in April 1969. However, this was downgraded to the third-highest rating of "Adequate" in an amended review from the Division's Deputy Chief, who recognized Hunt's "broad experience" but opined that "a series of personal and taxing problems" had "tended to dull his cutting edge."
Hunt later said that he "had been stigmatized by the Bay of Pigs", and had come to terms with the fact that he "would not get promoted too much higher."
In his final years with the CIA, Hunt began to cultivate new contacts in society and the business world. While serving as vice president of Brown University's club in Washington, D.C., he befriended and commenced a strong association with the organization's president, former congressional aide Charles Colson, who was working on Richard Nixon's presidential campaign.
CIA retirement
Hunt retired from the CIA at the pay grade of GS-15, Step 8 on April 30, 1970, at the age of 57.After retiring from the CIA, Hunt neglected to elect survivorship benefits for his wife. In April 1971, he requested to retroactively amend his election but was rebuffed by the agency. In a May 5, 1972, letter to CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, Hunt raised the possibility of returning to active duty for a short period of time in exchange for activating the benefits upon his proposed second retirement. Houston advised Hunt in his May 16, 1972, response that this "would be in violation of the spirit of the CIA Retirement Act".
Robert R. Mullen Company
Immediately following his retirement, Hunt went to work for the Robert R. Mullen Company, which cooperated with the CIA; H. R. Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff to President Nixon, wrote in 1978 that the Mullen Company was in fact a CIA front company, a fact that was apparently unknown to Haldeman while he worked in the White House. Through CIA's Project QKENCHANT, Hunt obtained a Covert Security Approval to handle the firm's affairs during Mullen's absence from Washington.White House
In 1971, Colson, who was then director of Nixon's Office of Public Liaison, hired Hunt, where he joined the White House Special Investigations Unit, specializing in political sabotage.Hunt's first assignment for the White House was a covert operation to break into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. In July 1971, Fielding refused a request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for psychiatric data on Ellsberg. Hunt and Liddy cased the building in late August. The burglary, on September 3, 1971, was not detected, but no Ellsberg files were found.
In the summer of 1971, Colson authorized Hunt to travel to New England to seek potentially scandalous information on Senator Edward Kennedy related to the Chappaquiddick incident and Kennedy's possible extramarital affairs. Hunt sought and used CIA disguises and other equipment for the project. The mission eventually proved unsuccessful, with little useful information uncovered by Hunt.
Hunt's White House duties included assassination-related disinformation. In September 1971, Hunt forged top-secret U.S. State Department cables designed to prove that President Kennedy had personally and specifically ordered the assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, during the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. He offered the forged documents to a Life magazine reporter. Hunt later told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he 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."
In 1972, on Colson's orders, Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were part of an assassination plot targeting journalist Jack Anderson. Nixon disliked Anderson because Anderson published a 1960 election-eve story about a secret loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother, which Nixon believed was a factor in his election defeat to John F. Kennedy. Hunt and Liddy met with a CIA operative and discussed methods of assassinating Anderson, which included covering Anderson's car steering wheel with LSD to drug him and cause a fatal accident, poisoning his aspirin bottle, and staging a fatal robbery. The assassination plot never materialized because Hunt and Liddy were arrested for their involvement in the Watergate scandal later that year.