Douglas Caddy

Behaviour of Members · February 3, 2007

As an American who has traveled a bit, and lives in an international city, Los Angeles, with as large a percentage of immigrants as any city in the world, I feel I can comment on Andy's statements. He's right. Americans are extremely aggressive, among the most aggressive people in the world. Part of this is our "Ugly American" attitude. If you take a day trip to Mexico you'll find Americans lined up at Papa's 'N' Beer, paying Mexican waiters to toss Tequila poppers down their throat and hold a towel over their mouths so they don't throw it back up. Part of it is purely conditioning. People in Los Angeles learn to drive fast, otherwise they won't get anywhere on time. The MTA adds extra minutes onto the route of any bus going through Chinatown, because Asian immigrants are known to drive much slower than those born here.
Now, if you get outside the large urban centers, you might witness a more laid back, passive existence. (Not completely true--small town folks in the Western states drive 90 mph on the highways and Americans, everywhere, like to drink and fight over football.) When my mom moved out to the desert, she was shocked. There, most everyone is on what some call "Indian Time". If the repairman says he'll be there at two, he'll call you at 4 and say he's running late and can he come back tomorrow. Perhaps some of my more defensive countrymen come from such areas.

Some have concluded this American aggressiveness is connected to our Puritan and Democratic heritage. We have no royalty. While people from other cultures are taught their lot in life from an early age, Americans are taught that they can become anything they want, and that they have to EARN their way into heaven. This combination spurs inventions, factories, music and murder. Americans are taught the world is theirs to mold. I suspect people from other countries have a different attitude.

As Adlai Stevenson once said: "In America anyone can be President. That's the chance we take."

February 3, 2007

My country is neutral and has never invaded another nation so I have no need to take such measures.
John

neutral shmootral, when there is a nuclear exchange and/or general warfare even if conventional and oil prices go to $200/ba and food and all things made from oil or transported get expensive and scarce there will be no neutrals....

Doug, I think a horror scenario like you posit and worse are all too possible. Iran has enough firepower and pride to sink many of our aircraftcarriers, down many of our jets, bomb the hell out of Isreal and American installations in Iraq, bomb and disable many oil installations Middle East-wide...

...and all hell could break out in the entire Middle East and spread to most other places in full or limited ways.....no one would be immune after some weeks.

I would trust few to act wisely at this perilous time and there would be no time for cooling off perhaps......

....well they wanted the end times and perhaps they will learn the meaning of what that really means...no rapture...only death, destruction and MUCH suffering worldwide.

China’s Mystery Satellites

U.S. Gauges Beijing’s ASAT Strategy

By VAGO MURADIAN

Defense News.Com

February 2, 2007

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2526188&C=asia

As worldwide attention focuses on China’s first successful anti-satellite missile test, U.S. officials are questioning why some Chinese spacecraft are in orbits that bring them close to key U.S. satellites, according to military sources.

The big question is the scale and progress of the Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) program, including whether the Chinese spacecraft are benign or time bombs that can someday be used to threaten the space assets on which the U.S. military and economy depend for everything from reconnaissance and dropping bombs to logistics, communications and navigation.

The Chinese spacecraft don’t appear to be conducting any particular mission. Rather, “there is a menu of missions that could be performed that we are not yet clear about,” said one source. “These things aren’t being sent up there to be space rocks.”

A 50-page report submitted Jan. 19 to Congress cites evidence that China is considering a covert anti-satellite network that could debilitate the United States in wartime.

For more than a decade, U.S. officials have warily eyed China’s growth as a space power, particularly its interest in developing anti-satellite systems to counter an overwhelming American superiority in space.

Interest peaked after a ground-based missile destroyed an obsolete Chinese weather satellite on Jan. 11. At least one previous test ended in failure, and perhaps two, sources said. Chinese officials issued assurances that the test should not be seen as threatening.

The White House publicly confirmed the test as part of a coordinated effort with close allies — Australia, Britain, Canada and Japan among them — to drive home to Beijing that its anti-satellite activities have global repercussions.

China’s direct-ascent anti-satellite missile is the latest test to prove counter-space capabilities. Last year, senior U.S. officials said China had attempted to use lasers to blind American satellites.

By international convention, a physical attack on a nation’s satellites is considered an act of war.

Tracking Spacecraft

The United States uses a vast array of orbiting and ground-based systems to track spacecraft and determine their purpose. But two programs are seen as key for the future military space force; the XSS-11 and its complementary effort dubbed Angels, both by Lockheed Martin.

Both aim to develop a range of capabilities that the Air Force sees as critical, including highly maneuverable spacecraft that can closely scrutinize what’s in space. XSS-11 flew in 2005 and its public mission was to demonstrate the ability to maneuver on orbit and autonomously rendezvous with orbiting satellites.

Critics say that such a maneuverable spacecraft could be used to ram enemy spacecraft or attack them with weapons.

The XSS-11 flight, however, brought back information that prompted top U.S. military commanders in January 2006 said they needed a better understanding of what’s in space that could jeopardize U.S. defense and economic interests. They also said they needed a more “operationally responsive” space system and the ability to quickly launch military satellites into space to replace those destroyed in an attack.

Assessing China’s Strategy

The Jan. 19 report, authored by Pentagon China consultant Michael Pillsbury for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, is based on the writings of more than 20 Chinese military strategists, particularly three colonels at Beijing’s National Defense University between 2001 and 2005.

The commission is a congressionally chartered bipartisan panel that advises lawmakers on the strategic U.S.-China security and business relationship.

Pillsbury declined to discuss whether China has already launched into orbit elements of a covert space fleet, but stressed that Beijing’s military strategists appear focused on designing a broad set of anti-satellite capabilities.

"We have three books and several dozen articles from China that go back 10 years, all of which advocate all types of anti-satellite weapons and they have a consistent theme — they have to be deployed covertly so that in a crisis with America, China can shoot down some satellites as a deterrent message,” Pillsbury said.

“These documents advocate multiple approaches to preemptive strikes on satellites from plasma clouds, pellets, directed-energy weapons, orbiting spacecraft and attacking ground stations with special forces,” he said.

China, Pillsbury said, is convinced the United States is weaponizing space and Beijing has concluded it must develop a like capability, while simultaneously pressing for an international space weapon ban.

“What’s interesting is that no matter how hard you try, you don’t find anything in Chinese writings that argues the opposite, that if you attack U.S. military satellites you will have World War III on your hands, which is why it’s better to initiate a space weapons dialogue and never have a crisis in the first place,” Pillsbury said.

A Chinese military official said he could not comment on the matter.

But Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said it is difficult to determine whether the authors quoted by Pillsbury represent fringe or mainstream military thought.

“The hard part of dissecting China is that we know so little of who’s who and we can’t necessarily tell as outside analysts which are credible sources,” she said.

“It would be dangerous to either underestimate or overestimate Chinese capabilities, but you have to be more aware of overestimation because you don’t want to be in a situation where you panic.”

Weapons in Space

China in 2002 called on the United States to send a delegation to Geneva to negotiate a space weapons ban. But Washington refused because Beijing rejected verification measures and defined space weapons as including missile defense components.

The Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967, prohibited nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction in space. But American officials say that while they are committed to the peaceful use of space, they will not be party to an agreement that could hamstring their ability to defend space assets.

The U.S. Congress barred the Air Force from building anti-satellite missiles in 1986, after an Air Force F-15 fighter launched a missile that destroyed an orbiting U.S. satellite. The Soviet Union also flexed its anti-satellite capabilities in the 1980s. And now China has joined the club.

Asked about the new Chinese anti-satellite threat, Lt. Col. Michael Pierson, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force Space Command, declined comment. “As a matter of principle, we do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, responses or steps to mitigate,” he said.

“In broad terms, the U.S. has an inherent right of self defense and we take all threats to our sovereign space systems seriously. We monitor activities that threaten our right to use space peacefully and take appropriate steps to defend our systems against current and future threats.”

Part of the problem, Pierson said, is the sheer number of operational and long-defunct spacecraft orbiting Earth. “In 1957, there was one man-made object in space. Today, we are tracking more than 14,000 man-made objects in space. So, the environment has changed,” Pierson said.

And better awareness of what’s exactly in space and why has become a major initiative for the Air Force since the release of a 2000 report by the blue ribbon Space Commission panel that declared that America was vulnerable to a “space Pearl Harbor.”

The panel was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, who would become defense secretary months later and spearhead changes to the military space organization, including subsuming the U.S. Space Command into the U.S. Strategic Command to ensure a single management point for strategic space.

Operationally Responsive Space

To focus attention on the issue, however, Rumsfeld asked Art Cebrowski to head the Pentagon’s new Office of Force Transformation, which made operationally responsive space a priority. Cebrowski tirelessly argued that the current space infrastructure needed to be re-engineered.

First, he argued, it takes too long to build military satellites and the rockets needed to place them into orbit. To ensure a failsafe space network critical to a new brand of networked warfare, he said, the United States must be able to loft satellites quickly into orbit to replace those that could be destroyed by an enemy.

Publicly, Cebrowski never named China as a potential foe, but Beijing’s interest in anti-satellite systems was a key factor in his strategic thinking. To that end, Cebrowski’s office launched a series of programs, chief among them the development of small “tactical satellites” or Tac-Sats.

The first of a series of such small, innovative and relatively inexpensive spacecraft by the Naval Research Laboratory, TACSAT-1 was to have been launched last year, but has been delayed because teething problems with the all-new, low-cost booster by SpaceX. The satellite and rocket together were planned to cost about $15 million.

The Air Force plans to spend about $300 million over the coming five years on a host of programs to face space threats, most of which would be directed to stockpiling launchers like the Minotaur rocket by Orbital Sciences which launched TACSAT-2 in December from Wallops Island, Va.

“Pearl Harbor was said for effect and may have been overstated, but we need to get serious about protecting the assets in space, not just the spacecraft, but the nodes and ground stations that contribute to that,” said Lance Lord, a retired Air Force general who until 2006 headed the service’s space command. “To underscore the importance of space situational awareness we reordered our priorities to space surveillance, defensive counter space and last, offensive counter space.”

Defense in Depth

“Defensive counterspace is key. You have to have defense in depth so that if you lose one spacecraft or a space-borne capability, you can reroute in a self-healing system to avoid single-point vulnerabilities. In terms of the overall system, it’s relatively robust, but not as good as it needs to be.”

Space, like the sea, is open to all nations for peaceful and select military applications like reconnaissance, surveillance, communications and weather forecasting, and with that openness comes challenges, Lord said.

“You have an inherent right of self defense in the commons of space and if someone is using space against you, you can take a variety of actions to defend yourself,” he said. “That is even more important now that the Chinese have proven that they are technically capable of large projects and want to be a full player in the environment and we have to appreciate how that plays into their doctrine.”

Knocking out the U.S. space network, or even big pieces of it, however, would be difficult. For example, the U.S. satellites that monitor the globe for missile launches — the Defense Support Program spacecraft — are in geosynchronous orbit some 24,000 miles high, while the GPS constellation orbits the Earth at a medium altitude of some 12,000 miles. Both are too high and redundant to easily incapacitate, analysts said.

More vulnerable are the series of giant Keyhole optical and Lacrosse radar reconnaissance satellites that are in low earth orbit several hundred miles high.

“These are big satellites and there aren’t many of them up there are and they aren’t immediately replaceable if lost,” said Barry Watts, the former head of the Pentagon’s Program Analysis & Evaluation office who is now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “We’re very focused on Iraq and things like armored Humvees, and they’re important, but you have to keep you eye on the space ball because almost everything we do depends on it.” •

E-mail: vmuradian@defensenews.com

February 3, 2007

BIGGEST BOOK YET ON JFK'S KILLING

By CINDY ADAMS

New York Post

February 2, 2007 -- PROSECUTOR on the Charles Man son murder trial, Vincent Bugliosi, a name from headlines past, was DA in L.A. eight years. He also wrote award-winning crime books like "Helter Skelter," "Till Death Do Us Part" and "Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder." He's at it again.

Not prosecuting. Writing.

Bugliosi's just written a 1,600-page, 1,500,000-word book. The thing's larger than most coffee tables. Start it in junior high, you'll finish as a senior citizen. The title: "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

So, why? He's setting the record straight forever and always. The man takes apart every single theory ever perpetrated. He follows the Oswald line, Ruby line, conspiracy line, every line ever even sniffed at. Following each to its nth degree with every twist around every corner behind every tree down every alley inside every crevice, he's five years late delivering the manuscript.

This book's like a train hurtling through a tunnel because his ultimate conclusion? The final revelation? There ain't no revelation. It was what it was. It wasn't more than it was. A nut killed the president of the United States, and that's it, period.

Bugliosi originally wanted this in separate volumes but that was - pardon the expression - shot down because readers usually buy only one. While no human alive will stick through to the end, it'll sell to every library, archive, historical society, etc. Publisher Random House, price $50, pub. date May 19.

February 2, 2007

My country is neutral and has never invaded another nation so I have no need to take such measures.
John

neutral shmootral, when there is a nuclear exchange and/or general warfare even if conventional and oil prices go to $200/ba and food and all things made from oil or transported get expensive and scarce there will be no neutrals....

Doug, I think a horror scenario like you posit and worse are all too possible. Iran has enough firepower and pride to sink many of our aircraftcarriers, down many of our jets, bomb the hell out of Isreal and American installations in Iraq, bomb and disable many oil installations Middle East-wide...

...and all hell could break out in the entire Middle East and spread to most other places in full or limited ways.....no one would be immune after some weeks.

I would trust few to act wisely at this perilous time and there would be no time for cooling off perhaps......

....well they wanted the end times and perhaps they will learn the meaning of what that really means...no rapture...only death, destruction and MUCH suffering worldwide.

Report: US plans strike against Iran

Staff, THE JERUSALEM POST

Jan. 31, 2007

The US was drawing up plans to attack sites where Iran is believed to be enriching uranium before President George W. Bush's candidacy comes to an end, the UK-based Times reported on Wednesday.

According to the Times, the Bush government has been inviting defense consultants and Middle East experts to the White House and Pentagon for tactical advice.

The Pentagon was reported to be considering ways for the US to destroy nuclear facilities such as Iran's main centrifuge plant at Natanz, despite the fact that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hoped that diplomatic efforts to restrain Iran would succeed.

Senior Pentagon planners recently advised the White House, however, that they did not yet have accurate intelligence as to the whereabouts of all Iran's nuclear enrichment sites.

Iran's nuclear program has been generating world-wide tension in recent months, despite claims by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the research is for peaceful means. The UN has threatened to put sanctions on Iran if they do not abandon the program.

According to analyst Shmuel Bar of the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, an American strike would only trigger the Iranian regime's primordial survival impulse. This would almost certainly result in a full-scale Iranian assault on Kuwaiti and Saudi oil fields, in an attempt to exact a price that would dissuade the West from carrying its assault to the point of regime change, he told The Jerusalem Post.

In addition, there is a 'real danger' that the Iranian regime could instigate labor strikes among the Shi'ites of southern Iraq, said Dr. Ian Bremer, president of the risk consultancy firm, Eurasia Group. This could drop oil production from over a million barrels per day, 'even to zero for short periods of time,' he warned.

Furthermore, as several analysts pointed out, any strike that was not dramatic enough to bring down the regime and discredit Ahmadinejad outright would trigger a surge of popular support for Ahmadinejad's faction in the regime, giving him a decisive advantage in the complex power struggles that characterize Iranian politics.

According to the Times report, despite speculations and divided opinions, the favored US scenario is to attack the Iranian nuclear plant with a small number of ground attack aircraft flying out of the British dependency of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The British would however have to approve the use of the American base there for an attack and would be asked to play a supporting role by providing air-to-air re-fuelling or sending out surveillance aircraft, ships and submarines.

The British Foreign Office has insisted that a diplomatic solution is still possible.

February 1, 2007

Could the U.S. be brought to its knees overnight?

Well, maybe not overnight but perhaps in a matter of weeks?

I have never considered myself attracted to a “survival” mode of living, that is preparing for a disaster by stockpiling food and supplies and whatever it takes to survive a local or national calamity.....until now.

However, for the first time in memory I sense an unease among the American population that an international event of disastrous proportions for the whole planet may be just around the corner.

While the possibility of such an event has been building up steam for the past 50 years, it has drastically accelerated under the present administration of President George W. Bush whose reckless foreign policy and war initiatives have kept the world living on the edge for the past six years.

His invasion of Iraq, sold by a cascade of lies, has opened up a Pandora’s Box that may not be closed within the lifetimes of those living today. One military historian has said that Bush’s Iraq initiative was the greatest strategic mistake in 2000 years.

An attack in the near future upon Iran by the U.S., carried out with the Israelis and the Saudis acting in unison, may be the final spark that ignites a worldwide conflagration, one threatening the very survival of Western Civilization.

Two recent events have brought home the fragility of society and how easily it might be for life in the United States to be ground to a halt within a short time span with the possibility of utter chaos ensuing.

The first event was a major earthquake in the U.S. state of Hawaii, which resulted in a shutdown of electrical current for hours. Nothing that functioned by electricity worked. Many citizens found that they only had a few dollars in their pocket with no access to a working ATM. The lack of electricity brought modern society in Hawaii to a virtual standstill. Had the shutdown lasted much longer panic might have ensued.

The second event was the Chinese military’s shooting down of a Chinese satellite high above the earth by means of a single missile. This is being interpreted as showing that all American satellites are equally vulnerable to such an attack. The destruction of even a small number of American satellites that perform crucial functions could cripple the U.S. economy overnight.

There can be no doubt but that “sleeper” terrorist cells exist within the continental U.S., which will become activated if America and its allies in the Mid East overreach themselves by expanding the war beyond Iraq. These cells have well-thought out plans that might bring the U.S. to its knees within a short time span by sabotaging electrical facilities and major modes of transportation. Even travel by car would become impossible as there would be no way to obtain fuel as the pumps of gas stations themselves operate using electricity.

So I have decided to take my own steps toward preparing for personal survival for at least a six-weeks period in the event catastrophe occurs. The Internet has a number of web sites that offer practical advice about doing so. My own plans do not include relocation but merely stockpiling of essentials.

Does anyone else in the forum share the same feeling of a possible impending calamity as do I?

Behaviour of Members · February 1, 2007

I think you should do whatever is necessary to eliminate the kinds of wholesale scurrilous and gratuitous personal attacks reflected in my sig below. And those are just a few examples.
I loathe every second I have to spend deflecting and dealing with such reprehensible tactics, but it came to a point early on where it was clear to me that just such sleaze was condoned and allowed here, and that I was on my own to attempt to deal with that kind of counterproductive noise at least enough to let the signal get through.

Even so, I never post only a response to such garbage: I always post pertinent and relevant facts, while dealing in any way I have to with these kinds of attempted personal smear campaigns.

It became clear to me just how much it was condoned as far back as 13 July 2006, when Pat Speer was allowed to post in the Watergate forum the muckraking topic Question for Ashton Gray; Let's Meet.

It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Watergate, starting in the first sentence with: "Ashton, since a lot of my problems with your assertions is that I think you're a fake..." and goes downhill from there. The man actually had the unspeakable gall to say the following, like some lightning-bolted goose-stepper guarding the gates of Prinz-Albrecht-Str-8: "You can show me an ID verifying that your name is really Ashton Gray, and we can be on our way." As though he has standing to use this public forum to stalk me and to attempt to invade my privacy, and demand me to "produce my papers" for him. <SPIT!>

I wrote you urgently, John, asking you to pull the leeches off of me, and to stop the ineffable personal attacks. You wrote back that you saw nothing wrong with it—this as Douglas Caddy chimed in to ramp up the fishwife gossip-mongering with statements like: "Ashton Gray, a/k/a the Great Fake/the Great Flake, seems to be avoiding meeting you. One can only wonder why." In the Watergate forum. It's all still there in that thread.

It was then I knew that this kind of sewer-level personal attack—which wouldn't be allowed in even the yellowest tabloid rag—was considered business as usual here, and that if I was going to continue to use this forum to attempt to discuss actual facts and issues, I was going to have to deal with that kind of catty traducement and spiteful personal vilification myself, because no moderation was in effect.

So I have.

I now have what amounts to a personal entourage of Pat Speer, Charles Black, and Thomas Purvis following me around like a pack into almost every thread I start, posting direct or cowardly oblique cat-calls and personal insults at me—such as the ones I now have memorialized in my sig. For a while it included Bill Miller, but I finally had enough and took care of that. And got a public warning for it.

My supreme preference is to deal with and stick to on-topic facts at issue. Every minute spent discussing anything else is a minute wasted, and I only have so much time I can devote to the forum at all. But I'll be damned if I'll stand by mutely and be used as a whipping boy for these kinds of insupportable, indefensible, off-topic, debased personal attacks.

Because I don't just lie there and learn to enjoy getting kicked in a virtual alleyway gang-bang, I now have my own reputation for being ascerbic, sarcastic, rude, abrasive and (fill in the blank). And I can be—real good—when being jerked around, lied to, or insulted.

It's not my preference. And it doesn't happen at all with other members who honor and respect the purpose and function and topics of the forum, and are trying in good faith to get at and discuss the facts, not launching sanctimonious personal attacks.

I think anything that will focus the purposes of the forums, and will keep topics on-topic, and will move the distractions and sideshows off the line will elevate and enhance the value of the forums, and will entirely validate and vindicate all of your good work and expense in making such an invaluable resource available.

Ashton

John is on the right track in banning forum members who continually show abusive behavior.

Ashton Gray's arrival in the Watergate section, with his instanteous personal attacks on other members, had the effect of ending that particular forum as a source of new information and valuable research concerning this history-changing scandal.

If abusive behavior is the standard by which a member should be banned, Ashton Gray easy meets and exceeds this criterion.

January 31, 2007

It's a chillingly plausible scenario, Douglas.
I posted a similar article from Robert Parry the other day but I can't seem to find it on the Forum. Anyway, here it is:

http://www.alternet.org/story/45852/

Parry suggests a plan has been hatched by Bush, Blair and Olmert for Israel to attack Syria and the Iranian nuclear sites, with America providing logistical support. The three leaders have had a round robin of meetings over the last two months.

The unholy haste in executing Saddam Hussein is highly suspicious, as Alexandrovna alludes to. I suspect it was an action designed to provoke a response from America's enemies in the region as a pretext for further action. I thought he was originally scheduled to be executed in late January, so there must be a reason for bringing it forward, since my faith in the good intentions of the US/Israel axis has long ago evaporated. I have read several articles suggesting that the US Administration refuses to rule out the possibility of utilising bunker-busting nuclear weapons in its campaign against Iran. Nothing can be ruled out, as I believe this US Administration, supported by unseen forces of apparently limitless evil, is the most dangerous in living memory.

The chess analogy is a good one. As in 2003, the Bush alliance may open with a few bold moves. However, as we have seen, their end game stinks. A baboon has more chance against Kasparov. The pawns in this game are us, of course, and the Bush regime is prone to gladly sacrificing pieces in order to achieve their unachievable goal--control of the entire Middle East.

Jan. 30, 2007 17:39

US strike group transits Suez Canal

By

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ISMAILIYA, Egypt

A US Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East.

The Bataan, which entered Egyptian waters Monday, spent the night at the Mediterranean harbor of Port Said and was expected to leave the Egyptian part of the Red Sea later Tuesday, a Suez Canal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The seven-vessel Bataan group includes 2,200 US Marines and sailors, helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, the Navy said in Bahrain.

The US Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, will be overseeing around 50 warships in the Mideast after the arrival of the Bataan and an American aircraft carrier group in February, said US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown.

The Fifth Fleet normally commands a fleet of about 45 ships, about a third of them from US-allied navies, Brown said.

The Navy is in the midst of a regional buildup, with the group of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis on its way as well as 21,500 US soldiers being sent to Iraq. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is already in the region.

The United States has not had two carriers in the Mideast since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Bataan will join a second amphibious assault ship, the USS Boxer, which was on port visit in Dubai on Tuesday.

Brown said the Pentagon recently extended the tour of duty of the Boxer's US Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is in Iraq.

The Bataan is on a routine six-month deployment to the region to conduct "maritime security operations" which includes boarding and searching ships suspected of carrying terrorists or nuclear components to Iran, the Navy said.

January 31, 2007

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 29, 2007

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiege...,462782,00.html

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH CIA'S FORMER EUROPE DIRECTOR

"We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech"

The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

The US attack on Baghdad (2003): "No President on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA."

SPIEGEL: Mr. Drumheller, do you still dare to travel to Europe?

Drumheller: Yes, absolutely. I was a great friend of the Europeans. I grew up in Wiesbaden. I love Germany very much.

SPIEGEL: Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called "renditions" program. Doesn't this worry you?

Drumheller: No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue.

SPIEGEL: One of the cases is the now famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested?

Drumheller: I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called "secret prisons." I would love to, but I can't. We have a life-long secrecy agreement and they are very, very strict about what you can say.

SPIEGEL: The renditions program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists to third countries. Were you involved in the program?

Drumheller: I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions, if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes.

SPIEGEL: We disagree. At the very least, you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people.

Drumheller: It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurences.

SPIEGEL: So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so called "war on terrorism"?

Martin H. SimonTyler Drumheller, 54, had a 25- year career working for the CIA. In 2001, he was promoted to become the American intelligence agency's chief of European operations. The spectacular kidnappings of suspected al- Qaida terrorists -- including the German- Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar and the German- Syrian Khaled el- Masri -- by CIA commandos happened under his watch. Drumheller, who retired in 2005, recently published his memoir, "On the Brink," in the United States.

Drumheller: Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention. This is no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

SPIEGEL: Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility.

Drumheller: Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President (George W.) Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush Administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

SPIEGEL: Investigations in the European Parliament and the German parliament, the Bundestag, are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship?

Drumheller: On terrorist issues very closely -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning (the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND) came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, 'Stop preaching to them.' The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years, we can learn from their successes and failures. Its not a good spy story, but it's actually how you do this.

SPIEGEL: How important is Europe to the CIA?

Drumheller: The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: How to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaida are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers.

SPIEGEL: But given the uproar in Germany and all over Europe, it looks highly unlikely that they will cooperate fully with the CIA.

Drumheller: The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know.

SPIEGEL: But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the intelligence community responsible for the disaster?

Drumheller: The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war.

SPIEGEL: One of the crucial bits of information the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was the supposed existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. That came from a German BND source who was given the code- name "Curveball." An offical investigation in the United States concluded that of all of the false statements that were made, this was the most damaging of all.

Drumheller: I think it is, it was a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum-seeker in Germany, the BND questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time.

SPIEGEL: There are more than a few critics in Washington who claim that the Germans, because of Curveball, bear a large part of the repsonsibility for the intelligence mess.

Drumheller: There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: "Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it." There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing, they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting.

SPIEGEL: The German government was convinced that "Curveball" would not be used in the now famous presentation that then US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave in 2003 before the United Nations Security Council.

Then Secretary of State Colin Powell as he presented "evidence" of weapon of mass destruction in Iraq to the United Nations general assembly: "We probably gave Powell the wrong speech."

Drumheller: I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Dont worry about that."

SPIEGEL: But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.

Drumheller: I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

SPIEGEL: After the war, the CIA was finally able to talk to "Curveball" -- something the BND had never allowed before. What was the result?

Drumheller: In March 2004, a fluent German-speaking officer, one of my best guys, who had a scientific background went to Germany and worked for about two weeks. Finally, at the end of it, Curveball just sort of sat back and said: "I don't have anything more to say." But he never admitted. People here always ask, was he polygraphed? Well, lie detector tests aren't used very much in Germany.

SPIEGEL: Do you think it would have make a difference if the Germans had allowed you to question Curveball earlier?

Drumheller: If they had allowed us to question him the way we did in March of 2004, it would have. Maybe the whole story would have turned out in a different way.

SPIEGEL: In your book, you mention a very high-ranking source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no large active WMD program. It has been reported that the source was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Drumheller: I'm not allowed to say who that was. In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: "Okay. Go ahead and see what you can do."

SPIEGEL: So what happened?

Drumheller: There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: "Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal."

SPIEGEL: Should you have pressed harder?

Drumheller: We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black and white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more.

Interview conducted by Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark.

Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

Letter from Berlin: Germany's Secret Aid for America's War (01/17/2006)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,395676,00.html

January 28, 2007

I think alot of us have a problem with Hunt and Dallas.
Structurally, we know he was intimately mixed with the Bay of Pigs veterans and CIA domestic

activities and directly implicated in the characters of interest.........

But many of us no longer think he was the "third tramp" despite our earlier

interest in that angle, same with the KGB forgery of the LHO-EHH correspondence.

Hunt either was a known JFK assassin who made Nixon xxxx his pants

........or maybe he wasn't...........

neat counter intelligence case study ,

that old rascal and bohemian author who thought he was America's 007

EVERETTE HOWARD HUNT

January 28, 2007

Word for Word | Spilt Ink

You Can Teach a Spy a Novelist’s Tricks

By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

The New York Times

E. Howard Hunt Jr., who died last week at 88, is best remembered as the man who helped plan and bungle the 1972 Watergate break-in. An ex-C.I.A. officer with a background in dirty tricks, sabotage and other skulduggery, Mr. Hunt was particularly qualified to be a “security consultant” for President Richard Nixon. In 1954, he helped overthrow the government of Guatemala, and he was later involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

He was also the author of more than 80 espionage and detective novels, many written under pseudonyms. Did his life imitate his art, or vice versa? It’s not always easy to tell.

Mr. Hunt was a maverick who attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis. So is the deputy director of Central Intelligence in “Dragon Teeth” (1997):

Vice Admiral USN (Ret.) Logan “Buck” Doremus had acquired his nickname as a famed Naval Academy fullback whose ball-carrying trademark was bucking an opponent’s defensive line. And within the Agency it was often remarked that he really should have worn a helmet while playing.

In 1971, Mr. Hunt tried to discredit Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, by burglarizing Dr. Ellsberg’s office.

In “On Hazardous Duty” (1965), Mr. Hunt had already explained the art of stealing secrets:

Mentally he saw them opening the door, masking the windows with black plastic and tape, setting the suction mike near the safe dial, and feeding its output into the Base computer as Harry went through dial-rotation procedures. With the safe open they would Polaroid-photograph the interior to guide them in replacing the contents. Then the laborious work of photographing page after page of documents by the illumination of the argon flashlight, methodically repositioning documents by the Polaroid picture, locking the safe, undraping the windows, and moving out.

After a highly checkered career, Mr. Hunt left the C.I.A. in 1970. In “The Berlin Ending” (1973), the fictional narrator, Neal Thorpe, describes leaving the agency:

I could have had a good career there, too, he reflected, but I felt things closing in, becoming too circumscribed, too stratified and bureaucratic. I wanted more freedom, so I got out. ...

Maybe my problem isn’t in making decisions but in making too many of them. Is my dissatisfaction valid or is it only restlessness — like the typist who quits her job and reapplies for it two weeks later? I’d hate to think that, but what’s the answer?

Mr. Hunt was fascinated by spy hardware and technology, as he demonstrates in “Murder in State” (1990):

“Last year we were waiting for a defector to come out of the UN building. A man jabbed an umbrella tip in his butt and our guy died on the UN steps. We saw the poison injected, but whatever it was, the forensics couldn’t detect it. Verdict: heart attack. The moral,” he said with a grim smile, “is to avoid umbrellas.”

Gumming up the opposition’s works was Mr. Hunt’s specialty, as he relates in “Body Count” (1992):

He leaned over the speedboat transom and unscrewed the gas tank cap, emptied the pouch of mothballs into the tank, and replaced the top. There was enough gasoline in the fuel lines to back the boat into open water, after which the naphthalene-gasoline mix would foul the carburetor and stop the engine. It was the first sabotage trick he had ever learned.

President Nixon’s downfall came after revelations of secret tape recordings and demands by Mr. Hunt and others for “hush money.” In “Angel Eyes” (1961), cash and recordings also intersect in a case of political blackmail:

I said, “There’s something for sale, Zellerhaus. Something new on the market. Yesterday it was offered for the first time. The asking price is $10,000.”

“Wha ... what is it?” he burbled.

“You’re the wizard with the built-in radar,” I sneered. “Figure it out. It’s what got Peachy Bolac killed. It’s the recording she made of you and Quinby that afternoon not so long ago. Made public it’s enough to put you and Quinby on the rock pile until they run out of rocks. The killer’s got it, Zellerhaus. He wants ten thousand skins.”

During Watergate, there were reports that Mr. Hunt kept a gun in his White House office. His alter ego, Jack Novak, packs heat in “Sonora” (2000):

At a gun shop where I was well and favorably known, I bought four boxes of .45 ACP ball ammo for the Tommy gun and a box of Black Talon .38s for my H& K pistol. From a large selection of rifles I chose a .308 caliber FAL with flash suppressor and 20-round magazine, and had it fitted with an 8-power Leupold scope while I waited.

Like Mr. Hunt, David Morgan, the hero of “The Hargrave Deception” (1980), is an ex-intelligence agent involved in an illegal covert operation. And like Mr. Hunt, he testifies before a Senate committee:

“A little while ago I was asked to comment on a question of morality,” he said. “Your inquiry raises deep moral issues, Senator — at least for me — since I gave my word as a representative of the United States that their participation in an activity in which this government was a coequal conspirator would never be made public by me. These men,” he went on as a wave of sound swept up around him, “were brave men, patriotic in their own view and responsive to what they felt to be the call of a higher moral duty.”

January 24, 2007

I think it would be a great mistake for anyone to take from Mr. Hunt's wild ride that he was an evil man. He undoubtedly told the truth much of the time. His "you can't handle the truth" attitude the rest of the time was something he learned from above. He was just more honest about it. While his "LBJ might have done it" farewell might have been to sell books, it might also represent his final judgment on both the assassination and his career in public service. While men like Hunt were conditioned to believe they were fighting the great evil--communism--as often as not they were merely helping corrupt politicians get elected. Hunt came to understand this after Watergate. He mentioned previously that LBJ used the CIA to spy on Goldwater. While one might use this to insist Hunt's "truth-telling" was limited to anti-Democrat "truth-telling," one should also remember Hunt's comments in "Give Us This Day". While most CIA apologists insist that Kennedy got scared and canceled the second air strike, and this doomed the Bay of Pigs invasion, Hunt's attitude is surprising. He points out that Kennedy asked Cabell if the second strike was absolutely necessary, and that Cabell said "NO." He blames Cabell for the failure. He also points out that, after it was clear the brigade needed more air support, Kennedy authorized a second strike with U.S. jets flying cover. Unfortunately, someone forgot to synchronize watches and, well, you know, it ended up being a suicide mission...
Men like Hunt are complicated. When we attempt to put them in evil bad guy boxes we do the truth, and ourselves, a disservice.

You're joking right???? Hunt "told the truth much of the time"? I'd ask you to name just one time...but I know where that would lead. A bit naive is an understatement. You're certainly entitled to your opinion, however, I do not think it's shared on this forum.

Dawn

I can name one time that Howard Hunt told the truth.

As The New York Times notes in its obituary today, Hunt served as an intelligence officer in China during World War II.

Soon after I met Hunt in 1970, he told me of his wartime service. He and a few other intelligence officers were able to infiltrate behind the Japanese lines. One of the officers was captured. Hunt and the others, vastly outnumbered, had to remain hidden while they listened in agony to the screams of their fellow officer as the Japanese flayed his skin while he was alive. When Hunt finished recounting this horrific story to me, there was tears in his eyes. His sorrow and frustration at what happened still burned within him.

RIP, Howard Hunt.

January 24, 2007

Not much caring whom I might offend with this post, my only thoughts are that another lying, cheating, blackmailing, murdering, conspirator and traitor is dead. My only remorse is that he was never placed under hostile interrogation !
Regarding his fiances, does anyone believe that this man died destitute?

Charlie Black

Was he murdered? He had agreed to give interviews to the media in order to promote his book that was due out in March. I can imagine that the CIA was pleased to hear of his death.

Can't ever rule out murder with this mob. And he died on a very congested news day--what with the scheduled STOU and more--where his obit would get buried along with his rancid putrid carcass.

Good riddance ya bastard.

I posted the following on July 17, 2006 in the Forum's discussion of the Watergate topic. I thought it pertinent to repost here to help round out Hunt's role in that scandal:

On December 6, 1996, G. Gordon Liddy gave a sworn deposition in Washington, D.C. in which he described the origins of the Watergate scandal. The deposition was given in the following styled lawsuit:

In the United States District Court for the District of Columbia

Maureen K. Dean and John W. Dean, Plaintiffs

v.

No. 92-1807

St. Martin’s Press, Inc., (HHG)(AK)

Len Colodny, Robert Gettlin,

G. Gordon Liddy, and

Phillip Mackin Bailley,

Defendants

The 148 page deposition presents an encompassing summary from the viewpoint of Mr. Liddy.

There are many highlights in the deposition. Attention is called especially to:

Pages 86 to 96: Planning and carrying out the first break-in on May 26, 27 and 28, 1972

Page 98: Planning the June 17, 1972 break-in upon instructions from Jeb Magruder.

These are Liddy’s words:

And that’s what he [Magruder] wanted. So that when I went back to Hunt and Hunt was upset. He said, “My God,” he said, “Do you know how much trouble it took us to get in there in the first place? All those three entries,” and this, that and the other thing, “And now this? With all the camera and all this film and all this exposure, I mean, the longer you are in there the more vulnerable you are.”

I said, “Howard, that’s what wanted, so we have to do it.” So we set up to do that.

Page 103: Describing the June 17, 1972 break-in

Page 105: Liddy’s words again:

But in any event, we held a council of war, so to speak. And the Cubans, they said, “Look, whatever the decision is, we are up to it.”

Question: Where was this council of war occurring?

Answer: This was in that – the room that Mr. Hunt and I had been in, the one with all the equipment that Mr. McCord had. And McCord, he was for doing it. Hunt was very, very loathe at first, but at any rate the decision was left up to me, because I was the operational chief. And I said, “Okay, we will go again.” And they went again. And the – they got in.

The two links below both lead to the 148 page transcript of the Liddy deposition. If one link does not work, try the other. If you have trouble making a link work, copy it and place it in your browser.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=164

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:x3l4K...clnk&cd=165

---------------------------------------

Also, below is The New York Time's obituary of today on Hunt's passing:

January 24, 2007

E. Howard Hunt, Agent Who Organized Botched Watergate Break-In, Dies at 88

By TIM WEINER

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/obituari...amp;oref=slogin

E. Howard Hunt, a cold warrior for the Central Intelligence Agency who left the spy service in disillusionment, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88.

His death, at North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura.

“This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.”

That was Howard Hunt’s burden: he was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the C.I.A. was destroyed by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon’s master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest in the Watergate case. He served 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping and emerged a broken man.

“I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents,” Mr. Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.”

He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda.

When he left the C.I.A. in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of a reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day “security consultant” at the Nixon White House in 1971.

In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that “when the president does it,” as Nixon once said, “that means it is not illegal.” Mr. Hunt and the nation found out otherwise.

Mr. Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the C.I.A. and the White House. He was “totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him,” Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, said in a State Department oral history.

“As far as I could tell, Howard went from one disaster to another,” Mr. Hart said, “until he hit Watergate.”

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, the son of a lawyer and a classically trained pianist who played church organ. He graduated from Brown University in June 1940 and entered the United States Naval Academy as a midshipman in February 1941.

He worked as a wartime intelligence officer in China, a postwar spokesman for the Marshall Plan in Paris and a screenwriter in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had just bought his fourth novel, “Bimini Run,” a thriller set in the Caribbean, when he joined the fledgling C.I.A. in April 1949.

Mr. Hunt was immediately assigned to train C.I.A. recruits in political and psychological warfare, fields in which he was a rank amateur, like most of his colleagues. He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife, the former Dorothy L. Wetzel.

In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,” Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, “to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.” Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala.

By the time of the coup, Mr. Hunt had been removed from responsibility. He moved on to uneventful stints in Japan and Uruguay. Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history.

The C.I.A. had received orders from both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his successor, President John F. Kennedy, to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Hunt’s assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the C.I.A.’s cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island. He fared no better than the paramilitary planners who had vowed to defeat Mr. Castro’s 60,000-man army with a 1,500-strong brigade.

The careers of the American intelligence officers who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the C.I.A.’s reputation for derring-do. Mr. Hunt spent most of the 1960s carrying out desultory propaganda tasks at the agency, among them running news services and subsidizing books that fell stillborn from the press.

He funneled his talent into writing paperback spy novels. His works followed a formula of sex and intrigue but offered flashes of insight. “We become lawless in a struggle for the rule of law — semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others,” says the author’s alter ego, Peter Ward, in the novel “Hazardous Duty.”

He retired from the C.I.A. in 1970 and secured a job with an agency-connected public relations firm in Washington. Then, a year later, came a call from the White House. A fellow Brown alumnus, Charles W. Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, hired Mr. Hunt to carry out acts of political warfare. Within weeks, Mr. Hunt was in charge of a subterranean department of dirty tricks.

He went back to C.I.A. headquarters, requesting false identification, a red wig, a voice-altering device and a tiny camera. He then burglarized the Beverly Hills office of a psychiatrist treating Dr. Daniel J. Ellsberg, a former national-security aide who had leaked a copy of the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times. Mr. Hunt was looking for information to discredit Mr. Ellsberg. When the break-in became public knowledge two years later, the federal case against Mr. Ellsberg on charges of leaking classified information was dismissed.

Mr. Hunt, in league with another recently retired C.I.A. officer and four Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, then led a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex to bug the telephone lines. The job was botched, and the team went in again to remove the taps. The burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972. One had Mr. Hunt’s name and a White House telephone number in his address book, a classic failure of espionage tradecraft that proved the first thread of the web that ensnarled the president.

The final blow that drove Nixon from office was one of the secret White House recordings he made — the “smoking gun” tape — in which he vowed to order the C.I.A. to shut down the federal investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national-security grounds. By the time Nixon resigned in August 1974, Mr. Hunt was a federal prisoner.

His life was in ruins: his wife had been killed in a plane crash in 1972, his legal fees approached $1 million, he had suffered a stroke, and whatever illusions he once had that his government would protect him were shattered. Standing before the judge who imprisoned him, he said he was “alone, nearly friendless, ridiculed, disgraced, destroyed as a man.”

Freed from prison just before his 60th birthday, Mr. Hunt moved to Miami, where he met and married his second wife, Laura, a schoolteacher, and started a second family. Besides his wife, he is survived by the two daughters and two sons from his first marriage: Lisa Hunt of Las Vegas, Kevan Hunt Spence of Pioneer, Calif., Howard St. John Hunt of Eureka, Calif., and David Hunt of Los Angeles; two children from his second marriage, Austin and Hollis, both of Miami; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Hunt’s last book, “American Spy: My Secret History in the C.I.A., Watergate and Beyond,” written with Greg Aunapu, is to be published on March 16 with a foreword by his old friend William F. Buckley Jr.

Late in life, he said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs.

January 24, 2007