E. Howard Hunt dies

[John Kennedy White]

E. Howard Hunt, one of the organizers of Watergate break in, dies at 88

Jan 23 17:24

By Tim Reynolds

MIAMI (AP) - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in that led to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

Hunt died after a lengthy bout of pneumonia, according to his son, Austin Hunt.

The elder Hunt was many things: a Second World War soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre.

Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't - a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator.''

"I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,'' Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.''

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars: Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched.

"According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign,'' Hunt told CNN in February 1992. ``And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found.''

The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began.

Hunt declined repeated interview requests from The Associated Press in the final years of his life, which he spent quietly in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighbourhood with his second wife, Laura.

[Ron Ecker]

I'll bet Nixon has already warned Satan, "That Hunt knows a hell of a lot of things."

[John Simkin]

Last night I received an email from Google that E. Howard Hunt had died. (Google let me know on a daily basis any article that is published on the CIA). I then did a search to discover how the American press was reporting his death. Virtually every newspaper carried the same article provided by the AP.

These newspapers reported that in June, 1995, Hunt filed for bankruptcy protection from his creditors. They did not explain why he was so short of money.

Before the internet we would have to accept the version of events being portrayed by the media. Now we can use search-engines to find out about characters like E. Howard Hunt. Wikipedia is first and my page on Hunt is second. His own website is third. The Wikipedia account of Hunt is very similar to the one provided by AP (maybe that is where they got it from).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntH.htm

http://www.ehowardhunt.com/

There is a very good reason why the newspapers, Wikipedia and Hunt's own website do not explain why he went bankrupt in 1995. In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed that E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. Later that month Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday News Journal.

The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action.

Lane eventually discovered Marchetti’s sources. The main source was William Corson. It also emerged that Marchetti had also consulted James Angleton and Alan J. Weberman before publishing the article. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA. It was this virtually unreported court case that resulted in Hunt’s bankruptcy.

The newspapers mentioned that Hunt’s memoirs were to be published in March, 2007. They did not say what Hunt will argue in the book. It includes a claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson might have been involved in ordering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part. LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. (John) Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK's car - where... he would have been out of danger."

Hunt suggests that senior CIA official, William K. Harvey could have been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy: "Harvey was a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary... He definitely had dreams of becoming (CIA director) and LBJ could do that for him if he were president.... (LBJ) would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt."

The newspapers also reported that Hunt’s wife Dorothy had died in a plane accident on 8th December, 1972. Also on the plane with Dorothy Hunt was Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick, Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: "Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative."

As Lalo J. Gastriani, pointed out in the Fair Play Magazine (November, 1994):

It was at 2:29 p.m. on Friday, December 8, 1972, during the height of the Watergate scandal that United Airlines flight 553 crashed just outside of Chicago during a landing approach to Midway Airport. Initial reports indicated that the plane had some sort of engine trouble when it descended from the clouds. But the odd thing about this crash is what happened after the plane went down. Witnesses living in the working-class neighborhood in which the plane crashed said that moments after impact, a battalion of plainclothes operatives in unmarked cars parked on side streets pounced on the crash-site. These so-called 'FBI types' took control of the scene and immediately began sifting through the wreckage looking for something. At least one survivor recognized a "rescue worker" - clad in overalls sifting through wreckage - as an operative of the CIA.

One day after the crash, the Whitehouse head of Nixon's "plumber's" outfit - Egil Krogh, Jr. - was made undersecretary of transportation, a position that put him in a direct position to oversee the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Agency which are both authorized by law to investigate airline crashes. Krogh would later be convicted of complicity in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's Psychiatrist's office along with Hunt, Liddy and a small cast of CIA-trained and retained Cuban black-bag specialists...

Ostensibly traveling with Mrs. Hunt on flight 553 was CBS news corespondent Michelle Clark who, rumor had it, had learned from her sources that the Hunts were about to spill the proverbial beans regarding the Nixon whitehouse and its involvement in the Watergate burglary; Clark also died in the crash.

A large sum of money (between $10,000 and $100,000) was found amid the wreckage in the possession of Mrs. Hunt. It was during this time that Dorothy Hunt was traveling around the country paying off operatives and witnesses in the Watergate operation with money her husband had extorted from Nixon via his counsel, John Dean. Hunt had threatened Nixon and Dean with exposing the nature of all the sordid deeds he had done.

Could it be that the fuel for Hunt's blackmail of the president had little to do with the so-called "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic headquarters? Could it have had more to do with the fate of John F. Kennedy and of Nixon's awareness of who was really behind the planning and deployment of his demise? In the Watergate tapes, Nixon displays a malignant paranoia to his chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, concerning E. Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation. He decides to use this paranoia to force the CIA to help cover up the Watergate affair.

[Charles Black]

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

[John Simkin]

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.

[Ron Ecker]

If Hunt was murdered, his killers must have been confident that he left nothing significant behind to be revealed in the event of his untimely demise. (It has long been speculated that Hunt kept such a "life insurance policy.") Of course that may also depend on whether any of his family or friends consider the old man's pneumonia to be untimely.

[Chuck Robbins]

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.

John,

The very first thought I had was that he was done in to keep his trap shut.

It would be interesting to find out if his book undergoes any last minute editing.

When he intrepidly voiced his opinion that LBJ "Was the man who had JFK killed",

his time was short..very short.

Maybe that was his way of bending his arm, with a fist at the elbow, and saying;

so kill me, I'm still telling!

[Charles Black]

Hello John

Tho the thought of murder entered my mind, I do not feel that intelligence was concerned that this man, who was "a professional xxxx and disinformationist"

as well as a mystery book author for over a half century, would have spilled "the wrong beans" !

His interviews, in my opinion, would truly have been "classic misdirections" made interesting with the insertion of some interesting, but unimportant, semi truths.

Although he had on occasion thratened disclosure of truth, it was well played extortion by someone who was KNOWN to hold, probably well hidden truths. I feel that they were afraid of how these "truths" may have been hidden, and were afraid to eliminate him..... or they would have done so in the 1970's.

This individual was a high placed CIA man who may not have only done away with his wife....but with the exception of Richard Nixon and GHW Bush are the only persons of proper age, to "claim" to have not known where they were on the day of the JFK assassination. These three were "Good Company".

I have spoken with some persons, with very limited schooling, and who might be considered somewhat "special", that knew exactly where they were on 11/22/63.

Yet three high ranking government officials did not! And quite a few others are unable to PROVE their whereabouts.

As I stated in another recent post, it would take more than 26 additional volumes to explain the enigma of the Warren Commission.

The November 22, 1963 Coup d' Etat was the greatest and most successful in the history of mankind.

Although all of the major bases of this excercise are and have been well known, world wide; no one has nor will be able to prosecute this crime that has and still does affect billions of people.

The perpretrators have been, are currently, and will continue to laugh in the face of the entire world.

Through all of the PROVEN outright lies and obvious distortion....it remains as probably the greatest, most costly, most enduring and enslaving Coup, in the History of all mankind.

When the forthcoming totality of the results of this event are tallied, I personally feel that these results will indicate that this was THE required major step in the elimination of the possibility of people to ever be truly "self ruled", the elimination of the middle class, and mass enslavement .........which was only made possible by the complacency of millions / billions of people !

Knowing it does not enable us to even imply that

we "Have nothing to lose but our chains"! I am afraid that we are not "chained"...but bolted !

Sorry to have sermonized....but I truly am in deep mourning as I don't think that our political "Resurrection" is any longer possible.

Despite all, we have what I consider "IDIOTS", attempting to find OTHER IDIOTS, to whom they can espouse their sub human intellectual theories of an insane single gunmen, that with the help of some several million COINCIDENCES, murdered a man of whom he was jealous, because his own long life of 24 years, had not been successful, and he was also not as handsome as John Kennedy.

Yet I am stupid enough to, for many years, have wasted thousands of hours of my limited life, engaged

in discussions with either those who are insane, or must obviously be in the employ of the decendents of the conspirators.

THEY must not be what I refer to as IDIOTS...since they have certainly beaten hell out of me.

Charlie Black

[Terry Mauro]

Last night I received an email from Google that E. Howard Hunt had died. (Google let me know on a daily basis any article that is published on the CIA). I then did a search to discover how the American press was reporting his death. Virtually every newspaper carried the same article provided by the AP.

These newspapers reported that in June, 1995, Hunt filed for bankruptcy protection from his creditors. They did not explain why he was so short of money.

Before the internet we would have to accept the version of events being portrayed by the media. Now we can use search-engines to find out about characters like E. Howard Hunt. Wikipedia is first and my page on Hunt is second. His own website is third. The Wikipedia account of Hunt is very similar to the one provided by AP (maybe that is where they got it from).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntH.htm

http://www.ehowardhunt.com/

There is a very good reason why the newspapers, Wikipedia and Hunt's own website do not explain why he went bankrupt in 1995. In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed that E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. Later that month Joseph Trento and Jacquie Powers wrote a similar story for the Sunday News Journal.

The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action.

Lane eventually discovered Marchetti’s sources. The main source was William Corson. It also emerged that Marchetti had also consulted James Angleton and Alan J. Weberman before publishing the article. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skillful cross-examination by Lane of Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA. It was this virtually unreported court case that resulted in Hunt’s bankruptcy.

The newspapers mentioned that Hunt’s memoirs were to be published in March, 2007. They did not say what Hunt will argue in the book. It includes a claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson might have been involved in ordering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part. LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. (John) Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK's car - where... he would have been out of danger."

Hunt suggests that senior CIA official, William K. Harvey could have been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy: "Harvey was a ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary... He definitely had dreams of becoming (CIA director) and LBJ could do that for him if he were president.... (LBJ) would have used Harvey because he was available and corrupt."

The newspapers also reported that Hunt’s wife Dorothy had died in a plane accident on 8th December, 1972. Also on the plane with Dorothy Hunt was Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick, Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: "Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative."

As Lalo J. Gastriani, pointed out in the Fair Play Magazine (November, 1994):

It was at 2:29 p.m. on Friday, December 8, 1972, during the height of the Watergate scandal that United Airlines flight 553 crashed just outside of Chicago during a landing approach to Midway Airport. Initial reports indicated that the plane had some sort of engine trouble when it descended from the clouds. But the odd thing about this crash is what happened after the plane went down. Witnesses living in the working-class neighborhood in which the plane crashed said that moments after impact, a battalion of plainclothes operatives in unmarked cars parked on side streets pounced on the crash-site. These so-called 'FBI types' took control of the scene and immediately began sifting through the wreckage looking for something. At least one survivor recognized a "rescue worker" - clad in overalls sifting through wreckage - as an operative of the CIA.

One day after the crash, the Whitehouse head of Nixon's "plumber's" outfit - Egil Krogh, Jr. - was made undersecretary of transportation, a position that put him in a direct position to oversee the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Agency which are both authorized by law to investigate airline crashes. Krogh would later be convicted of complicity in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's Psychiatrist's office along with Hunt, Liddy and a small cast of CIA-trained and retained Cuban black-bag specialists...

Ostensibly traveling with Mrs. Hunt on flight 553 was CBS news corespondent Michelle Clark who, rumor had it, had learned from her sources that the Hunts were about to spill the proverbial beans regarding the Nixon whitehouse and its involvement in the Watergate burglary; Clark also died in the crash.

A large sum of money (between $10,000 and $100,000) was found amid the wreckage in the possession of Mrs. Hunt. It was during this time that Dorothy Hunt was traveling around the country paying off operatives and witnesses in the Watergate operation with money her husband had extorted from Nixon via his counsel, John Dean. Hunt had threatened Nixon and Dean with exposing the nature of all the sordid deeds he had done.

Could it be that the fuel for Hunt's blackmail of the president had little to do with the so-called "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic headquarters? Could it have had more to do with the fate of John F. Kennedy and of Nixon's awareness of who was really behind the planning and deployment of his demise? In the Watergate tapes, Nixon displays a malignant paranoia to his chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, concerning E. Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation. He decides to use this paranoia to force the CIA to help cover up the Watergate affair.

******************************************************************

"The newspapers mentioned that Hunt’s memoirs were to be published in March, 2007. They did not say what Hunt will argue in the book. It includes a claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson might have been involved in ordering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part. LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. (John) Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK's car - where... he would have been out of danger." "

That cinches it for me. Operation Mockingbird's ["The newspapers...claim...LBJ might have been involved"] pure, unadulterated bullxxxx! ["Having Kennedy liquidated...a very tempting and logical move..."] And, still fomenting their same successful ploy at disseminating disinformation to the masses of dumbed-down Bush voters, who've helped to make this country the great bastion of assholes it's become today. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Too bad he couldn't have been strung up by his nuts, first.

E.H. HUNT, MAY HE ROT IN HELL WHERE HE BELONGS!!!

[Douglas Caddy]

E. Howard Hunt, one of the organizers of Watergate break in, dies at 88

Jan 23 17:24

By Tim Reynolds

MIAMI (AP) - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in that led to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

Hunt died after a lengthy bout of pneumonia, according to his son, Austin Hunt.

The elder Hunt was many things: a Second World War soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre.

Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't - a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator.''

"I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,'' Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.''

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars: Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched.

"According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign,'' Hunt told CNN in February 1992. ``And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found.''

The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began.

Hunt declined repeated interview requests from The Associated Press in the final years of his life, which he spent quietly in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighbourhood with his second wife, Laura.

Below is a more complete version of the AP story by Tim Reynolds in which Howard refutes allegations of being involved in the JFK assassination:

_______

Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies

Watergate Figure E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88; Organized Break-In That Led to Scandal

By TIM REYNOLDS

The Associated Press

January 23. 2007

MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

Hunt died at a Miami hospital after a lengthy bout with pneumonia, according to his son Austin Hunt.

The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre.

Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator."

"I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it."

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched.

"According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found."

The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began.

"I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country."

The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number.

Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty.

In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and that there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees."

After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done."

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.

"I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate."

Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

Hunt and Liddy the so-called White House "plumbers" broke into Ellsberg's office to gain information about him. The break-in was revealed during the 1973 espionage trial against Ellsberg and codefendant Anthony Russo, and was one of several incidents that led to dismissal of the case because of government misconduct.

Watergate was one of many wild tales some true, some not that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life.

His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with. One theory, which still exists in the minds of some, was that Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, that his image was captured in photographs from the scene.

"I was in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 22, 1963," Hunt wrote in a December 1975 letter to Time magazine, a note penned while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base's prison camp. "It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time."

Everette Howard Hunt was born Oct. 9, 1918, in Hamburg, N.Y., graduated from Brown University in 1940 and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year. He served as a destroyer gunnery officer, was injured at sea and honorably discharged from the Navy.

From 1949 through 1970 he worked for the CIA, and was involved in the operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala's president in 1954, plus the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money.

"I think I've paid my debt to society," Hunt said in 1997. "I think I've paid it amply."

Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press.

He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond."

Hunt's first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children.

A memorial service was scheduled for Monday in Miami.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2817001&page=3

[Myra Bronstein]

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.

[Douglas Caddy]

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

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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.

[Pat Speer]

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.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

He mentioned previously that LBJ used the CIA to spy on Goldwater.

Can you recall the source for Hunt's remarks about CIA helping LBJ in his 1964 campaign against Goldwater?

[Dawn Meredith]

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