Karl Jones Dot Com » E. Howard Hunt Dies at 88

E. Howard Hunt: Cold War spy, Watergate break-in mastermind

MIAMI — E. Howard Hunt, a mastermind of the 1972 Watergate break-in that brought down the Nixon presidency and afflicted U.S. politics with its most notorious scandal, died [January 23, 2007] of complications from pneumonia at North Shore Medical Center. He was 88.

Hunt was a strident anti-communist and architect of U.S. covert operations throughout a career that began with World War II military service and saw the right-wing militant play crucial roles in the fight against leftist movements throughout the Western Hemisphere.

… Born in Hamburg, N.Y., on Oct. 9, 1918, Everette Howard Hunt graduated from Brown University before serving in World War II as a Navy officer aboard a destroyer. He was injured at sea and honorably discharged.

… Hunt was a founder of the OSS, then became a CIA operative for two decades, which spanned the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was that operation that put him in touch with militant Cuban exiles on whom he depended for future actions, including the Watergate break-in.

… Hunt proudly took credit for orchestrating a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, as well as the 1967 killing of Castro ally Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

… After he resigned from the CIA in 1970, Hunt freelanced his skills as a spymaster and covert operations master, serving as a White House advisor to the Nixon administration at the time of the Watergate mission.

… Watergate … marked Hunt as an ideological spymaster and devoted servant of President Nixon, who was forced to resign amid voter outrage at the criminal intrusion into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in Washington.

… Hunt spent 33 months in federal prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, pleading guilty to evade what could have been a 35-year sentence if convicted at trial. Two dozen other men also served time for the bungled break-in. Nixon was forced to abandon his second term on Aug. 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to resign.

Hunt and Liddy also were involved in burglarizing the office of the psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, a defense analyst who leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. The government was forced to drop its case against Ellsberg because of its invasions of privacy.

After his release, Hunt turned full time to writing the spy novels he began putting out in the 1940s, drawing on his cloak-and-dagger days to produce about 80 titles before illness forced him to give up the six-hour writing stints.

A memoir by Hunt, “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond,” is due to be released next month.

[LA Times]