The original story from last year: The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt : Rolling Stone
In most people's minds, E. Howard Hunt is associated with the Watergate scandals, but his career in the shadows extends much further back than the Nixon era. His work with the Central Intelligence Agency stretches back to its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, and Hunt is known to have worked for American intelligence in Cuba, France, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Washington DC.
During World War II, Hunt worked behind the scenes on The March of Time, a monthly series of patriotic-themed short films produced by the Time-Life Company, which played in movie theaters before the feature. He also wrote for Life Magazine, and served in the Army Air Force as World War II drew to a close. In 1948, Hunt was placed in charge of a CIA psychological warfare workshop. In the early 1950s, he headed the CIA group that produced an animated film based on George Orwell's Animal Farm, with a CIA-written happy ending tacked on to add propaganda value to the story.
As Hunt climbed the ladder at CIA, he is known to have been deeply involved in the 1954 overthrow of the democratically-elected but unfortunately left-leaning government of Guatemala. After the coup, approximately 150,000 Guatemalans were killed by US-backed authorities, and another 50,000 were 'disappeared.' Several years later, Hunt was a key figure in the 'Bay of Pigs' plan to invade Cuba and topple Fidel Castro, a mission devised under Eisenhower but disastrously executed under John F. Kennedy in 1961. What other espionage Hunt may have been involved with remains unknown. The CIA does not issue career profiles.
After Richard M. Nixon became President, Hunt retired from the CIA, and was a seemingly perfect choice to run Nixon's in-house 'security'. Officially hired as a "part-time consultant," Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy headed a group cryptically called the "plumbers," responsible for discouraging and plugging White House information leaks. When Daniel Ellsberg was believed to have given the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, Hunt proposed that "overt, covert, and derogatory information" about Ellsberg could "destroy his public image and credibility." Along with Liddy, Hunt then plotted the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.
Later, as Nixon ran for his second term, Hunt and Liddy planned the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. The scandal began unraveling when Hunt’s name and White House phone number were found in the arrested men's possessions. Hunt was eventually charged, and he pressured the White House for large cash payments to buy his silence. Hunt's wife Dorothy handled most of these financial negotiations with the Nixon administration, and co-conspirator James W. McCord, Jr. wrote that she had said Hunt had information which would "blow the White House out of the water." In the infamous Watergate tapes, Nixon can be heard grousing several times that Hunt's demands could expose "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," and in his 1978 memoir The Ends of Power, Nixon's Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman wrote that Nixon's references to the Bay of Pigs were actually a veiled allusion to President Kennedy's assassination.
On December 8, 1972, a month after Nixon had been re-elected, Hunt's wife was among those killed when a United Airlines flight from Washington to Chicago crashed near that city's Midway Airport. Her luggage contained "a large sum in cash," with reports at the time ranging from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Mere weeks after this tragedy, Hunt pled guilty to conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping. He served almost three years in prison. In 1974, Chuck Colson, who had been Hunt's immediate boss at the White House, told Time Magazine, "I think they killed Dorothy Hunt."
Although the direct evidence is scant, many Americans suspect that the CIA -- and Hunt -- were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Hunt always said he was in Washington DC on November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas. In the immediate aftermath of the crime, three men were detained, then allowed to go. Their identities were never ascertained, and official reports merely described them as "railroad bums," but photographs of one of these un-named men resemble Hunt, and one of the other men resembles Frank Sturgis, one of the Watergate burglers who had previously been involved with the Bay of Pigs fiasco. A 1975 FBI analysis of the photos concluded that "neither E. Howard Hunt nor Frank Sturgis appear as any of the three derelicts arrested in Dallas, Texas, as shown in the photographs submitted". In 1981, Hunt won a $650,000 libel lawsuit against Liberty Lobby, publisher of the newsletter Spotlight, which had accused him of being involved in Kennedy's assassination. That verdict and award were appealed, however, and overturned at retrial after witnesses swore they had seen Hunt in Dallas on that day.
Interviewed by Slate in 2004, Hunt was asked point-blank where he was the day Kennedy was killed, and he replied, "No comment". After Hunt's death, his eldest son claimed that his father had drawn diagrams and left tape recordings explaining how the assassination had been orchestrated by Kennedy's Vice President, Lyndon B. Johnson.
During his CIA career, Hunt hired another now-famous CIA agent, William F. Buckley, and the two men and their families became very good friends. Buckley was godfather to three of Hunt's children, and while the children were young, Hunt's will stipulated that if any accident or act of God claimed both he and his wife, Buckley would become the legal guardian for their children. Many years later Buckley paid Hunt's legal bills for his Watergate scandal defense, and after the untimely death of Hunt's wife, he served as executor of her estate
