E. Howard Hunt

Everette Howard Hunt (born October 9, 1918 in Hamburg , New York , † January 23, 2007 in Miami , Florida ) was an American intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and writer .

Military service and work as a writer

He studied at Brown University , which he left with a degree in 1940. During World War II , he served in the US Navy , US Army Air Force, and the Office of Strategic Services . During his service and after the war, he wrote more than 50 spy novels, which he published under his name and under various pseudonyms. In it, his heroes were always dedicated to the fight against communist terror in the world.

Activities in the service of the CIA

Hunt worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its founding in 1948 until 1970 . From Mexico, Hunt prepared the US invasion of Guatemala ( Operation PBSUCCESS ) and the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz . Arbenz had carried out extensive land reforms in 1950–1954 and nationalized fallow lands of the United Fruit Company .

As an employee of the DDP (Directorate for Plans), he had contact with Cuban exiles in Miami under the code name Eduardo during the Bay of Pigs invasion . Before this invasion, Hunt had proposed that Fidel Castro be murdered. This proposal was rejected, but at least it made such an impression that US President John F. Kennedy mentioned it during a conversation. Hunt, together with CIA agent David Atlee Phillips, wrote the starting signal for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was broadcast in Cuba by the CIA station Radio Swan (the message was supposed to create the impression that the station was activating resistance groups in Cuba):

“Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red. "

After the 1,400 Cubans in exile had been wiped out by Castro's troops, Hunt came into conflict with Kennedy, whom he accused of having refused promised support from bombers. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy threatened that he would "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces". Hunt has therefore been linked to the assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy . Marita Lorenz , a witness before the Warren Commission , said she was a former lover of Castro. Before the attack, she drove with CIA agents and Lee Harvey Oswald from Miami to Dallas and met Hunt and Oswald's later murderer Jack Ruby in a motel . These statements cannot be correct because there is evidence that Hunt was in Washington, DC on the day Kennedy was assassinated ; Ruby, whose movements in Dallas were precisely reconstructed in various investigations, was not in the motel mentioned at the time in question. There is no evidence of Oswald's stay in Miami.

E. Howard Hunt and one of the "three tramps" arrested near Dealey Plaza and released three days later

Service in the Nixon Government

From July 1971, Howard Hunt worked in the White House for the Nixon government. Officially he worked in the office of Richard Nixon's advisor Charles Colson , but unofficially he led the illegal organization of the "plumbers" together with Gordon Liddy . This was set up immediately after the publication of the top secret Pentagon papers by the New York Times and other newspapers from June 1971 onwards to “seal leaks”, that is, information from the White House, ministries and authorities that had been launched to the media been. One of the criminal acts that the "plumbers" organized in 1971 under the direction of Liddy and Hunt was a break-in at the practice of psychiatrist Lewis J. Fielding in Los Angeles . This was in charge of Daniel Ellsberg , a former Pentagon analyst who was responsible for the publication of the Pentagon papers. Through his contacts with the Cuban exile community in Miami dating back to the early 1960s and hints of his high-ranking clients, Hunt was able to win over some Cubans, some of whom had experience of secret service operations through their CIA past, to carry out this break-in . One hoped to find incriminating information that could discredit Ellsberg in public, but did not find anything.

The "plumbers" troop was disbanded at the end of 1971; Liddy and Hunt continued their covert operations. While Hunt continued to officially work for the White House until April 1972, Liddy moved to the service of Nixon's re-election committee . From December 1971 onwards, the two discussed plans for a far-reaching spying on democratic presidential candidates in the upcoming election year. These simulation games, operating under the code name "Edelstein" ("Gemstone"), were finally approved in April 1972 by John N. Mitchell , the head of the re-election committee. Immediately afterwards, Liddy and Hunt began the preparations to break into the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Washington Watergate building complex , where internal documents were secretly photographed and bugs were to be laid to monitor premises or telephones. Liddy and Hunt hired some of the same men who had carried out the fielding break-in to carry out the break-in.

After the burglars were arrested on the night of June 17, 1972, investigators quickly found Hunt's lead. Hunt's phone number was found in Bernard Barker's notebook , one of the burglars.

In the months that followed, Hunt kept demanding hush money from the White House. Hunt was later sentenced to 33 months in prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. He spent the last years of his life in Florida.

Hunt was portrayed by Ed Harris in Oliver Stone's film Nixon .

Works

• East of Farewell 1942
• Limit of Darkness 1944
• Stranger in Town 1947
• Bimini Run 1949
• The Violent Ones 1950

literature

• E. Howard Hunt: Give Us This Day, the Inside Story of the CIA and the Bay of Pigs Invasion ... by One of Its Key Organizers , Arlington House Publishers, New Rochelle 1973, ISBN 978-0-87000-228-1 .
• E. Howard Hunt: Undercover - Memoirs of an American Secret Agent . Berkeley Publ., New York 1974.
• Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward: All the President's Men . Simon & Schuster, New York 1974.
• Victor Marchetti, John D. Marks: The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence . Knopf, New York 1974.
• John Ranelagh: The Agency - The Rise and Decline of the CIA . Simon & Schuster, New York 1986, ISBN 0-671-44318-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ John McAdams: JFK Assassination Logic. How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy. Potomac Books, Dulles, VA 2011, pp. 83 ff.