Dead Celebrity Alert

Just announced on CNN; no online links yet, so here’s his bio from Wikipedia:

Everette Howard Hunt (born October 9, 1918, in East Hamburg, New York, United States) worked for the CIA and later the White House under President Richard Nixon. Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, had engineered the Watergate first break-in. He subsequently was fingered in the ensuing Watergate Scandal and was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.

Hunt, with Liddy and others, was one of the White House’s “plumbers” — a secret team of operatives charged with fixing “leaks.” Information disclosures had proved an embarrassment to the Nixon administration when defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent a series of documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times.

During World War II, Hunt served in the U.S. Navy, United States Army Air Forces and finally, the Office of Strategic Services. An employee of the CIA from 1949 to 1970, in 1949, he established the first post-war CIA station in Mexico City. In 1951, he hired William F. Buckley, Jr. as a CIA agent working within the Mexican student movement. Buckley and Hunt remained life-long friends. During this period, he also wrote several novels under his own name East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949) and The Violent Ones (1950)] and, more famously, several spy novels under an array of pseudonyms.

Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy’s lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us this Day, he wrote: “The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.” (p.13-14)

Hunt organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building and was also found to be responsible for a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

JFK’s assassination

The Rockefeller Commission of the U.S. Congress, in 1974, regarded Hunt and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis as suspects in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Support for this claim came from a figure from the 1960s counterculture, Kerry Thornley, who believed that on several occasions from 1961 to 1963 he had conversed with Hunt (whom Thornley claimed used the alias “Gary Kirstein”) about plans to assassinate Kennedy, while Thornley was living in New Orleans. Newsweek magazine reported and printed photographs of two men similar in appearance to Hunt and Sturgis who were detained at the grassy knoll shortly after the assassination. The article stated the official reports that the men were released as “railroad bums” who had found shelter sleeping in the boxcars of the trains located near the grassy knoll. According to the article, the men were released without further inquiry; readers were invited to draw their own conclusions from the pictures published.

Many conspiracists thought two of the tramps to be Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, although several other men were also identified as tramps. The mystery was apparently solved in the early 1990s when researcher Mary LaFontaine discovered documents identifying the men as Harold Doyle, John Forester Gedney and Gus W. Abrams. Both the F.B.I. and independent researchers confirmed the identifications.

Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, was killed in the December 8, 1972, plane crash of United Airlines Flight 533 in Chicago. Congress, the FBI, and the NTSB investigated the crash, but did not find any basis for determining that the crash was not purely accidental. $10,000 was found in Dorothy Hunt’s handbag, and was generally regarded as part of the “hush money” paid to Watergate defendants in an attempt to procure their silence regarding White House involvement.

In 1981, Hunt was awarded $650,000 in a libel lawsuit against Liberty Lobby, after it published an article by Victor Marchetti in its newspaper The Spotlight accusing Hunt of involvement in the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. However, this decision was overturned on appeal, with Mark Lane successfully defending Liberty Lobby. Lane outlined his theory about Hunt’s and the CIA’s role in Kennedy’s murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

In addition to his work at the CIA — which included nontrivial roles in Operation PBSUCCESS and the Bay of Pigs Invasion — Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lives in Biscayne Park, Florida. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond is to be published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.

Source

Filed under Forteana, Government/Politics