Howard Hunt

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. (October 9, 1918 - January 23, 2007) was a CIA officer and prolific spy novelist who participated in two of the most significant CIA covert operations of the Cold War era - the 1954 Guatemalan coup (Operation PBSUCCESS) and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion - before his involvement in the Watergate burglary of June 1972 made him one of the most publicly known CIA officers in American history.¹

Early CIA Career

Hunt graduated from Brown University and served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II before joining the CIA at its founding. He was stationed in Mexico City, Vienna, Tokyo, and Uruguay, developing expertise in political action and propaganda operations. He was also a prolific author of spy fiction under multiple pen names, publishing more than forty novels during his career.

During the early 1950s Hunt worked under Frank Wisner in the Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA's political warfare arm that conducted operations across Europe and Asia against Soviet influence. This experience positioned him for PBSUCCESS.¹

Operation PBSUCCESS

Hunt was assigned to Operation PBSUCCESS in 1953-1954 as chief of political action and propaganda. His primary responsibility was the "Voice of Liberation" - Radio Liberación - the CIA-operated radio station broadcasting from Honduras that fabricated reports of the exile Liberation Army's military successes in Guatemala. The radio campaign was central to the operation's psychological strategy: convincing the Guatemalan military officer corps that Jacobo Arbenz's position was militarily hopeless, inducing the defections that ultimately forced Arbenz's resignation.

Hunt also managed the political exile leadership, working to maintain cohesion among the Guatemalan exile groups that would form the successor government. The experience gave Hunt a model he would attempt to apply in Cuba seven years later.¹

Bay of Pigs

Hunt was assigned as the CIA's political officer for the Bay of Pigs invasion, responsible for the Cuban Revolutionary Council - the exile political organization that would form a provisional government after the expected overthrow of Fidel Castro. He worked with the exile leadership in Miami and later in New York, managing their political expectations and organizational disputes.

The Bay of Pigs was a catastrophic failure, and Hunt's political operation collapsed along with the military operation. The exile political leadership was not told the operation was under way until it had already failed, and Hunt's management of their expectations was blamed by exile leaders for contributing to the political disorder. His role in the operation was not publicly acknowledged.¹

Watergate

By 1971, Hunt had been nominally retired from the CIA and was working as a consultant to the White House under Charles Colson, a senior aide to President Richard Nixon. Nixon's "plumbers" unit - tasked with plugging information leaks and conducting political intelligence operations - recruited Hunt for various activities, including the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in September 1971.

On the night of June 17, 1972, Hunt organized and directed the team that broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington - the burglary that produced five arrests, triggered the Senate investigation and Special Prosecutor investigation, and ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

Hunt was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping and sentenced to 35 years, subsequently reduced. He served approximately 33 months in federal prison. His wife Dorothy died in a plane crash in December 1972, with some researchers suggesting the crash was not accidental; the official ruling was that it was an accident.²

Kennedy Assassination Statements

In his final years, Hunt made a series of statements about the Kennedy assassination that attracted significant attention. In a 2007 article in Rolling Stone based on a recorded conversation with his son Saint John Hunt, Hunt implicated several CIA figures - including Cord Meyer and David Phillips - as having known about or participated in a conspiracy. Hunt's account was inconsistent across tellings and was disputed by the individuals named; his health had declined severely before the statements were made.

The statements were notable primarily because Hunt was one of the few CIA figures of his era with direct personal knowledge of the Guatemala and Bay of Pigs operations who made any public statement about Kennedy assassination involvement. They were not corroborated by independent evidence.

Hunt died of pneumonia on January 23, 2007, in Miami.¹