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American Spy by Howard Hunt
Howard Hunt, CIA propagandist, convicted Watergate burglar, potential conspirator in the John Kennedy assassination died this January shortly before publication of, essentially, his memoirs. Who was Hunt? He'd served with the OSS during WWII and thought of himself as a hardened, debonair covert operative. My take viewing Hunt from afar is of a short, ugly Ivy League rich kid who liked to play spy in third-world countries. Hunt's world view epitomized all that was wrong with US foreign policy during the Cold War (policies that have again reared their ugly head during the presidency of George W. Bush).
After graduation from Brown University, Hunt went to work for the CIA in 1949. He was made CIA station chief in Mexico City in 1950 and brought along pal William F. Buckley Jr. to work for him. Buckley and Hunt remained life-long friends. Hunt's primary responsibility while with the CIA was propaganda and disinformation aimed at foreign nations. The CIA would sponsor books, articles, radio shows, and even movies that depicted perceived enemies of the US in a bad light. By Hunt's account, he was the architect for Operation PB/SUCCESS, the CIA operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. "PB/Success did have a precedent that we planned to duplicate. In August 1953, Operation Ajax had successfully deposed the Iranian premier Mohammed Mossadega" replacing him with the Shah. American Spy at page 74.
The mostly bloodless CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala are considered the crown jewel successes of CIA covert ops. In the case of Iran, we can now see the obvious blowback. A country that was a stable democracy tilting only slightly left has become a fundamentalist Islamic state that is virulently anti-American. Starting in the 1960s and lasting into the 1990s, Guatemala was plagued by civil war between a guerrilla insurgency movement and the military that ran the government. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans were killed during the civil war. "More than 450 Mayan villages were destroyed and over 1 million people became internal and external refugees." Link. The Ivy League adolescents running the CIA have caused tremendous damage to the United States and the world at large. These are but two small examples.
In 1961, the CIA team (Hunt included) that pulled off the coup in Guatemala was reassembled to attempt the same thing in Cuba. Guatemala was used as the staging area for the invasion. We all know the Bay of Pigs invasion was a resounding failure. It was a huge embarrassment and loss of political capital for the new American president, John Kennedy. Hunt and the CIA principals completely underestimated the military strength of Castro and overestimated the degree to which the Cuban people would take up arms against him (there was no popular uprising). Hunt and his CIA cohorts placed the blame for the mission's failure on Kennedy's orders limiting the number of air strikes the rebels could make on Cuba using CIA supplied and flown aircraft.
The book Coup D'Etat In America alleges that Howard Hunt was in Dealy Plaza when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The main evidence for this are pictures of the so-called tramps found behind the grassy knoll immediately after the shooting. Hunt is said to be one of the tramps. Look for yourself (Hunt two pics on left, tramp on right).
  
Here is a picture of the three tramps. The Hunt tramp is the third in line.
The middle tramp is supposed to be CIA operative and later Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. Frank's birth name was Fiorini. He's 100% Italian and does not, to my eye, match the tall tramp.FN1. The theory goes that a CIA assassination team (Operation 40) of which Frank Sturgis was a member under operational control of the CIA Bay of Pigs team assassinated President Kennedy as payback for his placing limits on the invasion. In recent years, a man named Harold Doyle claimed on the Fox show "A Current Affair" Link to be the first of the three tramps and, further, he stated the three men were just bums who had nothing to do with the assassination. But others have analyzed Harold Doyle's photos and conclude he was not the first tramp. Link.
Hunt and Sturgis, of course, denied involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Besides the tramp photos, the best evidence against these two is the deposition of Marita Lorenz, the one-time mistress of Fidel Castro and CIA contract agent. She claims she went to Dallas with Sturgis and Hunt who were there the day Kennedy was killed. She testified that Sturgis confessed to her that "they" killed Kennedy. Lorenz bio. Another nugget from Hunt's book I was not aware of.
Nixon, on the Watergate tapes, made some famous statements about me. He said, 'Howard Hunt, knows too much. This is going to open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing.' [Strange given that Nixon is not publicly known to have had a connection to the Bay of Pigs invasion.] * * * H.R. Halderman wrote in his memoirs that 'Bay of Pigs' was code language for the Kennedy assassination.
Page 144-45. My personal view is that a right-wing faction within the CIA (including Hunt) did in fact kill President Kennedy.
Although denying his personal involvement, Hunt has plenty to say about the assassination going so far as to admit that it is plausible to him that certain CIA agents had a role in the assassination. Here is a gem: "Since I don't believe that Oswalt had the ability to perform the horrible feat of accurate marksmanship that killed Kennedy, especially with the mail-order 1938 Italian-manufactured Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he used, I think there may have been another shooter behind the fence." Page 135. He offers up the names of Cord Meyer and Bill Harvey, a high ranking CIA official, as the most likely suspects to have run the operation. Hunt claims in the book (pages 132-134) that Cord Meyer's wife, journalist Mary Pinchot, was having an affair with John Kennedy (this dude got lots of tail!). Meyer divorced Mary Pinchot who was later murdered while walking in a park in Georgetown (1964). Can you say Chandra Levy? Mary Pinchot's sister, upon learning of the murder, immediately goes to her sister's house to look for her diary. Upon arrival, she finds CIA counter-espionage chief James Angleton rummaging through the house looking for the diary. Sure, this was a random killing. Hunt gives us a motive of personal vengeance for Meyer to want Kennedy dead. How silly. The Bay of Pigs was the motive and that motive leads back to Hunt and his Cubans.
Hunt retired from the CIA in 1970 and, coincidentally, got a job in the Nixon White House. Nixon saw no difference between foreign enemies of the US and his own domestic political enemies. It's a matter of public record that Nixon wished to use the full power of the executive branch of the US Government (CIA, FBI, military, Department of Justice, IRS, et alia) against his domestic political enemies. To this end, G. Gordon Liddy (a former FBI agent) and Howard Hunt were deputized by the president's men to form a black bag team manned by Hunt's Cubans. I don't think anyone will ever know how many illegal break-ins and buggings they really pulled. The first one of public record is the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles. Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers and Nixon went bonkers. The break in was amateurish netting the burglars nothing. However, when it came to light after Watergate, Ellsberg was able to use this violation of his constitutional rights as a means to dismiss the criminal charges he faced. That was followed by the Watergate break in. I hadn't known before reading Hunt's book that his Cubans had, before getting caught, successfully broken into the Democratic campaign headquarters. However, the bug planted didn't work and they only netted a limited number of documents so the president's men (almost certainly with authorization directly from Nixon himself) ordered a repeat visit. It was during the 2nd break in that they got caught. They bungled the break in by re-taping the outer doors after the security guard removed it the first time and then left the tape in place after they had moved all their equipment in. How foolish!
It was not having his black bag team of Cubans caught in the Democratic campaign headquarters that brought Nixon down. More damaging was Hunt's paper trail begging for money for himself and his boys and Nixon's people getting them cash from the Committee To Re-elect The President (CREP). Congress thought of this as hush money and impeached Nixon. This was the greatest service Howard Hunt ever rendered to his country.
In the last chapter of the book, Hunt gives his theories on "fixing" the CIA. Hunt on how the CIA should counter the negative public image the agency currently possesses:
"[W]hat do you do? You have to start indoctrinating the youth. There's hardly a NASA engineer who doesn't trace his or her interest in space exploration to Star Trek. Likewise, the CIA needs to clandestinely produce television programs, movies, and electronic games that make people wan to grow up to serve their country and enter the intelligence community. Television shows like Fox's 24 are doing a bang-up job of reinventing the spy genre for modern times, even promoting previously untenable acts such as torture."
Two scary elements of this passage. First, Hunt's advocation of the CIA financing domestic propaganda in a big way. How would our country then be different from Communist China? Second, is not Fox a public relations extension of the CIA/neocon cabal currently running this country? Are not shows such as 24 the brain child of neocon crazies such as Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz (of whom Howard Hunt was a forerunner)? Hunt's Nixonian dreams are already reality.
CIA covert ops are fundamentally a cancer on the American republic. The story of Howard Hunt demonstrates how US Government use of propaganda, disinformation and black bag jobs against foreign governments eventually leads to domestic use of these tactics against political enemies. This is exactly what happened in the Nixon White House. And I believe the Bush / Cheney / Rove White House operates in exactly the same fashion as Nixon. The true legacy of Howard Hunt is transporting the evils of foreign black ops to the arena of domestic politics. The only difference today is that W Bush now does his domestic spying out in the light of day. He just flaunts the law while Congress and the press meow. Presently, our democracy is at a low ebb in its history.
3-14-07
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Footnote 1: As odd as it may sound, the individual often connected with the Kennedy assassination who most resembles the tall tramp is Charles Harrelson, convicted assassin and father of actor Woody Harrelson.
Update: Howard Hunt's sons St. John and David have come forward to disclose the following about their father according to the LA Times: "'He told me in no uncertain terms about a plot originating in Miami, to take place in Miami,' said St. John. He said his father identified key players and speculated that then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was responsible for moving the venue to Dallas, where the Texan could control the security scene." LA Times, 3-20-2007. The story goes, per the sons, that Howard Hunt refused to join the assassination team after being approached by the CIA. Bullshit! If Hunt was approached by the CIA, he would have had no choice but to participate. It's inconceivable that a team of CIA killers that assassinated the president would leave alive one of their own who knew the identifies of the those behind Kennedy's death but refused to participate (i.e., leaving Hunt free to inform on the perpetrators). It's like being a Mafia killer. You can never say "no" to a contract killing. These are offers one is unable to refuse.
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