Howard Hunt's Final Mission

By JAMES ROSEN | 2/6/07 5:22 PM EDT

"It's something that gets into your blood," E. Howard Hunt recently admitted, "keeps your heart beating, your mind keen …" The legendary Watergate conspirator was speaking, of course, of what he called "the action": the covert intrigues that inspired and consumed him, as a career intelligence official and prolific spy novelist, over the course of three decades in the Navy, the Army Air Force, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Central Intelligence Agency, and, finally, the Nixon White House.

Hunt was speaking, too, from the grave, for his confession came in a memoir whose publication he did not live to see. Hunt died Jan. 23 at the age of 88. "American Spy: My History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond," co-authored by Greg Aunapu, a Miami writer, is Hunt's third work of nonfiction, following "Give Us This Day" (1973), a firsthand account of the Bay of Pigs debacle; and "Undercover: Memoirs of a Secret Agent" (1974), a brisk autobiography, parts of which, concerning Watergate, Hunt later disavowed as lies -- and yet from which "American Spy," in retelling the spook's life story, borrows heavily.

So closely did Hunt's career track the rise and decline of the American intelligence apparatus that he could have stepped right out of "The Good Shepherd." He rubbed elbows with all of the real-life Ivy Leaguers portrayed in that film, and his own adventures inspired those of Ethan Hunt, the protagonist in Mission Impossible.

Born in upstate New York to affluent parents, Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a love of the classics, a proficiency in Latin, Greek and Spanish, and a degree in English. During World War II, he saw action in the North Atlantic but was sidelined by a fall on the icy deck of a destroyer. While on medical leave, he produced "East of Farewell," the first book-length account of that now-distant war written by a veteran and the first of 80 novels that Hunt would ultimately publish, both under his own name and various pseudonyms.

After Hunt served stints as a war correspondent for Life and in the Army Air Force, his father, a prominent lawyer and lobbyist, arranged for his son to meet Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the OSS and the father of America's modern intelligence services. From that meeting blossomed Hunt's often thrilling career in clandestine service: uncovering a double agent in Calcutta; sabotaging Japanese units behind enemy lines in China's Yunnan province; rescuing American POWs from starvation.

In the 1950s, Hunt went on to oversee CIA operations in Mexico City, where his charges included young Yale-educated William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather to Hunt's first four children. Bolstered by that posting, he got to help plot the agency's overthrow of Guatemala's Communist-leaning government, run anti-Soviet propaganda campaigns in the Balkans and rise to station chief in Uruguay.

However, after the CIA's calamitous attempt to replicate its Guatemalan success in Castro's Cuba at the Bay of Pigs -- a campaign fatally undermined, many believed, by President John F. Kennedy's withholding of crucial air support -- Hunt's career stalled. He spent the remainder of the 1960s shuffling through low-impact postings until he could retire from the CIA in 1970 (for at least the third time, the first two being officially sanctioned acts of disinformation) and collect his pension. Yet Hunt remained "action-oriented," and sought to supplement the income from his ho-hum PR job with a CIA front in Washington by serving as a consultant to Richard Nixon's White House.

At that time, in the summer of 1971, Nixon and his top aides felt besieged by a tidal wave of radicalism, in the form of bombings, campus strikes and antiwar protests. They were determined to stop an unprecedented series of leaks of classified data to the news media. The largest of these national security breaches came when Daniel Ellsberg, a disaffected Pentagon consultant, delivered to The New York Times the so-called Pentagon Papers, 7,000 pages of top-secret government documents detailing U.S. actions in Vietnam over the previous two decades.

With the encouragement of his boss, special counsel Charles Colson, Hunt undertook a broad portfolio of sub rosa, and sometimes illegal, intrigues: forging State Department cables to implicate President Kennedy in the 1963 murder of South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem; plotting a "surreptitious entry," with his partner in crime, G. Gordon Liddy, into the office of Ellsberg's Beverly Hills psychiatrist; and, most famously, reuniting with Liddy, as well as some old Bay of Pigs compadres, for the ill-fated break-in and wiretapping operation at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building.

That last misadventure, as history now records, proved the undoing of Hunt, the Nixon administration, and, for some time on the world stage, the United States. Nixon's infamous order to have CIA officials invoke national security as a way of blocking the FBI's early Watergate investigation -- captured on the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, six days after the arrest of Hunt's operatives -- was predicated on the president's belief, as conveyed to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that "this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much ... (Disclosure of Hunt's involvement) would make the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate -- both for CIA and for the country ..."

Eight months later, Nixon taped himself ruminating on whether to pay Hunt the $120,000 he was demanding -- not as "blackmail," a charge Hunt always resented, but for legal and family bills, which Hunt saw as the traditional remuneration due all captured soldiers in the spy game. The secret recording would, like the "smoking gun" tape, figure prominently in the articles of impeachment that effectively drove Nixon from office.

Despite Hunt's long and valorous service to his country, the untimely death of his first wife, Dorothy, in a plane crash shortly before his Watergate trial, and the anguish the whole affair visited on his family, Hunt was sentenced by a vindictive federal judge, John J. Sirica, to 35 years in prison -- unheard of for a first-time offender -- and subjected to treatment worthy of "Les Miserables": Across 33 months in various prisons, including the hellish D.C. jail, Hunt was beaten and robbed, suffered a stroke, and made, at the age of 56, and despite his obvious literacy skills, to perform hard labor on a cattle farm. "I was a man who was, at that point, considering killing himself, to be very blunt about it," Hunt told the Senate Watergate committee, in previously unpublished testimony, about the period after his wife's death in 1972.

After prison, Hunt endured what his old friend Bill Buckley, in his wistful introduction to "American Spy," calls "wretchedly protracted … suffering." The former spook-cum-novelist never regained his professional or literary reputations, struggled to pay nearly $800,000 in legal fees and failed to quash persistent conspiracy theories linking him, erroneously, if not downright maliciously, to Kennedy's assassination.

By 2003, Hunt had lost a leg to arteriosclerosis. But Hunt's life after Watergate was not without redemption. While in prison, he met the woman who would become his second wife, an unpretentious divorcee named Laura Martin. They had two children (one of whom, Austin, a ringer for Val Kilmer, has followed his father's footsteps into government service.) Hunt also remained a shrewd observer of the national scene. As early as 1977, shortly after Muslim terrorists stormed three buildings in Washington, taking more than 130 hostages and killing a radio reporter, Hunt warned, in a Newsweek essay, that post-Watergate hysteria had left the U.S. intelligence agencies "cowed and demoralized," with the consequence that "the FBI's ability to cope with domestic terrorism has been reduced to near nullity."

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As a posthumous memoir, however, "American Spy" is problematic. For one thing, advance proofs indicate one of his co-authors (omitted from the cover but not the copyright page) was Eric Hamburg, co-producer of Oliver Stone's film, "Nixon" -- which, among other misrepresentations, depicted an encounter between Hunt and White House counsel John Dean that, as far as is known, never took place. As one who suffered mightily at the hands of conspiracy theorists, Hunt's choice of allies is curious.

Indeed, much of the book's new material sounds as though it is the work of Hamburg or Aunapu and not Hunt. This is especially so in the recurrent, and transparently calculated, use of contemporary terms Hunt probably never uttered in his life such as "reality shows," "yuppies living in McMansions," and "X-Gamers." The problem recurs in several left-leaning harangues, inserted awkwardly into the narrative, that contrast sharply with the voice of a man who elsewhere rejoices in the company of CIA's Frank Wisner as "one of the few anti-Communist hardliners I met while in Europe, and a refreshing contrast, I thought, to the views of most of my colleagues."

Would Howard Hunt, an avid viewer of Fox News, still question, at this late date, even after the release of the incriminating Venona Papers, whether Alger Hiss really was guilty of being a Soviet spy? Would he spend five seconds entertaining as "not beyond consideration" the theory that, while a congressman, Nixon built a phony typewriter to implicate Hiss? Would he devote an entire chapter to empty theorizing about who "might" have been involved in the Kennedy assassination, even as he excoriated those who, with equal emptiness, falsely implicated him?

Most problematic are the Watergate chapters. There are numerous factual errors -- misspelled names, wrong dates, phantom participants in meetings, fictitious orders given -- and the authors never substantively address, only pause occasionally to demean, the vast scholarly literature that has arisen in the last two decades to explain the central mystery of Watergate: What was the purpose of the wiretap on the telephone of R. Spencer Oliver, the lone wiretap that worked, and was monitored, for the three-week lifespan of the doomed DNC surveillance operation?

Hunt similarly makes no effort to explain why one of the Cubans he recruited for the mission, Eugenio Martinez, was found by the FBI, upon arrest, to be carrying a key to the desk of Oliver's secretary, Ida "Maxie" Wells.

Neither Oliver nor Wells had anything to do with Democratic Party finances, which Hunt always claimed was the area he and his men were sent into the DNC to investigate. These inescapable facts have increasingly led scholars to believe that it was Wells and Oliver, not party chairman Larry O'Brien, who were the true targets of the Watergate operation. Likewise, Hunt notes again and again the "strange" behavior of the mission's wiretap installer, James McCord: repeatedly deceiving his Cuban cohorts, absenting himself at critical times. But he never confronts the "secret agenda" that numerous Watergate historians have alleged McCord to have harbored. These are important questions, and Hunt and his co-authors should have sought to answer them, not just ignore them or cursorily dismiss them as "revisionist."

Outside those unfortunate passages, "American Spy" succeeds in taking readers beyond the caricatures and conspiracy theories to preserve the valuable memory of Hunt as he really was: passionate patriot; committed Cold Warrior; a lover of fine food, wine and women; incurable intriguer, wicked wit and superb storyteller. One wonders if Hunt ever saw the parallels between an event from his wartime OSS service, recounted in "American Spy" for the first time, and the moment when he pleaded with Liddy, in the pre-dawn hours of June 17, 1972 and to no avail, not to go forward with the last, disastrous Watergate raid.

The earlier moment came in the summer of 1944, when the pilot of a C-47, against Hunt's pleas, recklessly flew their plane above Japanese anti-aircraft gunners stationed near Changsha. Two crewmen were shot to death before Hunt's own eyes, and plummeted through the plane's open doors. After landing, the pilot returned with horror on his face. "What happened to the others?" he asked. "What the hell did you expect?" Hunt retorted. "Flak happened."

James Rosen is the Fox News State Department correspondent and author of "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," forthcoming from Doubleday.