Watergate ‘plumber’ Howard Hunt helped Nixon’s government leak into oblivion

THE man in dark glasses testifying before a US senate committee could have been a spook out of a spy novel, but this was no ordinary spy it was Howard Hunt, one of President Nixon’s plumbers

Convicted Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt, in dark glasses, begins his second day of testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in Washington in September 1973.

THE man in dark glasses testifying before a Senate Committee hearing in 1973 looked every inch the cliche
of a CIA operative, but E. Howard Hunt was no ordinary spook. Retired from the agency in 1970, he
re-emerged in 1971 to join a Special Investigations Group (SIG) on the White House staff, taking orders from White House aides who reported directly to US president Richard Nixon.

The men of SIG became known as Nixon’s “plumbers”, because they plugged leaks of damaging information from the White House. But Hunt was caught organising a team to break into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office building in 1972 and was called before the committee.

This was his second day of testimony and the dark glasses disguised how ill and tired he really looked. During his testimony the fear and paranoia that had beset Nixon’s White House staff at the time was obvious. He blamed Alfred C. Baldwin, a lookout for his Watergate burglars, accusing Baldwin of being a double agent and betraying them.

E. Howard Hunt, pictured here in 1982, helped organise the Watergate break-in that led to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency.

But Hunt, despite some successes in the CIA, also had some notable failures, and this was just another one. He became a fall guy for Watergate, ending his day notorious as the man Nixon said “knows too damned much”.

Born on October 9, 1918, a century ago today, Everette Howard Hunt Jr was the son of lawyer and Republican party lobbyist Everette Hunt.

Hunt Jr gained a literature degree from Brown University in 1940 and, in 1941, joined the navy as a lieutenant.

He saw action in the Atlantic on the USS Mayo, but was injured after slipping on an icy ship’s deck and was invalided out of the navy.

He took a civilian job and wrote his first novel, East Of Farewell, published in 1942. Later he boasted it was the first published novel about WWII by someone who had served in the war.

But Hunt was eager to do more in the war. Employed to write navy training films, he lived the good life safe on land, but still yearned for something more substantial at the front, so he got a job as a war correspondent.

Blackballed for asking General Macarthur the “wrong question” at a press conference, he returned to civilian life. He wrote another novel before signing on as a private in the US Army air force. Sidelined again into a desk job, he asked his father to get him an interview with William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was recruiting for the intelligence agency known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex in Washington in 1973.

He was sent to China, where he edited intelligence reports and was taught some of the basics of being a field operative. When the OSS was disbanded in 1945 he went back to writing and for a time wrote screenplays for films. In 1947, when the CIA was formed, recruiters looked for former OSS members. While working in Paris in 1948, possibly as a CIA operative working for a US government agency, he met and married Dorothy Wetzel.

In 1950 he was transferred to the US embassy in Mexico, where he orchestrated the coup that ousted Guatemala’s elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. He later spent time in Japan before being posted in Uruguay. But after some early successes, in 1961 his name became indelibly associated with the Bay of Pigs fiasco because of his role in the CIA team that tried to forge Cuban exiles into an invasion force to overthrow Fidel Castro.

When he lay on his deathbed in 2007, Hunt also claimed to have been part of a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1963, saying the conspiracy went all the way up to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had “an almost maniacal urge to become president”. Few people took his claim seriously, given his track record for lying.

Howard Hunt responds to a question from the counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee in Washington, DC, in September 1973. Picture: AP

When he retired from the CIA in 1970 he was recruited to be part of SIG. Using funds from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) his job was to counteract bad stories and look for those who were leaking information from the White House. One of his first tasks was to find dirt on Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret report on US involvement in Vietnam.

Along with fellow plumber Gordon Liddy, he orchestrated the Watergate break-in in September 1971, looking for information to discredit Democrat candidates. But the men doing the dirty work, mostly Cubans who had been involved in the Bay of Pigs, were caught in the act and a paper trail implicated Hunt, Liddy and the White House.

As the Watergate fallout grew worse, his wife Dorothy was killed in a plane crash in December 1972. She was carrying $10,000 in cash, which Hunt later admitted had something to do with his SIG role.

Hunt served 33 months in federal prison and, afterwards, wrote a series of spy novels and his memoir. He died of pneumonia in Miami, Florida, in 2007.