E. Howard Hunt

BA, Brown University

He was a complete self-centered WASP who saw himself as this blue blood.… “I’m better than anybody because I’m white, Protestant and went to Brown, and since I’m in the CIA, I can do anything I want.” Jew, nigger, Polack, wop—he used all those racial epithets. He was an elitist. He hated everybody.

—HOWARD HUNT’S SON SAINT JOHN HUNT, IN ROLLING STONE

The “E” is for “Everette,” which is a disturbing name for a macho-man spy, especially with that girly “ette” ending. No wonder he abbreviated it. But the silly name isn’t what’s surprising about E. Howard Hunt. What’s surprising—if you’re familiar with Hunt as one of Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters—is that he was a novelist. A prolific one. He wrote at least forty books, mostly under his own name but also as Robert Dietrich, P. S. Donoghue, David St. John, and John Baxter. We don’t know how good a living he could have made had he focused on his writing career. But if he had—unless his writing was exceptionally bad—he probably wouldn’t have ended up spending thirty-three months in a federal prison camp.

Born in 1918 to ultra-WASPy parents in the middle of nowhere (Hamburg, New York), he majored in English at Brown. During the war he served in the navy, then as an intelligence officer for the OSS, precursor to the CIA. Joining the incipient CIA in 1949, he became station chief in Mexico City the following year; there he supervised another Ivy League grad and fellow rabid-anticommie William F. Buckley. Let’s have a look at some highlights of his CIA and post-CIA career:

• He worked on the 1954 coup that overthrew the president of Guatemala, leading to forty years of repression and 200,000 Guatemalan deaths. When later asked how he felt about that grisly body count, Hunt responded: “Deaths? What deaths?”

• He was deeply involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion—traditionally referred to as “the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion”—of Cuba in 1961. The operation was an abysmal flop. Hunt was removed from field operations—i.e., spying—and given an office job as assistant to Allen Dulles, director of Central Intelligence (and a Princeton man), where he reportedly worked on Dulles’s book The Craft of Intelligence.

• His exile to the director’s office didn’t last long. The CIA was meant to operate outside the boundaries of the United States, but after the Bay of Pigs failure the Kennedy administration launched the Domestic Operations Division, with Hunt as its chief of covert action. His primary mandate was to manipulate the news by feeding reporters false information or bribing them. Hunt later admitted that this home-front propaganda mission violated the CIA’s charter. He left the agency for good in 1970.

• In 1971 he was hired by Nixon’s special counsel (and future pious penitent) Chuck Colson (another Brown man) to put his CIA experience to work for Tricky Dick as a member of the president’s covert Special Investigations Unit, better known as the White House Plumbers. So called because their task was to stop leaks. Yeah, “ha ha.” Look, it’s Republican humor. The leak that started it all was the set of classified documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, that Daniel Ellsberg (Harvard BA, PhD) slipped to the New York Times and eighteen other newspapers.* Why was Nixon irked that these documents were going public? Because they provided tons of evidence that the government can’t be trusted!

• Hunt’s first assignment as a Plumber: break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s shrink and steal the shrink’s notes on the patient. The idea was to discredit Ellsberg and, incidentally, punish him for what he’d done. The operation was not only a miserable failure—Hunt either never found the notes or Nixon’s gang couldn’t figure out what to do with them—it was the reason the espionage case against Ellsberg was dismissed: government misconduct.

• When Ellsberg’s espionage charges were dismissed, Hunt concocted another plot to discredit him, this time by slipping him a dose of LSD before he spoke at an antiwar event.^* The Cuban waiters he hired to slip the payload into Ellsberg’s soup (true story) couldn’t get to the event on time, and the mission was aborted.

• Finally, Hunt’s crowning, and final, dirty trick: the Watergate break-in, in which he and evil genius G. Gordon Liddy organized a team^* to enter the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex to photograph documents and bug phones. They were busted by a security guard, the FBI traced them to Hunt, a cover-up was uncovered, Woodward and Bernstein followed the money, and soon everyone watched Nixon on the nightly news as he skulked across the White House lawn, awkwardly (and irrationally, absurdly) flashed the V sign, and climbed into the Marine chopper for the last time.

• Hunt went to prison for Watergate. Until the day he died, in 2007, he remained bitter that he was punished while Nixon remained a free—if disgraced—man. He never quite understood that being a white, Protestant Brown alum doesn’t mean you own the country.

He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the C.I.A. in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Mr. Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct classic espionage operations in order to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda.

—From Hunt’s New York Times obituary

But he did leave a sort-of-literary legacy: thanks to his last big, bungled burglary, we began to append the word “-gate” to every political scandal, real or bogus. And we still do, to this very day.