E. Howard Hunt biography

Synopsis

Early Life

E. Howard Hunt was born Everette Howard Hunt Jr. on October 9, 1918, in Hamburg, New York. A former CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt is best known for his involvement in the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. A graduate of Brown University, Hunt served in the U.S. Naval Reserves in the early 1940s before joining the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943. Also around this time, he worked on a documentary film for TIME magazine and served as a war correspondent for LIFE magazine. Skilled with words, Hunt won a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in 1946 and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a time.

CIA Operative

It is believed that Hunt began working for the CIA around 1949, which was a fairly new organization then. Over the years, he worked on a number of operations around the world, including the failed attempt to unseat Cuban dictator Fidel Castro known as the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 during the Kennedy administration. Outside of his duties as a CIA operative, Hunt found time to write a number of thrillers and spy novels, including The Violent Ones (1950), Return from Vorkuta (1965) and Diabolus (1968).

Watergate

After retiring from the CIA in 1970, Hunt worked at public relations firm in Washington, D.C., for a time before becoming a part-time consultant at the White House in 1971. Serving the administration of President Richard Nixon, he was known as a "plumber," or a person who helps fix information "leaks." Hunt was involved to stopping the leaks associated with the Pentagon Papers incident, in which a defense analyst gave The New York Times a confidential report on Vietnam. For his next project, Hunt worked with G. Gordon Liddy to gain information on Nixon’s political opposition for his re-election campaign. The two devised a plot to spy on the National Democratic Committee by breaking into its headquarters in the Watergate building complex in Washington, D.C. Hunt recruited five men for the job-four of whom he had known from the Bay of Pigs incident. The secret mission proved not to be so secret when the burglars were caught in the NDC offices on June 17, 1972.

Although the White House denied any involvement in the crime, the plot began to unravel as Hunt's telephone number was found in the address books of some of the burglars. Three months after the burglars' arrest, he and Liddy were indicted charges related to the crime. Hunt also suffered a personal tragedy that December.