Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved operating in the shadows and joined Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit (a.k.a. These guys meant to take the powers of the presidency and run amok. It all seems a little nutty now, but in 1972 it was serious business. Gordon Liddy, his Watergate co-conspirator and Nixon’s dirty-tricks chief, who would hold his own hand over an open flame to prove what a real tough guy he was. Constitution, while back then, in addition to Hunt, you had out-and-out thugs like G. Today you’ve got flabby-faced half-men like Karl Rove, with weakling names like “Scooter” Libby, blandly hacking their way through the constraints of the U.S. They sure don’t make white House bad guys the way they used to. And then he got better and went on to live for four more years. It was explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the JFK-assassination-theory landscape. He had lied during those two federal investigations. I shouldn’t have to do additional time and suffer additional losses for something I had nothing to do with.”īut now, in August 2003, propped up in his sickbed, paper on his lap, pen in hand and son sitting next to him, he began to write down the names of men who had indeed participated in a plot to kill the president. “I didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, didn’t know anything about it,” he said during one of them. He swore to this during two government investigations.
Despite almost universal skepticism, his father had always maintained that he didn’t. John came to him wanting to know if he had any information about the assassination of President Kennedy. That the country repaid him with almost three years in prison was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top as he once said, “I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land.” Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of course. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and they were for drugs. The two of them, father and son, had wiped fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other ways, too. There were a couple of days back in 1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen to the occasion. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for twenty years, a meth dealer for ten of those years and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California, borrowing money to fly because he was broke. John to get him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen. It smelled foul in there he was incontinent a few bottles of urine under the bed needed to be emptied but he was beyond caring. John wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed.
#E HOWARD HUNT CONFESSION SCOPES FULL#
They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. The Beatles in India: 16 Things You Didn't Know And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over. John Saint, for short – was by his side now. prisons – of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife’s death, of thirty-three months in U.S.
But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell, the New York Times once called “the best sea story” of World War II. In the CIA, he’d helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami.