E. Howard Hunt - JFK Conspiracy Theories

JFK Conspiracy Theories

Give Us This Day, Hunt's book on the Bay of Pigs Invasion, was published late in 1973. In the book's foreword, he commented on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as follows:

Once again it became fashionable to hold the city of Dallas collectively responsible for his murder. Still, and let this not be forgotten, Lee Harvey Oswald was a partisan of Fidel Castro, and an admitted Marxist who made desperate efforts to join the Red Revolution in Havana. In the end, he was an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But for Castro and the Bay of Pigs disaster there would have been no such "Committee." And perhaps no assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.

On November 3, 1978, Hunt gave a security-classified deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He denied knowledge of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy. (The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released the deposition in February 1996.)

The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, based on recording of the assassination from the open microphone on a Dallas Police officer's motorcycle. The scientific acoustical evidence was initially reported to furnish a 95% probability that there was a second gunman in the so-called grassy knoll area. This conclusion is controversial, and it is possible the open microphone was not at the scene of the assassination. See Dictabelt evidence relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The Committee could not determine who the gunman was and what the extent of the conspiracy was. In 2005, an article in Science & Justice by Ralph Linsker, Richard Garwin, Herman Chernoff, Paul Horowitz, and Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr. re-analyzed the acoustic synchronization evidence, supporting the NAS report's finding that the sounds alleged to be gunshots occurred about a minute after the assassination. Two newspaper articles published a few months before the deposition stated that a 1966 CIA memo linking Hunt to the assassination of President Kennedy had recently been provided to the HSCA. The first article, by Victor Marchetti—author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974)—appeared in the Liberty Lobby newspaper The Spotlight on August 14, 1978. According to Marchetti, the memo said in essence, "Some day we will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963." He also wrote that Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Gerry Patrick Hemming would soon be implicated in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.

The second article, by Joseph J. Trento and Jacquie Powers, appeared in the Wilmington, Delaware Sunday News Journal six days later. It alleged that the purported memo was initialed by Richard Helms and James Angleton and showed that, shortly after Helms and Angleton were elevated to their highest positions in the CIA, they discussed the fact that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that his presence there had to be kept secret. However, nobody has been able to produce this supposed memo, and the United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States determined that Hunt had been in Washington, D.C. on the day of the assassination.

Hunt sued Liberty Lobby—but not the Sunday News Journal—for libel. Liberty Lobby stipulated, in this first trial, that the question of Hunt's alleged involvement in the assassination would not be contested. Hunt prevailed and was awarded $650,000 damages. In 1983, however, the case was overturned on appeal because of error in jury instructions. In a second trial, held in 1985, Mark Lane made an issue of Hunt's location on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby by producing evidence suggesting that Hunt had been in Dallas. He used depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner, and Marita Lorenz, plus a cross-examination of Hunt. On retrial, the jury rendered a verdict for Liberty Lobby. In spite of Lane's claim that he convinced the jury that Hunt was a JFK assassination conspirator, most of the jurors who were interviewed by the media said they disregarded the conspiracy theory and judged the case (according to the judge's jury instructions) on whether the article was published with "reckless disregard for the truth." Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA's role in Kennedy's murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

Some people that believe JFK was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy have suggested that two of the "three tramps" that marched through Dealey Plaza in the wake of the assassination to be Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, although several other men, Charles Harrelson for example, were also identified as tramps. The mystery was thought to be solved in the early 1990s when researcher Mary LaFontaine discovered documents identifying the men as Harold Doyle, John Forester Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams. Both the F.B.I. and independent researchers confirmed the identifications.

The Mitrokhin Archive by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, on the evidence supplied by Mitrokhin's transcribed versions of Top Secret KGB files, alleges that the Soviet Union was principal in falsely connecting E. Howard Hunt to the Kennedy Assassination. Those allegations contradict the House Select Committee on Assassinations final report. The Committee concluded that there was no evidence to prove Soviet Union/KGB involvement. Mitrokhin alleges, for example, that the KGB recruited and provided secret financial support for Mark Lane and other conspiracy theorist authors, including Carl Aldo Marzani and Joachim Joesten.

Hunt was also the addressee of a letter, purportedly from Oswald, dated two weeks before the assassination. Andrew and Mitrokhin state that the letter was a hoax, carefully created by the KGB to implicate Hunt and the CIA, based upon a belief that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination. The letter was accepted as genuine by Oswald's widow and left the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978) unable to verify or discredit its authenticity. Eventually it appeared in the American press, though some assumed the "Mr. Hunt" to whom it was addressed to be the oil magnate H. L. Hunt, whom the Kremlin first suspected of plotting the assassination.

Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. He lived in Biscayne Park, Florida.

A fictionalized account of Hunt's role in the Bay of Pigs operation appears in Norman Mailer's 1991 novel Harlot's Ghost.

Canadian journalist David Giammarco interviewed Hunt for the December 2000 issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine. E. Howard Hunt also wrote the foreword to Giammarco's book For Your Eyes Only: Behind the Scenes of the James Bond Films (ECW Press, 2002).