E. Howard Hunt - Watergate and Related Scandals

Watergate and Related Scandals

Hunt's first assignment for the White House was a covert operation to break into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis J. Fielding. In July 1971, Fielding had refused an FBI request for psychiatric data on Ellsberg. Hunt and Liddy cased the building in late August. The burglary, on September 3, 1971, was not detected, but no Ellsberg files were found.

Also in the summer of 1971, Colson authorized Hunt to travel to New England to seek potentially scandalous information on Senator Edward Kennedy, specifically pertaining to the Chappaquiddick incident and to Kennedy's possible extramarital affairs. Hunt sought and used CIA disguises and other equipment for the project. This mission eventually proved unsuccessful, with little if any useful information uncovered by Hunt.

Hunt's White House duties included assassinations-related disinformation. In September 1971, Hunt forged and offered to a Life magazine reporter two top-secret U.S. State Department cables designed to prove that President Kennedy had personally and specifically ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he had fabricated the cables to show a link between President Kennedy and the assassination of Diem, a Catholic, to estrange Catholic voters from the Democratic Party, after Colson suggested he "might be able to improve upon the record."

According to Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, Nixon White House tapes show that after presidential candidate George Wallace was shot on May 15, 1972, Nixon and Colson agreed to send Hunt to the Milwaukee home of the gunman, Arthur Bremer, to place McGovern presidential campaign material there. The intention was to link Bremer with the Democrats. Hersh writes that, in a taped conversation, "Nixon is energized and excited by what seems to be the ultimate political dirty trick: the FBI and the Milwaukee police will be convinced, and will tell the world, that the attempted assassination of Wallace had its roots in left-wing Democratic politics." Hunt did not make the trip, however, because the FBI had moved too quickly to seal Bremer's apartment and place it under police guard.

Hunt organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building.

A few days after the break-in, Nixon was recorded saying, to H. R. Haldeman, "This fellow Hunt, he knows too damn much."

ery bad, to have this fellow Hunt, ah, you know, ah, it's, he, he knows too damn much and he was involved, we happen to know that. And that it gets out that the whole, this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it's a fiasco, and it's going to make the FBI, ah CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate for CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy, and he just better tough it and lay it on them.

Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five burglars arrested at the Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later.

Hunt put pressure on the White House and the Committee to Re-Elect the President for cash payments to cover legal fees, family support, and expenses, for himself and his fellow burglars. Key Nixon figures, including Haldeman, Charles Colson, Herbert Kalmbach, John Mitchell, Fred LaRue, and John Dean eventually became entangled in the payoff schemes, and large amounts of money were passed to Hunt and his accomplices, to try to ensure their silence at the trial, by pleading guilty to avoid prosecutors' questions, and afterwards.. Tenacious media, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, eventually used investigative journalism to break open the payoff scheme, and published many articles which proved to be the beginning of the end for the cover-up. Prosecutors had to follow up once the media reported. Hunt also pressured Colson, Dean, and John Ehrlichman to ask Nixon for clemency in sentencing, and eventual presidential pardons for himself and his cronies; this eventually helped to implicate and snare those higher up.

Hunt's wife, Dorothy, was killed in the December 8, 1972 plane crash of United Airlines Flight 553 in Chicago. Congress, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the crash, and found it to be an accident caused by crew error. Over $10,000 in cash was found in Dorothy Hunt's handbag in the wreckage.

Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison at the low-security Federal Prison Camp at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on a conspiracy charge, arriving there on April 25, 1975, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign while avoiding prosecution for any crimes he may have committed, and was later fully pardoned in September, 1974, by incoming President Gerald Ford.