U.S. military and OSS During
World War II, Hunt served in the
U.S. Navy on the destroyer
USS Mayo and the
U.S. Army Air Corps. He also served in
China with the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the
Central Intelligence Agency.
Author Hunt was a prolific author, publishing 73 books during his lifetime. During and after World War II, he wrote several novels under his own name, including
East of Farewell (1942),
Limit of Darkness (1944),
Stranger in Town (1947),
Maelstrom (1949),
Bimini Run (1949), and
The Violent Ones (1950). He also wrote
spy and
hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including
Robert Dietrich,
Gordon Davis,
David St. John, and
P. S. Donoghue. Some parallels exist between Hunt's writings and his experiences during the
Watergate scandal and espionage. He continued his writing career after he was released from prison, publishing nearly twenty spy thrillers between 1980 and 2000. In 1946, Hunt was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing.
Economic Cooperation Administration Prior to 1949, Hunt served as an officer in the Information Division of the
Economic Cooperation Administration, a predecessor of the
Mutual Security Agency.
Central Intelligence Agency Shortly following the end of
World War II, the OSS was disbanded. In 1947, with the
Cold War emerging and intensifying, the absence of a central intelligence organization was seen as a national security deficiency, and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed. In October 1949, just as
Warner Bros. acquired the rights to Hunt's novel
Bimini Run, Hunt joined the CIA's
Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). He was assigned as a
covert action officer specializing in political action and influence in what later came to be the CIA's
Special Activities Center.
Mexico City In 1950, Hunt was appointed OPC Station Chief in
Mexico City, where he recruited and supervised
William F. Buckley Jr., who worked under Hunt in his OPC Station in
Mexico from 1951 to 1952. Buckley and Hunt remained lifelong friends, and Buckley became godfather to Hunt's first three children. In
Mexico, Hunt helped lay the framework for
Operation PBFortune, later renamed
Operation PBSuccess, the successful covert operation to overthrow
Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of
Guatemala. Hunt would later say, "What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign, to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German
Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland." Hunt was then assigned as Chief of Covert Action in
Japan, and later as Chief of Station in
Uruguay, where he was noted by American diplomatic contemporary Samuel F. Hart for controversial working methods. Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began during the
Eisenhower administration, but Hunt was later bitter about what he perceived as President
John F. Kennedy's lack of commitment to the operation, which was designed to attack and overthrow the Castro government. In his semi-fictional autobiography,
Give Us This Day, Hunt wrote, "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of
José Martí, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away." In 1959, Hunt helped
CIA Director Allen W. Dulles write
The Craft of Intelligence. The following year, in 1960, Hunt established
Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed to attempt the military overthrow of the Castro's government in
Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion commenced on April 17, 1961, but was quickly aborted and viewed as a fiasco. Hunt was then reassigned as executive assistant to Dulles. In 1961, President Kennedy fired Dulles for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Hunt then served from 1962 to 1964 as the first Chief of Covert Action for the CIA's Domestic Operations Division (DODS). In 1974, Hunt told
The New York Times that he worked for DODS for approximately four years, beginning in 1962, shortly after the agency's establishment by the Kennedy administration over the objection of
Richard Helms and
Thomas H. Karamessines. Hunt said that the division was assembled shortly after the Bay of Pigs operation, and that "many men connected with that failure were shunted into the new domestic unit." He said that some of his projects from 1962 to 1966 dealt largely with subsidizing and manipulating news and publishing organizations in the United States, which he said "did seem to violate the intent of the agency's charter." In 1964,
John A. McCone, then deputy chief of intelligence at the CIA, directed Hunt to take a special assignment as a
Non-official cover officer in
Madrid, Spain, tasked with creating an American answer to
Ian Fleming's British MI-6 James Bond novel series. While in Spain, Hunt was covered as a recently retired
U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer who moved his family to Spain in order to write the first installment of the nine-novel Peter Ward series,
On Hazardous Duty, published in 1965. After a year and a half in Spain, Hunt returned to his assignment at DODS. Following a brief tenure on the Special Activities Staff of the Western European Division, he became Chief of Covert Action for the region in July 1968, and was based in the
Washington metropolitan area. Hunt was lauded for his "sagacity, balance and imagination", and received the second-highest rating of Strong signifying "performance ... characterized by exceptional proficiency" in a performance review from the Division's Chief of Operations in April 1969. However, this was downgraded to the third-highest rating of "Adequate" in an amended review from the Division's Deputy Chief, who recognized Hunt's "broad experience" but opined that "a series of personal and taxing problems" had "tended to dull his cutting edge." Hunt later said that he "had been stigmatized by the Bay of Pigs", and had come to terms with the fact that he "would not get promoted too much higher." In his final years with the CIA, Hunt began to cultivate new contacts in society and the business world.
CIA retirement Hunt retired from the CIA at the pay grade of
GS-15, Step 8 on April 30, 1970. After retiring from the CIA, Hunt neglected to elect survivorship benefits for his wife. In April 1971, he requested to retroactively amend his election but was rebuffed by the agency. In a May 5, 1972, letter to CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston, Hunt raised the possibility of returning to active duty for a short period of time in exchange for activating the benefits upon his proposed second retirement. Houston advised Hunt in his May 16, 1972, response that this "would be in violation of the spirit of the CIA Retirement Act". Through CIA's Project
QKENCHANT, Hunt obtained a Covert Security Approval to handle the firm's affairs during Mullen's absence from Washington.
White House In 1971, Colson, who was then director of Nixon's
Office of Public Liaison, hired Hunt, where he joined the
White House Special Investigations Unit, specializing in political sabotage. In July 1971, Fielding refused a request from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation 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. In the summer of 1971, Colson authorized Hunt to travel to
New England to seek potentially scandalous information on Senator
Edward Kennedy related to the
Chappaquiddick incident and Kennedy's possible extramarital affairs. The mission eventually proved unsuccessful, with little useful information uncovered by Hunt. Hunt later told the
Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he 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." In 1972, on Colson's orders, Hunt and
G. Gordon Liddy were part of an assassination plot targeting journalist
Jack Anderson. Nixon disliked Anderson because Anderson published a
1960 election-eve story about a secret loan from
Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother, which Nixon believed was a factor in his election defeat to
John F. Kennedy. Hunt and Liddy met with a CIA operative and discussed methods of assassinating Anderson, which included covering Anderson's car steering wheel with
LSD to drug him and cause a fatal accident, In his memoir Hunt reports that the day after the assassination attempt he received a call from
Chuck Colson, asking him to break into Bremer's apartment and plant "leftist literature to connect him to the Democrats". Hunt recalls that he was highly sceptical of the plan due to the apartment being guarded by the FBI but investigated the feasibility of it anyway due to Colson's insistence. Later that year, Hunt organized the bugging of the
Democratic National Committee at the
Watergate complex office building. On June 18, 1972, five burglars were arrested by police at the Watergate. Hunt and Liddy were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt put pressure on the White House and the
Committee for the Re-Election of 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 W. Kalmbach,
John Mitchell,
Fred LaRue, and
John Dean eventually became entangled in the payoff schemes. Large sums of money were passed to Hunt and his accomplices in an attempt to secure their silence at the trial, by pleading guilty to avoid prosecutors' questions, and afterwards.
The Washington Post and
The New York Times later reported on the payoff scheme, publishing many articles that proved to be the beginning of the end for the cover-up since prosecutors felt obligated to follow up on the media reports. Hunt also pressured Colson, Dean, and
John Ehrlichman to ask Nixon for clemency in sentencing, and eventual presidential pardons for himself and his Watergate break-in partners, which eventually helped implicate and snare those higher up. Hunt was sentenced to 30 months to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, and spent 33 months in prison at
Federal Correctional Complex, Allenwood, and the low-security Federal Prison Camp at
Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on a conspiracy charge; he arrived at the Eglin Air Force Base prison on April 25, 1975. While at Allenwood, Hunt suffered a mild
stroke. ==JFK conspiracy allegations==