Another Spy Who Knew Dies

Readers of my blog will recall that in the last installment of my series on the assassination, Dead Kennedys, I named CIA officers who I believe had guilty knowledge of the Mafia's plan to kill President Kennedy. I also said that there were other officers that fit the description. One of those died on January 23rd.

E. Howard Hunt, who achieved infamy as the organizer of Nixon's "Plumbers " unit that broke into the Watergate office of the Democratic Party was also well known to Cuban exiles plotting against Castro as "Eduardo". Hunt participated in the 1954 CIA coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. In 1959 he made the written recommendation to his CIA superiors that Castro be "neutralized". Hunt was a major planner of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He helped train resistance fighters under the leadership of former revolutionary Manuel Artime in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Henry Williams, a Bay of Pigs veteran and Kennedy Cuban coordinator for AMWORLD, was assigned to Hunt and later Watergate burglar, James McCord. In the early sixties he was the CIA's Mexico City station chief, but he was not at the scene of the murder as claimed by some theorists (not disguised as one of the 'derelicts' found by police in freight cars behind Dealy Plaza). Hunt probably would have known of Oswald's visit to the embassies of Cuba and Russia in Mexico City just prior to the assassination.

Hunt did 33 months in federal prison for his role in Watergate. While he was under arrest Hunt demanded $2 million from Nixon's White House lawyer, John Dean, to keep silent. He reportedly threatened to expose what he knew about the Kennedy murder. Hunt was a fanatical anti-communist and his hatred of JFK was well known in government circles.

Hunt sued a newspaper for liable in 1981 after an investigator, Victor Marchetti, claimed that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to kill the president. Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations had obtained a 1966 CIA memo (possibly part of an agency "limited hangout" to derail investigators) that said Hunt and other agents were involved. In the suit, Marita Lorenz, a former mistress of Castro, testified that she met Hunt in Dallas on November 21, 1963. Hunt's alibi for that day was brought into question. He lost the libel case on appeal and declared bankruptcy. Before he died Hunt made the outlandish and unsubstantiated claim in his memoirs that LBJ used disgruntled CIA officer William Harvey to eliminate JFK.