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The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt
He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of
American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate
break-in. Now he would reveal what he'd always kept hidden: who killed
JFK
ERIK HEDEGAARD
Once, when the old spymaster
thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The
scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia,
cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the
amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up.
Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. 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. 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. 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. prisons -- of, in fact, a
furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his
firstborn son -- he named him St.
John; Saint, for short -- was by his side now.
And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.
They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox
News at full volume, because his hearing had failed too. After a while,
he had St. John
wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. 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. He asked St. John to get
him a diet root beer, a pad of paper and a pen.
Saint had come to Miami from Eureka, California,
borrowing money to fly because he was broke.
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. There were a couple of days back in
1972, after the Watergate job, when the boy, then eighteen, had risen
to the occasion. The two of them, father and son, had wiped
fingerprints off a bunch of spy gear, and Saint had helped in other
ways, too. But as a man, he had two felony convictions to his name, and
they were for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted felon too, of
course. But that was different. He was E. Howard Hunt, a true American
patriot, and he had earned his while serving his country. 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."
Years had gone by when he and St.
John hardly spoke. But then St. John came to him wanting to know
if he had any information about the assassination of President Kennedy.
Despite almost universal skepticism, his father had always maintained
that he didn't. He swore to this during two government investigations.
"I didn't have anything to do with the assassination, didn't know
anything about it," he said during one of them. "I did my time
for Watergate. I shouldn't have to do additional time and suffer
additional losses for something I had nothing to do with."
But 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. He had lied during those two federal investigations. He knew
something after all. He told St.
John about his own involvement, too. It was
explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the
JFK-assassination-theory landscape. And then he got better and went on
to live for four more years.
They sure don't make White
House bad guys the way they used to. 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.
Constitution, while back then, in addition to Hunt, you had out-and-out
thugs like G. 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. It all seems a little nutty now,
but in 1972 it was serious business. These guys meant to take the
powers of the presidency and run amok. Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved
operating in the shadows and joined Nixon's Special Investigations Unit
(a.k.a. "the Plumbers") as a $100-a-day consultant in 1971,
specialized in political sabotage. Among his first assignments: forging
cables linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnam's
president. After that, he began sniffing around Ted Kennedy's dirty
laundry, to see what he could dig up there. Being a former CIA man, he
had no problem contemplating the use of firebombs and once thought
about slathering LSD on the steering wheel of an unfriendly
newspaperman's car, hoping it would leach into his skin and cause a
fatal accident. But of all his various plots and subterfuges, in the
end, only one of them mattered: the failed burglary at the Watergate
Hotel, in Washington,
D.C., in the spring of
1972.
The way it happened, Hunt enlisted some Cuban pals from his old Bay
of Pigs days to fly up from Miami
and bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which was
located inside the Watergate. Also on the team were a couple of shady
ex-government operators named James McCord and Frank Sturgis. The first
attempt ended when the outfit's lock picker realized he'd brought the
wrong tools. The next time, however, with Hunt stationed in a Howard
Johnson's hotel room across the way, communicating with the burglars by
walkie-talkie, the team gained entry into the office. Unfortunately, on
the way into the building, they'd taped open an exit door to allow
their escape, and when a night watchman found it, he called the cops.
The burglars were arrested on the spot. One of them had E. Howard's
phone number, at the White House, no less, in his address book.
Following this lead, police arrested Hunt and charged him with
burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. Abandoned by his bosses at the
White House, he soon began trying to extort money from them to help pay
his mounting bills, as well as those of his fellow burglars, the deal
being that if the White House paid, all those arrested would plead
guilty and maintain silence about the extent of the White House's
involvement.
That December, his wife, Dorothy, carrying $10,000 in $100 bills,
was killed in a plane crash, foul play suspected but never proved. Two
years later, impeachment imminent, Nixon resigned his presidency. And
in 1973, E. Howard Hunt, the man who had unwittingly set all these
events in motion, pleaded guilty and ultimately spent thirty-three
months in prison. "I cannot escape feeling," he said at the
time, "that the country I have served for my entire life and which
directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing
the very things it trained and directed me to do."
After his release, Hunt moved to Miami, where he remarried, had two
more children and spent three decades living a quiet, unexceptional
life, steadfastly refusing to talk about Watergate, much less the
Kennedy assassination. His connection to the JFK assassination came
about almost serendipitously, when in 1974 a researcher stumbled across
a photo of three tramps standing in Dallas'
Dealey Plaza. It was taken on November
22nd, 1963, the day of Kennedy's shooting, and one of the tramps looked
pretty much like E. Howard. In early inquiries, official and otherwise,
he always denied any involvement. In later years, he'd offer a curt
"No comment." And then, earlier this year, at the age of
eighty-eight, he died -- though not before writing an autobiography, American
Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond,
published last month. Not surprisingly, those things he wrote down
about JFK's death and gave to his eldest son don't make an appearance
in the book, at least not in any definitive way. E. Howard had
apparently decided to take them to the grave. But St. John still has the memo --
"It has all this stuff in it," he says, "the chain of
command, names, people, places, dates. He wrote it out to me directly,
in his own handwriting, starting with the initials 'LBJ' " -- and
he's decided it's time his father's last secrets finally see some
light, for better or for worse.
Out in eureka, a few days before
his father's death, St. John
is driving through town in a beat-up mottled-brown '88 Cutlass Sierra.
He is fifty-two. His hair is dark, worn long, and despite his decades
as a drug addict, he's still looking good. He has a Wiccan girlfriend
named Mona. He's also an accomplished and soulful guitar player,
leaning heavily toward Eric Clapton; he can often be found playing in
local haunts during open-mike nights and is working on putting a band
together, perhaps to be called Saint John and the Sinners or, though
less likely, the Konspirators. He's got a good sense of humor and a
large sentimental streak. The last time he saw his father, in Miami, was a week
ago.
"I sat by his bedside holding his hand for about ten hours the
first day," St. John
says somberly. "He hadn't been out of bed in ten weeks, had
pneumonia twenty-seven times in the last sixteen months. He's such a
tough old motherfucker, that guy. But he had all this fluid in his
lungs, a death rattle, and I thought, 'Any minute now, this is it, his
last breath, I'm looking at it right here.' A couple of times my
stepmom, Laura, would say, 'Howard, who is this?' He'd look at me and
her, and he didn't have a clue. Other times, he would quietly say, 'St. John.' He
said he loved me and was grateful I was there."
At the moment, Saint doesn't have a job; his felonies have gotten in
the way. He has to borrow money to put gas in his Cutlass. Beach chairs
substitute for furniture in the tiny apartment where, until recently,
he lived with an ex-girlfriend, herself a reformed meth addict, and two
kids, one hers, one theirs. "I would've loved to have lived a
normal life," he says. "I'm happy with who I am. I don't have
any regrets. But all the shit that happened, the whole thing, it really
spun me over."
And not only him but his siblings, too -- a brother, David, who has
had his own problems with drugs, and two older sisters, Kevan and Lisa,
who still hold their father responsible for the tragedy of their mom's
death. Dorothy Hunt was staunchly loyal to her husband and, after his
arrest, helped him with his plans to blackmail the White House. On
December 8th, 1972, carrying $10,000 in what's regarded as extorted
hush money and, some say, evidence that could have gotten Nixon
impeached, she boarded United Airlines Flight 553 from Washington to Chicago. The plane crashed, killing
forty-three people onboard, including Dorothy. The official explanation
was pilot error, but St. John
doesn't believe it. He thinks that the Nixon White House wanted to both
get rid of his mother and send a message to his father. Nonetheless, he
says he tries not to place blame.
"She got on that plane willingly and lovingly, because that's
the kind of woman she was," he says. "They had lots of
marital problems, but when it came down to it, she had his back, and
she could hang in there with the big dogs. She was really pissed at
Nixon, Liddy, all those guys, and she was saying, 'We're not going to
let them hang you out to dry. We're going to get them. Those
motherfuckers are going to pay.' So I've never held what happened
against him. I had bitterness and resentment, but I always knew he did
what he had to do given the circumstances."
And at times, he even seems to think of his dad with pride: "Did
you hear that the character that Tom Cruise plays in the Mission:
Impossible movies is
named after him? Instead of Everette Hunt, they named him Ethan Hunt. I
know he's been portrayed as kind of an inept, third-rate burglar, but
burglary wasn't really his bag. My dad was a really good spy, maybe a
great spy."
But then he starts talking about what it was like growing up the
eldest son of Everette Howard Hunt, and a different picture emerges.
"He loved the glamorous life, cocktail parties, nightclubbing, flirting,
all that," Saint says. "He was unfaithful to my mom, but she
stayed with him. He was a swinger. He thought of himself as a cool
dude, suave, sophisticated, intellectual. He
was Mr. Smooth. A man of danger. He was perfect for the CIA. He never
felt guilt about anything."
In the early days of the cold
war, the CIA's mandate was simple: to contain the spread of communism
by whatever means necessary; it was tacitly given permission to go
about its dirty business unfettered by oversight of any kind. For much
of the Cold War, it was answerable to no one. And if you were lucky
enough to become one of its agents, you had every right to consider
yourself a member of an elite corps, a big swinging all-American dick
like no other.
The middle-class son of a Hamburg, New York, attorney, E. Howard
Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a bachelor's in
English, joined the Navy during World War II, served in the North
Atlantic on the destroyer Mayo, slipped and fell, took a
medical discharge and wound up in China working under "Wild"
Bill Donovan in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. When the
OSS was
transformed into the CIA, Hunt jumped onboard. He loved action as much
as he hated communism, and he soon began operating with a level of
arrogance entirely typical of the CIA. He was instrumental, for
instance, in planning the 1954 coup in Guatemala that overthrew
the left-leaning, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and
ushered in forty years of military repression, which ultimately cost
200,000 Guatemalans their lives. Years later, when asked about the
200,000 deaths, E. Howard said, "Deaths? What deaths?" Like
Saint says, he never felt guilt about anything: "He was a complete
self-centered WASP who saw himself as this blue blood from upstate New York. 'I'm better than anybody because I'm white,
Protestant and went to Brown, and since I'm in the CIA, I can do
anything I want.' Jew, nigger, Polack, wop -- he used all those racial
epithets. He was an elitist. He hated everybody."
In the early Fifties, his father could often be seen cruising around
in a white Cadillac convertible; he loved that car. He also loved his
cigars and his wine and his country clubs and being waited on by
servants and having his children looked after by nannies. He was full
of himself and full of the romantic, swashbuckling, freewheeling
importance of his government mission. He had quite an imagination, too.
When he wasn't off saving the world from Reds, he spent much of his
time in front of a typewriter, hacking out espionage novels, some
eighty in all, with titles such as The Violent Ones
("They killed by day, they loved by night") and I Came to
Kill ("They wanted a tyrant liquidated, and cash could hire
him to do it").
Wherever E. Howard was stationed -- he'd pop up Zelig-like in hot
spots from Japan to Uruguay to Spain -- he and his family
lived lavishly and well, all presumably to lend credence to his cover
job as a high-ranking embassy official. One estate was as large as a
city block, and one dining table as long as a telephone pole, with the
parents sitting at distant opposite ends. Sadly, he treated his
children the way he and the CIA treated the rest of the world. They
were supposed to bend to his will and otherwise be invisible. God
forbid during a meal one of them should speak or rattle a dish.
"Whenever I made a sound, he looked at me with those hateful,
steely eyes of his, a look of utter contempt and disgust, like he could
kill," St. John
says. "He was a mean-spirited person and an extremely cruel father.
I was his firstborn son, and I was born with a clubfoot and had to have
operations. I suffered from petit-mal seizures. I was dyslexic and
developed a stutter. For the superspy not to have a superson was the
ultimate disappointment, like, 'Here's my idiot son with the clubfoot
and glasses. Can we keep him in the closet, Dorothy?' "
Later, E. Howard moved the family to the last home it would ever
occupy as a family, in Potomac,
Maryland. It was called Witches Island. It was a rambling
affair, with a horse paddock, a chicken coop, the Cold War bonus of a
bomb shelter, and a fishing pond across the way. E. Howard wanted Saint
to attend a top-flight prep school and one night took him to a dinner
at St. Andrew's School, to try and get his son enrolled. In the middle
of the meal, Saint leaned over to his dad and whispered, "Papa, I
have to go to the bathroom." His father glared at him. Pretty soon
Saint was banging his knees together under the table. "Sit
still," his father hissed. Saint said, "Papa, I really have
to go."
"I ended up pissing in my pants at the dinner," Saint
says. "Can you imagine how humiliating that was?
Unbelievable." He didn't get into St. Andrew's. He ended up
settling for a lower-tier boarding school called St. James, near Hagerstown, Maryland.
His second year there, in 1970, after being repeatedly molested by a
teacher, he broke down and told his mother what was going on. She told
his father. And rumor had it that E. Howard came up to St. James with a
carload of guns to make the teacher disappear. "He was really,
really pissed off," says Saint. "He wanted to kill." In
any case, at the school, neither the teacher nor St. John was ever seen again.
That same year, his father retired from the CIA after being
relegated to the backwaters for his role in the Bay
of Pigs. He went to work as a writer for a PR firm. He was
bored and missed the hands-on action of the CIA.The following year,
however, his lawyer pal Chuck Colson, who was special counsel to Nixon,
called him up with an invitation to join the president's Special
Investigations Unit as a kind of dirty-tricks consultant. He signed on.
He really thought he was going places.
Around the time of st. john's
Miami visit in 2003 to talk to his ailing father about JFK, certain
other people were also trying to get things out of E. Howard, including
the actor Kevin Costner, who had played a JFK-assassination-obsessed DA
in the Oliver Stone film JFK and had become somewhat obsessed himself.
Costner said that he could arrange for E. Howard to make $5 million for
telling the truth about what happened in Dallas. Unbeknown to St. John, however, Costner had
already met with E. Howard once. That meeting didn't go very well. When
Costner arrived at the house, he didn't ease into the subject. "So
who killed Kennedy?" he blurted out. "I mean, who did shoot
JFK, Mr. Hunt?"
E. Howard's mouth fell open, and he looked at his wife. "What
did he say?"
"Howard," Laura said, "he wants to know who shot
JFK."
And that ended that meeting, with E. Howard grumbling to himself about
Costner, "What a numskull."
But then St. John
got involved, and he knew better how to handle the situation. For one
thing, he knew that his stepmother wanted to forget about the past. She
didn't want to hear about Watergate or Kennedy. In fact, E. Howard
swore to Laura that he knew nothing about JFK's assassination; it was
one of her preconditions for marriage. Consequently, she and her sons
often found themselves in conflict with St. John.
"Why can't you go back to California and leave well enough alone?"
they asked him. "How can you do this? How dare you do this? He's
in the last years of his life."
But Saint's attitude was, "This has nothing to do with you.
This stuff is of historical significance and needs to come out, and if
you're worried that it'll make him out to be a liar, everybody knows
he's a liar already. Is this going to ruin the Hunt name? The Hunt name
is already filled with ruination."
So when Saint arrived in Miami
to talk to his dad, the two men spent a lot of time waiting for Laura to
leave the house. Saint painted the living room and built a wheelchair
ramp. In the mornings, he cooked breakfast. In the afternoons, he
plopped a fishing hat on E. Howard's head and wheeled him around the
neighborhood. They drank coffee together. And watched lots of Fox News.
And when Laura finally left, they talked.
Afterward, another meeting was arranged with Costner, this time in Los Angeles,
where the actor had fifty assassination-related questions all ready to
go. (The actor declined comment for this article.) Though the $5
million figure was still floating around, all Costner wanted to pay E.
Howard at this point was $100 a day for his time. There would be no
advance. St. John
called Costner.
"That's your offer? A hundred dollars? That's an insult. You're
a cheapskate."
"Nobody calls me a cheapskate," said Costner. "What
do you think I'm going to do, just hand over $5 million?"
"No. But the flight alone could kill him. He's deaf as a brick.
He's pissing in a bag. He's got one leg. You want him to fly to Los Angeles and
for $100 a day? Wow! What are we going to do with all that
money?!"
"I can't talk to you anymore, St. John," Costner said. And
that was the end of that, for good. It looked like what E. Howard had
to say would never get out.
One evening in Eureka, over a barbecue meal, St. John explains how he first came
to suspect that his father might somehow be involved in the Kennedy
assassination. "Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland
somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed
JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I
fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out
of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad.
There's nobody that has all those same facial features. People say it's
not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut
feeling."
He chews his sandwich. "And then, like an epiphany, I remember
'63, and my dad being gone, and my mom telling me that he was on a
business trip to Dallas.
I've tried to convince myself that's some kind of false memory, that
I'm just nuts, that it's something I heard years later. But, I mean,
his alibi for that day is that he was at home with his family. I
remember I was in the fifth grade. We were at recess. I was playing on
the merry-go-round. We were called in and told to go home, because the
president had been killed. And I remember going home. But I don't
remember my dad being there. I have no recollection of him being there.
And then he has this whole thing about shopping for Chinese food with
my mother that day, so that they could cook a meal together." His
father testified to this, in court, on more than one occasion, saying
that he and his wife often cooked meals together.
St. John
pauses and leans forward. "Well," he says, "I can tell
you that's just the biggest load of crap in the fucking world. He was
always looking at things like he was writing a novel; everything had to
be just so glamorous and so exciting. He couldn't even be bothered with
his children. That's not glamorous. James Bond doesn't have children.
So my dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I'm so
sorry, but that would never happen. Ever. That fucker never did
jack-squat like that. Ever."
Not that it was all bad back
then, in Potomac, at Witches
Island. E. Howard
played the trumpet, and his son was into music too, so sometimes the
pair went down to Blues Alley, in Georgetown,
to hear jazz. Back home, E. Howard would slap Benny Goodman's monster
swing-jazz song "Sing, Sing, Sing" on the turntable, and the
two would listen to it endlessly. And then, sometimes, during the
stomping Harry James horn solo, E. Howard would jump to his feet,
snapping his fingers like some cool cat, pull back his shirt sleeves,
lick his lips and play the air trumpet for all he was worth. It was
great stuff, and St. John
loved it. "I would sit there in awe," he says. But the best
was yet to come.
It was well past midnight on June 18th, 1972. Saint, eighteen years
old, was asleep in his basement bedroom, surrounded by his Beatles and Playboy
pinup posters, when he heard someone shouting, "You gotta wake up!
You gotta wake up!"
When he opened his eyes, Saint saw his father as he'd never seen him
before. E. Howard was dressed in his usual coat and tie, but everything
was akimbo. He was a sweaty, disheveled mess. Saint didn't know what to
think or what was going on.
"I don't need you to ask a lot of questions," his father
said. "I need you to get your clothes on and come upstairs."
He disappeared into the darkness. Saint changed out of his pajamas.
Upstairs, he found his father in the master bedroom, laboring over a
big green suitcase jumble-filled with microphones, walkie-talkies,
cameras, tripods, cords, wires, lots of weird stuff. His father started
giving him instructions. Saint went to the kitchen and returned with
Windex, paper towels and some rubber dishwashing gloves. Then, in
silence, the two of them began wiping fingerprints off all the junk in
the suitcase. After that, they loaded everything into E. Howard's
Pontiac Firebird and drove over to a lock on the C&O Canal.
E. Howard heaved the suitcase into the water, and it gurgled out of
sight.
They didn't speak on the way home. St. John still didn't know what was
going on. All he knew was that his dad had needed his help, and he'd
given it, successfully.
The next day, dressed in one of his prep-school blazers, he drove to
a Riggs Bank in Georgetown
and met his father inside the safety-deposit-box cage. His father
turned him around, lifted his blazer and shoved about $100,000 in cash
down the back of his pants. The boy made it home without picking up a
tail. Then his father had him get rid of a typewriter. Saint put the
typewriter in a bag, hoofed it across the Witches Island
property onto the neighboring spread and tossed it into the pond where
he and his brother David used to go fishing.
"Don't ever tell anybody you've done these things," his
father said later. "I could get in trouble. You could get in
trouble. I'm sorry to have to put you in this position, but I really am
grateful for your help."
"Of course, Papa," Saint said.
Everything he had done, he'd done because his father and his gang of
pals had botched the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Soon his mother
would be killed in a plane crash, and his father would be sent to jail,
and Nixon would resign, and his own life would fracture in unimaginable
ways. But right now, standing there with his father and hearing those
words of praise, he was the happiest he'd ever been.
Years later, when saint
started trying to get his father to tell what he knew about JFK, he
came to believe the information would be valuable. He both needed money
and thought he was owed money, for what he'd been through. Also, like
many a conspiracy nut before him, he was more than a little obsessed.
"After seeing that poster of the three tramps," he says,
"I read two dozen books on the JFK assassination, and the more I
read, the more I was unsure about what happened. I had all these
questions and uncertainties. I mean, I was trying to sort out things
that had touched me in a big way."
Touched him and turned him upside down, especially the death of his
mother. He had been particularly close to her. She was part Native
American and had sewed him a buckskin shirt that he used to wear like a
badge of honor, along with a pair of moccasins. At the same time, Saint
feels that he never got to know her. She told him that during World War
II, she'd tracked Nazi money for the U.S. Treasury Department, and
Saint believes that early in her marriage to his father, she may have
been in the CIA herself, "a contract agent, not officially
listed." But he isn't sure about any of it, really.
"In our family, everything was sort of like a mini-CIA,"
he says. "Nothing was ever talked about, so we grew up with all of
these walls, walls around my father, walls around my mother, walls around us kids, to protect and insulate us.
You grow up not knowing what really happened. Like, who was my mom, for
Christ's sake? Was she a CIA agent? What was her life really
like?" The one thing he does know is that when she died, so in
large part did the Hunt family.
Once his father went to prison, Saint moved to Wisconsin, where he worked in a
potato-processing plant and spent the rest of his time dropping acid.
In 1975, he moved to the Oakland,
California, area, started
snorting coke and for five years drove a bakery truck. He was in a band
and hoped to become a rock star, though touring alongside Buddy Guy was
about the biggest thing that ever happened. Then he gave up coke and
took up meth and a while later started dealing meth. Twenty years flew
by. He had wild sexual escapades; he shacked up with two sisters --
"nymphs," he calls them. But mainly his life, like his
father's, was a rolling series of misfortunes. He received insurance
money after his mom died, and bought a house; a week later, it burned
down in some drug-related fiasco. His brother David followed a similar
path; leaving boarding school, he hooked up with Saint, and together
they set about snorting and dealing away the years.
Finally, in 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to
go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he
stayed in a series of shelters, then took them
to live in Eureka, several hours north
of Oakland.
He's since earned a certificate in hotel management, but jobs don't
last. And the questions and uncertainties about his father continue to
circulate in his head.
"In some ways we turned out similarly," he says. "He
was a spy, into secrets and covert activity. I became a drug dealer.
What has to be more covert and secret than that? It's the same
mind-set. We were just on opposite sides of the -- well, actually, in
our case, I guess we weren't even on opposite sides of the law, were
we?" That time in miami, with saint
by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he's six
months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started
writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while,
and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root
beer, then sat down in the old man's wheelchair and waited.
E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for
Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under
"LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer.
Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was
murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to
Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to
Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a
well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his
father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words
"French Gunman Grassy Knoll."
So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy
killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying
that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only
shooter in Dallas.
There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the
Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in
other assassination theories.
"By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of
shock," Saint says. "His whole life, to me and everybody
else, he'd always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I
knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up,
he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or
Khrushchev. He didn't like Johnson. But you don't falsely implicate
your own country, for Christ's sake. My father is old-school, a
dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that's the last thing he would do."
Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that
contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting
him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: "Cord Meyer discusses a plot with
[David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He
meets with Oswald in Mexico
City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank
Sturgis in Miami
and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ
changes itinerary to Dallas,
citing personal reasons."
David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time
of JFK's death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is
a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint's father, is
supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of
the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has
repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the
mention of his name was big news.
In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent
of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he
attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room.
Here's what happens:
Morales leaves the room, at which point
Sturgis makes reference to a "Big Event" and asks E. Howard,
"Are you with us?"
E. Howard asks Sturgis what he's talking about.
Sturgis says, "Killing JFK."
E. Howard, "incredulous," says to Sturgis, "You seem
to have everything you need. Why do you need me?" In the
handwritten narrative, Sturgis' response is unclear, though what E.
Howard says to Sturgis next isn't: He says he won't "get involved
in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho."
After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his
"normal" life and "like the rest of the country . . . is
stunned by JFK's death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a
direct role."
After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father
had not only implicated LBJ, he'd also, with a few swift marks of a
pen, put the lie to almost everything he'd sworn to, under oath, about
his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions.
But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to
leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he
did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard's
voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders
down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he
made in his handwritten narrative.
Shortly thereafter, Laura found out what had been going on, and with
the help of E. Howard's attorney put an end to it. St. John and his father were kept
apart. When they did see each other, they were never left alone. And
they never got a chance to finish what they'd started. Instead, the old
man set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son.
He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint's life had been
nothing but "meaningless, self-serving instant
gratification," that he had never amounted to anything and never
would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though
not before making copies.
There is no way to confirm Hunt's allegations -- all but one of the
co-conspirators he named are long gone. St. John, for his
part, believes his father. E. Howard was lucid when he made his
confession. He was taking no serious medications, and he and his son
were finally on good terms. If anything, St. John believes, his father was
holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just
in case.
"Actually, there were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy,
because everybody hated Kennedy but the public," Saint says.
"The question is, which one of them worked? My dad has always
said, 'Thank God one of them worked.' I think he knows a lot more than
he told me. He claimed he backed out of the plot only so he could
disclaim actual involvement. In a way, I feel like he only opened
another can of worms." He takes a deep breath. "At a certain
point, I'm just going to have to let it go."
Out in Eureka, Saint has been reading an
advance copy of E. Howard's autobiography, American Spy. In it,
his father looks at LBJ as only one possible person behind the JFK
killing, and then only in the most halfhearted, couched-and-cloaked
way. He brings up various other possibilities, too, then
debunks each of them.
But of all the shadings and omissions in the book, the only one that
truly upsets St. John has to do with the happiest moment in his life,
that time in 1972, on the night of the Watergate burglary, when he
helped his father dispose of the spy gear, then ran money for him and
ditched the typewriter.
The way it unfolds in the book, St. John doesn't do anything for his
dad. And it's E. Howard himself who dumps the typewriter.
"That's a complete lie," Saint says, almost shouting.
"A total fabrication. I did that. I mean, he never took me aside
and thanked me in any kind of deep emotional way. But I'm the one who
helped him that night. Me! And he's robbing me of it. Why?"
Like so many other things, he will never know why, because the next
day, on January 23rd, in the morning, in Miami, the old spymaster dies.
Later in the day, Saint started reading a few of the obituaries.
One starts off, "Sleazebag E. Howard Hunt is finally
dead."
"Oh, God," Saint says and goes looking for how The New
York Times handled his father's death. The obit reads, "Mr.
Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the
record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the
CIA and the White House. He was 'totally self-absorbed, totally amoral
and a danger to himself and anybody around him. . . .' "
"Wow," Saint says. "I don't know if I can read these
things. I mean, that is one brutal obituary."
But the Times is right, of course.
E. Howard was a danger to anybody around him, and any list of those in
danger would always have to include, right at the top, his firstborn
son, St. John.
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