Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

INFAMOUS WATERGATE BURGLAR/POTENTIAL JFK CONSPIRATOR DIES!
by Terry Heath, 2007

E. Howard Hunt, the ex-Central Intelligence Agency spy behind the Watergate Hotel burglary that forced one president to resign and alleged conspirator by many in the assassination of another president, died of pneumonia at the age of 88 on Jan. 23 in Miami, his second wife Laura announced the same day.

Hunt was the quintessential CIA spook/political dirty tricks operator who could have been the inspiration for the character ‘The Smoking Man’ on TV’s ‘The X-Files’ and performed many assignments for the budding agency once it was created in 1947. Hunt participated in the 1954 overthrow of the government in Guatemala and in the failed invasion of Cuba in the spring of 1961 known as the ‘Bay of Pigs.’ He later wrote a book regarding his experiences in that debacle known as ‘Give Us This Day,’ which he ultimately blamed on John Kennedy’s timidity in taking on Fidel Castro so early in his presidential term.

He was always considered a prime suspect in the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy because many conspiracy theorists of that crime have claimed that Hunt was one of the ‘infamous three tramps’ seen and photographed near Dealey Plaza moments after the shooting took place which ended the life of the 35th chief executive. Photographers on the scene took several images of two Dallas, Texas police officers escorting a trio of down on their luck individuals found lurking nearby the Grassy Knoll located adjacent to the plaza where the supposed second shooter lay in ambush to kill the president. Many assassination buffs have long alleged that Hunt was one of those in the photographs so presumed he must have been involved in the killing.

Hunt sued the now defunct Washington-based national newspaper ‘The Spotlight’ after the newspaper published in 1978 an article written by Victor Marchetti, a former CIA official turned critic of the spy agency, who alleged in his writing that the Langley, Virginia intelligence entity was going to release information which would reveal Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that he had no authority from the agency for being there.

Hunt filed the suit for defamation in a federal court in Florida. Famed civil rights attorney Mark Lane represented the newspaper which won the case because jurors found Hunt’s claim that he was in Washington on the day of the killing to be unbelievable. And the forewoman stated in an interview after the civil trial ended that she and others on the jury were convinced Hunt and selected members of the government participated in the murder of the president.

Hunt was in charge of the Mexico City station of the CIA which was based inside the U.S. Embassy in that city in the fall of 1963, precisely the same time that JFK shooting suspect Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly visited the Russian Embassy in Mexico’s capital to obtain exit visas so he and his Russian-born wife could return to the Soviet Union and was observed doing so by CIA officials. But jurors were unimpressed by Hunt’s testimony at the trial that on the day of JFK’s shooting he was working in the nation’s capital since several of his acquaintances from that era testified he was in actually Dallas.

Hunt retired from the spy agency in 1970, then joined the Nixon White House in 1971 as a ‘security consultant.’ His idea of consulting was to conduct break-ins and burglaries of all those on Richard Nixon’s perceived enemies list since the increasingly paranoid president was worried he was not going to be re-elected to a second term.

Those burglaries included the office of the psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the former Lyndon Johnson national security aide, who leaked a copy of the Defense Department’s study of the major events during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations handling of Vietnam that were commonly referred to as the ‘Pentagon Papers’ to the New York Times. Those documents examined America’s long-term plans for Vietnam dating back to 1954 and revealed much information on the conduct and status of the war that was counter to what was being told to the American people. Their publication caused support for the unpopular war to drop even further.

But the June 17, 1972 burglary into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters located inside the posh Watergate Hotel by four Cubans hired by Hunt to get dirt on that political party to help out Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election campaign proved to be the ex-spy and the 37th President’s ultimate downfall.

One of the burglars arrested had Hunt’s name and White House office telephone number in an address book on his person, a simple mistake in the espionage world that proved fatal to every conspirator involved. That initial disclosure led two young Washington Post reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to document the unraveling of the subsequent cover-up by Nixon and his White House staff which eventually led to the president’s resignation in disgrace in August, 1974 that they detailed in two books, ‘All the President’s Men’ and ‘The Final Days.’

The attempted hush-up by Nixon’s minions at the White House over the next few months in the second half of 1972 leading up to the fall election proved very costly to Hunt on a personal basis. He demanded money from the administration to silence those initially arrested and presumed to be going to jail. His first wife, Dorothy Hunt, was killed on December 8, 1972 when the plane she was traveling on, United Airlines Flight 533, crashed onto the city streets of Chicago when the airliner undershot the runway of a nearby airport.

But what’s interesting is that the police found over ten thousand dollars in cash placed inside her purse at the wreckage site. Also killed in the same incident were Illinois Congressman George Collins and CBS news reporter Michelle Clark. Both had an interest in the growing political scandal and were supposedly traveling with Mrs. Hunt since she was allegedly about to reveal her knowledge of the cover-up to the news media and public.

Hunt spent three years in prison for his crimes, then moved to Florida a broken man in poor health and subsequently had to file for bankruptcy when he couldn’t pay his bills. He eventually re-married and resumed writing spy novels that he had once did back in the 1940’s before joining the CIA. Those books were somewhat successful as readers of the action tomes tried to read between the lines of the plotlines to figure out if the characters involved were based on real people from history or if Hunt was revealing any actual events from his personal spy past in his fictional writings.

His final book, ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond,’ is scheduled for a March, 2007 publication. Will this final work be a death-bed confession on all of his nefarious activities or has he taken his most important secrets to the grave? Will America ever really know what happened on two of the most important events of American political history that occurred in the past half-century and the part Howard Hunt played in them?

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com