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.

WATERGATE MASTERMIND BLAMES EVERYBODY BUT HIMSELF IN POSTHUMOUS MEMOIR
by Terry Heath, 2007

E. Howard Hunt is a name that is now forgotten in American political lexicon but the recently deceased dirty trickster/CIA agent will go down in history as responsible for causing the downfall of one U.S. president and alleged co-conspirator in the assassination of another. But, to read his posthumous tell-tale book ‘American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond,’ the only thing you learn from his thirty plus years as an intelligence operator in and out of the government is that when anything went wrong on an assignment it was everyone’s fault but Hunt’s!

That’s the general consensus one gets from reading this self-serving autobiographical tome which has just been issued by the Wiley publishing company. Hunt, who died in January, penned the work with the assistance of former People Magazine writer Greg Aunapu. The book is 340 pages and the former CIA employee offers his reminisces and opinions on various covert events he participated in which included the 1954 CIA sponsored coup in Guatemala, the 1961 Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, his denial of being a participant in the 1963 killing of President John Kennedy and his behind the scenes role in the Watergate Hotel burglary that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency.

There are no citing footnotes or copies of official documents in the book to support Hunt’s particular interpretations of those and other events from his life so we have to take him at face value when he says he was a great guy who loved America and anything that went wrong regarding such illegal activities wasn’t his responsibility.

The book reads like a deathbed confession of non-complicity and he seems disingenuous to the reader in his rather hollow justification of events as he tries to explain why none of the bad turns in his life was caused by his own actions. Or was he just naïve to the perceived criminal acts he did in his life in the name of patriotism and hoped the American public would remain ignorant of the same facts and forgive him in the manner they do to all contrite public figures?

Hunt was obviously talented in a creative sense, having written 70 spy novels and could come up with brilliant ideas to sabotage political opponents as a political ‘dirty tricks’ operator. Yet he offers no insight in his memoir on his particular creative process in coming up with those plots or unique personality traits for the characters in his novels. Were they based on actual happenings the American public has yet to learn about? And how did he dream up such convoluted story ideas where his idea of a hero battles the world’s bad guys? Were they idealized versions of what he always wanted America to be?

Hunt coordinated the 1961 CIA sponsored Cuban ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion that he and many in the spy community blamed its failure on newly inaugurated John Kennedy when the chief executive pulled the plug on the covert attack on the country situated just ninety miles south of Florida in fear of starting a wider war with the Soviet Union. But Hunt denies he played any role in the November 22, 1963 assassination of the 35th president as some type of revenge.

JFK conspiracy theorists have alleged for decades that Hunt could have been one of the so-called ‘Three Tramps’ who were detained by Dallas Police near the murder site at Dealey Plaza on that day and photographed by numerous individuals, but who then disappeared from official police records once Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the crime. Hunt insists he was not any of the individuals in those photographs but such denials have not ended speculation on his alleged potential involvement in the killing.

He only fleetingly mentions his failed lawsuit against the now defunct Spotlight newspaper which had printed an article in 1978 by a fellow ex-CIA employee who claimed the higher-ups in the agency knew Hunt was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed and were fearful such knowledge would become public. He sued for slander against the publication but a Florida jury ruled against him with many on the twelve member panel finding the evidence and testimony credible that Hunt was actually in Texas that fateful day.

Yet Hunt makes an accusation, without any supporting documentation for such a claim, that newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson would be the most likely backer of any plot to kill JFK since the Texan would have the most to benefit by taking over as leader of the United States. He also names those potential co-conspirators he knew while at the CIA who he says could have also been participants in such a plot but are now conveniently deceased and can’t protest the smearing of their names with such an allegation.

But Hunt will be best remembered for his role in the 1972 Watergate Hotel burglary that cost Richard Nixon his job as president.

He devised the break-in at the Democratic Party Headquarters at the downtown Washington D.C. hotel called ‘The Watergate’ to get dirt on Nixon’s opponents. Unfortunately, for Hunt and those who actually committed the burglary, they got caught and the subsequent cover-up by the president’s minions soon unraveled in the months to follow. Hunt’s role in the crime became public and that revelation not only took a toll on him but on his family.

He tries to offer an explanation in the book on why his late wife Dorothy had $10,000 in cash on her person when on a trip on December 8, 1972 to do what he claims was to make a stock investment in a family member’s business. The only problem was that the civilian airliner she was on crashed during a landing attempt that day when it overshot a runway on Chicago’s Midway Airport and she was killed.

He then casually mentions that a CBS radio reporter and several participants in a bribery scandal involving then Attorney General John Mitchell died in the same incident. But he gives no rational justification why all would be on the same flight except to suggest it was some random coincidence. And we’re supposed to accept that disclosure at face value and not be suspicious? At the height of the Watergate paranoia?

He also blamed others for his troubles once the cover-up finally collapsed and he was charged with a crime, then wondered why his friends and family abandoned him when he was convicted and sentenced to prison.

He did appear to be a changed man once he served three years in jail and, apart from resuming his writing career, managed to keep himself out of the limelight for the next three decades while many of the other convicted conspirators tried to cash in on their notoriety when released from prison.

Was such silence an act of repentance in seeking America’s forgiveness for the realization of what he did was wrong? Or was he staying mum to ensure he would not be the next to die?

The problem for the reader of this book is that he took the answers to those questions to the grave. Was that on purpose or was he conning us one final time with misdirection regarding the truth with this book?

Just remember what Hunt, Richard Nixon and everyone else who violates the public trust eventually learns the hard way. ‘No one is above the law.’

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com