AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW [ ] THE CIA SUPERSPY WHO ENGINEERED BOTH THE BAY OF PIGS AND WATERGATE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200710003-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 15, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 1, 1975
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

PENTHOUSE --T---,- // Approved For ReleasAX0~'ro~122 : CIA-Rl9A>0A56~0d020C70003-3
the CIA superspy wh vN?`" rrd
bot
ee
i u w.
GeV
eel ll 11
ay of Pigs and Waterg i
Howard Hunt is certainly the most famous, if not the most
successful, agent in the twenty-five-year history of the
CIA. He is also a prolific author, having published more
than forty novels under various pseudonyms since his
first book, East ofFarewell, in 1942. He was twenty-four years old at
the time, and he had just been discharged from the Navy. Reenlist-
ing in the Army Air Corps the next year, he joined the Office of Stra-
tegic Services-the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA-and thereby
embarked on a career as a spy that was to take him to far-flung places
over the next quarter-century, a career that culminated in his arrest
for masterminding the Watergate break-in in 1972.
The CIA's image as the exotic but essential protector of Ameri-
can democracy has lately been eroded by revelations of massive
illegal spying on American citizens, and also by charges that it is a
law unto itself, cloaked and daggered with secrecy, intrigue and
murder-charges that include the often repeated rumor that the
agency even had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
But in the Cold War deep-freeze, in the years immediately following
World War II, the CIA was a useful refuge for superpatriots like E.
Howard Hunt, to whom the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril
seemed both frightful and imminent. In that atmosphere, virtually
anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy was suspect as a pinko dupe.
.In the early 1950's, Hunt began his CIA career as an operative in
Mexico, where.he befriended a young recruit who was later to
become both his ideological mentor and the godfather of several of
his children-William F. Buckley, Jr. In 1954, Hunt had his first
taste of the CIA nitty-gritty when he helped overthrow the freely
elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. At
about the same time Fidel Castro, a young Cuban lawyer; was
organizing his band of guerrillas in the Sierra Maestro mountains,
and within a few years he had deposed the Batista regime.
Hunt was moved from his post in the American embassy in
Montevideo, Uruguay where he had been photographed proudly
pumping Eisenhower's hand on the president's official visit-to
Miami, to begin organizing the colony of anti-Castro expatriates,
thegusanos, for an attempt to overthrow Castro. For two years, Hunt
worked feverishly in Florida and at the CIA operations base. in
Guatemala to prepare for the landing in the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
"It was the hardest thing I ever had to do," he told Penthouse
interviewer Ken Kelley. "The great strengths and the great weak-
nesses of the Latin people were on hourly display."
Hunt was embittered by President Kennedy's refusal to commit
air support to the Bay of Pigs mercenaries, and when the popular
uprising of the Cuban people, which he had predicted, failed to
materialize, Hunt's dream of becoming the Bolivar of Cuba was
shattered. All was not in vain, however, for Hunt became very close
friends with many Cubans; and a decade later, when he and G. Gor-
don Liddy were charged with the task of recruiting a spy/burglar
team for break-ins at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and
Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate, Hunt chose four
An' excl,
n C