E. Howard Hunt

E. Howard Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, of English and Welsh descent. He attended Nichols School in Buffalo, New York and in 1940 he graduated from Brown University. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo, in the United States Army Air Forces, and then the Office of Strategic Services, which he served in China. During the war, his first novel, East of Farewell (1942), was published. In 1949, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and in 1950 he was stationed in Mexico City and worked on the plan to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the president of Guatemala. He was later stationed in Japan, Uruguay, and then returned to the United States to organize Cuban exiles for the take-over of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He served as the Chief of Covert Action for the CIA's Domestic Operations Division from 1962-1966. He became bitter about President Kennedy's handling of the Fidel Castro regime and retired from the CIA in 1970. In 1971 he joined the President's Special Investigations Unit (alias White House Plumbers). He was directly involved in the Watergate scandal and was indicted on federal charges. His wife, Dorothy, was killed in a United Airlines plane crash in 1972. He eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge. In 1973 his semi-autobiographical novel about the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Give Us This Day, was published. In 1978, a CIA memo linking him to the assassination of President Kennedy was discovered, and he gave a deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He has always denied the connection. He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lived in Biscayne Park, Florida. Over the course of his writing career, he wrote over 40 novels, primarily spy fiction. His memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond was published in 2007.