Customer Reviews

American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond

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There was a real snotty review of this book by the NY Times( the bastion of limosine liberalism and Oswald did it alone BS) But, anyone interested in Watergate or the JFK Assassination should read it- the reviewer doesn't have a clue more than the man in the street what Howard hunt, knew and he had a long association with the Assassination losing a lawsuit where he was 11-22-63 as shown in Mark Lane's Plausible denial. I'm not saying Hunt didn't embellish, or possibly deflate his own role,maybe threw in a couple bogus names, but the names he picks-the key ones: William Harvey, David Morales, and David Phillps all have several suspicious things about them in this regard, were all heavy drinkers and hated The Kennedys with a purple passion. There is nothing far fetched about their alleged involvement.one of the big reasons the conspiracy worked is no one in the Wash press corps could fathom it...& whatever Hoover said, or spokesman for Govt. Agencies was accepted without question in that day, thus denying a mountain of germane contrary evidence. As far as watergate- very interesting and it was horrible his wife died in the plane crash, and Hunt got 35 years from Judge Sirica!What they did was illegal, but nothing compared to what the current Administration is doing and though Hunt is hardly a shining knight, you can really see things through his eyes and his observations on notable people are just priceless and often I believe highly accurate ..In a sea of evil pathological liars that were much higher up the food chain-Hoover,Nixon, Helms, Angeton,& LBJ Hunt wasn't the epitome of malevolance as he was portrayed in the Establishment..there were people far worse...

I figured E. Howard Hunt would be a relatively interesting guy: real life spy, Watergate conspirator, author of dozens of espionage novels. All the derring-do is in this book and it's fun reading --underground in China, plotting the Bay of Pigs, being on the other end of the walkie-talkie as the Watergate "plumbers" break in and get caught. (Getting the inside story of that night from Hunt is fascinating.) But if you read between the lines in this fast-paced bio you also get an insight into a certain kind of twisted, ultra conservative patriotism. The self deception and duplicity are breathtaking and will remind you of some people in the headlines today -- except Hunt is surely a much better storyteller. He's a trip.

Hunt shows one last time why his books sold so well. This one reads as if he were sitting in a den with you, telling things as he remembered them. I just wish I could believe everything he said...

E. Howard Hunt, celebrated spy for the CIA, was primarily known for his role in the Watergate Scandal responsible for the downfall of Richard Nixon. Hunt died just prior to the publication of this memoir.

It was hoped that this volume would be more revealing, that Hunt would finally come clean on many aspects of his life that have been shielded in mystery. Many reviewers have alluded to dark secrets relating to the JFK assassination, in this regard.

But I was looking for something very different, the full truth of his long-time relationship to Conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote the forward for this book, and who served as godfather to three of Hunt's children.

Hunt had served as an intelligence operative in the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) during WWII. Buckley was a student at Yale (Skull and Bones 1950) where he served as shill and informant for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. One of Buckley's Yale professors, former Trotskyist Willmoore Kendall (formerly of the OSS and later consultant to the CIA) was a recruiter of talent for the newly created Agency.

Kendall recruited Buckley in 1951. Kendall introduced him to former Trotskyist James Burnham (also formerly of the OSS). Burnham was consultant to the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA's covert action division, actively working on the coup d'etat against Mossadegh in Iran.

Burnham first introduced Buckley to E. Howard Hunt in his Washington, D. C. apartment (page 48). Buckley then served with Hunt, as he further describes in this volume, in Mexico where Hunt was chief of station and Buckley's control officer.

Hunt observes that prior to his stint in the CIA, Regnery published Buckley's God and Man at Yale, an indictment of the supposed pervasive liberalism on that campus. The book launched Buckley's career as spokesman for the emerging "Conservative Movement" of the early 1950s.

What is not widely known is that the whole enterprise was largely that of a "vanity press" arrangement, with the Buckley family operating under the clandestine guise of the Catawba Corporation, commissioning and financing the book's publication and publicity. The book's ownership copyright secretly belonged to Catawba, not WFB.

Buckley was approached by Regnery to serve on the board of directors of the publishing firm, along with that of William J. Casey. Casey was a prominent Wall Street attorney who had served in the OSS and later became CIA Director under Ronald Reagan.

Hunt pointed out that Regnery was subsidized by the CIA during its early years.

At this time James Burnham, who had maintained many of his former leftist connections, was active in the CIA sponsored front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funding left-wing, anti-Soviet scholars and publications networks.

When later, at Burnham's urging, Buckley created National Review magazine, the premier "Conservative" publication of the past fifty years, joining him in the endeavor as principal editors were Kendall, Burnham, and his sister Priscilla, all of whom had been employed by the CIA.

William J. Casey drew up the incorporation papers for National Review, and served as its long-time legal counsel.

The mysterious early funding of this "non-profit" publication has long been an enigma to researchers. One hoped that Hunt (and Buckley) would finally shed light on this subject, for in one of the most fascinating, if incomplete, chapters in the book, The Great Propaganda Machine, Hunt describes some of his activities in the CIA's on-going efforts to manipulate, subsidize and influence the news media and through it, American public opinion.

The great unanswered question of this book therefore, is: What was Hunt's role in assisting his old colleague in creating the CIA's synthetic "Conservative Movement?"

Buckley's National Review editorial colleague Frank Meyer (and his good friend, National Review contributor Murray Rothbard) believed that the magazine was a CIA operation run by Burnham as Buckley's control. And Hunt does detail in the book how the CIA was engaged in many clandestine operations of covert front groups and foundations using media manipulation and propaganda to project American imperial power and hegemony throughout the world.

Why not come clean about National Review? Buckley remained close to Hunt and, as he relates in this book, helping him through some trying post-Watergate legal difficulties after the mysterious airline death of his wife Dorothy.

Years later, Buckley was outted as a CIA operative by former CIA agent William Sloan Coffin (Skull and Bones 1949).

Coffin was a long-time colleague of George H. W. Bush (Skull and Bones 1948) when they both attended Phillips Andover Academy and later Yale together.

Former CIA Director George Bush later presented Buckley the Presidential Medal of Freedom, something Hunt never got for his years of clandestine service.

Buckley subsequently created his famous fictional character of CIA agent Blackford Oakes, as Hunt had done earlier in his own series of eight spy novels (under the pseudonyn of David St. John) featuring CIA agent Peter Ward.

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.'

This is another of those books that shows what certains segments of the government and the power elite have been and continue to be willing to do to make sure that they keep power. You must also read The Plot to Seize the White House about the first and only American attempt at a military coup in the United States. Both these books will shock you awake as far as how this country really operates. And remember--we only read about the plots that didn't succeed. The others we'll never know about.d

I have the greatest respect for Hunt.
He was an insider on the JFK assassination and Watergate.
In addition he was a very skillful writer and keen analyst of the personalities around him.

This book takes on greater significance when Hunt's deathbed audio-taped confession of his involvement in the early planning for the Kennedy assassination is added to it.
In this book he describes his ideas about the assassination as a "what if" or "it might have happened this way" story.
Shortly after this he gave a confession to his son, that the "what if" story is the real story and he sat in on it.
I think he was totally honest.

So let me get this straight. Hunt says that William F. Buckley Jr. resigned from the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the CIA, where he was helping to publish right wing documents for the public media in the United States and elsewhere, so that he could publish right wing documents in the public media of... the United States and elsewhere - by the way taking all the financial risks for himself without a steady income, even though the CIA would have happily supported him in these very efforts. I buy that hook line and sinker - just as I do everything else Hunt says - all of which was reviewed by the CIA.

I came to this book a sane man; I came away from it a very paranoid man - and probably a saner one.

This book is well written and contains a good narrative account of Watergate break in. Aside from that Mr. Hunt seemed torn at the time he wrote this book (near the end of his life), He critizices the leaking of the events a Abu Graihb (not the actual events), yet at the same time he is critical of the decision to go to war in Iraq and seems uncomfortable with certain aspects of GWB's expansion of FISA.
Maybe these contradictions are due to his long career in CIA and other post that required deceitful and duplicitus words and actions. Whatever the reason this is still a book worth reading.

This book reads just like a mystery novel. It's easy to read and full of suspense, so I couldn't wait to turn the page to find out what happens. The pages on Watergate were especially suspenseful. This book was good from beginning to end. It's interesting to get the inside information on CIA training and activities from someone who was really there. Also, it was good to read about Watergate from someone who was really there and knows what happened. He also fills this book with stories about his personal life, his parents, wife and children. At the end, he offers his views on how to fix the agency today. This is a very good and easy to read book! I enjoyed every page of it.