Everette Howard Hunt Jr. (October 9, 1918 – January 23, 2007) was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he was a central figure in U.S. regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the attempted 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration's so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties.
Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. After his release, Hunt lived in Mexico and then Miami until his death in January 2007. Hunt was the subject of pervasive conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with his sons taping a disputed deathbed confession.
Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, the son of Ethel Jean (Totterdale) and Everette Howard Hunt Sr., an attorney and Republican Party official.
He attended Hamburg High School in Hamburg, N.Y., where he graduated in 1936 along with classmate Howard J. Osborn. He then attended Brown University, an Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated in 1940.
During World War II, Hunt served in the U.S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo and the U.S. Army Air Corps. He also served in China with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Hunt was a prolific author, publishing 73 books during his lifetime. During and after World War II, he wrote several novels under his own name, including East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Maelstrom (1949), Bimini Run (1949), and The Violent Ones (1950). He also wrote spy and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis, David St. John, and P. S. Donoghue.
Some parallels exist between Hunt's writings and his experiences during the Watergate scandal and espionage. He continued his writing career after he was released from prison, publishing nearly twenty spy thrillers between 1980 and 2000.
In 1946, Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing.
Economic Cooperation Administration
Prior to 1949, Hunt served as an officer in the Information Division of the Economic Cooperation Administration, a predecessor of the Mutual Security Agency.
Shortly following the end of World War II, the OSS was disbanded. In 1947, with the Cold War emerging and intensifying, the absence of a central intelligence organization was seen as a national security deficiency, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed. In October 1949, just as Warner Bros. acquired the rights to Hunt's novel Bimini Run, Hunt joined the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). He was assigned as a covert action officer specializing in political action and influence in what later came to be the CIA's Special Activities Center.
In 1950, Hunt was appointed OPC Station Chief in Mexico City, where he recruited and supervised William F. Buckley Jr., who worked under Hunt in his OPC Station in Mexico from 1951 to 1952. Buckley and Hunt remained lifelong friends, and Buckley became godfather to Hunt's first three children.
In Mexico, Hunt helped lay the framework for Operation PBFortune, later renamed Operation PBSuccess, the successful covert operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Hunt would later say, "What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign, to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland."
Hunt was then assigned as Chief of Covert Action in Japan, and later as Chief of Station in Uruguay, where he was noted by American diplomatic contemporary Samuel F. Hart for controversial working methods.
Hunt was subsequently assigned responsibility for organizing Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a suitably representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a pro-American government that could replace Fidel Castro.
Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began during the Eisenhower administration, but Hunt was later bitter about what he perceived as President John F. Kennedy's lack of commitment to the operation, which was designed to attack and overthrow the Castro government. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us This Day, Hunt wrote, "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of José Martí, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away."
In 1959, Hunt helped CIA Director Allen W. Dulles write The Craft of Intelligence. The following year, in 1960, Hunt established Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed to attempt the military overthrow of the Castro's government in Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion commenced on April 17, 1961, but was quickly aborted and viewed as a fiasco. Hunt was then reassigned as executive assistant to Dulles.
In 1961, President Kennedy fired Dulles for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.