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E Howard Hunt. Interview

 

 

INT: The next big problem, I guess, in the region was Cuba, when Castro overthrew Batista. You have personal memories of the operation that was modeled on your successful PB Success. Can you tell me about that, how it came to be, and indeed what it's called?

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HH: Four or five years later, it became apparent that... and I was in Montevideo at the time, as I recall... that there were groups of leftist students marching through the streets with big Cuban flags and blankets, collecting funds for Fidel Castro, who at that point was believed to be a bandit up in the hills of Cuba. And... so I became aware that there could be a problem in Cuba, but I thought: good God, here's a man with... a band of like 81 followers who landed with him when he came in from Mexico, and here Batisthas this in a sense a well-trained-by-the-US army and all kinds of civil police and internal restrictions and safeguards - there's just no way that this... Cuba is going to go the way that Guatemala did. So I didn't pay a lot of attention to it, ... of course, I could read the newspapers as well as anyone, and realized that things were getting desperate there; and then suddenly Batista fled, and Castro was in. So I was yanked back from Montevideo, where I would have been content to spend the rest of my life, and told: "What we're doing is reassembling the PB Success team" - that is, the Guatemala operational team - "to take care of Castro, as we did before." Well, of course, this was a much different situation: a much larger body of land, an entrenched or a well-trained, devoted communist group of followers of Castro, and the idea that the kind of psychological warfare we were able to run against Castro was... it was insignificant in the long run. Castro, was secure, and he was beloved by millions in Cuba, and it was a different situation than Guatemala. So, instead of our having a problem such as we had in Guatemala, of using less than 200 locals to overthrow a government, we were faced with a Cuban army, a Cuban militia, a loyal population - loyal to Castro, that is. He had his own air force, and really his own navy. None of these things obtained in the Guatemala situation. So, like topsy, it just grew and grew and grew. My role was very similar to what it had been in the Guatemalan project; I was located down here in Miami, in Coconut Grove, I was equipped with a safe house. And by that time, several hundred thousand Cuban exiles had come over here and made their home here. I was... told to go over to Havana undercover, and give a personal assessment of the situation. The main object that I was to consider while there was the strength of Castro's popularity on the street: in short, if there is an opposition invasion of Cuba, will the populace take up arms against Castro, or will they stay loyal to him? I stayed three or four days in Havana at that time, got out on the street, talked with a lot of people - taxi drivers, naturally, and men and women who ran these small lunch stands down at the at the waterfront - and all I could detect was a lot of enthusiasm for Fidel Castro.

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INT: Then why did the Bay of Pigs, as it called, fail initially...? I mean, I think there's quite a short answer, isn't there?

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HH: A short answer?

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INT: I'm thinking of... it wasn't the original landing place: it was switched, and the White House wouldn't provide air cover.

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HH: That's right.

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INT: Could you talk me through that one?

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HH: Sure. When I came back, I wrote a top secret report, and I had five recommendations, one of which was the one that's always been thrown at me, is that during... or... slightly antecedent to an invasion, Castro would have to be neutralized - and we all know what that meant, although I didn't want to say so in a memorandum with my name on it. Another one was that a landing had to be made at such a point in Cuba, presumably by airborne troops, that would quarter the nation, and that was the Trinidad project; cut the communications east to west, and there would be confusion. None of that took place. Once, when I came back from Coconut Grove and said, "What about... is anybody going after Castro? Are you going to get rid of him?", "It's in good hands," was the answer I got, which was a great bureaucratic answer. But the long and the short of it was that no attempt that I ever heard of was made against Castro's life specifically. President Idigros Fuentes of Guatemala was good enough to give our Cuban exiles two training areas in his country, one in the mountains, and then at (Retardo Lejo) we had an unused airstrip that he gave over to us, which we put into first-class condition for our fighter aircraft and our supply aircraft, and we trained Cuban paratroopers there. And the brigade never numbered more than about 1,500, which was 10 times more than Castillo Armas commanded.

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INT: Can I just push you forward a little bit? Why really, in short...

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HH: Why what?

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INT: Why, in a shorter answer, did the operation fail, whereas before... I mean, we know it had been a success in Guatemala, but why did the Bay of Pigs invasion fail?

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HH: OK. I was instructed by Eisenhower's Office to tell the exile leadership that I dealt with every day that the United States would cover the landing groups, the landing brigade, and that there would be no hostile air. That was a definite commitment made by the Administration to me, and a commitment that I made to the Cuban exiles. So there was no reason to think that anything was going to fail.

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INT: But you had another Administration come in before.

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HH: That's right, that's right. And oddly enough, many of the Cuban exiles thought that was going to be great for them. Of course, it turned out to be quite the opposite.

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INT: Could you make that point to me? Because don't forget that we'll lose my question. Just make the point that under the Eisenhower Administration, such and such had been planned, but then there was a change of president.

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HH: That's right. Under the Eisenhower Administration, this commitment was made to me, and through me to the Cuban exiles who were going to do the actual fighting. Then, in the midst of all that, there was a national election here in November, and the Administration changed. And things were static for a matter of weeks, and our natives there were getting very restless in their training camps, and I was summoned down on one occasion to, quote, "put down a mutiny", unquote, which was a rather hysterical,, appreciation of the situation that just simply meant that these men had been told that they were going to be able to get moving soon, and that hadn't happened. So, it was really after Christmas that year before Kennedy's group gave what turned out to be a limited approval, and Dean Rusk insisted on a change in the original plan: he said that an airborne landing at Trinidad, quartering the country, would be too obviously American and it would result in a big bang, and he wanted something with a smaller bang. And... so, despite all of these difficulties and changes and everything, the brigades... they set off from Nicaragua and from Guatemala ports to... headed for southern Cuba, and we had our own fighter aircraft go in and strafe the Cuban airfield, to put down the... suppress any hostile air. But as it turned out, they didn't get all of the aircraft; they came back to Miami and to Honduras and Nicaragua to rearm. And at that point, they were told to stand down, and that gave... and meanwhile, our ships are heading for the Cuban coast, and by then Castro, of course, was alarmed, the planes having gone in and strafed Havana, for Lord's sake, so he was on a high alert, and our ships were unprotected. Finally, we got a semi-OK to arm the aircraft and get them moving. By that time, the Cuban air force, which only had I think six aircraft left, but could fight for a while and then land, refuel and take off, just the way the Brits did in World War II, the Royal Air Force... it was their home, and we had to fly 1,000 miles, so that was very difficult for our pilots, many of which were shot down. So the reason that the Bay of Pigs failed was that the original promise made by Eisenhower was not kept by the subsequent Administration. It allowed hostile air to wipe out the approaching invasion force.

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INT: Why do you hate communists and communism so much? What does it actually mean, communism, and why did you base (Overlap)...

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HH: (Overlap) Well, it mea...

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INT: ... you had a career that was based on fighting it.

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HH: Well, that's true. ... to me, communism is a... it's a graveyard of skulls, of very unhappy people, below the level of the top bureaucracy. ... communism is an expansive form of political theory: it has to keep eating on its neighbors, finding new aggressive activities to keep itself going, fuelling itself. It itself is fuelled on hatred, hatred of capitalism, hatred of so-called imper, when yet it's the greatest imperialist power the world has ever known. (Slight overlap) There's a basic hypocrisy about them.

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INT: Why do you think it was the United States, above and way beyond any other country, that particularly took on communism, because their perception was that this was not going to happen?

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HH: I can't think of another country that could have done it. Think of the world at the end World War II: all of the Allies were frustrated; France was finished for a generation; Great Britain was licking its wounds, its casituation was terrible; forget the Scandinavian countries - they have always had a free ride out of whatever the rest of the world wanted to do to protect them; Italy... Who are we talking about as possible bearers of the torch? It had to be the United States. Of course, there was a great deal of self-interest there, too.

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INT: Yes. In Latin America... it's true to say that Latin America had quite a long and bloody Cold War, because as soon as one situation was solved, in terms of the fight against communism, it seemed that another one would pop along. You had the Cubas and the Chiles and the Nicaraguas and the Salvadors. Do you think there was a particular reason for that, or was it that the Soviet Union and Cuba were so determined to interfere in your backyard?

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HH: Well, not that it was Uncle Sam's backyard, but that there were ripe opportunities: there was economic misery in a lot of the continent, and very, very fertile ground for communism, and as always, they took advantage of existing situations and manipulated them and exploited them. , Argentina is a good example. They never got into Montevideo, because the uruguayos that I dealt with were very complacent people and they were very useful to the Soviets because they didn't take any anti-Communist stand. ... the problem basically in Latin America has been a class warfare type of thing: the haves versus the have-nots, and there will always in the world be many more have-nots than haves, and that is where communism was able to achieve such signal successes.

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INT: Thanks very much - that's brilliant.

(Cut)

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INT: American business interests in Latin America were and became massive during the period of the Cold War, and so the agencies' role in the areas, in this so-called backyard, became even more important, because there was a lot of money out there at stake. Could you tell me something about how that influence was spread around?

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HH: American influence?

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INT: Mm.

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HH: Well, when you take each country by... name and consider what it offers the rest of the world, and initially the United States, in terms of raw materials, you think of oil in the northern quarter of South America, you think of beef-cattle and hides and wool, you think of mines in Cuba... in Chile, I mean, copper, all that sort of thing; in Colombia, tremendous deposits of iron ore. All of these things are essential for a free society, and a free society must have access to them, uninhibited by the sort of strangulation that communism imposes on any economy that it takes over. And as we know, money determines elections in the United States, and where Braden's Copper companies in Chile and United Fruit in Guatemala, Standard Oil, I suppose, in the northern quadrant of South America - they want their properties protected, and they're entitled to have that protection; and if the local governments won't do it, then the United States has to take a paternalistic role, in my opinion. I wouldn't want to be part of that, because that's not my brief, but I can understand the rationale for it - and as you say, there was a great deal of money involved.

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INT: Do you think you had a good Cold War?

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HH: I would say this in terms of my career, that my career provided me with everything that I wanted, and I think a man is fortunate if he can say that at the end of his life.

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INT: But you won.

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HH: We won.

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INT: Thanks a lot.

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HH: Thank you.

 

The Last Confession.

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Just before his death in 2007, Hunt told his son Saint John Hunt this story:

That time in Miami, with Saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he’s six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man’s wheelchair and waited.

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E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.”

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So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

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“By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock,” Saint says. “His whole life, to me and everybody else, he’d always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn’t like Johnson. But you don’t falsely implicate your own country, for Christ’s sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that’s the last thing he would do.”

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City…. Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.”

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David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK’s death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala’ coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint’s father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here’s what happens:

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Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a “Big Event” and asks E. Howard, “Are you with us?”E. Howard asks Sturgis what he’s talking about. Sturgis says, “Killing JFK.” E. Howard, “incredulous,” says to Sturgis, “You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?” In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis’ response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn’t: He says he won’t “get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho.”

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After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his “normal” life and “like the rest of the country… is stunned by JFK’s death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role.”

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After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he’d also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he’d sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

 

 

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