E. Howard Hunt Biography
(American Intelligence Officer Who Served in the CIA)
Birthday: October 9, 1918 (Libra)
Born In: Hamburg, New York, United States
E. Howard Hunt was an American spy and author. In the Second World War, he served in the ‘Office of Strategic Services.’ After the war, he joined the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ (CIA) as an intelligence officer and worked with them from 1949 to 1970. He, along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and many others, was part of the Nixon administration’s team of operatives called the “plumbers”. They were assigned with the duty of identifying and preventing government leaks of information concerning national security to external parties. He organized a series of covert operations as a consultant to U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, who was forced to resign as a consequence of impending impeachment proceedings and Hunt’s indictment. He and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries, in which Hunt organized the bugging of the ‘Democratic National Committee’ headquarters. Prior to that, Hunt had masterminded the burglary of the Beverly Hills office of the psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the classified documents (on the Vietnam War) later known as the ‘Pentagon Papers.’ His phone number was found in the address book of one of the Watergate burglars, and that helped both investigators and reporters to connect the break-in to Nixon and his re-election campaign. Hunt was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping, which led him to serve 33 months in prison. He had also published 73 books throughout his life, many of them under various pseudonyms.