E. Howard Hunt

E. Howard Hunt was a former CIA officer whose name and activities connected the Watergate burglars to a broader White House world of political intelligence, covert operations, and damaging information. The evidence assembled around him ranged from the phone number in two burglars’ address books to allegations of a Kennedy investigation, campaign sabotage, and the destruction of politically explosive files. Hunt appears both as an operative in these accounts and as a point through which reporters and investigators traced a wider network, though the evidence did not always establish who ordered a particular action or what instructions Hunt received.

Identification and White House Connections

The first striking link was physical and small: two address books belonging to men arrested inside the Watergate contained Hunt’s name and telephone number, annotated with references to the White House. Bob Woodward checked a directory and found a listing for E. Howard Hunt, Jr., in Potomac, Maryland. When he reached Hunt, Woodward asked why the number appeared in the books of two of the arrested men. The question made Hunt a direct subject of the inquiry before the scope of his role was clear.

Robert F. Bennett, president of the Mullen public-relations firm, identified Hunt’s former CIA affiliation when Woodward asked about him. A White House aide later provided a more consequential account in a confidential conversation: Hunt had been assigned by the White House to investigate Edward Kennedy’s private life. The aide would not identify who had ordered the work, but left the impression that Charles Colson knew about it. The aide also recalled that Hunt had received material about Kennedy from the Library of Congress. This account linked Hunt to a White House assignment, while leaving its authorization and full purpose unresolved.

Watergate and the Campaign Operations

Hunt was indicted alongside Gordon Liddy and the five men arrested on June 17. The seven faced charges related to conspiracy, burglary, and violations of the federal statute against electronic interception of oral communications. The indictment established Hunt’s place among the defendants, but the reporting stressed that it did not answer the central questions about the espionage’s purpose or sponsorship.

Alfred C. Baldwin III’s account supplied a view of the operation from across the street. From the Howard Johnson Motor Hotel, Baldwin monitored Democrats’ telephone conversations and said James McCord had told him he would perform similar work at the Democratic convention in Miami. Baldwin recalled that he had been given a gun belonging to Fred LaRue when he was hired. He also described an aborted effort to enter and bug McGovern headquarters, during which Gordon Liddy suggested shooting out a streetlight to ease the entry. In Baldwin’s account, Hunt rushed into the hotel at 2:30 a.m. on June 17 and watched police lead five of his hirelings away from the Watergate. Baldwin also described a brief stint guarding Martha Mitchell. Together, these details situated Hunt among the people connected to the operation, while distinguishing Baldwin’s reported observations from the unanswered question of who had authorized it.

A later briefing by Deep Throat placed Hunt in an organizational scheme larger than the Watergate break-in. Deep Throat described four personnel groupings for undercover work: an advertising group, a convention group, a primary group, and a Hunt group characterized as the team for the heaviest operations. In another account, Deep Throat attributed to Charles Colson and Hunt an operation that sought not only to trace leaks to newspapers but also to manufacture material for the press. The alleged recipients included Jack Anderson, Evans and Novak, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Deep Throat connected this information operation to damaging material about Edmund Muskie’s running mate, Thomas Eagleton, including his drunk-driving and health records. These were reported as part of a broader effort to manipulate the press, not as proof that Hunt personally handled every item or contact.

Telephone Trails, Funding, and Silence

Telephone records furnished another path from Hunt to political operatives. Donald Segretti reportedly told Larry Young that the FBI had discovered him through calls from Hunt’s telephone, with many calls traveling from Hunt to Segretti. Young did not know what specific events the instructions Hunt allegedly gave were meant to affect, and the account distinguished those instructions from the Watergate bugging. A Justice Department lawyer confirmed that investigators had found Segretti through checks of Hunt’s calls: the Bureau had reviewed a large share of more than 700 calls and found one to Segretti. The lawyer cautioned that the dirty tricks were probably not illegal and said the department’s investigation was focused on the Watergate bugging. The call established a connection worth investigating; it did not, by itself, show what Hunt instructed Segretti to do or who stood behind the separate operations.

A former employee’s description of Hunt’s telephone provided a smaller, more intimate view of the same network. The phone had been installed for the employee to answer and take messages for Hunt. Bernard Barker was almost the only person who called on it, usually about once a week, sometimes two or three times a week. The employee recalled Hunt speaking warmly with Barker and sometimes speaking Spanish to him; Hunt also called Barker’s wife. Gordon Liddy may have used the line to call someone Hunt had contacted, whom the employee thought might have been Barker. Most calls came between August and November. The telephone was disconnected on March 15, by which time it had not been used for a long time. This testimony gave concrete shape to Hunt’s connection with Barker while leaving the purpose of particular calls unspecified.

The campaign’s financial and organizational habits formed part of the surrounding account. Funds for the Watergate espionage operation, The Washington Post reported, were controlled by several senior assistants to former campaign manager John Mitchell and held in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Hugh Sloan described a routine in which requests for money could be handled by telephoning Mitchell at the Justice Department; the calls had begun in 1971. Sloan said the amounts had seemed insignificant against a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. He also recalled that no one had explicitly ordered him not to talk, but that the repeated instruction was to hold ranks and keep the ship together. When Carl Bernstein later approached committee employees, some reacted with fear: one trembled and pleaded to be left alone, while another began to cry. These accounts describe the pressure and compartmentalization surrounding the campaign, not a direct financial transaction by Hunt.

Dangerous Files and an Expanding Investigation

After June 17, Mitchell conducted what he called his own investigation for about ten days and, according to a later account, was discovering matters that astonished even him. Hunt was assigned to help Mitchell obtain information, but John Ehrlichman soon ordered Hunt removed, fired, and told to leave town permanently. The abrupt reversal placed Hunt within an effort to investigate the unfolding crisis and then pushed him out of that work. It also showed that access to the investigation did not mean he remained in it.

The next year, a Capitol Hill source told Woodward that Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray III had destroyed documents taken from Hunt’s White House safe. The reported folders contained fabricated State Department cables intended to implicate President John F. Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and a dossier of information Hunt had collected on Senator Edward Kennedy. Deep Throat confirmed the account of the destruction and described the files as politically explosive. According to Deep Throat, Gray had been told by Ehrlichman and John Dean that the documents should never become public and could cause more damage than the Watergate bugging. Gray kept them for about a week, then said he put them in a burn bag in his office; he maintained that he had not been directly ordered to destroy them, though he understood what Dean and Ehrlichman wanted. The episode connected Hunt’s collected material to an effort to prevent its disclosure and placed the handling of the files within the broader cover-up.

Deep Throat also told Woodward that Dean had supplied information to prosecutors that had checked out, while warning that Dean knew of other illegal activities from his long tenure at the White House. The account framed Hunt’s files as part of a larger field of secret projects, rather than an isolated curiosity. The files’ contents and their destruction mattered both for what they revealed about the use of political intelligence and for the efforts made to keep that information from public view.

Claims, Limits, and Narrative Role

By the time of the Senate investigation, Hunt was understood to hold information about other undercover work. A Senate attorney told Woodward that Hunt had been brought from jail to Capitol Hill for lengthy interviews and had disclosed an instruction he said came from Colson about an hour after Alabama Governor George Wallace was shot. The reporting then identified the alleged instruction more specifically: Colson had asked Hunt to go to Milwaukee and enter Arthur Bremer’s apartment. Hunt’s attorney, William O. Bittman, confirmed that testimony existed about Colson asking Hunt to go there, but could not clearly recall the reason or whether the testimony had specifically used the word break-in. The distinction matters: the material supports the existence of testimony about a proposed mission, but leaves uncertainty about its precise purpose and wording.

Hunt’s own account of his place in the political operations was reported through Donald Segretti, who said he wanted to tell the whole story and did not understand how he had become so deeply involved. Segretti said he had been told only his own role and had to read the newspapers to learn what the operation was about. That description echoes the fragmentary structure of the evidence around Hunt: phone calls and assignments connected operatives, but people involved did not necessarily know the whole design. In the reporting, Hunt is therefore both a consequential link and an incomplete explanation. His contacts, alleged assignments, and files made the covert system more legible, while the chain of command and the full extent of his knowledge remained contested or undisclosed.