Most who have studied these photos at length are quite convinced that the 3rd tramp is E. Howard Hunt.
Posted on 01/23/2007 10:37:53 PM PST by mr. mojo risin
Everette Howard Hunt, the man who helped plan the Watergate break-in and wiretapping operation, is dead at age 88, FOX News has learned...
With his involvement in Watergate and the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a magnet for conspiracy theorists of all kinds. Those researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy began claiming in the mid-1970s that Hunt and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis appeared in photographs dressed as tramps and being arrested by Dallas policemen near the site of the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.
Hunt vigorously contested the charges publicly and in court, and he and his second wife, Laura, whom he met while serving his prison sentence, were deeply upset by the allegations.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
“This fellow Hunt,” President Richard M. Nixon said a few days after the June 1972 break-in, “he knows too damn much.”
Nixon: "P: O.K. . . . just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved—you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it's going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate—both for [the] CIA, and for the country, at this time, and for American foreign policy."
"This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky..."
On December 8, 1972, a month after Nixon had been re-elected, Hunt's wife was among those killed when a United Airlines flight from Washington to Chicago crashed near that city's Midway Airport. Her luggage contained "a large sum in cash," with reports at the time ranging from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Mere weeks after this tragedy, Hunt pled guilty to conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping. He served almost three years in prison. In 1974, Chuck Colson, who had been Hunt's immediate boss at the White House, told Time Magazine, "I think they killed Dorothy Hunt."
Most who have studied these photos at length are quite convinced that the 3rd tramp is E. Howard Hunt.
If you haven't read Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin...a pretty darned interesting read, even if they missed the boat on deep throat. (along with everyone else who'd ever made a guess)
"Most who have studied these photos at length are quite convinced that the 3rd tramp is E. Howard Hunt."
Most believe....etc.
always good for a yawn.
Interesting about the money she carried, who else was on board, why field agents already were "nearby" , blood toxins in some autopsies, the 737 sealed airspeed indicator had "aluminum oxide" applied to idler gear giving pilots a false high speed on landing approach, etc, etc.
The FAA cheif was replaced days after accident and did NOT review or sign the report...
UA Flight 533, which on 08 December 1972 hit the branches of trees close to Midway Airport, "then hit the roofs of a number of neighborhood bungalows before plowing into the home of Mrs. Veronica Kuculich at 3722 70th Place, demolishing the home and killing her and a daughter, Theresa."
I was a newspaperman working for the old Chicago Daily News at the time.
Interesting about the money she carried,
At least $10,000 in cash, plus she had herself purchased $250,000 in flight insurance payable to E. Howard Hunt-just before boarding the flight. In his 1974 book Undercover Hunt claimed not to have known that she had done so, and offered the following reason for the cash she carried: money for investment with Hal Carlstead in "two already-built Holiday Inns in the Chicago area".
who else was on board,
...including WBBM-TV/CBS newswoman Michelle Clark, working on then working on Chicago financial ties to the Watergate case, one *follow the money* lead never pursued by the Washington Post's Woodward/Burnstein team. Also aboard, per report by Sherm Skolnick, the gadfly Chitown researcher and TV producer who brought down crooked Chicago federal judge Otto Kerner:
Upwards of twelve persons connected in one way or another with Watergate, boarded United Air Lines Flight 553 on the afternoon of December 8, 1972. They had something in common. That week there had been a gas pipeline lobbyists meeting as part of the American Bar Association meeting in Washngton, DC It was conducted by Roger Moreau. His secretary was Nancy Parker. Among those attending were Ralph Blodgett and James W. Krueger, both attorneys for the Northern Natural Gas Co., of Omaha, Nebraska. Associated with them were Lon Bayer, attorney for Kansas-Nebraska Natural Gas Co.; Wilbur Erickson, president, Federal Land Bank in Omaha. This was a belligerent group determined to blow the lid off the Watergate case. Reason Former US Attorney General, John Mitchell, and his friends running the Justice Department were putting the spear into Northern Natural Gas. Some officials of that firm and its subsidiaries were indicted on federal criminal charges, September 7, 1972, in Omaha, Chicago, and Hammond, Indiana. Charge bribery of local officials in Northwest Indiana to let the gas pipeline go through. To blackmail their way out of these charges, the Omaha firm had uncovered documents showing that Mitchell, while U.S. Attorney General in 1969, dropped anti-trust charges against a competitor of Northern Natural Gas - El Paso Gas Co. The dropping of the charges against El Paso was worth 300 million dollars. A spokesman for Mitchell belatedly claimed, in March, 1973, that Mitchell had "disqualified" himself in 1969, because Mitchell's law partner represented El Paso. The Justice Department under Mitchell, dropped the charges. Period. About the same time, Mitchell, through a law partner as nominee, got a stock interest in El Paso. Gas and oil interests, such as El Paso, Gulf Resources, and others contributed heavily to Nixon's spy fund, supervised by Mitchell.
Pipeline official Krueger was carrying the Mitchell-El Paso documents on the plane. He had told his wife that he had in his possession irreplaceable papers of a sensitive nature. For months after the crash, his widow demanded, to no avail, that United Air Lines turn over to her his briefcase. It later came out in the pipeline trial in Hammond, that Blodgett had been browbeating federal officials, to drop the criminal charges just prior to the crash. (Our investigation uncovered that most of the local officials, to be government witnesses against the pipeline, were murdered just prior to trial. In all, some five Northwest Indiana officials.)
Dorothy Hunt, Watergate pay-off woman, who offered executive clemency directly on behalf of Nixon to some of the Watergate defendants, was seeking to leave the US with over 2 million dollars in cash and negotiables that she had gotten from CREEP, Committee to Re-Elect the President. (She was so concerned about these valuables, she purchased a separate first class seat next to her on the plane for this luggage.) She and her husband, E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate conspirator, were a "C.I.A. couple", two agents "married" and living together. Early in December, 1972, both were threatening to blow the lid off the White House if (a) he wasn't freed of the criminal charges; (b) Nixon didn't pay heavy to suppress the documents they had showing he was implicated in the planning and carrying out, by the FBI and the CIA, of the political murder of President Kennedy; and (c) Dorothy and Howard Hunt didn't both get several million dollars. Some of these details are in the Memo of Watergate double-agent, James McCord, a CIA official in charge of the Agency's physical security; details before the Senator Ervin Committee. Hunt claimed, according to McCord, to have the data necessary to impeach Nixon. McCord said matters were coming to a head early in December, 1972. Mrs. Hunt was unhappy with her job of going all over the country to bribe defendants and witnesses in the bugging case. She wanted out.
Mrs. Hunt was on the way to arrange to take her money out of the country, possibly Costa Rica, to link up with international swindler Robert Vesco who was there at the time; through Harold C. Carlstead, whose wife was Mrs. Hunt's cousin. Carlstead reportedly did accounting and tax work for mobster-owned businesses in the Chicago area. He operated two Holiday Inn motels in Chicago's south suburbs - at 174th and Torrence, Lansing, Illinois and at 171st and Halsted, Harvey, Illinois. Carlstead's motel on Torrence was reportedly a favorite hang out for gangsters and dope traffickers such as apparently "Cool" Freddie Smith, Grover Barnes, and the late Chicago mobster Sam DeStefano (who aided the American CIA in bloody tricks and was snuffed out to silence him), to name a few. Mrs. Hunt had (a) Ten Thousand Dollars in untraceable cash; (b) Forty Thousand Dollars in so-called "Barker" bills, traceable to Watergate spy Bernard Barker; and (c) upwards of Two Million Dollars in American Express money orders, travelers checks, and postal money orders. (As shown by testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board, re-opened Watergate plane crash hearings, June 13-14, 1973. Hearings reopened as a result of my lawsuit claiming sabotage covered up by the N.T.S.B.) Carlstead issued a fake "cover" story that had (only) Ten Thousand Dollars with Mrs. Hunt. A story swallowed up by the Establishment Press.
why field agents already were "nearby" ,
Including some four dozen agents from the Chicago Field Office of the FBI, who beat the ambulances, fire trucks and most newscrews to the scene of the crash. Interestingly, New Orleans Private Detective Guy Bannister had been the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago Bureau office before his retirement and relocation to New Orleans, where he later shared office space with one Lee Harvey Oswald....
... blood toxins in some autopsies, the 737 sealed airspeed indicator had "aluminum oxide" applied to idler gear giving pilots a false high speed on landing approach, etc, etc.
The FAA cheif was replaced days after accident and did NOT review or sign the report...
That was Nixon's deputy assistant, Alexander Butterfield, who was made the new head of the FAA, and five weeks later the president's appointment secretary, Dwight L. Chapin, become a top executive with United Airlines. BTW: Nixon had some other interesting ideas for what was to become the DEA, including the possibility of appointing Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser to head the agency, while having former military intelligence and CIA spook Lou Conein ran the DEA *Special Operations Group that handled, among other things, assassinations. Indeed, Conein had been was the US Army's point of contact for the Vietnamese plotters who overhrew the Diem government in 1963 a few days before JFK himself was killed in Dallas...and Conein was reported to have have himself been in Dallas that day. And had a previous attempted assassination of JFK in Chicago not been forestalled by the arrest of the shooter, a former Marine planning to fire on the presidential motorcade from an upper-story apartment window, the Diem and Kennedy regime changes would have been even more nearly simultaneous.
Howard Hunt had reportedly threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in. Former CIA employee Dorothy Hunt took part in the negotiations with Charles Colson. According to Sherman Skolnick, Hunt also had information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He argued that if "Nixon didn't pay heavy to suppress the documents they had showing he was implicated in the planning and carrying out, by the FBI and the CIA, of the political murder of President Kennedy"
James W. McCord claimed that Dorothy told him that at a meeting with her husband's attorney, William O. Buttmann, she revealed that Hunt had information that would "blow the White House out of the water".
In October, 1972, Dorothy Hunt attempted to speak to Charles Colson. He refused to talk to her but later admitted to the New York Times that she was "upset at the interruption of payments from Nixon's associates
In 1974, Charles Colson, Howard Hunt's boss at the White House, told Time Magazine: "I think they killed Dorothy Hunt." [7/8/1974 issue]
Taped conversation between Richard Nixon and John Dean (28 February, 1973)
John Dean: Kalmbach raised some cash.
Richard Nixon: They put that under the cover of a Cuban committee, I suppose?
John Dean: Well, they had a Cuban committee and they... some of it was given to Hunt's lawyer, who in turn passed it out. You know, when Hunt's wife was flying to Chicago with $10,000 she was actually, I understand after the fact now, was going to pass that money to one of the Cubans - to meet him in Chicago and pass it to, somebody there.... You've got then, an awful lot of the principals involved who know. Some people's wives know. Mrs. Hunt was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together.
Richard Nixon: Did she?
John Dean: Yes. Apparently, she was the pillar of strength in that family before the death.
Richard Nixon: Great sadness. As a matter of fact there was discussion with somebody about Hunt's problem on account of his wife and I said, of course commutation could be considered on the basis of his wife's death, and that is the only conversation I ever had in that light.
Not so. Washington news reporter Jim Mann, who had worked at the Post during Watergate named Felt in a 1992 article in the Atlantic Monthly figuring that the WP source had to be in the FBI...and Felt not only had high-level access, but also ELSUR reports from FBI taps on telephones, dating back to the Felt's activities running the COINTELPRO bugs and wiretaps of major figures under investigation, including Martin Luther King and Marilyn Monroe.
Likewise writer Jim Hougan postulated a FBI wiretap in his 1978 book Spooks as the source of much of the Deep Throat revelations, if falling a bit short of fingering Felt in particular.
And in the early 1990s I had the opportunity to interview convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy at one of the Soldier of Fortune conventions in Las Vegas. I asked him about the possibility that Felt or L. Patrick Gray was the source of the Deep Throat snitching, and his reply was a good one: He hoped not, as it'd be a betrayal of everything that the Bureau stood for, and all the other agents. But when I suggested Felt- and I'm sure I wasn't the first to do so- he frowned and clenched his teeth.
BTW: I think Nixon himself speculated it was Felt on one of the Watergate tapes. That's just a IIRC thought, as I don't have my own notes and index on the matter with me.
Related: [Howard] HUNT BLAMES JFK HIT ON LBJ
Only the most far-out conspiracy theorists believe in scenarios like Hunt's. But in a new memoir, "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond," due out in April, Hunt, 88, writes: "Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson's part.
"LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy, Gov. [John] Connolly, to ride with him instead of in JFK's car - where . . . he would have been out of danger."
Good info.
A dark chapter in our history, yet as relevent today as ever.
Interesting posts, Archy. Thanks for the ping.
A lot of people kept saying they thought it was Pat Buchanan but I knew it wasn't, he didn't seem like the type to do something like that. Same with Al Haig.
Thanks nit!
Hunt's accusation that LBJ did the JFK hit accounts for the known facts and provides plausible deniability, something Hunt failed to convince a jury of in the case described in Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, Thunders Mouth, 1991. Hunt failed to provide compelling proof of his whereabouts November 22, 1963.
He did admit to extorting money from Nixon via Colson under threat of revealing provable crimes committed by the White House.
Hunt admits under oath at the trial that he admitted to Colson that he forged cables to show the Kennedy Administration ordered the assassination of the South Vietnamese President Diem [page 269].
A constitutional law professor emeritus of a major law school simultaneously charges Lane with being a Communist, and Kennedy as having been terribly damaging to national security.
In a perfect world we'd all be singing Kumbaya and pass the juice boxes around.
Recommended for its passion, E. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day, Arlington House, 1973.
Had Kennedy allowed the final B-26 raid to take out Castro's three .50 cal. armed T-33s, and allowed the U.S. Navy standing offshore to give appropriate support the regime of Castro would have been ended and that of Kennedy would not.
Or perhaps a defector to the Soviet Union was allowed to shoot the president at the height of the Cold War. Posner believes it, as he believes Vince Foster in a fit of depression shot himself in Fort Marcy Park.
Billions of dollars and thousands of employees, Hunt's alma mater should surely be able to convince us of magic bullets.
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