His long war

National Review, April 30, 2007 by Mark Riebling

American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, by E. Howard Hunt with Greg Aunapu (Wiley, 352 pp., $25.95)

THOUGH espionage is supposed to be thrilling, CIA memoirs are often boring. Usually written decades after the fact, always sanitized by government censors, the typical "autospyography" has the vague, approximate effect of a police sketch drawn from the memory of a traumatized witness.

American Spy is, by happy contrast, the fiercely remembered life of the CIA's Forrest Gump.

E. Howard Hunt was a genial, incompetent genius who happened into many of the major secret operations of his time. If Robert DeNiro had really wanted to tell the story of the CIA in his recent film The Good Shepherd, he would have modeled his hero not on the composite who became Matt Damon's Edward Wilson, but on the more tragic and representative figure of Howard Hunt.

Fully half the book is devoted to Watergate and its aftermath. That is appropriate, not only because Hunt helped plan the burglaries there, but because post-Watergate reforms of U.S. intelligence have restricted the means by which we may know our enemies. But Hunt's well-known role in that scandal is not the soul of this book. The beating heart of American Spy is the Cold War; or, more exactly, the moral continuity between the Cold War and World War II.

This continuity was described by FBI deputy director William Sullivan, who ran domestic spying during the Cold War: "When a soldier in the field shot down an enemy, he did not ask himself is this legal or lawful, is it ethical? It was what he was expected to do as a soldier.... We never freed ourselves from that psychology that we were indoctrinated with, right after Pearl Harbor, you see."

Every sentence in this book vibrates to that iron string. "Anything I may have done," Hunt said at his trial on Watergate-related charges, "I did for what I believed to be in the best interests of my country." In fact, Hunt believed that America itself had taught and told him to burglarize the Democratic headquarters. "I cannot escape feeling," he testified to the Senate in 1973, "that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do."

The "country," of course, was not the men who directed Hunt to plan the burglary, but the ideals Hunt betrayed in planning it. Just how Hunt's moral compass malfunctioned--with such dreadful consequences to him, to the Agency he served, and to the country he loved--is the story he sets out to tell us in American Spy. In March 1943, Army private Hunt is chafing at the easy life in Orlando, Fla., when he hears whispers about a mysterious unit, the Office of Strategic Services.

Through his lobbyist father, Hunt gets a meeting with OSS director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who, at 67, still looks like a man you want next to you in a fight. Donovan taps him for a Pacific post. After tough training, Hunt makes the dangerous flight over the Himalayas into China, where he runs guns to guerrillas fighting the Japanese.

After the war, when OSS becomes CIA, Hunt quarterbacks covert operations in Latin America, Europe, and the Far East. But as political-action chief of the project to unseat Fidel Castro, Hunt never recovers, "psychologically or operationally," from the 1961 defeat of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs. Transferred into the agency's legally dodgy Domestic Operations Division, Hunt is writing spy novels under an assumed name when he meets Nixon aide Charles Colson (whom he calls the "spiritual ancestor to Karl Rove").

In 1971, Colson hires Hunt to spy on Nixon's enemies. Hunt teams with an eccentric former FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy, and hires anti-Castro Cubans with long CIAresumes to do the dirty work. On June 17, 1972, D.C. police catch Hunt's operatives breaking into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate.

In the ordeal that follows, Hunt loses nearly everything. His wife, Dorothy, dies in a plane crash. The White House abandons him. The press attacks him. His two eldest children disavow him. Even so, he remains a "good soldier," perjuring himself about White House links to Watergate until, realizing that Nixon is indifferent to his fate, he resolves to tell the truth.

The effect of turning against Nixon is almost magical, "flipping the stormy climate of animosity into balmy geniality." Publishers reissue Hunt's spy novels, and pay him to write more from prison.

Yet, when he walks free after 33 months in jail, Hunt is not free of Watergate. Conspiracy buffs accuse him not only of plotting JFK's death, but of himself being the spectral "second gunman." He wins a libel case, which only draws more attention to the charges.

Through it all, one blessing is visited on Hunt: a young Georgia divorcee, Laura, who writes him admiring letters while he's in jail. He marries her, has two new children, and lives to write this book.

Yet Hunt never answers the book's central dramatic question, namely: How could he have been so dumb? The flaw in the work is the flaw in the man. Hunt can't explain why he did the wrong thing, because he doesn't think he did anything wrong. "I have no regrets," he says on page 2. "If our Watergate team had found that the Democrats were indeed being financed by Communist enemies, then our criminal actions might have been judged heroic."