His long war

National Review, April 30, 2007 by Mark Riebling

Still, Hunt's shortcomings aside, American Spy is the only autobiography I know of that convincingly conveys what it was like to be an American spy. The ten-page mini-drama of his spy training is alone worth the price of the book. With equal grace, Hunt conjures the glittering life of a spy under embassy cover and the war of ideas waged by the CIA's book-publishing program.

It helps that Hunt was an English major who wrote more than 70 spy novels. He has a gift for evocative prose. In one of the book's most affecting scenes, a gung-ho OSS navigator persuades the captain to strafe a Japanese stronghold. While the navigator fires his tommy gun, Hunt sees the mission's photographer and captain silhouetted in the open doorway:

   Just then a burst of flak rocked the plane.
   Blood spurted from the photographer's
   chest. He fell out of the doorway and
   pulled his ripcord. There was another spurt
   of flak; the captain took a bullet in the
   head, spun around, tried to catch the door
   frame, but fell out of the aircraft.... When
   we were out of enemy range, the navigator
   stalked aft with his weapon, chuckling.
   Then his face fell.... I could barely look
   at him, because I did think it was his fault.

Here was an early lesson: An "action-oriented" ally could really be an enemy. It was a lesson that Hunt himself forgot, three decades later, when he hooked up with G. Gordon Liddy.

His friendship with Liddy provides a clue to Hunt's fall. "Like common drinkers, Liddy and I became covert action co-dependents. My wife and daughter thought we acted like school kids together, one feeding off the other." Room 16 of the Executive Office Building became their secret, after-school tree-house. Playing hooky from their wives, Hunt and Liddy rolled up their sleeves, drank bad coffee, and thought up crazy ways to save the world. They showed bogus documents to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, "proving" that JFK ordered the killing of Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. They tried to get syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, a thorn in the administration's side, "to ingest LSD through his skin from his steering wheel, so that he would crash his car."

Just what did the world need saving from, that Hunt could even think of doing such things? Though he never swivels his powers of insight fully on himself, his meditation on the Watergate worldview is the most trenchant I have read:

   The administration had been elected by a
   majority of voters, but the minority was
   trying to take power in a sort of slow-speed
   revolution, which had been fomenting
   over the last few years in campus
   uprisings, urban bombings, and mass
   marches. The counterculture government
   was also aided by elements in the media,
   clergy, scientists, and lawyers.... Added
   to that were moles such as [Pentagon
   Papers leaker Daniel] Ellsberg who were
   deeply entrenched in government, with
   access to classified information, who took
   it upon themselves as judge and jury to
   leak matters of national security. In some
   ways, this was a mirror image of events,
   sans military, that the CIA had perpetuated
   in other countries such as Guatemala
   to effect regime change. Perhaps that's
   what seemed so frightening to the administration.
   [Emphasis added.]