Nixon secret agent E. Howard Hunt dies

E. Howard Hunt, a Cold Warrior for the CIA who left the spy service in disillusion, joined the Nixon White House as a secret agent and bungled the break-in at the Watergate that brought the president down in disgrace, died Tuesday in Miami. He was 88.

His death, at the North Shore Medical Center, was caused by pneumonia, said his wife, Laura.

"This fellow Hunt," President Richard M. Nixon muttered a few days after the June 1972 break-in, "he knows too damn much."

That was Howard Hunt's burden: He was entrusted with too many secret missions. His career at the CIA was disgraced by the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and his time as Nixon's master of dirty tricks ended with his arrest at the Watergate, a crime for which he served 33 months in prison and emerged a broken man. "I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents," Hunt told the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years. "I cannot escape feeling 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."

He was a high-spirited 30-year-old novelist who aspired to wealth and power when he joined the CIA in 1949. He set out to live the life he had imagined for himself, a glamorous career as a spy. But Hunt was never much of a spy. He did not conduct espionage to gather information. His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda.

When he left the CIA in 1970 after a decidedly checkered career, he had become a world-weary cynic. Trading on the thin veneer of his reputation in the clandestine service, he won a job as a $100-a-day "security consultant" at the Nixon White House in 1971.

In that role, he conducted break-ins and burglaries in the name of national security. He drew no distinction between orchestrating a black-bag job at a foreign embassy in Mexico City and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate complex. He recognized no lawful limit on presidential power, convinced that "when the president does it," as Nixon once said, "that means it is not illegal." Hunt and the nation found out otherwise.