"My Dad Helped the CIA Kill JFK!"

Saint John Hunt, recipient and custodian of father E. Howard Hunt's confession to participating in the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated murder of JFK

[Don't miss James Fetzer's talk Who Killed JFK? this Tuesday, November 22nd at the University of Wisconsin-Madison! Details here.]


Of all the big lies told about the JFK assassination, perhaps the biggest is: "I guess we'll never really know what happened."

Bullshit! We do know.

Some of us know because we have studied the issue. Others, like Saint John Hunt, son of CIA executive and covert action agent E. Howard Hunt, know because they got it straight from the horse's mouth.

In 1979, as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I wrote an article for the Madison, WI Daily Cardinal compiling evidence that the CIA killed JFK. Shortly after the article was submitted to a dozen or so publications, but before it was published,  a woman appeared at my house and very politely announced she was a CIA-operated mind-control slave, brain wired with electrodes, whose job was to target enemies of the CIA for elimination. The next day, I asked my politically-savvy journalism professor, John T. McNelly, what was THAT about. He said, "They're just f**ing with you, kid. They're trying to intimidate you."

Saint John Hunt knows how badly "they" can f** with you.  He helped his CIA-agent father Howard conceal money and documents during the Watergate scandal, and suffered the pain of having his mother, Dorothy Hunt, blown out of the sky under circumstances that are far beyond suspicious.

So Saint John Hunt gets my vote as one America's greatest living heroes, for having the guts to stand up and tell the truth about his father's confession to participating in the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated assassination of John F. Kennedy. His family didn't want him to do it, the lawyers didn't want him to do it, and of course the CIA didn't want him to do it. But Saint John Hunt chose to live up to his arrangement with his dying father, who apparently felt some ambivalent remorse about his participation in "The Big Event" and, at the end of his life, asked his son to help expose the truth. By doing so, Saint John Hunt is not only keeping faith with his father, but also keeping faith with his country and its tortured, slowly dying Constitution. And if you believe, as I do, that one of God's highest names is al-Haqq (truth/reality), Saint John Hunt is keeping faith on that level as well.

11/18/2011 Interview with Saint John Hunt, lightly edited, Part 1 (Listen to the full interview here)

Saint John Hunt
(The JFK assassination) happened 49 years ago this November 22nd. That's basically a generation. And the old generation has published, I don't know, 500 books on the subject, noting all manner of conspiracies from every conceivable source - everything from the CIA to space aliens.

We were well warned by Eisenhower, when he passed the torch to JFK, that we've got a very dangerous situation here with the miltary-industrial-congressional complex - that's what was left out of his speech, the word "congressional." Those were (Eisenhower's) words, and he was correct in that appraisal.

Kevin Barrett
You've laid it on the line in a way that few have. I mean, this is your father that we're talking about! It must be really, really tough, (dealing with) the feeling of betrayal that we all have when we look into issues like this, when (we find) our own government has betrayed us, our own government has slaughtered 3000 people in the World Trade Center and blamed it on their enemies. People in our own government, the people really in charge, kill the President, kill his brother, and so on. We all feel a horrible sense of betrayal. But having it in the family must be worse. It must be like betrayal squared.

Hunt
Yeah, it was a pretty big shock when he called me down to his, we'll say his death bed side in Florida. And of course I had heard and seen...I had even attended a lecture in the mid-1970s by a comedian-turned-activist named Dick Gregory at San Francisco State. He was one of the first, along with Mark Lane and Silvia Meagher. And of course they accused my father of being one of the agents involved. So I was well aware that there were a lot of accusations flying around, and I just wanted to sort of figure things out for myself. But I kind of dropped the issue for ten or twenty years, until I got this phone call from my father. And lo and behold, there was some truth to the accusations and the alleged evil deeds. So that was quite a shock. And the arrangement that I had with him...originally we were going to bring it out together, before he passed away. But there was so much pressure from the inner family circle, and from various lawyers, and of course the CIA itself, that he backed down.

Barrett
What year was this happening?

Hunt
This was in 2005. And so he decided that he couldn't really come out with this information himself, while he was alive, because there would be too many repercussions. First of all, he was extremely worried that any up-and-coming hotshot lawyer would have him arrested for complicity in the death of the President, which there is no statute of limitations on. So he backed down. And of course his family was deeply distressed over the overwhelming repercussions this would have in their lives. His second family, which we're talking about, were relatively untainted by the things he had done when I, and my sisters and brothers and his first wife, were his main family. So he was a gentle man, toward the end there. But his wish for me was for me to bring this out after he had passed away. And of course that weighed very heavily on my shoulders. He passed away in 2007. After two years I just said "I'll do this." Against all pleas from my family, I decided to go ahead.

Barrett
Wow. That must be tough.
I know there's a tape and a handwritten letter (confession to participation in CIA execution of JFK). Did he give you those in 2005?

Hunt
He gave me the handwritten notes in 2005, I believe. That's when we were both working on how to bring this out to the mainstream media. He sent me the tape after I left. I just found it in the mail one day. I opened up the mail, and it was in an envelope. I put the cassette in and it was my father saying, on this audio cassette, how he was part of this "Big Event" (CIA code for its JFK asassination plot), naming the key players that he spoke with, that were arranging this. He ended the tape by saying that this information was for me and me alone.

We had had a very dynamic relationship. He was a staunch conservative Republican, while by that age, I was 17 in 1969 and very much part of the antiwar movement. So we had our differences, but we had always been very truthful with each other. And we had a bond of secrecy that really developed on the night of June 17th (1972) when he came home from Watergate. I was part of those crazy shennanigans, and I helped him dispose and disseminate lots of information, cash, money, you know. He trusted me with those. I never came forward and told anybody about it.

Barrett
Was he set up on Watergate? What's your take on that?

Hunt
Yeah, I believe Watergate was a set-up job. I think my father - I know my father was part of that set-up.
The interesting thing is that although my father claimed to have retired from the CIA in 1970. And then in early 1971 he was asked by Charles Colson, one of Nixon's advisors, to work under Mr. Colson in the White House in a special projects team that later became known as the Plumbers. But the truth of the matter is, and my father told me this years later, was that he never resigned from the CIA. Now he had had left the CIA twice before, and they were both false exits. They were so that he could have a new cover, yet still tapped into all the necessary CIA drop sources and do his job as an agent. So even in 1970, when he officially retired from the CIA, that was a third false exit from the CIA. He was still with the CIA, still on their books, still having meetings with Dick Helms and other top people at the CIA about Watergate and what Nixon was doing. So the CIA had my father there (in Nixon's Plumbers) as what they call a "mole," a deep agent, a double agent. So whatever was going on, the CIA was very well aware of it, because my father was reporting back to them on everything that was going down, all these crazy plots: kidnapping people, renting houseboats with prostitutes in them during the Democratic Convention in Miami, Florida, breaking into the George Wallace shooter, Arthur Bremer's apartment - Colson sent (Hunt) up to Milwaukee to break into Bremer's apartment and plant pro-McGovern literature so that Bremer would look like a leftist.

Barrett
That's pretty weird, isn't it?

Hunt
That's just so crazy to me.

Barrett
I don't know if you've seen Gore Vidal's essay on (Howard Hunt's connection to Bremer and the Wallace shooting, etc.). He's kind of hard on your father. And he points out that Bremer, who had something like a 65 IQ and was marginally literate, left an "assassin's diary" that reminds one of the prose style of the spy novels of Howard Hunt.

Hunt
Yeah, that was alleged to have been written by my father, and it really wouldn't surprise me, because my father was a ghost writer for, let me give you an example, Allan Dulles, one of the Dulles brothers. The two Dulles brothers, Allan Dulles and John Foster Dulles...Allan Dulles was head of the CIA before Dick Helms, I believe, and his brother John Foster Dulles was head of United Fruit Company, as well as many other corporations that had interests in Latin American businesses. And when Allan Dulles was planning his retirement from the CIA, he wanted to publish a novel, you know, his autobiography, which was actually written by my father, along with Allan Dulles. That's a little-known fact.

Barrett
I remember reading that, back in the day, and noticing that the passages about JFK just dripped with venom.

Hunt
Well, JFK was one of the most hated presidents, politically speaking, of all of our presidents, with possibly the exception of Abraham Lincoln. He was much-loved by almost all of the public. But...

Barrett
But not in the intelligence community.
(music) We'll be back in a moment. I'm talking with Saint John Hunt.

(To be continued tomorrow)

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