"E. Howard Hunt's Missing Report on The Kennedy Assassination"

This is the title of HSCA document #180-10112-10479, which consists of a 35-page report by a House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Mike Ewing. It is an interesting read and I will give a few excerpts. The report opens with a well-known excerpt from the Watergate tapes.

Nixon: "...well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things."

Haldeman: "That's what Ehrlichman says."

Nixon: "Of course this Hut, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of things...This involves these Cubans, Hunt and a lot of hanky-panky..."

...information which has only recently become available indicates that Hunt was, at the very least, quite interested in - and concerned about - the asassination of President Kennedy. This new information further indicates that a secret report about certain aspects of the Kennedy assassination (aspects particularly related to Cuba and Fidel Castro) was prepared by Hunt and his future Watergate burglar associates - and was in fact circulated to Charles Colson and the Nixon circle as well as officials within the CIA.

As will be seen from this information, and other long obscure Watergate data, a picture seems to be emerging which places the secret Hunt report on the Kennedy assassination at the heart of the feverish cover-up activities in the immediate days following the Kennedy assassination.

The Watergate burglars were arrested on the night of June 17. John Erlichman had phoned John Dean early on the morning of June 19. The FBI was already hot on the trail of Mr. Hunt due to the fact that his name and White House phone number were found in the address books of two of the burglars. Dean in turn called Charles Colson, who had brought Hunt to the Withe House. Colson confirmed Hunt's status as a White House "consultant" and then, according to Dean, "Colson also expressed concern over the contents of Hunt's safe." The safe was drilled open and the contents destroyed later that same day. The contents of the safe included material related to his work with the Plumbers, including his investigation of Chappaquiddick, as well as forged State Department cables which Hunt had himself fabricated, linking Kennedy to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.

Information which has only recently come to light indicates that in addition to that last item about the Diem murder, the secret Hunt safe also contained information resulting from yet another Plumbers probe - into some of the circumstances of another 1963 assassination - the assassination of President Kennedy.

That information included an interview with Hunt, conducted in late November of 1975, by two reporters for the Providence Journal. Hold told them of a secret probe which included interviewing a Cuban woman who "claimed to have been in the Castro household with one of Fidel's sisters" at the time of JFK's assassination. Apparently Castro was shocked and saddened by the assassination of the President. One wonders if Hunt had the same reaction. (Actually I suspect that Hunt knew about the assassination even before John Kennedy.) Why was Hunt interviewing this woman? According to Ewing, the most likely explanation is that he was ordered to.

Hunt told the two reporters that he sent a copy of the report to the CIA (as Barker had originally stated) and further, that he had also given the report to his own White House friend and patron, Charles W. Colson.

Hunt's own copy of the report he put into his White House safe. One can only imagine the reactions of White House officials, including Nixon, when they found a report related to the Kennedy assassination in Howard Hunt's safe. This report has still not seen the light of day.

As scrambled as the testimony is at this point, a couple of things are clear. The Hunt report related to the Kennedy assassination is missing. No copy of it has ever surfaced, nor have the tapes that Hunt, Barker, Martinez, and Sturgis made during the probe ever been found.

The last thing in the world the Nixon men needed at that point was a secret report about the Kennedy assassination coming out of Hunt's safe - written and produced by Hunt and his burglar friends Barker, Martinez, and Sturgis.

Posted in: