I’ve written about Bay of Pigs veteran E Howard Hunt here before. Most recently, I mentioned that the loveable old tramp was dead at 88, after a long, full and unquestionably evil life in the shadows of the CIA. Prior to that, I think that I’d mentioned on a few occasions that I’d spent way too much of my youth trying to connect him to the JFK assassination, something to which he never admitted. Here’s a clip from a 2004 interview he did with “Slate”:

Slate: I know there is a conspiracy theory saying that David Atlee Phillips - the Miami CIA station chief - was involved with the assassination of JFK.

Hunt: [Visibly uncomfortable] I have no comment.

Slate: I know you hired him early on, to work with you in Mexico, to help with Guatemala propaganda.

Hunt: He was one of the best briefers I ever saw.

Slate: And there were even conspiracy theories about you being in Dallas the day JFK was killed.

Hunt: No comment.

Apparently that wasn’t the end of the story though. According to the new issue of “Rolling Stone,” he did eventually talk – to his eldest son, Saint. If you can believe the perpetually broke and often incarcerated son of the Watergate burglar, he wasn’t involved himself, but he knew who was. He wrote it out for him on his death bed. Here’s a clip:

..E. Howard scribbled the initials “LBJ,” standing for Kennedy’s ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ,” connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that’s never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales’ name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll.”

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories…

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.”

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK’s death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint’s father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news…

According to this narrative, it sounds as though Hunt would have been involved himself in some capacity, but backed off when he heard that Bill Harvey, someone he referred to as an “alcoholic psycho,” was on the team. (We all, I guess, have our limits.)

So, what should we believe? This whole thing could be a lie perpetrated by Hunt’s son to get a few bucks. It could also be one final lie by the father, an attempt to distance himself a bit further from the events that unfolded that day in Dallas. As I believe E Howard Hunt was the las of these implicated men to die, I guess we’ll never really know. As for me, however, I think I belive it. Something about it feels right to me, like this is the perfect ending, even with the unanswered questions. It seems somehow fitting that it would come down to a near-dead Hunt confessing to his estranged fellon of a son named Saint.