My Dad and the CIA
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- January
- 29
As everyone knows (or should know) E. Howard Hunt died last week at the age of 88.
Hunt is the latest member of the cast of Watergate characters to kick the bucket. There aren’t too many left. John Dean is still out there. G. Gordon Liddy, of course. And a few others.
Hunt was the man who bungled the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and sparked the Watergate scandal which toppled the Nixon presidency.
Anyway, I was startled to read in Hunt’s obituary that he was involved in the successful CIA plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government. He also was a screenwriter and was a graduate of Brown University.
Well, my late father was also a screenwriter. He also went to Brown. And he also was recruited by the CIA and may have been involved in some of the government’s covert operations in Mexico and central America. I’m not sure of the details. They’re a bit hazy. I remember him telling me that he was hired to write propaganda scripts and he was given a gun and the alias, Lewis Allmine. Hilarious. He may have been an unwitting decoy while the real agents did their dirty work somewhere else.
This merits further checking.
In any event, my dad, who lived in Larchmont and died in 1999, did remember Hunt from college. He was a few years younger and kind of strange, he recalled. He hung out with a different crowd.
This entry was posted
on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 6:35 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
