Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration's so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties.

[5] During and after World War II, he wrote several novels under his own name, including East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Maelstrom (1949) Bimini Run (1949), and The Violent Ones (1950).

[1] Hunt was subsequently assigned responsibility for organizing Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a suitably representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a pro-American government that could replace Fidel Castro.

[14] Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began during the Eisenhower administration, but Hunt was later bitter about what he perceived as President John F. Kennedy's lack of commitment to the operation, which was designed to attack and overthrow the Castro government.

[15] In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us This Day, Hunt wrote, "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of José Martí, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away."

[16] The following year, in 1960, Hunt established Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles formed to attempt the military overthrow of the Castro's government in Cuba.

In 1974, Hunt told The New York Times that he worked for DODS for approximately four years, beginning in 1962, shortly after the agency's establishment by the Kennedy administration over the objection of Richard Helms and Thomas H. Karamessines.

"[18] In 1964, John A. McCone, then deputy chief of intelligence at the CIA, directed Hunt to take a special assignment as a Non-official cover officer in Madrid, Spain, tasked with creating an American answer to Ian Fleming's British MI-6 James Bond novel series.

Following a brief tenure on the Special Activities Staff of the Western European Division, he became Chief of Covert Action for the region in July 1968, and was based in the Washington metropolitan area.

However, this was downgraded to the third-highest rating of "Adequate" in an amended review from the Division's Deputy Chief, who recognized Hunt's "broad experience" but opined that "a series of personal and taxing problems" had "tended to dull his cutting edge.

[35] In his memoir Hunt reports that the day after the assassination attempt he received a call from Chuck Colson, asking him to break into Bremer's apartment and plant "leftist literature to connect him to the Democrats".

Hunt put pressure on the White House and the Committee for the Re-Election of the President for cash payments to cover legal fees, family support, and expenses, for himself and his fellow burglars.

Large sums of money were passed to Hunt and his accomplices in an attempt to secure their silence at the trial, by pleading guilty to avoid prosecutors' questions, and afterwards.

[45] According to Vincent Bugliosi, allegations that these men were involved in a conspiracy originated from theorist Richard E. Sprague who compiled the photographs in 1966 and 1967, and subsequently turned them over to Jim Garrison during his investigation of Clay Shaw.

[46] In 1975, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory helped bring national media attention to the allegations against Hunt and Sturgis after obtaining the comparison photographs from Weberman and Canfield.

[48] The commission's final report stated that witnesses testified that the derelicts bore a resemblance to Hunt or Sturgis "were not shown to have any qualifications in photo identification beyond that possessed by an average layman".

[51] In 1992, journalist Mary La Fontaine discovered the November 22, 1963, arrest records that the Dallas Police Department had released in 1989, which named the three men as Gus W. Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John F.

[52] According to the arrest reports, the three men were "taken off a boxcar in the railroad yards right after President Kennedy was shot", detained as "investigative prisoners", described as unemployed and passing through Dallas, then released four days later.

[60] Two newspaper articles published a few months before the deposition stated that a 1966 CIA memo linking Hunt to the assassination of President Kennedy had recently been provided to the HSCA.

[69] Former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin indicated in 1999 that Hunt was made part of a fabricated conspiracy theory disseminated by a Soviet "active measures" program designed to discredit the CIA and the United States.

[70][71] According to Mitrokhin, the KGB created a forged letter from Oswald to Hunt implying that the two were linked as conspirators, then forwarded copies of it to "three of the most active conspiracy buffs" in 1975.

[70] Mitrokhin indicated that the photocopies were accompanied by a fake cover letter from an anonymous source alleging that the original had been given to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley and was apparently being suppressed.

[70] According to Kerry Thornley, who served with Oswald in the Marine Corps and wrote the biographical book The Idle Warriors about him before the assassination of the president (the manuscript was seized during the investigation and was kept as physical evidence for a long time).

[75] Hunt's memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond,[77] was ghost-written by Greg Aunapu and published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.

"[79] He stated that the work "was clearly ghostwritten", and eventually agreed to write an introduction focusing on his early friendship with Hunt after he received a revised manuscript "with the loony grassy-knoll bits chiseled out".

[80] Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times said it was "a bitter and self-pitying memoir" and "offers a rather standard account of how men of his generation became involved in intelligence work".

"[82] Weiner said that the author's examination of the Kennedy assassination was the low-point of the book, indicating that Hunt pretended to take various conspiracy theories, including the involvement of former President Johnson, seriously.

[84] Contrasting this opinion, Politico's James Rosen described the chapters regarding Watergate as the "[m]ost problematic" and wrote: "There are numerous factual errors – misspelled names, wrong dates, phantom participants in meetings, fictitious orders given – and the authors never substantively address, only pause occasionally to demean, the vast scholarly literature that has arisen in the last two decades to explain the central mystery of Watergate.

"[85] Rosen's review was not entirely negative and he indicated that the book "succeeds in taking readers beyond the caricatures and conspiracy theories to preserve the valuable memory of Hunt as he really was: passionate patriot; committed Cold Warrior; a lover of fine food, wine and women; incurable intriguer, wicked wit and superb storyteller.

On the television series The X-Files, the antagonist known as Cigarette Smoking Man (portrayed by William B. Davis) was a shadowy intelligence operative partly modeled on Hunt.