The 'Watergate burglar'

E. Howard Hunt, who helped organise the Watergate break-in that led to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died. He was 88.

Hunt died on Tuesday after a lengthy bout of pneumonia, according to his son.

The elder Hunt was many things: Second World War soldier, CIA officer, organiser of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre. Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he always insisted he was not - a Watergate burglar.

He often said he preferred the term 'Watergate conspirator'. "I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told the Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it." While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars - Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

He said the burglary's aim was to see whether Fidel Castro's Cuban regime had given money to the campaign of Nixon's Democratic opponent, George McGovern.

"According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was ... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found." The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, 25 men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of scepticism toward government began.

"I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr, security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested on June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building.

Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973.

In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House cover-up, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed ... Hunt now is demanding another $72,000 [about Dh264,240] for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees". After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money. ... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done."

"I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," Hunt told The Associated Press in 1992.

"It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate." Hunt also was involved in organising an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defence analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most popular spy-esque stories Hunt was linked with.

Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighbourhood with his second wife. His first wife died in a plane crash. Hunt was also survived by six children.