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Partial Recording of Howard Hunt Tape. The cassette was mailed by Hunt to his son Saint John in Jan 2004, and was played on the Coast to Coast Live radio show on May 1, 2007. The website of the son of E. Howard Hunt on Spartacus Educational. Nixon 'smoking gun' tape transcript. Apr 5, 2007 - E. Howard Hunt during his imprisonment at the Federal Prison Camp at. Of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife's death, of thirty-three months in. Bills, was killed in a plane crash, foul play suspected but never proved.
One of the more persistent, but less well-known, conspiracy theories surrounding Watergate is the crash of United Airlines flight 553 that killed Dorothy Hunt, a former government employee who was transporting $10,000 in hush money on behalf of her husband and Watergate burglar, E. Howard Hunt. At the time, these theories were widely pushed by activist Sherman Skolnick, who used his call-in hotline to spread this and other conspiracy theories, making particular use of the control tower recording of the UA 553 crash having been preserved by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to Skolnick, Dorothy carried $2 million in traveler’s checks and money orders stolen from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, $50,000 in cash, and documents that may have led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. These claims are entirely unsubstantiated, with almost no support from documented facts or public officials. Only one public official seemed to have supported the theory that Dorothy was deliberately murdered in the plane crash - former White House Counsel Charles Colson. In an interview with Richard Bast and related in Time Magazine, Colson reportedly said, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that “I don’t say this to my people. They’d think I’m nuts. I think they killed Dorothy Hunt.”
Neither Colson, nor most conspiracy theorists, seem to address the fact that Illinois Congressman George W. Collins was also killed in the same crash. The interview prompted Time to speculate that Colson was either deflecting from Nixon’s culpability, or that he had simply “lost touch with reality.“
The closest to any other official source endorsing the conspiracy theory that Dorothy’s plane crash was engineered is a June 5th, 1973 letter from the Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board to Acting FBI Director William Ruckelshaus. The letter noted that the FBI arrived on the scene before the NTSB did, and that the Bureau listened to the control tower tapes and interviewed witnesses before the NTSB could. “These actions, particularly with respect to this flight on which Mrs. E. Howard Hunt was killed, have raised innumerable questions … It is likely that questions as to what specific actions were taken by the FBI in connection with this aircraft response, and why such actions were taken, will come up in a public oversight hearing … scheduled for June 13th, 1973.”
Far from endorsing the conspiracy theory, however, the NTSB Chairman merely noted that the case seemed unusual and that, given possible Watergate connections, there were questions that the NTSB and FBI would need to address. The letter was merely an attempt to pose the questions the NTSB felt were most significant, and to request all relevant records. Among the questions posed by the NTSB were, why was the FBI investigating and why so quickly, how many FBI personnel were involved, and what steps did the Bureau take.
The letter also suggested that the FBI and NTSB more formally liaise in the future, and delineate the specific responsibilities of each agency and how they would work together.
The FBI file provides one small breadcrumb to conspiracy theorists, noting that a federal narcotics agent was aboard the plane and survived the crash.
The FBI file and the NTSB report both reject any possibility that the crash was caused by sabotage or anything other than pilot error. The FBI file notes that “information from [the] Federal Aviation Administration reflects no possibility of any cause of crash other than pilot error.” The NTSB also produced a 65 page report detailing the crash from a technical standpoint. The report unambiguously concludes that there was no sabotage and that the crash was caused by pilot error.
Some, as the NTSB Chairman’s letter noted, have questioned the FBI’s purpose in investigating the crash. The FBI file repeatedly addresses this, noting that it’s standard procedure as crashes resulting from sabotage are within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Once the FBI determined that there was no likely sabotage, they ended their primary investigation. The FBI file also points to a second purpose: the assistance of the FBI Disaster Unit had been requested.
As noted in an above excerpt, the FBI’s review of the tower tapes indicated that the engine stalled. Once this was established and the FBI saw no indication of sabotage, they ended their investigation except to liaise with the NTSB and help identify bodies.
In a response to the NTSB Chairman’s letter, or similar inquiries, an FBI teletype explains that the Bureau had handed over all relevant records to the NTSB as soon as it became clear that there had been no sabotage and that the FBI had no jurisdiction. According to the FBI, the investigation was carried out by about 50 personnel who began arriving a little less than an hour after the crash, and continued arriving for another hour after.
The FBI responded to questions about why they began arriving before the NTSB by saying that this fact reflected more on the NTSB than it did the FBI. The FBI teletype also wrote that the NTSB was “obviously not aware of the abilities of our investigators,” referring to the FBI’s speedy identification of the stall signal.
The FBI’s teletype spent a full paragraph informing its readers that everyone was very grateful to the Bureau.
The FBI file claimed that the Bureau didn’t know about Dorothy Hunt’s presence on the plane until after their primary investigation had concluded.
The teletype concluded by noting that the identification of dead passengers was routine, and that “there was absolutely nothing unusual or untypical” about the FBI’s investigation, which was “terminated within 20 hours of the accident.”
While the FBI may have had simple explanations for the matter, their attention to the case would continue as a result of Skolnick’s accusations. The June 13th, 1973 hearing referred to in the NTSB Chairman’s letter was the direct result of Skolnick’s accusations. The hearing had been called by the NTSB at the request of United Airlines, due to Skolnick making many “ridiculous” accusations against United Airlines, CBS, the FAA and the Department of Justice over an alleged cover-up of the crash of United Airlines flight 553.
According to the FBI, Skolnick had accused them of “removing two million dollars from the aircraft” and claimed that “many of the passengers aboard the aircraft died of cyanide poisoning.” Skolnick not only connected the crash to the Watergate investigation, but to “a pipeline lobby, investment scandals in Switzerland, legislative acts in Costa Rica and underworld dealings in stolen currency.” The FBI’s Chicago office didn’t have anyone present at the hearings, instead getting their information from UA personnel and media reports.
The teletype also stated that the local news in Chicago had been covering the hearings, but that Skolnick wasn’t been taken seriously. According to the Bureau, “Skolnick’s testimony and the testimony of the witnesses he called has been completely unsubstantiated, and according to press reports persons in attendance snickered through Skolnick’s testimony.” The FBI’s liaison with UA reported that none of the conspiracy claims had been substantiated, and that they were “obviously a figment of Skolnick’s imagination.”
The consensus of every credible investigation has dismissed the conspiracy theories around UA 553, with technical reports detailing the crash and witnesses both on the plane and on the ground confirming the official narrative.
Yet the conspiracy theory persists in some circles. Why? Because some people just want to believe.
You can read part of the FBI file below, or the rest on the request page.
1341051 1 1060 (PDF)1341051 1 1060 (Text)
Image via Wikimedia Commons
8
August
1973
The following article, by Cari Oglesby of the 'Boston I Phoenix, ' is an in-depth inquiry into the crash of United I Airlines Flight 553, the plane crash on which Ms. E. ■ Howard Hunt, and some ten other people who in one I way or another represented a threat to the Nixon governI ment, met their deaths. Since the article wasfirst printed I in the 'Phoenix, ' several newfacts substantiating the I theory that the plane was sabotaged by those wishing to I permanently silence Ms. Hunt and the others have come I to light. The SUN has up-dated the article to include these I f acts. Most of the informa tion carne from Sherman SkolI rock, a private investigator in Chicago, who testified at I the National Transportation Board hearings on the crash I in June of this year. Skolnick managed to obtain the goI vernments records on the crash, and he testified to the I hearing committee that those records show that there was I sabotage, robbery and murder involved in Flight 55 3 's fatal I end. Skolnick has denounced the hearings and the safety I board, saying, 'the Board are Nixon 's puppets - like the I Warren Commission, they will ignore their own records in ■ order to continue saying that the Watergate plane crash I was an 'accident '. ' The established national press have thus far shied away ■ from reporting Skolnick 's findings, or from probing into I the mysteries and contradictions that surround the crash M'of Flight 553. The SUN believes that the following article I raises enough questions to warrant a full-scale review of I the crash and the circumstances that brought it about. If I Ms. Hunt and the others on the flight were, in f act, murI dered, then no hearings into the crash or into the subterI ranean activities of the Waterbuggers can be concluded unI til those responsible for the murders and sabotage are exI posed and made to answerfor their crimes. An explosive new aspect of the Watergate crisis is beI ginning to emerge from the United Airlines jetliner crash I last December 8 outside Chicago's Midway Airport in I which Dorothy Hunt, E. Howard's wife, and others I connected with Watergate met their deaths. Mrs. Hunt was reported at the time to have been I carrying $10,000 in cash. This was tacitly reckoned to be I hush money paid her husband for pleading guilty in the I Sirica trial and so keeping the lid on Watergate. It was said I she was taking it to Chicago to buy a Holiday Inn franI chise. It now appears she was carrying much more than I that. The crash was said to have happened because United I 55.Vs pilot, Captain Wendell Whitehouse, stalled out his I equipment trying to pull up too rapidly when he suddenly I found himself closing in the fog with another liner headed I for the same run way. No conclusive evidence could be presented for this I view because both flight recorders (missing in the wreckage I for two days), though designed and mounted specifícally I to survive such crashes with data intact, failed. And I there was a confusing report from one of two conflicting I coroners, Cook County and the FAA, that Whitehouse I actually djed before the crash, suddenly, as though from I massive heart attack. And no explanation has been given I as to why Flight 553 was scheduled into Chicago's MidI way Airport, an airport described by the New York Times I as 'little used' and 'almost deserted.' The overwhelming coincidence of Mrs. Hunt's I presence disoriented the event and made it stick out. I The accidental sudden death of public people at the I most dramatic moment possible will have always a I kind of charm for a kind of collector. It rivets everyI one's attention. It seems wrong and unreal. It distresses I the collective curiosity. The accusation of sabotage is being made in earnest I if not yet in desperation by a private investigator in I Chicago, Sherman Skolnick, whom none of the mainline I media press will take seriously. 'Dwight Chapín,' SkolI nick told me in a lengthy phone interview last week, I 'is exercising his and United's heaviest kind of clout'to I make sure this story doesn't get into the media.' Chapín of course is the former White House and I Creep (Committee to Re-elect the President) official I who appeared to leave Nixon last January to take a I top executive job with United Airlines. Because he I grumbled something when he left Washington about 'blowing the whistle if he had to,' people assumed there I had been scme struggle in which Chapin had either I forced his way out or got ejected. On the contrary, the I direction of Skolnick's idea is that Chapin was one of I the Nixon Creeps more than ever when he went to I United, that he was in fact sent to United by Nixon in I order to assert Creep influence if not control over I United's potentially dangerous in-house crash investigatior Skolnick operates out of a wheelchair in a home office at 9800 South Oglesby Ave. f,0617. through a group of investigative agents evidently skillful, trusty and brave. His group's name is Citizens' Committee to Clean Up the Courts. He is its founder and permanent chairman. No doubt his credibility suffers something from the tainted character of the private investigating profession, but on the other hand he is no hotel dick and his credentials are impressive as are the some times spectacular results he gets. Ex-superlib Otto Kerner, for example, nailed last year for bribery and extortion, would not have been nailed without Skolnick's persistence against disbelief, and half the Illinois Supreme Court would not have been busted for fraud two years befo re. Beginning with the crash details and working outwards from fact to surmise to discovery, Skolnick reaches an over-all view of Watergate strikingly close to the view l've been exploring since my first McCord article in the April 3 Phoenix ('Three Versions of McCord') but which I arrived at by way of a general thesis about the structure of American political experience. Trimmings out, the thesis is that primary, traditional and contemporary conflict within our society is rooted in a struggle between two regional power centers, once South and North, later East and West, today Northeast and Southwest. Yankee and Cowboy. Cowboy structure is apparent at a distance in Nixon's southern-rim strategy linking Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles conservativf elites arouñd such basic interests as southern oil and western wheat, textiles and defense. Opposed to this is the Northeastern neo-New DeaJism of the Kennedy group based politically on an urban coaJition of working blacks and whites around a middleclass program of engineered sociaUprogress, more subtle forms of foreign intervention than the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War, and the integration of world capitalism under general American multicorporate leadership. Skolnick and Watergate Skolnick's path into the heart of Watergate through the Midway crash was indirect and even accidental, though the accident was wholly logicaJ once it happened. We piek up the thread in September 1971 when his ace man Alex Bottos and other staff members started looking quietly into a number of mysterious deaths connected with court actions pending against Northern Natural Gas Co. in Hammond, Ind., Chicago, and Omaha. This is the same Northern Natural whose lawyers Blo gett and Krueger, according to Skolnick, will bring the so-called Mitchell documents aboard United 553 two and a half years later. In brief, the Mitchell documents implícate Northern Natural's competitor El Paso Gas in a 1969 deal in which Mitchell quashed Justice Department antitrust suits in return for El Paso contributions to the Creep fund. The documents are accounted valuable tor their blackmail potential and were first flashed by Chicago Congressman Daniel Rostenkowski in 1971 in order to force Mitchell to back away from Kerner. Today Skolnick kicks himself for being the funnel through which Mitchell leaked information on Rostenkowski which discredited and silenced him and evidently forced him to hand over the documents. Skolnick says they do not show up again until two days after the Midway crash when their availability is reported on the underworld market at a price of $5 million. Skolnick thinks they have been snapped up by Nixon. With the Northern Natural investigation simmering last summer (indictments came down against company officials last Sept 8, within a few days of which fïve more government witnesses died) Bottos drew a new and apparently disconnected assignment: to infíltrate the Joseph Sarelli mob. The Sarelli mob is said to be a high-technology speciality group active for the last several years in the in-flight theft of major securities shipped by the airlines in secret compartments which they know about. Bottos was among them in time for their theft of $2.5 million in Brinks securities from a North-Central jetliner during its 20 minute flight from Chicago to Milwaukee last August 17. Bottos of course informed and the Justice Department began preparing a case around his testimony. There being no nted to surface, Bottos stayed inside the Sarelli mob. He was in it when the Midway crash occured. He did not surface until January when the mob was busted for the August robbery, about the same time that Chapin was going from Creep to United. 'In February 1973,' writes Skolnick in his mid-April letter to Hunt in prison, 'the Strike Force (i.e., Justice Department lawyers prosecuting Sarelli mobsters) found out that the same air robbery gang was involved in robbing important and sensitive documents from United flight 553 and in sabotaging the airplane to cover up the murders. The Strike Force, headquartered in Chicago and answerable only to Nixon, was perfectly willing to bring a criminal investigation against the Sarelli mob and arrest them, as long as it was limited only to the August crime. They were unwilling to allow the Sarelli prosecution to spread to the crimes commited in respect to United flight 553 because that involved the Watergate.' On February 27 the FAA opened what it called 'public' hearings on the 553 crash under Chairwoman Isabel Burgess, Board of Inquiry, US National Transportation Board. On March 1 Skolnick presented Burgess with a letter outlining his claims and requesting an opportunity to present his facts in a regular public hearing. Burgess rejected this request immediately without explanation or comment. On March 2 Skolnick filed a civil suit against her and denounced the hearings as 'a sham and a pretense.' Subsequently Skolnick was granted an appearance and did testify before the Board, though they have yet to act on his discoveries. On March 3, as Skolnick wrote to Hunt, 'Strike Force star witness, informant and confidential source Alex Bottos was spirited away by federal marshals for so-called 'mental observation' for 60 days to forever without written charges, without a trial or a hearing. The Sarelli mob has been quietly released on all charges. Bottos was released in mid-April through the intervention of the Northwest Indiana Crime Commission, a watchdog agency. He had been held 40 days at the maximum security Federal Prison Hospital in Springfield, Mo. Skolnick's Story For Skolnick the most powerful proof of the involvement of the Sarelli mob in the robbery of 553 would be the word of his agent Bottos who was then working on the inside. But besides this Skolnick marshals a range of fragmentary detail around the crash sufficient for an argument that it must have been sagotaged, and from a speculation around these fragments the role of the Sarelli mob comes into focus as a logical and reasonable possibility. 1 . We have already noted the two-day-long loss of 553's crashproof recorders in the nose and tail and their vastly improbable doublé failure. 2. The tower tape is said to show that the crash carne suddenly, no warning, which is out of key with the theory that Whitehouse was trying to avoid a collision. 3. Skolnick's sources (he evidently has informants in the FAA) teil him there was a pinprick in the altimeter, making it malfunction. 4. Unaccountably to Midway tower people, Skolnick says, the electronic landing system on 553's runway (Midway has only one ILS runway) was turned off shortly before 553's arrival. 5. Chicago pólice whom he trusts told Skolnick. that immediately after the crash the vicinity was blocked off by dozens of what the pólice called 'federal people.' The nearest federal office was 1 5 miles from the crash scène. William D. Ruckelshaus, acting Director of the FBI, admitted later iri a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board, that it was a fact that 50 FBI agents were on the scène within 45 minutes of the crash. Ruckelshaus gave no explanation for the number or proximity of the FBI's operatives. 6. When plastic burns in a crash it gives off cyanide gas ir potentially lethal doses, which toxkologists set at 1 .0 gml. The FAA report to Burgess reads: 'Civil Aeromedical Institute, Aviation Toxicology Laboratory, Oklahoma City, examined specimens from three aircraft occupants. Results were as follows (for cyanide): Capt. Whitehouse, 3.9 gml; Flight Officer Coble, none; first class passenger, none.' 7. On December 9, the day after the crash, Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising both the National Transportion Safety Board and the FAA, the two govemment agencies involved in the crash investigation. Krogh was a core member of the covert White House security force and was also involved in the break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. 8. Ten days later, December 19, Nixon's deputy assistant and White House CIA liaison, Alexander P. Butterfield, was made head of the FAA. AN INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATOR named Ann Koutso working with Skolnick from the East Coast phoned up the National Transport Safety Board in Washington last week and tried to check out the cyanide story. It seemed after all rather strange that only Captain Whitehouse among the three in the cockpit showed _ cyanide and startling that he should have shown so much. You can't get four times a lethal dose by breathing because a fourth of the way through you die and stop breathing. A 3.9 level implies ingestión or injection, and either of these implies foul play. The first bureacrat Ann talked to confessed that the cause of the crash was still undetermined, only to volunteer later that 'sabotage has been ruled out.' 'Who ever brought it up?' said Ann. 'It comes up.' 'If you don't know why the aircraft crashed, how do you know it wasn't sabotage?' 'Because it has been ruled out.' When she got to cyanide a second bureaucrat had to rescue the first. This one asked to be called 'the board.' 'Tm the board. I'll answer all your questions.' 'Why does Whitehouse show so much cyanide?' 'It's from the burning plastic.' 'Four units?' 'it was only 0.21.' 'Then you've been up-dated or l've got a faked FAA report, but I'm looking at 3.9.' The next day the board verified the 3.9 level, agreed that it was suggestive, but declined further comment because he could not speak as an expert. We need not be so dry. (If the 3.9 level is right, 553's pilot was poisoned.) SKOLNICK's cardinal claims involve the Watergate figures who died on 553. He claims now to have identified ten passengere linked some way or another to Watergate. We will stay with four principáis. 1. DOROTHY HUNT. Skolnick describes her as the Secret Creep paymaster who spoke in her sphere with the authority of Nixon, but who was disaffected from the task and her husband, to whom she was married 'only technically.' She emerges too in McCord's occasional memoranda as apparently troubled by the worsening criminality of the Nixon group. McCord shows her again saying her husband had enough on Nixon 'to blow the White House out of the water.' Besides the $10,000 cash found in her purse, Skolnick's informants say she was carrying $40,000 in new hundreds traceable to the Barker fund, plus $2 million in American Express securities made out to cash. The Government Accounting Office says Creep spent $10 million in unreported funds. If this gives some indication of the size of the secret budget, then.it makes sense to see the two million Mrs. Hunt was carrying as one of several probably scattered Creep accounts. 2 MICHELE CLARK. United says she was traveling coach while Mrs. Hunt was in the first-class cabin. But shades of Dorothy Killgalen who died on the verge of 'blowing the JFK killing wide open,' this bright CBS reporter was known to be in hot pursuit of a Watergate angle. Skolnick claims to have witnesses saying they saw her with Mrs. Hunt before and that the two boarded together. 3. & 4. RALPH BLODGETT AND JAMES KRUEGER, thetwo Northern Natural lawyers. They were among a group of nine pipeline lobbyists who somehow had come into possession of the Mitchell documents, important to their company in its court hassles as a means of blackmailing the Justice Department through Mitchell and Nixon, and they were trying to get them safely out of Washington. Anonymously tipped they would not reach Chicago alive jf they absconded with the precious papers, B ; gett and Krueger nevertheless boarded 553. To my mind I strangely, Skolnick thinks their presence with Mrs. Hunt I was a coincidence. Both the securities in the amount of $2 million and the $50,000 cash she was carrying would I I quite logically be stashed in the same super-safe place Mitchell would keep his gamiest secrets in. What if she liberated these documents and laid them on Blodgett and Krueger? Add a fïfth passenger to this list - not connected to Watergate and actually one of the 1 5 survivors: HAROLD METCALF. He is a Sarelli hit man, says Skolnick, a Mafia Ishmael whose unique contribution to the understanding of Midway is the detail that not his own but at least the following independent contracts were working in connection with United 553: a. The cyanide murder of the specific Watergate figures, mainly MrS. Hunt. This was Metcalf, freaked to discover that what had hired him to poison her had hired someone else to destroy the airplane as a whole, and thus himself. And who was therefore talkative. b. Another cyanide hit on the pilot. c. At least two acts of technical sabotage, the ' altimeter and the runway 1LS, either of which could have caused the crash by itself. d. The technically flashy theft of the securities and the Mitchell documents. Reconstmction I have been proposing that we regard McCord as an anti-Creep, anti Nixon agent of a Yankee CIA who penetrated the secret group around Nixon in order to exposé it, precisely as Skolnick says, by contriving the bust of the lot of them that night last June. ' 1 mention this (a) because besides Martha Mitchell, Skolnick is the only other person who makes this claim, and (b) because it reverberates with me that McCord talks of Mrs. Hunt so much in his incredible memoranda and without ever saying anything directly suggests that she was disaffected from her husband, Creep and Nixon altogether, increasingly so in the agitated weeks before December 8 when she knew she would have to talk to the grand jury. McCord makes it clear they shared one another's anxieties. A week before the crash they again discussed the vastness of Nixon's predicament. We can prove nothing from all this, of course; but 1 think we have sufficiently suggestive detail from Skolnick's work, from McCord's rich testimony, and from analysis of the unfolded event to support a speculation along the following line: Dorothy Hunt was making a break from Creep on December 8. The 'very high-priced lawyer' Skolnick I says she was to meet in Chicago may very well have been some associate of McCord or Fensterwald, someone on the Yankee, anti-Nixon siSe.Her arrival in Chicago could have been shot like a Berlín Wall scène at the happy end of a dangerous escape, had she landed safely. Michele Clark would have established the story with the media, supplying the kind of security through visibility that UPl's Helen Thomas supplies for Martha Mitchell and the paparrazzi for Jackie Kennedy. Blodgett and Krueger would have safely stowed the Mitchell documents. And Mrs. Hunt would have been in from the cold. She must have moved quickly when the time finally carne to take what she needed for power and to find the way out. By the time inner Creep loyalists saw what was happening - which may have been quickly; maybe this whole thing was a chase - there may have been too little time to stop her except through the Sarelli mob, which had the unique organizational and technical resources neededlo provide 100%certainty of kill on zero notice and would find $7 million an unrefusable offer.
Subjects
Freeing John Sinclair
Old News
Ann Arbor Sun
Freeing John Sinclair
Old News
Ann Arbor Sun