TRIALS: The Spy in the Cold

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Hunt, a remarkable storyteller (who has written some 46 novels as well as an account of the Bay of Pigs fiasco called Give Us This Day), decided to talk because "I've been taking a real beating in the press. I've been portrayed as an irresponsible adventurer, a desperado. And bring a photographer. The pictures of me at the trial have made me look like a buffoon." For legal reasons, he refused to say much about the Watergate trial, but he reminisced freely about other adventures.

"Let me tell you a story," Hunt declared. "The last wartime operation I was involved in was an air resupply operation in central China. We had a five-man guerrilla team that hadn't been resupplied for months, so we went parachuting supplies out of a C-47 to them in a rice paddy. I went along as a cargo kicker, holding onto the chute wire and pushing the stuff out in a hurry from about 600 feet. Two of us were hit in the face by flak on the way back, and one later got caught by the Japs and skinned alive, but the point is this:

A team out on an unorthodox mission expects resupply, it expects concern and attention. The team should never get the feeling they're abandoned. End of story."

Hunt makes no effort to hide his own sense of abandonment. "Nobody has invited me anywhere for six months," he says. "My family has been harassed, my kids are teased and taunted at school. Most of my old CIA friends, people I worked with for years and thought I was close to, have cut me off.

I had lunch last week with my daughter at a club in Georgetown and saw a CIA officer who worked for me in Japan. He looked right through me."

Secure. Speaking of the death of his wife in a Chicago plane crash last month, Hunt insists that the mysterious $10,000 she was carrying in $100 bills was to have been invested "in a new business enterprise out there, a concern that might have provided me with a job after I got out of jail." Turning a bit maudlin, he remarks: "I've often wished that it had been me on the plane in stead of my wife. The Watergate would have been over for me. My family would have been financially secure. And the four children would have a mother instead of a father wasting away in jail."

At another point, as he spoke of trying to explain his situation to his nine-year-old son, he wept. Still later he referred to himself as "a fish at the end of a line; I'm struggling hard, but it looks like a pretty strong line."

Hunt joined the CIA in 1950 after having served in the Navy and the OSS during World War II, worked as a LIFE correspondent in the South Pacific, won a Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing and sold a movie script (Bimini Run) to Warner Bros, for $35,000. He is proud of his 20 years in the CIA, though he feels "the agency" has treated him badly of late. "When they identified me as a former CIA officer right after the Watergate arrests," he says, "they abrogated our agreement of confidentiality."