The Nation: E. Howard Hunt, Master Storyteller

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The agent who had planted the mike in the target office had tested the key, so the first barrier would yield. But the lock on the office door was a later model —pin and tumbler—and they would have to make its key on the spot ... "All right," Peter said curtly, "I don't want heroes, just the contents of the safe."

At first glance, this description of the espionage burglary of a government office building, contained in a yellowing 1965 paperback called On Hazardous Duty, might seem to be a rather ordinary experience in the life of Ace CIA Agent Peter Ward. As the star of a series of fictional thrillers by David St. John, Ward has had far more exciting adventures. There was the time, for instance, when he was assigned to verify the identity of the man with the scarred face who was returning from 20 years in Soviet slave labor camps to claim the throne of Spain. Or the time he went to Japan on his own and wound up in "a wild round of I Spy, featuring Koto-playing geishas, Chi-Com masters, and a beautiful Nipponese belle who's simply murder in the bath." Hazardous Duty's burglary scene is of special interest, however, to readers who know that Author David St. John is really E. Howard Hunt, the convicted Watergate conspirator.

During the past 30 years, 20 of them spent working for the CIA, Hunt has managed to write no fewer than 47 novels under a string of pen names: John Baxter, Gordon Davis and Robert Dietrich, as well as David St. John. His chief characters are Agent Ward, a younger version of Hunt himself (they both went to Brown University), and a casual, thrill-hunting Washington C.P.A., Steve Bentley, who describes the nation's capital as "a great town if you've got the stamina of a Cape buffalo and the wealth of a Punjab prince." Most of the books are predictable concoctions of espionage and sex in exotic settings. Hunt is said to earn $20,000 a year from his writing.

While in the CIA, Hunt cranked out at least one, and sometimes three books a year, drawing on his knowledge of agency operations. Each time he was obliged to submit the manuscript to his superiors for approval. "I made a conscientious effort to fudge details, blurring locations and identities so they couldn't be recognized," Hunt told TIME Correspondent David Beckwith. But occasionally his superiors would censor a scene or a theme, he recalled, "and I'd learn that some episode I thought I'd made up from whole cloth had described an actual operation—one that I'd never heard about."

Hunt's newest novel, The Berlin Ending, is about a Willy Brandt-like character—Klaus Werber, West German Foreign Minister and notorious "anti-Communist cold warrior," perhaps to be honored with the Nobel Prize and the secretary-generalship of the United Nations. The gimmick: in truth Werber is a Soviet agent.