When the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges had been constant and terrible recently: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. Long past were his years of heroic service to his country.

In the CIA, he had helped to mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose cold-war exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate hotel fiasco, of his first wife’s death, of 33 months in US prisons. But his first-born son – he named him St John; Saint, for short – was by his side now. And he still had a story or two left to share before it was all over.

They were in the living room, him in his wheelchair, watching Fox News. He had Saint wheel him into his bedroom and hoist him onto his bed. It smelt foul in there; he was incontinent; but he was beyond caring. He asked Saint to get him a diet root beer, paper and a pen.

Saint had come to Miami from California. Though clean now, he had been a meth addict for 20 years, and a source of frustration and anger to his father for much of his life. He had two convictions to his name, for drugs. The old spymaster was a convicted criminal too, but that was different. He was Everette Howard Hunt, a true American patriot, who had served his country. That the country repaid him with almost three years in jail was something he could never understand, if only because the orders that got him in such trouble came right from the top.

For years, he and Saint had hardly spoken. Then Saint came to him wanting to know if he had any information about JFK’s assassination. His father had sworn in two government investigations that he didn’t. But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sick bed, he began to write down the names of men who participated in a plot to kill the president. He had lied during those two federal investigations. He knew something after all. He told Saint about his own involvement, too. It was explosive stuff, with the potential to reconfigure the JFK-assassination-theory landscape. And then Hunt got better and went on to live for four more years.

They don’t make White House bad guys the way they used to. It seems a little nutty now, but in 1972 it was serious business. These guys meant to take the powers of the presidency and run amok. Hunt, an ex-CIA man who loved operating in the shadows and joined Nixon’s special investigations unit (aka “the Plumbers”) as a $100-a-day consultant in 1971, specialised in political sabotage. Among his first assignments: forging cables linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnam’s president. After that, he began sniffing around Ted Kennedy’s dirty laundry. But of all his subterfuges, in the end, only one mattered: the failed burglary at the Watergate hotel in Washington, DC, in spring 1972.

Hunt enlisted Cuban pals from his Bay of Pigs days to bug the Democratic National Committee HQ, which was located inside the Watergate. Also on the team were a couple of shady ex-government operators, James McCord and Frank Sturgis. The first attempt ended when the outfit’s lock picker realised he’d brought the wrong tools. The next time, Hunt was stationed in a hotel room across the way, communicating with the burglars by walkie-talkie as the team entered the office. Unfortunately, on the way into the building, they had taped open an exit door to allow their escape, and when a night watchman found it, he called the cops. The burglars were arrested on the spot. One of them had Hunt’s phone number, at the White House, no less, in his address book. Following this lead, police arrested Hunt and charged him with burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. Abandoned by his bosses at the White House, he began trying to extort money from them to help pay his mounting bills – the deal being that if the White House paid, all those arrested would plead guilty and maintain silence.

His wife, Dorothy, was staunchly loyal to him and, after his arrest, helped him with his plans to blackmail the White House. In December 1972 she boarded a flight to Chicago, carrying $10,000 in what is regarded as extorted hush money and, some say, evidence that could have got Nixon impeached. The plane crashed, killing all on board, including Dorothy. Foul play was suspected but never proved.

Two years later, impeachment imminent, Nixon resigned his presidency. And in 1973, Hunt, who had set all these events in motion, pleaded guilty and spent 33 months in prison. After his release, he moved to Miami, where he remarried, had two more children and spent 30 years living an unexceptional life, refusing to talk about Watergate, much less JFK’s assassination.

His connection to the assassination came about almost serendipitously, when in 1974 a researcher stumbled across a photo of three tramps standing in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. It was taken on November 22, 1963, the day of Kennedy’s shooting, and one of the tramps looked like Hunt. Hunt always denied any involvement. Then, earlier this year, aged 88, he died, but not before writing an autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond. Not surprisingly, those things he wrote down about JFK’s death and gave to his eldest son don’t appear in the book, at least not in any definitive way. Hunt had apparently decided to take them to the grave. But Saint still has the memo – “It has all this stuff in it,” he says, “the chain of command, names, people, places, dates. He wrote it out to me directly, in his own handwriting, starting with the initials ‘LBJ’ ” – and he’s decided it’s time that his father’s last secrets finally see some light.

At the moment, Saint doesn’t have a job; his criminal records have got in the way. “I’d have loved to have lived a normal life,” he says. “I’m happy with who I am, but all that shit that happened really spun me over.” And not only him but his siblings too – a brother, David, who has had his own problems with drugs, and two sisters, Kevan and Lisa, who still hold their father responsible for the tragedy of their mother’s death. “My parents had lots of marital problems,” Saint says, “but when it came down to it, she had his back and could hang in there with the big dogs. She was really pissed at Nixon, Liddy, all those guys, and was saying, ‘We’re not going to let them hang you out to dry. We’re gonna get them.’ So I’ve never held what happened against him.”

At times, he even seems to think of his dad with pride: “Did you hear that the character Tom Cruise plays in the Mission: Impossible movies is named after him? Instead of Everette Hunt, they named him Ethan Hunt. My dad was a really good spy.” But then he starts talking about what it was like growing up the eldest son of Hunt, and a different picture emerges. “He loved the glamorous life, cocktail parties, flirting, all that,” Saint says. “He was unfaithful to my mom, but she stayed with him. He thought of himself as a cool dude, sophisticated, intellectual. He was Mr Smooth. A man of danger. He was perfect for the CIA – he never felt guilt about anything.”

At the start of the cold war, the CIA’s mandate was simple: to contain the spread of communism by whatever means necessary. For much of the cold war, it was answerable to nobody. And if you were lucky enough to become one of its agents, you had every right to consider yourself a member of an elite corps. The middle-class son of a New York attorney, Hunt graduated from Brown University in 1940 with a bachelor’s in English, joined the navy in the second world war, served in the North Atlantic, slipped and fell, took a medical discharge, then wound up in China working in the newly formed Office of Strategic Services. When the OSS was transformed into the CIA, Hunt jumped on board. He was instrumental in planning the 1954 coup in Guatemala that overthrew the left-leaning, democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, and ushered in 40 years of military repression that cost 200,000 Guatemalans their lives. Later he said: “Deaths – what deaths?”

In the early 1950s, Hunt could be seen cruising around in a white Cadillac convertible; he loved that car. He also loved his cigars and his wine and his country clubs. He had quite an imagination, too. When he wasn’t off saving the world from reds, he spent much of his time in front of a typewriter, hacking out espionage novels, some 80 in all. He and his family lived lavishly and well, all presumably to lend credence to his cover job as a high-ranking embassy official. Sadly, he treated his children the way he and the CIA treated the rest of the world. They were supposed to bend to his will and otherwise be invisible. “He was a mean-spirited person and an extremely cruel father. I was his first-born son, and I was born with a club foot and had to have operations. I suffered from petit-mal seizures. I was dyslexic and developed a stutter. For the super-spy not to have a super-son was the ultimate disappointment.”

Later, Hunt moved the family to the last home it would occupy as a family, in Potomac, Maryland. Hunt wanted Saint to attend a top-flight prep school, St Andrew’s, and took him to a dinner there to get him enrolled. During the meal, Saint leant over to his dad and whispered: “Papa, I have to go to the bathroom.” His father glared at him. Soon Saint was banging his knees together under the table. “Sit still,” his father hissed. Saint said: “Papa, I really have to go.”

“I ended up pissing in my pants at the dinner,” Saint says. “Can you imagine how humiliating that was? Unbelievable.”

In 1970 his father retired from the CIA after being relegated to the backwaters for his role in the Bay of Pigs. The following year, his lawyer pal Chuck Colson, who was special counsel to Nixon, called him up with an invitation to join the president’s special investigations unit as a kind of dirty-tricks consultant. He signed on.

Around the time of Saint’s Miami visit in 2003 to talk to his father about JFK, other people were also trying to get things out of Hunt, including the actor Kevin Costner, who played a JFK-assassination-obsessed district attorney in the Oliver Stone film JFK. Saint believed there could be up to $5m on offer for his father telling the truth about what happened in Dallas. As Saint later discovered, Costner had already met Hunt once. That meeting didn’t go well. That meeting ended with Hunt grumbling to himself about Costner: “What a numbskull.”

But then Saint got involved, and he knew better how to handle the situation. For one thing, he knew his stepmother wanted to forget about the past. Consequently, she and her sons often found themselves in conflict with Saint. “Why can’t you go back to California and leave well enough alone?” they asked him. “How can you do this? He’s in the last years of his life.”

But Saint’s attitude was: “This has nothing to do with you. This stuff is of historical significance and needs to come out, and if you’re worried that it’ll make him out to be a liar, everyone knows he’s a liar already.” So when Saint arrived in Miami to talk to his dad, the two men spent a lot of time waiting for Laura to leave the house. And when Laura left, they talked.

Afterwards, another meeting was to be arranged with Costner, this time in Los Angeles, where the actor was thought to have had 50 assassination-related questions ready to go. (The actor declined to comment for this article.) Though the $5m figure was still floating around, Saint said Costner only wanted to pay Hunt at this point for his time. Saint recalls telephoning Costner and saying: “That’s your offer? A hundred dollars a day? That’s an insult. You’re a cheapskate.” “Nobody calls me a cheapskate,” said Costner. “What do you think I’m going to do, just hand over $5m?”

They could not agree terms for the meeting and discussions broke down, with Costner saying: “I can’t talk to you any more, Saint.” And that was the end of that. It looked like what Hunt had to say would never get out.

One evening, Saint explained how he came to suspect that his father might be involved in the Kennedy assassination. “Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I f***ing… like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head… It looks like my dad. There’s nobody that has those same facial features. Then, like an epiphany, I remember ’63, and my dad being gone, and my mom telling me he was on a business trip to Dallas. I’ve tried to convince myself it’s some kind of false memory, something I heard years later. But his alibi for that day is he was at home with his family. I was in the fifth grade. We were at recess. I was playing on the merry-go-round. We were told to go home, because the president had been killed. I remember going home but I don’t remember my dad being there. Then he has this whole thing about shopping for Chinese food with my mother that day, so they could cook a meal together.” His father testified to this in court on more than one occasion, saying he and his wife often cooked meals together.

Saint pauses. “I can tell you that’s the biggest load of crap in the f***ing world. He was always looking at things like he was writing a novel; everything had to be just so glamorous. He couldn’t even be bothered with his children. James Bond doesn’t have children. So, my dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I’m so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever.”

Not that it was all bad back then, in Potomac. Hunt played the trumpet and his son was into music too, so sometimes the pair went down to Blues Alley in Georgetown to hear jazz.

Back home, Hunt would slap Benny Goodman’s monster swing-jazz song Sing, Sing, Sing on the turntable. Sometimes he would jump to his feet, lick his lips and play the air trumpet for all he was worth. “I’d sit there in awe,” Saint says. But the best was yet to come.

It was well past midnight on June 18, 1972. Saint, 18 years old, was asleep in his basement bedroom, surrounded by his Beatles and Playboy posters, when he heard someone shouting: “You gotta wake up! You gotta wake up!” When he opened his eyes, Saint saw his father as he’d never seen him before: he was a sweaty, dishevelled mess. “I don’t need you to ask a lot of questions,” his father said. “I need you to get your clothes on and come upstairs.”

He disappeared into the darkness. Saint changed out of his pyjamas. Upstairs he found his father in the master bedroom, labouring over a green suitcase jumble-filled with microphones, walkie-talkies, cameras, tripods, cords, wires, lots of weird stuff. His father started giving him instructions. Saint went to the kitchen and returned with window cleaner, paper towels and rubber dishwashing gloves. Then the two of them began wiping fingerprints off all the junk in the suitcase. After that, they loaded everything into Hunt’s Pontiac Firebird and drove over to a lock. Hunt heaved the suitcase into the water, and it gurgled out of sight. They didn’t speak on the way home. Saint still didn’t know what was going on. All he knew was that his dad had needed his help, and he’d given it, successfully.

The next day, dressed in one of his prep-school blazers, he drove to a Riggs Bank in Georgetown and met his father inside the safety-deposit-box cage. His father turned him around, lifted his blazer and shoved about $100,000 cash down the back of his pants. The boy made it home without being followed. Then his father made him get rid of a typewriter. Saint put the typewriter in a bag and tossed it into a pond.

“Don’t ever tell anybody that you’ve done these things,” his father said later. “I could get in trouble. You could get in trouble. I’m sorry to have to put you in this position, but I really am grateful for your help.”

“Of course, Papa,” Saint said. Standing there with his father, hearing those words of praise, he was the happiest he’d ever been.

Years later, when Saint started trying to get his father to tell him what he knew about JFK, he came to believe the information would be valuable. He both needed money and thought he was owed money, for what he’d been through. Also, like many a conspiracy nut before him, he was more than a little obsessed. “After seeing that poster of the three tramps,” he says, “I read two dozen books on the JFK assassination, and the more I read, the more I was unsure about what happened. I was trying to sort out things that had touched me in a big way.”

Touched him and turned him upside down, especially the death of his mother. He had been particularly close to her, but Saint also felt he had never got to know her. She told him that during the second world war, she’d tracked Nazi money for the US Treasury Department, and Saint believes that early in her marriage to his father, she may have been in the CIA herself.

Once his father went to prison, Saint moved to Wisconsin, where he worked in a potato-processing plant and spent the rest of his time dropping acid. In 1975 he moved to the Oakland, California area, started snorting coke and for five years drove a bakery truck. He was in a band and hoped to become a rock star, though touring alongside Buddy Guy was about the biggest thing that ever happened. Then he gave up coke and took up meth and a while later started dealing meth. Twenty years flew by. He had wild sexual escapades; he shacked up with two sisters – “nymphs”, he calls them. But mainly his life, like his father’s, was a rolling series of misfortunes. He received insurance money after his mother died, and bought a house; a week later it burnt down in some drug-related fiasco.

Finally, in 2001, on the heels of two drug busts, Saint decided to go straight. With his ex-girlfriend, their daughter and her son, he stayed in a series of shelters, then took them to live in Eureka, several hours north of Oakland. He has since earned a certificate in hotel management, but jobs don’t last. And the questions about his father continue to circulate in his head.

That time in Miami, with Saint by his bed and him thinking he was six months from death, Hunt finally put pen to paper. He scribbled the initials “LBJ”, standing for Kennedy’s vice-president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ”, connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that has never been solved. Next, his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, another CIA man and a well-known, vicious black-operations specialist. Then his father connected to Morales’s name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll”.

So there it was: according to Hunt, LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon, largely because he was ambitious almost beyond words and it would enable him to rise to the presidency without having to campaign for it. Now Hunt was saying that’s the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

“By the time he handed me the paper,” Saint says, “I was in a state of shock. His whole life, to me and everyone else, he’d always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he’d have made something up about the mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn’t like Johnson. But you don’t falsely implicate your own country, for Christ’s sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that’s the last thing he’d do.”

Later that week, Hunt gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City… Then Veciana meets w/Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.”

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK’s death, knew Hunt from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint’s father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom Hunt, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate.

In the next few paragraphs, Hunt describes the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended in 1963 with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here’s what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a “big event” and asks Hunt: “Are you with us?”

Hunt asks Sturgis what he’s talking about.

Sturgis says: “Killing JFK.”

Hunt, “incredulous”, says to Sturgis: “You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?” In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis’s response is unclear, though what Hunt says to Sturgis next isn’t: he says he won’t “get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho”.

After that, the meeting ends. Hunt goes back to his “normal” life and “like the rest of the country… is stunned by JFK’s death and realises how lucky he is not to have had a direct role”.

After reading what his father had written, Saint was stunned. A few weeks later, Saint received in the mail a tape recording from his dad. Hunt’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, but he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.Soon afterwards, Laura found out what had been going on, and with the help of Hunt’s attorney put an end to it. Saint and his father were kept apart and never got a chance to finish what they’d started. Instead, Hunt set about writing his autobiography and turned his back on his son. He wrote him a letter in which he said that Saint’s life had been nothing but “meaningless, self-serving instant gratification”, that he had never amounted to anything and never would. He asked for his JFK memos back, and Saint returned them, though not before making copies.

There is no way to confirm Hunt’s allegations – all but one of the co-conspirators he named are long gone. Saint, for his part, feels his father was lucid when he made his confession and believes, if anything, his father was holding out on him, the old spy keeping a few secrets in reserve, just in case. “There were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public,” Saint says. “The question is, which one of them worked? My dad always said, ‘Thank God one of them worked.’ ”

In Eureka, Saint has been reading an advance copy of Hunt’s autobiography, American Spy. In it, his father looks at LBJ as only one possible person behind the JFK killing, and then only in the most half-hearted, couched and cloaked way. He brings up various other possibilities, too, then debunks each of them.

But of all the shadings and omissions in the book, the only one that truly upsets Saint has to do with the happiest moment in his life, that time in 1972, on the night of the Watergate burglary, when he helped his father dispose of the spy gear, then ran money for him and ditched the typewriter. The way it unfolds in the book, Saint doesn’t do anything for his dad. And it’s Hunt himself who dumps the typewriter.

“That’s a complete lie,” Saint says, almost shouting. “I’m the one who helped him that night. Me! And he’s robbing me of it. Why?”

Like so many other things, he will never know why, because on January 23, in Miami, the spymaster dies. Later in the day, Saint started reading a few of the obituaries. One starts off: “Sleazebag E Howard Hunt is finally dead.”

“Oh, God,” Saint says and goes looking for how The New York Times handled his father’s death. The obit reads: “Mr Hunt was intelligent, erudite, suave and loyal to his friends. But the record shows that he mishandled many of the tasks he received from the CIA and the White House. He was ‘totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him. . . ’ ”

“Wow,” Saint says. “I don’t know if I can read these things. That is one brutal obituary.”

But the Times is right, of course. Hunt was a danger to anybody around him, and any list of those in danger would always have to include, right at the top, his first-born son, Saint.

Are these the men who plotted to kill JFK?

The lead players in the assassination of President John F Kennedy, according to the late CIA spymaster E Howard Hunt

The successor: Lyndon B Johnson

Hunt’s theory: changes JFK hit site from Miami to Dallas

As a Texan, LBJ had the connections to lure JFK down to Dallas. As a Freemason, he secured the cover-up by packing the Warren Commission full of fellow masons (including Gerald Ford and Allen Dulles) to stand by the lone-gunman story.

The lInchpin: Cord Meyer

Hunt’s theory: sets plot in motion with David Atlee Phillips

Never linked to the assassination before, Meyer was the CIA agent in charge of the domestic propaganda programme.

The Middleman: David Atlee Phillips

Hunt’s theory: recruits William Harvey and Antonio Veciana

CIA lifer involved in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs. When Lee Harvey Oswald visited Mexico City, Phillips was in charge of the CIA station there.

The spook: William K Harvey

Hunt’s theory: dreamt of leading the CIA under LBJ

Longtime CIA honcho. Loathed JFK for not invading Cuba and for demoting him.

The recruiter: Antonio Veciana

Hunt’s theory: enlists Frank Sturgis and David Morales

A Cuban-born would-be assassin who testified before the White House that he saw his CIA contact in Dallas travelling with Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1963.

The mercenary: Frank Sturgis

Hunt’s theory: tried to recruit Hunt into the plot

A hired gun working as a go-between for the CIA and the mob. Was quoted as saying that Watergate was part of the JFK cover-up.

The hitman: David Morales

Hunt’s theory: brings in shadowy ‘French gunman’

CIA thug who first worked for Hunt in Guatemala. Tight with the mob but liked to get drunk and talk. Died mysteriously in 1978.

The French gunman: Lucien Sarti

Hunt’s theory: the second assassin on the grassy knoll

Could Hunt’s “French gunman” have been the Corsican drug trafficker Sarti? If so, he would be the most dubious name in Hunt’s scenario. Hardly anything concrete is known about him. He was killed by the police in 1972.

©2007, Rolling Stone. First published in Rolling Stone magazine. ®Distributed by Tribune Media Services

Times Recommends

• Obama: the world can expect better of America
• Gulp! Mystery killer threatens French oyster
• Secret of Northn Lights key to space safety