E52 E. Howard Hunt, Novelist

CIA agent Everette Howard Hunt, Jr is notorious for involvement in the 1954 Guatemalan coup, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the break-in at the Watergate hotel. But not many people know about most heinous crime: his decades-long side hustle as a hack writer. In this episode, we try to stomach his paranoid 1972 thriller "The Coven," in which a straight-laced attorney uncovers that Black Panthers are colluding with liberal elites in occult ceremonies in the shadows of Washington, DC. We explore what this book says about Hunt's personal anxieties, why his boss Richard Nixon thought the world could be divided into "Orthogonians" and "Franklins," and what the famed G-Man may or may not have been doing in Dallas on November 22, 1963 Hosted by Liam, Russian Sam, and Abram.