*[ E. Howard Hunt & JFK ]* (continued) FD: You mentioned E. Howard Hunt earlier. I understand that you wrote an article for a Washington-based publication about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Hunt sued the publication, charging libel. Could you give us some background on this matter? Marchetti: The article was written in the summer of 1978 and published by SPOTLIGHT, a weekly newspaper that advertises itself as `The Voice of the American Populist Party.' At the time I wrote the article for SPOTLIGHT the House Select Committee on Assassinations was getting ready to hold its hearings reviewing the Kennedy and King assassinations. I had picked up some information around town that a memo had recently been uncovered in the CIA, and that the CIA was concerned about it. I believe the memo was from James Angleton, who at the time was chief of counterintelligence for Richard Helms. I forget the exact date, but this memo was something like six years old, while Helms was still in office as director. The memo said that at some point in time the CIA was going to have to deal with the fact that Hunt was in Dallas the day of the Kennedy assassination or words to that effect. There was some other information in it, such as did you know anything about it, he wasn't doing anything for me, and back and forth. I had that piece of information, along with information that the House Select Committee was going to come out with tapes that indicated there was more than one shooter during the Kennedy assassination and that the FBI, or at least certain people in the FBI, believed these tapes to be accurate and had always believed that there was more than one shooter. I was in contact with the House Select Committee, and they were probing real deeply into things and they were very suspicious of the Kennedy assassination. There were some other reporters working on the story at the time, one in particular who has a tremendous reputation, and he felt there was something to it. So we rushed into print at SPOTLIGHT with a story saying, based on everything we put together, that we had this information, and we tried to predict what was going to happen. In essence we said whats going to happen is that the committee is going to unearth some new information that there was more than one shooter and probably come up with this memo, this internal CIA memorandum, and there will be some other things. Then the CIA will conduct a limited hangout, and will admit to some error or mistake, but then sweep everything else under the rug, and in the process they may let a few people dangle in the wind like E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Jerry Hemming, and other people who have been mentioned in the past as being involved in something related to the Kennedy assassination. It was that kind of speculative piece. What happened is that about a week after my article appeared in SPOTLIGHT the Wilmington News-Journal published an article by Joe Trento. This was a longer and more far-ranging article, in which he discussed the memo too but in greater detail. A couple of weeks after that Hunt informed SPOTLIGHT that he wanted a retraction. I checked with my sources and said I don't think we should retract. I said we should do a follow-up article. Now by this time some CIA guy was caught stealing pictures in the committee, some spy, so things were really hot and heavy at the time. There was a lot of expectation that the committee was going to do something, some really good work to bring their investigation around. So I said to SPOTLIGHT let's do a follow-up piece, but the publisher chickened out and said, nah, what we'll do is tell Hunt we'll give him equal space. He can say whatever he wants to in the same amount of space. Hunt ignored the offer. A couple of months later Hunt comes to town for secret hearings with the committee, and was heard in executive session. Hunt was suing the publisher of the book `Coup D'Etat in America,' and deposed me in relation to that case, and then he brought in, he tried to slip in, this SPOTLIGHT article. I was under instructions from my lawyer not to comment. My lawyer would have me refuse to answer on the grounds of journalistic privilege, and also on the grounds of my relationship with the CIA. My lawyer had on his own gone to the CIA before I gave my deposition and asked them about this, and they said to tell me to just hide behind my injunction. I told my lawyer I don't understand it, and he told me all that the CIA said is that they hate Hunt more than they hate you and they're not going to give Hunt any help. So that's what I did, and that was the end of it. We thought. Two years after it ran Hunt finally sued SPOTLIGHT over my article. SPOTLIGHT thought it was such a joke, all things considered, that they really didn't pay any attention. I never even went to the trial. I never even submitted an affidavit. I was not deposed or anything. The Hunt people didn't even try to call me as a witness or anything. I was left out of everything. Hunt ended up winning a judgment for $650,000. Now SPOTLIGHT got worried. They appealed and the Florida Appellate Court overturned the decision on certain technical grounds, and sent it back for retrial. The retrial finally occurred earlier this year. When it came time for the retrial, which we had close to a year to prepare for, SPOTLIGHT got serious, and went out and hired themselves a good lawyer, Mark Lane, who is something of an expert on the Kennedy assassination. They got me to become involved in everything, and we ended up going down there and just beating Hunt's pants off. The jury came in, I think, within several hours with a verdict in our favor. The interesting thing was the jury said we were clearly not guilty of libel and actual malice, but they were now suspicious of Hunt and everything he invoked because we brought out a lot of stuff on Hunt. Hunt lost, and was ordered to pay our court costs in addition to everything else. He has subsequently filed an appeal and that's where its at now. It's up for appeal. I imagine it will probably be another six months to a year before we hear anything further on it. Based on everything I have seen, Hunt doesn't have a leg to stand on because the deeper he gets into this the more he runs the risk of exposing himself. We had just all kinds of material on Hunt. We had a deposition from Joe Trento saying, yes, he saw the internal CIA memo. We produced one witness in deposition, Marita Lorenz, who was Castro's lover at one point, and she said that Hunt was taking her and people like Sturgis and Jerry Hemmings and others and running guns into Dallas. Lorenz said that a couple of days before the assassination Hunt met them in Dallas and made a payoff. What they all were doing, whether it was connected to the assassination, we don't know. I think if Hunt keeps pursuing this, all that he's doing is setting the stage for more and more people to come forward and say bad things about him, and raise more evidence that he was in Dallas that day and that he must have been involved in something. If it wasn't the assassination it must have been some kind of diversionary activity or maybe it was something unrelated to the assassination and the wires just got crossed and it was a coincidence at the time. One of the key points in the mind of the jury as far as we`ve been able to tell at SPOTLIGHT is that Hunt to this day still cannot come up with an alibi for where he was the day of the assassination. Hunt comes up with the weakest, phoniest stories that he can't corroborate. Some guy who was drunk came out of a bar and waved at him. His story doesn't match with that guy's story. Hunt says he can produce his children to testify he was in Washington. None of his children appeared at the trial. It's a very, very strange thing. Hunt clearly was, in my mind, not in Washington doing what he says he was doing Nov. 22, 1963. He was certainly not at work that day at the CIA. This subject has come up before, whether he was on sick leave, an annual leave, or where the hell he was. Hunt just cannot come up with a good alibi. Hunt has gone before committees. The Rockefeller Committee, I believe he was before the Church Committee, and before the House Select Committee. Nobody will give Hunt a clean bill of health. They always weasel words. Their comment on Hunt is always some sort of a way that can be interpreted anyway that you want. You can say this indicates the committee looked into it and they feel he wasn't involved. Or you can look at it and say the committee looked into it and they have a lot of doubts about Hunt, and they're just being very careful about what they are saying. Hunt himself will not tell you what happened before these committees. He says that his testimony is classified information. Well, if the testimony vindicates Hunt and provides him with an alibi then why can't he tell us? The mystery remains. FD: Do you believe it possible that the CIA knows where Hunt was Nov. 22, 1963, but just do not want to release that information? Marchetti: That's my guess. I think that subsequently, by now, the CIA may not have known where Hunt was at the time, and they may not have even realized what he was up to until years after and years later when his name started to be commonly mentioned in connection with the assassination. I think by now the CIA probably knows where Hunt was and what he was doing or have some very strong feelings about that, and they're not too happy about it. But whatever it was, and is, that Hunt was involved in, it seems to be, or would appear, that he was in or around Dallas about the time of the assassination, involved in some kind of clandestine activity. It may have been an illegal clandestine activity, even something the CIA was unaware of. The CIA acts very strangely about this. The CIA will not give Hunt any help. He got no help at all from the CIA in the preparation of his case against us or in the presentation of his case. They just left him out there.