The Death of Dorothy Hunt: Probing the Assassination of JFK, Part 2

Chicago legal reporter Sherman Skolnik received a telephone call urging him to look into the crash. He found that 150 federal personnel converged on the accident site and prevented anyone else from getting to the wreckage. An ambulance driver was outraged that rescuers were held back. On June 13, 1973 John Reed, chairman of the NTSB, told the House Government Activities Subcommittee that about 150 federal personnel were at the scene after the crash. Reed added that he complained to the FBI that they had kept rescue personnel away. There were fifty FBI agents there, and one went into the Midway Tower and seized the tape relating to Flight 553. Up to that time, the mainline press supported federal claims that Skolnich had lied about all the federal personnel being there. Skolnick marveled that many of the feds arrived at the scene before the Chicago firemen and police. A Chicago Congressman learned they were surveiling the plane because of claimed “air piracy.” Skolnich learned from other sources that the DIA and CIA had been ordered to arrest Dorothy Hunt. The day after the crash, the airplane fuselage was buried in a Chicago dump. So much for a careful study of the crash .

Activist Dick Gregory later told Skolnich there had been several efforts to get him onto that flight. Eventually someone slipped him a copy of the 1300 page NTSB document on the crash. Skolnich concluded that the plane had been sabotaged. On June 13 and 14, 1973, the NTSB heard his testimony and that of his eight witnesses. His case was that tower instruments monitoring the plane’s approach were turned off just before the approach and turned back on just after it got on the wrong runway. He thought the evidence suggested that the plane’s electronic buss bar was set to short out, thus disabling key instruments. The NTSB said crew errors caused the accident.

Skolnich was told that a government assassin using the name Harold R. Metcalf sat in seat B 17 and was seen exiting the crash. The NTSB report showed that he told the pilot he was a narcotics agent carrying a gun. One of Skolnich’s people later talked to Metcalf and Skolnick concluded that Metcalf was supposed to be a “double cut-out,” he was to make sure Mrs. Hunt was dead and then someone was supposed to kill him. Metcalf survived.


Later Skolnick interviewed Chuck Colson, who told him that Mrs. Hunt “was murdered by the FBI and the CIA." Colson added that he had already said too much. Colson also told Time, “I think they killed Dorothy. Hunt.” .Writers who agree are Robert J. Groden, Peter Dale Scott, Alan J. Weberman and Carl Oglesby.

Skolnick and some others have assumed that E. Howard Hunt was also in a position to reveal a great deal about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon was heard to complain a few times that Hunt’s demands for hush money on Watergate was likely to expose "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," H.R. Haldeman , Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote that this was a somewhat veiled reference to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some investigators believe the DNC had a reel of film showing Oswald with some CIA operative, but this writer has not been able to find much evidence for this other than a Los Angeles Times story. Frank Sturgis, told the San Francisco Chronicle (May 7, 1977) that "the reason we burglarized the Watergate was because Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."