Dorothy Wetzel was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1920. Shortly after the end of World War II she joined the CIA and was assigned to Shanghai. This is where she met E Howard Hunt. They married and had three children.

John Dean, once a trusted advisor to Richard Nixon, called her “the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together.” Her son, St John Hunt called her an amoral and dangerous woman. Dorothy was well suited for the cloak and dagger world of the CIA.

On December 8, 1972 flight 553 from Washington to Chicago crashed on the final approach to Midway Airport. Forty three of the sixty one persons on board died as did a mother and daughter on the ground. News reports told the story of Illinois Congressman George Collins and CBS reporter Michelle Clark lost in the tragedy.

However, these luminaries were not the reason 50 FBI agents from the Chicago office were on the ground within 45 minutes, or why one agent went directly to the Midway Airport tower and left with the recordings of the tower people and the plane. Dorothy Hunt was also on flight 553. In her purse was $10,000 in hundred dollar bills. In her bags was another $40,000 for Bernard Baker plus two million more in money orders and travelers checks.

Mrs Hunt was reportedly the paymaster for the Watergate team and the money, according to James McCord, was to take care of their legal expenses. She was traveling with Michelle Clark who was working with her to see her lawyer about telling her story, implicating various high ranking people in the Nixon administration and the intelligence community.

Rumors abounded, such a E Howard Hunt asking Richard Nixon for money so as not to be implicated in the Kennedy assassination, and that Nixon had someone on the plane to make sure she did not make it to tell her tale. There are always rumors when we are not told the full story of events like this.

Someone took out a flight life insurance policy on Mrs Hunt and Howard Hunt received $250,000 from that policy to soften his loss. When he heard McCord's assertion he said, “not so!” That money was to be invested in Howard Johnson Hotels. H R Haldeman, one of Nixon's right hand men, echoed the investment story was probably true.

Being a good team player at the time, William Ruckelshaus, the acting FBI director issued a statement that they were unaware of Dorothy Hunt's presence on the plane at the time and that it was standard procedure for the FBI to look into major air crashes. This was untrue on both counts as air safety is handled by the NTSB.

The official conclusion was that the crash was the result of pilot error as the Boeing 737s had been in service for over five years without any such incident and both the pilot and first officer had many years experience. Much of the vital evidence, however, was in the hands of the FBI.

Dorothy, "An Amoral and Dangerous Woman": The Murder of E. Howard Hunt's Wife – Watergate's Darkest Secret
by St. John Hunt

Dorothy Hunt, “An Amoral and Dangerous Woman” tells the life story of ex-CIA agent Dorothy Hunt, who married Watergate mastermind and confessed contributor to the assassination of JFK. The book chronicles her rise in the intelligence field after World War II, as well as her experiences in Shanghai, Calcutta, Mexico, and Washington, DC. It reveals her war with President Nixon and asserts that she was killed by the CIA in the crash of Flight 553. Written by the only person who was privy to the behind-the-scenes details of the Hunt family during Watergate, this book sheds light on a dark secret of the scandal.