"From that point on I felt relevant in his life, that I was the one he could count on," said Howa... Conspiracy secret died wit

"From that point on I felt relevant in his life, that I was the one he could count on," said Howard St. John Hunt, now 52, who is called St. John.

It also was a turning point for St. John's brother and two sisters. They learned their father wasn't just a Washington advertising executive and former diplomat. He was an ex-CIA agent and veteran of the ill-fated Cuban Bay of Pigs operation who worked for the Nixon White House as part of a secret team of "plumbers" that fixed information leaks.

The unmasking of Hunt, who was convicted in 1973, sent his family into a tailspin: His first wife, Dorothy, was killed in a Chicago plane crash in 1972 while carrying $10,000 in hush money from the White House to the burglars' families; son David was sent to live with his militant Cuban godfather in Miami; St. John became a drug addict and daughters Kevan and Lisa became estranged from their father.

But before his death at age 88 in January, E. Howard Hunt had reconciled with his children and left the sons one last tantalizing story, they say. The story, which he planned to detail in a memoir, was that rogue CIA agents plotted to kill President John Kennedy in 1963 and that they approached Hunt to join the plot but he declined.

"Our life as we knew it came to an explosive end," recalls daughter Kevan Hunt Spence, 54, of Pioneer, Calif., 50 miles east of Sacramento. "Our home was lost. Our financial security was lost. Our mother was dead. Our father was in prison."

Kevan, 20 at the time, and her sister Lisa, then 23, distanced themselves from a father they blamed for their mother's death and took refuge with friends.

Kevan, instead of burning records of White House payoffs as her father had asked, hid them in her Smith College dorm room until her father's lawyer needed them to prove White House complicity to get her father a reduced sentence.

David, the youngest of Hunt's children with Dorothy--he was 8 at the time of the break-in--was effectively orphaned when Hunt went to prison in 1973. At his father's request, lifelong friend William F. Buckley Jr. spirited David from the house to get him away from Lisa and St. John.

David left his privileged life to spend three years at the crowded Miami home of his Cuban exile godfather. A Bay of Pigs veteran and anti-communist militant, Manuel Artime would take David on gun-running missions to Central America.

Hunt's daughters headed west. Kevan has practiced law in California for 25 years. Lisa, who became a fundamentalist Christian, runs an insurance company in Las Vegas.

He was convicted twice on felony drug charges in the San Francisco Bay Area but served no prison time. When he became homeless, he renounced his drug habit, renewed ties with his father and siblings and moved to this Pacific Coast timber and fishing town. He works assisting elderly patients in their homes and is a student at College of the Redwoods.

David, now 43, also abused drugs after his mother's death and the years he spent in the violent milieu of Cuban exile politics. He now sells Jacuzzis at a spa shop in Los Angeles.

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