On Friday afternoon, December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt, the wife of E. Howard Hunt, boarded United Air Lines flight 553 in Washington for the weekend commuter run to Chicago. A few hours later, 553 crashed trying to land at Midway Airport. Hunt and 42 others were dead. There were 18 known survivors.

The press reported that Hunt had been carrying $10,000.00 in cash, and that she had purchased $225,000.00 in flight insurance earlier that day. But nowhere was it reported that she had also been in possession of more than two million dollars in negotiable securities stolen from The Committee to Re-elect the President.

What happened to these securities is clear but how they reached their destination is a different matter. Airport personnel and other witnesses said that dozens of FBI agents were at the crash scene almost before the plane hit the ground. It’s reasonable to assume that they recovered whatever was to be recovered. However, weeks later, the securities turned up on the black market in Chicago, being peddled by gangsters.

What happened to Dorothy Hunt, and why, is not so clear.

Throughout the fall, her husband had been threatening to “blow the lid off Watergate” if he was not granted executive clemency and handed plenty of money. Dorothy Hunt was the courier for these and other payoffs. The $10,000.00 cash she carried was earmarked for a Chicago source of arcane surveillance equipment not requisitioned from the CIA.

Dorothy Hunt was not the only interesting corpse fished out of the wreckage of 553. There was CBS newswoman Michele Clark, who was investigating Watergate. And there were a couple of lawyers for Northern Natural Gas Company of Omaha named James E. Krueger and Ralph Blodgett. These men had in their possession stock transfer lists of a Northern competitor, El Paso Natural Gas, which implicated John Mitchell in illegal activities. Northern was being prosecuted by the Mitchell Justice Department, and the lists were to be used as blackmail, since they are said to have proven Mitchell owned a piece of El Paso, through a front-man, while arranging to drop anti-trust action against the company. Mitchell was never prosecuted for this, however the Supreme Court later re-instated the charges.

I offer for your consideration the following.

Flight 553 was supposed to land at O’Hare Airport but was instead directed to Midway. The National Transportation and Safety Board, which later held hearings, was unable to determine who had caused this to happen.

Midway had only one runway capable of handling a 737, runway 13-R. Only 13-R was long enough to accomodate a 737, and it had glidescope capacity, a navigational aid for altitude. United 553 was mis-directed to runway 31-L. When circuit breakers “began popping in the cockpit” 15 minutes before landing, the crew lost the capacity to determine altitude, and the lack of glidescope at 31-L became dangerous.

In charting course for 31-L, 553 was dependent upon it’s altimeters, two separate altitude measuring and display systems for the pilot and co-pilot. In order to fool the crew, each system would have to fail in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. NTSB hearings established that this had never happened before. But it did on United flight 553.

There were other malfunctions. Because of the twin failures of the in-flight altimeters, the Midway “outer marker” was critical. This marker was a vertical electronic beam transmitted to aid aircraft in runway approaches. At Midway, the “outer marker” or Localizer, was positioned at 87th and Kedzie in Chicago.

Less than two minutes before the crash, as shown in the tape of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, the Kedzie Localizer was properly functioning. Abruptly, it went out. Immediately after the crash, it was again functioning.

Then there was the Flight Data Recorder, which kept track of aircraft parameters, such as barometric and transponder altitudes, air speed, and aircraft roll and pitch angles, and monitored instrument presentations to the crew. 15 minutes before the crash, the Recorder also failed.

Making all of this even crazier is the possibility that one of the surviving passengers was trailing Dorothy Hunt with the intention of killing her. The manifest included the name of Harold R.Metcalf, since identified as a professional assassin. Metcalf had been assigned seat B-17, near the food galley and the rear door. Metcalf was seen by eyewitnesses exiting the tail of the plane wearing a jump suit.

I am not making this up: Metcalf was identified by a former military intelligence officer who used his credentials to access the crash scene and testified before the NTSB. In fact, NTSB transcripts document each of the foregoing system failures, as well as one other bizarre fact:

When a plane crash is accompanied by fire, the burning of plastic gives off hydrogen cyanide. This substance is often found in the bodies of victims. However, in the case of United flight 553, the amount of cyanide found in the bodies of Dorothy Hunt, Captain Wendell Whitehouse (I know, I know), and Flight Officer W. O. Coble, exceeded what had been found in any other crash victim – ever: 3.9 micrograms per millimeter, sufficient to cause death by itself. These tests were conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration’s toxicology laboratory in Oklahoma City.

On the day after the crash, White House aide Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, with direct responsibility of overseeing the NTSB investigation. And ten days after that, Alexander Butterfield was named administrator of the F.A.A., the parent agency for the Bureau of Aviation Safety, which also investigated the crash.

One cockpit warning device which did not malfunction was the “stickshaker”, a function of the Air Data Computer, which monitored the health of the entire system, including air speed, engine thrust, and aerodynamic configuration. The device is meant to warn a pilot and co-pilot of impending stall.

When the “stickshaker” warning buzzer sounded, less than a minute before the crash, as is found in the CVR tape, the crew did not respond. No attempt was made to alter course or correct for a stall.

None of these things in isolation would prove very much. Taken together, they imply that there was a cause for this crash beyond the NTSB finding of “pilot error.” If 553 was sabotaged, who was the intended victim? It is of course speculative. But it is obvious that if someone wanted to kill Dorothy Hunt and harbored no qualms about what various administrations have termed “collateral damage,” this method had the great attraction of making it appear to be accidental while any inquiry would be simultaneously subject to political control. It also served to scare the bejeezus out of Howard Hunt, as well as to sever the payment of money for silence which Nixon had approved.

As I say, it’s all speculative in the sense that we don’t know what it means. However, we probably know what it was: murder. I considered leaving this section out of the Watergate series because I do not know if it is what it appears to be. And although I could guess who did it and why – and so can you – this series is not meant to involve a lot of guessing. The hard facts are generally enough, and as to Watergate itself they seem to me conclusive. I posted Part 9 because the facts I recited are all found in government documents, principally the Report and exhibits from the NTSB, the “findings” of the NTSB are not supported by its own exhibits, and a reader may want to pursue this event him/herself.

Next, Watergate, Part 10: The Matter Of Proof. This will be the last post in the series, thank God.