United Airlines Flight 553 was a Boeing 737-222 that crashed during an aborted landing and go around while approaching Chicago Midway International Airport .
According to Spartacus-Educational
It was at 2:29 PM on Friday, December 8, 1972, during the height of the Watergate scandal that United Airlines flight 553 crashed just outside of Chicago during a landing approach.
Initial reports indicated that the plane had some sort of engine trouble when it descended from the clouds.
Miss Dubinski was working her shift at A&P on a cold, drizzly afternoon Dec. 8, 1972, when the foreman told her there had been a terrible accident and offered to drive her home immediately.
The twisted wreckage of a plane was on top of 3722 W. 70th Place, where her family’s bungalow had stood.
Dubinski’s 70-year-old mother, Veronica Cuculich, and sister, Theresa, 37, were on the porch counting change when a Boeing 737 fell from the sky, killing the two women and 43 passengers and crew.
It was a about a mile away from the landing strip and litteraly fell out of the sky and burst into flames.
But the odd thing about this crash is what happened after the plane went down.
Witnesses living in the working-class neighborhood in which the plane crashed said that moments after impact, a battalion of plainclothes operatives in unmarked cars parked on side streets pounced on the crash-site [High Treason 2 (1992, Carroll and Graf); Harrison Livingston; p426] .
These so-called ‘FBI types’ took control of the scene and immediately began sifting through the wreckage looking for something. At least one survivor recognized a “rescue worker”–clad in overalls sifting through wreckage–as an operative of the CIA [op. cit.; p428]
The National Transportation Safety Board found there was no record of mechanical failure, and at the time of the crash , the skies were clear, so weather as a cause was ruled out.
Still investigators found a purse of one of the victim’s carrying $10,000 dollars, and it belonged to Dorothy Wetzel Hunt, wife of Everette Howard Hunt Jr., better known as E. Howard Hunt.
Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Along with G. Gordon Liddy and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration “plumbers”, a team of operatives charged with identifying government sources of national security information “leaks” to outside parties.
G. Gordon Liddy, arrested during conspiracy probe.
Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the ensuing Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.
One day after the crash, the Whitehouse head of Nixon’s “plumber’s” outfit–Egil Krogh, Jr.– was made undersecretary of transportation, a position that put him in a direct position to oversee the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Agency which are both authorized by law to investigate airline crashes.
Krogh would later be convicted of complicity in the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s Psychiatrist’s office along with Hunt, Liddy and a small cast of CIA-trained and retained Cuban black-bag specialists.
About a month after Krogh’s new assignment, Nixon’s appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, was made an executive in the Chicago office of United Airlines [op. cit.; p429], where he threatened the media to steer clear of speculation about sabotage in the crash.
He was afraid of speculation of sabotage, because a few months before the crash, On 3rd July, 1972, Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Bernard L. Barker and James W. McCord were arrested while removing electronic devices from the Democratic Party campaign offices in an apartment block called Watergate.
The phone number of E. Howard Hunt was found in address books of two of the burglars.
Address Book of Watergate Burglar Bernard Barker, Discovered in a Room at the Watergate Hotel, 1972 Description Scope and content: “HH,” initials for Hunt, after confirming the number listed here was at the White House, the FBI linked the Watergate break-in to the White House during the investigation’s earliest hours. Wikicommons
Reporters were able to link the break-in to the White House. Bob Woodward, a reporter working for the Washington Post was told by a friend who was employed by the government, that senior aides of President Richard Nixon, had paid the burglars to obtain information about its political opponents.
E. Howard Hunt threatened to reveal details of who paid him to organize the Watergate break-in.
Colson was a member of the Republican Party and in 1956 he became Administration Assistant to Senator Leverett Saltonstall. In 1961 Colson became a partner in the Gadsby and Hannah Law Firm. In 1969 Colson was appointed to the White House staff as Counsel to President Richard Nixon. Colson also began involved in the activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).
On 20th March, 1971, at a meeting of CREEP it was agreed to spend $250,000 “intelligence gathering” operation against the Democratic Party. Colson and John Ehrlichman appointed E. Howard Hunt as a member of the White House Special Investigations Unit. On 15th May Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate George Wallace.
As a result Colson ordered Hunt to break into Bremer’s apartment to see if he could find any information that the Democratic Party was involved in the assassination. However, some have claimed that Hunt’s role was to remove incriminating documents from Bremer’s home.
Dorothy Hunt took part in the negotiations with Charles Colson. Which might, normally be strange for the wife of an agent, but she was once, one herself.
She became an employee for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the Second World War and was stationed in Shanghai, China, where she met her future husband, E. Howard Hunt.
After the war Dorothy worked for the CIA in Paris. She was liaison between the American Embassy and the Economic Cooperation Administration (a CIA front).
The couple returned to the United States and settled in Maryland. Her husband spent much of his time involved in covert operations in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Cuba.
According to investigator Sherman Skolnick, Hunt also had information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He argued that if “Nixon didn’t pay heavy to suppress the documents they had showing he was implicated in the planning and carrying out, by the FBI and the CIA, of the political murder of President Kennedy”
James W. McCord claimed that Dorothy told him that at a meeting with her husband’s attorney, William O. Buttmann, she revealed that Hunt had information that would “blow the White House out of the water”.
In October, 1972, Dorothy Hunt attempted to speak to Charles Colson.
He refused to talk to her but later admitted to the New York Times that she was “upset at the interruption of payments from Nixon’s associates to Watergate defendants.”
Affair.On 15th November, Colson met with Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at Camp David to discuss Howard Hunt’s blackmail threat.
Haldeman was an American political aide and businessman, best known for his service as White House Chief of Staff to President Richard Nixon and his consequent involvement in the Watergate
John N. Mitchell was also getting worried by Dorothy Hunt’s threats and he asked John Dean to use a secret White House fund to “get the Hunt situation settled down”.
Eventually it was arranged for Frederick LaRue to give Hunt about $250,000 to buy his silence.
However, on 8th December, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had a meeting with Michelle Clark, a journalist working for CBS. According to Sherman Skolnick,
Clark was working on a story on the Watergate case: “Ms Clark had lots of insight into the bugging and cover-up through her boyfriend, a CIA operative.” Also with Hunt and Clark was Chicago Congressman George Collins.
Dorothy Hunt, Michelle Clark and George Collins took the Flight 533 from Washington to Chicago.
The aircraft hit the branches of trees close to Midway Airport: “It then hit the roofs of a number of neighborhood bungalows before plowing into the home of Mrs. Veronica Kuculich at 3722 70th Place, demolishing the home and killing her and a daughter, Theresa.
The plane burst into flames killing a total of 45 persons, 43 of them on the plane, including the pilot and first and second officers. Eighteen passengers survived.” Hunt, Clark and Collins were all killed in the accident.
Just before Dorothy Hunt boarded the aircraft she purchased $250,000 in flight insurance payable to E. Howard Hunt.
In his book Undercover (1974) Hunt claims he was unaware that his wife planned to do this. In the book he also tried to explain what his wife was doing with $10,000 in her purse.
According to Hunt it was money to be invested with Hal Carlstead in “two already-built Holiday Inns in the Chicago area”.
The following month E. Howard Hunt pleaded guilty to burglary and wiretapping and eventually served 33 months in prison.
Hunt kept his silence although another member of the Watergate team, James W. McCord, wrote a letter to Judge John J. Sirica claiming that the defendants had pleaded guilty under pressure (from John Dean and John N. Mitchell) and that perjury had been committed.
The airplane crash was blamed on equipment malfunctions.
Carl Oglesby (The Yankee and Cowboy War) has pointed out that the day after the crash, White House aide Egil Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Association – the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash. A week later, Nixon’s deputy assistant Alexander P. Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA.
Several writers, including Robert J. Groden, Peter Dale Scott, Alan J. Weberman, Sherman Skolnick and Carl Oglesby, have suggested that Dorothy Hunt was murdered.
In 1974, Charles Colson, Howard Hunt’s boss at the White House, told Time Magazine: “I think they killed Dorothy Hunt.” (7/8/1974)
Barboura Morris Freed also raised several issues in her article, Flight 553: The Watergate Murder? Freed claimed that Attorney General John N. Mitchell was under investigation for corruptly helping the El Paso Natural Gas Company against its main competitor, the Northern Natural Gas Company.
Mitchell’s decision to drop anti-trust charges was worth an estimated $300 million to El Paso. Ralph Blodgett and James W. Kreuger, two attorneys working for Northern Natural Gas Company in the investigation of Mitchell, were both killed in the crash. .
Freed also claimed that just hours after the crash an anonymous call was made to the WBBM Chicago (CBS) talk show.
The caller described himself as a radio ham who had monitored ground control’s communications with 553, and he reported an exchange concerning gross control tower error or sabotage.
CBS, the employer of Michelle Clark, kept this information from the authorities investigating the accident.
One FBI agent went straight to Midway’s control tower and confiscated the tape containing information concerning the crash. The FBI did this before the NTSB could act – a unique and illegal intervention.
Freed also pointed out that FBI agents were at the scene of the crash before the Fire Department, which received a call within one minute of the crash. The FBI later claimed that 12 agents reached the scene of the crash.
Later it was revealed that there were over 50 agents searching through the wreckage.
(It was completely irregular for the FBI to get involved in investigating a crash until invited in by the National Transportation Safety Board. The FBI director justified this action because it considered the accident to have been the result of sabotage.
That raises two issues: (i) How were they able to get to the crash scene so quickly? (ii) Why did they believe Flight 553 had been a case of possible sabotage?
Freed does not answer these questions. However, it could be argued that it is possible to answer both questions with the same answer. The FBI had been told that Flight 553 was going to crash as it landed in Chicago.
According to Special for Fair Play by Lalo J. Gastriani
On December 19th–eleven days after the crash–Nixon appointed ex-CIA officer, Alexander Butterfield, as head of the FAA.
Students of Watergate will remember Butterfield as the Whitehouse official who supervised Nixon’s secret taping system and who exposed the existence of the infamous tapes that ultimately would force Nixon to resign.
Ostensibly traveling with Mrs. Hunt on flight 553 was CBS news corespondent Michelle Clark who, rumor had it, had learned from her sources that the Hunts were about to spill the proverbial beans regarding the Nixon whitehouse and its involvement in the Watergate burglary; Clark also died in the crash.
It was during this time that Dorothy Hunt was traveling around the country paying off operatives and witnesses in the Watergate operation with money her husband had extorted from Nixon via his counsel, John Dean.
Hunt had threatened Nixon and Dean with exposing the nature of all the sordid deeds he had done.
Could it be that the fuel for Hunt’s blackmail of the president had little to do with the so-called “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic headquarters?
Could it have had more to do with the fate of John F. Kennedy and of Nixon’s awareness of who was really behind the planning and deployment of his demise?
In the Watergate tapes, Nixon displays a malignant paranoia to his chief-of-staff, H. R. Haldeman, concerning E. Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs operation. He decides to use this paranoia to force the CIA to help cover up the Watergate affair:
“…just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah, he knows too damned much, if he was involved — you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate – both for the CIA and for the country…”
In his memoir, The Ends of Power (1978), Haldeman claims that all the references in the tapes to “The Bay of Pigs thing”, were coded references by Nixon:
In those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs [in the White House tapes] he [Nixon] was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination…After Kennedy was killed, the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up…The CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA…in fact, Counter Intelligence Chief James Angleton of the CIA called Bill Sullivan of the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover, who later died of a gunshot would) and rehearsed the questions and answers they would give to the Warren Commission investigators.”
In The Haldeman Diaries (1994), editor Stephen Ambrose wrote that Haldeman, in the latter years of his life, attributed the above revelations to his ghost writer, Joseph Di Mona; by 1990, Haldeman was repudiating the entire book. One must remember that from the time Nixon fired Haldeman (1973) until December 1978, the two men were not on speaking terms; it was during this time–coincident with his prison term–that Haldeman released his book.
One must remember that E. Howard Hunt is a prolific author, having written over seventy books, virtually all of them spy novels; novels that some have speculated were designed by Hunt’s superiors at the CIA to be Cold War disinformation tools. Hunt has also written screenplays, the most notable being Bimini Run.
Alibis have crumbled
One thing is for sure: Hunt has consistently changed his story about his whereabouts on that November day in 1963. We must go no further than the retrial of Hunt’s liable lawsuit against the Liberty Lobby (1985) to realize that there is much that Hunt is holding back on this matter.
In this trial, attorney and JFK assassination author Mark Lane was able to get Hunt to finally admit that he was not with his family in Washington on November 22, 1963, watching on TV, along with the rest of the world, the aftermath of the assassination.
Lane posed the question to Hunt that if he was with his family that day, than why did he have to pursue the lawsuit to square himself with his children who, Hunt contended, had to endure for years the nagging question of whether or not their father had in some way been involved in the assassination.
Dorothy and Howard Hunt Family in 1958
Hunt’s reaction to the query–a stunned, head-snapping recoil, followed by a 30-second pause, pretty much answered the question for the jury. His case was overturned [Plausible Denial (1991, Thunder’s Mouth Press); Mark Lane; p 283].
Admitted as part of the evidence was a sworn deposition of CIA operative and one-time Castro love-interest, Marita Lorenz, testimony which places Hunt–along with CIA contract agent Frank Sturgis, supermercanary Gerry Patrick Hemming and Jack Ruby–in a Dallas motel room, with Hunt doling out cash from his famous attache case ostensibly for the procurement and transportation of two carloads of firearms moved from Florida to Dallas the day before the assassination.
What did Dorothy Know?
In James Hougan’s Watergate book, Secret Agenda, amongst the cash Mrs. Hunt had in her possession, was a $100 bill with the inscription, “Good Luck FS”. FS could stand for Howard’s Watergate co-conspirator and fellow CIA affiliate – Frank Sturgis.
Also , in reports of other crash-material ascribed to Mrs. Hunt from the ill-fated flight, such as in Agenda, Hougan describes an engineer, Michael Stevens, proprietor of the Chicago-based Stevens Research Laboratories, visited in early May, 1972 by Watergate wireman James McCord who had come to place orders for ten highly-sophisticated eavesdropping devices—much more sophisticated units than the cheap, commercial-grade bugs supposedly found in the DNC the next month in June.
Stevens claims that Dorothy Hunt was traveling to see him in Chicago when her plane went down and that the $10,000 or more she possessed was intended for him as an installment for his silence.
Stevens says he told the FBI that his own life had been threatened anonymously and that Hunt’s death was a homicide.
According to Hougan, the high-performance bugs were not used at the DNC but rather in various hotel rooms setup by Hunt and McCord as combination “dens of compromise” and psychological data-gathering field laboratories; rooms in which high-priced call girls helped stage episodes with political figures that were worthy of blackmail.
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A United Airlines Boeing 737-222 similar to the aircraft involved in the accident of United Airlines Flight 553
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| Accident | |
|---|---|
| Date | December 8, 1972 |
| Summary | Stall during approach due to pilot error[1] |
| Site | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Boeing 737-222 |
| Operator | United Airlines |
| Registration | N9031U |
| Flight origin | Washington National Airport |
| Stopover | Chicago Midway Int’l Airport |
| Destination | Eppley Airfield |
| Passengers | 55 |
| Crew | 6 |
| Fatalities | 45 (including 2 on ground) |
| Injuries | 16 |
| Survivors | 18 |