FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE VENUS PROBE

The Venus Probe by "David St. John"  (E. Howard Hunt), 1966

The race is on.  Kennedy vowed to place an American on the moon by the end of the decade.

Now, leading scientists, specialists in a variety of fields and from various countries, have died over the past months.  But where are their bodies?  One, supposedly buried in an avalanche.  Another went deep-sea diving and never came up.  And so on and so on.  It's enough to make the CIA suspicious.  And when the CIA gets suspicious, it's time to send in Clandestine Services agent Pete Ward, David St. John's wannabe James Bond.

It helped that people wanted to stop Peter's investigation before it even started, coincidently giving Peter a starting point when an attempt was made to kill him.  Or was it?  Could the attempt have been made on another well-known scientist at whose home Peter was staying?  Could it have been an attempted kidnapping and not an attempted murder?  No matter.  Peter is off and running, first to Montmartre, where the supposed widow of one of the scientists had a strip act in a local club.  The trail leads Pete to the foot of the Andes, then to the Alps, and finally to the middle of the Pacific Ocean where the Russians have constructed a huge underwater city housing the missing scientists.

Going by the specialties of the scientists alone, Peter and his boss (whom Hunt based on his friend, Richard Helms) figured the Russians kidnapped the men to help them with a secret project to put a man on the moon.  But it was not so.  The Russians were planning to send men on a one-way trip to Venus because the international publicity and prestige would be so much greater.  When I say they panned to send men to Venus, I meant they were planning to send the six scientists (there were seven, but one of them died) to out sister planet.  I haven't bothered to check what state the scientific knowledge of Venus was in 1966, but knowing what we know about Venus today, it was a pretty dumb plan.

Anyway, lots of bodies throughout the book, and lot of beautiful women anxious to bed Peter (he succumbs only once and tried to be virtuous the rest of the tine), and many narrow escapes from death for our stalwart hero.  At least Peter needed time to recover from his various injuries, which was convenient because that pushed to climax of the book to just before the scheduled launch to Venus.  And yes, there were explosions.

It all sounds so silly to put it on paper, but the book was a pretty good read in a "willingness to suspend one's disbelief" sort of way.  Hunt (1918-2007) did spend too much time, I thought, in going through the intricacies of the spy-guy business, but I'm willing to forgive that because that was Hunt's primary business for more than two decades.  I was bothered by the continuous footnotes explaining what various initials and acronyms for different spy and government agencies were.  There were some aspects of the CIA culture displayed that were just not believable, but they made for some decent background.  And Peter Ward himself was even more over the top than 007, with his love and knowledge of fine food, wine, tobacco, and creature comforts. but he was also presented as a widower who appears to be devoted to his sister and her children while trying to keep his spy-guy job a secret from his brother-in-law.

This is one of those books where you go along for the ride, ignore the inconsistencies, and pass an enjoyable evening lost in the make-believe world lethal and dumb Russians and noble and brave heroes.

Peter Ward appeared in nine paperback originals under the St. John pseudonym.  (Where did Hunt get the "St. John" pseudonym,? I hear you not asking.  Hunt's two sons were named Howard St. John Hunt and David Hunt.  I have no idea where Hunt got his other pseudonyms -- "P. S. Donoghue," "Robert Dietrich," "Gordon Davis," and "John Baxter."  Hunt published 73 books in his lifetime; a final boom under his name -- a memoir  -- was entirely ghost-written when Hunt became too ill to work on the book.  Hunt's early books received acclaim and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946.  In 1949 Hunt joined the CIA, specializing in covert actions; over the years, he was involved in various CIA plots and was one of the architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion and served as one of the White House "plumbers" in the Watergate affair.  Most of his writing after joining the CIA was in the thriller and spy genres.  A supposed deathbed confession to his two sons implicated Lyndon Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Atlee Phllips, Frank Sturgis, and others in the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Hunt was known to be in Dallas on that day.

Despite writing dozens of books in the broad genre of the mystery novel, Hunt was never a member of the Mystery Writers of America.  (I asked back in the Watergate days.)

The "Cigarette-Smoking Man" from the X-Files television series was based partly on Hunt. 

Hunt was good friends with William F. Buckley, who Hunt had hired for the CIA.  Buckley was godfather to three of Hunt's children.  H refused to write an introduction to Hunt's ghost-written memoir because of hints that LBJ was involved with the Kennedy assassination; Buckley relented after a revised manuscript came through "with all the loony grassy-knoll bits chiseled out."