E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, died Tuesday. He was 88.

The elder Hunt was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many pseudonymously-published spy romances.

Yet the bulk of his notoriety came from the one thing he wasn’t — a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term “Watergate conspirator.”

“I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars — Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all who had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

“According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Mr. Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign,” Hunt told CNN in February 1992. “And the idea was … that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found.”

The idea was wrong, and after the burglars were caught, the fallout escalated into huge political scandal. “It was a bungled operation, he told the New York Post in 2000. “Why? Because no one took out the guard.”

Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan. Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign.

“I felt that in true politician’s fashion, he’d assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame,” he told The Associated Press in 1992. “It wasn’t my idea to go into the Watergate.”

But Hunt was already expert in burglarizing Washington offices, having helped organize with G. Gordon Liddy the burglary of the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

Watergate was one of many wild tales — some true, some not — that followed Hunt through the final decades of his colorful life.

His alleged involvement in the purported conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy was among the most spectacular of these. He repeatedly denied being in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

In a 2004 interview with the online magazine Slate, he claimed to have masterminded the coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz as Guatemala’s president in 1954, as well as the killing of Che Guevara in 1967.

“We wanted his memory to vanish as soon as possible,” Hunt told Slate. “But it never did. Even my son goes on about Che.”

Everette Howard Hunt was born October 9, 1918, graduated from Brown University in 1940, and was commissioned as a Naval officer in Annapolis, Md. the following year.

He was already the author of several novels by the time he went to work for the CIA in 1949. The agency later screened his work and insisted he publish under pseudonyms.

Hunt declared bankruptcy in 1997, largely blaming his Watergate fines and legal fees. A $650,000 libel settlement he was awarded in 1981 stemming from an article alleging his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy was overturned, and he never received any of that money.

Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami’s Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt.

He has a memoir coming out next month titled “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond.”