Citizen Hughes

by Michael Drosnin

  The three men chatted amiably for ten or fifteen minutes, none apparently so gauche as to mention the just completed transaction. Nixon instead bemoaned the problems of finding suitable entertainment for the White House, noted how difficult it was to get movies that were not “a little too raw,” and asked Danner about the shows in Las Vegas.

  All that had happened a month ago. The second half of the Hughes payoff was now safely stashed away in Bebe Rebozo’s Key Biscayne bank, another cash-filled manila envelope with “HH” marked discreetly on one corner, clipped to the first envelope delivered back in September 1969, both now locked in safe-deposit box #224, $100,000 for the president’s personal use.

  Now, in August, Danner was desperate to make contact again. He finally reached Rebozo through the White House switchboard and relayed Hughes’s fears about the impending nerve-gas attack.

  By the time Rebozo got word to Nixon the trains were already rolling, carrying their deadly freight on a slow trip to the sea. The president was surprised by Hughes’s protest. He had no idea that his hidden benefactor was planning to move to the Bahamas, much less that he was going there to escape the bomb tests. As for the nerve gas, Nixon had decided to dump it in the ocean just to appease Howard Hughes. The original plan had been to blow it up in Nevada.

  “Howard, the ‘top man’ has asked that the following information be imparted to you,” reported Maheu with no hint of irony. “In deference to you he rejected, out of hand, the suggestion that the gas be exploded by the AEC in Nevada. The decision to dump the gas at the designated location was made because the area is restricted by virtue of Cape Kennedy activity, and continuously monitored.

  “I was also asked to tell you that you would not believe the pressures (particularly from the South and East) which they withstood in order to avoid the necessity of bringing the load to Nevada,” he continued, unfolding a tale that could have been written by O. Henry. “The man said that he truly believed he was cooperating with you to the fullest in this matter.

  “We have just received a telephone call asking if you have any alternative means for the disposition of this gas, and we are assured that if you do it will be considered very seriously.”

  Hughes was not appeased. He no longer trusted Nixon, who first took his money, then bombed him, and was now about to gas him. But the billionaire did have an alternative to suggest.

  “If the Administration can be persuaded to dump the gas at a location further away from the Bahamas than the presently selected location, I would be very grateful,” he wrote.

  “In such event, I would like to study the situation before suggesting a location.

  “My desire is to see a location selected as far as possible from the Bahamas,” he reiterated. “Preferably near the Arctic Circle, or as far North as they can possibly take it.”

  Yes, the North Pole would be excellent. No need to study the situation after all. Meanwhile, distrustful of Nixon, Hughes pressed for his covert operation, the plan that would pit the president against the calypso boy.

  Maheu wanted no part of it.

  “Since I feel Danner and I are primarily responsible for any White House intervention, it would be absolutely irresponsible for us to be identified with a caper which could end up embarrassing the White House,” he advised Hughes. “Therefore, I think it is important that the ‘tiger hunt’ designed to embarrass the President should not be identified with Danner and me.

  “Since Davis and Gay took over responsibility for the Bahamian situation a year ago,” he added, revealing some pique over his rivals’ role in the escape plans, “I am awaiting a report from them pertaining to the situation there before Danner and I can make our next move with the White House.”

  Seizing the chance to gain on Maheu, Bill Gay and Chester Davis immediately set out on the tiger hunt their rival had refused to join.

  They first went to work on a Bahamian government eager to lure Hughes and his millions down to the islands and within days had inspired the cabinet to meet in emergency session and issue a “strong protest” against the threatened nerve-gas dumping, the first formal complaint it had ever lodged against another nation.

  Meanwhile, Gay made his own move on the White House. He contacted an obscure bureaucrat in the Department of Transportation, a fellow Mormon named Robert Foster Bennett, whose father happened to be a United States senator and, like Gay himself, a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

  Gay knew that the younger Bennett also had a White House connection, Nixon’s bully boy Chuck Colson. Gay asked Bennett two questions. Could he, through Colson, block the gas dumping? And would Maheu really be able to do it through his Danner-Rebozo connection?

  Nothing could stop the nerve gas, Bennett reported back. Not him. Not Colson. Not Maheu. No one.

  While Gay made his secret move on the White House through his mysterious Mormon connection, Chester Davis was having more success with a clandestine court action.

  Working entirely behind the scenes, never letting the name Hughes surface in public, Davis had a longtime legal associate, Lola Lea, file suit in federal court to enjoin the nerve-gas pollution, ostensibly on behalf of a group of concerned citizens, the Environmental Defense Fund. He also managed to get Florida’s governor, Claude Kirk, a Republican feuding with Nixon, to join in the lawsuit.

  At first, the surreptitious legal maneuver triumphed. Just as the army finished off-loading the gas from its trains to the waiting ship, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction, ordering the gas-laden old freighter not to set sail with its deadly cargo. The victory, however, was short-lived. After further hearings the next day, the judge lifted her injunction despite “serious misgivings” about the dump site. It was not its proximity to the Bahamas that troubled the judge, but her fears that sinking the nerve gas three miles deep would subject it to water pressure so great that all of the concrete coffins would get crushed at once, releasing all of the lethal poison simultaneously. Freeing the military to dump the gas, she suggested that it be done in shallower water.

  Up in his penthouse, a distraught Hughes received the news with alarm. It was not the legal setback that most upset him but the change in depth.

  “What has me worried the most now is all this talk about selecting a location where the water will be shallower,” he wrote in an urgent scrawl.

  “I think this is dynamite, because the search for such a site could easily lead to a location even less desirable than the one presently selected,” he added, envisioning a dump practically on the beach of his intended island refuge.

  “I have no concern about the depth of the water. In fact, I think the deeper the better.”

  On Saturday night, the unstoppable Lola Lea, still posing as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, reached Chief Justice Warren Burger at his home and managed to persuade the Nixon appointee to once more block the dumping. It was only a temporary reprieve. At high noon Sunday the military won the final showdown in the court of appeals, and the gas-laden ship immediately left port on its two-day voyage to the Bahamas.

  With the collapse of his clandestine court battle, Hughes turned frantically back to Maheu and Nixon. There was no more talk of calypso-boy cartoons. The billionaire had been reduced to another desperate eleventh-hour plea. Only the president could save him now.

  Maheu confidently stepped back in, dropping code names, presenting himself to the penthouse as the only operative with the real connections.

  “Our ‘friend from Florida’ has just returned after spending the entire weekend with the ‘top man,’ ” he wrote, after making contact with Rebozo, just back from Camp David.

  “In spite of our participation in the injunction, which they very quickly identified, they are thoroughly convinced that Danner and me were not involved in that particular operation,” added Maheu, unable to resist an I-told-you-so slur on the failed Gay-Davis initiative.

  “There was much time spent considering alternate sites, but additional scientific in
puts bolstered the conviction that the proper site had been chosen. Our friend stated that the ‘top man’ presumably did not reiterate his request that you have faith and confidence in him, since that message had been delivered previously.

  “Again, however, they are prepared to give you a full scientific briefing, either in person or on the telephone, which they are convinced would satisfy all your apprehensions,” he concluded, for all his big connections able to offer only blind faith and another briefing. “Our friend stated again that the ‘top man’ had categorically refused to listen to any suggestion about disposition here in Nevada, thinking very seriously that he was cooperating with us to the fullest.”

  Hughes didn’t want a briefing, and he didn’t want to hear another word about Nixon’s good intentions. He wanted the nerve gas shipped to the North Pole. And now, on Tuesday morning, as it instead neared the Bahamas, the billionaire demanded that Maheu stop fooling with Rebozo and go see the president.

  It was too late. By the time Hughes sent Maheu on his White House mission, the deadly convoy had already reached the dump site. By the time Maheu could get to Washington, the nerve gas would be deep-sixed. But the resourceful Maheu had a plan.

  “Howard, bearing in mind that when we reach the ‘top man’ the scheduled dumping will be literally minutes away, I wonder if we should not consider the following action,” the never-say-die lieutenant wrote. “I happen to know that at San Clemente they are geared with a permanent installation of scramblers which permit the President to communicate comfortably anywhere in the world where comparable scramblers are located.

  “It is conceivable, therefore, that I should fly immediately to San Clemente so as to communicate whatever message I have within a period of an hour rather than the 5 or 6 hours it would take to go to Washington,” he suggested to Hughes, who was furiously composing a still undisclosed secret message to Nixon.

  “The decision which the Army has made, and which obviously the White House has backed 100% is being watched by the whole world to its final conclusion. It would be a lot easier for the President to explain a delay of an hour than one of six.

  “I think we should be doubly careful that we do not make one false move and that in no way do we lose the confidence of the Administration. There is no doubt, Howard, that the man’s nose was out of joint when he detected our ‘Italian hand’ in the injunction,” added Maheu, even now at the zero hour taking another shot at Chester Davis, born Caesar Simon in Rome, Italy.

  “Howard, I hope I am not being too verbose because time is of great urgency and I truly know what this particular matter means to you,” concluded Maheu, his sharp tactical analysis turning into a windy exposition as the minutes ticked away.

  While Maheu discussed tactics with Hughes, a crack team of navy frogmen opened flood valves deep in the holds of the LeBaron Russell Briggs, and the old World War II liberty ship, weighed down by tons of nerve gas, began to sink slowly into the Atlantic 150 miles from Paradise Island.

  Unaware that the gas ship had already been scuttled, Hughes finally made a command decision. No phone calls. No San Clemente. He insisted that Maheu meet personally with the president.

  “Howard, there is no problem in getting the appointment,” a glum Maheu replied in a classic good-news/bad-news memo. “Unfortunately, however, the sinking started some time ago, and they are now at the point of no return.”

  At 12:53 P.M. on Tuesday, August 18, 1970, after taking on water for four hours, the half-submerged death ship with its cargo of nerve gas suddenly took a huge gulp and disappeared beneath the waves. Within eight minutes it had hit bottom.

  So had Howard Hughes. Once more he was totally immobilized. Trapped in his penthouse. Without a refuge. Afraid to go, afraid to stay.

  While Hughes brooded about the nerve gas dumped in the Atlantic, a top-secret task force at the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to figure out how to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.

  The CIA had been grappling with the problem for a full year, the same year that Hughes had been desperately trying to make good his escape. Now, just as all of Hughes’s plans were foiled again, the CIA finally came up with a plan it was sure would work.

  It would build a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar ship, longer than two football fields, with a two-hundred-foot-tall derrick in the center that straddled a well in the hold, and towered over a hull that could open to reel out more than three miles of steel pipe and lower a giant claw that would just reach down and snatch the Soviet sub from the sea floor. Without anybody being the wiser.

  Of course, the Agency would need a good cover story. It would claim the fantastic ship was a futuristic deep-sea mining vessel designed to scoop up the oceans’ vast untapped mineral wealth.

  Now all the CIA needed was a plausible front man. It decided on Howard Hughes.

  Thus began the Glomar Explorer project, a bizarre caper that for the next five years would have the whole world believing Hughes had once more embarked on an incredible pioneering business adventure—and then, when the true mission of the Glomar became public, that Hughes was a full-time partner of the CIA.

  But not even the CIA knew that it had made a naked madman privy to its biggest national security secret.

  In any event, the most immediate victim of the Glomar deal was neither the Russians nor the CIA nor any of the great powers in the world beyond, but Howard Hughes’s own right-hand man, Robert Maheu.

  Late in August 1970, just days after the nerve-gas fiasco came to its terrible end, the CIA reached out to Hughes. It first tried to contact him directly but had no more success than Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger.

  Casting about for a suitable go-between, the Agency settled not on Maheu, its erstwhile partner in the Castro assassination plot, but instead on his rivals, Bill Gay and Chester Davis, and their new ally in Houston, Hughes Tool Company chief Raymond Holliday.

  Maheu was frozen out completely. He was now considered unreliable, a bad risk, a man who knew too much and drank too much, an embarrassment and a danger, far too close to his Castro plot cohort John Roselli and their mutual lawyer Ed Morgan, who had already leaked the story of the failed murder conspiracy to columnist Jack Anderson.

  To make contact with Hughes, the CIA turned instead to a discreet businessman, Raymond Holliday.

  Holliday held the purse-strings and he held the title of chief executive in the Hughes empire, but he had not seen his boss for fifteen years and had spoken to him by telephone only once since the billionaire arrived in Las Vegas. That was when the Mormons wanted a raise and Holliday had refused to approve it without direct word from Hughes. To reach him again with the CIA’s big secret, Holliday would first have to get past the nursemaids.

  To do that, he would need to bring in their boss, Bill Gay. And before he presented the CIA’s sensitive proposal to Hughes, he would also need a legal reading from Chester Davis. The shared secret helped forge a new alliance.

  When Holliday finally presented the Glomar project to Hughes, the recluse was more than enthusiastic.

  His empire already had strong ties to the CIA through the Hughes Aircraft Company, but Hughes himself had no contact with that operation and he had long wanted a more personal alliance with the Agency. In fact, he had been pressing Maheu for years to make just such an intimate partnership.

  Now Hughes gave Holliday his full blessing.

  “Give them my assurance that I will do my utmost to help them in their mission,” he instructed his man from Houston, “and anytime they don’t receive the cooperation they think they ought to, be in touch with me and I’ll see that they get it.”

  Hughes was impressed with the Glomar project. It had both the bizarre grandiosity and the cloak-and-dagger spirit that complemented his own self-image. And he was impressed with the men who had brought it to him.

  The new team had succeeded where Maheu had failed. Suddenly Maheu did not seem quite so well connected, quite so omnipotent. It was Holliday, Gay,
and Davis who really had the big connections that Maheu only claimed. The more Hughes considered it all, the clearer it became. Maheu had failed him as a protector, failed him as a fixer, and if the others had also failed him over the nerve gas, at least they had not balked, had not lectured him about “tiger hunts.”

  Late in August, shortly after the Glomar contact, Hughes let it drop to his Mormons that he was preparing a proxy that would give Gay, Davis, and Holliday authority over all his Nevada operations.

  The plan for Maheu’s ouster began to take shape.

  Emboldened by the apparent Hughes-Maheu split, sensing that their once impregnable rival was now vulnerable, the other powers joined forces to make their move against him.

  Gay flew to Washington to meet secretly with Robert Peloquin, president of International Intelligence, Inc., a private cloak-and-dagger firm better known as Intertel that happened to be a subsidiary of the same company that owned Paradise Island. Gay told Peloquin that Hughes wanted to retain the spy-for-hire outfit to conduct a secret audit of his Las Vegas casinos.

  Not long afterward, Peloquin flew to Los Angeles to confer with Chester Davis. The gruff lawyer took the plot a big step further. He asked the man from Intertel to draw up a detailed plan “for a change of management in Nevada.”

  Meanwhile, Raymond Holliday was feeding Hughes’s growing fears of financial ruin and suggesting that Maheu was largely to blame.

  There were indeed real problems, and Hughes himself had presented the grim picture to Maheu months earlier: “I can boil it down to one fact—three years ago there was 650 million dollars in cash in the till. Now, after three years, this year is scheduled to finish with a hundred million dollars shortage of funds which have to be borrowed.”

  Now the problems were even worse. Hughes had been hit with a final default judgment of $145 million on TWA. His disastrous helicopter enterprise was headed for a loss of $90 million. He was not yet even aware that John Meier had swindled him out of $20 million for phony mining claims. And his two-hundred-million-dollar Nevada investment had, against all odds, lost money every year.