Robert Maheu was in a panic; he had a meeting with the President of the United States the next morning and he had no idea what he was supposed to say. Maheu had already asked his boss Howard Hughes before he traveled to Dallas what the point of the high-profile meeting was; Hughes had only replied: “I am not ready to tell you yet.” Now checked into his motel, Maheu tried once more on the phone: “I wish you would tell me what it is that you want me to discuss with him so that I could be thinking about it, at least during the night.” Hughes refused but instructed him: “Call me in the morning just before you leave, and in the meantime just sleep comfortably.” Maheu was unimpressed with being given the runaround, telling Hughes: “It is kind of difficult...to sleep comfortably when you have an appointment with the President of the United States tomorrow morning and I still don’t know what it’s all about.”
What Hughes, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, would not reveal was that he had a problem with nuclear underground testing, given the proximity of the tests to him and his Las Vegas casinos. The nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site planned for April 26, 1968 had him particularly concerned; codenamed Boxcar, it was over 80 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (1.3 megatons compared to 15 kilotons). Having failed to convince the Atomic Energy Commission to abandon or delay the test, Hughes decided to focus on influencing President Lyndon Johnson, who had recently announced his plan to leave the presidency at the end of his term. Maheu finally received the details he was seeking from Hughes the next morning; they included telling Johnson that Hughes, according to Maheu, “was prepared to give him a million dollars, after he left the office of the presidency, if he would stop the atomic testing before he left office.”
When Maheu arrived at LBJ’s ranch in Stonewall, Texas, he was greeted by Lady Bird Johnson. The President had recently fallen ill and was at the hospital, she explained, but he would return soon for their meeting. She gave Maheu a tour of the ranch before LBJ arrived at 11 am. Maheu was faced with the dilemma of how to bribe a president. He despised being placed in this predicament: “The thought of being able to bribe the president of the United States appealed to Hughes's innate need to exercise his control over everyone,” he later wrote. Maheu took an indirect route and asked LBJ how Hughes could help him in the future. Johnson mentioned that Hughes could make a small contribution to the LBJ Presidential Library, then under construction in Austin. Maheu recalled Johnson saying that “such a contribution” would make the outgoing president “very, very happy.” Whether discussing a direct bribe or not, it turned out LBJ was well aware of Hughes’ request to cease atomic weapons testing. Hughes’ letter to the President was one item, LBJ told Maheu, that would never be featured for prominent display in the Library: “Johnson felt that it was so full of inaccuracies that it would have been an embarrassment to them both,” Maheu recounted.
The letter from Hughes was the culmination of his efforts against the AEC. Running out of ideas, he considered joining with peace groups to protest nuclear testing, which he personally found distasteful: “if that is the only way we can gather support for our cause, I will go to bed with the devil himself,” he had told Maheu. Hughes’ advisers ended up catching the most glaring mistake in the first draft, when Hughes stated that Johnson had been Vice-President under Harry Truman. The four-page letter, sent the day before the scheduled test, read in part:
Based upon my personal promise that independent scientists and technicians have definite evidence, and can obtain more, demonstrating the risk and uncertainty to the health of the citizens of southern Nevada, if the megaton-plus nuclear explosion is detonated tomorrow morning, will you grant even a brief postponement of this explosion to permit my representatives to come to Washington and lay before whomever you designate the urgent, impelling reasons why we feel a 90 day postponement is needed?
[...]
I have tryed [sic] every conceivable way to avoid bothering you with this. I appeal to you only as a last resort.
The independent scientists and technicians to whom I refer are not a part of any of the groups who have historically championed the anti-bomb cause.
I am certainly no peacenik. My feelings have been well known through the years to be far to the right of center.
It is not my purpose to impede the defense program in any way, and I can positively prove that if my appeal is heeded, the nuclear test program will proceed more rapidly than at present.
It is not my wish to plead the case in this document. But, if you doubt any of my statements, please ask yourself the following questions:
1. If the AEC technicians did not consider the nuclear explosion at the Las Vegas Test Site to be of marginal safety, then why did they make a firm agreement with me eleven months ago, to move the large explosions to central Nevada or to some more remote place? And why did they, in fact, move to central Nevada and build a test site there and detonate one explosion there, and also why did they move to the Aleutian Islands and build a test site and detonate one or more explosions there, which brought objections from Russia?
It just does not seem to me that the citizens of southern Nevada should be forced to swallow something that the citizens of central Nevada would not tolerate and something that was removed from the Aleutian Islands because the Russians objected. I think Nevada has become a fully accredited state now and should no longer be treated like a barren wasteland that is only useful as a dumping place for poisonous, contaminated nuclear waste material, such as normally is carefully sealed up and dumped in the deepest part of the ocean.
2. The AEC technicians assure that there will be no harmful consequences, but I wonder where those technicians will be ten or 20 years from now.
There are some sheep lying dead in nearby Utah.
Surely the technicians in charge of that experiment were equally certain that there would be no harmful consequences. In that instance, it did not take 10 or 20 years for the effects to be felt.
Hughes was not unfamiliar with the idea of using money to influence politicians. Maheu had in fact hired Las Vegas lawyer Thomas Bell, who was in charge of dispensing Hughes’ money to congressional candidates. Hughes wanted to support winners to influence legislators from Nevada, whether they be a Republican or a Democrat. Bell would choose the amount to give the candidates, between $500 to $15,000, most often cash stuffed into envelopes. For example, an aide to a Democratic candidate for governor once left his car running, burst into the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip and grabbed $10,000 ($100,000 today) in cash and returned in a rush to his still-idling car. Bell would then monitor Nevada legislators to ensure they were following Hughes’ wishes, no matter how large or small, on topics such as dog racing, taxes, school integration, gambling debts, censorship, antipornography laws, and several other topics. The sheer volume of Hughes requests amounted to “something very near a program to control the entire state of Nevada,” wrote one biographer.
By the time Maheu met with LBJ, Boxcar had already exploded as planned at 7 am on April 26. The blast created a desert cavern over 700 feet in diameter and registered on seismographs on the eastern coast of the United States. In Las Vegas hotels, chandeliers were disturbed and the floors vibrated, but there was no perceptive damage. Hughes’ psyche was immensely impacted “I was physically very ill and emotionally reduced to a nervous wreck by the end of the week,” he explained, “and life is too short for that.” Not wanting to repeat the experience, he focused his efforts on bribing presidential candidates. First on the list was Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, then seeking the Democratic nomination for President. Hughes wrote to his team: “Why don’t we get word to him on a basis of secrecy that is really, really reliable that we will give immediately full, unlimited support for his campaign to enter the White House if he will just take this one on for us?”
In July, Maheu was staying at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Gordon Judd, a Hughes employee, handed him a briefcase containing $25,000. After they finished dinner in the suite, Maheu added another envelope, bringing the total to $50,000 ($450,000 today) in cash. Maheu informed Judd he would return soon. Judd went out to the balcony and later described seeing an unusual amount of activity outside: “There were police helicopters hovering in the area, a lot of police motorcycles in the area. It was dark out, except that those helicopters had spotlights on them and the whole scene was quite light.” Judd saw Maheu below walking to a curb. A black limousine pulled up and Maheu got in with his briefcase. The car drove for a short time southbound on the Avenue of the Stars, stopping to let Maheu out, who was no longer carrying a briefcase.
When Maheu returned to the hotel room, he said to Judd: “Mission accomplished.” The $50,000 had been delivered to the Humphrey campaign. There were several campaigns left to influence. The next day Maheu met with two other Hughes employees at the hotel and told them Hughes had approved other contributions. On a piece of hotel stationery, he wrote down three numbers: $25,000 for Robert F. Kennedy, $50,000 for Humphrey, and $50,000 for Nixon. Hughes executive Nadine Henley handed Maheu the funds for RFK the same day. She did not bother to confirm the amounts with Hughes: Maheu, in her words, “was a trusted member of our team, and I always accepted his word. I had no reason not to.”
Later in the summer, Maheu called Henley with revised amounts: an additional $100,000 for Humphrey and $100,000 for Nixon. He asked for checks to be written, saying he would start with $50,000 for Nixon first and obtain a further $50,000 later. The same day, Henley wrote out two checks payable to Robert A. Maheu Associates, totaling $150,000. Hughes was still looking to end the nuclear tests in Nevada and by handing large cash payments to both presidential candidates, he was certain he would get his way. “You just remember,” he once told Maheu, “that every man—I can buy—I, Howard Hughes, can buy any man in the world, or I can destroy him.”
Richard Danner, like Maheu a former FBI agent and now a Hughes employee, met with Nixon’s best friend and confidant Bebe Rebozo in July 1970 at the Western White House in San Clemente. When they moved on to Rebozo’s cottage in the compound, Danner handed him an unmarked envelope with bundles of $100 bills totaling $50,000. Rebozo, Danner recalled, “laid the bundles out on the bed and counted them, but he didn’t fan them or break down the amounts, he put them back in the envelope and put them in his handbag.” Nothing was written down and did not have to be; their relationship dated back decades and they had previously been involved in political fundraising together. This was the first instalment of the promised $100,000 for Nixon. After visiting a nearby golf course, they dropped in on the President, who had known Danner for 20 years. Nixon asked Danner how he liked working in Las Vegas and complained that there were “problems at the White House in getting entertainment that [was] suitable for a young audience, a mixed audience, and so on. How difficult it was to get movies that were not a little too raw.” No mention was made of money: “Rebozo had always made it clear that he didn't want any discussion with the President having to do with contributions, receiving them, or soliciting them,” Danner explained. Rebozo later took the envelope, wrote “HH” in one of its corners, and stored it in a safety deposit box in the Key Biscayne Bank, an institution which he personally owned.
Following this, in August, Danner and Maheu made the second delivery of cash to Rebozo at his home directly adjacent to Nixon’s Florida White House residence. After 5 pm, a limousine picked the pair up at their hotel and took them on a short trip to meet Rebozo. Upon their arrival, Rebozo was already standing outside and greeted them warmly. Inside, Danner handed him the $50,000, which Rebozo took to a bedroom in the back of the house; he casually reemerged as if nothing had transpired. Cheerfully, Rebezo offered them a drink. Maheu asked for a gin martini on the rocks. He watched with surprise as Rebozo pushed a lever on the fridge and ice cubes starting falling into the glass he held against the fridge door. Maheu had never seen such a contraption; however, the feature had first been introduced to market five years before.
Instead of speaking about the money delivery, the trio discussed the Reverend Billy Graham, a friend of Rebozo, who was interested in creating conservative TV programming. Rebozo wanted to know more about Hughes’ potential plan to create a fourth TV network and his failed attempt at acquiring ABC. After their drinks were finished, Rebozo drove the Hughes employees to a restaurant, where they ate “a particularly lavish meal,” as Maheu remembered. Before midnight, they had returned to their hotel room with the “mission accomplished.” They had no idea in the moment that the two deliveries of $50,000 envelopes would come back to haunt them. Another $150,000 was delivered by Hughes team to the Nixon campaign for the 1972 election.
Quantico
During his first assignment after being hired by the FBI back in 1941, Maheu already wanted to escape. Since he happened to join the Bureau during World War II, Maheu went through a reduced training program in Quantico, Virginia totaling six weeks; he felt like the least trained FBI agent in history. Maheu expected his first task would have something to do with gangsters; criminals with “Machine Gun” or “Pretty Boy” attached to their names. He looked down at the file he was handed with disappointment: a stenographer was looking to be hired by the Bureau and his job was to conduct background interviews.
His first interview was with the prospective employee’s next-door neighbor. Upon entering the man’s home, Maheu learned to his dismay that the neighbor was an FBI fanatic: he had read everything ever written about the Bureau and had been writing letters to its director J. Edgar Hoover for years. The man showed him the voluminous correspondence and began questioning Maheu on life in the FBI. After entertaining questions for an hour, Maheu finally began questioning him on the stenographer: he had moved in the week before, he explained, and did not know who she was. Making a quick exit, Maheu was followed by the man to his car, still listening to him extolling his love of the G-men of the FBI. Maheu developed a sinking feeling in his stomach once he realized he had locked himself out of his car. The man thought this was no trouble: he had read about how special agents were trained in lockpicking. Going inside to fetch a suitable tool, the man came back outside with a paperclip he was sure would do the trick. He watched with surprise as Maheu was in the process of bashing his driver’s-side window with the butt of his gun. Maheu drove away as fast as he could, leaving the man behind holding onto his paperclip in disbelief. “I’d never seen anyone so disappointed,” he later wrote.
While working for the FBI, Maheu rounded up Japanese-Americans into internment camps in the Pacific Rim. “It didn’t make sense to me then, and it makes even less sense to me now,” he admitted of the enforcement measures at the time. “Some of these people had sons fighting on our side in the war. Yet here we were, locking their families up in camps.” Maheu thought the least they could do was keep their posessions safe while they were in custody. However, in meeting with the voluntary police he once entered the home of a deputy marshal and witnessed “a whole room loaded with Shinto and Buddhist treasures that he had stolen from the poor souls he had been arresting.”
Nazi Spy Ring
After a series of successful raids on residences illegally storing guns and ammunition, Maheu was assigned to go undercover as part of a Nazi spy sting operation codenamed Cocase in New York City. He was trained to handle a spy sent to the U.S. by Germany, the French fighter ace Dieudonné Costes. The aviator had become famous fighting in the French Air Service during World War I, but with the Germans occupying Paris, Costes was forced to join a Nazi spy network. Instead of following their orders, he offered to help the United States. The U.S. could not ascertain with confidence if he was a double agent betraying Germany, or a triple agent, pretending to assist the Americans. Maheu’s job was to put him to the test and he was given a secret identity of Robert A. Marchand, a supposed black market operator.
Within minutes of checking into the Tatum Surf Club in Miami Beach under his new name, a man slapped Maheu on the back. “Bob Maheu! What the hell are you doing here?” A former classmate from his college days was excited to see Maheu and was in danger of blowing his cover. Fortunately for Maheu, none of his targets were present for the unexpected reunion.
The other spy sent from Germany was a Prussian radio transmission technician named Jean-Paul Marie Cavaillez. In the U.S. operation, Cavaillez was to be fed incorrect information about D-Day to pass on to the Germans. As an early test, Costes’ messages were dropped in Lisbon and Portugal using invisible ink with harmless information about Allied troop movements. Cavaillez needed to join the team as the D-Day invasion was fast approaching to send his radio communications, but with his wife pregnant, Cavaillez delayed his travel to the United States in anticipation of his child being born, much to the dismay of Germany and the U.S.
Using a mail drop, the Allies sent a message to Germany warning of the firebombing of Hamburg, timed to reach the Germans after the bombing had already occurred. The plan worked in that the Germans realized having Cavaillez in place to radio the communications would have supposedly given them advance warning of the attack. Cavaillez finally traveled to the United States, but he failed to contact Costes for two weeks. The U.S. thought he may have developed cold feet, but instead they found he had been taking the time to womanize each night. Since going to church was “the only time he spent away from the ladies,” according to Maheu, Costes was sent to Sunday Mass to confront him. “The party was over,” Maheu recalled. “It was time to begin work.”
Right before the D-Day invasion was scheduled to take place, the FBI sent messages using Cavaillez’s radio of an impending invasion in the south of France, as opposed to the actual invasion planned in the north on the beaches of Normandy. “The Germans bought our story...it’s known that the German high command expected the invasion to take place there,” Maheu later wrote, “and it is certain that one critical aspect of D day’s success was the fact that it took the Nazis by surprise.” This deception work was known under the codename Operation Zeppelin, was one of several misdirection operations that contributed to the overall success of the Battle of Normandy.
Spending every day living a double life for work was beginning to wear on Maheu. “I was living a lie, plain and simple, twenty-four hours a day,” he lamented. “Lying about my philosophy, my hopes, my dreams. Everything. And always worrying about slipping up. Even asleep I worried, afraid that if I shared a room, I might mumble something in the middle of the night that would give me away.” Maheu was unable to find any relief and the deception took a personal toll: “It drove me nuts. I was losing weight. My health started to go. The pressure was so bad, I literally lost my hair over it.”
As the deception operation came to a close, Maheu realized that he had grown to like Cavaillez and was consequently dismayed to receive an order to get Cavaillez drunk the night before he was to be arrested by the FBI. After several drinks, Maheu recalled, “Cavaillez started to go on about how much he liked and trusted me. He even told me that at espionage school in Hamburg he had learned a technique to test someone’s honesty. The test involved asking a series of personal and philosophical questions a number of times, varying the questions slightly each time, checking the subject’s consistency. And that I had passed with flying colors. I had never wavered, he said, smiling and slapping me on the back. If only he knew, I thought.”
After the arrest was made, the FBI had difficulty getting Cavaillez to talk. Maheu was brought in to assist, telling Cavaillez: “You and I are in a tough business. It would be easy for our positions to be reversed. The unfortunate thing, though, is that only one of us can be on the right side. I happen to think that’s the side I’m on.” To Maheu’s surprise, Cavaillez stood up, tears in his eyes. Christ, get a grip, Maheu thought, until he realized there were also tears in his eyes. The two shook hands and Cavaillez sat back down and finally talked to investigators. On September 25, 1945 Cavaillez pleaded guilty to charges of trading with the enemy and violating a government order regarding frozen German funds and was sentenced to five years in prison. In 1947, Costes was arrested in France and charged with collaborating with the Germans. He was held in pretrial detention for 19 months until his trial in 1949, where was acquitted of all charges by a military court.
Associates
After Maheu’s wife fell ill with tuberculosis, the family moved to Waterville, Maine, where he continued to work for the FBI. However, he quickly became bored on the job with a lack of stimulating work. He resigned his position and started a canned-cream business called Dairy Dream Farms, Inc. The enterprise failed miserably, accumulating debts he estimated would take him until age 70 to repay once he took a new job at the Small Business Administration.
An illegal craps game in the early 1950s changed the trajectory of Maheu’s life. Gambling at a party with ex-FBI agents, he won $800 and a $2,800 IOU from James M. McInerney, assistant attorney general of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. Maheu offered that he pay 10 cents on the dollar. “If the positions were reversed,” McInerney admitted, “I’d insist that you pay me the entire amount. You better learn right now that gambling debts are one thing that you always pay. If you can’t afford to pay, don’t play.” The next day Maheu was paid the entire $2,800 ($32,700 today) and he started a new private consulting firm designed to handle “sensitive” issues, which he called Robert A. Maheu Associates.
Since Maheu’s ex-FBI colleagues, James O’Connell and Robert Cunningham, now worked for the CIA, he was able to pick up business from the Agency immediately. They employed Maheu to be a “cut-out” for the Agency, doing work that could not be officially tied to the CIA. Maheu happened to share an office with Carmine Bellino, an ex-FBI agent who served as personal accountant and private detective for the Kennedys. The CIA asked Maheu to move offices to conduct his work in private but since he could not afford to do so, the Agency subsidized Maheu through a retainer of $500 monthly to effectuate the move. The vast array of contacts he had collected over the years were what fueled his business, Maheu admitted: “Much of my success was based on contacts within the FBI-CIA old-boy circuit, which I used for inside information in delicate or clandestine matters.” In comparison with his later CIA assignments, for his first task Maheu would take his orders from private interests and he would have to learn how to not simultaneously run afoul of the government, a sensitive operation which would bring him face-to-face with a future president.
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