Spooks

The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents

Jim Hougan

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781504075268
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"Probably the most eye-opening and engrossing exposé to date of the bizarre 'power games' played by multinational corporations and tycoons." — Publishers Weekly A classic of investigative reporting, Spooks is a treasure trove of who-shot-who research on the metastasis of the US intelligence community, whose practices and personnel have engulfed the larger society. Teeming with tales of wiremen, hitmen, and mobsters; crooked politicians and corrupt cops going about their business of regime-change, union-busting, wiretapping, money laundering, and industrial espionage, read about:
• Richard Nixon's "Mission Impossible" war on Aristotle Onassis
• Not-so-deep-fake porno films starring the CIA's enemies
• The Robert Vesco heist, targeting billions in numbered Swiss accounts
• Robert Maheu and the kidnapping of billionaire Howard Hughes
• The murder-for-hire of a Columbia University professor
• Bobby Kennedy's archipelago of private intelligence agencies—Intertel and the "Five I's"
• "The Friendly Ghost" and Nixon's secret account in the offshore Castle Bank & Trust "One of the best non-fiction books of the year, a monument of fourth-level research and fact-searching." — Los Angeles Times " This book will curl your hair with its revelations and the names it names. A landmark book in its field of investigative reporting." —John Barkham Reviews "Hougan is a superb storyteller and the pages teem with unforgettable characters. Admirable." — The Washington Post "Hougan is exhilarating on the mystique of spooks." — The New York Review of Book

X

Howard’s Man

1 / A THEORY OF KIDNAPPING

I was thinking about Maheu’s early successes as he chatted on the telephone in the bar of the Georgetown Inn. Many of the cases that he’d worked in the 1950s—the Onassis affair was only one—had received extensive (but ultimately insubstantial) press coverage. Usually, the public was misled about the substance of the issues involved: ignorant of Maheu’s part (and of the CIA’s), reporters tended to accept events at face value—while the real game, of course, was played out behind the scenes. Naively, the catastrophes befalling Onassis were regarded as somehow independent of one another: always wary of conspiracy theories, reporters disdained the shipping magnate’s explanations and denials, giving credence to the most preposterous allegations (for example, Catapodis’ charges about the disappearing signature). Had the press understood Maheu’s role (or known of his employment by the CIA), it would have become obvious that the new Agency had dangerously exceeded its authority, conspiring with one group of private businessmen to ruin a rival—all the while manipulating the U.S. press and courts to achieve that end. As we’ve seen, it was Nixon and Maheu who enlisted the CIA in the scheme to ruin Onassis. And not the other way around. Years later, Maheu would become involved in a plot to destroy another man, Fidel Castro. And in the wake of that murder plot, some journalists, hoodlums, and spooks would charge that the scheme backfired, leading to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.* Investigating the Castro plot, the Senate would be disturbed in 1975 to find that “lines of authority” between the CIA and its agents were deliberately blurred—and that the scheme’s origins were therefore obscure. No one could say precisely whose idea it was, though everyone assumed that the plan originated within the Agency. As the Onassis affair demonstrated, however, the CIA is sometimes a tool of its agents, rather than vice versa. There is, therefore, a possibility that the plot to kill Castro was dreamed up by the Mafia—as represented by Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Roselli—who then prevailed upon their friend Maheu to obtain the Agency’s cooperation and assistance. Admittedly, while the Onassis caper provides a precedent for such a reversal of authority, there is yet but little evidence to support the possibility that I’ve raised (and just as little to deny it). Giancana and Roselli have been brutally murdered. Trafficante absented himself from the United States during the Senate’s investigation of the Castro assassination plot, returning only to take the Fifth in connection with the JFK hit. Maheu’s testimony, and that of the CIA officers with whom he worked, is Vague on the question of whose idea it was to knock off Castro—but then, one would hardly expect the Agency or its representatives (or, for that matter, the Senate) to willingly acknowledge that this country’s intelligence service has, at times, been a pawn of organized crime. To use the Mob is one thing; to be used by it is quite another.

The point is that we’re only beginning to understand the complex workings and significance of having a national intelligence agency. American reporters working in the early Fifties could not have easily questioned or revealed the CIA’s role in then-current events. To have done so would have placed their loyalty in question. Moreover, the CIA was then so new (only seven years old when the Jiddah Agreement was signed) that few gave it much consideration, and no reporter dared to publicly criticize it. As a result, the Agency was for decades left alone to conceal its transgressions—to the detriment of both itself and the country which it’s supposed to serve. During the same period, the Agency’s graduates (some retired, some expelled) came to play almost as large a role in business as they had in secret politics. They were, therefore, twice removed from scrutiny: few knew where they’d come from, and fewer knew what they’d come to do. And while the federal intelligence community has lately become the object of intensive scrutiny by the press, its commercial counterpart has remained almost invisible, with the result that our understanding of events in the private sector tends to be superficial when it’s not entirely misguided. If there is a lesson, it is this: merely knowing that Robert Maheu or his colleagues are involved in a transaction should cause us to examine it with the same suspicion that we might formerly have reserved for acts of war. The clandestine expertise that constitutes the stock-in-trade of every spook is, in fact, a martial art. And whether it’s applied to geopolitics or geocommerce, the means are often the same: deception, deniability, and dirty tricks.

“Where were we?” Maheu settled himself into his armchair, relighting the thin brown cigar which he’d extinguished while talking on the phone.

“I think—we were talking about Hughes. About his having been kidnapped.”

“Impossible to prove,” he said. “But the Old Man was a perfect target, isolated like that. Whoever controlled the palace guard, the Mormon Mafia, controlled him. And he knew it. He didn’t trust them, whatever anyone else may say. Howard and I knew they were manipulating him: I’d send him messages, or he’d send them to me, and they’d never be received. The Mormons were censoring our communications: they’d tell me the Old Man was ‘out’—when I knew that he’d just had a [blood] transfusion and that he was fully conscious. Eventually, we began timing our messages. We knew it took so many minutes and so many seconds for something to be delivered from here to there—and we’d give instructions for the communiqué to be delivered immediately. Sometimes it never arrived. More often, there was a delay—a few minutes here and there. We suspected that the letters were being copied by the palace guard.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward. “No one will ever prove anything about Howard Hughes. In fact, I doubt that he’ll ever be seen by anyone again—assuming he’s still alive.”

“In the press conference—”

“I know. He promised a return to public life.” Maheu laughed, reaching for his glass of wine. “It will never happen,” he said. “He should—at best—he should be in a hospital. What kind of hospital, I’m not sure. You know—this kidnapping business … It was very well planned. Peloquin and Crosby, the Intertel people, came through Las Vegas months before Mr. Hughes disappeared. They wanted to look at our security system, supposedly to compare it with the Resorts’ [International] operation in the Bahamas. What they were actually doing, of course, was casing the place. They were going to take over, and they wanted to know our weak points. And we showed them. That was a mistake. There had been indications—well, Bill Gay* was on the outs with the Old Man. Hughes hated him for having ruined his marriage with Jean Peters. (It wasn’t Bill’s fault, actually, but Hughes blamed him anyway.) And Chester Davis† had fallen from grace. He nearly cost us half-a-billion dollars. They were both on the edge of being fired—and both of them are very ambitious men. Gay wants to be an elder of the Mormon Church and Davis—you never met a more Machiavellian pair. And Nadine Henley: Hughes didn’t even know she was still working for him until I mentioned her. And he was shocked. ‘That bitch?’ he said. ‘Is she still on the payroll?’ And now look who’s running the show: Gay, Davis, and Henley. It’s incredible. It’s also incredible that Hughes would have placed himself and his affairs in the hands of an outfit owned by business rivals. But I should have seen it coming. Bill Gay approached me on several occasions, suggesting that we take over the Hughes operation from the Old Man. I have witnesses to that proposal—but I never took it very seriously. Now, of course, I wonder.”

“You think Hughes is being held against his will?”

Maheu shrugged. “What will? I doubt that he even knows he’s in the Bahamas. I suspect that he’s either unconscious or deceived. It wouldn’t be so hard. One hotel room is very like another—or can be made, to seem so. His notion of time is terribly distorted: he can lose an entire week without knowing it. It would be a simple matter to provide the Old Man with day-old copies of the Las Vegas Sun, day-old video tapes of Las Vegas television shows, and so on. I’m not saying this has happened. I doubt that anything so elaborate would be necessary. Howard Hughes could be in a hotel room on Mars, and so long as the television worked and the news came from Vegas, he’d have no reason to suspect that he was anywhere other than nine floors above the Strip. You have to realize, the Mormons controlled every input and output involving the Old Man. He never looked out the window. Time was meaningless.”

To Robert Maheu, the possibility that his former boss was kidnapped from Las Vegas in November, 1970, will always be real. The notion is a shocking one, of course—but no more shocking than revelations concerning Hughes’s physical condition, appearance, and the circumstances of his last years. A dying drug addict, he was effectively entombed from 1971 until his biological death in 1975 in a succession of heavily guarded penthouses whose windows were blacked out and shuttered against the sun. Like a corpse in an air-conditioned coffin, Hughes’s body underwent a slow deterioration, with only the hair and nails exhibiting any ordinary vitality—and they, of course, grew to Ripleyan lengths, emphasizing his grotesque emaciation. Weaving in and out of narcotic comas, he is said to have spent his waking moments picking at geometric desserts while staring through the darkness at segments of old B movies. Bemused personal aides who’ve subsequently written self-serving accounts about Hughes make it clear that the painfully constipated and malnourished Old Man was treated by his male nurses with the spiteful contempt reserved by some for the senile and incontinent.

That Hughes may have been kidnapped is a possibility that is no more improbable than the facts so far revealed about the man. Nor is Maheu alone in suggesting that possibility. An IRS memorandum written in February, 1972, by a special agent of that service states: “It is my belief that Howard Hughes died in Las Vegas in 1970 and that key officials in charge of running his empire concealed this fact at the time in order to prevent a catastrophic dissolution of his holdings.” The memo goes on to suggest that a “double” was substituted for the billionaire and “schooled in Hughes’ speech, mannerisms, and eccentricities.”* Removing Hughes to a foreign country, the memo suggests, was necessary “to obviate the possibility of a government intrusion by search warrant.”†

Maheu and some IRS agents, therefore, shared similar suspicions about Hughes’s disappearance, differing only on the question of whether or not the billionaire left Vegas in vivo. And while this disagreement would appear to have been resolved by Hughes’s autopsy in 1975—suggesting that he was indeed alive when he left Las Vegas in 1970—medical definitions of death vary. The possibility has been raised (by Maheu when he referred to Karen Quinlan) that the billionaire was kept technically alive by means of extraordinary medical measures. If we are to believe this, however, then we must disbelieve the testimony of those who guarded him during his last five years of “life”—a skepticism that is not difficult to achieve if we also believe that Hughes was taken from Las Vegas against (or in the absence of) his will.

We may wonder if such things can happen in the United States. And yet, one needn’t go far to find a precedent. In fact, Hughes’s disappearance from Las Vegas may well have given Maheu a sense of déjà vu. In 1957, while running his “Mission Impossible” agency in Washington, Maheu was hauled before a grand jury to explain what role, if any, he or his firm had played in a contract kidnapping carried out the year before. The man asking questions of Maheu was Justice Department attorney William Hundley, who, with Robert Peloquin, would one day establish Intertel. One of Maheu’s employees—John Frank, the man credited with arranging the wiretap against Onassis—was a prime suspect in the kidnapping. The victim was Jesus de Galindez, and his disappearance would change the course of Caribbean history.

2 / CONTRACT KIDNAPPING

Galindez was a Spanish Basque who’d emigrated to the Dominican Republic in the 1930s and risen to a position of influence among the country’s intelligentsia—only to find himself sickened by the dictator’s rule. Abandoning Hispaniola for Manhattan, he took with him a detailed knowledge of Dominican intrigue. As Galindez knew, the Trujillo dictatorship was one of the richest and cruelest in modem times. Its headman, Rafael, was a decadent paranoid whose sensual appetites were rivaled only by the sadistic excesses of his favorite son, Ramfis, a psychopath who relished other people’s pain. Galindez was able to document the Trujillos’ crimes, and while teaching at Columbia University, he did just that.

Throughout the winter of 1955 and into the first months of 1956, the aspiring professor worked in his Greenwich Village apartment at Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, putting the finishing touches on a dissertation* that would describe no fewer than 140 political assassinations instigated by Trujillo over the preceding twenty-five years—almost one such murder every two months for a quarter of a century. It was the most dangerous form of scholarship possible, and Galindez knew, perhaps better than anyone else, that it would place him at the top of the charts on Trujillo’s “Hit Parade.” Which it did. There was no way to keep a secret from the dictator’s agents in New York’s Dominican exile community, and it was inevitable that news of the dissertation would reach Ciudad Trujillo. A fundraiser for the Basque nationalists who was also a controlled agent of the FBI, Galindez was not without protection and friends. But he had no way of knowing, as the spring approached, how many spooks and spies and hitmen had converged to get him killed, or who they were.

Moving between Miami and New York were Beauty and the Beast: Ana Gloria Viera and “El Cojo.” Ana Gloria was a zaftig Puerto Rican whore who’d cast her lot with Trujillo, becoming his personal Mata Hari. She was beautiful, and according to all accounts, a woman of marginal sophistication and few scruples. El Cojo was a short, squat man of indeterminate nationality: it was said that he spoke Spanish with a Castilian accent, and yet he claimed American citizenship by insisting that he’d been born in Puerto Rico. The FBI knew him as a Dominican agent of Trujillo’s, compiling a thick dossier upon him under the name “Felix Hernandez Marques.” Whether that was his real name or not, no one knew: he had at least two aliases, and perhaps as many passports, for every year of his life and there could be no certainty about his origins. What was indisputable, however, was the aptness of his moniker, El Cojo, or “the Lame One.” He had a withered arm, a glass eye, a toupee, and a painful limp that invited comparisons with the movements of a crab. His voice, they say, was a ruined, menacing whisper. He and Ana Gloria had come to the United States together, bearing a twenty-thousand-dollar contract on Galindez.

Besides this pair, however, there were others with an interest in the Basque professor.* Johnny Frank, alias “John Kane” and “Jason Fort,” was one. Frank was a forty-two-year-old spook, ex-FBI and ex-CIA, who worked on contract to Maheu Associates as early as 1954. Bright and athletic, he was a tight-lipped anti-Communist who divided his leisure time between sets of tennis with other spies and reading Voltaire in French. Not that he had much leisure time. At the recommendation of the State Department, he’d served as Trujillo’s bodyguard on a trip through Europe. The two men had gotten along famously, and subsequently Frank found himself embroiled in the dictator’s affairs. A resident of Washington, employed by Maheu, he nevertheless had an office in Trujillo’s National Palace. At the same time, he found himself spending two months a year in New York, working out of Maheu’s “safe suite” at the National Republican Club in midtown Manhattan, and using Horace Schmahl’s offices in the Wall Street area. Together, Frank and Schmahl, veterans of so many secret campaigns, made quite a pair. Having served in the FBI’s New York office during World War II, Frank was superbly well-connected with the Big Apple’s police forces, and in particular with spooks at the city’s Bureau of Special Services (BOSS-y). That was Manhattan’s investigative elite, with responsibility for political surveillance, counterespionage, and the diplomatic community. A “Red Squad,” and much more, BOSS-y’s ranks included some of the best wiremen in the country, causing detectives such as Frank and Schmahl to make a point of their acquaintance.

In 1954, Frank was thought to have arranged a tap on the New York offices of Aristotle Onassis for Robert Maheu, the CIA, and the shipping magnate’s relative, Stavros Niarchos. That job had gone off well and Frank’s colleagues at Robert A. Maheu Associates credited the successful “installation” to Frank’s contacts with New York police and, in particular, to a mysterious “Mr. Small.” Since then Frank had become increasingly busy, commuting regularly among Washington, New York, Miami, and the Dominican Republic. Along with Maheu and Tom La-Venia, a onetime Secret Service man who was a partner in the former’s “Mission Impossible” agency, Frank was engaged in negotiating with Trujillo for the establishment of a school for spies in the Dominican Republic. And while that proposition would eventually come to naught, perhaps as a result of the scandal surrounding the Galindez case, Maheu Associates would be paid $81,000 by the dictator during 1956—supposedly in return for electronic security equipment (“Grey audographs,” used for bugging, and “inspectographs,” X-ray devices commonly used at airports). And there was other business too. One of Frank’s assignments in New York was to conduct an “investigation” of Galindez, supposedly to learn whether the professor was implicated in an alleged plot to assassinate “El Caudillo” or other members of the Trujillo family. Yet another assignment of Frank’s, which he used to explain his presence in New York and his frequent contacts with Manhattan police and BOSS-y staffers, was to obtain call girls willing to service Indonesia’s President Sukarno on his impending visit to the United States.

An examination of Frank’s telephone toll slips at the National Republican Club suggests that he might have been involved in still other matters during 1956. Besides calls to spooks at BOSS-y, Frank repeatedly telephoned Democratic campaign committees.* Since the Maheu firm was then working for New Hampshire publisher William Loeb, helping Nixon to a place on the GOP’s national ticket, it was thought that Frank was part of the Maheu team that destroyed the vice-presidential candidacy of Nixon rival Christian Herter, Harold Stassen’s candidate.

Cataloging all these secret operations, one can easily understand why another Maheu Associate, Raymond Taggart, found it necessary to leave the firm after two years, complaining that the work turned him into “a nervous wreck.” Frank, however, seems to have had steelier nerves and even to have enjoyed his labors behind the scenes. Outwitting men such as Onassis, impinging on U.S. elections, and dabbling in the secret affairs of foreign dictators—all of it accomplished in high style, with suites...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Sionics, Quantum & Mac
• II The Pulp Dossier
• III The Paladins
• IV “Is That You, Boinie?”
• V Assassination, Inc.
• VI The World of Bobby V.
• VII “Ich Bin Ein Costa Rican!”
• VIII Death of a Detective
• IX The Master Spook
• X Howard’s Man
• XI Intertel
• XII It Started with The Prince of Phones, Perhaps
• XIII Caviar’s Locusts
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright