American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [50]
Let’s start with a story that H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, related in his memoirs. Soon after taking office in 1969, the president called him into the Oval Office and officially asked Haldeman to get hold of any and all documents from the CIA that pertained to the Bay of Pigs. This was the first of many occasions that Nixon referred to that historical event, when the CIA sent an invasion force of Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro in April 1961. This plan had been in the works before JFK took office and, when it failed, Kennedy threatened to “scatter the CIA to the four winds.” Now that Nixon was president, why should he desire to learn everything he could about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as he put it during one of his taped Oval Office conversations. Haldeman makes the startling assertion in his book that “in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”3
Around the middle of ’69, Haldeman remembers Nixon domestic adviser John Ehrlichman dropping by to talk about Nixon’s demand for CIA records. “Those bastards in Langley are holding back something,” Ehrlichman said. “They just dig in their heels and say the President can’t have it. Period. Imagine that! The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document relating to a military operation, and the spooks say he can’t have it.... From the way they’re protecting it, it must be pure dynamite.”4 At that same time, CIA Director Richard Helms—who’d been in charge of clandestine ops when JFK was in power—was on his way over to the White House. Ehrlichman believed that “the president is going to give him [Helms] a direct order.”
But after a long private conversation between Helms and Nixon, Ehrlichman said the president instructed him “to forget all about that CIA document. In fact, I am to cease and desist from trying to obtain it.”5
That little story is a volume-getter to me. First, it makes me wonder how much stonewalling takes place at the highest levels of government by subordinates? The CIA is supposedly the president’s intelligence-gathering arm and answerable to him. What’s gone wrong with our country when his guys are now keeping information from the boss? What gives them the right to make that kind of command decision? I can understand, in certain instances, giving the boss plausible denial if you’re doing something underhanded. But by the same token, people are going to question who’s actually running the show.
During these same early months of Nixon’s presidency, the Howard Hughes empire was imploding in Las Vegas. Hughes had gotten billions in secret contracts from the CIA over the years, and let his Medical Institute serve as one of their front companies. Hughes also gave Nixon, among other politicians, plenty of under-the-table funds. At the end of 1970, suddenly Hughes disappears. His top aide, Robert Maheu, thinks the billionaire has been kidnapped. Maheu gets forced off the Hughes Tool Company board, and he stashes a bunch of documents and tapes in the safe of his pal Hank Greenspun, the editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
What might have been in those documents and tapes? One of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, later said he’d been part of a plot to steal some stuff from Greenspun’s safe. When the Senate Watergate Committee demanded that Greenspun show them those documents, the publisher got a court order to stop it. We still don’t know what they contained, but one clue emerged in a column by Jack Anderson early in 1971 that tracked right back to the “whole Bay of Pigs thing.”6
“Locked in the darkest recesses of the CIA is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro,” the article began. It went on to detail how Hughes’s man Maheu had teamed up