Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [39]
Lipset put it this way: “I’m in it for the money.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Man Is Gone
Hal Lipset began as a small-time private eye, presiding over a tiny firm operated out of his house in San Francisco, and his outfit was a far cry from those of his predecessors at Pinkerton and elsewhere. Later in the twentieth century, corporate sleuths would once again build much more elaborate intelligence empires—some would become intertwined with United States government intelligence, offer their services to the nation in times of crisis, work the opposite side of the street for foreign governments, ride the ragged edge of morality, and grow extraordinarily wealthy.
The first claimant to the Pinkerton legacy was International Intelligence, which was often referred to as Intertel and was known as the “private CIA” of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Intertel terrified the Nixon administration, which worried that it was being used by the Kennedys to help elect Teddy Kennedy as president. In just a few years after it was founded by veterans of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, Intertel had extended its reach into the worlds of Hughes, the Kennedys, Richard Nixon’s incompetent plumbers, vicious Mafia figures, and the elusive CIA. As a result, its history has become something of a touchstone for conspiracy theorists, many of whom have concocted elaborate fantasies about Intertel and the dastardly deeds of elites controlling the world. Much of that is no more than fantasy, or fiction. But Intertel did exist, and for about a decade it was involved in some of the country’s most secret episodes.
Howard Hughes was an oilman, a Hollywood bon vivant, and an aviator. He lived in Texas, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean, among other locales around the world. But today, his last remaining secrets can be found in an unlikely place: the small town of Fairfield, Pennsylvania, amid the rural countryside just north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here, alongside 400 acres of soybeans, sit a small brown farmhouse, two silos, and a barn. Intertel’s founder, Robert Dolan Peloquin, and his wife, Peggy, live here.
Peloquin, who is nearly eighty, is an imposing man: tall, with a firm handshake, swept-back white hair, a welcoming manner, and a deep voice edged with a southern Massachusetts accent. He relishes telling stories about the old days. Peloquin was once an intelligence officer at the National Security Agency and a Mafia hunter at the Department of Justice. In later years, there were Christmas-morning requests from Howard Hughes, sudden trips to Switzerland to track down a con artist, and jaunts to the Caribbean to play Twenty Questions with Merv Griffin. (Griffin, a famous entertainment executive and talk show host, kept the topics focused on Hollywood, and so usually won the games.) Robert Peloquin was one of the world’s greatest corporate spies.
He began his career, like so many other corporate spies, in the military. After graduating from Georgetown University at the beginning of the Korean War, Peloquin entered the navy. He figured it would be easier duty than slogging through the mud in the army. But after midshipman school at Newport, Rhode Island, he was assigned to Norfolk, Virginia, and a navy unit called the beach masters—an amphibious force designed to take charge of beachheads during the first wave of any invasion, making sure that the troops and matériel got forward as fast as possible. Peloquin didn’t like what he saw of the beach masters. This was a first-wave invasion force training to go to war in Korea. Its commanding officer, whose name was Peterson, had been a hero in World War II—wounded seven times in action.