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By Root 1302 0

Mafia. Maheu, eager to curry favor with his most lucrative client, stepped out into the street and called Hughes back on a pay phone, saying that he couldn’t come to work that day because he was in Miami working on a secret CIA plot to kill Castro. Hughes, though, wouldn’t be put off, and talked Maheu into flying to Los Angeles to work on his project for a day or two. Hughes was impressed by Maheu’s involvement in the scheme—unsuccessful though it was—and spent much of the next decade figuring out how to use Maheu’s CIA relationship to his own advantage. Hughes, too, was connected to the CIA, and many of his companies served as fronts for CIA operations over the years.

But by 1970, Hughes’s relationship with Maheu had begun to crumble. Hughes’s paranoia and his increasing insanity had something to do with this, but Maheu and Hughes also had disagreements over important issues. For one thing, Hughes wanted to intertwine his operations ever more deeply with the CIA, and Maheu resisted the idea. In 1975, in top-secret testimony before a Senate committee investigating wrongdoing by the CIA, Maheu told investigators of Hughes’s plan.

“From time to time during conversations with Mr. Hughes, he would beg of me to try to help him set up a huge, the way he described it, a huge covert operation involving one of his companies,” Maheu said.

“Why,” asked a Senate investigator, “did he want you to set up a large covert operation under one of his companies?”

“His answer to the very same question when I put it to him,” replied Maheu, “was that he wanted to be put in a position that if he ever became involved in any serious problem with the U.S. government, that they could not afford to prosecute him.”

Maheu said he “categorically refused” to help Hughes set up the plan.

In 1968, Maheu said, Hughes asked him for help with an even more ruthless plot: to extend the Vietnam War. Two years earlier Hughes had begun selling a light observation helicopter, the OH-6A Cayuse, for which the army placed an initial order of 1,468 units.5 It was a lucrative project, and Hughes was afraid the Vietnam War might wind down before he could make up some earlier financial losses. Peace would be bad for business.

“He was fearful that the Vietnam War would come to an end,” Maheu told the Senate investigators, “and asked me if I would help him to conceive some plan whereby the Vietnam War would be extended.”

Maheu added, “And I frankly told him to go to hell.”6

It’s possible, of course, that Maheu’s description of Hughes’s machinations is the self-serving account of a fired contractor; but whatever the truth, it was clear that Maheu and Hughes were growing apart.

It was bad timing for a rift. Hughes’s insanity made him vulnerable to a palace coup, as Maheu later told the journalist Jim Hougan. “The old man was a perfect target, isolated like that,” Maheu said. “Whoever controlled the palace guard, the Mormon mafia [most of the half dozen aides who had physical access to Hughes were Mormons], controlled him. And he knew it. He didn’t trust them, whatever anyone else may say. Howard and I knew they were manipulating him.” Despite all the years he spent as Howard Hughes’s consigliere, Robert Maheu never once laid eyes on Hughes. His only contact with Hughes was by telephone or through a series of scrawled notes passed between the two men by personal aides loyal to Bill Gay. Gay’s total control of information going into and out of Hughes’s office gave him the upper hand in the power struggle against Maheu. By this point, Hughes knew only what Gay allowed him to know.

When Gay and Davis teamed up to push Maheu out, they turned to Intertel to do the deed. For Peloquin, it was a huge boost for his tiny company. And the Hughes organization paid well: “Hughes was a wonderful client,” Peloquin recalls. “We’d send a bill in on Monday, and on Thursday, that check would come right back…. I didn’t have any money problems at all,” he says, waving his arm in the direction of the soybean field. “That’s why I’ve got this farm.”*

Under pressure from Gay and Davis, Hughes