Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [46]
While the escape was in progress, Peloquin took up a position in the lobby, waiting to see if the operation would set off an alarm that would summon Maheu. He knew that if Maheu arrived on the scene, there wasn’t much he could do other than stall for time. Even though it was Maheu’s job to provide security for the hotel, he never discovered that Hughes was being slipped out the back door. The Intertel operation was so thorough that it was days before Maheu would know what had happened to Hughes. And although journalists through the years have wondered whether or not Hughes himself was aware of the move, since he was frequently delirious with drugs and paranoid fantasies, Peloquin says he was awake and aware that he was being moved to the Caribbean.
Outside the hotel, the Intertel team bundled Hughes into a waiting car and made a dash for nearby McCarran Airport. One of Hughes’s planes was waiting on the airstrip. The team whisked him to the Bahamas and installed him in a new private lair on the ninth floor of the Britannia Beach Hotel on Paradise Island, where he would live for years, protected—at great cost—by Intertel’s armed guards, closed-circuit television cameras, and bug sweepers.
The next day, Thanksgiving Day 1970, Maheu was enjoying a rare day off at his chalet on Charleston Peak, Nevada, to which he’d flown in some friends on a helicopter owned by the Hughes company. In his autobiography, Next to Hughes, Maheu recalled the scene. He was poised over a thirty-five-pound turkey, carving knife in hand, when the phone rang. Jack Hooper, the head of security for Hughes’s holdings in Nevada, was on the line. He said just four words: “The Man is gone.”
“What the hell do you mean, the Man is gone?” I asked none too calmly.
Everyone was seated at the table just a few feet away from me. I was trying like hell not to yell. It wasn’t easy.7
Devastated by the palace coup, and suspicious that Hughes had been kidnapped by Intertel on behalf of Gay and Davis, Maheu hired his own team of private detectives to find out if Hughes was still in control of his company or if agents from Intertel had taken it over.
A team of eight agents working for Maheu traveled to the Bahamas, but they couldn’t make any headway. Intertel deployed its own counterintelligence measures against them. By one account, they used bugs, phone taps, mail intercepts, and other tricks of the spy trade to keep Maheu’s men from finding out anything about Hughes. (Peloquin says his firm never tapped phones or engaged in illegal conduct, and always thought it was important to obey the law.)
Maheu’s spies set up shop on the eighth floor of the hotel, drilling a hole in the ceiling to slip a microphone into Hughes’s quarters. But Intertel was waiting for that predictable move, and called the local police, who raided the room and arrested Maheu’s team. Peloquin intervened with the Bahamian police force to have the men released without charges, so long as they would head straight back to the United States. The spooks returned home, defeated.
LIFE IN THE Bahamas was grand. Peloquin lived in style and rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. In the late 1970s, Crosby called: the shah of Iran had just been deposed in the Iranian revolution, and President Jimmy Carter didn’t want him to come into the United States. Could Peloquin help? Peloquin worked out the logistics with the government of the Bahamas, and got the shah admitted to that Caribbean country, where he