Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [50]
That year, the muckraking newspaper columnist Jack Anderson revealed a memo written by ITT’s Washington lobbyist Dita Beard. It appeared to link the company’s pledge of $400,000 to sponsor the upcoming Republican national convention and a favorable resolution of an important antitrust case against ITT by the Department of Justice. Washington exploded—had the White House sold out for campaign cash? Everyone involved went into damage-control mode.9 ITT decided to argue that the memo was a forgery and turned to Intertel’s document experts to analyze it. The experts concluded that the memo probably had been written on a typewriter from Beard’s office—and if so, it was probably genuine. But they also concluded that it would be almost impossible to prove that the document had been typed by Beard. This constituted enough deniability for ITT to go ahead with the claim of forgery. If the memo couldn’t be proved to be genuine, the accusation that it was a forgery couldn’t be disproved, either.
Jack Anderson reported later that Intertel had also tried to dig up dirt on him, with an eye toward throwing him off the scent. But, as Anderson wrote in his memoir, Intertel couldn’t find any damaging gossip to use against him.10 Perhaps that’s because Anderson was a Mormon who didn’t smoke, drink, curse, or even drink coffee. (Peloquin denies that Intertel ever went after Anderson, saying, “I wasn’t that wacky that I wanted to get written up by Jack Anderson.”)
The existence of an intelligence firm for hire, connected to the Kennedys, terrified the Nixon administration. A confidential memo within the Nixon White House noted: “We should be particularly concerned about the new and rapidly growing Intertel organization…. Should this Kennedy-mafia dominated intelligence ‘gun for hire’ be turned against us in ’72, we would, indeed, have a dangerous and formidable foe.”11
Indeed, some journalists have long suspected that the Watergate burglars broke into Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972, because of Intertel. The theory is that the burglars worried that Intertel had given the Democrats details of illicit payments from Howard Hughes to Nixon’s associates. Thus, the break-in was designed to find out what the Democratic National Committee (DNC) knew about the Hughes connection.
For his part, Peloquin says that Intertel was never a spy agency for the Kennedys, although he acknowledges that Republicans feared it might be. He says that Intertel’s Washington offices were broken into at one point, and the burglars attempted to drill holes in the safes that contained the firm’s secret documents. The safes proved too strong for the drills, and the burglars left with nothing. Peloquin is convinced that the burglars had been sent by the White House. “They were supposedly fearful that we had info that Hughes had put Nixon on his payroll,” Peloquin recalls. Ironically, Intertel didn’t have the proof the burglars might have been after. Peloquin says that he had his suspicions, but never proved that Nixon took bribes from Howard Hughes. “There probably was some payment made to Nixon or Nixon’s brother. But I had no evidence of that.”
Intertel maintained a much lower profile through the 1980s and early 1990s, but it maintained a roster of high-paying corporate clients. One former vice president of the firm recalls working on cases in the 1980s for McDonald’s, Kraft Foods, Mars, and the Clorox Company.
Intertel worked on the famous Tylenol tampering case of 1982, serving as the central point of contact for all law enforcement officials who wanted access to Johnson and Johnson, the company that made Tylenol. But Intertel didn’t do any investigating on that case, which was never solved. To this day, no one knows who killed seven people in the Chicago area by lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide.
Intertel never grew large. At its peak it had something on the order of fifty employees scattered around the world. But those people had special