Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [13]
Only a handful of people knew that, and on July 1 Glenn discovered something none of them knew.
A document outlining the Glomar’s true mission was missing. It was apparently now in the hands of the unknown burglars who had looted Romaine a month earlier. The security breach could not have come at a more sensitive time. The Glomar had just arrived at its destination and was about to reach a giant claw three miles underwater to recover a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Glenn’s boss, Bill Gay, called CIA Director William Colby to give him the news. Colby called FBI Director Clarence Kelley. Kelley called William Sullivan, head of the Bureau’s Los Angeles office. And Sullivan went directly to LAPD headquarters to confer with Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis.
When Sullivan emerged from his secret meeting with Chief Davis, he went downstairs to brief the detectives handling the Romaine investigation. He told them that “national security” was involved. He did not mention the Glomar or the Russian sub. But he did instruct the cops not to look at the stolen Hughes papers if they recovered them.
“We were supposed to close our eyes, seal the documents in a pouch, and deliver them unread to the FBI,” said one detective who was at the meeting. “That’s actually what they told us. I don’t know how we were expected to find the stuff with our eyes closed.”
Romaine was no longer a local police case. While lower-level officers were left to stumble about blindly, CIA general counsel John Warner met secretly with Chief Davis and Los Angeles District Attorney Joseph Busch.
“It’s clear that Busch and Davis believed they were really doing something big for national security,” recalled a prosecutor who became privy to the details. “But for the guys actually handling the investigation it was a disaster. Nobody knew what was up. The Hughes people were so goddamn mysterious, we couldn’t get a thing out of them, then the FBI steps in and starts playing cat-and-mouse—saying it’s your case, but don’t ask what’s going on—and lurking behind everything there’s the CIA.”
Indeed, some local law-enforcement officials wondered if the CIA had invented the “national security” claim to sabotage their investigation, to keep them from finding Hughes’s secrets.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, a hastily formed CIA task force noted that “the burglars may well have been hired by the Corporation itself” and wondered if the Glomar document was really missing at all.
Perhaps the entire Glomar scare was merely a ploy to cover up Hughes’s theft of his own files and at the same time bring the CIA into his battle against Maheu. “Hughes may attempt to place the blame for the burglary on Maheu,” reported the task force, “simultaneously attempting to ascertain how strongly the Agency feels about the loss of the sensitive document, and hope that the Agency may offer to intercede in the Maheu trial.”
But the CIA had to assume that the Glomar memo was in fact stolen, had to recognize that even the Russians might have it, and William Colby had to tell that to the president.
It must have been an odd meeting. In less than a month Richard Nixon would be forced out of office; his dealings with Hughes were under heavy scrutiny; and Colby knew that the president had reason beyond the Glomar to worry about the Romaine heist: the missing secret papers might contain a whole brace of “smoking guns.”
Indeed, the CIA suspected that the White House itself might be behind the break-in. In its first list of “possible culprits,” the Agency suggested that the burglary was “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation,” and among “possible customers” the CIA included “anti-impeachment forces if documents are embarrassing.”
But Colby claimed to