Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [188]
It was too late. By the time Hughes sent Maheu on his White House mission, the deadly convoy had already reached the dump site. By the time Maheu could get to Washington, the nerve gas would be deep-sixed. But the resourceful Maheu had a plan.
“Howard, bearing in mind that when we reach the ‘top man’ the scheduled dumping will be literally minutes away, I wonder if we should not consider the following action,” the never-say-die lieutenant wrote. “I happen to know that at San Clemente they are geared with a permanent installation of scramblers which permit the President to communicate comfortably anywhere in the world where comparable scramblers are located.
“It is conceivable, therefore, that I should fly immediately to San Clemente so as to communicate whatever message I have within a period of an hour rather than the 5 or 6 hours it would take to go to Washington,” he suggested to Hughes, who was furiously composing a still undisclosed secret message to Nixon.
“The decision which the Army has made, and which obviously the White House has backed 100% is being watched by the whole world to its final conclusion. It would be a lot easier for the President to explain a delay of an hour than one of six.
“I think we should be doubly careful that we do not make one false move and that in no way do we lose the confidence of the Administration. There is no doubt, Howard, that the man’s nose was out of joint when he detected our ‘Italian hand’ in the injunction,” added Maheu, even now at the zero hour taking another shot at Chester Davis, born Caesar Simon in Rome, Italy.
“Howard, I hope I am not being too verbose because time is of great urgency and I truly know what this particular matter means to you,” concluded Maheu, his sharp tactical analysis turning into a windy exposition as the minutes ticked away.
While Maheu discussed tactics with Hughes, a crack team of navy frogmen opened flood valves deep in the holds of the LeBaron Russell Briggs, and the old World War II liberty ship, weighed down by tons of nerve gas, began to sink slowly into the Atlantic 150 miles from Paradise Island.
Unaware that the gas ship had already been scuttled, Hughes finally made a command decision. No phone calls. No San Clemente. He insisted that Maheu meet personally with the president.
“Howard, there is no problem in getting the appointment,” a glum Maheu replied in a classic good-news/bad-news memo. “Unfortunately, however, the sinking started some time ago, and they are now at the point of no return.”
At 12:53 P.M. on Tuesday, August 18, 1970, after taking on water for four hours, the half-submerged death ship with its cargo of nerve gas suddenly took a huge gulp and disappeared beneath the waves. Within eight minutes it had hit bottom.
So had Howard Hughes. Once more he was totally immobilized. Trapped in his penthouse. Without a refuge. Afraid to go, afraid to stay.
While Hughes brooded about the nerve gas dumped in the Atlantic, a top-secret task force at the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to figure out how to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.
The CIA had been grappling with the problem for a full year, the same year that Hughes had been desperately trying to make good his escape. Now, just as all of Hughes’s plans were foiled again, the CIA finally came up with a plan it was sure would work.
It would build a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar ship, longer than two football fields, with a two-hundred-foot-tall derrick in the center that straddled a well in the hold, and towered over a hull that could open to reel out more than three miles of steel pipe and lower a giant claw that would just reach down and snatch the Soviet sub from the sea floor. Without anybody being the wiser.
Of course, the Agency would need a good cover story. It would claim the fantastic ship was a futuristic deep-sea mining vessel designed to scoop up the oceans’ vast untapped mineral wealth.
Now all the CIA needed was a plausible front man.