Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [205]
Liddy immediately began to plan the Greenspun job, plotting it with his partner in the Ellsberg break-in, a former CIA agent named E. Howard Hunt, who was already working for both Chuck Colson at the White House and Howard Hughes’s man in Washington, Bob Bennett.
Indeed, Bennett played a central role in the Greenspun caper. He apparently suggested the burglary to Hunt a few days before Mitchell approved it—as a kind of joint venture—and now he introduced Hunt and Liddy to Hughes security chief Ralph Winte.
They met again the weekend of February 20, in a plush suite at the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles. Winte had prepared a hand-drawn diagram of Greenspun’s office, the location of his safe marked by a big X. Liddy had the job all figured. The Nixon gang would handle the break-in, bust open the safe, throw the stolen Hughes memos into a canvas bag, and hop on a waiting Hughes jet that would fly them directly to some secret Central American rendezvous point, where the Nixon men and the Hughes men would meet to divide up the booty.
“Gee!” said Winte. “Suppose you get caught?”
“Don’t worry about that,” replied Hunt. “We’re professionals!”
The Hughes high command, however, had no interest in the plot and refused to supply the getaway jet. Liddy was crestfallen. He continued to case Greenspun’s office, but without the airplane the mission did not have the same appeal, and it appears that the break-in was never attempted.
Nixon was getting impatient. Months had passed since he first ordered a covert intelligence operation, and still there were no results. In fact, Mitchell still had not approved Liddy’s overall plan.
The president called Haldeman into the Oval Office. “When are they going to do something over there?” he demanded, drumming his fingers on the desk.
Haldeman told his expediter, Gordon Strachan, to get action, and Strachan called Mitchell’s deputy, Jeb Magruder.
“The president wants it done, and there’s to be no more arguing about it,” Strachan told Magruder, and the pressure from the White House continued.
More and more the pressure focused on Larry O’Brien.
A new scandal had erupted, and O’Brien was leading the attack. Late in February, Jack Anderson revealed that Nixon had killed an antitrust suit against ITT in return for a donation of $400,000 to the Republican convention. It was O’Brien who first made the accusation months earlier, and Nixon believed that he was somehow behind the Anderson exposé. If the two of them could make this much trouble over ITT, imagine what they could do with the Hughes hundred grand.
Day after day O’Brien kept the ITT scandal in the headlines, and an enraged Nixon turned to Chuck Colson. Colson was his ass-kicker, the man who would do anything, the man with whom Nixon shared his darkest fantasies. “One day we will get them,” he would tell Colson, speaking of all his enemies. “We’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?” And Colson would reply, “Yes, sir, we’ll get them.”
Now the president called Colson into his hideaway rooms at the Executive Office Building and railed at him about ITT and Larry O’Brien. It was an outrage, said Nixon. O’Brien of all people making noise about ITT underwriting the Republican convention. Shit, Howard Hughes was underwriting the Democratic National Committee. O’Brien was on his damn payroll!
At about that same time, Howard Hunt, who was on Colson’s payroll, brought his partner Liddy in to see Colson. Liddy complained that he couldn’t get anyone to approve his espionage plan. Colson immediately picked up his phone and called Jeb Magruder.
“Why don’t you guys get off the stick and get Liddy’s budget approved?” demanded Colson. “We need information, particularly on O’Brien.”
Jeb Magruder was tense as he headed over to the attorney general’s office to see his boss, John