Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [218]
“Since the Watergate incident, there has been a bitterly fanatic political movement to destroy Nixon. The staggering sums which Maheu is supposed to have paid, allegedly on your behalf and pursuant to your instructions, and the publication of alleged messages from you to Maheu construed as instructions to influence if not control the Administration, has encouraged the Senate Watergate Committee to pursue the contention that Nixon received monies from you (including the $100,000 to Rebozo) for his personal use rather than as a proper contribution to a political campaign.
“To date we have successfully resisted the efforts of the IRS, SEC, and the Senate Watergate Committee from having access to you.
“This has developed into quite a dog fight,” concluded Davis, “but I am confident we will prevail.”
In fact, Hughes did prevail. He was the only major Watergate figure who eluded all the probes, who was never brought to justice.
Beyond the law in his Bahamas bedroom, under indictment and under subpoena, Hughes watched B-movies in a codeine haze while his past machinations brought down the government of the United States.
If the billionaire was safe, however, his secrets were not.
In the early morning hours of June 5, 1974, the secret papers that Richard Nixon feared were stashed in Larry O’Brien’s office or Hank Greenspun’s safe were stolen from Howard Hughes’s old headquarters at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood.
No one dared tell Hughes that his sacred memos were gone.
Nonetheless he was worried. Not that unknown burglars had discovered his dealings with Nixon but that they had made off with an old steam car Hughes had bought when he was twenty or disturbed the movies he had preserved in his vaults. And most of all he was worried that more outsiders would start poking through this warehouse of his past life.
“He wants to know who is actually going to look in the various areas, vaults, and rooms at Romaine to ascertain just what is missing and presumed stolen in the robbery,” his aides informed headquarters.
“He does not want some insurance investigator to take it upon himself to start opening boxes and crates when he has left such rigid instructions through the years on the handling of such sensitive items as his motion picture equipment, etc.
“He wants a detailed report, step by step, on just how it is intended that these searches be made. He wants this report before anything is touched.”
While Hughes worried about his memorabilia, his aides back at Romaine discovered that another “sensitive item” was missing—a memo revealing the true mission of the Glomar Explorer. The security breach could not have come at a more dangerous time. The Glomar was just about to reach its giant claw three miles underwater and scoop up a sunken Russian submarine.
Now, a month after the break-in, CIA Director William Colby had to tell the president the Glomar secret was out, apparently in the hands of unknown burglars who had looted Romaine.
The president received that unsettling news just days after he returned from Moscow, where he signed an arms-control treaty that might have saved him had he signed it a few years earlier. It ended the big blasts in Nevada.
But too late. And now Nixon had reason beyond the Glomar to worry about the Hughes heist.
Colby knew that. When the CIA compiled its first list of “possible culprits” on July 4, it noted that the Romaine break-in might have been “politically motivated to aid or deter Watergate investigation.” And among “possible customers for documents” the Agency listed “anti-impeachment forces if documents are embarrassing.”
And now Colby was coming to see Nixon. It could not have been entirely comfortable, this meeting between a CIA director who believed there might be a Watergate motive behind the Hughes break-in, and a president who knew there was a Hughes motive behind the Watergate break-in.
But whatever