The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [396]
The Forest Service, at government expense, ran eleven miles of telephone line into the camp, removed overhanging branches along the trail, and hired a packer with twenty-four horses to transport most of the group to a campsite that included tents with stoves and portable lavatories. All the time a helicopter and pilot stood at the ready.
Bobby might disappear into the pristine wilderness of the Northwest, but wherever he traveled he carried with him a burdensome weight of knowledge of matters that would have shocked most Americans. Early in May 1962, Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s director of security, and Lawrence Houston, the agency’s general counsel, told Bobby about a serious problem involving targeted mobsters and the Mafia plots to assassinate Castro.
When Giancana suspected that his mistress, singer Phyllis McGuire, might be having an affair with comedian Dan Rowan, he turned to Robert Maheu, his new friend with the CIA connections. The mobster asked for a favor he considered small compared to attempting to murder Castro. He wanted Maheu to bug McGuire’s Las Vegas hotel room. Maheu used CIA contacts and money to attempt to place the electronic device. The technicians were so incompetent that they were immediately found out, and the Las Vegas police arrested one of them. That was October 31, 1960, before Kennedy had been elected. When Maheu was called, he used his connections to squelch the local case, but the FBI sought to turn the matter into a federal indictment. At the end of March 1962, Sheffield Edwards met with the FBI liaison to the CIA to ask the agency to back off the Las Vegas prosecution in the name of the national interest. That was the decision about which Bobby was being asked to give his approval.
“If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness,” Houston recalled. Bobby’s jaw may have been set, and his eyes steely, but he mouthed no words of criticism of the assassination plots. Bobby was not a man to hold in his rage or to seek less than draconian punishments of those who dared betray him. Bobby was merciless at ferreting out truth, but he was no relentless questioner this day. Edwards recalled that the attorney general neither expressed disapproval of what had gone on in the past nor asked that they refrain from such actions in the future. “He cautioned Larry Houston to the effect that he was to know about these things,” Edwards recalled.
After hearing from the CIA about the bungled bugging in Las Vegas, Bobby met two days later with the FBI chief. Hoover knew about the CIA’s role in the wiretapping, but until the attorney general told him, he suggested that he did not know that Giancana had been involved in an assassination plot against Castro, though he surely must have suspected.
Hoover treated truth as if it were a precious commodity, to be given out only in small quantities, and his memo of the meeting probably included only what he chose to memorialize. “I told the attorney general that this was a most unfortunate development,” Hoover wrote.
I stated as he well knew the “gutter gossip” was that the reason nothing had been done against Giancana was because of Giancana’s close friendship with Frank Sinatra, who, in turn, claimed to be quite close to the Kennedy family. The attorney general stated he realized this and it was for that reason that he was quite concerned when he received this information from CIA about Giancana and Maheu. The attorney general stated that he felt notwithstanding the obstacle now in the path of prosecution of Giancana, we should still keep after him.
Hoover wrote a memo to Bobby saying