It would be more than a year before Hughes discovered there was a Watergate crisis, and he would remain forever puzzled by reports that he might somehow be involved in it.
But Hughes had not merely been watching movies while his specter drove Nixon to Watergate. He had been through quite a few adventures of his own on his way to this new blacked-out bedroom.
Back in February he had been forced to flee Paradise Island when Bahamian immigration authorities raided his penthouse. It was another fallout of the Clifford Irving affair. The publicity triggered an official inquiry and, rather than face it, Hughes left by the fire escape while the local lawmen pounded on his door.
The escape, however, led to the first revelation of his bizarre appearance. The skipper of a yacht chartered to smuggle Hughes off the island got a good look at his strange cargo and some weeks later told his tale to the press.
It was not that the billionaire had hair down past his shoulders or that he was wearing only a bathrobe that struck the captain as weird. It was his toenails. “They were so long they curled up,” he told a Miami newspaper. “Never seen anything like that in my life. I had to look twice. Craziest thing I ever saw.”
Hughes next took refuge in Nicaragua, under the personal protection of the country’s dictator, General Anastasio Somoza. After his narrow escape from the Bahamas, however, Hughes was taking no chances. He decided to offer the general a friendly bribe.
“I think that while Somoza is being so decent to me in the face of all this bad publicity,” wrote Hughes, “something might happen tomorrow to change all this.
“The Central and South American people are very emotional and changeable. So before this happens, I think I should make a present to Somoza.
“I suggest a really desirable automobile. We should find out whether he likes to drive himself and would prefer a sports car, or a very elaborate limousine with a bar and telephone and TV set, and the very last word in accessories.
“Also, I want to be damn sure he (Somoza) is told loud and clear that this was my personal idea because I appreciate the considerate treatment he has shown me.”
Somoza, however, had a bigger reward in mind. He asked Hughes to bail out his country’s bankrupt airline, which the general himself happened to own. Hughes bought 25 percent of the stock. The dictator was not satisfied. He offered his guest an interest in his plywood factory, his pharmaceuticals company, and some choice local real estate.
Less than a month after his arrival, Hughes decided to leave Nicaragua, before Somoza tried to sell him anything else. But on the way out he made an extraordinary decision. He would break fifteen years of isolation and meet with his host.
Preparations for the big meeting began two days in advance. Hughes watched a movie, Mirage, then called in an aide to create his own illusion. For the first time in years he had one of the Mormons cut his hair, trim his beard, and pare those toenails. After four hours of grooming, he even took a shower.
It was a new man who welcomed Somoza and U.S. Ambassador Turner Shelton aboard his Gulfstream jet at 10:45 P.M. on March 13, greeting both with a firm handshake. They chatted until midnight, and when his guests left, Hughes shook hands again.
Hughes, his public image restored, flew off to Vancouver and arrived in broad daylight. Now quite bold, even reckless, he sauntered through the hotel lobby in his bathrobe, and once up in his penthouse paused at the window to watch a seaplane land in the harbor.
The Mormons were not pleased. They quickly hustled Hughes into his new blacked-out bedroom, warning of spies with telephoto lenses—“we know that we are presently being surveilled”—and their boss passively reverted to a life of hiding, of movies, and of drugs.
While the White House burglars plotted the break-in back in Washington, Hughes lay in a stupor watching Diamonds Are Forever, a James Bond movie about a reclusive billionaire held prisoner in his Las Vegas penthouse, his empire run by an evil imposter. And Hughes was still in that darkened room, watching The Brain That Would Not Die, when the burglars were busted at Watergate.
But if Hughes himself remained oblivious of Watergate, his henchmen were becoming ever more entangled in it. Back in Washington, the mysterious Bob Bennett immediately assumed a central role in the cover-up, acting as go-between for Liddy and Hunt, all the while doing his best to expose it, reporting not to Hughes or even his fellow Mormons, but to the CIA and the Washington Post.
On July 10, over lunch at a Marriott Hot Shoppes, Bennett came in from the cold. To his CIA case officer, Martin Lukasky, he passed on everything he had learned about Watergate from Hunt and Liddy. He said that the White House was behind the break-in and pointed the finger at his pal Chuck Colson: “Colson most likely suggested the break-in to Hunt on an ‘I don’t want to know, just get me the information’ basis.”
Lukasky deemed Bennett’s report so sensitive that he hand-carried it to CIA Director Richard Helms.
The report revealed that Bennett was busy on several fronts, all aimed at undermining the cover-up. He had established “back-door entry” to Edward Bennett Williams, the lawyer representing Larry O’Brien in a million-dollar civil suit filed against Nixon’s campaign committee.
And he was talking to the press—to the Washington Star, to the New York Times, to Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times. According to a CIA report, “Bennett took relish in implicating Colson in Hunt’s activities, while protecting the Agency at the same time.”
But most of all Bennett was talking to the Washington Post. He told the CIA he was feeding stories to Bob Woodward, who was “suitably grateful,” making no attribution to Bennett and protecting his valued source.
Later, much later, Nixon would tell Haldeman that he believed Bob Bennett was “Deep Throat,” and he would wonder whether Hughes and the CIA had plotted together to bring him down.
For the moment, however, Nixon remained obsessed by Larry O’Brien. And just a month after the break-in he saw his chance to go back on the attack.
The president was sitting with his feet up on his desk, sipping a cup of coffee, when John Ehrlichman came to see him on July 24. Ehrlichman had just received the latest IRS “sensitive case report” from the still growing Hughes investigation. There was more bad news about Donald, but that was not the big news. A new name had popped up in the probe—Larry O’Brien. The IRS had turned up the dirt that all the president’s men had failed to find: proof of O’Brien’s Hughes connection.
Ehrlichman read it to Nixon: “Hughes Tool Company paid $190,000 to Lawrence F. O’Brien and Associates, Washington, D.C., during 1970. Purpose of these payments are unknown.”
The president was excited. He took his feet down off his desk, swung around, and leaned toward Ehrlichman. “The American people have a right to know about this!” he declared. “The American people need to know that the chairman of one of its two great political parties was on Hughes’s payroll.”
Ehrlichman had rarely seen Nixon so excited. Even now, even after his pursuit had led him to Watergate, the president remained determined to nail O’Brien on Hughes.
“This made a lot of trouble for me, and it’s going to make a lot of trouble for O’Brien,” said Nixon. He was sure that the IRS had uncovered only the tip of the iceberg, that O’Brien had received a lot more Hughes money, and that he had probably failed to report it all on his tax returns. He told Ehrlichman to order a full audit of O’Brien’s financial records and to get him for income-tax evasion.