The quoted CIA list of “possible culprits” is dated July 4, 1974, and was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The discovery of the Castro plot by the Senate Watergate Committee was disclosed by a staff investigator. The details, including Maheu’s call to Hughes, were disclosed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975.
The five earlier Hughes break-ins were described in LAPD, FBI, and CIA reports, and further detailed in interviews with detectives involved in the local police investigations. The quoted LAPD report on the Romaine case is dated July 30, 1974. Davis’s refusal to submit to a polygraph and Kelley’s failure of his polygraph are noted in the same police report. The FBI report on Kelley’s lie-test is also dated July 30, 1974.
Kelley arranged a second polygraph through a private eye named Robert Duke Hall, who was murdered two years later on July 22, 1976. According to Burbank police Lt. Al Madrid, who handled the murder case, the same two men charged with killing Hall—Jack Ginsburgs and Gene LeBell—also staged the April 1974 break-in at Hughes’s Encino office and delivered the stolen voice scrambler to Hall, who eventually returned it to Kelley. Madrid said in an interview that he found no evidence that the Encino theft was linked to the Romaine break-in six weeks later, or that Hall’s murder was in any way connected to either of the burglaries.
Howard Hunt first revealed Winte’s involvement in the aborted Greenspun break-in in sworn testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee, later confirmed by G. Gordon Liddy in Will (St. Martin’s Press, 1980, pp. 204–205), and by Bennett in statements to both the Senate committee and the Special Prosecutor’s Office.
The LAPD’s conclusion that the Romaine heist was an “inside job” is quoted from its July 30, 1974, report.
The inside story of the break-in was revealed to me in a series of interviews with one of the burglars, my confidential source called the Pro, and as noted above his account was verified by LAPD, CIA, and FBI records, by interviews with law-enforcement officials, and by my own investigation.
The Chester Brooks ransom calls were detailed by police reports, grand jury testimony, and a transcript of the call recorded by the LAPD. The Hughes memo left by Brooks was later filed in court. The police dragnet for Brooks was detailed in LAPD and FBI reports. Henley’s failure to receive the final call and her attendance at the Glomar event was noted in LAPD and CIA reports. Henley apparently left instructions for Kay Glenn to receive the ransom call in her absence, but Glenn also missed the call, according to a CIA report.
Glenn’s discovery that the Glomar document was missing is noted in CIA reports. Sources at the CIA, FBI, and LAPD detailed the series of contacts that ensued. The Sullivan briefing was described by a detective who was present. The CIA suspicion that the Hughes organization staged the break-in and then falsely claimed the Glomar document was missing was noted in a July 5, 1974, report by the Agency’s task force. CIA Director Colby confirmed his meeting with President Nixon in a series of interviews, and his quoted remarks are from those interviews.
All accounts of the Gordon-Woolbright meetings are based on Gordon’s grand jury testimony, further detailed by Gordon in a series of interviews. Woolbright’s background was obtained from Los Angeles and St. Louis police records. Their contacts with J. P. Hayes and Maynard Davis were confirmed by both Hayes and Davis in interviews. Winte’s report that Korshak and Shenker may have been involved was noted in an LAPD report dated August 25, 1976. Shenker denied any involvement with the burglary or the stolen papers in an interview. Korshak refused comment.
Gordon’s contact with the police, and the FBI-CIA reaction was detailed by Gordon, by an investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office he first contacted, by LAPD detectives, and FBI and CIA reports. The quoted CIA “payoff” report is dated October 7, 1974. The quoted FBI buyback scheme is dated September 23, 1974. Gordon described his talks with the authorities and with Woolbright in grand jury testimony and interviews. His account is confirmed by LAPD and FBI reports.
The quoted FBI report of the CIA-FBI strategy meeting is dated November 1, 1974. The CIA’s report to the FBI describing the stolen Hughes papers is dated August 5, 1974. The CIA report closing the case is dated November 25, 1974.
Michael Brenner, the assistant district attorney handling the Romaine case, confirmed in a series of interviews that the Hughes organization had not cooperated with the police investigation, that the CIA had interfered with his grand jury probe—at one point actually halting the investigation completely—and Brenner also commented. “The aspect of the case that worries me is that there probably wasn’t a burglary.”
At his first trial in April 1977. Woolbright was convicted of receiving stolen property and acquitted of attempted extortion. His conviction was set aside on appeal because the trial judge had wrongfully ordered the deadlocked jurors to reach a verdict. His second trial in June 1978 ended in a hung jury, and the district attorney dismissed all charges against Woolbright.
The famous “missing Glomar document” was not among the Hughes papers stolen from Romaine. The Pro said in an interview that he never had or saw any such document. Ten months after the break-in, the security guard Mike Davis came forward and told the district attorney that he, not the burglars, had taken the Glomar memo. Davis claimed he found it on the floor after the burglars had escaped, stuffed it into his pocket, forgot that he had it, panicked, kept it hidden in a bedroom drawer, and finally flushed it down the toilet, afraid to get “involved.” “It was just an absent-minded thing,” Davis explained in an interview. “I don’t know why I did these things. I can’t figure it out myself.”
1 Mr. Big
My reconstruction of the first scene, Hughes watching reports of RFK’s assassination, comes from one of his own handwritten memos not quoted here but in chapter 9. In it, Hughes himself recounts his TV vigil, noting that he was awake for two nights watching CBS and that he “heard Mankiewicz make the fateful announcement.” To determine what he had seen, I viewed videotapes of the same CBS reports.
The description of Hughes lying naked in his bedroom is based on interviews with a personal aide who recalled the RFK death watch. The aide also recalled that Hughes had a Zenith Space Commander, and Hughes’s own memo shows that he used it to check out all the networks.
The process by which Hughes sent his orders to Maheu was confirmed both by Maheu and the Mormon attendants, as well as by one of the security guards who made the deliveries. That Hughes summoned his aides by snapping a fingernail against a paper bag was confirmed by the aides, who said they could hear the familiar signal above his blaring TV, even when he kept his door closed.
The timing of the RFK memos was determined both by their content and Maheu’s unpublished Senate Watergate Committee testimony that Hughes first ordered him to hire Kennedy’s men within minutes of Bobby’s death. (The first memo Hughes wrote that night was misdated 6/7/68, but was clearly written 6/6/68, and the date was therefore deleted in the facsimile to avoid confusion.)
A series of memos revealed the outcome—the hiring of O’Brien—and I interviewed O’Brien and his associates for further detail. The link between Hughes’s impulsive command to hire the Kennedy team and the Watergate break-in four years later is established in the epilogues, based on sources detailed later in these notes.