“I think the Mexican government is more stable, but I have less confidence in our ability to occupy a position of sufficient influence and privilege with the Mexicans.
“In other words,” he concluded, still undecided, already fearing trouble in paradise, “I have pretty well assumed that you felt confident of a very favorable position with the new Bahamian government, whereas, I do not somehow gain that impression in respect to Mexico.”
Hughes continued his Godlike review of the globe, ranging over the map in his search for some suitable refuge, endlessly re-analyzing the possibilities, finding fault with all. He kept coming back to the Bahamas, the last place he had visited before drifting into seclusion.
“In the light of everything we know,” he wrote, “this is the most hopeful and very most realistic possible site for the location of the projects I have planned.
“However, there are many other powerful entities located in the Florida, Bahama, Carribean area, and they present a deeply entrenched powerful force that may not take kindly to my entry into that area. There is no way I can estimate the strength of these competitive entities since we must keep my plans the most religiously guarded secret, or everything will really be screwed up completely.”
Hughes was not up to a clash of the Titans. He was looking for virgin territory he could just walk into and take right over.
“I do know that Baja has been much, much less invaded by rich American projects than the Florida-Bahamas area,” he mused, returning to the invitingly undeveloped Mexican peninsula.
“I want to consider a development in Baja that would be similar to the all-inclusive arrangement Onassis had in Monte Carlo. I dont mean that I aspire to take over the Mexican government as he did Monaco. I mean that I want to make a deal with the Mexicans which would be somewhat similar to the deal [Daniel K.] Ludwig made with the Bahamian government when Freeport was established.
“Please consider the problems in obtaining ‘Empire Status,’” he instructed his henchman.
“It has been my hope that we could approach this project, since it is so much more important than even you realize, with a basis of three strings to the bow—the Bahama location, Baja, and Puerta Rico.
“I put Puerto Rico last,” he added, explaining his new addition, “only because it is a little far away for the headquarters location I am seeking, but please dont encourage anyone else to move in that direction because I want to keep it as an ace in the hole.”
Having narrowed the field to three, Hughes reiterated the absolute need for absolute one-man control.
“It just does not work out to have more than one tiger to each hill in a situation like this,” he concluded. “In Las Vegas, everything was fine until the place was invaded by Kerkorian, Parvin-Dohrman, and a few others.”
While Hughes juggled travel plans, he also juggled travel agents. It seemed as if everyone were in on it. He was reaching out to all his key executives, advisers, attorneys, and aides, all of them eager to control the move and thus control Hughes. It finally shaped up into a battle of Maheu versus the Mormons.
Maheu did not want Hughes to leave at all, but if there was going to be a move, he wanted to be at his boss’s side, calling the shots.
First he tried to scare Hughes into staying. Did he really want to go to the Bahamas, where blacks were in control—and out of control?
He sent Hughes a twelve-page confidential report, code-named “Down-hill Racer” to appeal to Hughes’s love of cloak-and-dagger intrigue. “Blood—white blood—will run in the streets of Nassau,” the report warned. “When the axe falls, it will take an army to protect a white man in the Bahamas.”
Hughes betrayed no fear to Maheu. He saw the chaos Maheu had described as a challenge, an opportunity:
“If this report is even partially accurate, boy, they need a saviour down there like the poor bastards in the Middle East never needed when they were in trouble.”
While Maheu tried to arouse Hughes’s fear of blacks, the Mormons tried to arouse his fears of Maheu.
“It seems to me,” one of his nursemaids suggested, “that asking Bob about leaving here is like a bird asking how to get out of his cage so he can fly away.”
Hughes hardly needed the warning. When the planning for the exodus began, Robert Maheu was already in exile. He did not know why he was in exile. Hughes would not tell him.
He had kept Maheu away from Las Vegas ever since his unauthorized attendance at the Nixon dinner in August by giving him one mission after another that took him from Seattle to Vancouver to Dallas to Washington to New York to Los Angeles. Hughes did not try to conceal his own travel plans. In fact, he conferred with Maheu about the getaway by long-distance all the while. What Hughes did not reveal was that he intended to keep Maheu out of town until after he had made his escape.
After more than a month of this mysterious exile, more than a bit worried about what plot Hughes might be hatching, Maheu threatened to return. With or without Hughes’s permission.
“Howard, now that all the reasons for which I must stay away from Las Vegas have faded into the dust of oblivion, will you please let me return,” he pleaded. “There is an occasion taking place involving my immediate family which makes my presence mandatory. I intend to be there whatever the consequences may be, and however disastrously it may affect my career. It would make it so much more pleasant, therefore, for me to be there with your approval.”
Maheu’s threatened insubordination forced Hughes to take off the wraps. He finally told Maheu why he was in exile. He had been banished before he could wrest control of the empire from Hughes.
“I am very sure you are well aware of the fact that my reason for asking you to remain away from Las Vegas at this time is in some way related to the position of over-powering dominance to which you have climbed in the organizational structure of my business affairs,” he wrote.
“Bob, I have no way of knowing, or even estimating accurately the extent to which you have dominated just about everybody associated with me.
“You have succeeded in achieving a position of such strength that I just dont know how many of my people are afraid to disclose information to me or how much information is being withheld.”
Hughes had long feared that Maheu was secretly seizing control. Now, encouraged in his paranoia by the whispering Mormons, he was certain that Maheu had in fact taken over completely and was actually planning a coup.
“You have built an ‘organization-within-an-organization’ here in Nevada,” he continued, hurling the ultimate accusation, “the very thing you have so vehemently denied, and the very thing that Dietrich did to me, and which you, yourself, so violently criticized.
“In fact, I have been told that the ‘blueprints have already been cut’ for a mass exodus of the guts of this organization exactly along the lines followed by Ramo and Wooldridge.”
Once more his trusted alter ego was about to betray him, as Dietrich had. Once more his key men were about to defect, to set up a rival operation, as had the top scientists of the Hughes Aircraft Company. It was the same story all over again—treachery by trusted insiders, undermining him from within.
“Bob, this capsulized organization-within-an-organization, being easily removable and capable of setting up shop elsewhere, this is a terrifying thing, and it worries me a great deal,” added Hughes with a sick sense of déjà vu.
“I dont say you did it deliberately. I dont even say you were aware of its subtle growth.
“I dont know exactly to what extent it exists. But whatever that extent may be, it is very dangerous to me.