So had Howard Hughes. Once more he was totally immobilized. Trapped in his penthouse. Without a refuge. Afraid to go, afraid to stay.
While Hughes brooded about the nerve gas dumped in the Atlantic, a top-secret task force at the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to figure out how to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.
The CIA had been grappling with the problem for a full year, the same year that Hughes had been desperately trying to make good his escape. Now, just as all of Hughes’s plans were foiled again, the CIA finally came up with a plan it was sure would work.
It would build a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar ship, longer than two football fields, with a two-hundred-foot-tall derrick in the center that straddled a well in the hold, and towered over a hull that could open to reel out more than three miles of steel pipe and lower a giant claw that would just reach down and snatch the Soviet sub from the sea floor. Without anybody being the wiser.
Of course, the Agency would need a good cover story. It would claim the fantastic ship was a futuristic deep-sea mining vessel designed to scoop up the oceans’ vast untapped mineral wealth.
Now all the CIA needed was a plausible front man. It decided on Howard Hughes.
Thus began the Glomar Explorer project, a bizarre caper that for the next five years would have the whole world believing Hughes had once more embarked on an incredible pioneering business adventure—and then, when the true mission of the Glomar became public, that Hughes was a full-time partner of the CIA.
But not even the CIA knew that it had made a naked madman privy to its biggest national security secret.
In any event, the most immediate victim of the Glomar deal was neither the Russians nor the CIA nor any of the great powers in the world beyond, but Howard Hughes’s own right-hand man, Robert Maheu.
Late in August 1970, just days after the nerve-gas fiasco came to its terrible end, the CIA reached out to Hughes. It first tried to contact him directly but had no more success than Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger.
Casting about for a suitable go-between, the Agency settled not on Maheu, its erstwhile partner in the Castro assassination plot, but instead on his rivals, Bill Gay and Chester Davis, and their new ally in Houston, Hughes Tool Company chief Raymond Holliday.
Maheu was frozen out completely. He was now considered unreliable, a bad risk, a man who knew too much and drank too much, an embarrassment and a danger, far too close to his Castro plot cohort John Roselli and their mutual lawyer Ed Morgan, who had already leaked the story of the failed murder conspiracy to columnist Jack Anderson.
To make contact with Hughes, the CIA turned instead to a discreet businessman, Raymond Holliday.
Holliday held the purse-strings and he held the title of chief executive in the Hughes empire, but he had not seen his boss for fifteen years and had spoken to him by telephone only once since the billionaire arrived in Las Vegas. That was when the Mormons wanted a raise and Holliday had refused to approve it without direct word from Hughes. To reach him again with the CIA’s big secret, Holliday would first have to get past the nursemaids.
To do that, he would need to bring in their boss, Bill Gay. And before he presented the CIA’s sensitive proposal to Hughes, he would also need a legal reading from Chester Davis. The shared secret helped forge a new alliance.
When Holliday finally presented the Glomar project to Hughes, the recluse was more than enthusiastic.
His empire already had strong ties to the CIA through the Hughes Aircraft Company, but Hughes himself had no contact with that operation and he had long wanted a more personal alliance with the Agency. In fact, he had been pressing Maheu for years to make just such an intimate partnership.
Now Hughes gave Holliday his full blessing.
“Give them my assurance that I will do my utmost to help them in their mission,” he instructed his man from Houston, “and anytime they don’t receive the cooperation they think they ought to, be in touch with me and I’ll see that they get it.”
Hughes was impressed with the Glomar project. It had both the bizarre grandiosity and the cloak-and-dagger spirit that complemented his own self-image. And he was impressed with the men who had brought it to him.
The new team had succeeded where Maheu had failed. Suddenly Maheu did not seem quite so well connected, quite so omnipotent. It was Holliday, Gay, and Davis who really had the big connections that Maheu only claimed. The more Hughes considered it all, the clearer it became. Maheu had failed him as a protector, failed him as a fixer, and if the others had also failed him over the nerve gas, at least they had not balked, had not lectured him about “tiger hunts.”
Late in August, shortly after the Glomar contact, Hughes let it drop to his Mormons that he was preparing a proxy that would give Gay, Davis, and Holliday authority over all his Nevada operations.
The plan for Maheu’s ouster began to take shape.
Emboldened by the apparent Hughes-Maheu split, sensing that their once impregnable rival was now vulnerable, the other powers joined forces to make their move against him.
Gay flew to Washington to meet secretly with Robert Peloquin, president of International Intelligence, Inc., a private cloak-and-dagger firm better known as Intertel that happened to be a subsidiary of the same company that owned Paradise Island. Gay told Peloquin that Hughes wanted to retain the spy-for-hire outfit to conduct a secret audit of his Las Vegas casinos.
Not long afterward, Peloquin flew to Los Angeles to confer with Chester Davis. The gruff lawyer took the plot a big step further. He asked the man from Intertel to draw up a detailed plan “for a change of management in Nevada.”
Meanwhile, Raymond Holliday was feeding Hughes’s growing fears of financial ruin and suggesting that Maheu was largely to blame.
There were indeed real problems, and Hughes himself had presented the grim picture to Maheu months earlier: “I can boil it down to one fact—three years ago there was 650 million dollars in cash in the till. Now, after three years, this year is scheduled to finish with a hundred million dollars shortage of funds which have to be borrowed.”
Now the problems were even worse. Hughes had been hit with a final default judgment of $145 million on TWA. His disastrous helicopter enterprise was headed for a loss of $90 million. He was not yet even aware that John Meier had swindled him out of $20 million for phony mining claims. And his two-hundred-million-dollar Nevada investment had, against all odds, lost money every year.
But most of all, Hughes was worried about his image.
“At the present time when I am having a little trouble making both ends meet,” he wrote, “I am sure there is a large army of people waiting in expectant, hushed silence for the first indication of a slide backward in my financial resources.
“There is only one thing worse than being broke, and that is to have everybody know that you are broke.
“In most cases, and at normal times, I am quite content to be referred to merely as an industrialist without a price tag,” continued Hughes, upset by a local newspaper story that had referred to him as a “millionaire,” a story based on a press release issued by his own p.r. firm.
“However, at present, in my highly critical situation, I think it is a bad time for us to put out publicity referring to me as a mere millionaire. There are several hundred millionaires on the horizon now, and since I have been referred to as a Billionaire ever since we became established in Las Vegas, I am fearful that some enemy of mine will pick up this small deviation and make a story about it—you know, something like: ‘Well, well, has he finally gotten to the bottom of his bankroll? Etc., etc.’