A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  On April 3, 1968, the FBI had made clear to Harvey that, since Harvey appeared to be acting as a sort of unofficial counsel to Roselli, the FBI could not talk to him about Roselli, “Harvey was visibly shaken and asked, ‘What is behind this?’” Harvey stressed that his only goal was to protect the interests of the FBI and CIA:

  He was extremely critical of CIA, maintaining that the Agency does not fully appreciate the significance of exposure to potential embarrassment.

  Was Harvey hinting Roselli knew something about the CIA that was even worse than their Castro assassination plots? It’s hard not to read that into what follows in the same memo:

  Harvey briefly commented that some people may forget that this is an election year. He followed by stating that Robert Kennedy was knowledgeable of the operations which had been devised by CIA with the collaboration of Roselli and his cohorts. Although he did not so state, Harvey definitely left the implication that Kennedy is in an extremely vulnerable position if it were ever publicized that he condoned an operation which involved U.S. Government utilization of hoodlum elements. Harvey stated that he was not certain if Kennedy was privy to the beginnings of the operation, but he definitely was cognizant of its existence in the late stages.

  Harvey probably believed Kennedy did have knowledge of ongoing plots, although the CIA’s report made clear he did not. But more important is what Harvey wasn’t saying but seemed to be hinting at: that there was something much more sensitive involving Roselli and the CIA than the Castro plots. Was he providing Helms and the FBI a coded hint about perhaps another assassination plot that involved Roselli, such as the assassination of President Kennedy?

  Whatever it was that Harvey was referring to eventually persuaded Helms to change his mind. By mid-April 1968, just weeks before Robert Kennedy would be killed, an FBI teletype reported the CIA had said the following:

  CIA REQUESTED THAT BUREAU NOT DISSEMINATE THIS INFO BECAUSE ROSELLI’S CONTACT WITH CIA EXTREMELY SENSITIVE COULD BE HARMFUL TO NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS.825

  It seems likely Roselli had been involved in a plot more sensitive than the Castro assassination plot, perhaps the assassination of President John Kennedy, and/or that he knew something about the upcoming plot against Senator Robert Kennedy through his close association with Robert Maheu.

  Robert Maheu

  TWO DIFFERENT SOURCES TOLD ME THAT ROBERT MAHEU HAD BEEN behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy. But even without those sources, Maheu seemed the obvious choice. The assassination of Robert Kennedy required comprehensive planning that clearly included the following:

  • Control of the LAPD’s investigation

  • Control of the D.A.’s investigation

  • Control of the Sheriff’s deputies (who were the first to arrive at the crime scene)

  • Control of Sirhan’s defense team

  • Access to trained assassins

  • Access to a patsy that could be hypnotized into taking the fall for the crime

  The CIA had the power to control and provide all of this. But more specifically, Robert Maheu connected directly to every point above. And the source for most of these connections was Maheu himself. In 1992, with Richard Hack, Robert Maheu penned his autobiography Next to Hughes. There, he revealed all kinds of information that makes him the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. He revealed additional information when interviewed by the Church Committee and elsewhere.

  Maheu had friends in the deepest, darkest corner of the CIA: the Office of Security, the component that ran the mind control programs and bugged CIA employees to prevent them from leaking to others. He was extremely well-connected at the highest realms of power in the country, had access to nearly unlimited funds, and had provable experience in running assassination plots for the CIA. He had mob contacts through Roselli. The Mission: Impossible TV series was said to have been based on his company Robert A. Maheu Associates (RAMA), which fronted for CIA activities and provided cover to CIA employees. Maheu also had friends in the LAPD and Sheriff’s office. He had run CIA operations in conjunction with the LAPD in the past.

  In his autobiography, Maheu claims he was initially recruited in March 1954 to work for the CIA through the Office of Security. In his testimony to the Church Committee, however, Maheu set the date of the approach as 1952 or 1953. Jim Hougan, in his book Spooks, which has a chapter on Maheu titled “The Master Spook,” suggested Maheu may have been working for the CIA even earlier due to other records.

  Prior to joining the CIA, Maheu had performed counterespionage assignments in the FBI. He was in the same FBI class as Bill Harvey,826 who headed the Operation Mongoose plots designed to topple Castro. Bill Harvey ran Staff D, which served as liaison with the Office of Security and the then still-secret National Security Agency (NSA) and the office through which, according to Joseph Burkholder Smith, coup plotters had to be cleared before they could engage in coup operations. Both Harvey and Maheu were close to Roselli. It doesn’t appear that Maheu and Harvey were in direct contact in 1968, although Harvey’s query to the CIA about Maheu suggests contact may have happened.

  At the FBI, Maheu was also classmates with two men who later joined the CIA’s Office of Security: Jim O’Connell, who was initially tapped to aid the CIA in killing Lumumba, and Bob Cunningham, who helped cover up the apparent murder of Frank Olson by the CIA (see A Terrible Mistake, by Hank Albarelli, for that story).827 The role of the Office of Security is to ensure the CIA’s operations do not get exposed. That’s why mole hunts were buried there, and why the CIA chose to stash its super-secret mind control operations there.

  O’Connell and Cunningham encouraged Maheu to do “cut-out” work for the CIA. But before Maheu could get in bed with the CIA, he had to get out of bed with Carmine Bellino—another ex-FBI agent—with whom Maheu shared an office. Bellino worked for the Kennedy family, and the CIA wanted nothing to do with the Kennedys. Maheu mistakenly attributes this to the Kennedys’ “support” of Sen. Joe McCarthy, claiming inaccurately that the Kennedys supported “McCarthyism” while the CIA fought it.828 More accurately, the CIA turned against McCarthy when he started accusing a couple of their own of being Communist stooges. And the Kennedys, while anti-Communist, were not pro-witch hunts. Joe McCarthy was a family friend, but even then there were limits. Robert Kennedy did not participate in the smears that McCarthy made. And the oft-repeated misinformation that Robert Kennedy asked Joe McCarthy to be the godfather of Robert’s firstborn, Kathleen, is simply not true. Kathleen Kennedy reported in her book Failing America’s Faithful that her godfather was actually Dr. Danny Walsh, a theology professor credited with converting Thomas Merton to Catholicism.

  After working for the CIA’s Office of Security for a $500/month retainer (roughly equivalent to $4,500 a month in 2017 dollars) for six months, the CIA changed his contract to a cash-on-delivery basis, probably because a few months in, a British man who turned out to be an agent for Stavros Niarchos hired Maheu for the equivalent of roughly $55,000 to sink an oil shipping contract between Ari Onassis and Saudi Arabia. Had the contract been allowed to stand, Onassis would have eventually had the shipping contract for all major oil companies. Standard Oil, Mobil, Exxon and the rest would have had to go to Onassis. As Maheu explained, “By regulating the chief source of energy in an oil-dependent world, Onassis would become one of the most powerful men alive, capable of bringing whole governments to their knees.”829 Maheu managed to persuade the Saudi king to break the contract.

  During the Onassis case, Maheu employed another former FBI man who was working for the CIA, John Joseph Frank. Frank appears to have been involved in the disappearance and apparent murder of Jesus de Galindez, a vocal critic of Rafael Trujillo at a time when the CIA in general and Frank in particular were aiding and abetting Trujillo’s dictatorship. Frank rented the airplane that an Oregon man named Gerald L. Murphy apparently used to fly the kidnapped Galindez to the Dominican Republic. Neither Murphy nor Galindez were seen al
ive again, and a federal prosecutor charged Frank with being involved, although after the CIA interceded on Frank’s behalf, he was not convicted. When asked by the Church Committee if he had employed Frank during 1954, the year documents showed Trujillo first discussed killing Galindez, Maheu refused to answer under the Fifth Amendment on the grounds that he might incriminate himself.

  I have often wondered why the CIA turned to Maheu, of all the people it knew, to organize a plot to kill Castro. The obvious answer has always been that Maheu was known for a successful assassination in some previous plot, perhaps the Galindez case. But there were other candidates. He might have arranged the murder of Samuel Rand. John Meier, one of Hughes’ close associates late in Hughes’ life, called Maheu an “assassin” but clarified he was known for arranging plots, not killing people himself.

  When Hughes needed a “fixer,” Maheu was recommended to him. At the time, Hughes was living in Bel Air, an upscale private development in the mountains above UCLA.

  Hughes was known to admire pretty women. He sometimes had his employees approach such women and offer them a place to stay. Hughes visited some and never even visited others. Some of these “kept” women of course rebelled at being at his beck and call. One of them, Yvonne Shubert, had befriended an actor named Samuel Rand. Hughes wanted Maheu to get rid of Rand. Hughes had called Shubert and told her if she didn’t stop seeing Rand, Rand might “have his face fixed.”830 The official story is that Rand accidentally killed himself while checking Shubert’s gun after it had failed to fire.831 But prior to this, Maheu, using the pseudonym of Bob Marshall, had invited the actor to visit him in his suite at the Bel-Air Hotel. There, Maheu invited his friend, undersheriff Harold Marlowe, up to the suite. Marlowe casually revealed the gun he was carrying and suggested Rand stay away from Shubert.832

  Hughes was convinced Maheu had killed Rand, a belief Maheu claimed first surprised, then alarmed him. Maheu called his undersheriff friend Hal Marlowe and asked him to make a ballistics test to prove the bullet came from the actor’s own hand and not someone else’s. Maheu described this as “a little insurance policy, just in case somebody else thought the way Hughes did.”833

  In 1956, when President Sukarno of Indonesia came to visit the United States, Scott McLeod of the State Department contacted Maheu and asked him to vet hookers for Sukarno from a security standpoint under the CIA’s Project Harpstar. Maheu said this was done to “please” Sukarno, but no doubt this was also an attempt to compromise him with photographs and other material for potential blackmail. The problem was, Sukarno’s appetite for women was part of his appeal to a segment of the public in Indonesia.

  A little over a year later, according to Maheu, he got a call from Sheffield Edwards at CIA, the security officer who oversaw the Bluebird and ARTICHOKE CIA mind control programs. Edwards wanted Maheu to perform another operation relative to Sukarno.834 Evidently, the Soviets supplied Sukarno with prostitutes too, but one of them was a KGB agent. Edwards was initially asked to contact Maheu by the CIA’s Far East Division.835

  Edwards asked Maheu to make a film purporting to show Sukarno and this Soviet agent having sex to insinuate that Sukarno was under the control of a Soviet agent, to be titled Happy Days. “It was never in any way intended to be a ‘porno’ movie,” Maheu wrote.836 So Maheu contacted Bing Crosby and his brother Larry. “The reason was simple,” Maheu explained. “The Company [CIA] liked Bing and Larry’s politics and, after doing a security check on them, felt they could be trusted completely.”837

  Maheu admitted working with the man who was Sheriff at the time of the Robert Kennedy assassination, Peter Pitchess, on Happy Days for the CIA, but Maheu omitted mention of the involvement of the LAPD in this episode. Initially, the CIA hoped to find footage they could use from existing pornographic movies, supplied by no less than Police Chief William Parker.838 It appears Maheu was loath to brag about his connections to the LAPD, which was unusual, as he tended to brag about everything else.

  When Maheu worked for Hughes, he hired Jack Hooper to head Howard Hughes’ personal security detail. Hooper was “a retired Los Angeles Police Department detective he had used on special assignments since the late 1950s, to supervise overall security.”839

  John Meier

  JOHN MEIER WAS A TOP AIDE TO HOWARD HUGHES FROM 1966 TO 1970. He was one of the few people allowed in the room with Hughes. Meier was a computer analyst before and after a stint in the Korean War. He met Howard Hughes in the 1950s, and impressed Hughes. Meier is a charismatic, articulate and obviously intelligent individual with a mischievous sense of humor, so it’s easy to see why Hughes would have wanted this man at his side.

  Meier did not realize, when he took the job, just how deeply embedded the CIA was within the Hughes organization. For its part, the CIA’s nickname for Hughes was “The Stockholder,” presumably because so much of his money paid for the operations of “The Company,” as the CIA called itself. The CIA was so deeply entwined with the Hughes organization that no less than James Angleton, the 25-year head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence unit, spoke at Hughes’ small funeral service after he died:

  Howard Hughes! Where his country’s interests were concerned, no man knew his target better. We were fortunate to have him. He is a great patriot.”840

  Meier first learned of the CIA’s role with Hughes two months after Robert Kennedy was assassinated, in August 1968, when a CIA operative named Michael Merhage, who assumed Meier was also CIA, mentioned his CIA employment. Merhage gave Meier a list of American politicians the CIA wanted to support. The list included former Warren Commissioner and soon-to-be President Gerald Ford. Others on the list included James Eastland, John Tower, Paul Laxalt, Wallace Bennett (father of Robert Bennett, whose Mullen Company PR firm employed E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate participants when Hunt was ostensibly “retired”—for the third time841—from the CIA.)

  When I visited Meier in his home in Canada in the 1990s, he had told me the Robert Kennedy assassination had been organized by Robert Maheu. His proof related to the many daily diaries he had kept all his adult life. At the time, he would not show me nor read to me from his diaries, and I didn’t press. But when I visited him again with David Talbot in 2013, Meier read us diary entries that included the following:

  [June 1, 1968] I completed the speech and the supporting background documentation I had prepared for Robert Kennedy on the AEC underground testing programs in Nevada. Spent the morning with George Roth, my research editor on additional background information. At noon, Bob Maheu called and told me to cancel my trip scheduled for Monday, and wait until after the fifth. I was upset and advised him a schedule had already been arranged and I was to meet with Harry Evans and Paul Schrade of the UAW who were assisting Kennedy in his campaign in California. They were also assisting Howard Hughes and myself in stopping the underground testing in Nevada. …

  [June 4, 1968] Maheu called in the morning and said he wanted me to call Don Nixon urgently and ask him to fly to Las Vegas to meet with Maheu on Wednesday the 5th. He wanted me to introduce him, as they had never met. That was the reason Maheu wanted me to stay in Vegas and not fly on to L.A. I left a message for Don Nixon …. He called me at 11 A.M. and advised me that he was very busy and was not able to make the meeting on the 5th. I called Maheu and when he heard Don was not coming out, he told me to call Don back and have him call his brother again. At 3 P.M. Don called me back and I gave him the message to call his brother Richard Nixon. Don was upset that this Maheu would try and run his life!

  In a version of Meier’s diary that circulated among researchers on the Internet at one point, there is an odd bit included on the June 4 entry that was not in the diary as John Meier read it to David and me. In the online version, there is out-of-place text about the Oregon primary, which had happened the previous week. But this is not on the tape that David Talbot recorded when we talked to Meier. Someone apparently inserted some text out of place in the typed version—either by mistake or perhaps deliberately
—to discredit the text.

  When Meier was shaving himself around 4 A.M. on June 5, 1968, he learned that Robert Kennedy had been shot in the pantry. He cut himself and frantically tried to reach Paul Schrade and his friend Harry Evans. He had heard that someone named Evans had also been shot in the pantry, but that was a reference to Elizabeth Evans, not his friend Harry.

  Meier read the following passages to me and David from his diary entry of June 6, 1968. Robert Kennedy died in the early hours of June 6:

  Bob Maheu called to ask about the Don Nixon meeting and suggested 8:30 for breakfast at the Desert Inn Country Club. I went to the club. Maheu was all smiles, and Don Nixon walks in all smiles. What followed next had to be seen to be believed. They embraced each other and Don Nixon said, “Well that prick is dead,” and Maheu said, “Well it looks like your brother is in now.” At the time I did not even know what they were talking about.

  Maheu joked that they should now be calling Don Nixon “Mr. Vice President.” I still did not realize that Robert Kennedy had died and when they saw that I was unaware Maheu told me, “John, you are out of it. Why don’t you go home and Don and I will carry on without you.”

  Meier was sickened when he learned Kennedy had died. And the news got more disturbing with each passing day. Meier recognized a name in the news that gave him a chill, as he noted in his diary entry for June 13:

  Listening to the radio where they were discussing the RFK assassination and who was shot, etc. They mentioned Thane Cesar who was a security guard at the hotel working for ACE Guard Security and was also employed by Lockheed Aircraft. I remember Thane from his trips to Vegas where he was meeting with numerous gaming people and was introduced to me by Jack Hooper, an associate of Bob Maheu.

  Meier told us he had “called someone and discussed the fact that I knew RFK, Paul Schrade, Harry Evans and Thane Cesar—all of whom had been at the Ambassador that night.” Thane Cesar was known to Meier because he worked for the Hughes organization at that time. But Meier’s inquiries brought a reprisal from Maheu the following day: