by Eamon Javers
“What the hell do you mean, the Man is gone?” I asked none too calmly.
Everyone was seated at the table just a few feet away from me. I was trying like hell not to yell. It wasn’t easy.7
Devastated by the palace coup, and suspicious that Hughes had been kidnapped by Intertel on behalf of Gay and Davis, Maheu hired his own team of private detectives to find out if Hughes was still in control of his company or if agents from Intertel had taken it over.
A team of eight agents working for Maheu traveled to the Bahamas, but they couldn’t make any headway. Intertel deployed its own counterintelligence measures against them. By one account, they used bugs, phone taps, mail intercepts, and other tricks of the spy trade to keep Maheu’s men from finding out anything about Hughes. (Peloquin says his firm never tapped phones or engaged in illegal conduct, and always thought it was important to obey the law.)
Maheu’s spies set up shop on the eighth floor of the hotel, drilling a hole in the ceiling to slip a microphone into Hughes’s quarters. But Intertel was waiting for that predictable move, and called the local police, who raided the room and arrested Maheu’s team. Peloquin intervened with the Bahamian police force to have the men released without charges, so long as they would head straight back to the United States. The spooks returned home, defeated.
LIFE IN THE Bahamas was grand. Peloquin lived in style and rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous. In the late 1970s, Crosby called: the shah of Iran had just been deposed in the Iranian revolution, and President Jimmy Carter didn’t want him to come into the United States. Could Peloquin help? Peloquin worked out the logistics with the government of the Bahamas, and got the shah admitted to that Caribbean country, where he stayed in Crosby’s home. Peloquin recalls spending long hours playing tennis with the shah and his teenage son and heir apparent, Reza Pahlavi.
But the shah’s Bahamian idyll didn’t last long. Peloquin got a call from the office of Prime Minister Lynden Oscar Pindling of the Bahamas, who had gone out of his way to admit the shah into the country. Pindling wanted to meet the shah, and Peloquin said he’d arrange it.
“The liaison guy from the state department was a perfect jerk,” Peloquin recalls. The department wouldn’t allow the shah to meet with the prime minister. Why? “The State Department guy said, ‘I don’t think the shah would be interested in meeting with a Negro prime minister.’” Peloquin knew that was nonsense. He didn’t know if the shah was a racist or not, but he did know that the shah—who was dependent on American help—would meet with anyone the United States told him to. The State Department was throwing up roadblocks that didn’t need to be there. The Bahamian prime minister, who had been the first black premier of the British colony, was offended by the crude rejection. “Two days later, they expelled the shah from the Bahamas,” Peloquin says.
Back in Washington, Intertel’s business was taking off, and a parade of prominent citizens with odd problems began marching through the doors. One visitor, Henry Ford, the grandson of the legendary automaker, sent Peloquin’s secretary into a frenzy of preparations, shining the wooden office doors in anticipation of the great man’s arrival. Ford was opening a casino on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. He told Peloquin that he’d asked the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, for advice, and Hoover had recommended Intertel. Intertel men were soon running background checks on every one of Ford’s new casino employees, making sure that no one with known Mafia ties was hired.
On another occasion the Washington super-lawyer Edward Bennett Williams walked into the Intertel office on Seventeenth Street with two clients in tow: the publisher of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, and its editor, Ben Bradlee. They were in the middle of the high-stakes drama of Watergate, breaking story after story about corruption at the White House. They worried that Nixon’s men were bugging their offices. Peloquin dispatched a team to sweep Graham and Bradlee’s offices, finding no evidence of eavesdropping.
From the early 1970s on, Howard Hughes came to depend ever more on Intertel. When Clifford Irving announced that he had cowritten an autobiography of Hughes to be published by McGraw-Hill, Intertel got the case. Irving was a fraud: Hughes had never granted permission for an autobiography. And he certainly had not received compensation for selling his life story, as the publishing house was claiming. Irving’s interviews, documents, and anecdotes were either made up or lifted from other media accounts of Hughes’s colorful life.*
“Chester Davis said, ‘this is pure bullshit,’” Peloquin recalls. “The Hughes people were up in arms about it, because Hughes himself was up in arms about it. The author was a wacko.”
Allegations that the book was a fake erupted in the media in January 1972. The Hughes organization called a meeting in a hotel conference room in Hollywood with seven reporters who had known Howard Hughes in the days before he’d become a hermit. Peloquin recalls that the reporters quizzed Hughes over a phone line especially piped in for the remote press conference. Do you know this guy? they asked. Hughes denied it.
For the moment, Hughes was as charming as ever. “I only wish I was still in the movie business,” the disembodied voice said over the phone line. “Because I don’t remember any script as wild or as stretching the imagination as this yarn has turned out to be.”8
But that wasn’t enough to derail the book. Hughes needed definitive proof.
To prove the book was a hoax, Peloquin set up a meeting with his former colleagues at the criminal division of the Department of Justice. He told officials there that Hughes had no intention of paying any taxes on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in income he had supposedly earned from McGraw-Hill. Peloquin’s strategy was simple. He wanted to provoke an IRS audit. The government would find that Hughes had never collected a cent from the publishing house.
But before the federal government could roll into action, Peloquin got an even better opportunity. An executive at McGraw-Hill went on the Today show to hold up three checks the company had made out to “H. Hughes,” as payment for his life story. The checks had been cashed, and McGraw-Hill viewed them as proof of its agreement with Hughes. Chester Davis filmed the appearance, enlarged the image, and made out the names of the Swiss banks that had cashed the checks.
Davis called Peloquin: “Get your ass over to Switzerland and find out what the scoop is.”
Peloquin took the next plane to Zurich. There, he began to reap the rewards of his shrewd hiring spree. He turned to Vadja Kalombatovic, a veteran of the FBI whose father had defected to the United States from Yugoslavia. Kalombatovic spoke perhaps a dozen languages, and—more important—he’d developed contacts in nearly every police force in Europe during his time as the FBI’s legal attaché in France, Spain, and Italy.*
Now an executive at Intertel, Kalombatovic called a contact in Swiss law enforcement, and the Swiss dispatched a police sergeant to meet Peloquin at his hotel in Zurich. “I told him my problem,” Peloquin recalls. “‘We have to get into that bank to find out what is really going on.’” Who had been cashing the checks made out to “H. Hughes”? Once again, Intertel would profit from government sleuthing. The Swiss police sergeant told Peloquin to stay put.
He returned four hours later, proclaiming in slightly mangled English, “I have solved your Hughes.”
As Intertel suspected, the person who’d cashed the checks wasn’t Howard Hughes at all; it was a woman going by the name of “Helga Hughes.” The police sergeant took Peloquin to the bank and introduced him to the private banker who had dealt with the supposed Helga Hughes. On a hunch, Peloquin showed the banker a picture of Clifford Irving’s wife, Edith Sommer Irving, whose looks and long blond hair were reminiscent of the young Jane Fonda. The banker replied, “Yes, she has dyed her hair black, but that’s the woman.”
It was the smoking gun that Howard Hughes had been searching for. Clifford Irving and his wife had been in on the scam together, concocting the memoir on their own and duping McGraw-Hill into buying it. They had collected hundreds of thousands o
f dollars in the hoax.
By the end of January, Clifford Irving’s story was falling apart, and he’d soon confess the fraud. Both Irvings wound up going to jail.
Hughes was delighted. “That made me, as far as Hughes was concerned,” says Peloquin.
IN GRATITUDE, HUGHES—WHO almost never met with anyone—wanted to greet Peloquin in person. On Christmas Day, Peloquin got a call at home from Hughes’s office. Hughes had decided to fly from Canada to London. He was in the air already, but he hadn’t bothered to bring his passport or any papers at all. He’d need help in a few hours when he landed in London. What could Peloquin do to smooth his entry into England?
Again, Peloquin tapped Intertel’s connections. On his board of directors sat Sir Ranulph Bacon, a former head of Scotland Yard.* Peloquin, in a panic, reached him by phone.
“Ranulph, we’ve got to get Howard into London,” he said.
About a half an hour later, Bacon called back: “He’ll be fine.” Hughes was warmly received in the United Kingdom.
That minor triumph set up Peloquin’s only face-to-face meeting with Hughes. Peloquin got a call from Hughes’s office ordering him to report to London immediately. He went to Washington’s National Airport, where he was met by a Hughes airplane and crew. Peloquin would be the only passenger. The aircrew set up a bed so he could get some rest during the overnight flight. Before he knew it, he was landing at Heathrow Airport. Hughes was ensconced in an expensive hotel near Buckingham Palace, and hovering nearby was the ever-present Bill Gay. “Howard would like to meet you,” he said.
Peloquin was prepared for the worst. Stories of Hughes’s physical appearance were grim. Worse, Hughes had suffered another injury in England. Peloquin says Hughes—now nearing seventy, and in poor mental and physical health—had looked up an old British flying buddy, who offered to take him on one more flight over England. Hughes went along, possibly taking the controls of his friend’s airplane for several minutes. The flight was uneventful. But climbing out of the plane proved too challenging for Hughes, who fell, breaking his hip.
He refused to be taken to a hospital, so English doctors tried to set the hip in his hotel room. The operation wasn’t successful, and Hughes was in a lot of pain. He would be dead three years later.
Peloquin was, therefore, surprised to find a likable, lucid man in the hotel suite. “He wasn’t that odd,” Peloquin says. “His hair was reasonably long, but he talked sensibly.”
Hughes, who had a notorious germ phobia, didn’t shake hands, which made for an uncomfortable moment. But still, he didn’t wear Kleenex boxes on his feet, as some reports had described. Hughes suffered from gut-wrenching constipation because of the drug cocktail he consumed daily, and Peloquin says he spent a large part of each day on the toilet. As awful as that sounds, Hughes continued to innovate: he developed a toilet seat for himself based on the design of the military’s McClellan horse saddle, which had a hole in the crotch area.* Later, suffering from bedsores, Hughes designed himself a new mattress that helped alleviate the lesions.
In April 1976 Intertel landed one last secret mission on behalf of the mad billionaire. Hughes was staying in Acapulco’s Princess Hotel when he reached the end of his life. Naked, emaciated, and covered with bedsores, he lay dying. Gay and his other confidants decided to fly him back to the United States, but they said he died during the flight. For Hughes, it was the end of years of misery. But for his aides, who hoped to continue to run the Hughes empire, it was a nightmare. The first problem they faced was that Mexican authorities arrested the entire Hughes retinue in Acapulco. Mexican doctors had been appalled at Hughes’s condition, and suspected neglect—benign or otherwise.
Once again, Gay called Peloquin with an emergency request: get to Mexico and spring the Hughes entourage from prison. Peloquin and a former member of the Arizona border patrol took flights to Mexico.
“Bob, have you got any money?” the man from the border patrol asked Peloquin when they arrived.
“I’ve got a couple of thousand.”
“Give it to me.”
Peloquin handed over the cash. (When dealing with Hughes, Peloquin was accustomed to carrying huge amounts of hard currency.)
The border patrolman disappeared up a back alley, Peloquin says. “A couple of hours later, he came back to the hotel with the Hughes aides, and they were free. That’s Mexico.” Bribing Mexican law enforcement officers was apparently one of Intertel’s services—at least for the firm’s best client.
Now the Intertel men faced another quandary. Hughes’s rooms were loaded with his billionaire’s drugs, legal and illegal, stacked in box after box filled with small glass bottles. The aides were afraid they’d be arrested again, on narcotics charges. The border patrol man left the hotel room. He came back with a truck, and Hughes’s people loaded all the drugs into the back. He and Peloquin drove out into the Mexican desert, where the border patrolman had somehow secured a bulldozer. They watched as the drugs were dumped on the desert floor and crushed under the treads of the bulldozer.
“I think the fish in the bay got pretty high that night,” Peloquin says with a chuckle.
Intertel’s men spent the following months searching everywhere for Hughes’s will. But it was never found—if one had ever existed at all. Eventually, Hughes’s cousins in Texas, whom he had barely known, inherited his money.
AS ALL-CONSUMING AS he could be, Hughes wasn’t Intertel’s only client. Among others, there was the telecommunications giant ITT, and in 1972 the Intertel team played a tangential role in a Washington scandal known as the “Dita Beard affair.”
That year, the muckraking newspaper columnist Jack Anderson revealed a memo written by ITT’s Washington lobbyist Dita Beard. It appeared to link the company’s pledge of $400,000 to sponsor the upcoming Republican national convention and a favorable resolution of an important antitrust case against ITT by the Department of Justice. Washington exploded—had the White House sold out for campaign cash? Everyone involved went into damage-control mode.9 ITT decided to argue that the memo was a forgery and turned to Intertel’s document experts to analyze it. The experts concluded that the memo probably had been written on a typewriter from Beard’s office—and if so, it was probably genuine. But they also concluded that it would be almost impossible to prove that the document had been typed by Beard. This constituted enough deniability for ITT to go ahead with the claim of forgery. If the memo couldn’t be proved to be genuine, the accusation that it was a forgery couldn’t be disproved, either.
Jack Anderson reported later that Intertel had also tried to dig up dirt on him, with an eye toward throwing him off the scent. But, as Anderson wrote in his memoir, Intertel couldn’t find any damaging gossip to use against him.10 Perhaps that’s because Anderson was a Mormon who didn’t smoke, drink, curse, or even drink coffee. (Peloquin denies that Intertel ever went after Anderson, saying, “I wasn’t that wacky that I wanted to get written up by Jack Anderson.”)
The existence of an intelligence firm for hire, connected to the Kennedys, terrified the Nixon administration. A confidential memo within the Nixon White House noted: “We should be particularly concerned about the new and rapidly growing Intertel organization…. Should this Kennedy-mafia dominated intelligence ‘gun for hire’ be turned against us in ’72, we would, indeed, have a dangerous and formidable foe.”11
Indeed, some journalists have long suspected that the Watergate burglars broke into Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972, because of Intertel. The theory is that the burglars worried that Intertel had given the Democrats details of illicit payments from Howard Hughes to Nixon’s associates. Thus, the break-in was designed to find out what the Democratic National Committee (DNC) knew about the Hughes connection.
For his part, Peloquin says that Intertel was never a spy agency for the Kennedys, although he acknowledges that Republicans feared it might be. He says that Intertel’s Washington offices were broken into at one point, and the burglars attempted to drill holes i
n the safes that contained the firm’s secret documents. The safes proved too strong for the drills, and the burglars left with nothing. Peloquin is convinced that the burglars had been sent by the White House. “They were supposedly fearful that we had info that Hughes had put Nixon on his payroll,” Peloquin recalls. Ironically, Intertel didn’t have the proof the burglars might have been after. Peloquin says that he had his suspicions, but never proved that Nixon took bribes from Howard Hughes. “There probably was some payment made to Nixon or Nixon’s brother. But I had no evidence of that.”
Intertel maintained a much lower profile through the 1980s and early 1990s, but it maintained a roster of high-paying corporate clients. One former vice president of the firm recalls working on cases in the 1980s for McDonald’s, Kraft Foods, Mars, and the Clorox Company.
Intertel worked on the famous Tylenol tampering case of 1982, serving as the central point of contact for all law enforcement officials who wanted access to Johnson and Johnson, the company that made Tylenol. But Intertel didn’t do any investigating on that case, which was never solved. To this day, no one knows who killed seven people in the Chicago area by lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide.
Intertel never grew large. At its peak it had something on the order of fifty employees scattered around the world. But those people had special skills. Jim Healy, who had served a long time at the FBI and who worked for Intertel from 1984 to 1994, says his colleagues at Intertel were almost all veterans of the government, including CIA officers, IRS investigators, and customs agents.
Intertel developed a new system of high-resolution closed-circuit television cameras for its casino customers. Intertel installed them to help casino security forces monitor the action at gaming tables. Were employees pilfering cash? Were players cheating? The cameras could tell. “The quality of the pictures was excellent,” recalls Healy. “You could look at the customers and tell if they had real freckles or fake freckles.”