UNFINISHED BUSINESS PRESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200140002-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 20, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: September 24, 1976
• Content Type: NSPR

Approved For Release 200
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Before getting on with the rest of the American cen-
tury there are a few pieces of unfinished business to
be cleared up. To wit: why did the Watergate burglars
want to tap Larry O'Brien's phone? Why did Howard
Hughes give $100,000 to Bebe Reboso for Richard
Nixon? What were the terms of .Hughes' arrangement
with the Mafia in Las Vegas? Why did the CIA- give
Hughes a zillion-dollar contract for the Glomar Ex-
plorer? Was Deep Throat working for the CIA? Did the
CIA have a case officer monitoring the Plumbers? Did
someone blow up the plane carrying E. Howard Hunt's
wife? Why were Hunt and Liddy planning to crack
Hank Greenspun's safe in Las Vegas? Did the CIA
put a tap on Judith Excer's' phone in October, 1960?
Why did Howard Hughes neglect to leave a will, when
he had frequently declared a plan to'leave his fortune
to the Hughes Medical Institute? What is the CIA's re-
?lation to the Hughes empire now that Hughes is dead?
For that matter, why did the CIA deal with Hughes,
a man whose loyalty it could not check? Why did the
CIA allow Robert Maheu to tell Hughes that the CIA
had asked Mahen to organize a. Mafia operation to kill
Castro? Who killed Maheu's instruments, Sam Giancana
and John Roselli? Why did Lyndon Johnson believe that
Castro killed John F. Kennedy? Why did the CIA ne-
glect to investigate the presence of certain Cuban agents
in the United States at the t,
tion?? Why did Jaynes McCord ask Bernard Fensterwalc
to represent him during the Watergate hearings,. whe
Fensterwald was well-known as the chairman of th
Committee to Investigate Assassinations? Was Franz
Sturgis telling the truth when he told UPI in July tha
Jack Ruby met Fidel Castro 1.0 weeks before Dallas)
Why are there so many questions of this sort? How
are we going to answer them? What is their hidden
meaning?
The literature on these matters is staggering: literally
hundreds of books, hundreds of pages of citations in
the New York Times Index, tens of thousands of pages
of Congressional hearing transcripts, scores of green-and--
gray-covered Senate and House committee reports, thou-
ands of CIA.and FBI documents, thousands of entries
in the Reader's Guide-to Periodical Literature, thousands -
of unindexed articles in newspapers and magazines. It
would take a team of trained researchers a year just to
gather it all. It would take a decade to skim it. It would
take a lifetime to absorb and.see it whole._It might take
forever to understand it.
But if you haven't got a lifetime to. give to this
undertaking, you can still get the flavor of its rich
complexity by reading one book, J. Anthony Lukas's
Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Year.e, and
three recent articles: Howard Koh.n's "Strange Bed-
fellows: The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection" in -
Rolling Stone of May 20, Norman Mailer's "A Harlot
High and Low: Reconnoitering Through the Secret
Government" in New York of August 16, and Larry
DuBois's and Laurence Gonzales's "The Puppet and the
Puppet masters" in the September Playboy. These authors
have all muted the existing literature :Lukas.and Kohn
have strip-mined it-but -they have returned to the
surface with a very great many more questions than
answers. Their only common. conclusion is that there .
is more here than meets the eye.
But what? Their diagrams look like highway reaps,
in which every throughway and back country dirt track
eventually meet. There are facts in plenty to support
any conjecture. In the land of Kennedy-Nixon-Hughes-
CIA-Cuba-Mafia you can get . from anywhere to any..
where. Sometimes the route is broad and well-marked,
sometimes circuitous. Our cartographer-authors have
done heroic work, mapping the intercoiniections of power
Approved
and money in Darkest America., but they are.far from
agreeing why there are so many unanswered questions
and what is their hidden meaning.
One despairs of finding the answer, but one does not
want to give up either. It comes down to being a per--
sonal matter. The fact that Hughes, Nixon, the' Mafia,
the CIA and all their various partners, allies, friends,
agents and heirs want us to sigh and .shrug and leave
there alone spurs us on. In addition, the issues are im-
For Release 2004/10/1j3?1b( Fbk16Y1M?9n4423flto Nixon for
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