Reply #86: Playboy: The Puppet and the Puppetmasters

[MinM]

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black408b.mp3

SNIP...

Hughes was extremely anxious to get himself into an alliance with the CIA that would protect him from investigation by other Government agencies.
-- ROBERT MAHEU

A CIA cover organization is a strange and very useful thing. It's like having a magic box. You can put things in and you can take things out. You can take things out that you never put in and you can put things in that will never come out. Or you can get into the box yourself and go away somewhere -- or perhaps ago away forever. If the box is large enough, you can put an entire country inside it and no one will ever know.

The Hughes organization is such a box, the biggest and most useful of its kind. According to information given to us by a highly placed intelligence source, there is nothing else like it in the world, as far as intelligence fronts go. It is no secret to most foreign governments, most of which stand in awe of its ineffable, elegant vastness. From within this magic box, an important part of the United States' covert intelligence operations emanate. But by 1971, it had begun to crack. So much had been put into the box that things were beginning to come out. The magic was fading.

Hughes's alliance with the agency started as early as 1949. Only two years after the CIA got its charter, it began giving contracts to Hughes.

April 1, 1975, The Washington Post reported, "Hughes Aircraft has been mentioned as a potential hotbed of interrelationships with the CIA." The New York Times on March 20, 1975, quoted high Government officials as saying the HAC had been building satellites for intelligence purposes for years and "employs a number of high-ranking CIA and military men." As early as 1960, Maheu had Hughes's blessing in taking on one of the agency's most sensitive assignments: the assassination of Fidel Castro. Maheu worked out several unsuccessful plots with gangsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

The affinity between Hughes and the agency was natural: America's most secretive billionaire and the most secretive part of America's Government. In a way, Hughes was a kind of modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric genius who pushed to the cutting edge of the 20th Century, whether in early talking movies or in space satellites. Just after his death was reported, Newsweek quoted a top-ranking Washington intelligence official as saying, "Hughes gravitated into areas that other people refused to go into or didn't believe in." HAC pioneered the synchronous-orbit satellite, built the first Early Bird satellite and the Surveyor spacecraft that made the first soft landing on the moon and sent pictures back to NASA in preparation for the manned moon shots. Without Hughes's signal-amplifying microwave tubes, pictures from Mars would have been impossible. HAC is responsible for three-dimensional radar that is used for tracking hundreds of planes simultaneously. And the world's first operating laser arced across the labs of HAC. Laser weapons are now one of the hottest topics within the Pentagon -- they may someday make nuclear weapons obsolete. The secrets of laser-weapon technology are so closely guarded that Pentagon insiders will discuss it only in state-of-the-art terms.


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http://www.playboy.com/features/features/puppetmasters/

Thank you, Octafish
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3788027&mesg_id=3788328

and Jim DiEugenio (Show #408: Jan 22nd, 2009)
http://www.blackopradio.com/archives2009.html