The former CIA case officer won't call it a bribe, but he says Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, offered 20 years ago to ensure the CIA officer would "not have to worry about his retirement" if he would pass on derogatory information about a business enemy of Bennett.
"I just ignored it and let it pass," Martin Lukoskie, who is now retired from the CIA, told the Deseret News.The offer was disclosed this week in The Nation magazine, which found a 20-year-old memo mentioning it among the boxes of CIA documents just released that deal, often indirectly, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
While Lukoskie won't call the
offer a bribe, The Nation's Washington editor, David Corn, does. He wrote that it paints the picture of "Bennett trying to bribe a government employee to obtain dirt on a political enemy" long before his election as a senator last year.
However, Bennett issued a short statement Wednesday, saying, "If Lukoskie thinks I offered him any kind of inducement, his memory is playing tricks on him. After all, this conversation took place 20 years ago. The fact is I didn't and wouldn't."
Back in the early 1970s, Lukos-kie was assigned as the CIA case officer to Bennett, who then had just bought the public relations firm of Mullen & Co. Besides its regular business, it provided cover for CIA agents worldwide by claiming them as employees.
Lukoskie said he recalls that during a lunch with Bennett - whose largest client was billionaire Howard Hughes - that the future senator was interested in obtaining data about Robert Maheu, a former Hughes lieutenant who had a falling out and was suing Hughes.
"He looked at me and said, `Anybody who gives me derogatory information about Bob Maheu will not have to worry about his retirement,' " Lukoskie said.
"He was dead serious," he added. "I wouldn't call it a bribe. It was an offer, and the way it came through to me was he was talking about money . . . and that he would want me to pass on the information to others."
Lukoskie said the topic came up because Bennett found that Lukoskie had known Maheu when they both worked for the FBI.
Lukoskie said he ignored the offer and let it pass. But he reported it to his superior as an example of how he questioned whether the agency could trust Bennett. He said that superior - who attended the same church as he and Bennett - told Bennett about it, much to Lukoskie's surprise and chagrin.
Besides Lukoskie's 20-year-old memory of the incident, it is also mentioned in a 1974 memo detailing closed-door testimony given by several CIA agents, including Lukoskie, to the Senate committee investigating the Watergate scandal.
Bennett had become involved in Watergate because one of his employees, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, had planned much of the Watergate break-in from his office adjacent to Bennett's, and Bennett later relayed some messages to the White House for Hunt.
That memo said Lukoskie questioned how much Bennett could be trusted, especially because of "Bennett's suggestion that Lukoskie would be well taken care of if he could assist in getting unfavorable information on Mr. Maheu."
Lukoskie said he had read Bennett's testimony to the Watergate committee and didn't totally trust it. "I had reservations about Bob," he said. "I didn't feel like he always leveled with me."
Corn said the memo was likely in the JFK files because of the mentions about Maheu - who some feel was a middleman between the CIA and the mob in plots to kill Fidel Castro. Some theorized Cubans helped plot to kill JFK in retaliation.
It was the second memo The Nation disclosed in two weeks from the JFK files that hurt Bennett. The first was a 1973 memo from another CIA officer saying that "Hunt early on had informed Bennett of the existence of the (White House) `plumbers' group as well as the projected plan to break into the safe of (Las Vegas Sun publisher) Hank Greenspun."
Bennett dismissed those as old and disproven charges.
In stories about his Watergate ties before Bennett's election last year, he consistently maintained that he had no foreknowledge of the Watergate break-in. He said he did pass on an inquiry from Hunt to Hughes officials about whether they would be interested in information in Greenspun's safe if obtained.
He also said he once agreed to help recruit political spies but never actually did; he helped a BYU student get a job where the student ended up as a political spy for Hunt's operatives and was told by that student that Hunt and others planned a break-in - but was unsure where and how accurate the data was. He also advised the student to do nothing illegal and to leave Hunt's employment.
Bennett had also acknowledged lying to the media about his ties with the CIA to preserve the cover his company offered; and acknowledged he studied for Hughes officials what would be involved in bugging the office of a man who wrote a biography about Hughes - but said such bugging never actually occurred.