Media Mayhem

Instead of shutting down Al-Sadr's newspaper, which resulted in the Shiite uprising, the military brass in Iraq should have had Mike Lacey, the owner of New Times, Inc., buy the publication. Under Lacey, the paper would haven't even mentioned the U.S. occupation. If you look at any of his dozen newspapers in the U.S., you couldn't even tell there was war going on. Undoubtedly, Lacey would have started advertising prostitutes in the Baghdad New Times, which could have been used to further distract the fundamentalist Islamic clerics from their anti-American agenda. Instead of whacking U.S. solidiers, they would have tortured and killed their own women.

When I last met John Ross in 1998, he was running as a maverick Democrat for Rep. Jim Talent's seat. He lost, of course. Ross was also a fledgling writer, having self-published his 800-page, first novel Unintend ed Consequences. The antagonists of the book are federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents who are intent upon burning the Constition, raping and pillaging. The book came out in the wake of the right-wing Ruby Ridge, Waco backlash. Ros s now clai m s he's sold 60,000 hardcover copies of UC, as he likes to call it. And he's supposedly, working on a sequel. Meanwhile, since the Missouri legislature legalized concealed weapons this session, Ross is busy giving lessons on how to kill people with extreme prejudice.

excerpted from a Miami Herald editorial:

"Buried in the Legislature's budget bill is a proposal by Gov. Jeb Bush to save $700,000 by privatizing elevator inspections. Officials at the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation told The St. Petersburg Times that private companies already do 87 percent of the state's inspections. So what's the catch? Turns out William ``Bucky'' Bush, the governor's uncle and a fundraiser for George W. Bush's presidential campaig n, owns a 12.5 percent interest in National Elevator Inspection Services of St. Louis. Could that have anything to do with the governor's proposal? No, no, of course not. ``That whole line of thinking is very annoying and very insulting,'' says Bucky. But if it happens, he'll locate an office in the state and go after the business, he adds. Definitely a man headed to the top.""

"Either you're crooked or you're not crooked, I guess is the way to put it bluntly. Either you're somebody who can be bought, or you're somebody who's running on principle. My job is to convince the American people that I'm a man running on principle." --George W. Bush, April 28, 2000



British Prime Minister Tony Blair grinned sheepishly in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, as Would-Be President George W. Bush proclaimed him to be "a stand-up guy, as we say down in Crawford (Texas)."

Crawford is the site of Bush's 1,700-acre ranch. "Stand up guy" is mob slang for somebody who you can depend upon.

Now they say the war is over but I think it's just begun.

Penny Evans by Steve Goodman




Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21
A young widow in the war that's being fought in Viet Nam
And I have two infant daughters and I do the best I can
Now they say the war is over, but I think it's just begun

I remember I was seventeen on the da y I met young Bill
At his father's grand piano, we'd play old Heart and Soul
Well, I only knew the left hand part and he the right so well
He's the only boy I ever slept with and the only one I will

It's first we had a baby girl and we had two good years
It was next the 1-A notice came and we parted without tears
So it's nine months from our last good night our second babe
appears
So it's ten months and a telegram confirming all our fears

And now every month I get a check from an Army bureaucrat
And it's every month I tear it up and mail the damn thing back
Do you think that makes it all right, do you think I'd fall for that
And you can keep your bloody money, it won't bring my Billy back

I never cared for politics and speeches I don't understand
And likewise never took no charity from any living man
But tonight there's fifty thousand gone in this unhappy land
and fifty thousand "Heart and Soul's" being played with just one
hand

Oh my name is Penny Evans and my age is 21
A young widow in the war that's being fought in Viet Nam
And I have two infant daughters and thank God I have no sons.
Now they say the war is over, but I think it's just begun

On April 15, tax day, Engineered Support Systems Inc., a St. Louis-based defense contractor announced that it had received $10.9 million in contracts from the U.S. Air Force.

The contract announcement come s as the death count among U.S. servicemen and women in Iraq approaches 100 for the first two weeks of April.

For those behind the frontlines, the war is a "win-win" situation. Last year, Engineered Support made $573 million mainly from military contracts. This year the company's revenue is expected to grow to $780 million. Who serves to gain from this war profiteering? William "Bucky" Bush, a director of Engineered Support and uncle of George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, the families of enlisted men and women are being forced into bread lines because military pay is not adequate, according to a segment that appeared last night on Now, the PBS current affairs program.

George W.'s uncle, William "Bucky" Bush, sits on the board of St. Louis-based Engineered Support, a big-time defense contractor. Engineered Support's revenue from military contracts is expected to grow by hundreds of millions of dollars this year. Besides Bush, the board is stacked with retired military generals. The company was founded by Blues Hockey fan Mike Shanahan. Keep in mind that many U.S. military families are struggling to keep food on the table because they aren't paid a living wage.

Uncle Bucky and MK-ULTRA
George W. Bush's uncle -- William H.T. "Bucky" Bush -- lives here in St. Louis. He
used to be the president of Boatmen's Bank. When Reagan was shot in March 1981,
the St. Louis Globe-Democrat had reporter Rick Stoff do a story on "Bucky's"
reaction to the assassination attempt. It remains one of my all-time favorite weird clips.

First, there's the headline: "Bush is devoted to Re agan; `it's got to be terrible for him,'
brother says.

Then there's the cutline under Bucky's mugshot: "William H.T. "Bucky" Bush,
president of Boatmen's Bank of St. Louis, said he was trying not to think about the
po sibility that his brother, George, could become president."

But the best part was tucked at the end of the story itself:

"... As an example of the unstable personalities responsible for assassination attempts,
Bush offered a flier forwarded to him Monday after copies were left on cars during
Saturday night's performance at the St. Louis Repertory (formerly Loretto-Hilton)
Theatre in Webster Groves. Bush is a member of the theater's board of directors.

"The printed sheets, labeled `WARNING,' contained a man's rambling account of how
he was a target of a `subliminal learning/mind control operation conducted by the U.S.
government with the cooperation of `local law enforcement agen cies, corporations,
universtities, colleges and certain private citizens.'

"The sheet said the man had been a target of the operation since 1977 in attempts to
turn him into a homosexual.

"He listed government offic ials and public institutions that have allegedly partcipated in
attempts to control his mind, and concluded that a possiuble motive was the
`assassination of the president,' from which St. Louis might profit because the next
pre sident would be George Bush, `whose brother heads a bank in St. Louis.'

"Bucky Bush said he had never heard of the man, who listed his name and address on
the sheet, and referred to him as 'some three-dollar bill.'

"When a reporter asked for a copy of the sheet, Bush suggested he take the original. 'I
don't want the damn thing.'"

My MLK page resurrected courtesy of the Wayback Machine:
Full text available by clicking here.

MAKING A KILLING

May 20, 1998

In the final chapter of Killing the Dream, Gerald Posner takes the reader inside of the mind of James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. This is no small trick considering the author never interviewed Ray, who died shortly after publication of the book in A pril.

OVERREACHING REASON

April 29, 1998

With the death of James Earl Ray last week, mainstream news organizations have intimated that the convicted assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. somehow took all knowledge of the crime with him to the gr ave; that nothing further can be learned.

REASONABLE DOUBT

April 2, 1997

On March 13, 1969, three days after pleading guilty, James Earl Ray wrote to Judge Preston Battle, claiming he had been coerced into admitting responsibility for the assassinatio n of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis the previous year.

CASE NOT CLOSED

April 2, 1997

Mark Lane, former attorney for James Earl Ray, has spent much of his career questioning the official version of events concerning the assassinations of Pre si dent John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

A CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATOR FINGERS JAMES EARL RAY

April 8, 1992

Lt. Conrad "Pete" Baetz, 45, has served with the Madison County Sheriff's Department for 21 years. In 1978, Baetz took a leave of absence from local law enforcement duties to work as a congressional investigator for the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA).

THE TRAIL OF MLK'S ASSASSIN LEADS TO ST. LOUIS

April 8, 1992

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinat io ns (HSCA) concluded there was a St. Louis-based conspiracy to murder the Rev. Martin Luther King. Evidence gathered by the HSCA has been sealed until 2027. James Earl Ray, the convicted murderer of King, claims the congressional investigation itself was a cover-up.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Like any good conspiracy theory, there is a subplot to the conclusions of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations(HSCA).

THE SETTINGS FOR AN ASSASSINATION PLOT

A two-family flat at 1115 Claytonia Terrace: The sit e of the 1979 car bombing death of convicted contract murderer John Paul Spica. St. Louis connections are unresolved.

-

JESSE JAMES
BY C.D. STELZER

Bill D. Miller, the circuit court clerk of Franklin County, Mo. still keeps Case No. 1095 close at hand because of the frequent requests he receives for it. The dogeared cardboard poach contains a name change petition filed in 1950 by J. Frank Dalton, who was then 102 years old. Dalton claimed to be Jesse Woodson James, the notorious 19th-century outlaw. New evidence may soon be available to show whether Dalton’s bizarre tale is worthy of any credence.

James E. Starrs, a law professor and forensic specialist, resurrected the debate over the Jesse James legend last month, when he led a team of experts from George Washington University in the exhumation of the outlaw’s presumed grave at the Mt. Olivette cemetery in Kearney, Mo. Seventeen descendants of the bandit consented to the disinterment to disprove longstanding accusations that James did not die on April 3, 1882, as has been traditionally accepted.

"We recovered 15 teeth and large portions of the skull and the main bones in the arms and legs," says Derik Regensburger, a 25-year-old research assistant for Starrs. None of the remains have undergone conclusive DNA tests yet, Regensburger says. When the DNA from the bones is compared to samples taken from two of James’ living relatives, it should determine whether the outlaw is buried in his own grave.

Meanwhile, what the scholarly bodysnatchers’ have unearthed has only added to the mystery. Instead of finding a metal casket as expected, the researchers uncovered the cavity of what once may have been a wooden coffin. In addition, a .31-caliber bullet from a Navy Colt revolver was found inside the grave, Regensburger says.

In 1882, reports indicated Bob Ford, the self-proclaimed assassin of Jesse James, murdered the famed outlaw by shooting him in the back of the head at close range with a .44-caliber revolver. The crime took place at James’ residence in St. Joseph, Mo. Regensburger surmises that the smaller slug may be from a non-fatal chest wound that James received earlier in his freebooting career. Starrs is expected to release an interim report on his findings Sept. 22 at a historical society meeting in Lexington, Ky.

Regensburger described July 6, the first day of the exhumation, as a "zoo." "The interest was beyond what any of us would have expected," he says.

The young law student’s reaction to the crowd at the exhumation might have amused the late Lester Dill, the original owner of Meramec Caverns in Stanton, Mo. Dill understood the allure of Jesse James and possessed the instincts of P.T. Barnum. When he opened the cave as a tourist attraction in 1935, nearby Route 66 virtually guaranteed commercial success, but Dill didn’t rely only on the cave’s natural beauty to spur ticket sales.

After Frank O. Hall, a journalist in Lawton, Okla., reported that the real Jesse James was still alive, his subsequent promotions of Dalton gained the attention of Rudy Turilli, Dill’s son-in-law. Turilli arranged through Hall to have Dalton moved to a cabin on the cave grounds in 1949. Dalton, who was bedridden with a broken hip by this time, still managed to chew tobacco, cuss and fire a six-shooter indiscriminately on occasion. His long white hair and beard gave him the appearance of Wild Bill Hickok. For years afterwards, barn roofs throughout the Midwest enticed travelers to visit the caverns by pitching it as Jesse James’ hideout.

Turilli estimated that he traveled more than 98,000 miles and spent $35,000 investigating the Dalton case. In the process, he tracked down a number of elderly witnesses who stated for the record that Dalton was indeed Jesse James.

One of his attempts to gain exposure involved hauling Dalton to New York City, where the old man appeared on a nationally broadcasted program, "We the People." On the air, Turilli offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove Dalton was an imposter. After returning to Missouri, Turilli had Dalton file a petition in Franklin County Circuit Court to legally change his name to Jesse Woodson James. In response, Jesse E. James, the outlaw’s son, who was an attorney in California, filed an opposing motion.

The hearing took place before 80-year-old Judge Ransom J. Breuer on March 10, 1950. Among those to testify on behalf of Dalton’s request was 109-year-old Col. James Davis, a Confederate Civil War veteran from Nashville, Tenn. His testimony was backed by that of 111-year-old John Trammell, a black man from Guthrie, Okla., who claimed to have once been the cook for the James gang. Davis died in Stanton, Mo. the day after he testified at the hearing.

Turilli paraded out a cast of other elderly men who also backed Dalton’s contention. Among them was 95-year-old John William Pierce, who claimed to have been one of the first to arrive at the murder scene in 1882. Pierce swore in a notarized affidavit that he was acquainted with both James and another outlaw Charlie Bigelow, and that the murder victim was most assuredly the latter. Retired Judge Henry Priest of St. Louis, then 91 years of old, said Dalton appeared to be the same man who had rented a house from him in Nashville in 1881 using the last name of Howard. James is known to have employed the alias Thomas Howard.

Three witnesses for Jesse E. James, the son of the outlaw, rebutted Dalton’s claims. The octogenarians from St. Joseph all stated that they had identified James’ body at the time of his death.

When the hearing ended, Judge Breuer ruled the issue was beyond his authority. "There is nothing for this court to pass on," said Breuer. "This court has been called on to change a man’s name where there is nothing to change, because he never changed it, and by law it has never been changed from Jesse James to anything else. If he isn’t (who) he professes to be, then he is trying to perpetrate a fraud upon this court. If he is Jesse James, ... then my suggestion would be that he retreat to his rendezvous and ask the good God above to forgive him, so he may pass away in peace when his time comes to go."

Eventually, J. Frank Dalton returned to Granbury, Texas, where he died Aug. 15, 1951. Until his death, he continued to assert that Bigelow was actually the man who was murdered in his stead back in 1882. According to the theory, members of the James gang suspected Bigelow of being an informant for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. At the time, a $5,000 dead- or-alive bounty had been placed on James by Missouri Gov. Thomas T. Crittenden. Crittenden solicited the reward money from railroads and express companies with the help of a lawyer for Wabash line in St. Louis.

Supporters of Dalton’s version of events assert that Bigelow disappeared immediately after the shooting never to be heard from again. The conspiracy is said to have been planned by James with the assistance of Charlie and Bob Ford, Gov. Crittenden, Kansas City police commissioner Henry H. Craig and Clay County Sheriff James H. Timberlake, among others. Dalton’s confidant Col. Davis alleged that James contributed substantially to Crittenden’s 1880 gubernatorial campaign. In return, Crittenden later allowed James to fake his own death. The governor then supposedly pocketed most of the reward money. Bob Ford the trigger-man who killed Bigelow is said to have only collected small portion of the bounty.

A flurry of events preceeded the assassination. As pressure increased to halt James’ 16-year crime spree, gang member Dick Liddil turned himself in to authorities, after murdering James’ cousin Wood Hite. Liddil likely killed Hite over a love triangle that included Martha Bolton -- Bob Ford’s sister. Bolton is suspected of negotiating Liddil’s surrender.with Gov. Crittenden. At the time, John Bugler, another gang member, was on trial in Independence for the 1881 train robbery. The story is further complicated by intermarriage. Hite, Ford, Bigelow and Zerelda Mims James -- the outlaw’s wife -- were all said to be cousins of James.

Doubts over who was murdered on April 3, 1882, at house on the corner of 13th and Lafayette streets in St. Joseph, Mo., began almost immediately after the shooting. On April 4, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported: "Mrs. James strenuously denied the identity of her husband for some time, but finally broke down and acknowledged the truth." Other accounts describe a similar reaction by the outlaw’s mother.

One of those who believes Dalton was Jesse James is Joe Wood. The retired St. Louis Globe-Democrat photographer, who was a close friend of both Dill and Turilli, published his recollections in the Washington Missourian newspaper in 1989. His story has since been reproduced in a booklet and is available at Meramec Caverns. Wood’s version mirrors that Turilli’s account, with a few noted exceptions. The moment of Wood’s total conversion came when he witnessed the reunion of Col. Davis and Dalton. "In that brief exchange," wrote Wood, "something happened to me. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it was the expression in their eyes, the sincere tone in their voices. I began to perspire and could only say to myself: `My God it’s true.’"

Carl W. Breihan, on the other hand, has never been convinced of Dalton’s authenticity. "Wood ... just brings out contemporary stuff that people said back in the 1950s. He can believe what he wants, it’s his opinion," says Breihan, who has written four books on Jesse James. The former St. Louis County councilman, labels the Crittenden conspiracy theory as nonsense. Furthermore, Bigelow, the purported fall guy, disappeared because he died in 1880 -- two years prior to James, Breihan says. Breihan contends that James shot off the middle finger of his left hand as a young man, and in 1950 Dalton still had all five digits. According to Breihan, Trammell, the 111-year-old man, who claimed to be the James gang’s cook, later recanted his testimony. Breihan suspects that more than one witness was paid to testify in Dalton’s behalf.

Whatever the DNA results may indicate Jesse James will remain an American folk hero to many, mainly because he died before the future could catch up with him. His older brother Frank, however, may be regarded as a modern anti-hero.

Both men participated as Confederate guerrillas in the Civil War. After their defeat, the James Brothers found that their irregular military status prevented them from readily receiving amnesty. The denial of constitutional rights coupled with the abuses of the carpetbaggers made reassimilating difficult for many of Quantrill’s raiders. In some ways, the subsequent bank and train robberies were considered a continuation of the war against financial interests of the North. The James brothers found political support from former Confederate Gen. Jo Shelby, and their crimes were romanticized by journalist John Newman Edwards, a Southern sympathizer. Their pro-slavery sentiments were often overshadowed by the violence of the Jayhawkers and Pinkertons who opposed them.

For Jesse this all ended in 1882. After surrendering to Gov. Crittenden, Frank James stood trial the following year in Gallatin, Mo. He was ultimately acquitted in a highly politicized trial, that included the drunken testimony of Gen. Shelby.

In his later years, the Frank James became a parody of his former self. He was exhibited at county fairs and used as a starter at horse races. He sold shoes for a while in Nevada, Missouri, and worked for a clothing company in Dallas. For a brief time, the Shakespearian-quoting outlaw acted in Vaudeville. In 1903, he promoted a Wild West show for a Chicago brewer, with his former partner in crime Cole Younger.

From 1894 to 1901, Frank James was the doorman at Ed Butler’s Standard Theater, a burlesque house here. Butler didn’t need to rob banks or trains, he was the first leader of organized crime in St. Louis. He controlled every politician in City Hall.

Before his death in 1915, Frank James’ experiences led him to redefine the enemy. "If there is ever another war in this country, it will be between capital and labor. I mean between greed and manhood, and I’m as ready to march now in defense of American manhood as I was when a boy in defense of the South."

Frank James had entered the 20th century.



During the Gov. Warren Hearnes' two-term administration, Pipefitters Local 562 had access to the governor's office through Doc Lawler [read more].

Big Brother and the Holding Company: The World Behind Watergate
Steve Weissman, editor; Ramparts Press, 1974
pages 281, 282
"... Oil money, for example, has always found its way into politics, as much from the old corporations with chiefly international interests as from the new independents who have sprung up along the Southern rim. But it has been the latter who have been most important in Nixon's career, from such supporters as Union Oil, Superior Oil, and Texas ultra-conservative H. L. Hunt, who helped finance his early campaigns, through California right-winger Henry Salvatori, the Texas Murchison family, and at least a third of the backers in the 1952 "slush fund." In this last campaign there were some large contributions from old oil -- Richard Mellon Scaife (Gulf Oil, among other interests) gave a million dollars, the Phipps family (Texaco among others) gave $55,000 -- but (in) fact the number of domestic oil donor, rimsters or rim interests, people like Kent Smith (Lubrizol, $244,000), Francis Cappeat (Southern oil and agribusiness, $174,000), John Paul Getty (Getty Oil $97,000), Elisha Walker (Petroleum Corporation of America, $100,000), Max Fisher (Marathon Oil, $60,000), the O'Connor family (Texas Oil, $60,000), and Osea Wyatt family (Coastal States Gas $41,000)*
____________
*These figures are from the Citizens Research Foundation of Princeton, New Jersey, a group that tries to keep track of all the sources of campaign money. They are generally only estimates and often represent only a small part of what was actually given. Other major oil donors and fundraisers on the CRF lists include Arthur E. Johnson (Midwest Oil), Thomas Pappas (Esso-Pappas), the Pew family (Sun Oil), William Liedtke (Pennzoil), J. A. Vickers (Vickers Petroleum), and H.W. McCollum, Philip Kramer and J.D. Callender (Amerada Hess). ..."

1991 Hoover's Handbook: Profiles of Over 500 Major Corporations, edited by Gary Hoover, Alta Campell and Patrick J. Spain; The Reference Press Inc. ,1990
page 429

" Overview
Pennzoil, best known for its motor oil, is the 18th largest U.S. oil company, an umbrella for four wholly owned subsidiaries in the petroleum and minerals businesses.
Pennzoil Exploration and Production (PEPCO) searches for oil in Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Minnesota and the Gulf of Mexico. It has just begun to explore in Indonesia.
Pennzoil Products manufactures the nation's best-selling motor oil, with about 20 percent of the market. Golfer Arnold Palmer is the longtime spokesman in the company's commercials. Pennzoil also owns 80 percent of Jiffy Lube International, the largest franchiser of quick-lube operations, with more than 1,000 independently owned outlets. Pennzoil is selling its Purolator automotive products business.
Pennzoil Sulfur extracts sulfur in far West Texas, mostly to make fertilizer. Another subsidiary , Richmond Development, oversees real estate and mineral rights, including a gold and silver deposit in Borneo.

"When the post WWII oil boom in West Texas attracted J. Hugh and Bill Liedtke and a Connecticut scion named George Bush. Anxious to make their fortunes, they formed Zapata Petroleum. Zapata hit big with more than 120 producing wells in the Jameson Field in Coke County.
Zapata, expanded with a subsidiary that drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1959 Bush bought out the subsidiary and moved to Houston, where he later embarked on a political career that continues in the White House. The Liedtkes set their sights on South Penn Oil in Oil City, Penn. -- a rusty relic from the 1911 dissolution of Standard Oil. Enlisting the support of oilman J. Paul Getty, the Liedtkes took control of South Penn in 1963, merged it with Zapata, renamed it Pennzoil in honor of the lubricant it sold and moved the headquarters to Houston.
In 1965, J. Hugh Liedtke engineered the historic takeover of Shreveport-based United Gas Pipeline, 5 times the size of Pennzoil. Blessed with a large pipeline system and vast mineral interests, United Gas was beset with lethargic management.
Using takeover tactic that would break ground for a generation of corporate raiding, Liedtke launched a hostile cash tender offer. Pennzoil invited United Gas shareholders to sell their shares at a price higher than the market price.
Shareholders tendered 5 times the number of shares that Pennzoil wanted to buy. Undaunted, the Liedtkes raised the additional funds to buy 42 percent of United Gas stock. Pennzoil spun off a scaled-down United in 1974.
In the late 1960s Pennzoil pioneered financing of oil exploration with the use of subsidiaries (with colorful acronyms like POGO and PLATO) that raised money for speculative drilling by selling stock directly to the public. Shareholders in the subsidiaries were given some security with rights to Pennzoil stock if the risky drilling proved unsuccessful.
In 1983 J. Hugh Liedtke hoped to purchase Getty Oil, the company begun by his old benefactor and thought he had a deal. Texaco bought Getty instead. Pennzoil sued and in 1985 a Texas jury awarded a record $10.53 billion in damages. Texaco sought refuge in bankruptcy court, emerging only after it had settled with Pennzoil for $3 billion.
Liedtke stepped down as CEO in 1988 but remained chairman as Pennzoil determined how to spend its booty. In 1989, Pennzoil spent $2.1 billion for 8.8 percent of Chevron, but Liedtke denied that his company had a takeover in mind. With Liedtke's swashbuckling history at Pennzoil, Chevron wasn't convinced and filed suit in 1989 to keep him at bay. Much of the suit was dismissed in 1990, and in July of that year Pennzoil announced that it intended to buy more of Chevron.
"Who
Chairman J. H. Liedtke, age 68
President and CEO James L. Pate, age 54, $269,200 pay (prior to promotion)
Group VP, Oil and Gas: William H. Schell, age 63
Group VP Sulfur: Robert Semrd, age 63, $288,900 pay
Group VP Motor Oil and Automotive Products: Richard A. Valentine, age 64, $219,200 pay
SVP Finance and Principal Financial Officer: David P. Alderson II, age 40
Auditors: Arthur Anderson & Co.
Employees: 10,700
"Where
Pennzoil Place
P.O. Box 2967, Houston, Texas 7752
Phone: 713-546-4000
FAX: 713-546-7591

Exploration and Production: Drilling in 13 states and offshore, and in four foreign countries

Products: three refineries -- Rouseville, Pa; Shreveport, La.; and Roosevelt, Utah. Pennzoil motor oil sold internationally

Sulfur: Mining in Culberson County, Texas; processing in Galveston, Texas and in Antwerp Belgium.

Richmond Development: Acreage in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Louisiana and New Mexico; gold and silver deposits in Borneo. "

Conspiracies, Cover Ups and Crimes by Jonathan Vankin, Dell Publishing, 1992
page 233-34
"Bush belongs to Skull and Bones, group "tapped" every year from Yale University's junior class. There are seven "Senior Societies" at Yale with long traditions of cornball cloak and dagger, college style, but Skull and Bones is the elite of the elite. Bush was a 1947 inductee. The society is more than just a glorified frat. It has a fat financial portfolio and a summer retreat on Deer Island available to Bonesmen for life. Most important, though, it provides a network of support and cooperation for some of the most powerful people in the U.S.
Bush is the second Bones president [now third, counting his son]. William Howard Taft was the first. Other heavy-hitting Bonesmen include multinational business demigod Averill P. Harriman; Rhode Island senator John Chafee; one-time Nazi-sympathizer Henry P. Luce, who founded Time magazine; and numerous top-of-the-heap corporate and legal figures. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who has been Bush's most dogged pursuer on the Iran-Contra drug-smuggling trail, is also a Bonesman, oddly enough. McGeorge Bundy, an architect of the Vietnam War, is Skull and Bones, too, as is Robert Gow, president of Zapata Oil, which was Bush's company in the 1960s.
"It should hardly be a revelation that the roster of the CIA is speckled with Bonesmen. Besides Bush, a partial list would have to mention William Bundy, another Vietnam booster and vet of both the CIA and OSS. An enthusiastic proponent of "counterinsurgency" Bundy advocated preserving "liberal values" through "the use of the full range of U.S. power, including if necessary its shady applications. Other Skull and Bones former intelligence agents include the aforementioned William F. Buckley, whose brother James is also a Bonesman and baker of CIA covert activity in Chile (though not CIA himself) and William Sloane Coffin. ...

The Mafia, CIA and George Bush: The Untold Story of America's Greatest Financial Debacle by Pete Brewton; Spi Books, 1992
pages 137-38
The same month that MCorp was formed Bank of the Southwest gobbled up Capital National Bank in Houston in the largest bank merger in Texas History to that date. Capital National Bank had been formed in 1965 in Houston and in 1969 joined a Swiss bank, Paravicini Bank, to start a new Swiss bank called Bank for Investment and Credit Berne.
The chairman of the new bank was J.F. Paravicini, the head of Paravicini Bank, while the vice chairman became L.F. McCollum, Sr., chairman of Capital National. Other investors in the new bank included Boeing in Seattle, Seagrams in Montreal, Minute Maid in Zurich (an affiliate of Coca-Cola), the London subsidiary of Brown and Root [Harriman's investment banking firm? No, the Houston-based construction company, George and Herman Brown] headed by ] … and Schlesinger Organization of London and Johannesburg. One of the directors of Capital National Bank was George Bush's close friend and trustee of his blind trust, William Stamps Farish III, then an officer in Underwood Nehaus.
Another director of Capital National at the time the Swiss affiliate formed was J. Hugh Liedtke, who was Bush's original partner in Zapata Petroleum back in the 1950s and later chairman of Pennzoil.
Shortly after the union of Capital National Bank and Paravicini Bank, Paravicini's owner was caught helping Billy Mellon Hitchcock (the oil heir, LSD freak and associate of Seymour Lazar) hide and launder $67 million of Hitchcock's money, which included proceeds from the manufacture and sale of LSD. Paravicini was also involved in fraudulent stock transactions with Hitchcock and was eventually forced to sell Paravicini Bank. After Parvicini got into trouble with Hitchcock, Capital National Bank continued on in the Swiss bank, the Paravicini's travails were never mentioned in the Houston press. ...

page 378 [Liedtke]
One of George Bush's closest friends, with whom he started Zapata Petroleum back in the 1950s, is Hugh Liedtke, the chairman of Pennzoil. Liedtke is mentioned in this book, in connection with a Houston bank. Liedtke is also a member of the board of directors of Paramount Communications, the parent company of Simon & Shuster.
Paramount Communications is the successor company to the giant conglomerate Gulf + Western. One Gulf + Western's original founders was Houston businessman John Duncan. Duncan and his brother, Charles, the former Secretary of Energy and before that Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Carter Administration, were involved in the family's business, Duncan Coffee Company, which was merged with Coca-Cola. Charles subsequently became president of Coca-Cola, the company that later would buy 700,000 acres in Belize with none other than Walter Mischer. ....

Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK by Mark Lane; Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991
pages 330-32
"... As the Iran-Contra testimony revealed, Bush routinely keeps a diary of plausible deniability, with the skill employed by a crooked accountant who maintains two sets of corporate book, one of them cooked. In 1976, when Bush was appointed Director of the CIA, questions raised about his assignment to so high and secret a post since what was publicly known of his background did not seem to provide experience warranting the position.
(Joseph) McBride disclosed a Nov. 29, 1963 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, to the State Department. It was entitled "Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963." It stated that on November 23, 1963, while Oswald was in police custody and available for interrogation about his affiliation with agencies of the United States government, FBI Special Agent W.T. Forsyth and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" about potential problems related to the assassination. McBride states, "A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine operations.
During 1988, Bush responded to McBride's charges through a spokesperson, denied that he had been associated with the CIA before he was named its director in 1976. Subsequently the CIA said that the George Bush who had been briefed by the DIA and the FBI the day after the assassination was George William Bush, not George Herbert Walker Bush. There the matter might have ended, a footnote to a complex conundrum, had McBride not persisted. He located George William Bush, a lower level researcher, who denied that either the FBI or DIA had briefed him.
The work assignment of George William Bush, who had been employed by the CIA for only six months during 1963 and 1964, was looking over photographs and documents unrelated to the subject matter of the briefing. ....
The subject matter of the DIA and FBI briefing of Bush on November 23, 1963, focused upon contemplated or possible unauthorized military actions against Cuba. Why would the FBI and DIA believe Bush might possess information about the unauthorized actions, which would presuppose knowledge of authorized actions? An examination of the facts surrounding the movements of George Herbert Walker Bush prior to 1963 might provide an answer.
After Bush left New Haven he moved to Texas where he entered into business arrangement with John Overbey and then Hugh and Bill Liedtke. In 1953, they formed an oil company, Zapata Petroleum Corp., with Bush starting in the now familiar role of vice president. Hugh Liedtke, the Texan [actually Liedtke was originally from Tulsa, Okla.] with knowledge of the oil business and ready access to oil money, was president.
Bush had the responsibility of providing additional funding. It was a tradition among Yalies, Bush explained that OPM, Other People's Money, was the right way to go. ... Bush returned to the East , where Uncle "Herbie" Walker was pleased to help Prescott Bush's son and urged his friends on Wall Street to do the same [Harriman, Brown & Root?]. Thus, Bush-Overbey was formed and later merged with the Liedtke family into Zapata Petroleum. With Hugh Liedtke at the helm, Zapata struck it rich, Bush sold his interest in Zapata ;then he and his wife Barbara moved to Houston, where he founded Zapata Off Shore Co., and served as its CEO from 1956 to 1964. Little is known of Bush's activities during this period. When Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the United States from the Soviet Union, he settled in Texas. A wealthy white Russian oil man, named George de Mohrenschildt, then residing in Texas befriended him. There is evidence suggesting that de Mohrenschmidt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions. De Mohrenschmidt died from a gun shot just as he was about to be questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. After his death his personal telephone book was located. It contained this entry: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland."
.... While Bush resided in Houston with Barbara and ran Zapata during 1961, the CIA planned the Bay of Pigs invasion. The top secret code name given by the CIA to plan for the invasion of Cuba, known only to a select few, was "Operation Zapata."
Col. Fletcher Prouty was responsible for securing the ordinance for the invasion. He was ordered to find two United States Navy crafts suitable for carrying men, tanks, weapons, and ammunition. His instructions were to provide equipment for 25,000 men although only approximately 1,400 were to make the initial landing. He was told that the CIA was confident that the invasion would succeed within 72 hours. ... Cuban political leaders were placed in Miami to form a government in exile and to appeal to the OAS. The OAS had been primed and was ready to act at once. ...
Prouty secured two vessels from the Navy that he had located at an U.S. Navy storage facility utilized by the military. They were sent to an inactive Naval Base near Elizabeth City, North Carolina where the colors of the U.S. Navy were painted over. Trainloads f military equipment were delivered dockside while the ships were being made seaworthy. New names were painted on the ships for their historic mission -- the launching of "Operation Zapata." The names were "Barbara" and "Houston." ...." [see articles from the Nation by Joseph McBride in the appendix to Lane's book]

Brewton, ibid
[Baker, James A III]
pgs 63-64, 165- 167

... The junior attorneys at Andrews & Kurth who worked on the lawsuit apparent wanted to file it against (Raymond) Hill and the other Mainland officers and directors. But the lawsuit was stopped at the upper-levels of that firm and at the upper levels of the Federal Savings and Lon Insurance Corporation. During this time, the U.S.Treasury Secretary was James A Baker III, today White House Chief of Staff. Baker was also the former managing partner at Andrews & Kurth and a longtime friend of Raymond Hill ...
In June 1985, after Mainland Savings had already made its disastrous deals with Howard Pulver's group and was negotiating its deal with Khashoggi, Secretary of the Treasury Baker appeared before a Senate banking subcommittee and testified of the Reagan administration's optimism about the S&L industry. "I don't think there is any cause for undue concern and I would reject any suggestion that we are in the midst of some sort of a major systematic problem with respect to any element of our financial services industry, " Baker told the senators. ...."

Palmer National Bank is located in a busy business district of the nation's capital, just three blocks north of the White House. But it is much closer to the Presidency than that in terms of its politics and people who organized and control it.
When Palmer opened its doors in June 1983, the founding chairman of its board was Stefan Halper, a conservative Republican political operative who had absolutely no banking experience, but was old hand at government wheeling and dealing and political espionage.
After Halper graduated from Stanford University and attended Oxford, he joined the Nixon White House in 1971 as a domestic policy adviser. He stayed there during Watergate and through the Ford administration, holding positions in the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Communications and the Office of the Chief of Staff.
When Halper first began working for the White House his father-in-law, Ray S. Cline, was head of the State Department's Intelligence Bureau. Cline is leading member of the CIA's old-boy's network. He had joined the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, during World War II, serving at one point in China. Other OSS veterans of the China front included E. Howard Hunt, John Singlaub , Mitch WerBell, and Paul Helliwell. (Many of this country's fiascoes that touched the CIA, including the Bay of Pigs, Watergate and Iran-Contra have involved one or more of these China OSS veterans. Cline, who was a Harvard fellow when he joined the OSS, later served as chief of CIA stations in Taiwan and Germany, and worked has way up to Deputy Director of Intelligence before joining the State Department. Exiting the department in 1973, he joined the conservative think-tank/lecture circuit group as an expert on anti-terrorism.
After the Democrats took over the White House in 1977, Stefan Halper went to work as a legislative aide to U.S. Sen. William Roth, the earlier mentioned Republican from Delaware with ties to the du Pont family. (Another Roth aide was Stephen Cass Weiland, the future attorney of Robert Corson.) Then, in 1980, Halper was named policy director of the presidential campaign of George Bush, and when Reagan won the nomination, he joined the Reagan-Bush team as a policy coordinator.
Cline, too, worked in the Bush campaign as a top foreign policy and defense adviser. "Cline boasted during the primaries that he intended to "organize [some of] my old CIA staff" to help Bush win, said a 1988 article in the Village Voice.
During the 1980 campaign, Halper worked in a select group that was trying to find out what the Carter campaign was doing. In a July 7, 1983 story by Leslie Gelb, the New York Times reported that Halper had been in charge of an operation to gather inside information on Carter's foreign policy. Halper concentrated in particular, according to the Times, n whether Carter's people might be able to pull off an "October Surprise," in getting the American hostages in Tehran released before the election, possibly thereby securing a victory for the Democrats..
The Times quoted unnamed sources as saying, "There was some CIA stuff coming from Halper, and some agency guys were hired." One former CIA official working for Halper during the campaign was Robert Gambino, who had headed the CIA's super-sensitive Office of Security. Other ex-CIA officers worked under Gambino.
In May 1984, a House subcommittee came out with a report implicating Halper in the so-called "Debategate" scandal in which inside information from the Carter administration ended up in the Reagan campaign for use in the debates between the candidates. The report stated that Halper, as Director of Policy Coordination, either received or circulated non-public information from inside the Carter campaign.
"I may have seen a few pages of it, but I can't confirm any particular subject or format, Halper told The New York Times.
The subcommittee report concluded that James A Baker III, who was in charge of the Reagan debate group, had obtained the Carter materials from Republican campaign manager William J. Casey, who went on to become Director of Central Intelligence. Casey denied that he had provided Baker with any Carter materials, but the sub-committee believed Baker because of corroboration by Baker aide Margaret Tutwiler.
The Times reported that Baker and David Gergen, who both served in the Bush campaign during the primaries, brought Halper on board the Reagan campaign staff after the Republican National Convention. When the Times attempted to contact Gergen for comment abut its story on Halper's gather Carter inside information, Gergen didn't return phone calls. Gergen, currently an editor with U.S. News & World Report, instead called Cline, who then called the Times to deny any CIA connection to the Reagan-Bush campaign.
After Reagan won the 1980 election, Halper was named to a newly created position of deputy director for the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. "State Department officials said the White House, and Mr. Gergen in particular, had applied a great deal of pressure to create this position for Mr. Halper," the Times reported.
Less than two years later Halper resigned his position to help organize Palmer National Bank.
One of the five organizers of the bank was Frederic V. Malek, another veteran on the Nixon White House. As Nixon's White House personnel chief, Malek compiled figures for Nixon on the number of Jews among top officials of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Several of these people were transferred out of their top positions. This came back to haunt Malek in September 1988, after George Bush named hi deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. He resigned this position after the Washington Post published a story about his early services for Nixon. He has, however, remained in favor with Bush, who picked him to manage the Republican National Convention in 1988 and then named him to direct the economic summit of world leaders in Houston during the summer of 1990. Malek is now the Bush-Quayle campaign manager. ...

Profits of War by Ari Ben-Menashe, Sheridan Square Press, 1992
page 71

"I was agreed that the Israelis would escort an Iranian official to the U.S. if Tehran agreed. The Iranians were desperate to try anything as long as they could receive arms from somewhere, so they agreed to send a representative. The American contingent said they would arrange an U.S. visa for the Iranian official in Germany, even though the State Department was not under their control.
We were told that the Americans would be represented at the Washington meeting by Robert McFarlane; Richard Allen; James Baker III, former campaign manager for George Bush; and Lawrence Silberman, a close friend of Bush's. The choices of McFarlane, Baker and Silberman were all understandable, considering their connections. But Allen was a mystery; he was a man with connections to the Carter administration. We did not know until McFarlane told Eitan, that Allen had a deal with the Reagan camp that assured him the position of national security adviser for Reagan. ...
As it turned out, James Baker did not attend the October 2 meeting held in the lobby of Washington's L'Enfant Plaza Hotel. But the other three were there; ..."

Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery by Robert Parry, Sheridan Square Press, 1993 [Bates, David]
pgs 182-83

"... Knight-Ridder's White House correspondent Owen Ullmann called me in early May. He wondered how I had gotten myself into such a bizarre story. Ullmann, an old friend during our days at the Associated Press in the early 1980s, said he intended to write an article establishing, once and for all, that George Bush had not gone to Paris in October 1980.
I encouraged Ullmann to try, but noted that we had hoped to put that issue to rest, too. We found clarifying the point more difficult than we had expected. Censored Secret Service records, which we had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, did show Bush's detail going to the Chevy Chase Country Club on the morning of Sunday, October 19. We put the records on the screen to buttress the president's denial of a Paris trip. But we found no independent corroboration.
Ullmann, an experienced reporter, also got conflicting accounts of Bush's activities that day. A former Bush campaign aide, David Q. Bates, thought he had played tennis with Bush that day at the Chevy Chase club. But a White House aide told Ullmann that Bush had spent the entire Sunday at home preparing for his speech that night to the Zionist Organization of America. Bush's press secretary, Peter Teeley, said he could not recall what Bush was doing, but knew he wasn't in Paris. The president, Ullmann noted in his article for the Knight-Ridder newspapers, "has not detailed his activities on the October weekend in question." So instead of solving the mystery, the Knight-Ridder article added to it. ..."

Who's Who profile
ibid, Lane, Plausible Denial, footnote
pg 330
BUSH, GEORGE HERBERT WALKER, govt re., former chmn. Republican Nat. Com.; b Milton, Mass. June 12, 1924; s Prescott Sheldon and Dorothy (Walker) B. grad. Philips Acad., Andover, Mass, 1942; B.A. in Econs., Yale, 1948; m Barbara Pierce, Jan. 6 1945; children -- George W., John E., Neil M., Marvin P., Dorothy W. Co-founder, dir. Zapata Petroleum Corp. 1953-59;
pres Zapata Off Shore Co., Houston, 1956-64, chmn bd. 1964-66; mem. 90th-91st congresses, 7th dist., Tex., memb Ways and Means com.; U.S. ambassador to U.N. 1971-72; chmn. Rep Nat. Com., 1973-74; chief Liaison Office Peking, People's Republic China, 1974 -- Tex chmn. Heart Fund. Chmn. Rep Party Harris County, Tex.,1963-64; del. Rep Nat. Conv.,1964, 1968; Rep. candidate U.S. Senate from Tex., 1964, 1970. Served lt. (j.g.) pilot, USNR, World War II. Decorated D.F.C. Air Medals (3). Home 5161 Palisade Lane NW, Washington, DC 20016. Office: USLO Peking People's Republic of China.

The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA by Jonathan Kwitny, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, London, 1987
[Quasha, William]
pg 36
At the time of the inquest in April, when the papers were reporting that Nugan Hand was suspending payouts and might go under, LeRoy Manor left the Philippines. Wilfred Gregory, the Nugan Hand salesman who was administering the Manila office with General Manor, says that Manor's departure was inspired by a conversation with their Manila lawyer, William Quasha. Gregory says Quasha "arranged for Manor to leave the country. He told e to go, too. He said, `You could wind up in jail.'" The three-star general, according to Gregory, left overnight.
General Manor praises Gregory as a "real refined individual, and smart. He married a real nice girl, a society girl." But the general says he left the Philippines only because it was time for home leave, and that he would have returned except for the Iranian mission.
Of course, Gregory's word isn't necessarily trustworthy, either. Since the Philippine Government never chartered Nugan Hand as a bank, it was legally forbidden from taking deposits. Operating from a lavish suite of offices in a prestigious downtown building that also houses several U.S. Government agencies, the Gregory-Manor operation was supposed to confine itself to brokering international trade deals. It apparently never brokered a single successful transaction. ..."

pg 38, ibid [Houghton, Maurice Bernard "Bernie," Nugan Hand mystery man]
HOUGHTON: "Bernie Houghton was so secretive about his past that he wouldn't tell his own lawyer if he had any traceable wives or children when the lawyer was trying to draw Houghton's will. A Texan, he was known as a camp follower of America's Asian wars, always as a civilian since his few years in the Army air corps during World War II. He had been to Korea and to Vietnam, and had made what seemed a lot of money, buying and selling war surplus and supplying the "recreational" needs of GIs. Though ostensibly occupied in Australia only as honky-tonk bar impresario, Houghton's movements were facilitated whenever he needed by that country's secret security agency, and he displayed a smooth working relationship with all levels of the U.S. Government. ..."

Texas Almanac, 1990-91, Dallas Morning News [Midland, Odessa, Texas and Coke County]
pg 54
Midland's first official building was a railroad mail car, brought in to serves as a post office, depot and trading house when the T&P Railroad arrived in 1881. Midland was first called Midway for its location half-way between Fort Worth and El Paso. The name was changed to Midland about the time town lots were offered for sale by the Midland Town Company in 1885, the same year that Midland County was created. At that time, the business district comprised two saloons, two general stores, a restaurant and wagon yard. Herman Nelson Garrett, a California sheepman, arrived in 1882 to become the first permanent white settler in the area He was joined by others in 1883. At first, water was hauled from Monahans, but soon windmills dotted the growing town. John S. Scharbauer, who had raised sheep in Eastland, Taylor, Nolan and Mitchell counties, moved to Midland in 1887. He switched from sheep to cattle in 1888 and soon had a large herd of registered Herefords.
Odessa, also spawned by he coming of the railroad, was named by Russian railroad workers, who though that its wide, flat prairies resembled the steppes near the Ukrainian town of Odessa. A group of Pennsylvania realtors formed a townsite company to sell lots in the fledgling town, and the glowing descriptions published in their pamphlet in 1886 persuaded several German Methodist families from Pennsylvania to settle there. Although some early settlers dreamed of making the area a wheat center, the realities of the climate of western Texas dictated that it become a cow town.

ibid, pgs 59-62 [ Texas oil]
... Brown county had some of the earliest oil production in the West Central Texas area: In the early 1880s, three wells were producing about 100 barrels of oil a day, which was marketed by the bottle for medicinal purposes and by the gallon as a lubricant. Water-well drillers hit oil near Hicks in Shackelford County in December 1891, ...
The first commercial oil field in Texas was the Corisicana Field discovered in 1894. On Jan 10, 1901, the Spindletop Field near Beaumont blew in, eventually converting Texas from a quiet agricultural state to an industrial giant.
When rancher W.T. Waggoner struck oil while seeking water near Electra in Wichita County in 1904, some interest was stirred. ... Then the Electra Field gusher blew in on April 1, 1911, and the boom was on. Production peaked in 1914. ...
S.L. Fowler persuaded several small investors to back him in exploring for oil on his land ... "Fowler's Folly" blew in on July 18, 1918, and set off a wild boom. Promoters sold shares in both real and fictitious companies as gusher after gusher was brought in. Although the Burkburnett Field had produced 40 million barrels by the end of 1919, its production did not last very long. ... Nevertheless, the 1940 movie Boom Town, starring Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Caludette Colbert and Hedy Lamarr captured the story of the Burkburnett boom on film. ...

The Texas Railroad Commission became involved in the state's petroleum industry in 1917, when the legislature declared oil pipelines to be common carriers subject to regulation by the commission. The Oil and Gas Division of the TRC was formally organized in 1919 and 1920 following passage by the legislature of an "Act to Conserve Oil and Gas Resources of the state of Texas." It was the basis for most of the regulation that followed. ...

Regulations and rulings of the TRC have generally favored and supported the interests of the smaller independent operators over those of the major oil companies based on the belief that a healthy petroleum industry is dependent on the risk-taking independents. Nationally, the TRC has devoted itself to advancingthe economy of Texas. From 1935 to the 1970s, national oil policy was largely left to the states, and since Texas possessed just under half of the nation's petroleum reserves, the TRC was the most influential of the state petroleum-regulating agencies. ...

Then came the inevitable: In 1921, the crash started. The all-out, no-holds-barred oil boom turned into a post-war depression exacerbated by overproduction. The price of oil fell to one dollar a barrel within a thee month period, and banks were closing all over West Central Texas. ...

The first pipeline from West Texas to the Gulf was completed in 1925. Several shorter lines were installed between 1927 and 1929. By 1938, West Central Texas was crisscrossed with refineries. The legendary Santa Rita No. 1, the discovery well of the Big Lake Field, blew in on May 28, 1923, in Reagan County. It was drilled by Frank Pickerell of Texon Oil and Land Company on University Lands. The well was named for the patron saint of the impossible and hopeless at the request of a group of Catholic women investors from New York. Within a year, there were 17 producing wells in the Big Lake Field and the University of Texas was well on its way to becoming one of the wealthiest schools in the nation. This boon had its beginning in Mirabeau B. Lamar's strong support of public education when he was president of the Republic of Texas. He urged the Texas Congress to appropriate public domain to support public education and in 1839 the congress called for 50 leagues (221,400 acres) to be set aside for the endowment of a university. In 1858, the figure was increased to one million acres, and it specified that it had to be good agricultural land. However, the framers of the 1876 Constitution saw no harm in shifting the University Lands from valuable agricultural land into the arid plains, since no university had yet been established. The first million were located in Schleicher, Crockett, Terrell, Pecos, Upton, Reagan and Irion counties. In 1883, the legislature set aside a second million acres in Andrews, Crane Culberson, Dawson, Ector, El Paso, Gaines, Hudspeth, Loving, Martin, Ward and Winkler counties. ...Around the turn of the century, the University's Bureau of Economic Geology began to investigate the possibility of finding oil and gas on university lands. In 1916, at a time when most geologists did not believe there was oil in the Permian Basin, the University's Dr. Johan A. Udden reported that it was likely ...
As of April 30, 1981, the cumulative income realized by the University of Texas from its two million acres of arid plains stood at almost $1.5 trillion dollars. ....

A constant problem of more oil than the market demanded kept prices down. There was some recognition that production should be reduced, but working out the details to please both major oil companies and small producers was almost impossible. In 1929, the American Petroleum Institute attempted to set production quotas for all oil-producing states, but the federal government wuld not promise to prosecute on anti-trust grounds. ...

Chaos hit the petroleum industry on Oct. 3, 1930, when C.M. "Dad" Joiner brought in the Daisy Bradford No. 3 in Ruse County in East Texas. Within a year production from the East Texas field was more than a million barrels a day. Oil prices plummeted. And the situation exacerbated by the Great Depression. Desperate East Texas operators tried to promote a voluntary shutdown. Instead production increased so dramatically that Gov. Ross Sterling declared martial law to shut down production ...

And the Permian Basin was hurt worst of all. With the glut of sweet, high gravity crude from East Texas, demand for the sour (oil with high sulfur content) Permian crude crashed. Odessa lost about half its population. Businesses across the Permanian Basin closed. Debate developed on ways to control overproduction, conserve oil and stabilize prices. ...

Since the Permian Basin produced sour crude, which was more expensive to refine, and the East Texas Field produced mostly sweet crude, the majors usually indicated a preference for buying sweet crude from fields close to their Gulf Coast refineries.
Although oil was not found in Midland County until 1945, Midland's leaders publicized the city's central location in the oil boom area to persuade oil companies to establish their headquarters there. Midland became the commercial and financial center of the Permian Basin.
The first oil discovery in Ector County came in 1926, but commercial production did not occur until the 1930s, with major fields being developed in 1930, 1932 and 1935. The Ector County Field eventually became second only to the giant East Texas Field in overall petroleum production, and Odessa became a service-and-supply and trucking center for the area. One of the largest inland petrochemical complexes in the nation was eventually there.
Although it never completely stopped, activity in the Permian basin declined during the Depression. By 1932, the area was dotted with empty office buildings, deserted hotels and abandoned work yards, and by 1937, only 18 petroleum-related businesses in Midland were listed in the 1930 city directory. Oil was 10 cents a barrel. The familiar demon of hard times was afoot in a region so often glamorized for its wealth. ...

Harold Ickes, who under various titles was the chief federal administrator of oil production during World War II, believed in keeping oil in the ground. The orders and regulations issuing from the nation's capital reflected little knowledge of the oil business. The price of oil was frozen at the October 1941 level until the war was over.
With the completion of the 24-inch War Emergency Pipe Line, popularly known as the "Big Inch," from East Texas to the East Coast refineries in the fall of 1943, demand for oil increased. The laying of the Big Inch was a heroic feat: The 1,254-mile line was completed in 350 days -- a record -- and the pipeline soon was transporting 300,000 barrels of crude a day from East Texas to the East Coast. ...
The "Little Inch" pipeline was begun four months before the Big Inch was completed and the builders of the 1,475-mile Little Inch completed this longer pipeline in only 225 days. The Little Inch carried 235,000 barrels of refined products -- gasoline, diesel and fuel oil -- from East Texas refineries to the East Coast. With the tanker fleet reduced, these two pipelines were crucial to victory. ...

Midland Army Air Field, halfway between Midland and Odessa began in 1931 as Sloan Field. The name was changed in 1942, when it was expanded for use as a bombardier training facility. ...

The unprecedented demand for oil during Wold War II led to the highest prices from crude since the 1920s, spurring record levels of exploration and development. But the cost of finding and producing new oil rose even faster. Most of the shallow oil had been found, leaving the more expensive oil at deeper levels to be exploited.
Compounding technical problems was the federal government. The Office of Price Administration continued to control the price of oil, grudgingly allowing a 10-cent increase in April 1946. Texas oilmen formed the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners (TIPRO) to lobby for lifting controls on oil prices, and they were finally successful on June 30, 1946. By late 1947, the demand for oil was so great that the railroad commission ordered no field shut-down days for the first time in eight years. TIPRO is still active today. ...

The enormous demand for oil had a flip side, however. Not only did it mean prosperity for West and West Central Texas, as well as the other oil producing regions of the state, it also forced the United States to become a net importer of oil. By late June 1950, the West Texas fields were producing at full capacity. Oil-field equipment and servicing companies had unlimited opportunities; the area was a magnet to new investors. By August, the Permian Basin was producing one million barrels of crude a day.
Towns in western Texas experienced enormous growth during this period. Midland more than doubled in population between 1940 and 1950 -- from 9,352 to 21,756 -- and the number of oil companies maintaining affiliate offices there reached 300. Odessa's population jumped from 9,573 to 29,432, with 200 oil-related industries operating there in 1950. San Angelo grew from 25,802 to 51,889 in the same time period, while Lamesa, the center of a cotton-growing area as well as an oil-producing region, increased from 6,038 to 10,706.
Unfortunately, by 1948, demand for oil declined. ...

The drought of the 1930s was eclipsed by the drought that began in 1950 and lasted almost without break through early 1957. The economic impact was felt as early as 1953, tough 1954 and 1956 were two of the five driest years in Texas history. ...

The drought was at its most intense in 1956. Wink reported less than two inches of rain for the entire year. The most severe dust storms also occurred that year.: On March 2 and 3, the air in Odessa was clogged with dust that automatic street lights came on in mid-afternoon. ...

Oil activity was the major factor that kept the drought of the 1950s from completely devastating the entire region. ...

The natural gas industry in West Central Texas, as well as oil, was affected b federal regulations. The Federal Power Commission (FPC) was created by the Natural Gas Act of 1938 primarily to regulate interstate commerce in natural gas. ...

The trend toward importing cheap crude from the Middle Eastern counties, Venezuela and other foreign suppliers, which continued during the 1950s and 1960s resulted in a major crisis in the 1970s. Mandatory import quotas imposed in April 1959 had only slight long-term effects, and imports continued to increase. The growing reliance on Middle Eastern oil was particularly hard on independent operators, and there were nearly 700 mergers or acquisitions in the U.S. oil industry from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. ...

The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of 1970 prompted power plants to convert from coal to cleaner-burning oil. With greater oil demand, imports continued to rise, and the federal government began talking of a world oil emergency. As if on cue, Syria claimed that an oil pipeline had been cut and said that it would not be "repaired" until higher transit fees were paid. The oil that normally would have used the pipeline was forced to turn to tankers for transport, causing a tanker shortage. Then Libya cut back production to force higher prices. The U.S. government responded by lifting price controls in 1971 on everything except oil production, which had the effect of discouraging exploration. ...

By 1986, only 1,326 gas wells were completed, a drop of almost 70 percent. Statewide, oil production peaked in 1972, when 1,301,685,000 barrels were produced. Production declined steadily, with 1986 seeing 813,620,000 cubic feet, declining to 5,663,491 million cubic feet in 1986. And as the petroleum industry suffered and loan payments could not be met, the lending institutions most heavily invested in oil and gas began closing their doors. The dominoes are still falling.

ibid, pg 161 [Coke County, location of Jameson Field, Zapata Petroleum's wells]
location: West central
Congressional district 17
U.S. Jud. Dist. N-S Ang.
history: Created, organized 1889 from Tom Green County named for Gov. Richard Coke.
physical features: Prairie, hills, Colorado River valley, red soils; E.V. Spence Reservoir
minerals: oil, gas, sand, gravel
population: 3,563
businesses: oil-well supplies, agribusiness tourism
agriculture: cattle, sheep, goats, sorghums, small grains, hay leading crops.
Robert Lee (1,324) county seat, ranching, petroleum center, nursing home; other towns: Blackwell (282), Bronte (1,107)ll.

ibid, pg 225
Location: West
Midland County
Congressional Dist 21
U.S. Jud Dist. W: M-O
history: created from Tom Green County, organized, 1885;
name came from midway location on railroad between El Paso and Ft. Worth
Physical features: flat, broken by draws, sandy, loam soils
Recreation: Permian Basin Petroleum Museum ...
minerals: production of oil, gas, stone
population: 103,835
Midland county seat, (91,631); petroleum, petroleum chemical center ...

other towns, Odessa (95,636) mostly in Ector County ...

ibid, pg 177
Location: West
Congressional Dist. 16, 19
History: Created from Tom Green County, 1887, organized, 1891; named for Texas legislator-jurist, M.D. Ector
Physical features: level to rolling, some sand dunes, meteor crater, desert vegetation
recreation:... presidential museum
minerals: leading oil-producing county with more than 2 billion barrels produced since 1926; gas, cement, stone
population: 122,309
business: oil-based economy; center for Permian Basin oil operations
Odessa county seat (95,636) oil field services, supplies, petrochemical complex; medical center ... Odessa College, University of Texas of Permian Basin; other town Goldsmith (418)

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, co-editors, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989
pgs 748,749
...significant numbers of West Virginia and Pennsylvania oil field workers migrated to the nascent Texas industry. The 1894 discovery in Corsicana signaled the beginning of commercial production in Texas, but the strike at Spindletop, near Beaumont, on 10 January 1901 immediately made the South a major force in the industry. The Texas Gulf Coast fields in the next few years produced quantities of oil that transformed the national, as well as regional, economy. This new industry attracted much northern capital, mainly from Pennsylvania, and it created thousands of jobs to which farm boys flocked, thus beginning to shift the balance from rural to an industrial economy. Once farmers went into the oil field, they usually stayed, following the booms from one new field to another. ...
Arkansas had two banner fields in the early 1920s -- El Dorado (where H.L. Hunt) entered the business) and Smackover. ...

That oilmen were influential in politics was also attested to when Ross Sterling, onetime president of Humble, was elected governor of Texas in 1930. ...

The region's first sizable refinery, the Standard Oil (now Exxon) plant in Baton Rouge, opened in 1909. From the 1920s onward, the Texas Gulf Coast has boasted such giants as the Magnolia (now Mobil) in Beaumont, the Gulf and Texaco in ort Arthur, and the Humble (now Exxon) in Baytown. Offshore drilling symbolizes the technological sophistication of the 1980s, but the South's first wells in water were in the Goose Creek, Texas field in 1908. Subsequent drilling in the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma helped develop the techniques that now enable behemoth rigs to drill in the deep Gulf waters off Texas and Louisiana.

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (already cited), page 1197, [Southern Strategy] ...

Southern Strategy also encompasses, however, the rhetoric, tactics and government policies employed by Post World War II Republican presidents and presidential aspirants to lure the southern voter from the traditional Democratic fold. In marshalling southern support Dwight D. Eisenhower did little more than advocate state control of (largely southern) offshore oil deposits and appoint a number of Eisenhower Democrats to patronage positions. Even so, he was able to capitalize on the southern discontent with the Democratic Party, which the Dixiecrat movement of 1948 had reflected, and make impressive gains in the South ...

The Goldwater movement nudged even more southerners in the GOP ranks in 1964 -- a disaster year for Republicans in every other part of the nation but a banner year in the South.
What the Goldwater movement had begun, Richard Nixon and Ronald W. Reagan developed and refined. ...

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, pg. 1422 [oil workers]

... Unionism bloomed during World War I, as the wages and the primitive camps became more intolerable. Ten thousand strikers walked out after the owners of the fields in Texas and Louisiana refused even to meet with their representatives. The major companies utilized martial law and private armies to break the strike, and they soon virtually destroyed the union.
Under the protection of the National Recovery Act (1933-34) oil unionism revived. ... The demise of the NRA, rising company resistance and relatively high pay scales in the refineries drastically hindered growth of the oil workers' union. During their renewed organizing efforts of the late 1930s and the war years, members of the Oil Workers International (Congress of Industrial Organization) were continually labeled as a Communist front by southeast Texas Congressman Martin Dies. And the refineries established company unions, deliberately hired minorities in order to stir racial tensions, and jacked up wages just before organizing drives. Still the union doubled its membership during the war, winning significant victories at the Texas Company and Gulf in Port Arthur. It failed to crack the nation's largest refinery, Esso at Baton Rouge, or the big Humble plant in Baytown, both of which were Standard Oil operations. In 1944, so many oil workers registered to vote that it was a major factor in convincing Martin Dies not to run for reelection. ...

Traveling Texas Borders: A Guide to the Best of Both Sides by Ann Ruff, Lone Star Books, Houston, 1983

... To see Texas' first oil well, turn south on FM 226 and travel about ten miles. Near Woden is a sign pointing to Oil Springs. If the weather has been bad, don't go to Oil Springs, for the red East Texas mud is treacherous. About five miles back in the woods is a run-down park with a historical marker that has served as a target for local hunters. Here, still seeping oil is the discovery well drilled in 1866 by L.T. Barret. At 106 feet, it produced 10 barrels a day, and there is still some drilling activity in this old field. ...

Louisiana Almanac 1997-1998; editor Calhoun, Milburn, Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, La., 1997 [the Mars Platform, source: Shell Offshore, Inc.]

... Under the auspices of Shell Offshore , Inc. , an affiliate of Shell Oil Co., the tension-leg platform known as Mars was towed to its designated production site in April of 1996. It is the deepest oil platform to be found in the world and will produce oil and gas from the largest Gulf of Mexico oil and gas discovery in the last 25 years. Located 130 miles southeast of New Orleans, Mars has been installed in 2,940 feet of water. Completely assembled, the tension-leg platform will rise 3,250 feet high from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico to the crown block of the drilling rig. The deck, 1.5 acres in size, is supported by a buoyant hull connected by 12 steel tendons to pilings driven 300 feet into the seafloor. Total weight: 36,500 tons. It is built to withstand hurricane-force winds of 140 mph and hurricane-force sea waves of 71 feet.
Mars is expected to recover in excess of 500 million barrels equivalent. Daily capacity is expected to produce 100,000 barrels of oil and 110 million cubic feet of gas by early 1997. The Mars field encompasses either a portion or all of six Outer Continental Shelf leases in the Mississippi Canyon area. The platform is installed on Mississippi Canyon Block 807. Other blocks in the Mars unit are 762,763,806,850 and 851. Leases for these blocks were acquired by Shell in 1985 and 1988 for a total bonus of $8.5 million. Shell is the operator and has 71.5 percent interest, while British Petroleum holds the other 28.5 percent interest. The drillship, Discoverer Seven Seas, drilled the discovery well on Mississippi Canyon Block 763 in 1989.
The geologic age of the Mars formation found above 14,000 feet is Pliocene. The deeper reservoirs are Miocene. ...

Miami by Joan Didion, Simon & Shuster, 1987, pg 184-185

... The five authors of A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties, who called themselves "The Committee of Santa Fe," were all well-known on the Right, regulars on the boards and foundations around Washington. There was Lynn Francis Bouchey of the Council for Inter-American Security. There was David C. Jordan, a professor of government at the University of Virginia and the co-author of Nationalism in Contemporary Latin America. There was Lieutenant General Gordon Sumner, Jr., at one time chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board and later, during the Reagan administration special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. There was Roger Fontaine, formerly the director for Latin America at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies and, later during the Reagan administration, a Latin American specialist at the National Security Council. There was, finally, Lewis Tambs, who had worked in Caracas and Marcaibo as a pipeline engineer for Creole Petroleum and was later, during the Reagan administration, appointed ambassador first to Colombia, then Costa Rica, where,, as he eventually told both the Tower Commission and the select committees investigating arms shipments to the contras, he understood himself o have been charged with the task of opening a southern front for the Nicaraguan resistance.
According to these men and to that small but significant group of people who thought as they did, the people with whom they shared the boards and letterheads of various conservative lobbies and foundations around Washington, the "crisis" facing the United States in Central America was "metaphysical." The war was "for the minds of mankind." What the Santa Fe document had called "ideo-politics" would "prevail." These were not people, as time passed and men like James Baker and Michael Deaver and David Gergen moved into the White House, men who understood that the distinction between crisis and no crisis was on of "perception," or "setting the scene," particularly close to the center of power. They were, in varying degrees, ideologues, people who had seized or been seized by an idea, and, as such, they were to the White House only sometimes useful ...

ibid, pg 191

...Jack Wheeler had recently been with the mujahaddin in Afghanistan [is Wheeler, the corrupt Texas congressman, involved in arms dealing to Afghanistan as recently as the mid-to-late 1990s?] ...

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas, Feral House Press, 1996, pgs. 78-79

...Mark Lane, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission, documented Hunt's inability to defend himself against these charges in his book Plausible Denial. One of Lane's key witnesses in that trial, Marita Lorenz, named E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Orlando Bosch, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Novos Brothers, Gerry Patrick Hemming, and Pedro Diaz Lanz as the JFK hit. The Novos were later held for the Letelier murders; Bosch was imprisoned for bombing a Cubana Airlines jet in October 1976, killing 73 people. Were these Octopus hits?
And what of the George Bush address found in the address book of CIA agent George De Morenschildt, the control agent for Lee Harvey Oswald? De Mohrenschildt had been a spy for the OSS in German intelligence, and some have speculated that he also may have been Bush's CIA "handler." Jeanne DeMohrenschildt alleged that her husband had been a Nazi spy, and J. Edgar Hoover had written a memo concerning "Mr. George Bush of the CIA," who had been briefed on Nov. 23, 1963 about the reaction to Kennedy's assassination by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami.
Bush, Helms and Hunt were three limbs of the Octopus that held keys to answers behind the mother of all assassination conspiracy tales, as well as the strings to an Octopus puppet also seen as a player in JFK's death: Richard Nixon. The Watergate tapes of June 23, 1972, has Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, scheming to put a halt to the FBI investigating Watergate because it might expose "the Bay of Pigs thing." Later, Haldeman confessed that the phrase was code for JFK's assassination.
Researcher Paul Kangas points out that the tape reveals "Nixon discussing the role of Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the `Texas fundraisers for Nixon.' On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the 'Cubans' and the 'Texans,' 'Helms,' 'Bernard Barker,' 'Robert Mosbacher,' and the 'Bay of Pigs.' Over and over on the Watergate tapes these names come up around the discussion of the photos from Dallas, that Nixon was trying to obtain when he ordered the CIA to burglarize the Watergate." Frank Sturgis told the San Francisco Chronicle that "reason we burglarized the Watergate was because Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking relating to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." ...

The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (already cited), pgs. 356-357

[Faragout, T.J., partner of Bush in Zapata's illegal Mexican offshore oil deal, see reference in Barron's magazine story, 1988, by Kwitny, Jonathan]

... Robert Dailey, Robert Corson's first cousin, approached Hill Financial about buying the Florida land. Dailey told Hill officials that he was working with a company called Government Securities and he had a letter of credit from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Nothing came of it.
For its part Hill Financial brought in one of its borrowers, Patrick Harrison, to try to run things and get some development going. Harrison had borrowed tens of millions of dollars from Hill Financial to buy repossessed real estate in Colorado and Texas, under the name Warehouse Associates, including some that had been controlled by John Riddle and Richard Rossmiller.
Harrison's father was Nat Harrison, a Florida construction contractor whose lawsuit against the IRS in 1964 is noted in a 1985 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on "Crime and Secrecy: The Use of Offshore Banks and Companies." The Senate report, which was worked on by Robert Corson's attorney-to-be, S. Cass Weiland, stated that Nat Harrison's company had entered into three contracts to construct missile facilities in the Caribbean, and then formed a Panamanian company to do the work in order to try to keep the profits offshore and untaxed.
One of Nat Harrison's partner's in his construction company was his father-in-law (and Patrick Harrison's grandfather) Alto Adams, a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court. Adams was also one of the five trustees of Victor Posner's irrevocable trust along with Posner and Armer White, the Miami businessman and father of Harold White, who was involved with Sunshine State Bank and Peoples Savings.
The Houston law firm that represents Harrison and his company, Warehouse Associates is Stumpf & Falgout, the name partner of which is T.J. Falgout III. Falgout is a cousin of Tilman Fertitta,; in fact, they share the same first names, Tilman Joseph. Fertitta, as previously mentioned, is a relative of the Maceos, the old Galveston Mafia family.
Falgout's father, T.J. Falgout Jr., a boat company owner in Louisiana, appears in the bankruptcy papers of Commercial Helicopters, the Baton Rouge company that was financed by Herman K. Beebe and supplied helicopter parts to CIA agent Carl Jenkins. As Commercial Helicopter teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1983, Falgout and his partners came in to buy the company. Their proposed purchase, however, never materialized. ...


The Mexican Connection: A Look at an Old George Business Venture by Jonathan Kwitny, Barron's magazine, Sept. 19, 1988.

Without shareholder approval, George Bush secretly orchestrated a deal with powerful Mexican businessmen in 1960, which help set up another drilling operation that competed with his own Houston-based Zapata Off-Shore Co.
His business interests in Mexico involved Peroraciones Marinas del Golfo or PERMARGO.

"... Association with Jorge Diaz Serrano, a now-convicted felon who has become a symbol of political corruption ... Bush and his associates at Zapata teamed up with Diaz Serrano and a Mexican associate in camouflaging the 50 percent American ownership of Permargo.
Eventually, Diaz Serrano would take control of Permargo, before moving on to head Pemex, Mexico’s government oil monopoly. Shortly after his five-year stint at Pemex, he would begin a five year stint in jail, having defrauded the Mexican government of $58 million it is still trying to get back.
Efforts to pinpoint the precise nature of Bush's involvement to Permargo have been severely hampered by the fact that a federal warehouse "inadvertently" destroyed a host of 20-year-old pertinent Zapata SEC filings early in the first term of the Reagan Administration. Specifically missing are all the files from 1960 to 1966, the years spanning Bush's involvement with Permargo. The records resume with Bush's sale of his company as he entered politics. ...

"Diaz Serrano once had serious presidential aspirations ...
A childhood playmate and longtime associate of President Lopez Portillo, who ruled Mexico from 1976 to 1982 and who appointed Diaz Serrano head of Pemex ...
"Diaz Serrano is also a personal friend of Bush and visited the Vice President as recently as 1982, when he stopped by the White House on his way to Moscow, where he would briefly serve as Mexico's ambassador to the Soviet Union. ...

"...When asked whether Bush's previous friendship with Diaz Serrano might not be a source of embarrassment to the Vice President today, Bush spokesman Steve Hart snapped: "That may be true 28 years after the business deal was completed, but in 1960 he [Diaz Serrano] was a representative of Dresser Industries, and Zapata, whose interest was to do business in Mexico, entered into a partnership with him which lasted a mere seven months. ...


... Although SEC filings for Zapata are intact from its first stock registration in 1955 to 1959, records for 1960-1966 -- the precise years spanning Bush's involvement with Permargo and Zapata -- were according to SEC records officer Suzanne McHugh, "inadvertently destroyed." ...

...Bush was Zapata's president and chief executive, and he and his family and their privately held companies were by far Zapata's largest shareholders. Zapata's surviving records at the SEC resume precisely with Bush's departure from the company in 1966.
"The records were inadvertently placed in a session file to be destroyed," explains McHugh, noting that a total of 1,000 boxes were pulped in this procedure.

[SEC record analyst Wison Carpenter says the files were destroyed shortly after Reagan-Bush took office] (but) ... McHugh claims that the files were destroyed in October 1983. ...

...Permargo was cooked up precisely because of new Mexican government strictures requiring that drilling contacts be put in the hands of Mexican nationals. ...
... half the stock in Permargo was held by Americans intimately connected to Bush, including a longtime employee and a large Zapata shareholder. These individuals thereupon enlisted Mexican front men as stand-ins so that Permargo would appear on official records to be 100-percent Mexican-owned. ...
Mexicans associates say that the use of Mexican stand-ins by foreigners who hold undisclosed interest in Mexican companies is perfectly normal; because the Mexican government recognizes the companies need for foreign capital and expertise. ...
... Fernado Cabrera, the lawyer whoa fronted for the Americans ...

...Permargo idrectly competed with Zapata, thus depriving Bush's drilling concern of at least some revenues. ...
... Zapata's 2,000 shareholders apparently were never told of Permargo's existence, nor of how its existence nor of how its existence might affect the Amex-listed company whose shares they owned. ...

... Permargo seemingly had its origin in a conversation at the headquarters of Pemex -- the Mexican national oil monopoly that Diaz Serrano would lead down an initially prosperous but ultimately ruinous path from 1976 to 1981. The conservation involved Diaz Serrano, a high-ranking Pemex official named Jose Colomo and Edwin Pauley, a wealthy U.S. oilman.
At the time, Pauley's company, Pauley Pan American Petroleum Corp., had an oil-exploitation agreement with the Mexican government, and had been paying Bush's company, Zapata, to drill for oil off the Mexican coasts. In fact, the contact with Pauley accounted for a hefty chunk of Zapata's business, since, Bush's company, like Permargo later on, hired out its own drilling whether or not oil was found. Zapata also negotiated for a share in any oil ultimately produced. ...
... now that the Pauley contract had been dumped into his lap, he set abut finding off-shore drilling equipment for the company he was going to form to handle the Pauley account. He did so with the assistance of Jorge Escalante, his partner in the oil business since the mid 1950s, and the man who still controls Permargo.
The two men first approached Dresser Industries, a major U.S. oil equipment manufacturer that Diaz Serrano had been representing as a Mexican sales agent. According to Escalante, Dresser recommended Bush, who had cut his teeth in the oil business by working for Dresser from 1948 to 1951. ...
Diaz Serrano (insists) Bush nor Zapata were ever owners of Permargo. Instead, he claims that the hidden American interest was held by Wayne H. Dean and T.J. Falgout Sr. Both have since died.
Dean, a veteran oil executive had been manager of operations for Bush at Zapata ever since its founding in 1954, and Falgout was one of Zapata's major shareholders. Dean also held a substantial stock interest in Zapata ... but according to records at Zapata headquarters in Houston, his entire investment was paid for with money lent to him by a holding company that Bush was part of, a company that held the controlling interest in Zapata prior to its reorganization in 1959. ...
... All the principals, involved in the Permargo deal -- Bush, Dean, Falgout, and Pauley --had apparently known each other before the Permargo deal came up.
"We had lunch at the Petroleum Club -- it's all one family," Escalante says of the Mexican oil business. ...

...Zapata's records report that the drilling rig called the Nola 1, wasn't sold to Permargo until late 1964, four years after Mexican corporate registration records show that Bush helped for Permargo's original board. ...

... The vice president's office concedes that Zapata did have a seven-month relationship with Permargo, beginning in March 1960, during which it had a 50 percent partnership in the company with Escalante and Diaz Serrano and that the relationship was severed in September 1960.
One problem with this is that the Mexican records show Permargo wasn't incorporated until Oct. 31, 1960, with Bush's name clearly on the papers and no mention of Zapata. ...

Escalante contends that Zapata itself was an original "partner" in the Mexican company putting up $500,000 of the $1 million in seed capital and holding about 50 percent of the stock. He says that Dean and Bush joined Permargo's board as representatives of Zapata. ...

... Records show that the board also included Escalante; one of his cousins; Diaz Serrano; and a member of the law firm that was fronting for the American stock interest. ...

... Permargo's largest shareholder .... was Fernando Cabera, a lawyer with about 50 percent of the stock. Cabrera disclosed that he was acting for a client whose name he cannot divulge, and that eight days after receiving the shares he followed instructions to forward them to Escalante. Cabrera says he had had nothing to do with Permargo since then.
Escalante says that as soon as he received the stock from Cabrera in 1960, he passed it along to the real owner Zapata. He recollects that two or three months later Zapata sold its Permargo stock to Dean and Falgout, and Bush left the board. ...
... [Escalante] remembers having heard something about a falling out with Dean. ...
... However, Mexican records show that Zapata continued to operated in Mexico until 1964, when it sold its last drilling rig there to Permargo. ...

... Zapata's records include an announcement in the 1960 annual report that Dean had resigned in September 1960 "in order to go into the drilling business in Mexico." ...

... Escalante states that in 1965 or 1966 he and Diaz Serrano bought out Dean for a price he doesn't remember, and that later, upon the death of Falgout, the other big Zapata shareholder, the pair bought his stock as well. ...

... Cabrera, the lawyer who served as stand-in for the American shareholders was empowered to represent Bush and Dean in their capacities as directors of Permargo. ...

Bush and his family sold their controlling interest in Zapata to entirely new owners in 1966. ...

...The vice president's office says that after Zapata's seven-month relationship with Permargo, Dean bought all of Zapata's shares in Permargo at an undisclosed price. ...

After launching Permargo in 1960, Diaz Serrano saw the company blossom into a large well-known enterprise, working primarily under contract t Pemex, the Mexican oil monopoly,. In 1975, at the behest of his old mentor, President Lopez Portillo ... Diaz Serrano left Permargo to run Pemex. ...

... Diaz Serrano reportedly sold what he says was his 20 percent stake in Permargo to three engineers. He says he received only $280,000, though the company stated capitalization by then of $1.9 million not to mention a dozen costly drilling rigs, a 16-story office tower in Mexico City, and 7.5 acres of machine shops and storage yards on the Gulf Coast.
The reported sale came to light in 1983, when, after Diaz Serrano's indictment, the government tried to seizer or embargo his shares. ...

... Speculation continues in the Mexican press and among the Mexican political opposition that Diaz Serrano never relinquished his stake ...

In 1983, Diaz Serrano was charged with something specific: defrauding the government of $58 million in overpayments to a Saudi Arabian-based middle man in connection with the purchase of two oil tankers from a Belgian shipyard. He was convicted , fined and sentenced to 10 years in jail, ultimately serving half his term. ...

... Diaz Serrano maintains that Bush joined the Permargo board of directors for roughly four weeks at the time of the drilling-rig sale by Zapata to Permargo. Escalante puts Bush's board membership four years earlier, but recalls that Bush did personally negotiate Zapata's sale of the drilling rig Nola 1 to Permargo in 1964, for a price Escalate remembers between $500,000 and $1 million. ...

.... Zapata's 1964 annual report, announced that Nola 1 was sold "to a subsidiary of a Mexican drilling company (not identified) at a profit of $119,158, after taxes of $87,000. ...

... In 1960, Zapata reported a yearly profit of $96,945 on gross revenues of $6.6 million. By 1964 profitability had increased to $1.3 million, but gross revenues (including the Nola 1 sale) were still in the $7 million range. During this period, the stock market valued the entire company at somewhere between $ 3 million and 8 million. …

Major items in the annual 10K were simply omitted on the forms. …

… "These items have been omitted as provide by General Instruction D `Reports by Registrants Filing Proxy Statements." According to the SEC, this apparently refers to a provision, since revised, that rules that a company needn’t produce duplicate material in its 10-K if the items , normally filed at the time of its legally filed at the time of its legally mandated annual meeting of shareholders.
But Zapata’s proxy statements were similarly undetailed and fail to refer to Permargo. Nor do they supply other information normally disclosed on 10-Ks. And in the critical years 1960 and 1961, there isn’t any known record of Zapata’s filing proxy statements at all. …

The Economist, Sept. 29, 1979, pg 34
George Bush … he is not even number one in his home town. That honor goes to a fellow native of Houston, Mr. John Connally, who is rapidly emerging as Ronald Reagan’s chief rival. …
He has not held elected office since 1970. … lost two bids for the United States senate. … son of a former senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush. In the senate campaigns of 1964 and 1970, Bush was called everything from an Ivy-Leaguer to a carpetbagger. … education at Phillips Academy and Yale. … spent his entire adult life in Texas. … began as a oil equipment salesman, going on to found the Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Off Shore companies. …
Bush was originally based in Midland, an isolated oil boom town in the west Texas prairie. … first taste of politics as county chairman for Eisenhower. … moved to Houston and again rose through the ranks. [defeated in] 1964 senate race. … The biggest contributor to that first campaign of Bush’s was a wealthy Dallas businessman, Bill Clements, who is now governor of Texas.
… [in 64] cast too much as a Goldwater Republican (he even went so far as to call for financial and military aid for a new invasion of Cuba) …
A federal redistricting order opened the way for Bush to capture a newly created congressional seat in Republican southwest Houston in 1966. He served two terms. … voted in favor of an open housing act. In 1970, Bush started as the favorite against a liberal Democrat, but an ill timed visit to Texas by the unpopular vice-president, Spiro Agnew, hurt his chances. A conservative Democratic newcomer to state politics, Lloyd Bentsen defeated the liberal in the primary. …
… [Bush] wanted to be treasury secretary, a job Mr. Nixon gave instead to Mr. Connally, then still a Democrat., had been instrumental in gathering money and business support for Mr. Bentsen against Mr. Bush a year earlier. Bush loyalists were outraged, and more than a decade later, they still are.
Bush had to settle for the post of ambassador to the United Nations. … later took a job as chairman of the Republican national committee … in the middle of Watergate. … first envoy to China [actually second?] recalled to take over … the CIA … In a party where ideology counts for a lot, Bush has been able to escape classification by holding none ideological jobs. …

U.S. News and World Reports, Oct. 22, 1979, pg 65.
55 years old in 79 … Congressman, Ambassador to U.N., second envoy to the People’s Republic of China, CIA director, and National Republican Party Chairman. … presenting as a virtue his split geographic background in New England and Texas as well as his business success as an independent oil driller. … lost the only two statewide races he ever entered … passed over for vice president. … trailing both former Texas Gov. John Connally and Ronald Reagan.
… His recognition by 38 percent of those surveyed contrasted starkly with ratings of 94 percent for Gerald Ford, 91 percent for Reagan and 76 percent for Connally. ...
… In New England showdowns, Bush hopes to exploit strong family ties inherited from his late father, Prescott Bush, who served 10 years as a Republican senator from Connecticut. The Bush family still has a summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. …
6-2, 188-pound, boyish good looks, and patrician manner. DOB 6-12-24. Graduate Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass in 1942. Enlisted in Naval Reserve, WWII served as carrier pilot in the South Pacific. Plane shot down over the Pacific and rescued by a submarine. Completed active duty in 45 as a lieutenant.
… Landed a job as an oil-field-supply salesman in Midland, Texas [actually, Odessa?] later … founding Zapata Petroleum, and eventually forming an off-shore drilling firm. Zapata Off Shore Co. became a successful multi-million-dollar venture with operations around the world. …
… Moved to Houston in 1959. …
In 64, won the Republican nomination to run for Senate against incumbent liberal Democrat Ralph Yarborough. … lost by 300,000 votes. Two years later, elected to Congress from Houston’s 7th District. Reelected in 68 without opposition.
Served on the influential House Ways and Means Committee. … supported open-housing legislation. …
Bush made a splash in Congress by pushing legislation to require lawmakers to disclose their personal finances. … following that belief by releasing his income-tax returns for the last six years. According to those returns, Bush’s most lucrative year during that period was 1973, when he reported income of $221,577 and taxes of $89,861. He estimates his net worth today at around $1.8 million dollars. …
… In 1970, Bush made a second run for the Senate, with the personal urging of President Richard Nixon. … Opposition this time was conservative Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. Bush lost to Bentsen by 157,000 votes.
A month later, Nixon named Bush his UN ambassador. Bush fought for the administration’s "two China" policy but was unable to thwart UN action expelling Nationalist China, when the Peking government was admitted. …

… His name was talked up by some for Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned under fire in October of 1973 for his financial dealings, but Nixon finally settled on Gerald Ford.
With Nixon’s resignation the following year, Bush again was in strong contention for the nation’s No. 2 post but lost out to Nelson Rockefeller.
September of 1974 traveled to Peking as Ford’s chief of the U.S. liaison office. … In late 1975, Bush returned to the U.S. to head the CIA. … Bush returned to Houston in 1977. …
… The experience of James Baker, Bush’s campaign manager, and Ford’s top man in 1976, and the money-raising of Robert Mosbacher, Ford’s finance chairman in the last presidential campaign, have paid off. The campaign also boasts the respected strategical mind of David Keene, a Reagan aide four years ago.
Son George, 33, ran (unsuccessfully for the U.S. House last year from Texas in a featured congressional battle. Others are Jeb, 26; Neil, 24; Marvin,22; Dorothy, 20.
… Straight arrow. Strong tennis player, jogs frequently, non-smoker, limits his drinking to a glass of wine or beer. …
… Bush fought against expulsion of Taiwan from the U.N. …

Newsweek, Dec. 11, 1978, pg 37
Connecticut Yankee who moved to Texas, at 53 the holder of more upper-echelon posts than any Republican except Elliot Richardson … presents himself as a healer for the perennial factionalism between the Republican center and the Republican right. … New England born and bred. His father, Prescott Bush, was senator from Connecticut and George is a graduate of Andover and Yale, where he was captain of the baseball team and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in economics. … migrating to Odessa, Texas and the oil business. Bush and his wife Barbara, reared five children in Texas. And Bush made a small fortune as founder of the Zapata Off Shore Co, an oil-drilling firm.
Son George, 33, this year followed his father into politics by running for Congress in Texas’ 19th House District. He won a tough primary but lost the general election to Democrat Kent Hance. … [same background info as above] …

Washington Post, May 24, 1979, by Paul Hendrickson
Wife of 35 years
Five grown children
54
Son of the late patrician senator from Connecticut, Presscot Bush
Beat Reagan in Iowa caucuses. "Bush’s victory Monday night, at a state party dinner, was nearly 14 percentage points ahead of Reagan, the alleged front GOP runner in Campaign 80.
… before his formal announcement in Washington on May 1, Bush had already been in 42 states since last September …
… Mrs. Prescott Bush … lives in Greenwich, Conn. … "It was always Sen. Bush’s policy to and my own to let them do whatever they strongly wished I was apprehensive at first, because George can get tired. Actually, I think he’ll win the whole thing. …
George Bush is for nuclear development. … He thinks we’ve tied the hands of the CIA. He thinks a tax cut is fruitless without a cut in federal spending. He thinks we should still build up military strength and show the flag abroad. Inflation is the key issue, he says. … a moderate conservative.
… In 1942, George Bush enlisted in the Navy … he went to Chapel Hill for training and 10 months later he was an ensign with wings, the youngest pilot in Navy history. He was 18.
After three air medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross, he came home to go to Yale. Got married. Finished his economics degree in two and a half years. Turned down Wall Street. Went to Odessa, Texas, where he lived in a trailer compound next door to a prostitute. Got started in land dealing. He co-founded three independent oil firms, two of which – Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Off Shore Co. – made him wealthy [what was the name of the third company?]
George Bush is thin, high timbered Eastern accent; lives in the Memorial Tanglewood area of Houston. Big house, but not splashy. There is a pool but not tennis court, which is odd because tennis is what the Bush family plays with passion. … He’s very tough in singles. Brother: Jonathan (Johnny) Bush. …
When you ask George Bush whether he’s a New Englander or a Texan, he say, "I’m hybrid. I’m enriched by two cultures. I have two incarnations, so to speak.
Bush has three brothers and one sister. He is second oldest. His older brother, Pres, is big in insurance in Connecticut. Bucky, the youngest, is president of the Boatman’s National Bank in St. Louis.
He’s got one of Reagan’s former top strategists, David Keene He’s got Gerald Ford’s 1971 campaign manager, James Baker (who lives three blocks from Bush in Houston and plays ferocious tennis with him), and Gerald Ford’s former national chairman, Robert Mosbacher. He’s got a former communications director from the Democratic National Committee, Susan Morrison, as his deputy press head. He’s even signed on two top former aides to George Wallace to organize Alabama. They are earning $4,000 a month. …
His central office is in Houston, where 35 are on the payroll; another 15 are working out of Alexandria. When Bush comes to Washington he usually stays at the Jefferson Hotel. …
Up until six weeks ago, Bush was drumming across the country in the tourist section of airliners in the company of David Bates, a 27-year-old Houston lawyer-neighbor, who functions as instant advance man, valet, moral support. [Baker and Bush] customarily jog three miles a week together, when they’re on the road. …

The Washington Post, January 27, 1980, Pg A1, by Lou Cannon, et al (George Larder Jr.,)
[Bush and Carter] … both chose to participate in one of the establishment’s characteristic endeavors, David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission …
Bush entered politics in 1964 as a "Goldwater Republican" who opposed civil rights legislation, denounced the nuclear test ban treaty and said he might favor the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. …
For many years Bush was a friend and protégé of Richard Nixon. In January 1973, when Nixon needed a loyal and reliable new chairman of the Republican National Committee, … he picked George Bush for the job.
Bush is a product of the time and class that preoccupied F. Scott Fitzgerald: the moneyed and established eastern elite of the first half of this century. Bush’s father, Prestcot, was the managing director of the investment banking house of Brown Brothers, Harriman, and then a Republican senator from Connecticut. He put young George through Greenwich Country Day School, … Andover … Yale.
… stint as a Navy pilot in World War II. At one time he was the youngest flier in the Navy. He was shot down in the Pacific, his fellow crew-members were killed, and his dramatic rescue by an American submarine was recorded for posterity (and for this year’s campaign ads) on film. …
Bush grew up in Fairfield County, Conn., a world of stone mansions, wood paneling and vast lawns. … but … after leaving Yale … [he and his wife Barbara] were installed on Easter Egg Row in Odessa, Texas, a brightly painted FHA-financed postwar housing development that looked as though the mortgage might last longer than the houses. … [Dresser Industries connection omitted from this profile]
In 1951, with a partner named John A. Overbey, Bush started out for himself. They put together deals, bought up royalties and took what risks they felt they could, doing quite well.
Two years later, Bush entered a venture with neighbors who had come from Oklahoma, Hugh and Bill Liedtke. Each of them raised half a million dollars, the Liedtkes from friends in Tulsa, Bush from back East. His uncle, George Herbert Walker, an investment banker from whom he was named, arranged for most of Bush’s share. (His parents put in $50,000.) …
Bush and the Liedtkes made a great success of their company, which they named Zapata Petroleum for the then-current Marlon Brando film, Viva Zapata.
… In his 34th-floor office, overlooking downtown Houston, Hugh Liedtke recalled that their first key decision at Zapata was on a single, $850,000 investment.
They had a theory that several scattered wells in West Texas were tapping the same huge oil field, and after a lot of study they decided this was true. They drilled 130 times around what they thought was the field, and "we never drilled a dry hole," as Liedtke recalled. … Not a single duster. …
Later they formed a subsidiary Zapata Offshore, and this became Bush’s responsibility. Eventually, he and the Liedtkes divided their holdings, leaving Bush in control of Offshore. He moved the firm to Houston …
Offshore drilling was in its infancy in the mid-1950s …
The success of Zapata Offshore made Bush wealthy. (according to the unusually detailed disclosures he made last year, his net worth is $1.8 million.) ...

He backed Barry Goldwater 1,000 percent and enunciated a hard-line foreign policy. …
Bush came out against the pending 1964 Civil Rights Act on "constitutional" grounds. … He said emphatically that the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 "will not work." He said the United States should withdraw from the United Nations "if Red China is admitted."
Candidate Bush came out for drastic reductions in foreign aid … said America should recognize a Cuban government in exile, and support it when it sought to reoccupy its homeland. Bush warned voters to reject Yaborough’s "Reuther-dominated, left-wing philosophy. (The reference was to the late Walter Reuther, then president of the United Auto Workers.) … Bush favored "a limited extension of the war in Vietnam including restricted use of nuclear weapons if `militarily prudent.’ …
… In 1966, after Texas seats in the House had been redistricted partly as a result of a lawsuit Bush helped to bring, he ran for the House from a wealthy new Houston district. In that campaign, the opposition was further to the right than Bush, and he seemed to deliberately to strike a more moderate pose. For example, he told the Wall Street Journal that year that he regretted not having repudiated the John Birch Society earlier. He did so in 1966. ..
… old friend John Hammerschmidt (R-Ark.) …
… He voted as a conservative on fiscal matters, and defended Big Oil. He was able to do this effectively from his seat on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. … He supported the war in Vietnam. …
He fought for a strong ethics bill and was quick to disclose his own personal finances. He developed an interest in world population and co-sponsored legislation to expand domestic birth control programs. He gave important jobs on his staff to women. …
[supported] the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included a hotly controversial open-housing provision. …
… Bush did vote for the bill on April 10, 1968 but a few minutes earlier he had voted against the supporters of open housing in what Congressional Quartery described as "the key vote" of the day.
That key vote was a procedural motion that might have allowed the House to send the open-housing provisions back to a conference committee, thus stalling or perhaps killing them. Pro-open-housing liberals won that vote 229 to 195, but Bush was one of the 195. Then he joined the majority that sent the whole bill to the president by 250 to 172. …
… Bentsen got to the target first, beating Yarborough in a bitter Democratic primary. Bentsen was John Connally’s candidate. His victory set up a Senate race between two pro-oil conservatives. Bush and Bentsen seemed to agree on every major issue. … Bush tossed his chances away by welcoming to Texas both Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon in the last weeks of the campaign. … But both Agnew and Nixon made sharply partisan remarks in their Texas appearances, the turnout in traditional Democratic areas was higher than expected, and Bentsen beat Bush 53 to 47 percent.
… He was convinced by friends to ask Nixon for the job as ambassador to the United Nations. In some 20-minute meeting he did suggest to Nixon that he take that job, and Nixon gave it to him. …
But in January 1973, Nixon insisted that Bush come to the Republican National Committee and Bush, ever the loyalist, took the job. …
Bush first met Nixon in the mid-1950s. They became friendly in the 60s when Bush got actively into politics. When Nixon landed in the White House in 1969, he found Bush in the House and quickly took a shine to (him). Bush became one of the White House’s favorite congressmen.
At the end of 1972, … Nixon and his inner circle wanted to replace Sen. Bob Dole at the RNC. … Bush was the one. …
In 1973, he traveled the country – 40 states, 118 speeches during his first year as chairman. The message was that "the party is separate from Watergate." …
"Resignation is something that the president alone must decide," Bush said, adding his confidence that "the president will do what is right – what is best for the country."
… Bush said, "I suggested that he resign right near the time when he did. The Washington Post could find no such public statement and Bush said yesterday the message was in a personal letter to Nixon.
… In October 1974, President Ford asked Bush to (be) American envoy in Peking. Bush agreed. [Bush took over from David Bruce]. Bush stayed in Peking little more than a year, when Ford asked him to return … to take over the CIA. … E. Henry Knoche, … served as deputy director under Bush. …
At Yale, his classmate William J. Clark recalls, he and Bush used to joke about the prospect that Bush might someday appoint Clark his Secretary of State. (In recent months Clark has raised $400,000 for Bush, but says he isn’t interested in becoming Secretary.)
Yale friends like Clark and Richard E. Jenkins of Houston …
One Yale classmate said Bush is relying heavily on Yale graduates. …
After Carter’s State of the Union address, Bush called for a naval blockage of Iran to "tighten the economic noose," stepping up pressure to free the hostages. He was hazy, however, on how the United States could enforce such a move without the support of allies. …
… He criticizes (Carter) for canceling the B1 bomber and insufficiently funding the MX missile and naval improvements. …
But the most vehement attack is on the Democrats’ efforts to deny American aid to certain countries, which torture and imprison their own citizens. It is inconsistent, he say, to criticize Argentina without criticizing Cuba. He would criticize both, he said, "but quietly."
Carter, Bush claims, has sacrificed strategic interests for human rights. "We should not impose our standard of human rights on every country around the world. China is a good example. We must improve relations, but if we start dictating to them or cutting them off because of human rights, we will diminish our strategic interests.
When Bush first announced, his early campaign literature avoided mentioning his CIA directorship. Now Bush trumpets the fact and audiences applaud enthusiastically when he says he knows "exactly how to strengthen the CIA." Among other measures, he would try to restrict the Freedom of Information Act, he said, so that "Russians can’t write in and get information." …
He is attacked by the ultra-right for his past membership in the Trilateral Commission, the same private foreign policy group that gave Jimmy Carter credibility four years ago. …
Bush says he can cut today’s 13 percent inflation to one percent by balancing the federal budget, limiting its annual growth to seven percent and getting rid of excessive regulations.
He advocates a tax cut of $20 billion, with half the benefits going to individuals and half to business to stimulate investment. He would cut the corporate tax rate by five percent in the next five years. … Bush opposes a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. …
On energy, he says, "I’m an across the board increase-the-supply-of-energy person" – a philosophy that warms the hearts of the oil companies that have substantial interest in coal, uranium and solar technology. Bush occasionally mentions conservation, but it usually comes as an after-thought.
… Bush said he would amend the Clean Air Act and the strip mine act to make it easier to mine and burn coal, a move which environmentalists contend would increase lung disease and damage crops with acid rain. …
… "I remember sitting in a precinct in Midland, Texas, in 1952, the first year they ever had a [Republican] primary. …
… Bush’s political strategist David Keene (is) a former Reagan man.
Harry Treleaven, the ad man immortalized for his role in Nixon’s 1968 campaign in Joe McGinniss’s book, The Selling of the President," worked for George Bush in 1966. Bush was his first politician.
Later, according to McGinniss, Treleaven wrote a report on Bush’s successful race for Congress that year. In it he observed that national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand and have opinions on that they either intimidate or more often, bore the average voter. Few politicians recognize this fact."
Treleaven found Bush was seen (in Houston in 66) as "an extremely likable person," … There’ll be few opportunities for logical persuasion," he wrote, "which is all right – because probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." … "People sympathize with a man who tries hard; they are also flattered that anyone would really exert himself to get their vote. …"

Chicago Sun Times, Dec. 15, 2000, pg 6
[George and Barbara Bush] "met, as children of prominent New England families will do, at a society Christmas dance.
George was 17, the son of a U.S. senator, … talented first baseman at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. Barbara Pierce was 16, the daughter of the publisher of McCall’s magazine. He couldn’t waltz, so they talked instead.
Six months, later … George … enlisted in the Navy [against his parents wishes] on his 18th birthday, June 12, 1943. He soon became the youngest pilot in the Navy and shipped out to the South Pacific.
… His place shot down over enemy waters. Rescued by submarine. Coming home a hero, with three Air Medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross. George and Barbara – who dropped out of Smith College at the beginning of her sophomore year … were married just after New Year’s 1945. …
Bush entered Yale. He was fraternity president, member of Skull and Bones – Yale’s most legendary secret society – Phi Beta Kappa, all in three years.
… also star first baseman of the team that won the Eastern Intercollegiate championship two out of his three years. …
… decision to pack his red Studebaker and head for Texas and the oil business in 1948.
… added to the legend. … Bush told Fortune magazine he wanted to avoid "cut and dried jobs" … getting a job with Dad’s help and through Dad’s friends. …
In reality, the oil field supply firm that hired him in Odessa, Texas was a subsidiary of Dresser Industries. Prescott Bush sat on Dresser’s board and his son’s job had been recommended by his good friend, the company’s president.
… Robin, the Bush’s first daughter and second-born child after George W. was diagnosed in 1952 at the age of 3 with leukemia. Robin wasted away, and died. The Bushes had four more children – [besides George W.] Jeb, Marvin, Neil and Dorothy.
… [Bush] made a bid for the Senate in heavily Democratic Texas in 1964, but lost to incumbent Ralph Yarborough in Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential landslide.
Two years later, he bounced back, winning election to the U.S. House, where he served two terms … [voted] for the civil rights open housing bill.
In 1970, Bush made another run at the upper house and lost again, in another good Democratic year, to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.
President Richard M. Nixon, who installed him at the United Nations as the U.S. ambassador. Two years later, Nixon summoned Bush back to Washington to head the Republican National Committee.
… Gerald R. Ford, tapped Bush to be his envoy to China, where he served a one-year term.
Hoping to be slated for vice president in 1976, Bush [accepted] the post of [CIA director]. …
In 1976, Bush found himself out of office. But four years later he went up against Ronald Reagan for the White House. Reagan won … but then selected Bush to be his running mate. …
… unproved accusations that Bush knew details of the Iran-contra scandal. … Bush insisted he was out of the loop …
… After eight years as vice president, Bush defeated Michael Dukakis and assumed the [presidency] in 1988.
Memorable moments in the White House: the end of the Cold War, invasion of Panama, breaking his "read my lips: No new taxes" pledge and the Persian Gulf War. … but the glory had begun to fade by the 1992 election, when the economy was stumbling and Saddam Hussein was still in power. …
They left the White House, following George’s loss to Bill Clinton. …

James Baker and George Bush Represent a New Kind of Lone Star Politician in the White House – the Texas Preppie by James Conaway, Washington Post magazine, Dec. 13, 1981

James A. Baker III, chief of staff, and George Bush, vice president, known locally as Texas Republicans, lacked the showmanship and the glad press of the flesh that characterized their predecessors. They are as removed from LBJ and Rayburn as the Brazos River is from the Watergate pool, corporate technicians who seem cloned in air-conditioned offices and given a dose of Texas as if it were hoof-and-mouth serum.
… First Bush ran for Senate with Baker’s help – and lost. Then Baker ran for attorney general of Texas with Bush’s help – and lost.
… A spectator at one election-eve party described the scene as "high preppy: It looked like a Brooks Brothers showroom – all button-down Oxford cloth and horn-rimmed glasses. Everybody in Houston who had gone to an Ivy League school worked in Baker’s campaign. They were like British colonials in India – more British than the people at home." …
… Bush and Baker have been friends for years. They met in Houston, the oilman-turned congressman, and the corporate lawyer, respectively. They attended the same party in manicured Southwest Houston one night. Bush lived in Indian Trails, where private security agents make certain outsiders behave themselves, and Baker lived nearby. They began to play tennis at the Houston Country Club. …
… According to a relative, Bush’s father was born in Ohio and rescued from selling hardware by one of the Harriman brothers he had known at Yale, who invited Prescott Bush to join the family bank, By that time, Baker’s father was a millionaire several times over. The Baker money is about as old as Houston can claim. …
…For years Baker has been dropping whatever he was doing in Texas to accommodate powerful men. In 1975, when Commerce Secretary Rogers Morton, acting on George Bush’s recommendation, asked Baker to leave his lucrative Houston law practice and come to Commerce, Baker agreed. When President Ford asked him to manage his campaign in 1976, Baker again agreed, although I really didn’t want to." And he agreed to manage his friend Bush’s doubtful bid for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. He says he took his job with Reagan "because the president asked me to." …

The key to understanding Baker and Bush, their ambitions and successes, lies not in Washington, but in Texas. What was down home to LBJ and Rayburn – a cattle-and-cotton barony soaked with oil but still mortgage-ridden and farm poor – has become a predominantly urban state, capital-intensive and sophisticated. Houston is the fastest growing big city in America, where urologists advertise vasectomies on billboards and the air hums – smells – of unbridled free enterprise.
V.O. Key author of Southern Politics said of Texas: "A modified class politics seems to be evolving … because of the personal insecurity of men suddenly made rich who are fearful lest they lose their wealth … A new-rich class has arisen from the exploitation of natural resources in a gold rush atmosphere." …

… Baker’s fortune is symbolized by the torrid real estate market and Brobdingnagian law firms that grew up with the oil business, and with banking. Baker and Botts, which greatly expanded under "Captain" Baker, James Baker’s grandfather, is now one of the dozen largest law firms in the nation. The Bakers own a healthy share of Texas Commerce Bank. A friend and former colleague characterizes the family as "moderately wealthy old Houston." Baker estimates the entire family including his mother’s assets, worth about $7 million.
Bush’s money by comparison was just minted. He sold oil well drilling equipment in Odessa, in west Texas, and swept out the shop himself. He and his wife, Barbara, once lived next door to a prostitute. They moved to a section of nearby Midland known as "Easter egg row" because of the garish color of the houses. They were two Yankees determined to fit in where entertaining meant "cooking something in the backyard, and drinking a little whiskey." A friend remembers Bush wearing a diaper to a New Year’s Eve party, a show of exuberance highly valued in west Texas.
Bush and two other lease-hustlers, Hugh and Bill Liedtke, formed their own oil company, Bush raising his half of million dollars in seed money with the help of a maternal uncle. They named the company Zapata, after seeing film "Viva Zapata," with Marlon Brando. Depending upon your view of the company, says, Hugh Liedtke, "Zapata was either a patriot, or a bandit."
Today the best symbol of the Bush’s good fortune are the twin black towers in downtown Houston, one named Zapata, and the other Pennzoil, designed by Philip Johnson.
Liedtke remembers Bush in Midland as a man determined to make his own career. "He wanted to show himself he could do it. Luck was a factor. But most people make their own luck. In the oil fields, it’s called the Jesus factor." …

Baker’s father taught him tennis at the River Oaks Country Club. …
… Baker’s father, an alumnus of the Hill School and Princeton, had already broken the Tex-prep trail. His son became a member of both tennis teams, but switched to rugby at Princeton because the rugby team went to Bermuda every spring. …
… To avoid being drafted Baker joined the Marines in 1952 … he later enrolled in the university of Texas Law School. He was 25 years old, married, and a father, but when his father asked him to pledge a fraternity, to make valuable business contacts, Baker complied. He lived on $160 a month provided under the GI Bill; his father paid only the rent.
Anti-nepotism policy at Baker and Bott prevented him from joining his father there. Instead, he joined what is now Andrews, Kurth, Campell and Jones another prestigious firm. The man who hired Baker, Milton West, recalls a senior partner saying, "I don’t care much about academics. Just make sure he’ll stand back-to-back with me in a whorehouse fight." …
Baker’s willingness to accept authority today goes back to that father/son relationship. "I grew up at a time when what your parents wanted you to do was the right thing. I didn’t get into the vegetarians, the demonstrations, Hare Krishna, and East Indian religious stuff, like Jamie did."
Jamie is James A Baker IV, the only one of Baker’s fours sons to go to the Right Coast – that’s Texan for East Coast. … Jamie went to Cornell not Princeton. He is proof of how much Houston and the Bakers have changed. …

… the largess of his and Bush’s friends, carried Houston for Bush in his Senate race, with 61 percent of the vote. Baker converted to Republicanism shortly thereafter, and in 1972 he worked 14 counties for Nixon. …
… As Bush’s campaign manager, Baker rejected all language and strategy that might have offended Reagan, almost as if he planned for Bush to become vice president. …

… This administration is worse than Carter’s in freezing out people who aren’t part of the ideological team." (says an aide to Rep. Sen. Bob Packwood, who opposed the AWACS sale.) …

… Ben Love, president of Texas Commerce Bank, would dearly love for Baker to succeed him. And there’s always the 1986 Texas governorship, when Republican Bill Clements steps aside. …


The Team Player George Bush by Louise Sweeney, Christian Science Monitor, January, 26, 1984

[in his first term as vice president in the Reagan administration. This story, which cites a disparaging quotation about the role of the vice-presidency from Dissertations by Mr. Dooley by Finley Peter Dunne, occurred before the Iran-Contra scandal broke. In the story, Bush is credited with access to information and his active involvement and participation within the administration as a decisionmaker. After the scandal became public, claimed just the opposite; that he was "out of the loop."

… After 452,022 miles in flight to 48 states and 52 foreign countries, as well as $35.5 million worth of fund raising for the Republican Party, Vice President Bush is not amused by Mr. Dooley’s job description.
"Well, I think there is a rather satirical and sometimes cynical view of it," noting that the vice-presidency has changed dramatically since Jimmy Carter gave unprecedented responsibilities and access to Walter Mondale. … I have, thanks to the president, total access to information and to the president himself."
[description of Bush] tall, lanky, frame is draped in a conservative navy-blue suit, white shirt with French cuffs, and delft-blue figured tie. If he is wearing one of his fabled Preppy watchbands it doesn’t show. His eyes are Yale blue … behind rimless aviator’s glasses.
… Bush, who as candidate accused Reagan of "voodoo economics," has beaten the drum for Reagan’s economic policies as vice-president. …
… Asked if he’s that much of an alter ego to President Reagan, George Bush demurs: "Well, you’d have to look at what I’ve been doing and let someone else reach a conclusion on that. I wouldn’t try to represent myself as the President’s alter ego. …
… Bush also has weekly private luncheons with the president and an office nearby, crucial for access: a large room decorated in cream, shrimp and green, filled with antiques, portraits of Thomas Jefferson and President Pierce, a shuttle model and flags of the United States, the UN, the vice-president and the CIA. …
… on his February trip to eight European countries to rally support for President Reagan’s arms control policies. "Do you think we don’t want peace? Do you thin we care less than others about a nuclear war?" he told London protesters during that trip. …
… he demonstrated the same quiet skill last year in successfully heading up the President’s federal South Florida Task Force against drugs; in chairing the Task Group on Regulation of Financial Services; and the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief. …
… But throughout his public career, George Bush has tied to keep a profile so low it is almost horizontal. …
… Even a political archrival, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the Democrat who whomped Bush in his run for the Senate in Texas, praises Bush’s job performance. …
Whatever shots are taken at Bush now come from a "friendly" fire zone in his own party, the Conservative Digest. The voice of the Republican ultra-right his month devotes its cover story, a 12-page diatribe, to the "elitist Bush, to premise that George Bush is not acceptable as heir apparent to Ronald Reagan." …

Barbara (Bus) her hazel eyes blaze …

…She is about to serve tea to several dozen women whose husbands are stationed at the National War College. They are visiting the Victorian, white turreted, red-brick vice-president’s mansion. A silver-haired woman … she sits with the family[‘s blonde cocker spaniel C. Fred (named for a friend, C. Fred Chambers, see below) …

… The sole survivor of a torpedo bomber plane crash in World War II, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Later, he co-founded a pioneer Texas oil-rig firm Zapata Offshore Company of Houston. Life there gave him his unique accent, a mix of patrician Yankee and Texas twang, and made him a multimillionaire with a weakness for country-and-western music. He also has a soft spot for speedboats, Chinese food, baseball and bonefishing. …

… Robert Mosbacher, Bush’s longtime friend, partner and campaign finance chairman …

… Bush’s critics have sometimes charged that he takes expedient political positions and has shallow convictions. …

… Bush’s younger brother, William (Bucky) Bush, president of Boatmen’s National Bank in St. Louis …

… Is there anything Bush regrets having said or done as veep – from telling Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1981, "We love your adherence to Democratic principles and the democratic process," to casting the tie-breaking vote for nerve gas as the chairman of the Senate. …

… He defends his nerve gas vote without regrets, pointing out that in Geneva he had proposed a treaty eliminating all nerve gas, but since the Soviets haven’t agreed to it, "you’d better not be at a disadvantage."

On the Privilege of being George Bush by Walt Harrington, Washington Post magazine, Sept. 28, 1986, pg W16.

… Bush knows every rock along this Maine coast. He has come here 61 or his 62 summers. Only getting shot down in the Pacific kept him away in 1944. … Bush leans comfortably against the captain’s chair of his 28-foot cigarette boat, the Fidelity, one hand on the wheel, the other holding his fishing rod off the starboard side. …
… Skull and Bones … Phi Beta Kappa at Yale … old red Studebaker … West Texas …
… There was a visit to his Waspy home town of Greenwich, Conn., a tour of the elegant Victorian where Bush grew up, walks along the streets of Midland, Texas, where he got rich. Finally, I was invited to Walker’s Point, the Bush family compound in Maine, where Bush, his wife and their children were vacationing. They worshiped at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, ate hot dogs on the deck at Walker’s Point …
… And as George Bush, his 40-year-old son George Jr. and I bob lazily on the Saco River, the vice president becomes suddenly reflective.
"I think you think `class’ is more important than I do," he says. Bush believes "class" is the snottiness and arrogance found in some rich people, those who think they are "better" than the less well-off. He says he has never felt that way. Exactly what does the word "class" mean to me? …
… I say that social class is all about family connections and money and expectations and training, and what those can mean. I say the sons of fathers in high-level jobs end up in high-level jobs about 20 percent of the time. I say that social class shapes everything from our self-esteem to our child-rearing to our sense of control over our lives. I say that education is the great American leveler – but that rich kids get more of it. And that families like the Bushes often send their kids to expensive private schools to ensure their leg up. …

[George Jr.’s response to the above] This sounds, well, un-American to George Jr., and he rages that it is crap from the 60s. Nobody thinks that way anymore! But his father cuts him off. "No, I want to understand what he’s saying." … The amazing thing is that Bush finds these ideas so novel. He seems baffled that I could see America in this way. People who work the hardest – even though some have a head start – will usually get ahead, he says. To see it otherwise is divisive. …

The secret to what make George Bush tick is not philosophical. It is somewhere here at Walker’s Point, a boot of rocky land jutting austerely into the Atlantic. The place has been in the family since 1899, and it’s home to the Bush family values. …

… [description of Bush Sr.’s Connecticut home] The house on Grove Lane had no number when George Bush was a boy. People just called it the Bush house, and everyone in Greenwich knew. The town, about 45 minutes from Manhattan via the New Haven train line was among the wealthiest communities in America. With its endless miles of stone fences and homes visible from the road only when the leaves were off the trees, Greenwich was the proverbial world apart. Its great estates, those of the Rockefellers and the Milbanks, had been subdivided by the 30s, but the bankers, brokers and businessmen who bought Greenwich’s new miniature estates assured its affluence. The Great Depression raged, but the children of Greenwich would grow up without even a memory of it. …

… attended private Greenwich Country Day School. … The Bush chauffeur, Alec … Christmases were spent in South Carolina, where Mrs. Bush’s father, George Herbert Walker, owned a plantation named Duncannon. …
… With the hot months of summer, the Bushes left Greenwich for Maine, where Grandfather Walker also owned Walker’s Point. The Walker family, in the dry goods business in St. Louis, had bought the place to escape the summer polio epidemics of the city. George’s father, Prescott Bush, a New York financier, would arrive in Maine by sleeper car on Saturday mornings and return Sunday nights. …

… George’s mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, 85 and still living in Greenwich …

… Grandfather Walker, after whom George Bush is named, was a champion polo player and the donor of golf’s Walker Cup British-American amateur competition. Grandfather Bush was a fine golfer and George’s father was the Yale baseball team captain and Ohio’s amateur gold champion. Mrs. Bush’s brother, Herbert, called Uncle Herbie in the family, was an avid golfer and Yale letterman in baseball. Prescott and Herbie, the reigning family patriarchs, were fierce competitors.

… Dorothy Bush was a lithe, beautiful, vivacious woman with a marvelous sense of humor. A devout Episcopalian. …

… Bush’s (sr.) boyhood friend George de B. Bell, whose family also summered in Maine … "With George’s father around it was difficult. He was an imposing 6 feet 4, a stiff, stern man, gracious and friendly, but formal even with his children.
"At one point I said I never heard him fart," says Jonathan Bush, laughing. …

… Prescott Bush gad gone to private high school in Newport, R.I., then to Yale, where he was inducted into the prestigious secret society Skull and Bones, a direct pipeline to America’s Eastern Establishment. At Yale, Prescott became friendly with E. Roland Harriman. A few years out of college, Prescott married Dorothy Walker, whose father had left his finance firm in St. Louis to head a Wall Street investment firm being started by Roland’s brother, Averell, who eventually became the quintessential member of the Eastern Establishment – financier, ambassador and adviser to presidents. Prescott Bush followed his father-in-law to the firm that eventually became Brown Brothers Harriman. …

… Prescott … was 57 before he became a U.S. senator; 67 when he retired in failing health. …

… the Walker side of the family contributed its fun-loving spirit to the family, it was Prescott who contributed its stoic sense of noblesse oblige.
… she Dorothy Walker Bush also told the children that when Prescott joined the Elks, he sat naked on a huge cake of ice as his initiation. The idea of Father naked on a cake of ice put them in stitches – if Father wasn’t around. Says Jonathan: Dad was no laughing matter. …

Young George was like a laboratory clone of his mother’s personality and father’s values. …

"He was earmarked in the family as a tremendous winner," says Uncle Herbie’s son, George Herbert Walker III. Uncle Herbie, 19 years older and a powerful, successful man himself – idolized young George. He believed George could do anything, and later would show that confidence in the form of a half million dollars in investor financing for George, the young oilman.

… At Andover, George excelled, again. His senior yearbook entry lists more activities than any classmate – student council secretary, senior class president, captain of the soccer and baseball teams and 20 others. Bush’s grades were mediocre, but he was, if not the most popular boy at Andover, certainly among them.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson … told members of the 1942 Andover graduating class they shouldn’t enlist in World War II, but go to college. Most boys listened. Not George Bush. …
… He became the war’s youngest Navy pilot and flew Avenger bombers in the Pacific. His plane was hit. … Bush still dropped his 500-pound bombs on an enemy radio station before bailing out into the ocean. His two-man crew was killed. After hours at sea, Bush sick and vomiting, was saved … by a U.S. submarine. … He would rack up 1,228 hours in the air and 58 combat missions. …

Bush wanted "out from under" the shadow of his family. …

… Bush was … a straight arrow, and engaged to Barbara Pierce, daughter of the Rye, N.Y., chairman of the McCall’s publishing empire. …

wartime buddy Lou J. Grab: "What came across was when I went by his grandfather’s or uncle’s apartment in Manhattan," recalls Grab. "It was about the grandest thing I’d ever seen." Pilot Milton Moore, Bush’s best friend in those days, was invited to Greenwich for George’s wedding in 45. "I was very impressed," says Moore whose father owned a laundry. Everybody was friendly, but Moore noticed that the people at the wedding seemed more self-assured than those he knew. No one in Moore’s family had even gone to college, but everyone there seemed to talk about college constantly. When introduced, people’s colleges were added like extra last names. … He visited Bush after the war at Yale, and he visited him later in Texas. …

[graduated Yale in 2 and a half years, Phi Beta Kappa, captain of the baseball team] But the greatest hit of Bush’s future success came on Yale’s April "tap night," when the school’s best and brightest are inducted into Yale’s secret societies. Bush was "the last man tapped" In tapdom’s neo-Masonic world of mysterious chants and psychosexual confessions, the first are last, making Bush the most desirable man in his class. The selection might not have been a total surprise, since Bush’s father and Averell Harriman were Bonesmen. But it was no small honor. Besides Harriman, Bones alums include Stimson, William Howard Taft, Henry Luce and McGeorge Bundy, to name a few. …

… His cousin, George Herbert Walker III, predicted to Barbara Bush that George would be president someday. …

Brown Brothers Harriman, where his father worked, waived its nepotism rule to offer Bush a job, but he said no. … But in Bush’s world it was hard to escape the womb of privilege. One of his father’s closest friends, Neil Henry Mallon, was president of Dresser Industries, an oil conglomerate, and Prescott was on its board. Mallon had no children and George was like a surrogate son. (Bush eventually would name a son after Mallon.) So when Mallon offered him a job selling oil rig equipment in Odessa, Texas, Bush took it.
… The red Studebaker, wife and baby (George Jr. ) … drove to Odessa. …

… Bill Nelson was a hardened Texas oil-field worker, and when Bush walked into the West Texas office of the International Derrick and Equipment Co. in the summer of 48, Nelson took one look and figured he’d last a week. … Bush was dressed for West Texas, wool trousers, white shirt, black shoes, no tie, but his mannerisms gave him away. Nelson had already been told that Bush was a Dresser board member’s kid. …
When Bush hit town, West Texas was in the midst of the great Scurry County oil boom. Housing was so scarce in Midland and Odessa, the area’s twin towns that tent cities cropped up. The Bushes lives in Odessa, the blue-collar sister city to the white-collar Midland. Their shotgun apartment on a dirt road shared a bathroom with a whore next door. …

… Real power to shape the future breeds optimism, which breeds effort, which breeds success. …

… Bush hadn’t set out to make a wildcatter’s fortune, but he caught the fever. And he wasn’t the only eastern import who did. They were swarming all over the place. Dubbed the "Ivy Leaguers," these migrants became key players in West Texas oil. The imports weren’t all Ivy Leaguers, but one quality distinguished many of them: They too were from well-connected families of wealth and privilege. …

Before World War II wildcatting was a mom-and-pop store. But rising drilling costs had made financing tougher. Bush and the Ivy Leaguers brought what the natives needed: pipelines to money. "Connections were the whole game," says C. Fred Chambers, a Texas oil man who became Bush’s best friend.
Independent oilmen are oil-deal promoters who convince landowners to sell a portion of their mineral rights to investors. In return, the promoter gets a free share of the deal. Bush did this successfully and then with William C. and J. Hugh Liedtke, who would later form Pennzoil, he created Zapata Petroleum. The Liedtkes, whose father was Gulf Oil’s chief legal counsel in Tulsa, had gone to private high school and Amherst College. They tapped their Tulsa connections for about half-a-million dollars and Bush tapped his Eastern connections for the same – with the help of his admiring Uncle Herbie’s investor clients. Zapata scored: 128 wells without a dry hole. …
… Bush would hit on his Eastern connections again and again. Fred Chambers, whose connections were modest compared to Bush’s, recalls with awe a meeting he and Bush had with Eugene Meyer, a founder of Allied Chemical Corp., the principal owner of the Washington Post and a friend of Prescott. Bush.
… Meyer invested (another) $50,000, (and on the way to the train station) another $25,000. Such was Bush’s world. At 30, he already traveled in circles that hard work, charm, brains and empathy alone could never have opened. …
… (Bush) was a director of an new Midland bank. … "He did represent some outside financial interests from New York and Tulsa," says Midland oilman Earle M. Craig Jr. …
… In 52, Bush got into politics, opposing the old Robert A. Taft Republicans in Texas in favor of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Back in Connecticut, his father was doing the same as part of a group that talked Ike into running for president. Once a staunch Herbert Hoover man, Prescott Bush was at the heart of the Republican Party’s shift away from old-line conservatism toward more non-ideological, pragmatic Republicanism that made its peace with the New Deal. In 52, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. …
… By the mid-50s George Bush would tell his closest friend, Fred Chambers, that he hoped to enter politics someday. … He also pushed ahead in business, moving to Houston and forming Zapata Offshore, one of the nation’s first offshore oil-drilling companies. … Bush got a bleeding ulcer. …
… Chase Untermeyer, a Bush friend and campaign worker from those days. …
… He ran as a Goldwater Republican in 64, but by Texas standards he was a moderate. He took way-out liberal positions such as opposing the repeal of the federal income tax. Yet he was a hawk on Vietnam and an opponent of civil rights legislation. He called Robert F. Kennedy a "left-wing carpetbagger," and Medicare "socialized medicine." He lost.
In 66 Bush was elected to Congress from a safe, silk-stocking Republican district in Houston and his views became more liberal. He voted for civil rights legislation, the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft. He backed a call for American withdrawal from Vietnam. According to Americans for Constitutional Action, a conservative ratings group, Bush’s voting record fell from 83 percent conservative to 58 percent conservative in 1970. …
… he was given the rare honor a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee. But other great force was also at work. "His father came to me … and wanted him on my committee," recalls Wilbur D. Mills, then the Democratic chairman of Ways and Means and an old friend of Prescott Bush. I said, "I’m a Democrat and I don’t thing I can do anything. He said, could I call Jerry Ford?" And so I did./ Ford was the Republican leader of the House. "He engineered that," Mills says, as a favor to Prescott Bush. Ford recalls helping Bush win the seat, but as a way to give Texas Republicans "a shot in the arm." He says, however that Bush wouldn’t have gotten it if Mills objected. …
… After four hours trolling the Saco River (in Maine) …
… They say George Bush doesn’t know himself … Goldwater conservative to Jerry Ford conservative to Ronald Reagan conservative. This is silly. … He was in a very real sense born to rule. … He didn’t come to this ambition by ideology, but by osmosis. … He is a reasonable man. He’ll change with the times and change back with them, again. He opposed civil rights legislation, then favored it. He backed the Vietnam War, but later wanted American soldiers withdrawn. He opposed a constitutional amendment barring most abortions, but now favors such an amendment. He opposed Ronald Reaganism, but now favors it.
Issues don’t motivate Bush; people and ambition motivate him. His ardent backers spout not ideology but faith in his goodness. … a guiltless pragmatism is Bush’s trademark. He is a living barometer of the middle course. …
While Bush is on the Fidelity, a man flicks him the bird from shore …
But Bush isn’t built for TV. He’s hot while the medium is cold. … Nothing irks Bush more than harping about his "preppy" style. …
… What I wanted from bush was an admission, some acknowledgment that on the simplest human level the privileges in his life were unfair. Bush simply doesn’t agree with this. Or he can’t acknowledge it.
"Any society, any capitalistic society is gonna have some people who are well-to-do and some who are not doing very well, and who are poor. Abjectly poor … what you do is strive hard (so) that it’s as equal as possible. … I view it as, you know, with great pride. And no sense of wanting to cooperate by saying, `Gosh, isn’t it awful that my, you know, family were privileged. … So I’m not apologetic. So long as I make a contribution and my kids do.
George Bush is without social guilt, which is probably good for his mental health. …
Hearing Bush preach the American Gospel – no matter how much I like him – is still like listening to a very tall man praise the virtues of being tall. I think: Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. …
… John Alsop said of Bush father: "I always thought Pres did a very good job of mingling with the ordinary guy, but he really didn’t understand them very well. He’d just never been one.
… They say George Bush is most like himself, when he’s at Walker’s Point. He loves to fish for a while, then roar off with his twin Mercruisers at full throttle. …
… George Prescott, now 10, climbs alone on the huge rock boat between Bush and the sea. Today the rock is a toy, tomorrow it will be a symbol. … the family as rock in a sand castle world. Because the Bushes are their own kind of American dynasty. And all these things will be bred in his bones.

Bush Opened Up to Secret Yale Society; Turning Points in a Life Built on Alliances by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1988, pg A1

40 years ago, locked in the windowless building on High Street in New Haven that is the home of Skull and Bones, Yale’s most secretive student club, George Herbert Walker Bush presented his life history or LH as it is called by Bones men.
Each year 15 Yale junior are tapped to join Skull and Bones by the 15 graduating seniors in the society. In Bush’s day selection to Bones was perhaps the ultimate honor for a Yale undergraduate. …
Bush then 23, [told his war story]. On Sept. 2, 1944, … shot down during a bombing run over the island of Chichi Jima in the Pacific. (His) TBM Avenger plummeted toward (Bush bailed). Later, rescued by a U.S. submarine. But Bush’s two crewmen died.
One of them Lt. (j.g.) William G. (Ted) White, an officer not trained as a naval aviator, who had been begging to go for a ride on a combat mission in the turret gunner’s seat; Bush and the squadron commander let him go. White had been a Bush family friend. He was also a Bones men, Class of 1942.
Witness to the confession – Thomas W.L. (Lud) Ashley, a fellow Bones man …
Apparently, Bush was able to open up to that group in a way he has rarely been able to duplicate in 25 years in public life, and his relationships with his classmates in Skull and Bones have continued to be an important party of his life for 40 years. As recently as three years ago, … four members of the group had dinner with him in Washington to buck him up, as several put it.
Bush’s … autobiography, Looking Forward, was published last year (87). It did not include … his membership in Skull and Bones. …
More than 200 people were interviewed for this series of articles, and extensive records of Bush’s career in politics were culled from the presidential archives of Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. …
Records at the Johnson library show that in preparing to run for a Senate seat in Texas in 1970, Bush, the Republican, avidly cultivated the support of Johnson the Democrat. The Nixon archives reveal that after Bush lost that race he accepted a job on the Nixon White House staff, but then talked his way into the more prestigious post of United Nations ambassador. …
… In 1974, Bush hoped … to be chosen as Gerald Ford’s vice president. He knew he was first choice of leading Republicans in a private White House survey – 225 backed Bush, while 181 preferred Nelson A. Rockefeller, who got the job. … Bush then asked for the job of U.S. envoy to China, though he knew he would play no significant role in China policy (then dominated by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who repeatedly put Bush in his place during the Nixon-Ford years.
… Within months … Bush began looking for a way back to Washington. … Ford again frustrated that dream (of the vice presidency) by appointing him CIA director. (Ford) acquiesced to the demands of Democratic senators that he promise not to put Bush on the 76 GOP ticket. …
[Through Skull and Bones] … Bush has forged a series of strong personal allegiances that have been critically important to him personally, and to his rise; relationships with other people have always been much more important to Bush than political ideas, policy preferences or any abstract intellectual concern.
"Family, Yale, country, our group, these were the driving forces … He works at it they are one extended family for Bush, said Valleau Wilkie Jr., another member of the Bones Class of 1948.

"A drilling rig can disappear off the face of the earth, you can go down in the polls," his son, George W. Bush, said in a recent interview, but friendship "doesn’t waver with the polls. It is there and consistent." For Bush, his son said, these relationships provide a "permanency" in life that is absent in politics.
… In 1970, two Houston friends lost their wives to cancer at almost the same time. Both were despondent. … Bush gathered (them) up and took them to dinner, expressed his concern for both, gently suggested that they had to let go of the past, … One of the men is James A. Baker III, who Friday announced he will give up his job as Secretary of the Treasury to become Bush’s campaign chairman. The other is Robert A. Mosbacher, Bush’s chief fund-raiser since 1970. …
"He is a product of Victorian parents in a modern world," said Ashley, Bush’s Yale classmate. …
… Bush’s accounts of various periods of his life "are often 10 to 30 percent," said a longtime friend, who asked not to be identified … there is a certain reserve, even secretiveness … the inner turmoil is not conveyed. …
… Bush does not have an ego problem, and can step back let others handle details
… [Bush like Reagan has a limited attention span. "You have to stand between him and the window or he will spend his whole time looking out the window, day-dreaming," said one frustrated official after an economic briefing for Bush. …
… Bush approaches an issue in its own frame, not in a larger context. "He can settle a problem, but not look ahead five years from now. …
… The relationships that were formed in the "Tomb," the large mausoleum-like building where the society’s took place each Thursday and Sunday night during the academic year, have had a strong place in Bush’s life, according to all 11 of his fellow Bonesmen who are still alive.
… Before giving his life history, each member had to spend a Sunday night reviewing his sex life in a talk known in the Tomb as CB, or "connubial bliss," a term from the 19th century annals of the society.
"The first time you review your sex life … We went all the way around the 15, said Lucius H. Biglow Jr., a retired Seattle attorney. "That way you get everybody committed to a certain extent. So when we came around to round two [the LH] your knew where you stood. … It was a gradual way of building confidence. …
… sexual histories helped break down the normal defenses of the members, according to several of the members from his class. William J. Connelly Jr., another member from Bush’s class, said, "In Skull and Bones we all stand together, 15 brothers under the skin. [It is] the greatest allegiance in the world."
Memento Mori – Latin for "Remember that you must die." It is one of the phrases that is part of the lore of the 156-year-old Skull and Bones ritual. … "It’s like the scholastics of the Middle Ages who kept a skull around to remind themselves they are mortal," said one of Bush’s fellow Bones men.
… Tempus fugit – time flies – another Latin phrase that appears in a hymn written for the society in the 19th Century. … another reminder of their mortality, and the importance of the brotherhood in this short life.
The society has been almost a family tradition. Besides Bush’s father, a member of Bones, Class of 1917, another member was Neil Mallon, head of Dresser Industries, who gave Bush his first job out of Yale. Bush’s oldest son, George W. Bush, also was in Bones, Class of 1968, as were about a half-dozen other Bush family members. …
Several (Bones men) provided comfort when Bush’s daughter, Robin, died from leukemia in the early 1950s. … One invested $40,000 in Bush’s Zapata oil company in the early 1950s, later selling his investment for nearly a 300 percent profit. Another who invested in Zapata came out with enough profit to make a down payment on a house.
On Feb. 21, 1981, a month after Bush was sworn in as vice president, 12 of the surviving Bonesmen, their wives and the widows of two members, gathered in Washington for a weekend reunion, including a Saturday night dinner at the vice president’s mansion.
John E. Caulkins, a Michigan banker, read a poem … using vice president’s childhood name "Old Poppy."
The next day the group went on a tour of the Oval Office and the Capitol.
In 1985, … a half-dozen Republicans were gearing up to challenge Bush for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, and the vice president’s inglorious campaign against Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine A. Farraro had tarnished his image.
… Ashley … served as a Democratic member of Congress from Ohio for 26 years until 1980. …
Bush, Ashley, Moseley, Caulkins and a fifth member of their Bones class, Samuel S. Walker Jr., with their wives, met for dinner at Ashley’s house in Northwest Washington on Saturday Oct. 5, 1985.
… Moseley, a true believer in the magic that is woven by these relationships … stands up and says, "Let’s repair to the inner sanctum." …
"If there is a flaw in Bush," Ashley said, "it is the level at which he accepts compromise. …
… San Francisco stockbroker George H. Pfau Jr. said of Bush, "He generally calls on New Year’s. I don’t hear from anyone in my family, but I hear from George Bush."
… Bush was the best man at Pfau’s first wedding. After a divorce, Pfau remarried in 1975 when Bush was in China with the U.S. mission. "It was a cushy job and there wasn’t much to do," Pfau recalled. He and his new wife went to China for their honeymoon and stayed with the Bushes. "It was the best visit we’ve ever had. He didn’t have much to do and we rode bikes around Peking."

U.S. News & World Report, August 22, 1988, pg 14
… Chairman of South Florida Task Force, formed in 1982, coordinating strategy of several government agencies in drug interdiction. However, cocaine and "crack" smuggling have increased three fold since then …
…Bush founded Zapata Petroleum Corporation with William C. and Hugh Liedtke and John Overbey in 1953. His success partly stemmed from his mastery of the business in a training program at Dresser Industries in the late 1940s. Zapata "pioneered" the use of offshore-drilling equipment, which is still used today. At the time, it was a risky venture and Bush’s gamble paid off handsomely when he sold a Zapata affiliate in 1966, making a $1 million profit. …

Bush’s Braintrust: 3 aides and himself by John W. Mashek, The Boston Globe, Aug. 26, 1990, pg 24

… As Ronald Reagan’s vice president Bush was a frequent overseas traveler, visiting Israel and the Arab nations on many goodwill missions. Bush considers King Hussein of Jordan, a leader torn between friendship to the Unites States and fear of his powerful neighbor Iraq, to be a particular friend. They have hosted each other for state visits and share a love of boats.
Bush’s association with King Hussein dates back to 1964 after Bush lost a Senate race in Texas and wanted to catch up on the latest developments in the oil business before going back to work.
Aleene Smith, Bush’s longtime secretary, now retired in Florida, recalled that Bush spent six weeks overseas, stopping in the Middle East to see Hussein, among others. At that time, Bush headed Zapata Oil, an offshore oil concern he later sold.
When he was vice president Bush had contact with Hussein, the sultan of Oman, and he met King Fahd and other Saudi Arabian officials when he attended King Khalid’s funeral in 1982. Also, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt visited Bush’s residence in Washington when both men were vice presidents. Mubarak became president in 1981 after Anwar Sadat was assassinated. …

[During the lead up to Gulf War I] Playing the dominant roles in what one aide described as "an inner-inner circle" are Defense Secretary Richard Cheney; the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell; and the national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

Financial Times, Jan. 5, 1991, by Daniel Yergin, pg 1
… Bush quickly mattered the skills of the independent oil man, flying off to North Dakota to try to buy royalty interests from suspicious farmers; combing courthouse records to find out who owned the mineral rights adjacent to new discoveries’ arranging for drilling crews as quickly and cheaply as possible; and, of course, making the pilgrimage to the U.S. East Coast to round up money from investors. …"
The only time the loyal vice president Bush was at odds with the rest of the Reagan administration was over the 1986 oil price collapse. The Reagan administration’s ‘free market’ approach toward energy rested upon a contradiction; after all, a cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), was preventing a big fall in the price of oil, thus providing the incentives for conservation and energy development in the U.S. and elsewhere. But this contradiction remained latent and untroubling until the price collapse of 1986, which saw oil prices plummet from $29 a barrel to under $10. That collapse also showed something of what Bush thought about oil.
In April 1986, he traveled to the Middle East at a time when Iran had the upper hand in the war with Iraq. The nervous Saudis and other states welcomed the Bush visit. Bush remembered how low prices had depressed the U.S. oil industry in the 1950s, and he was convinced that the price collapse would devastate the U.S. oil industry and so threaten U.S. security. And he repeated that message all along his trip.
However, back home, columnists denounced him for cuddling up to OPEC and the oil industry, and the White House itself disavowed him. The price collapse was welcomed by almost everyone in the Reagan administration because it would, in the words of one Reaganite, ‘help the world economy and hurt the Russians.’ Yet Bush’s warnings have been borne out in the years since; U.S. oil output plummeted by two million barrels a day – more than either Venezuela or Kuwait was producing before the invasion.
Bush privately told the Saudis that low prices would create strong pressure for a U.S. oil tariff which would discriminate against imported oil, including that from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis took that as a deliberate warning, as they looked to the U.S. for their own security. The message of the Bush trip was that they would have to be attentive to the energy security needs of the U.S. Four years later, in 1990, the Saudis had reason to be glad that they had been responsive. …
…He is a politician who operates on a personal basis, and the way in which Saddam misled King Hussein of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt – they in turn misled Bush – makes him think that Saddam is a totally unreliable and very dangerous man, especially in relation to nuclear and chemical weapons. …
… On the steps of the Pentagon [Bush said] "Our jobs, our way of life our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein."

… The Ba’thist or ‘renaissance’ party, which was launched in Damascus in the early 1940s came to hate the western oil companies operating in Iraq after the discovery of oil in 1927. …

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 7, 1992
… George along with his sister and three brothers, grew up in a nine-bedroom Victorian house in Greenwich, Conn., a prosperous suburb of New Work. …

Convention Roller Coaster Ride Began Here by Alan Bernstein, Houston Chronicle, Aug. 16, 1992

… He [Bush] is preparing to accept the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in the Astrodome. …

Big Oil Change by Wayne Madsen, In These Times, Aug. 20, 2001, pg 11

… the immense power that Big Oil now exercises (are) … apparent … in the respective relationships that Bush and Cheney have with two energy industry magnates – Bill Gammell of Cairn Energy and Steve Remp of Ramco Energy. Both companies are headquartered in Scotland.
Dubya’s relationship with Bill Gammell has a historical precedent. In 1952, after his grandfather Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator, made an entreaty, Gammell’s father, James, invested in young George H.W. Bush’s Zapata Petroleum Company. Zapata would figure heavily in the CIA’s early covert operations aimed at toppling Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Bush supplied two Zapata Oil exploration ships – the Zapata and the Barbara J. – for the CIA’s abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. [This conflicts with the earlier account, which does not cite Zapata directly as the source for the ships and says one of the ships was named Houston not Zapata]

[Bush and Billy Gammels] relationship dates back to 1959, when a teen-age Bush spent the summer at the Gammell family’s Scottish estate. … Bush again traveled to Scotland in 1982 when he needed Billy to ante up some cash for his fledgling Arbusto Energy Company in Midland, Texas. Billy was one of 50 original investors who sank some $ 3 million into the enterprise. Billy and the other investors got back just 20 cents on every dollar of their investment. Yet Bush returned to Scotland in 1983 for Billy’s wedding. …
… In 1999, [Billy Gammell’s] Cairn Energy found oil of the west coast of India in the Gulf of Cambay – a lucrative addition to the company’s already sizable natural gas interests in Bangladesh and oil wells on the Indian mainland. …
… Enron is expanding its operations to India and is already running a privatized electrical distribution system in Bombay. …
… Cairn Energy and Halliburton, Cheney’s old firm, are partners in developing Bangladesh’s natural gas fields in the Bay of Bengal. … In 1998 Cheney went to Bangladesh … visiting the Sangu offshore natural gas fields, a joining venture between Halliburton (a 25 percent stakeholder) Cairn, Shell Oil and Bangladesh’s state-owed Pertobangla energy company. …

… Ramco’s Steve Remp has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with Cheney and Halliburton. Remp, a dual U.S.-British citizen, has made millions form Ramco’s oil discoveries in Azerbaijan. But pumping the oil from the Caspian Sea’s Azei-Chirag-Gunashli fields would not have been possible without the help of Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton that provides infrastructure and logistics support around the world to customers ranging from oil companies to the Pentagon.

In 1994, Ramco partnered in the Azerbaijan operation with Pennzoil, a company that was created when South Penn Oil Company was bought by Zapata Petroleum Co. (which itself had been launched with the help of a $50,000 investment from James Gammell). In 1999, PennzEnergy company – the new incarnation of Pennzoil – was bought by Devon Energy of Oklahoma City. Although Ramco has sold its concession in Azerbaijan to Amerada Hess (directors of which have included Bush I Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady), Devon continues to play an important role in oil production in the Caspian fields.
Devon too has important links to the Bushes. A former member of its board is Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush the Elder. [Devon’s political contributions cited. Source: politicalmoneyline.com]
The interests of Devon and other U.S. oil companies involved in Azerbaijan are championed by the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Its former co-chairman is Richard Armitage – an Iran-contra figure who was accused by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh of having detailed knowledge of the 1985 shipment of Hawk missiles to Iran while serving as an assistant secretary of defense. Armitage is now deputy secretary of state and Colin Powell’s chief adviser. …
… Remp struck black gold again – this time off Montenegro’s Adriatic coast. The Montenegro oil reserves may rival those found in the Caspian. Although Montenegro’s government is pro-Western and has given Ramco a generous majority stake in the Adriatic oil profits [Montenegro’s President Milo] Djukanovic has been charged with corruption by some Western governments. …
… Apparently that’s what $26 million in political contributions (the amount Big Oil gave to the Republicans during the last election) can buy. …

George Bush’s Moderate Strategic Outlook by Jake Hansen, Defense & Foreign Affairs, Oct.-Nov. 1988, pg 32

… In 1977, when Carter became president, Bush stepped down and became chairman of the First International Bank of Houston. …
… In the first three years [of the Reagan administration], he traveled more than 350, 000 miles attending Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral and Ferdinand Marcos’ inauguration. He has been rewarded with several high profile chairmanships of task forces on terrorism, regulatory relief and crime and drug smuggling. …

Newest Presidential Library to Offer Insight on Bush, World Leaders, Ex-Presidents to Attend Tomorrow’s Opening by Carolyn Barta, the Dallas Morning News, Nov. 5, 1997

College Station, Texas -- … The museum will be open to the public Friday, after former presidents and world leaders gather tomorrow for the dedication of the $823 million complex, which includes the country’s 10th federally funded presidential library and the second in Texas. …

… Among the family pictures of five surviving children is son George W. Bush, now the governor of Texas, as a youngster at a rig christening for his father’s Zapata Offshore Oil Co. …

… The Bush Library Foundation raised $42 million of the $83 million in construction costs for the complex, said foundation director Don Wilson. The rest of the money came from Texas A&M. … Library operational costs will be borne largely by the federal government.

College Station, where Texas A&M is located, is near Houston.


The Family That Preys Together by Jack Colhoun, Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1992

… the oil production sharing agreement the Harken Energy Corp. signed in January 1990 with Bahrain. … Harken was given the exclusive right to explore for gas and oil off the shores of the Gulf island nation. … Harken would have exclusive marketing and transportation rights for the energy resources …
… George W. Bush, the eldest son of George and Barbara Bush … is a member of Harken’s board of directors, a consultant and a stockholder in the Texas-based company. … His relationship to President Bush made him a valuable asset for Harken, the Republican Party benefactors, Middle East oil sheiks and covert operators who played a part in Harken’s Bahrain deal. …
George W. Bush began his career in Midland, Texas in the mid-1970s when he founded Arbusto Energy, Inc. When oil prices dropped in the early 80s, [Arbusto and Bush] were rescued from business failure when the company was purchased by Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. As a part of the September 1984 deal, Bush became Spectrum 7’s president and was given 13.6 percent share in the company’s stock. … within two years Spectrum 7 was in trouble.
In the six months before Spectrum 7 was acquired by Harken 1986, it lost $400,000. In the buyout deal, George W. and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Made a director and hired as a "consultant" to Harken, George W. received another $600,000 in Harken stock, and been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year since 1986. George W.’s value to Harken soon became apparent when the company needed an infusion of cash in the spring of 1987. W. and other Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens Inc., a large investment bank in Little Rock, Ark. (Stephens made a $100,000 contribution to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.

In 1987, Stephens made arrangements with Union Bank of Switzerland (USB) to provide $25 million to Harken in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the Stephens-brokered deal Sheik Abduallah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken’s board as a major investor. Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each have ties to the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
It was Stephens who suggested in the late 1970s that BCCI purchase what became First American Bankshares in Washington, D.C. BCCI later acquired First American’s predecessor, Financial General Bankshares. At the time of the Harken investment, UBS was a joint-venture partner with BCCI in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland. Bakhsh has been an investment partner in Saudi Arabia with Gaith Pharoan, identified by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a "front man" for BCCI’s secret acquisition of U.S. banks.
Stephens Inc. played a role in the Harken deal with Bahrain as well. Former Stephens bankers David and Mike Edwards contacted Michael Ameen, the former chief of Mobil Oil’s East operations, when Bahrain broke off 1989 talks with Amoco … The Edwardes recommended Harken for the job and urged Ameen to get in touch with Bahrain. … Ameen was simultaneously working as a State Department consultant briefing incoming U.S. ambassador in Bahrain, Charles Hostler, the Wall Street Journal noted. …
… Harken lacked sufficient financing to explore off the coast of Bahrain so it brought in Bass Enterprises Production Co. of Fort Worth, as a partner. … On Jan. 22, 1990, George W. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560, a cool 200 percent profit. … One week after (he) sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of it value over the next six months. On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved in to Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf. … "There is substantial evidence to suggest Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold [his Harken stock]," asserted U.S. News & World Reports. …
… George W. also violated Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, which require "insider" stock deals to be reported, in Bush’s case by July 10, 1990. He didn’t file the stock sale with the SEC until the first week of March 1991. …
…James Bath a Texas entrepreneur who invested $50,000 in Arbusto Energy, may be a business cutout for the CIA. Bath also acted as an investment "adviser" to Saudi Arabian sheiks, linked to the outlaw BCCI, which also has ties to the CIA. …
Bill White, a former Bath partner, claims Bath has "national security" connections. White … charges Bath developed a network of off-shore companies to camouflage the movement of money and aircraft between Texas and the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.
Alan Quasha, a Harken director and former chair of the company, is the son of William Quasha, who defended figures in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal in Australia. Closed in 1980, Nugan Hand was not only tied to drug-money laundering and U.S. intelligence and military circles, but also to the CIA’s covert backing for a "constitutional coup" in Australia that caused the fall of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. …
… Talat Othman’s sudden rise to prominence in Bush administration foreign policy circles didn’t have access to President Bush before Harken’s Bahrain agreement. "But since August 1990, the Palestinian-born Chicago investor has attended three White House meetings with President Bush to discuss Middle East policy. …

Like W. Prescott [ Sr.’s older brother] combined business with secret operations. He offered his services to the covert operations of the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980, and later to the Reagan administration. A September 3, 1980 l, letter from Prescott to James Baker indicates Prescott was part of the Reagan-Bush campaign’s secret surveillance of the Carter administration’s efforts to obtain release of the U.S. hostages held in Iran. Prior to inauguration, the Reagan-Bush campaign recruited retired military and intelligence officers to monitor activities of the CIA, the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, and the White House. This operation later became known as the October Surprise.

[this article also goes into detail about Jeb and Neil Bush’s involvement, in BCCI, Silverado, mafia connections, anti-Castro Cubans and CIA links, the contra, etc.]


Covert Action Information Bulletin #33, Winter 1990
… According to Stansfield Turner, Bush’s successor as DCI, "The reason they had a great lover for George Bush [at the CIA] was that he let them do whatever they wanted. …"
Reagan was truly "out of the loop," while the men and women around him played politics with Machiavellian vindictiveness. … Elliott Abrams, Edwin Meese, … William Casey.
Bush was the master of the CIA when Edwin Wilson, Frank Terpil, Thomas Clines, Ted Shackley and Rafael Quintero ran their arms and assassination business with special support from CIA proprietaries. He helped stall the investigation of the 1976 Letelier/Moffitt murders, and met … with CIA asset Manuel Noriega. Is it not also iroinic that Donald Gregg, the vice president’s closest adviser on national security issues, would be caught running a contra resupply effort from the vice president’s office, and that Gregg would later end up as Ambassador to South Korea, where he had served as CIA station chief from 1973-1976. …
… CIA assets Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carilles were plotting acts of terrorism as revenge for Cuba’s revolution. In October, 1976, a Cuban airliner was blown out of the sky over Barbados and all 73 passengers were killed. … Bosch later escaped from a Venezuelan prison, some say, with the help of the CIA. He recently turned up in Miami, fighting extradition and seeking assistance of Bush’s son Jeb and the president himself.
Posada Carriles also escaped from prison and later surfaced in El Salvador helping Felix Rodriguez in a CIA "counter-terrorism" operation. … Rodriguez participated (in) a CIA "pacification" (under) former DCI William Colby in Vietnam. … Rodriguez is … a good friend of Donald Gregg’s. Greg and he worked for the CIA in Saigon when Theodore Shackley was station chief.
How is it that George Bush, the man appointed by Ronald Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force and the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, could be so tied up with drug dealing?
Besides his relationship to Noriega, Bush had connections to … Rodriguez, … Gregg’s helper, (who) passed money from the Medellin cartel to the contras.
… Richard Armitage was to be Bush’s choice for Secretary of the Army, but declined the nomination. There is speculation that the confirmation hearings would have brought up unpleasant questions about Armitage’s role in heroin smuggling in the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war.
Bush was brought in as head of the Republican National Committee during the downfall of Richard Nixon. … and tried to stop the Senate Watergate Committee’s chief investigator, Carmine Bellion. . …
Robert Mosbacher, Bush’s … business partner and campaign finance chair has … collected millions of dollars from a business deal in the Philippines which reportedly stole from the Filipino treasury and enriched not only Mosbacher, but Ferdinand Marcos. … A few years later, Bush [toasted Marcos, saying:] " We love your adherence to democratic principles – and to the democratic process."
[Bush hired] Stuart Spencer to be Dan Quayle’s handler during the campaign. Spencer had a … reputation for cleaning up political embarrassments. Prior to his job … for Quayle he had worked as a PR person for Panamanian General Manuel Noriega and the South African government. …

The 1980 campaign: Agents for Bush by Bob Callahan, ibid
George Bush owed his recent political fortune to several old CIA friends, chiefly Ray Cline, who had helped to rally the intelligence community … and started … "Agents for Bush."
Bill Peterson of the Washington Post wrote in a March 1, 1980 article, "Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory – perhaps ever – has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as [has] the campaign of former CIA director George Bush."
George Bush’s CIA campaign staff included Cline, CIA Chief of Station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962; Lt. Gen. Salm V. Wilson and Lt. Gen. Harold A. Aaron, both former Directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Also included were retired Gen. Richard Stillwell, once the CIA’s Chief of Covert Operations for the Far East, and at least 25 other retired Company directors, deputy directors and, or, agents.
… Angelo Codevilla, informed a congressional committee that was "aware that active duty agents of the CIA worked for the George Bush primary election campaign.
… Ray Cline claimed that he had been promoting the pro-CIA agenda that Bush had embraced for years, and that he had found the post Church-hearings criticism had died down some time ago. "I found there was a tremendous constituency for the CIA when everyone in Washington was still urinating all over it," Cline said. … "It’s panned out almost too good to be true. The country is waking up just in time for George’s candidacy. …
In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem. … (with) leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States. … The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was hosted by the Israeli government and … most of Israel’s top intelligence officers … were in attendance. …
… The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its annual report on human rights wherein the Israeli government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. …

The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and Major Gen. George Keegan (former USAF intelligence chief) and Harvard professor Richard Pipes.
Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.
… Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response. … but rather an instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications. …

… Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. …
Claire Sterling, who had also attended the conference, would create the first "bible" of this new perspective with the publication of her highly controversial book, The Terror Network. … Eventually, it would be Bush’s own task force – the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism – which would provide Oliver North back channel authorization through which he would bypass certain dissenting administration officials in his ongoing management of the Reagan-Bush secret war against Nicaragua. …
… William Casey convinced Ronald Reagan to choose Bush as his running mate. …
… In 1962, for example, Casey and Prescott Bush – George’s father – co-founded the National Strategy Information Center in New York City. The elder Bush and Casey were both leading Republican conservative members of the New York’s Wall Street community, and both could claim a background in intelligence matters while members of the U.S. military.
… In subsequent years, … the … Center … funded a series of Forum World Features publications until it was publicly revealed that the Forum was a CIA proprietary operating out of London and was engaged in a variety of anti-left disinformation campaigns.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, was in many ways an outgrowth of the original Bush/Casey think tank, CSIS’s illustrious faculty included Henry Kissinger, George Carver Michael Ledeen and Ray Cline.
William Casey’s relationship with young George Bush culminated in 1976 when Casey was appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and George Bush was appointed Director of the CIA.
George Bush and William Casey … forme(ed) their own study group to provide the CIA with some competitive analysis. – a Team B analysis. … (Team B’s argument, of course, (was) the primary justification for the massive U.S. arms build-up under Reagan. Team B was led by George Bush’s future adviser, Professor Richard Pipes and by General Daniel Graham, who later became a leader in the fight to develop Star Wars technology. …

Eight Years of CIA Covert Action by William Blum, ibid
… The Reagan administration (made) the (foreign intrigues) ostensibly overt and thus … eliminated the stigma associated with covert activities.
In 1983, The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was set up to "strengthen democratic institutions throughout the world through private, non-governmental efforts. Funded by Congress, ie. the American taxpayers, NED engages in much of the same interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries, which are hallmark of the CIA. …
Some causes … supported by NED largesse: …
… $830,000 to Force Ouvrieve, the French anti-communist trade union, which the CIA began funding in the late 1940s.
$575,000 to an extreme rightwing French group of paramilitary and criminal background, the National Inter-University Union. The funding of this group, as well as Force Ouvriere was secret and is known of only because of its exposure by French journalists in November 1985. …
Surinam: In December 1982, CIA director William Casey told the House and Senate intelligence committees that President Reagan had authorized the CIA to try to topple Col. Desi Bouterse, supposedly leading his country into the "Cuban orbit." … An invasion of the country was scheduled for July 1, 1983 by Florida-based mercenaries – Americans and others. It was called off only after being discovered by the internal security agency of the Netherlands, the former colonial power in Surinam. …

… Lebannon: … In 1985, William Casey and a Saudi price conspired to eliminate Muslim leader Sheik Fadlallah, believed to be connected to the attacks on the American facilities. This plot culminated in March when the men employed to carry out the elimination drove a car bomb into a Beirut suburb near Fadlallah’s residence. The explosion took 80 lives, wounded 200 and left widespread devastation. Fadlallah escaped without injury. …

NED Quasi-Covert Action, ibid
… The principal initial recipients of NED funds are publicly known: The AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise of the Chamber of Commerce, the National Republican Institute for International Affairs and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. …
… The FTUI, for example, funds three AFL-CIO regional institutes: The American Institute for Free Labor Development (Latin America), the Asian-American Free Labor Institute, and the African_ American Labor Center. … All three of these organizationswere created in part by the CIA in the 1960s to work against leftist-leaning unions in the Third World. …
In the 1970s, disclosures of such activities meant expose-type headlines and condemnations from congressmen and other public figures. In the 1980sd, they are greeted largely with a straight face, if not silence. …
… The National Endowment for Democracy was the public side of Project Democracy … Various organizations which were part of Oliver North’s shadowy network received money from NED, including PRODEMCA (Friends of the Democratic Center in the Americas) which served as a conduit to Nicaraguan recipients and the Institute for Nouth-South Issues, which received almost $500,000. . …
Col. North … passed top-secret intelligence data to Iran. … Project Democracy (was a) parallel foreign policy apparatus, complete with its own communications systems, secret envoys, private employees and consultant, ad hoc foundations, leased ships, airplanes, off-shore corporations and secret bank accounts. …
… officials had decided to run the covert side from the National Security Council to which North was attached. In 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 77, a classified executive order that permitted the NSC to coordinate inter-agency efforts for Project Democracy. …

Bush and North: The Task Force on Combatting Terrorism by Peter Dale Scott, ibid

… This legacy is the secret counter-terrorism apparatus that was assmebled under the auspices of then Vice President Bush and which became the vehicle for Oliver North’s extraordinary influence within the government. … it was through the auspices of Vice President Bush’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism that North began his rise to power and infamy in the U.S. government. …
… the North-Bush collaboration in the area of domestic repression, including the contingency plans developed by North (under Bush’s auspices), for the roundup and deportation of "terrorist aliens." North was the National Security Council staff coordinator for crisis management. Bush at this time was charged by National Security Decision Directive #3 (NSDD3) with responsibilities for crisis management. …
On July 5, 1987, the Miami Herald reported that North "helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.
The plan … ensisaged the roundup and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents – some 26,000 – and aliens – perhaps as many as 300,000 to 400,000 – in camps scattered around the country.
In June 1986, a new Alien Border Control Committee was established to "implement specific recommendations made by the Vice President’s Task Force on Terrorism regarding the control and removal of terrorist aliens in the U.S. …
… The contingency plans "relating to alien terrorists … anticipated that the INS may be tasked with … apprehending and removing from the U.S., a "sizable group of aliens," and again called for housing "up to 5,000 aliens in temporary (tents) quarters at a camp in Oakdale, Louisiana. …
… In April 1984, North drafted another National Security Decision Directive, creating a new counter-terrorism planning group, the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG), to rescue U.S. hostages in Lebanon (and above all CIA station chief William Buckley). TIWG’s first major action was the October 1985 interception and capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. …
… In July 1985, the Reagan administration convened the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism. Then on, Jan. 20, 1986, following recommendations of an official report of the Task Force, National Security Decision Directive 207 institutionalized North’s role as coordinator of the administration’s counter-terrorism program. He was given a secret office and staff (the Office to Combat Terrorism) that were kept hidden from certain members of the national Security Council. …
… The only official reference to NSDD 207 appears in a letter of April 17, 1987, from FBI Executive Assistant Director Oliver B. "Buck" Revell to Senator David Boren (Dem. –OK), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. …
… Two key members of Bush’s Task Force staff, Robert Earl and Craig Coy, moved over to North’s new office. Darl and Coy spendt much of the next year working on the Iran arms sales and contra support operation, making it easier for North to travel. While working for North, Earl and Coy were in fact officially attached to the Crisis Management Center, where North had worked in 1983. …
… North’s diaries … show four meetings with Vice President Bush, either alone or with Amiram Nir, the top Israeli counter-terrorism expert or in the presence of Donald Gregg. …
… The Operations Sub-Group (OSG), an interagency creation of the Task Force and NSDD 207, was convened for the first time on Jan. 7, 1986. …
… members appear to have been already meeting with North, under the auspices of the Restricted Terrorist Incidents Working Group (RTWIG) months earlier. The diaries … show at least 14 other meetings between North and the Task Force’s senior members (Admiral James Holloway, Ambassador Robert Oakley, Charles Allen), its principal consultant (Terry Arnold) and its staff (Robert Earl and Craig Coy). …
… North … told the (Iran-Contra) Committee that "when my father fied, there were three people in the government of the United States that expressed their condolences." Two these were Admiral Poindexter and William Casey, his top bosses in the Iran/contra covert operations. The third "was the Vice President of the United States." …
… By establishing a special apparatus to combat terrorism, the Reagan administration and the Bush Task Force in particular, created an ongoing network able to bypass normal channels and proceed with an Iran arms deal policy that was opposed by both Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, as well as the area officers in their departments at the CIA. … This apparatus is … more accurately described as a cabal. …
… The true cabal … consisted largely of middle-level operatives brought together by their responsibility for counter-terrorism, a group including not only North and Poindexter but the CIA’s Duane "Dewey" Clarridge and the quintet who moved from developing and reviewing the "counter-terrorist" policies with North at the Bush Task Force Senior Review Group to executing them with North through the Operations Sub-Group. (The five were Charles Allen of the CIA, Robert Oakley of State, Noel Koch of the Defense Department, Lt. Gen. John Moellering from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Oliver Revell of the FBI.) …
… In 1985-1986, Robert Oakley was the director of the State Department’s Office to Combat Terrorism. … He served first on the Bush Task Force Senior Review Group and then co-chaired the Operations Sub-Group (OSG) with North until about July 1986. …
… One of National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci’s early acts of the post-Iran/contra housecleaning in 1987 was to bring Robert Oakely back from private life to the National Security Council. Oakley now serves as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan. …
… the Iran arms deals with Ghorbanifar, although they had been proposed as early as Novermber 1984, were blocked until the Bush Task Force began to operate in July 1985. Thereafter, the arms deals were handled by a number of bureaucrats whose common denominator … was responsibility for counter-terrorism. (These men were Michael Ledeen, Charles Allen, Duane Clarridge, Robert Oakley, Oliver North for the United States; Amiram Nir for Israel.) …
… The counter-terrorism network even had its own "special worldwide anti-terrorist computer network, code-named Flashboard. … Those involved in the Iran arms deals appear to have used "flash" messages on this secure system as late as Oct. 31, 1986. …
… When Reagan admitted in March 1987 that the arms sales to Iran were a mistake, he asked Bush to reconvene his Task Force "to review our policy for combating terrorism and to evaluate the effectiveness of our current program." Asked … to evaluate his own creation, Bush’s public response in June 1987 was predictable: "Our current policy as articulated in the Task Force report is sound, effective and fully in accord with our democratic principles and national ideals of freedom."
… The depositions that Robert Earl and Craig Coy gave to the (Iran Contra) … committee … reveal that the Office to Combat Terrorism had rapidly become the means whereby North could coordinate … Iran arms sales and contra … supply operations (and) the domestic propaganda activities of Carl "Spitz" Channell and Richard Miller, the closing off of potentially embarrassing investigations by other government agencies and the handling of right-wing contributors for illegal contra arms purchases. …
… (The Iran-Contra) Committee … went out of its way to ignore the existence of the counter-terrorism network that operated through its own institutions, institutions which at least partly still exist. …

Out of the Loop: The VP’s Office: Cover for Iran/Contra by Jane Hunter, ibid

One of the most compelling revelations came in 1988 and related to the connection between Donald Gregg and the so-called Harari network. The Harari network consisted of Israelis, Panamanians and U.S. citizens set up by the Reagan administration and the government of Israel in 1982 to run a secret aid program for the contras. Its namesake was Mike Harari, a longtime Mossad official, who since around 1979 has served as Israel’s agent in Panama. … Harari supervises Gen. Manuel Noriega’s security arrangements and is credited with hleping the general withstand a coup sponsored by the Reagan administration in 1988. Harari also acts as financial adviser and business parnter to Noriega. Following the October 1989 coup attempt, Harari reportedly took over the day-to-day supervision of Panama’s military intelligenc.
The existence of the Harari network became publicly known in April 1988, during testimony before the Subcommittee on Narctoics, Terrorism and International Operations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was looking into the connections between the war against Nicaragua and drug trafficking. …
… Jose Blandon, a former intelligence aide to Noriega, told the subcommittee … that the Harari network had brought East bloc arms to Central America for the Nicaraguan contras and had smuggled cocaine from Colombia to the United States via Panama. Blandon testified that on occasion, the aircraft and Costa Rican airstrips the Harari network used for arms delieveries to the contras also carried narcotics shipments north to the U.S.
… ABC news interviewed a U.S. pilot, who said he had helped purchase and deliver the Harari network’s arms and had also flown drugs from Colombia to Panama. Using the pseudonym "Harry," the pilot said he had regarded Israel as his primary employer and the U.S. his secondary employer. …
Richard Brenneke, … went public. … The Oregon businessman claims to have worked for both the Mossad and the CIA. Brenneke said he was recruited to work with the Harari network by Pesakh Ben-Or, the Mossad station chief in Guatemala. … Brenneke claims Ben-Or gave him Donald Gregg’s phone number in Washington, D.C. to call … He said when he called Gregg on Nov. 3, 1983, Gregg told him that he should "by all means cooperate."
… Israel (according to ABC News) had provided $20 million start up capital for the Harari network and was later reimbursed from U.S. covert operations funds. Brenneke claimed that the funding, aircraft and occasionally pilots for the Harari network and its counterpart in Honduras, dubbed the Arms Supermarket, were supplied by the Medellin Cartel.
UPI reported the Arms Supermarket consisted of three warehouses in San Pedro Sula, Honduras … filled with Eastern Bloc arms. Brenneke claims it was established "at the request of the Reagan administration" and "initiated jointly by opertatives of the Israeli Mossad, Honduran military officers now under investigation for drug trafficking and CIA-connected arms dealers.
Brenneke … claims the Supermarket was a separate operation from the Harari network. This was because Ben-Or did not get along with Mario Del Amico and Ron Martin, the CIA arms dealers connected to the Supermarket. …
… Both Brenneke and ABC News identified Felix Rodriquez, the former CIA official who managed secret contra supply operations from Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador, as the harari network’s U.s. contact in Central America. …
… Brenneke … in 1985 … called Gregg to warn him about the Harari network’s connection to the Medellin Cartel. Brenneke claims … Gregg told him "Your should do what you were assigned to do. Don’t question decisions of your betters." …
` … Steven Emerson, author of Secret Warriors, (wrote): " [classified documents] show that the National Security Council had assumed a new operational role as early as 1982, with Gregg serving in a Key role as a pivotal player in the NSC offline links to the CIA. …
… Greg was a lifelong CIA officer before going to work as a member of the NSC staff between 1979 and 1981, after which he became Bush’s national security adviser.
When Vice President Bush challenged Brenneke’s crdedibility, Brenneke produced documentation that seemed to substantiate some of his claims. Unfortunately, all he had to document his conversation with Gregg were phone records. …
… Bush personally accused Sen. Kerry of allowing "slanderous" allegations to leak from his committee, which Brenneke had testified before in closed session. Bush also exclaimed that Newsweek’s … report on the Arms Supermarket was printing "garbage." Of Brenneke, Bush said, "The guy who they are quoting is the guy who is trying to save his own neck." …
… Michael G. Kozak, acting Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs … the Council on Hemispheric Affairs pointed out that the cable, written by then Ambassador John Negroponte, himself a main Iran/congra player – would have been routinely sanitized (in this case, probably by Donald Gregg) before it was onsigned to the permanent files. …
… Donald Gregg’s reward for his loyalty to George Bush … was to be nominated as ambassador to South Korea. …
… Reflecting widespread disappointment with the nomination, an editorial in a South Korean newspaper asked whether Gregg’s return to the nation where he had been CIA station chief from 1973-1975 meant that "the U.S. regards Korea not as a diplomatic but as an intelligence and operations target. …
… (A)fter denying that in 1985 he met with Oliver North and Col. James Steel – then chief U.S. military adviser in El Salvador – to discuss the contra operation, Gregg cooly absorbed the news that Steele had confirmed the meeting.
An indignant Cranston charged: "Your career training in establishing secrecy and deniability for covert operations and your decades-old friendship with Felix Rodriguez apparently led you to believe that you could serve the national interest by sponsoring a freelance operation of the Vice President’s office.
… Steven Emerson reported that he had seen a March 1983 memo prepared by Gregg which accompanied a plan to organize a "search-and-destroy" air team." The plan was drafted by Felix Rodriguez and contained a map. … Emerson said these "still classified" documents bore the handwritten approval of then National Security Adviser William Clark. …
… Cranston wondered aloud how Gregg didn’t know that Rodriguez was involved with the contras when the NSC staff, the State Department and Gen. Paul Gorman, head of the U.S. southern Command, all knew that the illegal contra aid operation was Rodriguez’s real priority in Central America. …
… At his trial, Oliver North testified that "I was put in touch with Mr. Rodriguez by Mr. Gregg of the Vice President’s office. … During his confirmation hearings Gregg said North’s statements were "just not true."
… Recalling Bush’s statement in October 1986 that Felix Rodriguez was not working for the U.S. government and Gregg’s own knowledge that Rodriguez had received help from the U.S. military in El Salvador, Cranston asked Greg: "Did you inform Bush of those facts so he could make calculated misleading statements or did you keep him in the dark so he could make misleading statement?"
Gregg evaded the question, contending that Rodriguez was not being paid a government salary but was living off his CIA pension. …
Three Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee joined all the Republicans, in voting to report the nomination favorably to the full Senate. One of the Democrats, Terry Sanford of North Carolina, confirmed Cranston’s explanation of his vote – that he was afraid "the path would lead to Bush." "If Gregg was lying," said Sanford, "he was lying to protect the president, which is different from lying to protect himself." …

Bush and Noriega, ibid

During the 1988 campaign George Bush (was) repeatedly asked … whether in 1983 and 1985, they had discussed the allegations that Noriega was involved in narcotics money laundering. … (Bush said) he did not know about the reports of Noriega’s involvement with drug trafficking until a U.S. court indicted the general in February 1988. … Of the Dec. 1983 meeting, Bush said: "What I talked to the Panamanians about was doing what they could to get their banks out of laundering any money, that was laundering it for narcotics traffic." …
Donald Gregg also attended the 1983 meeting and, according to Jose Blandon, former intelligence aide to Noriega, Gregg obtained Noriega’s commitment "to help secretly arm, train and finance the contras in early 1984. …
… Panamanian Col. Roberto Diaz Herrera and Jose Blondon appeared in a Britsh documentary, saying that … Noriega claimed to have photographs and tape recordings made at this meeting that would show "Bush or his aides knew that the United States was helping to train Nicaraguan insurgents at a time when this was prohibited by American law. …
… In 1988, the Reagan administration ordered the State Department, the Pentagon, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the CIA not to cooperate with the GAO (the investigative arm of Congress)in a "case study" it had been ordered to conduct, using Panama as an example of how drug trafficking by foreign officials influences U.S. foreign policy decisions. …


Bush’s Boy’s Club: Skull and Bones, ibid

… There is even informed speculation that there is a "Bones cell" inside the CIA. …
One unusual bonesman … is the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, … best known for his ant-Vietnam war activities and his political activism at Riverside Church in New York City. Sloane Coffin was recruited by the CIA shortly after he graduated from Yale in 1949. …
William F. Buckley: Buckley began his cooperation with the Agency while he was in Mexico City in 1952, where his good friend, E. Howard Hunt, was CIA station chief at the time. …
Buckley and Bush … are members of the prestigious older-boys California getaway, "The Bohemian Club." …
Buckley’s older brother, James Buckley, is also a member of Skull and Bones. From 1981-1982 Buckley was Under secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology, where it was his job to see that U.S. military aide went to support the right regimes.
Buckely was also directly connected to the work of the Chilean secret police, DINA. In September 1976, DINA agents assassinated former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C. … On September 14, 1976, one week before the Letelier assassination, Michael Townley and Guillermo Novo [two DINA agents involved in the assassination] drove to the office of Senator James Buckley in New York City for a meeting. …
Hugh Cunningham, Bonesman from the class of 1934, is a Rhodes Scholar with a lengthy career in the CIA. He was in the Agency from 1947 to 1973, during which time he served in top positionswith the Clandestine Services, the Board of National Estimates and was the Director of Training from 1969-73. He also served with the CIA’s precursor, the Central Intelligence Group from 1945-1947.
William Bundy is a Bonesman from the class of 1939. Bundy began his intelligence career in the OSS during World War II. From 1951-61 he worked at the CIA, including at its Office of National Estimates. …
From the class of 1950 comes Bonesman Dino Pionzo. His claim to fame was the time he spent as CIA deputy chief of station in Santiago, Chile in 1970, during the massive CIA destabilization of the Allende government. His is also a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Pionzo (later became)… an investment banker. As of 1983, he was vice president of investment firm, Dillon, Reed. …
Nicholas Brady, the current Secretary of the Treasury was co-chair of Dillon, Read and a graduate of Yale, but not a Bonesman. …
From the days of George Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, comes former spook F. Trubee Davidson. Davidson, a Bonesman, from the class of 1918, was the Director of Personnel at the CIA in 1951. Davidson begot little Bonesmen, Endicott Peabody Davidson and Daniel Pomeroy Davidson. Endicott Davidson went to work at the law firm of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam and Roberts (Henry Stimson was the Secretary of War during World War II and also a Bonesman).
Another interesting Bonesman is David Lyle Boren, the
Senate Democrat from Oklahoma. While he is not an employee of the CIA (some say this is open to question), Boren, nevertheless, is part of the intelligence community because he is the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. …
The list of Bonesmen includes … Robert H. Gow (president of Zapata Oil, once owned by Bush and which had possible links to the CIA)

Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Bush’s Secret Team by Jane Hunter, ibid

… One of Bush’s first moves as president was to make a highly unusual appearance before the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee, asking them to fund a CIA operation to influence the May 1989 Panamanian elections. …
… Many of the Bush appointees were involved in the Iran/contra affair. …
… Robert Gates: Gates was deputy director of the CIA under the late William Casey, … under Bush he holds the position of deputy national security adviser. …
… The Restricted Inter-Agency Group (RIG)(is) the most infamous, … devised to direct the secret war against Nicaragua.

John Tower: … (Bush’s) nomination of John Tower as Defense Secretary. Tower, as the Reagan-appointed head of the Tower Commission, was the man who cleared Bush of complicity in the scandal –- thus acquiring the moral status of co-conspirator. Bush stuck by Tower’s nomination through weeks of revelations about the former Texas senator’s sordid past up until the time when the nomination went down in a lopsided defeat on the Senate floor. …

Thomas Pickering: … During his time in El Salvador, from 1983-85, Picering became entwined in the Iran/contra affair. …
… Pickering also dismissed communications he received from Donald Gregg (at the time, Vice President Bush’s National Security Adviser) regarding Felix Rodriguez as well as those from Gen. Paul Gorman, head of the U.S. Southern Command.
Pickering (was) … ambassador to Israel from 1985-88. …

John Negroponte: Bush’s choice as Ambassador to Mexico. … Negroponte … was … Ambassador … to Honduras between 1981-85. A foreign service officer in Vietnam in the 1960s, then an aide to former Secretary of State Kissinger during the Paris peace talks. Negroponte was assigned in the early 1980s to oversee the assembling of the mercenary army that came to be known as the contras …
… Negroponte "allegedly helped Gen. Gustavo Alvarez create Battalion 316, an elite unite responsible for more than 100 death squad killings. …
… Negroponte, whose last post in the Reagan administration was as deputy to National Security Adviser Colin Powell, is intended to preside over the dismantling of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or to protect it from defeat by the ascendant coaliton slightly to its left, led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. … "The impression people have is that you don’t send Negroponte to a place where you don’t expect trouble," said Jorge Castaneda, a Mexican political scientist.

Richard Melton: … Bush has picked Richard Melton to be Ambassador to Bravil. Melton was Reagan’s ambassador to Nicaragua until he was kicked out in June 1988 for helping to organize a violent demonstation. … He was stationed in the Dominican Republic when the U.S. invaded in 1965 and was sent as ambassador to Portugal after the overthrow of the military government in 1974. …
Melton’s (previously worked in Brazil as a) political affairs officer at the U.S. consulate in Recife in 1968. Richard Zaratini now an adviser to a member of the Chamber of Deputies , recently saw a picture of Melton and recognized him as one of two U.S. officials who interrogated him in 1968. Zaratini, at the time a union organizer, says he had been arrested several days earlier and tortured before his confrontation with Melton. … Melton, recalled zaratini, "asked me what I had against the United States."

Richard Armitage: Another Bush nominee – and Iran/contra activist – Richard L. Armitage withdrew from consideration for the post of Secretary of the Army to avoid hearings "that were expected to include questions about his role in the Iran-contra affair," as well as questions of drug dealings during his service in the Vietnam war. Armitage also resigned as assistant secretary of defense for international affairs.
In December 1985, Armitage discussed Iran arms sales with Menachem Meron, the director-general of the Israeli defense ministry, and, according to an unreleased Israeli report on the Iran/contra afrair, told Meron that besides Secretary Caspar Weinberger, he [Armitage] was the only Pentagon official "in the picture on the Iranian issue."

Robert Kimmitt: Kimmitt was the executive secretary of the National Security Council during much of the Reagan presidency. As a member of Bush’s campaign staff, Kimmitt is credited with dreaming up the choice of Dan Quayle for vice president. …
… Kimmitt was not part of the Oliver North-Robert McFarlane inner circle at the NSC. …

Cresencio Arcos: Cresencio S. Arcos Jr., commonly known as Chris Arcos, was deputy director of the State Department’s notorious Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office between September 1985 and August 1986. Bush has recently chosen him to succeed Everett Briggs as ambassador to Honduras.
A career foreign service officer with the U.S. Information Agency since January 1973, Arco had spent the five years leading up to his NHAO assignment as a public affairs counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras under then Ambassador John Negroponte.
While in Honduras, Arcos said he had theopportunity to meet Oliver North and Felix Rodriguez. Rodriguez, he claims, "was referred to me by Mr. Jorge Mas Canosa, who is the President of the Cuban –American [National] Foundation in Miami. …
Arcos recounted meeting Rodriguez again, in December 1985, during a stopover in El Salvador on a one-day trip to Honduras he made with Oliver North and deputy assistant secretary of state William Walker (now U.S. ambassador to El Salvador. …
… Arcos also recalled sitting at a meeting of the Restricted Inter-Agency Group (RIG) and listening to Walker, Elliot Abrams, and NHAO director Robert Deuling, discuss a request by Oliver North to give Rob Owen a consultancy at NHAO. …

John Kelly: Ambassador to Lebanon in August 1986. … Kelly admits that he followed instructions from Oliver North and John Poindexter, McFarlane’s successor. … Much of the testimony he gave the Iran/contra committee investigators has been blacked out.

John Bolton: In February 1989, Bolton became Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Until that time, he was Assistant Attorney General, a post he also held under Attorney General Edwin Meese. In the Meese Justice Department, Bolton sabotaged Sen. John Kerry’s investigation into contra connections with drug trafficking, according to an aide to Kerry’s subcommitte on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, by failing to provide requested information and by working actively with Republican senators who were opposed to Kerry’s investigation.

Lawrence Eagleburger: Eagleburger made $900,000 last year as president of Kissinger Associates. He refused to reveal names of all the "consulting’ company’s clients during his confirmation hearing for Assistant Secretary of State in the Bush administration, provoking an outcry which led nowhere. (National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, another associate, salaried at $293,000, also refused this request during his confirmation hearing.) Speculation on exactly what Henry Kissinger has been doing as a private citizen – and for whom – resulted in the portrayal of Eagleburger as a man who would have a special relationship with the political and corporate elites of the creditor nations. …
… In 1983, a U.S.-Israeli political-military committee was established and David Kimche, director of the Israeli foreign ministry and Eagelburger "were named as coordinators of the new strategic cooperation outside the Middle East.
… Bush has kept at least two other CIA veterans in circulation. James Lilley, who was the CIA’s China station chief when Bush was ambassador there (and was most recently Ambassador to South Korea, following a stint at the NSC and in the Taiwan diplomatic office) is now himself ambassador to China. …
Vernon Walter, formerly deputy director of the CIA and most recently the Reagan administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations, is now serving as Ambassador to West Germany. …

Old Nazis and the New Right: The Republican Party and Fascists by Russ Bellant, ibid

It is May 17, 1985, Reagan attends a luncheon at Shoreham Hotel, as are 400 luncheon guests (held) … by National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council (RHGC). … Eastern European émigré network which includes anti-Semites, racists, authoritarian, and fascists, including sympathizers and collaborators of Hitler’s Third Reich, former Nazis, and even possible war criminals. … The RHGC use anti-communist sentiments as a cover for their views, while they operate as a defacto émigré fascist network. [Members of the RHGC] later joined the 1988 election campaign of President George Bush.
This fascist network within the Republican Party represents a small but significant element of the coalition which brought Ronald Reagan into the White House. It is from this network that the Bush presidential campaign assembled its ethnic outreach unit in 1988, a unit that saw eight resignations by persons charged with anti-Semitism, racism, and even Nazi collaboration.

Laszlo Pasztor: The founding chair … began his political career in a Hungarian pro-Nazi party.
Radi Slavoff: The RHGC’s executive director is a member of a Bulgarian fascist group.
Nicolas Nazarenko: A former World War II officer in the German SS Cossack Division
Florian Galdau: A close associate and defener of Valerian Trifa, the Romanian archbishop prosecuted for concealing his involvement in war crimes of the pro-Nazi Romanian Iron Guard.
Philip A. Guarino: He is an honorary American member of the conspiratorial P-2 Masonic Lodge of Italy, which plotted in the early 1970s to overthrow the Italian government in order to install a dictatorship.
Anna Chennault: chairperson and funder of the Chinese Republican affiliate; linked to the authoritarian Taiwan regime. …

… The Displaced Persons Commission, which worked from 1948 to 1952, arranged for approximately 400,000 persons to come to the U.S. Initially it sought to bar members of pro-Nazi groups, but in 1950 a dramatic reversal took place. The Commission declared "… the Baltic Legion not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States." The Baltic Legion was also known as the Baltic Waffen (armed) SS. …

… In 1952 … the Republican National Committee formed an Ethnic Division. Displaced fascists, hoping to be returned to power by an Eisenhower-Nixon "liberation" policy, were among those who signed on. This would become the embryo for the formation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969. …
… The foundation of the Republican Heritage Groups Council lay in Hitler’s networks in Eastern Europe before World War II. In many Eastern European countries the German SS set up or funded political action organizations that helped form SS militias during the war.
In Hungary, … the Arrow Cross; … Romania the Iron Guard; the Bulgarian Legion; the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Latvian Legion, and the Byelorussian (white Russian) Belarus Brigade were all SS-linked. …
… Laszlo Pasztor, an activist in various Hungarian rightist and Nazi-linked groups. In World War II, Pasztor was a member of the youth group of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian equivalent of the German Nazi Party. …
… Pasztor came to the U.S. in the 1950s, he joined the GOP’s Ethnic Division. One of the leaders of the 1968 Nixon-Agnew campaign’s ethnic unit. …
… "It was my job to identify about 25 ethic groups," to bring into the RHGC. …
` … Today, there are 34 nationality federations and 25 state councils that constitute the National Republican Heritage Groups Council. …
… The Bulgarian National Front … (is)… headed by Ian Docheff. As early as 1971, the GOP was warned that the National Front was beyond the pale. A Jack Anderson column quoted another Bulgarian-American organization, the conservative Bulgarian National Committee, which labeled Docheff’s National Front as "fascist." …
… In 1981, Italian authorities uncoveered a conspiracy in which a group of business, political, Mafia, military and Vatican-connected figures planned to overthrow Italian parliamentary democracy and install a dictatorship. The group, called the P2 Masonic Lodge, had nearly a thousand members. The prestige of P-2 members (heads of intelligence agencies, 38 generals and admirals, and three cabinet officers, for example), plus revelations of financial scandals, brought extensive European press coverage, the collapse of the Italian government and a parliamentary inquiry. …
One American involved in this intrigue was Philip A. Gurarino, 79, an adviser on senior citizens’ affairs to the Republican National Committee …
… Guarino was also involved in John Conally’s Committee for the Defense of the Mediterranean, which disseminated propaganda on the Italian Communist Party supposed threat to the West. Connally was Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury and member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1978, Guarino’s friend and ally, Frank Stella, became National Chair of the "Heritage National Committee of Connally for President," when Connally sought the 1980 GOP nomination for president. …
… (Stella), in 1981, was nominated for the little-known Intelligence Oversight Board, which is supposed to monitor the legalities of covert operations of the intelligence agencies. He withdrew his name after it had been publicly released. Stella was being consiered for the post of Ambassador to Italy in 1985, but withdrew his name again. … In 1983, he was made a White House fellow. …
Anna Chennalut … gained fame in the 1950s and 1960s as an ardent advocate of Chiang Kai-Shek’s dictatorship of Taiwan. …
… There are no African-American or Jewish Republican federations. …

FEMA and the NSC: The Rise of the National Security State by Diana Reynolds, ibid

On October 30, 1969, President Richard Nixon issued Executive Order 11490, "Assigning Emergency Preparedness Functions to Federal Departments and Agencies," consolidated some 21 operative Executive Orders and two Defense Mobilization Orders issued between 1951 and 1966 on a variety of emergency preparedness matters.
In 1976 President Gerald Ford ordered the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency (FEPA) to develop plans to establish government control of the mechanisms of productions and distribution, of energy sources, wages and salaries, credit and flow of money in American financial institutions in any (heretofore undefine) "national emergency." This Executive Order (EO 11921) also indicated that, when a state of emergency is declared by the president, Congress could not review the matter for a period of six months. …
… President Carter … in 1977 … signed Executive Order 12148 creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to replace the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency. This presidential directive mandated an interface between the Defense Department and FEMA for civil defense planning and funding. …
… Reagan … gave FEMA vastly expanded executive emergency powers and appointed retired National Guard General Louis O. Giuffrida as his "emergency czar."…
… As governor, Reagan called on Giuffrida to design Operation Cable Splicer. Cable Slicer I, II and III were martial law plans to legitimize the arrest and detention of anti-Vietnam war activists and other political dissidents. In 1971, Reagan, with a $425,000 grant from the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, established a counter-terrorism training center – the California Specialized Training Institute – and made Guiffrida its commandant. …
… Guiffrida … flooded high-level FEMA posts with friends from CSTI and the military police, creating a Civil Security Division of FEMA and established a Civil Defense Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland based of the CSTI model. By 1984, the Center had trained one thousand civil defense personnel in survival techniques, counter-terrorism and military police methods.
From February to July 1982, Reagan signed a series of National Security Decision Directives … on defense policy and emergency mobilization preparedness. …
… NSDD 47 provides for an intensified counter-intelligence effort at home and the maintenance of law and order in a variety of emergencies, particularly terrorist incidents, civil disturbances and nuclear emergencies.
… Reagan gave the NSC authority over the planning for civil defense policy with it expanded security powers. … He mandated the creation of … the Emergency Mobilization Preparedness Board. …
… Members of the EMPB were the Assistant for National Security Affairs, … the DOD’s Secretary of Defense for Policy, Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and representatives from 10 other federal agencies. FEMA provided the staff … for EMPB.
Oliver North served on the EMPB … from 1982-1984, assigned by former NSC adviser Robert McFarlane. Guiffrida was there, too. They … used this executive authority to change civil defense planning into a military/police version of civil security.
… In January 1982, FEMA … (was) given carte blanche emergency powers to acquire resources from federal and state agencies (including National Guard personnel) and private sector (banking, communications, transportation, etc.) "for use in civil disturbance operations." …
… General Frank S. Salcedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division … recommended expanding FEMA’s power further in the areas of survival training, research on imposing martial law and the potential threat posed by foreign and domestic adversaries. … As he saw it, at least 100,000 U.S. citizens, from survivalists to tax protestors were serious threats to civil security. …
… In 1981, FEMA and DOD began a continuing tradition of biannual joint exercises to test civilian mobilization, civil security, and counter-terrorism plans using such names as "Proud Saber/Rex-82, Pre-Nest, and Rex84/Night Train." [The exercises included the participation of the] CIA, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, and the FBI.
… To fight subversive activities, … the military was authorized to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population and the imposition of martial rule. …
Attorney General William French Smith … admonished McFarlane … in a letter dated Aug. 2, 1984 ….
… FBI director William Webster had previously complained when FEMA’s Director of Civil Security, General Salcedo, had intruded into the FBI’s domestic intelligence jurisdiction under the rubric of counter terrorism. Salcedo was forced to turn over to Webster some 12,000 names he had been compiling on a list of potential threats to civil security. …
Giuffrida resigned in 1985 after a House subcommittee charged that FEMA was being mismanaged, and it was publicized that Giuffrida had staffed FEMA with his military/police cronies and … allowed $170,000 of agency funds to be used to outfit a deluxe bachelor pad at the Civil Defense Training Academy at Emmitsburg. He now operates a security consulting firm in Washington, D.C. …
… There was a rumored joint investigation conducted by the Defense Department and the CIA into the unconstitutionality of planning for a civil security emergency by several government agencies. Supposedly, the two investigators, Special Forces Lt. Col. Kvererdas and the CIA’s William Buckley, prior to his fatal Beirut assignment, destroyed the plans and the exercise data.
Some believe that much of the planning was incorporated into Vice President Bush’s Report from his Task Force on Combating Terrorism, which has inspired civil security contingency plans at the INS by an Alien Border Control Committee. The working group within the INS was designing plans and programs regarding the control and removal of alien terrorists, potential terrorist aliens and those "who are likely to be supportive of terrorist activity within the U.S.
The most obvious resting place for the material is the NSC. In 1987, Reagan signed another NSDD, number 259, which superseded [prior directives] … no significant changes are evident in civil defense planning from the 1984 EMPB scenarios. … Just before he left office, Reagan signed Executive Order 12656, which … puts the NSC clearly in charge. …
… The director of FEMA has now been promoted to adviser to the NSC … authorized to assist in the implementation of national security emergency preparedness policy. …
On the same day that Reagan signed EO 12656 he also signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 …
… The anti-drug policy authorizes the use of U.S. military to assist in the drug war at home. If you live in federal housing or if you reside in large urban areas … this act will authorize the military to fence off your streets, keep track of who comes from and goes to your home, stop and frisk you, your friends and family, and regularly inspect your home and belongings. If you or anyone who visits you is suspected by the authorities of using, selling or trafficking in any kind of illicit narcotic substance, you can be evicted from your home whether your landlord is the government or a private party. …
The Justice Department is given the power to confiscate private property and deny state and federal entitlement by decree. Once caught, even the casual marijuana users could be subject to the confiscation of their homes, cars, and bank accounts. …


Bush and the CIA: Company Man by Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, Mother Jones, October 1988

As vice president, Bush headed National Security Council groups on crisis management, drug interdiction and terrorism.

… [As China envoy, Bush] loyally obeyed detailed instructions from Henry Kissinger. …
… Kissinger cabled Bush in Beijing with the offer of DCI on Nov. 1, 1976. Bush … accepted the offer.
… His Yale classmate and fellow Skull and Bones member Thomas "Lud" Ashley, a House Democrat at the time, asked Bush, "What the fuck do you know about intelligence?"
"Ask me in six weeks," a confident Bush responded.
… The ammunition for Colby’s attack on Congress and the press arrived on Dec. 23, 1975, when Richard Welch, chief of the CIA’s Athens station, was murdered on his doorstep. Colby immediately denounced Counterspy magazine, which he claimed had unmasked Welch.
The agency’s own internal investigation concluded that Welch’s position and local home address were well known, and that he had been targeted in connection with his activities in Cyprus and Lebanon. …
… At the end of January the Senate confirmed Bush. As he moved into the CIA’s Langley, Va. Headquarters, he took control of the most inbred bureaucracy in government. Room 7D5607 was an unattractive, cramped L-shaped office. It had a square sitting area with a column incongruously placed in the middle, a cramped alcove housing the director’s desk and picture windows overlooking a panorama of the Virginia woods nearby. …
It seemed easier and more important, according to former aides, to change the CIA’s relationship with Capitol Hill than to alter the Agency to satisfy the Hill. Bush’s central charge would be to keep the House and Senate intelligence committees at bay. …
… On February 11 and 18, 1976, the Village Voice published a copy of the suppressed, uncensored Pike committee report, later revealed to have been leaked by CBS correspondent Daniel Shorr. …
… Overnight the political landscape shifted from support for investigations of the CIA to questions about the motives of its critics. Bush took advantage of the shift. …
… On February 18, 1976, the Ford White House was able to catch the unsuspecting congressional committees by surprise. By issuing Executive Order 11905, "to establish policies to improve the quality of intelligence needed for national security [and] to clarify the authority and responsibilities of the intelligence departments and agencies. …
… One of the agency’s current ranking officials says Bush … "[spent] so much time explaining to the people that he [had] little to no time to look at what we, in the operations division, [were] doing." (Bush would make 51 appearances on Capitol Hill during his year at the CIA.) …
… From the time of his confirmation, Bush relied principally on E. Henry Knoche, a CIA veteran who helped coordinate Colby’s and Bush’s responses to the congressional committees. …
… Knoche knew "where the bodies were buried or half-buried."
Bush also turned to William Wells, a career covert operator who had graduated a few years ahead of him at Yale, and made him the new deputy for operations. A month later, on Wells’ recommendation, Bush appointed Theodore Shackley to be associate deputy director for operations. A third career covert operator, John Waller, assumed the post of inspector general, the sensitive position responible for monitoring internal improprieties. …
… In June, four Cuban-American organizations joined together to form CORU, or the Command of United Revolutionary Organizations. CORU was formed to build political support for overthrowing Castro, and its members began working directly with the intelligence agencies of the right-wing regimes in Chile, Paraguay and Nicaragua.
After a CORU meeting at Bonao, a mountain resort in the Dominican Republic, consistent reports of planned bombings and political assassinations filtered back to the CIA. Within six weeks, bombs exploded at the Cuban United Nations mission in New York, and at four other locations in the hemisphere. The first terrorist war in the Americas was under way, and it was being waged by agents trained and paid by the CIA. …
… In February 1976, the CIA blew the whisle on Orlando Bosch, a Miami pediatrician and anti-Castro organizer. Costa Rican police detained Bosch for plotting to assassinate Henry Kissinger. The plot was reportedly organized because Kissinger had been conducting negotiations to improve relations with Cuba.
The CIA also intervened when officials learned the Chilean Intelligence Service (DINA) was planning to use Cuban ex-CIA agents to assassinate Chilean exiles in Portugal and France through a regional counter-terrorist organization known as Operation Condor. Headed by Chile, Operation Condor included agents, from Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil and Uruguay, dedicated to tracking down "subversives" throughout the hemisphere. …
… In these cases, Bush’s CIA proved capable of averting attacks planned by its friends. Unfortunately, for targets of similar plots, the agency did not develop any systematic way of dealing with such terrorist threats.

On June 16, 1976, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Francis E. Meloy Jr., his driver and the embassy’s economic counselor were assassinated on their way to a meeting with Lebanese president elect Elias Sarkis. … The crisis group – Ford, Bush, Kissinger, National Security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements Jr. and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George Brown – was convened four times in the next four days. …
… Most intelligence from Lebanon came from three sources, Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service; SAVAK, Iran’s intelligence service; and a limited group of Lebanese Phalangists and assorted right-wing sources who had been managed out of the Athens CIA station by Richard Welch. …
… The information Bush wanted could be obtained, the CIA’s clandestine operators assured him, but only if Bush made it clear that the CIA would not crack down on "cooperative" intelligence agency activities and report their plans or the information they shared to the FBI.
At that point, according to a still active CIA official, Bush made a tactical judgment, one of the few clear choices of his career. He wanted to concentrate on collecting more information on terrorist activities around the world. But in order to get it, the CIA had to cooperate with friendly foreign agencies operating in the United States. No furtther pressure would be brough to bear on rogue operations of "cooperative" intelligence agencies. He would try to find ways to help them rather than to curtail their activities.
… U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, George Landau, cabled the CIA on July 28 to say that he had just issued special U.S. visas to two Chilean military operatives who had been issued fake passports by Paraguayan intelligence officials. The two claimed they were heading to Washington to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, among other things. In a separate courier pouch, Landua sent photocopies of the passports to Walters. Back from the CIA came a "service message" acknowledging receipt of his cable and stating that it had been "delivered to George Bush, the director of the CIA …"
… On Aug. 4, the CIA forwarded a response on behalf of the recently retired Walters to the ambassador in Paraguay, stating that "he was unaware of the visit and that his agency did not desire to have any contact with the Chileans." The ambassador revoked the visas. Two days later the CIA sent photographs accompanying the visas to the State Department.
This series of transactions meant little to anyone in the CIA except those in the clandestine service who had followed Operation Condor, the counter-terrorism program that the agency blocked later that year from assassinating Chilean exiles in Portugal and France. The cooperation between intelligence operatives of two member nations – Paraguay and Chile – meant they were probably gearing up for an action in the United States. …
… On September 7, 1976, a former CIA officer named Kevin Mulcahy had called Theodore Shackely, the associate deputy director of operations. Mulcahy reported that another former CIA agent Edwin Wilson, was training Libyan terrorists in explosives and was providing the timing devices for detonators. Wilson was getting the devices from William Weisenburger, the CIA’s technical expert, and from an agency supplier, Scientific Communications. Wilson and another former CIA officer were shipping firearms to Libya, and they were planning to ship Redeye missiles. Most significantly, Wilson was coordingating his clearly illegal activities through Thomas Clines, Shackley’s former subordinate in several CIA assignments. …
Clines, along with other CIA officials, knew that Mulcahy had gone to the FBI. On September 20, Clines, reported that a Cuban-American former CIA agent still used from time to time by the agency, "Chi Chi" Quintero, had sought Clines out the day before. (Quintero would reemerge, along with Clines, as a participant in the Iran-contra scandal.) Quintero complained that Wilson had recruited him for what Quintero had thought was to be an agency hit on the international terrorist "Carlos. …
On September 21, a devastating bomb (of the type the FBI believed Wilson was selling) exploded under the Chevelle sedan of former Chilean Ambassador to the United States Orlando Letelier, killing Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt, a colleague from the Institute for Policy Studies., where Letalier worked. By the dend of the day, institute spokespeople were accusing the Chilean intelligence service of the crime.
Within a week, the FBI’s legal attache in South America’s southern cone had filed a classified cable about Operation Condor. The cable, which was shared with the CIA and the State Department, set forth the distinct possibility that the Letelier assassination was an Operation Condor action and made reference to the practice of member countries dispatching secret teams to do each other’s dirty work.
On October 4, 1976, Eugene Propper, an assistant U.S. attorney, … met with Bush and his general counsel, Anthony Lapham. "Look," Bush told them, according to Propper’s account in Labyrinth, a book he wrote with Taylor Branch, "I’m appalled by the bombing. …
… Two days later, a Cubana Airlines jet en route to Kingston exploded shortly after takeoff from Barbados’ Seawell Airport, killing all 73 people aboard, including 24 members of the Cuban fencing team. Fidel Castro immediately blamed the CIA. In Miami, a man with a Hispanic accent called the Miami Herald saying he represented Operation Condor and claimed credit for the bombing. A Miami radio station also received a call from a woman who claimed the bombing had been carried out by CORU, the violent Cuban-American group bent on overthrowing Castro.
Within two days, Venezulean police arrested two CORU leaders, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. …
Posada would reemerge in 1985 in a CIA counter-terrorism operation in El Salvador. That operation would be headed by Felix Rodriguez, who was originally recruited fro the job through Vice President Bush’s office. …
… It was Bush’s job to protect the CIA’s sources and methods: he believed Woodward and his sources had violated the Signals Intelligence Act, which makes it a felony to "knowingly and willfully" publish "in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States," any classified information concerning codes, ciphers, communications intelligence activities or equipment used in cryptographic or communications intelligence. …

… According to a still-active agency official the CIA file on [Korean businessman and influence peddler] Park Tong Sun, disappeared inside the agency for several months, only to reappear without some of the more important cables about members of Congress who had received payoffs, and about the CIA officers closest to Park. (The CIA’s chief of station in Seoul, Donald Gregg, later became Bush’s national security adviser when he was vice president.) …
Attorney General Edward Levi brought his differences with the CIA to a head over a relatively minor espionage case – that of Dewin Gibbons Moore II, a former CIA agent caught by the FBI trying to sell slassified information to the Soviets. When the Justice Department began prosecuting Moore, the CIA refused to turn over some of the documents, particularly CIA telephone books. The CIA argued that the Soviets would thereby get the most valuable and damaging information, including the names of undercover personnel. The Justice Department countered that it needed all the matierial, but it would make public only a small portion. …
… Bush was successful in stalling, if not in actually preventing the prosecutions of those associated with the CIA’s role in Chile, the Wilson affair, and the assassination of Olando Letelier. Eventually, these cases would be acted upon more vigorously by Jimmy Carter’s director of Central Intelligence, Stansfield Turner. …
… In 1976, after Bush decided not to restrain "cooperative foreign intelligence agencies, rogue operators became involved in blowing up an airliner, assassinating a former Chilean diplomat in Washington, attempting assassinations here and abroad and smuggling arms. … It was this aspect of his tenure at the CIA which set the stage for the Iran-contra scandal. … Bush failed to conduct prudent internal inquiries, failed to purge the CIA of rogue connections, and failed to proscribe such behavior in unequivocal policy pronouncements. …

…As chief of the NSC’s Crisis Management Team since 1981, and as vice president, Bush was privy to the same information provided the president. …
… There were only eight individuals, out of hundreds involved, who were actually "in the loop" of detailed information about both the arms-for-hostage deal with Iran and funding for the Nicaraguan contras.
One – William Casey of the CIA – is dead. Five of the others – Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim – have pleaded guilty nor been indicted for their involvement in the loop. One is leaving office on January 20, 1989.
And the last George Bush, hopes to take office on that day.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: ‘George Bush,’ CIA Operative by Joseph McBride, The Nation, July 16/23, 1988, pg 1, 41

A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.
… [Through spokesman Stephen Hart, Vice President, and presidential candidate George Bush denied being in Miami in the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963.] "I was in Houston Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late ’63." "Must be another George Bush," added Hart. …
Hoover’s memo, which was written to the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was buried among the 98,755 pages of FBI documents released to the public in 1977 and 1978 as a result of Freedom of Information Act suits. It was written to summarize the briefing given to Bush and Capt. William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency by the FBI’s W.T. Forsyth on November 23, the day after the assassination, when Lee Harvey Oswald was still alive to be interrogated about his connections to Cuban exiles and the CIA. …
William T. Forsyth … is dead. Forsyth worked out of the Washington FBI headquarters and was best known for running the investigation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Bureau’s subversive control section. Efforts to locate Edwards by press time were unsuccessful. …
[Bush in his autobiography Looking Forward is vague about the time era,] when he was running the Houston-based Zapata Off-Shore Company. ("Running an offshore oil company," he writes, "would mean days spent on or over water; not only the Gulf of Mexico but oceans and seas the world over.")
[Bush’s 1972 Current Biography profile provides more details of the former vice president and president’s early career in the oil business.] "Bush traveled throughout the world to sell Zapata’s oil-drilling service. Under his direction, it grew to be a multimillion dollar concern, with operations in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Japan, Australia and Western Europe." And, according to Nicholas King’s George Bush: A Biography, Zapata was concentrating its business in the Caribbean and off South America in the early 1960s, a piece of information that meshes neatly with the available data on Bush’s early CIA responsibilities. …
… The initial reaction of Sen. Frank Church, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to the firing of William Colby and the naming of Bush as Director of Central Intelligence in 1975 was to complain that it was part of a pattern of attempts by President Gerald Ford (a former member of the Warren Commission) to impede the Church committee’s nearly concluded investigation into CIA assassination plots, with which Colby was cooperating but which Ford was trying vainly to keep secret. …
… Leslie Cockburn writes in Out of Control, "The anti-Castro CIA team in Florida were already drawing attention to their drug-smuggling activities by 1963," and that it was Felix Rodriguez, the CIA "alumnus who wore Che Guevara’s watch and counted George Bush among his friends," who allegedly coordinated a $10 million payment to the contras by the Colombian cocaine cartel. …

Bush and Shrub: The Scottish Connection by Simon Pia, The Scotsman, Sept. 8, 2000, pg 14

George Lodge, from Midland, Texas, has alerted us to the Charlotte Square connection and shares our misgivings about the man. "The boy couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on his sole. But did you know about his pappy’s association with Ivory & Sime in Edinboro? Shrub wouldn’t even be on the scene if it wasn’t for the late Jimmy Gammell from Edinboro bankrolling his Pa. "In the early 50s, Bush senior, after falling to shine in the jobs that his rich Uncle Herbie (Walker) had set up for him after the war, decided to try his hand as a "landsman" in Texas. Basically, a landsman would visit poor dirt farmers and ranchers in rural Texas, and after persuading them that there was virtually no chance of oil being found under their land, persuade them to sign over mineral rights for a pittance.
There is evidence that in Bush’s case he went in with prior knowledge of geological reports. When seeking to expand this venture, George was introduced to Jimmy Gammell, of Ivory and Sime, who, as manager of I&S’s Atlantic Asset Trust, put up $50,000 …
George’s relationship with Jimmy Gammell prospered. George, Uncle Herbie, the wealthy Liedtke brothers and others formed Zapata Petroleum in 1954, with Jimmy on the board of directors. Initially successful, Zapata shares went up from seven cents to $23, enabling Bush to become a millionaire in his own right. After three years, the company was losing money, but the original investors had made their killing.

Scotsman Diary: Oiling the Wheels by Simon Pia, The Scotsman, Sept. 15, 2000, pg 16

… The link in the chain goes back to Lt. Gen. Sir James Gammell (Jimmy’s pa) who was head of the British military mission in Moscow in 1945, when Averell Harriman was the U.S. ambassador. Bush’s pa Prescott was at Yale with Averell, and worked for who else but Brown Brothers Harriman. It was them good ol’ boys who set up Bush with Gammell’s backing in the Zapata oil company.
… A former Ivory & Sime man tells us: "The joke in Charlotte Square was that we were the CIA’s station in Scotland. …
… When the heat was on during the Gulf War, who should Bush turn to but buddy Jimmy Gammell, according to the U.S. media.
… Jimmy Gammell’s son Bill, the former Scottish rugby internationalist, is a buddy of George W. Bush … (Bush Jr.) has even visited the Gammell pile in Glen Isla in Angus. …
As for Bill Gammell, he ended up … in the oil business running Cairn Energy. …
… In 1998 … Cairn Energy and Brown & Root signed a deal to build a gas pipeline from Burma to Orissa state in India with the Indian government gas company.
The chief executive of Brown & Root was Dick Cheney. … Dick was in Bush senior’s administration and is now (vice president).
But the timeing was unfortunate as the next month India exploded its nuclear bomb and the Clinton administration imposed sanctions, so the butchers of Rangoon were deprived of this huge revenue source. …
… A protégé of Jimmy Gammell’s was a young man called Peter Burt, who got his first job at merchant bankers Edward Bates & Sons in Edinburgh in 1974. Today, Perter is head honcho at the Bank of Scotland, where Jimmy Gammell was a former director. …
… Peter Burt’s … liaison with fundamentalist Pat Robertson … came through the Scottish-American right-wing network, including President Bush (Sr.). …

…Bill Gammell’s not just buddies with Bush. He [went to school with] Tony Blair [old Fettesian?]. …

Jimmy Gammell owned Foxhall farm near Kirkliston in 1971.

Quiet Sunset for Once Voluble J.P. Bryan and Torch Energy by James Norman, Platt’s Oilgram News, July 3, 2002

James (J.P. ) Bryan … his once sprawling Torch Energy empire … gaunt, 62-year-old Texas oil financier, marathon runner and semi-pro golfer. … Houston-based Torch (victim of) bad deals, lost money and good-old-boy relationships …coincidental ties to Bush family oil interests. … socialite, brother Shelby Bryan … once a prominent Democrat fundraiser … squires Vogue editor Anna Wintour. … Bankruptcy reorganization of ICG Communications fiber-optic telecom venture lost $4 billion and wiped out … $5 billion of stock and bond value …
… slide dates back to early 1998, when he was removed as CEO of Gulf Canada Resoures. J.P. took control of the reserve rich but ebt heavy Calgary independent as the head of a group of former Torch investors in early 1995. Put up $300 million in new equity and bought foreclosed Reichman family holdings. …
[Bryan went on a buying spree instead of paying down the debt.] Purchased Alberta heavy-oil producer Stampeder and UK North Sea player Clyde Petroleum. … Shopped Gulf Canada as a takeover to Union Pacific Resources … Last year (2001), Gulf Canada succumbs to a friendly $6.3 billion takeover by Conoco. [in the spring of 2002] Conoco bought the remaining 28 percent of Gulf Indonesia Resources for $329 million …
Bryan finds himself a dirctor of bankrupt ANC Rental, the Florida parent of Alamo Car Rental and a spin-off from friend Wayne Huisenga’s AutoNation (formerly Republic Industries), where Bryan is also a director. …
In the early 80s, the biggest private equity play in direct U.S. oil and gas property ownership. Through Torch, the former E.F. Hutton investment banker corralled several billion dollars of corporate and institutional fundes from the likes of AT&T, GE, IBM and other blue chips. …
… For a time, Torch was the single biggest U.S. energy investment fund. …
In 1996, near its peak, Torch had more than 800 employees, more than $1.8 billion in properties under management and 182-million boe (barrels?) of reserves in 4,800 spread over 16 states and the Gulf of Mexico, not counting Gulf Canada. Bryan created a complex web of inter-related partnerships and companies. …
All the entities were connected to Torch Energy Advisors, the management firm Bryan set up to buy, sell and operate gas properties …
From its formation in 1981, … Torch operated as a subsidiary of its namesake Torchmark, a Birmington, Ala., insurance firm. … Bryan began building Torch’s in-house capabilities and embarked on a series of complex deals to take parts of his empire public.
… First, … California heavy oil producer Nuevo Energy, formed in the late 80s. … Bellwether Exploration … customers … Plains Resources and Newfield Exploration. …
… Doug Foshee … Nuevo’s dismal financial performance ultimately led to Forshee’s departure last year, landing as CFO at Halliburton, thanks perhaps to Bryan’s network of connections. …
… Torch’s … reserves … in Alabama’s Robinson Bend Black Warrior Basin field. …
Bellwether renamed in 2001 Mission Resources, when it bought Bargo Energy, headed by former Bryan lieutenant Timothy Goff …
… Goff, 43, was Bryan’s personal vice-president for "special projects at Torch in the early 90s. IN 1993, he left to head BEC Partnership, when it was sold by Buttes Energy Co., and arm of CIA-linked Buttes Gas & Oil. …
In 2000 Bellwether took control of moribund Calgary-based Ukraine explorer Carpatsky Petroleum for $4 million and Bryan became CEO, after its founder, former Houston mayor Fred Hofeinz, was indicted and later pleaded guilty on a federal bribery charge. … A planned merger of Carpatsky with Denver’s Pease Oil & Gas fell apart in late 2000 …
… Also buried inside Mission are some of the remnants of President George W. Bush’s failed Arbusto Energy. Arbusto was bought in 1986 by Spectrum 7 Energy, whose properties ended up scattered between Harken Energy and Frank Lodzinski’s Hampton Resources. Bellwether bought Hampton in 1995 for $17 million. …
… Lodzinski … went on to run Texoil, which he sold last year to Ocean Energy … (Ocean CEO James Hackett is a former director of Nuevo, along with Goff’s Bargo partner Thomas Barrow and John Connally III.
Lodzinski now runs AROC and EnCap, the Dallas finance arm of El Paso. Encap has also had director seats at Harken (which recently bought most of the assets of Pease) and EnCap managing director D. Martin Phillips is a director of Nuevo, Mission and Plains.
There are other odd connections between J.P. Bryan and Bush family interests, although they may be only coincidental. One is Robert Allen, installed by Bryan as a director at both Nuevo and Gulf Indonesia, where he remained chairman even after Conoco bought Gulf Canada. His wife Judy, a board member of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, is a director of Mission.
In the early 80s, Allen was … CEO of … Gulf Resources & Chemical, a Houston energy and metals firm that owned Idaho’s Bunker Hill silver mine. While trying to corner the silver market in 1981, the Hunt family made a rich offer to buy GRC. … Allen turned down the Hunts, after selling his own shares, and GRC’s stock tanked. …
…Among the senior officers hired by Allen at GRC had been Robert Gow, who gave future president George W. Bush his first real job in 1971. Gow, a former officer of Zapata Petroleum and a Bush family friend, had been head of a horticultural firm called Stratford of Houston, which hired the new Yale grad to scout Central American nursery buys, according to the New York Times (7/22/00).
Another Bryan-Bush link has been his close ties to New York investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, where former U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush had been a partner. Its 1818 Fund controls Vaalco Energy, co-founded by Nuevo director Robert Gerry III and the late Charles Alcorn. Vaalco is now in line for International Finance Corp. funding for a West African offshore oil development.

A relative of Union Pacific head Elbridge Gerry and a signer of the Declaration of Independence of the same name, Gerry is a former Torch employee and had been a director of formerly Bush-led Zapata Offshore. …


Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President by J.H. Hatfield, Soft Skull Press, 2002 [Robert Gow], pg 48

…After his father’s 1970 campaign, Junior moved to a garage apartment on a tree-lined street close to Rice University, which he shared with Ensenat. When not flying "alerts" over the Gulf for the National Gualrd on weekends (sometimes he flew his F-102 from Houston to Orlando and back), he worked part-time during the day for an agricultural conglomerate owned by Robert Gow, a Yale graduate and family frined who years earlier had been an executive at the elder Bush’s Houston oil company, Zapata Offshore.
Gow who dispatched George W. to Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states to do preliminary research on plant nurseries he sought to acquire, remembered the younger Bush as "a button-down Brooks Brothers type." … [Bush] quit the agribusiness company in less than a year. …

Revelations May Hurt Ties with Mexico by Andres Oppenheimer, the Miami Herald, Feb 17, 1997, pg 18A

[abstract] … witnesses say former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, his imprisoned brother Raul and other members of the country’s ruling elite met with drug lord Juan Garcia Abrego at a Salinas family ranch; Jeb Bush admits he met with Raul Salinas several times but has never done any business with him …