The rush to war in Iraq, officially sanctioned torture, CIA destruction of evidence, spying on
Americans with the collusion of private corporations, head-in-the-sand dismissal of climate
change, the subprime mortgage disaster, skyrocketing oil prices. None of these developments
looks so surprising when one considers the untold story of what came before. This book is
about that secret history, and the people and institutions that created it . . . Bush’s mistakes--
and his biggest was surely was the delusion that he could successfully lead the nation as its
president--were only the most recent chapters in a story that goes back to his father and even
his grandfather.
The story itself begins with the famous 1963 memo by J. Edgar Hoover in the aftermath of the JFK assassination stating that William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency was briefed about the possibility of anti-Castro forces using the event to make another attempt to invade Cuba. The other person briefed: Mr. George W. Bush of the CIA. Of course Bush denied working for CIA in any capacity prior to heading the agency under Gerald Ford. Why wouldn’t he? But it wasn’t until 2006 that another document came to light showing Bush had been in the CIA as early as 1953. Before there was a CIA, the government used industrial spies to conduct much of their overseas investigations, through shell companies like the ones that Prescott Bush was running in South America that had turned those countries into little more than colonies for powerful U.S. business interests. The trend continued with confessed CIA agent Thomas Devine setting up George H.W. Bush in a shell oil company as a cover for his CIA work. But Bush’s espionage activities had actually begun earlier with his participation in Naval intelligence gathering during the Second World War.
It’s a convoluted story, and there’s a lot of conjecture, as there must be with anyone associated with an agency as secretive as the CIA. But they can’t hide everything, and a mountain of connections combined with an incoherence in the official stories he does tell lead fairly clearly to the conclusion that Baker makes. It begins with Precott Bush’s banking connections and his influence in the government through his work in the Senate as well as his close relationship to the Dulles brothers. After Eisenhower’s successful presidential bit in 1952, “the Dulles brothers obtained effective control of foreign policy: John Foster Dulles became Ike’s secretary of state, and Allen the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The rest of the administration was filled with Bush allies . . .” Like Reagan thirty years later, Eisenhower had little interest in the minutia of governance and let his subordinates run daily operations. And since the CIA had no mandate to carry out their work, they allied themselves with U.S. business interests who had international concerns and would be able to provide cover for operations that would benefit their bottom line in the long run. Thus, “agents created a host of entities to serve as middlemen to support rebels in countries targeted for regime change.” The key area of the Bush’s assignment would be oil, considering how vital it had been in winning World War Two.
Harold Ickes had warned in 1943, "If there should be a World War III it would have to be
fought with someone else’s petroleum, because the United States wouldn’t have it . . . We
should have available oil in different parts of the world . . . The time to get going is now."
Ickes’ eye was then on Saudi Arabia, the only place in the Middle East that had huge
untapped oil pools under the control of an American oil company, the Rockefellers’ Standard
Oil of California.
George H.W. Bush was then given a loan by his father’s friends on Wall Street in order to start Zapata Offshore oil company, which could provide the CIA with a host of services. It would give operatives access to oil producing countries around the world, excuses for their international travel, money laundering capabilities, and the company’s offshore sites could providing training facilities for covert military operations against Cuba. “Though Zapata had only a handful of rigs, [Bush] set up operations for Zapata Offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, Borneo, and Medellin, Columbia.” It was all part of the CIA partnership with big business “creating plausible deniability as it began what would be a series of efforts to topple ‘unfriendly’ regimes around the world.” Unfriendly, that is, to U.S. businesses. As always, these operations have absolutely no connection to the actual safety of the U.S. or its citizens, the effects of regime change on the people in those countries or our own, and worst of all no thoughts of long-term ramifications. This is the exact same thing son George W. Bush is guilty of, the way that his administration destabilized the entire Middle East for economic gains by his corporate partners like Halliburton, resulting in the worldwide chaos and climate change crises we’re suffering today.
After the CIA had successfully toppled the democratically elected prime minister in Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 because, “Mossadegh began nationalizing Anglo-American oil concessions,” they set their sights on Cuba a few years later for the same reason. “Fidel Castro began to expropriate the massive properties of large foreign (chiefly American) companies.” Thus, Bush’s offshore oilrig was then moved to Cay Sal Bank, “just fifty-four miles north of Isabela, Cuba.” Zapata Offshore would become the base for Caribbean operations in the plot to overthrow Castro, just one aspect of which was the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that John F. Kennedy had been pressured into green-lighting by his military-industrial complex connected advisors. As any good operative would do, Bush was able to cover his tracks. Investigations into this time period uncovered the fact that, “Zapata filings” with the Securities and Exchange Commission “from 1960 to 1966 had been ‘inadvertently destroyed’ several months after Bush became vice president.” The connection between Cuba and the assassination of JFK is a simple one. The CIA’s financiers wanted Castro out so that they could reclaim their confiscated property and their lucrative business interests on the island. Kennedy, on the other hand, was moving toward reconciliation with Cuba, a move that would irrevocably end U.S. corporate control in the country. As James Douglass reports in one of the best books on the subject, JFK and the Unspeakable, “In 1963 John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on Cuba: a secret dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro.”
But there is nothing more suspicious than Bush senior’s claim that he can’t remember where he was in Texas when he heard the news of the assassination. Then again, this also makes perfect sense. The problem with making up a lie about that particular day is that everyone knows where they were that day, and if he had attempted to fabricate something the lie would inevitably have been exposed. The year before the assassination Bush had moved full-time into politics, eventually deciding to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas. Yet he was still frequently traveling internationally under he guise of working for Zapata, and also busy setting up a campaign office in Dallas. Documents unearthed in 1993, however, show that Bush actually called the FBI office in Dallas on November 22, 1963 in order to implicate a man named James Parrott in the plot. Corroborating testimony has Bush delivering a speech to the local Kiwanis Club at the Blackstone Hotel in Tyler, Texas when he was told about the shooting. He apparently ended his speech by delivering the news to the crowd and then sitting down, calm and unflustered, as Baker points out, “not unlike his own son’s composure in another moment of crisis . . . after being told about the 9/11 attacks.” So if he was in Tyler, why the caginess? Baker suggests the call may have been a way of establishing with the authorities that he was in Tyler, and not actually in Dallas. The fact is, Bush had been in Dallas delivering another speech to oil contractors the night before the assassination, and Baker further speculates that he didn’t fly to Tyler until the next morning.
One of Bush senior’s friends in Dallas was George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian émigré who also happened to be a close, personal associate of one Lee Harvey Oswald. Just prior to the assassination de Mohrenschildt had not only met with CIA agents in Washington but with Thomas Devine from Zapata who also worked for the CIA. In the 1950s, before they met, his future wife Jeanne worked in fashion with Abraham Zapruder, who took the most famous film of the assassination, while de Mohrenschildt himself was leasing oil-drilling rights in Cuba. In fact, he was working for a holding company “with a focus on ‘stability’ in Latin American countries, which could reasonably be assumed to refer to creating conditions of political stability favorable to the exploration activities.” After Castro began taking back the island from U.S. corporate interests, however, a Cuban Task Force was created and “Vice President Richard Nixon . . . was the administration’s Cuba ‘case officer.’” Nixon met with Texas businessmen at the time to raise funds for the task force, a group that was apparently headed by Bush himself. In 1976, while Bush was head of the CIA, George de Mohrenschildt began writing letters that alluded to new information about Oswald. Naturally, he was hounded by the FBI and CIA, and so he wrote a letter to his old friend to ask if he could help. Bush wrote a memo declaring he barely knew the man, and six months later de Mohrenschildt was executed and the scene staged to look like a suicide.
After the Bay of Pigs Kennedy fired Allen Dulles--a close friend of the Bushes--which infuriated Prescott Bush. Baker calls this, “a declaration of independence from the Wall Street intelligence nexus that pretty much had its way in the previous administration.” But Kennedy’s antagonism toward the money men was also more direct, “when he interfered with their oil and mineral development plans in Brazil’s vast Amazon basin.” Add to that Kennedy’s push to move toward nuclear disarmament, and its attendant undermining of the uranium production industry--primarily based in Texas--that had grown rapidly after the war, and it’s little wonder that JFK’s policies were seen as nothing short of an all out assault on American financial interests both domestic and abroad. For wealthy capitalists the outlook was grim. Not only was JFK sure to win another term in the White House, there was also the fact that both Jack and his brother Bobby were incredibly young and that, along with their younger brother Ted, they might dominate the political landscape in Washington for decades to come. “The Kennedy administration struck at the heart of the Southern establishment’s growing wealth and power . . . Yet in the space of five years, Jack and Bobby Kennedy were dead, and the prospect of a Kennedy political dynasty had been snuffed out.
The leaders of these same institutions have frequently seen nothing wrong with assassinating
leaders in other countries, even democratically elected ones . . . Is it that difficult to believe
that those who viewed assassination as a policy tool would use it at home, where the sense
of grievance and the threat to their interests was even greater?
The two works diverge somewhat on how they specifically tie Bush to the Kennedy assassination. Dark Legacy emphasizes the relationship of Prescott Bush to Nixon, and then ties to that Nixon’s relationship to Howard Hunt and Bush’s oversight of the anti-Castro Cubans in the Caribbean. Baker, on the other hand, makes his central argument the relationship of Bush to George de Mohrenschildt and the free pass he received from the Warren Commission. Far more compelling, however, is Bush’s close relationship to Jack Crichton. Crichton not only would openly admit later to working for the CIA, but was also heading a military intelligence unit at the time of the assassination, as well as running for governor at the same time Bush was seeking his senate seat. “Crichton was so plugged into the Dallas power structure that one of his company directors was . . . D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building.” In addition, Crichton worked as part of the Dallas Civil Defense program, setting up their communications system, and was in the pilot car of the motorcade.
Thus, in November 1963, Bush and Crichton were essentially working in tandem. Given that
alliance, Poppy would need to explain not only where he was on November 22 and why he
tried so hard to hide that, but also what he knew about Crichton’s activities that day and about
Crichton’s Intelligence colleagues in the pilot car of the motorcade.
Of course neither Dark Legacy, nor Family of Secrets goes so far as to implicate George Bush Sr. directly in the assassination of Kennedy. But they both raise important questions to consider when looking at what many writers call the “Deep State,” the actual control of the government by the military-industrial complex. The CIA is only the most visible of the forces that make the real decisions in American politics. One of the most cogent explanations of this hybrid government operating within the machinery of Washington D.C. was written by Mike Lofgren two years ago in an essay titled “Anatomy of the Deep State.”
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security
and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the
Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Depart-
ment. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial
flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street . . .
[But] the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically
called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations . . . There are now 854,000
contract personnel with top-secret clearances--a number greater than that of top-secret-
cleared civilian employees of the government.
Attempts to question Bush Sr. about his time as a CIA operative have all been met with flat denials, because one of the primary functions of clandestine agencies is to maintain secrecy. Was George H.W. Bush a member of the CIA in 1953 or even earlier? Almost certainly, and the evidence of his association with admitted CIA employees at the time, as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s memo in 1963 attest to the fact. Bush’s work with Zapata Offshore gave him access to oil producing governments and excuses for international travel at the behest of corporate interests that were controlling the military in Washington, and one of their primary concerns was the loss of property and manufacturing facilities in Cuba after Castro had confiscated them. Kennedy’s decision to opt out of the Cold War and normalize relations with Cuba would mean that American business interests on the island would be irrevocably lost. Add to that the fact that the CIA had routinely toppled or killed leaders in other countries to benefit their corporate benefactors, and it would make sense that they simply would have extended its use to the domestic front. But it strains credulity to believe that Bush would not have known about the operation to assassinate Kennedy in his home state of Texas. And his thinly-veiled attempts to create documentation for his not being in Dallas, as well as his obvious lies about not remembering where he was when he heard the news, clearly indicate complicity at some level. What that is will probably never be known, especially after he was put in charge of the CIA in 1976.
If Bush managed to expunge the records of Zapata Offshore from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s files, it’s pretty clear that any evidence of his work with the CIA prior to 1976 is gone as well. His appointment by Warren Commission participant Gerald Ford to the top spot in the agency saw to that, and would also have given Bush the ability to destroy any evidence of Richard Nixon’s participation in Dallas as well. This is an aspect of the story that became apparent in 1988 in The Nation, after the Hoover memo first came to light in the article “The Man Who Wasn't There, ‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative” by Joseph McBride.
Asked recently about Bush’s early C.I.A. connections, (former Texas Democratic Senator Ralph)
Yarborough said, “I never heard anything about it. It doesn't surprise me. What surprised me was
that they picked him for Director of Central Intelligence--how in hell he was appointed head of
the C.I.A. without any experience or knowledge.” Hoover's memo “explains something to me that
I’ve wondered about. It does make sense to have a trained C.I.A. man, with experience, appointed
to the job.”
As far as the substance of the memo is concerned, Hankey’s Dark Legacy attempts to use this as his strongest link to the assassination. Hoover states that the Miami FBI office had been advised by the State Department that “some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba,” but Hoover assures the department that this is not the case. Hankey implies that this “misguided anti-Castro group” refers to the agents in Bush’s Zapata group--which it almost certainly does--but then further implies that this must have been the group that carried out the assassination--which doesn’t really make much sense at all. What seems far more likely is that the memo is an attempt to reassure the military that Bush’s Zapata group is not going to carry out any unauthorized actions on the heels of the assassination. Bush, in essence, is being told in the meeting to control his people, and the function of the memo is to assure those reading it in Washington that he will follow his orders.
Baker, in Family of Secrets, has a tough time making any direct connection between Bush Sr. and the actual shooting of the president and doesn’t really try. He does provide convincing evidence, however, of his CIA and corporate connections and his oil company’s work in Cuba. If there’s a flaw in the book it’s that he spends too much space in that section dealing with peripheral assassination information because he has only a small, finite amount of actual material on Bush’s CIA career prior to 1976. This isn’t a flaw at all, however, if the reader is generally unfamiliar with the inner workings of the assassination plot. But for anyone who has read more than a couple of books on the subject, much of Baker’s work is redundant. Still, there are plenty of books on the assassination that don’t mention Bush at all, so it is valuable to have Baker weave that story into the rest of the tapestry and makes the reader wish that many more threads could be woven into the story as well, especially where the office of the President of the United States is concerned.
In drawing conclusions from both sources it seems more than likely that Bush knew about the assassination attempt, and that the specific details of his complicity were something that he felt the necessity to cover up, if only to protect his future political career. Going forward, however, what seems like a thoroughly fascinating angle to explore in terms of the assassination as a whole, is determining the exact nature of the participation of four eventual U.S. presidents in the death of John F. Kennedy. Certainly Lyndon Johnson benefited immediately from JFK’s death and proceeded to reward his military-industrial directors with the Vietnam War, a situation that forced him to effectively resign in 1968 rather than continue to give them what they wanted. Richard Nixon, also in Dallas on the day of the assassination, was a case officer for Cuba while vice-president and had no such compunctions. He took the baton from Johnson willingly and continued to prosecute the war for his financiers after JFK’s brother Robert was eliminated from the running. Nixon’s choice of Gerald Ford from the Warren Commission to succeed him allowed for his eventual pardon, while former CIA operative and Ford appointee to the top spot in the CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush, used his position to clean up any loose ends and eventually make his way to the White House himself. Now that would be an incredible book to read.
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