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Skull and Bones Forever
September 25, 2013
The CIA recruited heavily at all of the Ivy League schools in those days, with the New Haven campus the standout.
Bush’s father, Prescott, was on the university’s board, and the school was crawling with faculty serving as recruiters for the intelligence services... Yale’s society’s boys were the cream of the crop, and could keep secrets to boot.
And no secret society was more suited to the spy establishment than Skull and Bones, for which Poppy Bush, like his father, was tapped in his junior year.
Established in 1832, Skull and Bones is the oldest secret society at Yale, and thus at least theoretically entrusted its membership with a more comprehensive body of secrets than any other campus group.
Bones alumni would appear throughout the public
and private history of both wartime and peacetime intelligence...
Dresser has never received the scrutiny it
deserves. Between the lines of its official story can be discerned an
alternate version that could suggest a corporate double life...
At the time, Dresser’s principal assets consisted of two very valuable patents in the rapidly expanding oil industry. One was for a packer that made it much easier to remove oil from the ground; the other was for a coupler that made long-range natural gas pipelines feasible. Instead of controlling the oil, Dresser’s strategy was to control the technology that made drilling possible.
W.A. Harriman and Company, which had
brought Prescott Bush aboard two years earlier, purchased Dresser in 1928.
As World War II approached, Dresser began expanding, gobbling up one militarily strategic manufacturer after another.
While Dresser was still engaged in the mundane manufacture of drill bits, drilling mud, and other products useful to the oil industry, it was also moving closer to the heart of the rapidly growing military-industrial sector as a defense contractor and subcontractor.
It also assembled a board that would epitomize
the cozy relationships between titans of industry, finance, media,
government, military, and intelligence - and the revolving door between
those sectors...
Mallon dispatched the inexperienced Yale grad
and Navy vet, with his wife Barbara and firstborn George W. in tow, to
Odessa, the remote West Texas boomtown that, with neighboring Midland, was
rapidly becoming the center of the oil extraction business.
A resource required in abundance to fuel the modern navy, army, and air force, oil had driven the engine of World War II. With the end of hostilities, America still had plenty of petroleum, but the demands of the war had exhausted many oil fields.
As President Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior and later his petroleum administrator for war, Harold Ickes had warned in 1943,
Ickes’s eye was then on Saudi Arabia.
Continuing his whirlwind "training," Dresser transferred Bush to California, where the company had begun acquiring subsidiaries in 1940. Poppy has never written or spoken publicly in any depth about the California period of his career. He has made only brief references to work on the assembly line at Dresser’s Pacific Pump Works in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Park and sales chores for other companies owned by Dresser.
In later years, when criticized for his
anti-union stands, he would pull out a union card which he claimed came from
his membership in the United Steelworkers Union. Why Bush joined the
Steelworkers (and attended their meetings) is something of a mystery, since
that union was not operating inside Pacific Pump Works.
During World War II, Pacific Pump became, like
Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm supplied
hydraulic-actuating assemblies for airplane landing gear, wing flaps, and
bomb doors, and even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that
produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Poppy was often absent, according to Barbara, even from their brief-tenure outposts. Was he truly a Willy Loman, peddling drill bits, dragging a pregnant wife and a one-year-old child with him? Or was he doing something else?
Although "ordinary" scions often toil briefly at
the bottom, Bush was no ordinary scion.
Another longtime Bush associate told a reporter anonymously that Poppy’s own accounts of various periods in his life,
From Dallas, with Love
Their attack had not been even vaguely anticipated in the National Intelligence Estimate - from the fledgling CIA - which had arrived on the president’s desk just six days before.
Heads rolled, and in the ensuing shake-up,
Allen Dulles became deputy director in charge of clandestine operations,
which included both spying and proactive covert operations. For the Bushes,
who had a decades-long personal and business relationship to the Dulles
family, this was certainly an interesting development.
Even as far back as World War I, while Dulles’s uncle served as secretary of state, Prescott’s father, Samuel Bush, oversaw small arms manufacturing for the War Industries Board, and young Allen played a crucial role in the fledgling intelligence services operations in Europe.
Later, the families interacted regularly as the
Bush clan plied their trade in investment banking and the Dulleses in the
law.
Started in 1918, the World Affairs Councils
of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed
Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen
Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.
It included,
Soon the group moved even closer to the center of power.
General Dwight Eisenhower... had responded to entreaties from a GOP group that included the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush, as well as Allen and John Foster Dulles…
With Ike the Republican nominee, they all scrambled for seats on his train. The Dulleses were key advisers.
Prescott Bush was backing Ike and mounting what
would be a successful race for a Senate seat from Connecticut. Prescott’s
son George H. W. Bush was not left out. He became the Midland County
chairman of the Eisenhower-Nixon campaigns in both 1952 and 1956. With the
West Texas city at the center of the oil boom, young George functioned as a
crucial link between the Eastern Establishment, the next Republican
administration, and Midland’s oil-based new wealth.
The rest of the administration was filled with
Bush allies, including national security adviser Gordon Gray, a close
friend of Prescott’s, and Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, a
sometime member of the Dresser Industries board.
Some of those businessmen taking it upon themselves to help chart the course were from the Dallas group. Shortly after Ike took office, Mallon’s Council of World Affairs announced its intention to send fifteen members on a three-month world tour, for meetings with what the group characterized as "responsible" political and business leaders.
Shortly after the group returned, Dulles came to
visit with the Dallas council chapter...
Since the CIA’s charter severely constrained the domestic side of covert operations, agents created a host of entities to serve as middlemen to support rebels in countries targeted for regime change. During the early days of Dresser in Dallas - and of Zapata Petroleum - Dulles was just beginning to experiment with "off the books" operations.
Eventually, by the seventies and eighties, when
Poppy Bush ran the CIA and coordinated covert operations as vice president,
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such entities had been created...
Uncle Herbie also was instrumental in bringing in others, including Eugene Meyer, a Yale graduate and owner of the influential Washington Post. Meyer was one of many media titans, such as Prescott’s good friend and fellow Bonesman Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, and William Paley of CBS (on whose board Prescott sat), who shared an interest in intelligence.
In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Carl
Bernstein, famed for breaking the Watergate story in the Washington
Post, states that both Luce and Paley cooperated regularly with the CIA, and
even mentions his own paper’s history with the agency, though he does not
fully probe the Post’s intelligence connections...
Based on a "hunch" of Hugh Liedtke’s, the company drilled 127 consecutive "wet" holes, and the firm’s stock exploded from seven cents a share to twenty-three dollars a share...
Mural by Jose Clemente Orozco
They would commence with efforts to overthrow
Latin American and Caribbean leaders in the 1950s. The efforts would
continue, under Poppy Bush, with Iran-contra in the 1980s.
The [Cay Sal] island had been recently leased to
oilman Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties, as well
as his own "private CIA."
This was the same Kermit Roosevelt who had overseen the CIA’s successful 1953 coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after Mossadegh began nationalizing Anglo-American oil concessions.
It looked like the Bush-CIA group was preparing
for operations in the Caribbean basin.
The importance of this early Bush connection with Cuba should not be ignored in assessing his connections to contemporaneous events.
For example, it sheds light on the 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover discovered by reporter Joseph McBride. The memo, which mentioned a briefing about Cuban activity in the wake of the JFK assassination, had been given to "George Bush of the CIA."
Years later, many figures from the Bay of Pigs
operation would resurface in key positions in administrations in which Poppy
Bush held high posts, and during his presidency. Others would show up in
off-the-books operations run by Poppy’s friends and associates.
This period of his life was characterized by frenetic travel to all corners of the world, though Zapata had only a handful of rigs. The pattern would continue through his entire career.
He set up operations for Zapata Offshore in,
Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum
Development Company, which began his close association with the Kuwaiti
elite.
Through the story of the Bushes and their circle
runs a thread of entitlement to resources in other countries, and anger and
disbelief when others challenged that claim.
After Castro took power, the Eisenhower
administration began a boycott of Cuban sugar, which is a crucial component
of the island’s economy. The Cubans in turn became increasingly dependent on
the USSR as supplier of goods and protector.
He severed his ties to the Liedtkes by buying out their stake in Zapata Offshore, and then moved its operations to Houston - which, unlike the remote Midland-Odessa area, had access to the Caribbean through the Houston Ship Channel.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, after extensive
planning, the Bay of Pigs project began with Eisenhower’s approval on March
17, 1960...
Zapata filings "inadvertently
destroyed"
George H. W. Bush did not want this relationship exposed, even decades later.
When investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny
tried to document Bush’s precise involvement with Permargo for a 1988
article, he was told by an SEC spokeswoman that Zapata filings from 1960 to
1966 had been "inadvertently destroyed" several months after Bush became
vice president...
Bush increasingly spent his time on politics, and others were brought in to transform the company into a larger entity that could more credibly run global operations...
Bush’s reward for all his troubles may have come in 1965, when one of the company’s rigs was ostensibly lost in Hurricane Betsy. For the first time in its history, the insurance giant Lloyds of London paid out an oil-platform disaster claim without physical evidence. Zapata received eight million dollars for a rig that had cost only three million.
The fate of the rig remains a mystery.
Poppy’s brother Bucky recalled the fears expressed by Zapata offshore staff that it would be impossible for an insurance claim to be paid because of the absence of any wreckage.
But Poppy himself was calm, reassuring his people that,
The financials of Zapata, like those of latter-day Enron, were almost impossible to understand. This appears to have been by design.
A bit of this can be gleaned from the words of
the company’s former executive Bob Gow, another in a small army of
Bush loyalists who show up repeatedly in the family story - and by extension
the nation’s.
I also obtained Gow’s self-published memoirs,
the five hundred pages of which include much about Zapata, bamboo, beeswax,
and catfish, but manage to say little about the Bushes and their doings. Gow
did, however admit that he did some spying for the CIA…
In all probability, the foreign operations had dual functions. Since Zapata was set up with guidance from Neil Mallon, it is likely that the overseas undertakings were modeled in part on Dresser’s.
According to the in-house history of Dresser, one of the company’s bolder moves was a then-innovative tax strategy that involved a separate company in the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein.
That is, if the money was ever returned to the United States.
And there was another characteristic of funds
that were not repatriated: they were out of sight of federal authorities.
There was no effective way to know where they went ultimately, or for what
purposes.
Whether Zapata was partially designed for laundering money for covert or clandestine operations may never be known.
But one thing is certain: spy work depends, as
much as anything, on a large flow of funds for keeping foreign palms
greased. It is an enormously expensive business, and it requires layers and
layers of ostensibly unconnected cutouts for the millions to flow properly
and without detection.
Although in his memoirs he freely admits that he
served the CIA later on, he strives mightily to avoid extensive discussion
of the Bush clan...
Gow hesitated a moment, smiled just a bit, and then replied,
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