by Russ Baker
On that December day, Shinley came upon an internal CIA memo that mentioned George H. W. Bush. Dated November 29, 1975, it reported, in typically spare terms, the revelation that the man who was about to become the head of the CIA actually had prior ties to the agency. And the connection discussed here, unlike that unearthed by McBride, went back not to 1963, but to 1953—a full decade earlier. Writing to the chief of the spy section of the analysis and espionage agency, the chief of the “cover and commercial staff” noted:
Through Mr. Gale Allen . . . I learned that Mr. George Bush, DCI designate, has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe. He became aware of this project through Mr. Thomas J. Devine, a former CIA Staff Employee and later, oil-wildcatting associate with Mr. Bush. Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil [sic] which they eventually sold. After the sale of Zapata Oil, Mr. Bush went into politics, and Mr. Devine became a member of the investment firm of Train, Cabot and Associates, New York . . . The attached memorandum describes the close relationship between Messrs. Devine and Bush in 1967-1968 which, according to Mr. Allen, continued while Mr. Bush was our ambassador to the United Nations.
In typical fashion for the highly compartmentalized and secretive intelligence organization, the memo did not make clear how Bush knew Devine, or whether Devine was simply dropping out of the spy business to become a true entrepreneur. For Devine, who would have been about twenty-seven years old at the time, to “resign” at such a young age, so soon after the CIA had spent a great deal of time and money training him, was, at minimum, highly unusual. It would turn out, however, that Devine had a special relationship allowing him to come and go from the agency, enabling him to do other things without really leaving its employ. In fact, CIA history is littered with instances where CIA officers have tendered their “resignation” as a means of creating deniability while continuing to work closely with the agency. One such example is the colorful E. Howard Hunt, whose “resignation” in 1970 left him in a position to find work in the Nixon White House—where he promptly began a “liaison” relationship with his old bosses.8
Devine’s role in setting up Zapata would remain hidden for more than a decade—until 1965. At that point, as Bush was extricating himself from business to devote his energies to pursuing a congressional seat, Devine’s name suddenly surfaced as a member of the board of Bush’s spin-off company, Zapata Offshore—almost as if it was his function to keep the operation running. To be sure, he and Bush remained joined at the hip. As indicated in the 1975 CIA memo, Bush and Devine enjoyed a “close relationship” that continued while Mr. Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations nine years later. In fact, Devine even accompanied then-congressman Bush on a two-week junket to Vietnam, leaving the day after Christmas in 1967, a year before the Republicans would retake the White House. After being “out” of the CIA since 1953, Devine’s top-secret security clearance required an update, though what top-secret business a freshman congressman on the Ways and Means Committee could have, requiring two weeks in Vietnam with a “businessman,” was not made clear.
The writer of the above-mentioned CIA memo had appended an earlier memo from agency files, describing Thomas Devine’s role in a CIA project codenamed WUBRINY. Devine was “a cleared and witting contact in the investment banking firm which houses and manages the proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” (BRINY was actually a Haiti-based operation engaged by a corporation, code-named SALINE, that was wholly owned by the CIA. SALINE, like many CIA proprietaries, was in turn operating inside a “legitimate” corporation, whose employees were generally unaware of the spies in their midst.) In this case, the cover corporation was run by investment banker John Train, a sponsor and longtime enthusiast of foreign intrigues, from financing the CIA-connected literary publication the Paris Review to backing the Afghan rebels during the Reagan-Bush years.9 Train was enormously well connected, and received appointments from presidents Reagan, Bush Senior, and even Bill Clinton.
Devine, like the senior George Bush, is now in his eighties and still active in business in New York. When I reached him in the winter of 2007 and told him about recently uncovered CIA memos that related both his agency connections and his longtime ties to Bush, he uttered a dry chuckle, then continued on cautiously.
“Tell me who you are working with in the family,” he asked when I informed him I was working on a book about the Bushes. I explained that the book was not exactly an “authorized” biography, and therefore I was not “working” with someone in the family. Moreover, I noted, the Bushes were not known for their responsiveness to journalistic inquiries. “The family policy has been as long as George has been in office, they don’t talk to media,” Devine replied. But he agreed to contact the Bush family seeking clearance. “Well, the answer is, I will inquire. I have your telephone number, and I’ll call you back when I’ve inquired.”
Surprisingly enough, he did call again, two weeks later, having checked in with his old friend in Houston. He explained that he had been told by former president George H. W. Bush not to cooperate. When I spoke to him several months later, he still would not talk about anything—though he did complain that, thanks to an article I had written about him for the Real News Project (www.realnews.org), he was now listed in Wikipedia. And then he did offer a few words.
THOMAS DEVINE: Well, the notion that I put George Bush in the oil business is just nuts.
RUSS BAKER: Well, it says that in the CIA memo. I didn’t make it up.
TD: That’s the trouble with you guys. You believe what you read in government documents.
RB: So you think somebody put that in there deliberately and that it was untrue?
TD: I think they didn’t know what they were doing . . . I wish you well, but I just broke one of the first rules in this game.
RB: And what is that?
TD: Do not complain.
In fact, Devine had little to complain about. At the time, although I was aware that he seemed to be confirming that he himself had been in the “game,” I did not understand the full extent of his activities in conjunction with Bush. Nor did I understand the heightened significance of their relationship during the tumultuous events of 1963, to be discussed in subsequent chapters.
No Business like the Spy Business
Before there was an Office of Strategic Services (July 1942–October 1945) or a Central Intelligence Agency (founded in 1947), corporations and attorneys who represented international businesses often employed associates in their firms as private agents to gather data on competitors and business opportunities abroad. So it was only to be expected that many of the first OSS recruits were taken from the ranks of oil companies, Wall Street banking firms, and Ivy League universities and often equated the interests of their high-powered business partners with the national interest. Such relationships like the one between George H. W. Bush and Thomas Devine thus made perfect sense to the CIA, which was comfortable taking orders from such Wall Street icons as Henry L. Stimson, Robert A. Lovett, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, John Foster Dulles, and Allen Dulles—men who were always mindful of President Calvin Coolidge’s adage that “the business of America is business.”
The late Robert T. Crowley, who managed the CIA’s relations with cooperative multinational corporations like Ford Motor Company and International Telephone and Telegraph, has explained, however, that working with existing companies was not always the best way to go when the CIA was running agents abroad. “Sometimes we would suggest someone go off on their own,” Crowley told the journalist and author Joseph Trento. “It was much easier to simply set someone up in business like Bush and let him take orders.”10
The setup with Devine in the oil business provided Bush with a perfect cover to travel abroad and, according to Crowley, identify potential CIA recruits among foreign nationals. It was a simple task for a man whose father, Prescott, was a senior partner at the preeminent British-America
n investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman.
Understanding the role of Brown Brothers Harriman is central to understanding the Bush legacy and the vast, if underappreciated, influence of the Bushes’ immediate circle. At Yale, in 1916, Prescott Bush had become close friends with his classmate Roland “Bunny” Harriman, heir, along with his older brother, W. Averell Harriman, to E. H. Harriman’s vast railroad, shipping, mining, and banking empire. Both Harrimans, like Prescott Bush, were initiates of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. After graduation, Prescott took a job offer from a Skull and Bones elder in St. Louis, where he soon married the daughter of the prominent St. Louis stockbroker George Herbert Walker. Shortly after that, G. H. Walker was hired by the Harrimans to come to New York and build a new investment banking empire for the family.
Perhaps to forestall charges of obvious nepotism, Prescott spent several years working for other firms before joining W. A. Harriman in 1926. One year after the stock market crash of 1929, W. A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers, a white-shoe banking partnership whose Wall Street operation dated to 1843, and whose roots went back decades earlier to cotton mills in England. The oldest and largest partnership bank in the United States, Brown Brothers Harriman has never been widely known outside Wall Street and Washington, yet it remains extremely influential in the closely connected worlds of finance and politics.
The firm’s real power lies in its ability to meld moneymaking with policy— in particular, foreign policy advantageous to the interests of its clients. On June 7, 1922, the Nation published an editorial titled “The Republic of Brown Brothers.” It attacked the “new imperialism” of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, a concomitant in good part of the “dollar diplomacy” promoted by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox during President Taft’s administration. The editorial asserted that over the past dozen years, the American government had reduced Haiti, Santo Domingo (later known as the Dominican Republic), and Nicaragua “to the status of colonies with at most a degree of rather fictitious self-government.” The United States had “forced ruinous loans, making ‘free and sovereign’ republics the creatures of New York banks.” In effect, the U.S. government had been “agents for these bankers, using American Marines when necessary to impose their will.” But according to Brown Brothers Harriman’s in-house history, Partners in Banking, it was the other way around—the firm was doing the U.S. government a favor.11
Earlier partners in the Brown Brothers bank in England had served in governments in that country, and the firm’s influence in the United States was perhaps even greater. Brown Brothers Harriman was resolutely bipartisan, and partners moved effortlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back through a steadily revolving door. Prescott and some others were Republicans, while Democrat Averell Harriman built a formidable career for himself in government service, at high levels and in every conceivable capacity, for presidents from FDR to Lyndon Johnson. Partner Robert Lovett, yet another Bonesman in the firm, worked directly as one of Henry Stimson’s “wise men” on foreign policy before being named secretary of defense by President Truman.
The Brown Brothers Harriman group was to a person rabidly Anglophilic. Indeed, the Bushes have long touted their distant familial ties to the House of Windsor.12 And like the once-great British Empire, the sun never set on the operations of the banking firm. Thus it was that the vanquishing of the German Empire in World War I presented abundant opportunities to invest throughout Europe, and led to extensive financial relationships in German-influenced areas. As a result of this, Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers would have some assets seized by the U.S. government for continuing to do business with the most powerful German industrialists at a time when those men were financing the Nazi Party and the rise of Adolf Hitler.13
By the time George H. W. Bush founded his own company, Zapata Petroleum, it was not difficult to line up backers with long-standing ties to industrial espionage activities. One was Clark Estates Inc., a trust benefiting the descendants of a founder of what would become known as the Singer sewing machine company. By setting up British factories in 1868, Singer earned the distinction of being perhaps the world’s first multinational corporation. Clark Estates was a ground-floor investor in Zapata in 1953.14 Clark Estates and Zapata had the same legal representation: Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts, the old law firm of former secretary of war and Bonesman Henry Stimson.
“Poppy” Bush’s own role with intelligence appears to date back as early as the Second World War, when he joined the Navy at age eighteen.15 On arrival at his training base in Norfolk, Virginia, in the fall of 1942, Bush was trained not only as a pilot of a torpedo bomber but also as a photographic officer, responsible for crucial, highly sensitive aerial surveillance. On his way to his ship, the USS San Jacinto, Bush stopped off in Pearl Harbor for meetings with military intelligence officers assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center for the Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA).
After mastering the technique of operating the handheld K-20 aerial camera and film processing, Bush recruited and trained other pilots and crewmen. His own flight team became part bomber unit, part spy unit. The information they obtained about the Japanese navy, as well as crucial intelligence on Japanese land-based defenses, was forwarded to the U.S. Navy’s intelligence center at Pearl Harbor and to the Marine Corps for use in planning amphibious landings in order to reduce casualties.
The so-called Operation Snapshot was so hush-hush that, under naval regulations in effect at the time, even revealing its name would lead to court-martial. According to a book by Robert Stinnett, a fellow flier, Admiral Marc Mitscher hit the “bulkhead” when he saw that Bush’s team had filed a report in which they actually referred by name to their top-secret project. The three people above Bush in his command chain were made to take razor blades to the pages of the report and remove the forbidden language.16
The lesson was apparently not lost on Bush. From that moment forward, as every Bush researcher has learned, Bush’s life would honor the principle: no names, no paper trail, no fingerprints. If you wanted to know what Bush had done, you had to have the patience of a sleuth yourself.
A Changing Story
The enveloping fog extends even to Poppy Bush’s most sterling political symbol: his record as a war hero.
On September 2, 1944, the plane he was piloting was hit by Japanese fire during a bombing run over Chichi Jima, a small island in the Pacific. Bush successfully parachuted to the ocean surface, where he was rescued. His two crew members perished.
A documentary film about the rescue was aired as part of a 1984 Republican Convention tribute to Vice President Bush. And on September 2, 1984, forty years to the day of his doomed bombing mission, a ceremony was held at the Norfolk Naval Station, complete with a Navy band and an encomium from Navy Secretary John Lehman. Bush’s war service, Lehman declared, was the beginning of a career “which went on to mark some of the most remarkable achievements in the annals of American politics.”17
The real story turns out to be far more complicated. In particular, there are two unresolved issues: What did Bush know of his crew members’ fate? And how badly was his plane hit at the moment when he decided to bail out? These are not merely hypothetical: as the pilot, Bush’s decision to ditch the craft would have doomed anyone still on board. Navy regulations dictate that officers who are thought to have abandoned crew members could be court-martialed.
On board with Bush that day were Radioman Second Class John Delaney, situated below in the plane’s belly, and, directly behind Bush, the turret gunner Lieutenant Junior Grade William Gardiner “Ted” White. Bush would claim in an early 1980s interview with author Doug Wead that he had seen at least one parachute leaving the plane. In 2002 he told the author James Bradley that he had not known the fate of either of his crew members. After Bradley had finished conducting an interview with Bush for his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, the former president turned to the author and asked if he had any information on the fate of h
is two crewmen.
“It still plagues me if I gave those guys enough time to get out,” Bush said.
Bradley would later write in his book: “No one knew exactly what had happened to Ted and John that day, only that both of them died.”18
Yet Poppy has offered multiple conflicting versions of the episode. In a letter to his parents following his rescue, Poppy asserted that after the plane was hit, he had ordered his crew members to parachute out. He was uncertain what happened next, he claimed, due to the smoke that filled the cockpit: “They didn’t answer at all, but I looked around and couldn’t see Ted in the turret so I assumed he had gone below to get his chute fastened on.”
Another version surfaced in the 1980s, when his staff decided that Bush had previously been too modest and now needed to acknowledge his heroism. They hooked him up with a writer, Doug Wead, who prepared the book George Bush: Man of Integrity. In that book, which got little attention, Poppy says:
