by Russ Baker
The Dulles and Bush clans had long mixed over business, politics, and friendship, and the corollary to all three—intelligence. 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.
In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas, which besides being an oil capital was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy elite. Though a virtual unknown on his arrival, Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the nonprofit Council on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. 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.
A September 1951 organizing meeting at Mallon’s home featured a group with suggestive connections and affiliations. It included Fred Florence, the founder of the Republic National Bank, whose Dallas office tower was a covert repository for CIA-connected ventures; T. E. Braniff, a pioneer of the airline industry and member of the Knights of Malta, an exclusive, conservative, Vatican-connected order with longtime intelligence ties; Fred Wooten, an official of the First National Bank of Dallas, which would employ Poppy Bush in the years between his tenure as CIA director and vice president; and Colonel Robert G. Storey, later named as liaison between Texas law enforcement and the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.
Another attendee was General Robert J. Smith, who as a colonel in World War II had played a role in the earliest cold war operations, including the secret 1944 transport of Nazi intelligence agents. At the time of Mallon’s house meeting, Smith, a Texan, was deputy chairman of a little-known Washington entity called the National Security Resources Board.24 Among its principal concerns was the establishment of adequate supplies of strategic resources, oil in particular. Smith’s presence at the Dallas meeting suggests that the creation of Mallon’s Dallas Council on World Affairs may have had some kind of sanction at the highest levels.
Soon, the group moved even closer to the center of power. General Dwight Eisenhower had been courted by both major political parties but had responded to entreaties from a GOP group that included the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush, as well as Allen and John Foster Dulles. (As attorneys, the Dulleses had done business with Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman for years.) 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.
Following Ike’s decisive victory, the Dulles brothers obtained effective control of foreign policy: John Foster 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, 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.
Eisenhower, with no track record in civilian government and little enthusiasm for the daily grind, was only too happy to leave many of the operational decisions to these others. Even the normally hypercautious Prescott, who frequently golfed with the new president, would admit to this. In an oral history interview conducted by Columbia University, the interviewer asked Prescott about trade policy:
INTERVIEWER: Had the president laid down any guidelines for the course of action?
PRESCOTT BUSH: No, he did not . . . I don’t think he knew much about [the policy]. After all, why should he? He’d been a military man all his life, and he was turning to a group of congressmen and businessmen.25
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 on 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. An October 28, 1953, letter from Mallon to Dulles reveals nothing about the director’s objective in visiting Dallas—but does comment on the fact that Dulles and his wife, Clover, were made “honorary Texans” and presented with cowboy hats.
The true power wielded by the duo of Prescott Bush and Neil Mallon is revealed in a round of correspondence where the two virtually demanded a high-level Washington job for a friend: the oilman and adventurer Tom Slick.26 Slick sat on the Dresser Industries board but was best known for his esoteric explorations, including searches for Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Loren Coleman, an anthropologist and retired professor who wrote two books on Slick, asserts that the explorer was actually a longtime CIA operative who used his adventure travel as cover for his spy work.27
At the time, the CIA was in the process of creating plausible deniability as it began what would be a series of efforts to topple “unfriendly” regimes around the world, including those in Guatemala and Iran. 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.
The Bushes were apparently so good at keeping people guessing that otherwise savvy intelligence operatives misperceived the actual roles of both Prescott and Poppy. Captain William R. Corson, for example, was convinced that Allen Dulles was using Poppy as a “business-cover asset” as part of an elaborate chess game with his old friend Prescott Bush—who by then was in charge of monitoring Dulles’s CIA for the U.S. Senate. Corson believed that Dulles had recruited Poppy without Prescott’s knowledge.
The theory was based on an awareness that Poppy (and his siblings) had never gotten over their fear and awe of their forbidding father, who stood six feet four, drank heavily, and stood in watchful judgment over his children. Poppy was said to virtually cower in his father’s presence. “George’s insecurities were clay to someone like Dulles,” said Corson.28 Dulles convinced Poppy, Corson said, that “he could contribute to his country as well as get help from the CIA for his overseas business activities. Of course it was all nonsense. Dulles could care less about helping the kid. It really was a tool to help give him a wedge with Prescott if he needed it.”
Corson was a member of a military covert operations team that answered directly to President Eisenhower. He recalled a time in 1955 when Senator Prescott Bush visited him in Hong Kong as part of an inquiry into a botched U.S. effort to kill the Chinese premier Zhou En-lai at an international conference by poisoning his rice bowl with a slow-acting toxin.29
While enjoying a round of golf together at Victoria Island’s Shek O Golf Club course overlooking the South China Sea, Prescott pressed Corson, who knew the CIA director well, about the relationship between Dulles and Dulles’s own son. “He wanted to know how the [Dulles] son got along with his father,” Corson recalled. “I told him he hated his father.”30 Corson asserted that this surprised Prescott.
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p; Corson, who would later work personally for Dulles, said he warned Prescott about Dulles’s Machiavellian tactics. Specifically, he said that it would not be beyond the calculating director to try to recruit George into intelligence work as a way of exerting leverage over Prescott and his Senate colleagues. “He just shook his head and laughed . . . He disparaged George.”
Most likely, Prescott was putting on a show for Corson. After all, by that time Poppy was already very much part of the team. Nevertheless, his complicated relationship with his father would both create tension and foster a lifelong quest for approval that would be mirrored in the relationship between Poppy and his own son George W. Bush.
A Hunch, a Dream, and a Whole Lotta Moolah
In 1953, as Dulles was building his global machine, Poppy Bush launched his own enterprise, with help from Dulles, Mallon, and Poppy’s maternal uncle Herbert Walker. The importance of this strategic alliance and others like it in setting Poppy on his professional path would be deliberately blurred.
The “official” version of Poppy’s life, disseminated again and again to credulous journalists and authors, portrays Bush as a young fellow who rejected the easy path to Wall Street, pointed a red Studebaker into the sun, and struck out on his own for the West Texas oil fields. Here’s a typical account, offered to the historian Herbert Parmet by Bush’s elder brother, Prescott Bush Jr.: “[Poppy] met a bunch of fellows in the Navy from the West and the Southwest, and they talked a lot about the oil industry and the opportunities there and everything else, and that’s what made up his mind that he wanted to go out there and see what he could do in the oil industry.”31
Such accounts failed to note that the Bush family had long been connected at the very top of the oil industry, through ties to the Rockefellers and their Standard Oil of New Jersey and its large Texan subsidiary, Humble Oil.32 But a future political career necessitated a more modest start—albeit one benefiting from considerable outside assists. It was a template closely followed years later by Poppy’s eldest son.
Poppy’s first venture involved convincing a local landman by the name of John Overbey to partner with him. The landman business was sharp-elbowed; it involved obtaining oil field intelligence, then convincing landowners to sell the drilling rights on their property. Overbey handled the real estate end; Poppy raised the cash.
Bush got money from Uncle Herbie (George Herbert Walker Jr., Skull and Bones, 1927), an investment banker. Uncle Herbie also was instrumental in bringing in others, including Eugene Meyer, a Yale graduate and owner of the influential Washington Post. Meyer’s investments were handled by Brown Brothers Harriman.33 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. “Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy,” he concludes.34
For Poppy, well-connected investors like Meyer weren’t hard to come by. Though start-ups are risky, there were incentives. For one thing, income tax rates for the rich back then were so high—90 percent in some cases—that losses could be recouped almost dollar for dollar in taxes saved. For another, when you invested in a young Poppy Bush, you got the older, more influential Prescott in the bargain. And the extended Bush clan truly represented a kind of private-public business combine. For example, within months of Prescott being named to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, Uncle Herbie formed a partnership to invest in commercial nuclear energy businesses.35
The news business, the policy business, and the intelligence business had a lot in common: they were all about who you knew and what you knew. In fact, so was the oil business. The Bushes’ skill at cultivating connections was evident in 1953, when Poppy joined forces with a couple of brothers from Tulsa, Hugh and Bill Liedtke, to form Zapata Petroleum. The Liedtkes’ contacts were nearly as interesting as the Bushes’, with strands leading to, among others, the millionaire former bootlegger Joseph P. Kennedy and Ray Kravis, the father of the famed corporate raider Henry Kravis. 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.
There is no dispute that the Liedtkes handled much of the operational side of the company. But the accounts of the Bush-Liedtke partnership leave out something quite significant. As documented in chapter 11, the Liedtkes would later involve themselves in political operations with Poppy Bush that would contribute to the demise of Richard M. Nixon.
Pirates of the Caribbean
Zapata Offshore, which provided perfect cover for activities in a host of hot spots around the world, may have been the brightest stone in Allen Dulles’s crown. On April 10, 1953, exactly two weeks after Zapata Offshore’s land-based sister, Zapata Petroleum, was launched,36 Neil Mallon wrote to CIA director Dulles about an upcoming meeting at D.C.’s Carlton Hotel. “In addition to Bob Johnson, I have invited a close personal friend, Prescott Bush. We want to talk to them about our Pilot Project in the Caribbean and have you listen in.”37
The letter was written in a kind of code-speak. Prescott Bush was well known to Dulles, as was his close relationship to Mallon and the fact that he was a sitting United States senator. He had brought Mallon and Dulles together, and the two had become close friends, visiting each other, exchanging gifts, and sending notes on important family occasions.
Mallon would play a crucial role for Dulles by introducing him to the powerful new-moneyed oil elites in Dallas that would, along with a separate group in Houston, become the leading funders of off-the-books covert operations in Latin America. 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.
What was the “pilot project” to which Mallon referred? Very likely it was Zapata Offshore, launched by Poppy in 1954, just as the U.S. government, under an administration dominated by the Dulles-Bush circles, began auctioning offshore mineral rights. The funding, again, came courtesy of Uncle Herbie, who organized a stock issue.
In 1958, Zapata Offshore’s drilling rig Scorpion was moved from the Gulf of Mexico to Cay Sal Bank, the most remote group of islands in the Bahamas and just fifty-four miles north of Isabela, Cuba.38 The island had been recently leased to oilman Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties, as well as his own “private CIA.”39 Hughes would even lend his ship to the CIA to dredge for a Soviet submarine.40
By most appearances, a number of CIA-connected entities were involved in the operation. Zapata leased the Scorpion to Standard Oil of California and to Gulf Oil. CIA director Dulles had previously served as Gulf’s counsel for Latin America. The same year that Gulf leased Bush’s platform, CIA veteran Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt joined Gulf’s board. 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 Carib -bean basin.
The offshore platforms had a specific purpose. “George Bush would be given a list of names of Cuban oil workers we would want placed in jobs,” said one official connected to Operation Mongoose, the program to overthrow Castro. “The oil platforms he dealt in were perfect for training the Cubans in raids on their homeland.”41
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. Th
e 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 own presidency.42 Others would show up in off-the-books operations run by Poppy’s friends and associates.43
George H. W. Bush did not, however, limit himself to the Caribbean. 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 the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, Borneo, and Medellín, Colombia. Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company, which began his close association with the Kuwaiti elite.
Facing Fidel
That a lot of what was labeled “national security” work was largely about money—making it, protecting it—was fairly transparent. 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.
