Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

by Russ Baker

  3. For the job, Pearson tasked Yale graduate Richard W. Cutler. See Richard W. Cutler, Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2004).

  4. Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power (New York: Back Bay, 2002), p. 53.

  5. Ibid., p. 187.

  6. Besides Bush, two other CIA directors, Porter Goss and R. James Woolsey, are Yale alumni. Soare top CIA Operations Division directors Richard M. Bissell Jr. and Tracy Barnes, engineers of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Walter L. Pforzheimer, who headed several key OSS operations and helped draft the act that created the CIA in 1947.

  7. The Edward Wilson character was in reality a loose composite of several CIA figures, in particular the agency’s longtime counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, Yale ’41.

  8. In a November 1, 2005, editorial for the National Review, Buckley recounted: “When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? ‘I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President.’ ”

  Another graduate, Jack Downey, Yale ’51, was convicted of espionage in China a year after graduation, charged with secretly air-dropping supplies and agents in a CIA attempt to foment an uprising. See Jerome Alan Cohen, “Will Jack Make His 25th Reunion,” New York Times, July 7, 1971.

  9. Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: The Story of Dresser Industries (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 114.

  10. The stories of characters throughout the Bush saga are full of unexplained, lengthy hikingtrips, circumnavigations, and the like, all preceding important new assignments.

  11. Randall Rothenberg, “In Search of George Bush,”New York Times, March 6, 1988.

  12. Mallon’s brother-in-law Alan Tower Waterman served as the Navy’s technology purchasing liaison. Later Waterman became the first head of the National Science Foundation, created by Congress in 1950 to fund basic research with a statutory mandate “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense” (National Science Foundation Web site, www.nsf.gov/about). Such a mission, paralleling as it does the lofty language of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, captures the sense of importance that men like Mallon brought to their government service, and which they carried with them into their private business endeavors.

  13. Over the years, board members would include the publisher of theLos Angeles Times, a former Texas governor, an official of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an executive of the predecessor to Citibank, and President Eisenhower’s treasury secretary. Several were Bonesmen.

  14. Prescott Bush, interview for the Columbia University Oral History Research Project, 1966.

  15. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 395.

  16. Author interview with Valta Ree Casselman, August 14, 2006.

  17. George Bush with Victor Gold, Looking Forward: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 49–50.

  18. National Security Council policy papers, NSC 18/2, published February 17, 1949; and NSC18/4, published November 17, 1949 (both declassified October 1, 1987).

  19. Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), pp. 13–14.

  20. Gerald M. Boyd, “Bush Gets Harsh Reception at Shipyard in Oregon,”New York Times, September 7, 1988. Bush, confronted by boos and obscenities from shipyard union members critical of Reagan’s economic policies, got out his wallet and had a supporter wave his old union card in front of the crowd. “How many guys running for President of the United States has been a member of the C.I.O. steelworkers?” Bush asked. “You are looking at one.”

  21. Payne, Initiative in Energy, pp. 176–77.

  22. Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 13.

  23. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, “Bush Opened Up to Secret Yale Society; Turning Points in a Life Built on Alliances,” Washington Post, August 7, 1988.

  24. This had been created under the National Security Act of 1947 by President Truman with significant input from his key advisers, Prescott Bush’s business partners Averell Harriman and Robert A. Lovett. Its mandate was to help prepare the country for industrial and civilian mobilization in time of war.

  25. Prescott Bush, interview for the Columbia University Oral History Research Project, 1966, p. 83.

  26. Mallon wrote to Allen Dulles: “What [Slick] really wants is to take Eric Johnston’s place as head of the advisory committee for Technical Cooperation Administration or whatever the Point Four program will be called from now on.” TCA ostensibly provided “scientific and technical assistance to underdeveloped countries in order to maintain political stability and to further economic and social progress,” but it was also a key means of carrying out clandestine intelligence operations.

  27. Loren Coleman wrote Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989) and Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology (Fresno, CA: Linden, 2002).

  28. Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 14.

  29. Ibid., p. 10.

  30. Ibid., pp. 11–12. See also Leonard Mosley, Dull: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), p. 480, which speaks of Allen Dulles Jr.’s “absolute hatred” of his father.

  31. Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), p. 68.

  32. Even Poppy’s paternal grandfather, Samuel Bush, had Rockefeller connections. William Good-sell Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller’s brother, was a major backer of the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, where Samuel Bush worked as a top executive at the turn of the nineteenth century. After that, Samuel began running Buckeye Malleable Iron & Coupler Company, a Columbus, Ohio, company backed by John D. Rockefeller’s other brother, Franklin.

  33. George Bush, Looking Forward.

  34. Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. Bernstein bases his assertion on the following evidence: “Katharine Graham, Philip Graham’s widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers.”

  35. Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 127.

  36. Zapata Petroleum filed its certificate of incorporation in Delaware on March 27, 1953, and registeredto do business in Texas on April 30, 1953.

  37. Letter from Neil Mallon to Allen Dulles, April 10, 1953. Allen W. Dulles Papers, 1845–1971. See-leyG. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Discovered by independent researcher Bruce Adamson.

  38. At the time, U.S. public opinion was very much behind the insurgency of Fidel Castro, which was growing quickly in its struggle against the stunningly corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista, but corporate interests with large Cuban holdings watched the situation nervously.

  39. In an odd twist, Dresser Industries had tried, unsuccessfully, to buy out Hughes’s drill bit company years earlier.


  40. Michael Drosnin, Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness (New York: Holt, Rine-hart and Winston, 1985).

  41. Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 16.

  42. These include Theodore Shackley, E. Howard Hunt, Felix Rodriguez, and Porter Goss.

  43. The training base for the Bay of Pigs invasion was the plantation of Roberto Alejos Arzu, a powerful and feared figure who would later run a notorious death squad, La Mano Blanca, and chair the local efforts of several Bush-backed ventures, including Ameri Cares, the contra-friendly relief organization founded by yet another of Poppy’s college roommates, Connecticut resident Robert Macauley. See Russ Baker, “A Thousand Points of Blight,” Village Voice, January 8, 1991.

  44. John A. Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank: Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1818–1968 (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968), pp. 206–7.

  45. Conventional historical accounts restrict the causes of the split to disputes between the strong-willed Hugh Liedtke and the equally bullheaded Herbie Walker. But there may have been more to it. If in fact Zapata Offshore, like Mallon’s Dresser Industries, was allowing itself to be used as a chess piece in global intrigues, the Liedtkes, who went on to great wealth independent of Bush, may not have been that enthusiastic about sacrificing profits for a “greater cause.”

  46. Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 17.

  47. Jonathan Kwitny, “The Mexican Connection: A Look at an Old George Bush Business Venture,” Barron’s, September 19, 1988. After Kwitny unearthed duplicate copies elsewhere, Bush admitted through a spokesman a brief business relationship with Jorge Diaz Serrano, claiming it lasted just seven months. Yet Kwitny was able to in dependently locate Zapata SEC filings that made clear that Bush’s dealings with the Mexican lasted four years. They also established that the relationship involved both breaking Mexican law and keeping Zapata’s own shareholders in the dark about the deal, a violation of U.S. securities law. The principal method of moving funds to Diaz Serrano was to drastically undercharge him for an oil rig. “It was mighty generous of Bush to sell us the rig,” Diaz Serrano said. (Kwitny’s reporting, which was published less than two months before Bush was elected president in 1988, received little attention or follow-through from other media outlets.)

  48. At the time, Diaz Serrano was on his way to Moscow for a stint as Mexico’s ambassador to theSoviet Union.

  49. Robert H. Gow, You Can’t Direct the Wind; You Can Only Reset the Sails: My First 62 Years (Houston: Xixim Publishing, 2002), p. 109.

  50. Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 21.

  51. Joseph J. Trento interview with Vincent Bounds, March 27, 1992. Cited in Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 21.

  52. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Hippocrene, 1989), pp. 73–74.

  53. Farish was sole heir to a family that helped found Humble Oil, which later became part of the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey (which is now Exxon). Farish’s grandfather, chairman of Standard, found himself, like Prescott Bush, under investigation by the U.S. Senate for his war-time dealings with the Nazis and died of a heart attack shortly afterward. Farish III, who served as an aide to Poppy Bush when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964, hardly needed a paycheck. His avocations included breeding racehorses (even stabling for Queen Elizabeth II, who was a guest at Farish’s Lane’s End Farm).

  54. Gow, You Can’t Direct the Wind, p. 104.

  55. Payne, Initiative in Energy, p. 221.

  56. Gow, You Can’t Direct the Wind, pp. 104–24.

  4: WHERE WAS POPPY?

  1. Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 213.

  2. Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-MAFIA War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), p. 103. The “something” looks more and more like the assassination of Castro. Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998), edited by Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive, reports that the CIA’s Richard Bissell told Robert F. Kennedy that “the CIA’s ‘associated planning’ for the Bay of Pigs invasion included ‘the use of the underworld against Castro’ ” (p. 10). This suggests that knocking off the leader was an integral part of the original plan.

  3. “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool,” New York Times, April 25, 1966.

  4. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  5. Michael R. Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 72.

  6. Statistics on the number of questions, by panel member, can be found in Walt Brown’s The Warren Omission (Florence, KY: Delmar, 1996), p. 85. There were 2,154 questions by Dulles to Warren’s 608, with Ford, Cooper, and McCloy in between. But Warren was present at the most sessions (p. 83), 110 to Dulles’s 85, with Ford in between at 95.

  7. E. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day (New York: Arlington House, 1973), p. 215.

  8. Prescott Bush to Allen Dulles, 1969. Allen W. Dulles Papers, 1845–1971. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, box 10, folder 11.

  9. Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, reprint 2000), p. 94.

  10. George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Texas: “Zapata—Business Alpha File, Box 3, World Trip, 1963.”

  11. The oil depletion allowance sheltered 27.5 percent of oil income as compensation for the “depletion”of finite reserves. As the journalist Robert Bryce noted in Cronies: Oil, Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (New York: Public Affairs, 2004): “Numerous studies showed that the oilmen were getting a tax break that was unprece dented in American business. While other businessmen had to pay taxes on their income regardless of what they sold, the oilmen got special treatment.”

  12. The FBI report is available through the Mary Ferrell Foundation Web site (): Graham Kitchel report in Warren Commission document 14. This brief report, but not one that described George Bush in more detail and contained other additional information, was apparently received by Warren Commission staff. There is no reason to think that in 1964, staffers would have paid particular attention to this as one of many such tips.

  13. Author interview with Leslie Acoca, January 26, 2007.

  14. Miguel Acoca, “Documents: Bush Blew Whistle on Rival in JFK Slaying,” San Francisco Examiner, August 25, 1988.

  15. Barbara Bush, Barbara Bush: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 1994), pp. 59–60.

  16. Tyler lies about ninety miles to the east of Dallas; its population in 1963 was around thirty-eight thousand.

  17. Kelley, The Family, p. 212.

  18. Author interview with Aubrey Irby, February 1, 2007.

  19. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (St. Petersburg, FL: Tree Farm, 1992); and Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

  20. Hersh, The Old Boys, p. 394.

  21. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor, 2008), p. 144.

  22. Ulmer was running things in Greece during the country’s vicious civil war; the Athens CIA station was also in charge of most Middle East operations and anti-Soviet-bloc efforts in Yugo slavia, Albania, and other Balkan countries. Ulmer would go on to a host of key CIA assignments, including running the Paris station and the CIA’s Far East division, overseeing operations in Southeast Asia, and an attempted coup against the populist Indonesian president with the typically Indonesian one-word name: Sukarno.