by Russ Baker
10. “Assassination Ban and E.O. 12333: A Brief Summary,” available at the Federation of American Scientists Web site www.fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf.
11. “Of Moles and Molehunters: Spy Stories,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, October 1993.
12. Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, chapter 1.
13. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982), p. 153.
14. When the original text of “Family Jewels” was finally declassified in 2007, the Washington Post reported, “Only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year. But it was not until Hersh’s article that Colby took the file to the White House.” DeYoung and Pincus, “CIA to Air De cades of Its Dirty Laundry.” Also see Thomas Powers, “Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1979.
15. James M. Naughton, “Sweeping Change: Cheney Is White House Staff Chief—General Is Security Adviser,” New York Times, November 4, 1975.
16. “A Breezy Head of the C.I.A.,” New York Times, November 4, 1975.
17. “Bush Explains Decision,” New York Times, November 4, 1975.
18. Houston Post, November 8, 1975. See Tarpley, p. 293, footnote 4; found in Philip Buchen Files, Box 24, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
19. Bill Peterson, “Bush Says He Reported 1970 ‘Townhouse’ Donation,” Washington Post, February 8, 1980.
20. Nicholas M. Horrock, “Mr. Bush Does Not Fit the Top-Spy Mold,” New York Times, November 9, 1975.
21. U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Nomination of George Bush to Be Director of Central Intelligence, December 15–16, 1975, p. 10.
22. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, “Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes; Appointive Jobs Were Turning Point,” Washington Post, August 9, 1988.
23. “George Bush: Hot Property in Presidential Politics,” Washington Post, January 27, 1980.
24. Count de Marenches and David A. Andelman, The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992), pp. 248–49.
25. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 576. Also see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 324.
26. Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 108–9.
27. Letter from Richard M. Nixon to George Bush, November 12, 1975, Richard Nixon presidential library, Yorba Linda, California.
28. Letter from George Bush to Richard M. Nixon, December 4, 1975, Richard Nixon presidential library.
29. De Marenches and Andelman, The Fourth World War, p. 247.
30. Nicholas M. Horrock, untitled article, New York Times, February 18, 1976.
31. Fareed Zakaria, “Exaggerating the Threats,” Newsweek, June 16, 2003.
32. John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2004); Dinges was the Washington Post’s South America correspondent from 1975 to 1983. Also see Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
33. Though no longer the powerhouse that it once was, Reader’s Digest has remained a “reliable” publication. When George W. Bush became president, he would install a top Reader’s Digest executive, Kenneth Tomlinson, to lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with the mandate to exorcise a perceived liberal slant, particularly at PBS.
34. Fulton Oursler worked closely with Hoover and later, as a senior editor at Reader’s Digest, with FBI assistant director Louis B. Nichols. See Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).
35. Epstein himself admitted that Angleton was a key source, two years after the counterintelligence chief's death. See Edward J. Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989).
36. The House Select Committee on Assassinations would issue its final report in 1979.
37. Poppy Bush’s assertion that he was out of touch with de Mohrenschildt in the years surrounding the Kennedy assassination are further cast in doubt by an interoffice memo to Poppy from his employee R. C. Mosby, dated March 30, 1965, which cites a bevy of men tied to de Mohrenschildt through business and friendship:
You have asked that we prepare a list of individuals to be invited to a small gathering next Monday. The following is a list of contract drilling people and construction people who would be interested in having equipment built in the Niarchos facilities in Greece.
Among the names are “G. B. Kitchel, Vice President, Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Inc.,” with the notation that the letter to him should be addressed to “George”; “Mr. George Brown, Brown and Root”; “Mr. John Mecom”; and, added in pencil beside a notation for “Mr. Carnes Weaver, World over Drilling Company,” “Mr. W. C. Savage (for Mr. Weaver).” Internal correspondence from Zapata Offshore, on company letterhead, dated March 30, 1965, found in the files of the George H. W. Bush Library, College Station, Texas. (Handwritten notes show that at least Kitchel and Savage had RSVP’d affirmatively.) Interestingly, Kitchel, Brown, Mecom, and Savage were all close with de Mohrenschildt—and the above-mentioned Greek, Stavros Niarchos, was a longtime CIA asset.
38. See in depen dent researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson’s work available at www.ciajfk.com/images/l-319b.jpg.
39. According to handwritten notes provided by Adamson available at www.ciajfk.com/images/Bush-7a.jpg and www.ciajfk.com/images/Bush-8.jpg.
40. George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt were divorced in 1974 but had three little chihuahuas they shared. He lived in an apartment at Bishop College, in Texas, and she lived alone in Dallas. While he was committed to the mental hospital, she moved to California. After he was released, he lived alone in Dallas.
41. Kurtz, who has been studying the assassination for decades, does not cite the dates of his conversations with these sources, which apparently occurred years ago. In an interview with me on August 2, 2008, he said he recalled that the three CIA veterans had actually called him, in part, he believes, because they appreciated his conclusion that the agency was not involved with the assassination. As he recalled, their knowing Mrs. de Mohrenschildt came up during the conversation but was not the central topic. Michael Kurtz, The JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), pp. 149–51.
42. Jim Marrs, “Widow Disputes Suicide,” Fort Worth Evening Star-Telegram, May 11, 1978.
43. De Marenches and Andelman, The Fourth World War, pp. 22–23.
44. HSCA transcript, p. 21.
45. De Mohrenschildt’s first wife, Dorothy Pierson, had been just eighteen when she became pregnant with Alexandra. Dorothy abandoned her daughter, who was raised by Dorothy’s cousin Nancy Pierson. The relationship between Nancy Pierson and de Mohrenschildt was often strained.
46. Rangely Field, Colorado.
47. Savage interview with in de pen dent researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson.
48. The two were Hoyt S. Taylor and Harry Wayne Dean.
49. Bruce Campbell Adamson interview with George B. Kitchel.
50. Ibid.
51. Combined Warren Commission testimonies of George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.
52. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Death Investigation Report is available at http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death2.txt.
53. Marrs, “Widow Disputes Suicide.”
54. Michael Canfield interview with Paul Raigorodsky, November 22, 1976.
13: POPPY’S PROXY AND THE SAUDIS
1. That Bath opened his plane brokerage in 1976 was asserted in Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, “A Mysterious Mover of Money and Planes,” Time, October 28, 1991.
2. Craig Unger,
House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 20.
3. Roughly a dozen brothers manage the Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry—one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East. For more information on its origins, see Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), pp. 176–79.
4. There are varying accounts as to Mohammed’s date of death. Some sources say 1967, others say 1968.
5. By 1991, as Osama’s radicalism threatened the security of Saudi Arabia itself, the family would completely disown him. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 231.
6. A passenger manifest, made public by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), shows that at least thirteen relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The manifest, which Lautenberg obtained from officials of Boston’s Logan International Airport, was released on July 21, 2004.
7. Author interviews with multiple Bath associates.
8. Christopher Robbins, Air America: The Story of the CIA’s Secret Airline (New York: Avon, 1985), p. 21.
9. Author interview with Dr. Richard Mayo, July 23, 2004.
10. Atlantic Aviation’s chairman was Edward B. Du Pont. One board member, Edward Du Pont’scousin Richard C. Du Pont Jr., owned the CIA-connected Summit Aviation, which was active during both Vietnam and later Iran-contra. (For background on Summit, see Jeff Gerth, “Ex-U.S. Intelligence and Military Personnel Supply Anti-Nicaragua Rebels,” New York Times, November 8, 1983.) Another Du Pont relative, Samuel H. Du Pont Jr., headed the Civil Air Patrol nationally circa 1970. Bath’s employment as a VP of Atlantic Aviation is referenced by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugo slavia (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 125.
11. Timothy Noah, “Found Object: Bush’s Early Discharge,” Slate, November 11, 2003.
12. National Guard Bureau, Aeronautical Order, no. 87, September 29, 1972.
13. Craig Unger, “Mystery Man,” Salon.com, April 27, 2004.
14. Author interview with General Belisario Flores (Ret.), August 30, 2004.
15. Unger, “Mystery Man.”
16. Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud, p. 34.
17. E-mail to author from Bill White, May 17, 2008.
18. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 393.
19. That same year, in Washington, the son of Abdul Aziz’s adviser St. John Philby, Kim Philby, ahigh-ranking British intelligence officer, met with Lieutenant Commander William Conkling Ladd of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The meeting was an important one to discuss collaboration between Britain and the United States on intelligence concerning Russia and Communism. The meeting represented the formal launching of postwar intelligence cooperation and would lead to the founding of an American civilian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency. Philby was the official representative of British intelligence in Washington, and in the ensuing years he would often dine with Allen Dulles. Kim Philby would later be unmasked as a notorious Soviet double agent. Lieutenant Commander Ladd’s daughter, Olivia, would marry a Wall Street operator named Marion Gilliam. Marion Gilliam would end up involved in a little-known company called Lucky Chance Mining, one of whose directors would be George W. Bush.
20. Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), p. 41.
21. Ibid., p. 41.
22. The Saudis had become alarmed over Egypt’s relentless bombardments of Yemen, just south of Saudi Arabia, using Soviet-supplied weapons. Worried that Egyptian nationalist president Nasser would extend his influence into southern Arabia, the Saudis decided to beef up their own defenses.
23. That was the same plane George W. Bush was flying, and at the same exact time. Bandar, who had a very real reason for developing military skills as a guardian of his family’s sometimes-threatened hold on power, would fly for seventeen years, while Bush would quit after two.
24. The interest on the part of privileged and connected Saudis in coming to the United States to learn to fly made the practice seem routine by the time some nonroyal Saudis began arriving in the United States to do the same—the men who became the pilots of the hijacked craft on 9/11. There are no known connections between the royal pilots and the terrorists—indeed, the 9/11 pilots are dedicated to bringing down the Saudi royal family. Nevertheless, the general U.S. effort to accommodate Saudis wishing to learn to fly is believed by some to have lowered security standards in general in a way that may have inadvertently made it easier for the hijackers to gain visas.
25. Bandar’s rise to prominence had begun in 1981, when he came to the United States to argue before Congress for the sale of AWACs (airborne control and warning systems) and F-15 equipment to the Saudis. Part of his strategy was to carry around with him a photo of his grandfather Abdul Azizibn Saud, who had negotiated the original concession with the United States in 1933 and had developed a particularly warm friendship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II. Ever since then, Saudi princes had toured the United States, studied in its colleges, trained in its military bases, and received overall red carpet treatment. But this visit by Prince Bandar was particularly noteworthy. For now, the Saudis were seriously trying to counterbalance the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress. By engaging in an intensive lobbying campaign coordinated by Bandar, they won Senate approval of the AWAC sale, 52–48. It was a milestone in Saudi-U.S. relations.
26. A significant if little-discussed by-product of the embargo was the extent to which American oilcompanies themselves reaped the profits of quadrupled oil prices. By 1974, Exxon overtook General Motors as the biggest American corporation in gross revenues, with its competitors following closely behind.
27. “Annual Oil Market Chronology Energy Data, Statistics and Analysis,” available through the Energy Information Administration at www.eia.doe.gov.
28. In March 1973, an American firm, Vinnell Corporation, was hired by the Department of Defenseto “modernize” the Saudi National Guard, and has ever since played a major role in the kingdom’s internal security. Vinnell had a long history of association with U.S. intelligence and had been involved in arming and supplying Chinese anti-Communist forces in the 1940s. See also: Matt Gaul, “Regulating the New Privateers: Private Military Service Contracting and the Modern Marque and Reprisal Clause,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, June 1998; Dan Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
In 1992, Vinnell along with its parent company, BDM, were acquired by the Carlyle Group. Frank C. Carlucci, a former secretary of defense under President Reagan, was chairman of BDM for most of the 1990s. Carlucci also served as Reagan’s national security adviser and a deputy director of the CIA from 1978 to ’81; he headed the Carlyle Group from 1992 until 2003.
29. John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2004), p. 12.
