By
Russ Baker on Sep 16, 2013
What possible connection could there have been between George H.W.
Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A.
and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people,
apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one
live wire touch another.
In his book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years,
Russ Baker, editor of WhoWhatWhy, documents some of the strangest and
least known events relating to the assassination, whose 50th anniversary falls this November 22.
This is the first installment of a ten-part series, featuring
excerpts from relevant chapters of the book. (The excerpts in Part 1
come from Chapter 2 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been
changed for this publication.)
Notes: (1) Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the
book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (2) To
distinguish between George Bush, father and son, George H.W. Bush is
sometimes referred to by his nickname Poppy, and George W. Bush by his,
W.
Poppy’s Secret
When Joseph McBride came upon the document about George H. W. Bush’s
double life, he was not looking for it. It was 1985, and McBride, a
former
Daily Variety writer, was in the library of California
State University San Bernardino, researching a book about the movie
director Frank Capra. Like many good reporters, McBride took off on a
“slight,” if time-consuming, tangent – spending day after day poring
over reels of microfilmed documents related to the FBI and the JFK
assassination. McBride had been a volunteer on Kennedy’s campaign, and
since 1963 had been intrigued by the unanswered questions surrounding
that most singular of American tragedies.
A particular memo caught his eye, and he leaned in for a closer look.
Practically jumping off the screen was a memorandum from FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963. Under the subject heading
“Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Hoover reported that, on
the day after JFK’s murder, the bureau had provided two individuals with
briefings. One was “Captain William Edwards of the Defense
Intelligence Agency.” The other: “Mr. George Bush of the Central
Intelligence Agency.”
To:
Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
[We have been] advised that the
Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might
capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid
against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. policy… [Our] sources know of no
[such] plans… The substance of the foregoing information was orally
furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and
Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
McBride shook his head. George H. W. Bush? In the CIA in 1963?
Dealing with Cubans and the JFK assassination? Could this be the same
man who was now vice president of the United States? Even when Bush was
named CIA director in 1976 amid much agency-bashing, his primary asset
had been the fact that he was not a part of the agency during the coups,
attempted coups, and murder plots in Iran, Cuba, Chile, and other hot
spots about which embarrassing information was being disclosed every day
in Senate hearings.
For CIA director Bush, there had been much damage to control. The
decade from 1963 to 1973 had seen one confidence-shaking crisis after
another. There was the Kennedy assassination and the dubious accounting
of it by the Warren Commission. Then came the revelations of how the CIA
had used private foundations to channel funds to organizations inside
the United States, such as the National Student Association. Then came
Watergate, with its penumbra of CIA operatives such as E. Howard Hunt
and their shadowy misdoings. Americans were getting the sense of a kind
of sanctioned underground organization, operating outside the law and
yet protected by it. Then President Gerald Ford, who had ascended to
that office when Richard Nixon resigned, fired William Colby, the
director of the CIA, who was perceived by hard-liners as too
accommodating to congressional investigators and would-be intelligence
reformers.
Now Ford had named George H. W. Bush to take over the CIA. But Bush
seemed wholly unqualified for such a position – especially at a time
when the agency was under maximum scrutiny. He had been U.N. ambassador,
Republican National Committee chairman, and the U.S. envoy to Beijing,
where both Nixon and Henry Kissinger had regarded him as a lightweight
and worked around him. What experience did he have in the world of
intelligence and spying? How would he restore public confidence in a
tarnished spy agency? No one seemed to know. Or did Gerald Ford realize
something most others didn’t?
Bush served at the CIA for one year, from early 1976 to early 1977.
He worked quietly to reverse the Watergate-era reforms of CIA practices,
moving as many operations as possible offshore and beyond
accountability. Although a short stint, it nevertheless created an image
problem in 1980 when Bush ran unsuccessfully for the Republican
presidential nomination against former California governor Ronald
Reagan. Some critics warned of the dangerous precedent in elevating
someone who had led the CIA, with its legacy of dark secrets and covert
plots, blackmail and murder, to preside over the United States
government.
“Must be another George Bush”
In 1985, when McBride found the FBI memo apparently relating to
Bush’s past, the reporter did not immediately follow up this curious
lead. Bush was now a recently reelected vice president (a famously
powerless position), and McBride himself was busy with other things. By
1988, however, the true identity of “Mr. George Bush of the CIA” took on
new meaning, as George H. W. Bush prepared to assume his role as
Reagan’s heir to the presidency. Joe McBride decided to make the leap
from entertainment reportage to politics. He picked up the phone and
called the White House.
“May I speak with the vice president?” he asked
McBride had to settle for Stephen Hart, a vice presidential
spokesman. Hart denied that his boss had been the man mentioned in the
memo, quoting Bush directly. “I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and
involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for
the Senate in late ’63. I don’t have any idea of what he’s talking
about.” Hart concluded with this suggestion: “Must be another George
Bush.”
McBride found the response troubling – rather detailed for a ritual
non-denial. It almost felt like a cover story that Bush was a bit too
eager to trot out. He returned to Hart with more questions for Bush:
- Did you do any work with or for the CIA prior to the time you became its director?
- If so, what was the nature of your relationship with the agency, and how long did it last?
- Did you receive a briefing by a member of the FBI on anti-Castro
Cuban activities in the aftermath [of] the assassination of President
Kennedy?
Within half an hour, Hart called him back. The spokesman now declared that, though he had
not
spoken with Bush, he would nevertheless answer the questions himself.
Hart said that the answer to the first question was no, and, therefore,
the other two were moot.
Undeterred, McBride called the CIA. A spokesman for the agency, Bill
Devine, responded: “This is the first time I’ve ever heard this . . .
I’ll see what I can find out and call you back.”
The following day, the PR man was tersely formal and opaque: “I can
neither confirm nor deny.” It was the standard response the agency gave
when it dealt with its sources and methods. Could the agency reveal
whether there had been another George Bush in the CIA? Devine replied:
“Twenty-seven years ago? I doubt that very much. In any event, we have a
standard policy of not confirming that anyone is involved in the CIA.”
“Apparently” George William Bush
But it appears this standard policy was made to be broken. McBride’s
revelations appeared in the July 16, 1988, issue of the liberal magazine
the
Nation, under the headline “The Man Who Wasn’t There,
‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative.” Shortly thereafter, CIA spokeswoman
Sharron Basso told the Associated Press that the CIA believed that “the
record should be clarified.” She said that the FBI document “apparently”
referred to a George
William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the
night shift at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters, and that “would have
been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report.” George
William Bush, she said, had left the CIA in 1964 to join the Defense
Intelligence Agency.
Certainly, the article caused George H. W. Bush no major headaches.
By the following month, he was triumphantly accepting the GOP’s
presidential nomination at its New Orleans convention, unencumbered by
tough questions about his past.
CIA can’t find “other” George Bush?
Meanwhile, the CIA’s Basso told reporters that the agency had been
unable to locate the “other” George Bush. The assertion was reported by
several news outlets, with no comment about the irony of a vaunted
intelligence agency – with a staff of thousands and a budget of billions
– being unable to locate a former employee within American borders.
Perhaps what the CIA really needed was someone like Joseph McBride.
Though not an investigative journalist, McBride had no trouble finding
George William Bush. Not only was the man findable; he was still on the
U.S. government payroll. By 1988 this George Bush was working as a
claims representative for the Social Security Administration. He
explained to McBride that he had worked only briefly at the CIA, as a
GS-5 probationary civil servant, analyzing documents and photos during
the night shift. Moreover, he said, he had never received interagency
briefings.
Several years later, in 1991, former
Texas Observer editor
David Armstrong would track down the other person listed on the Hoover
memo, Captain William Edwards. Edwards could confirm that he had been on
duty at the Defense Intelligence Agency the day in question. He said he
did not remember this briefing, but that he found the memo plausible in
reference to a briefing he might have received over the phone while at
his desk. While he said he had no idea who the George Bush was who also
was briefed, Edward’s rank and experience was certainly far above that
of the night clerk George William Bush.
Shortly after McBride’s article appeared in the
Nation, the
magazine ran a follow-up op-ed, in which the author provided evidence
that the Central Intelligence Agency had foisted a lie on the American
people. The piece appeared while everyone else was focusing on Bush’s
coronation at the Louisiana Superdome. As with McBride’s previous
story, this disclosure was greeted with the equivalent of a collective
media yawn. An opportunity was bungled, not only to learn about the true
history of the man who would be president, but also to recognize the
“George William Bush” diversion for what it was: one in a long series of
calculated distractions and disinformation episodes that run through
the Bush family history.
George William Bush Deposes
With the election only two months away, and a growing sense of
urgency in some quarters, George William Bush acknowledged under oath –
as part of a deposition in a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit group
seeking records on Bush’s past – that he was the junior officer on a
three- to four-man watch shift at CIA headquarters between September
1963 and February 1964, which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. “I do
not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to
me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA,” he said. “In
fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral
communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I
did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination
during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the above, it is my
conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence
Agency referred to in the memorandum.” . . .
George H.W. Bush: Spy from the age of 18
Almost a decade would pass between Bush’s election in 1988 and the
declassification and release in 1996 of another government document that
shed further light on the matter. This declassified document would help
to answer some of the questions raised by the ’63 Hoover memo –
questions such as, “If George Herbert Walker Bush was already connected
with the CIA in 1963, how far back did the relationship go?”
But yet another decade would pass before this second document would be found,
read,
and revealed to the public. Fast-forward to December 2006, on a day
when JFK researcher Jerry Shinley sat, as he did on so many days, glued
to his computer, browsing through the digitized database of documents on
the Web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.
On that December day, Shinley came upon an internal CIA memo that
mentioned George H. W. Bush [the Bush designated Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI)]. 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] [in 1953] 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 . . .
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 . . .
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 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 enquired.”
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: I just broke one of the first rules in this game.
Russ Baker: And what is that?
Thomas Devine: 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 event 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 .
. .
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. The setup with Devine in the
oil business provided Bush with a perfect cover to travel abroad and . .
. identify potential CIA recruits among foreign nationals . . .
“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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
Next: Part 2. Viva Zapata
Posts
