Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (40 page)

Moreover, Bush was being mentioned as a possible running mate for Ford in 1976. “It is wrong for [Bush] to want both positions, even in a Bicentennial year,” said Church, only half joking.
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In response to such criticism, Ford drafted a letter announcing that Bush would not seek the vice presidency. “[Bush] urged that I make this decision,” Ford’s letter asserted. “This says something about the man and about his desire to do this job for the nation.”
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Bush himself laid it on even thicker. “Old-fashioned as it may seem to some, it is my duty to serve my country,” Bush told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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The Senate eventually approved Bush by a vote of 64 to 27.

Immediately, Poppy was recognized by elite leaders of other intelligence services as to the manner born. As Count Alexandre de Marenches, head of French intelligence, writes in his memoirs:

Mr. Bush was introduced to me by the French ambassador to the United Nations in a handwritten note. “He is a real gentleman,” the ambassador wrote to me, “born of an old New England family who has had a respect from birth for the kinds of fundamental moral values that we both share.”

Shortly after this note arrived, George Bush turned up in Paris. It was March 1976. From the first moment, we got along famously. Our first meeting took place in my office at our headquarters, over a wonderful lunch prepared by our French Navy chef. I still remember the soufflé. Bush was accompanied by his principal aide, General Vernon Walters, who was and remains one of the most extraordinary diplomats and intelligence analysts in the West. Alas, their hands were very much tied by the corrosive and systemic failings of the American intelligence system.

When he returned to Washington, I quickly received a charming, handwritten note:

Dear Friend:

. . . the luncheon was spectacular, but the conversation and getting your impressive views on the troubled world surpassed even that delectable soufflé. An added dividend was Barbara’s great feeling of warmth for your charming wife . . .

sincerely, George B.
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AS CIA DIRECTOR, Poppy was a busy man. On the one hand, he needed to repeatedly trot over to Capitol Hill to mollify members of Congress. On the other hand, he needed to help craft the CIA’s response to the Church Committee, which was on the warpath over the agency’s wrongdoing and excesses. One solution to the scrutiny was simply to scrub the files, and there was precedent for this. Before then-director Helms left the CIA, he had ordered the destruction of files on mind-control experiments and hundreds of hours of secretly recorded tapes of his own conversations.
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Senator Frank Church, at least, seemed to have an inkling that something was afoot. “There is no question in my mind,” he said, “but that concealment is the new order of the day.”
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Upon Bush’s nomination, former president Nixon, clearly unwitting to Poppy’s recent role in his demise, had offered him one bit of advice: “You will be tempted greatly to ‘give away the store’ in assuring the members of the Senate Committee that everything the CIA does in the future will be an open book,” he wrote. “I think you will be far better off to stand up and strongly defend the CIA and the need to maintain, particularly, its covert activities.”
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Bush’s handwritten response to these unintentionally ironic remarks suggested that the toppled leader had little to fear. “I couldn’t agree more,” Bush wrote. “We must not see the Agency compromised further by reckless disclosure.”
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FOR SOMEONE WHO supposedly knew nothing about intelligence, Poppy made quite an impression on other professionals in the field. As Count de Marenches noted, “The Americans, in my opinion, are the least prepared of all. Few of the heads of American intelligence with whom I came in close contact . . . ever fully understood . . . [the] most basic axioms of war or espionage or geopolitics in the age of South-North conflict. Perhaps the one who came closest was George Bush.”
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Something truly epochal was going on—but it entirely evaded the ken of the media and public. After sequestering Poppy in China during the bloody aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, Ford brought him back to be the chief spy. And then he handed Bush an unprece dented mandate.

Shortly after Poppy took over the CIA—on February 17, 1976—Ford announced a major reorganization that increased both the agency’s authority to conduct controversial operations and its director’s authority over the larger intelligence community, including agencies that were part of the Defense Department. The
New York Times
reported that Bush now had more power than any other director of Central Intelligence since the creation of the CIA.
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Bush wielded this heightened power on behalf of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had so famously warned against in his valedictory speech. Politicizing the process of intelligence analysis, he imposed a systematic bias that supported a new harder line toward the communist bloc. This was a direct reversal of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente.

Under the guidance of Rumsfeld, Cheney, a young Paul Wolfowitz, and others who had ascended in the Halloween Massacre, Poppy began finding ways to get around the analysts who did not sufficiently hype the Soviet threat. To that end he created a second analytical team, which produced alarming estimates of Soviet military capabilities. The concept was known as Team A/Team B.

In this way, Poppy was the father of the analytical gamesmanship his son would use to justify war with Iraq nearly three decades later—under the guidance of the same Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. That makes it particularly ironic that during W.’s presidency, Poppy was widely characterized as the cautious one who was privately troubled by his son’s bumptious foreign policy.

In 2003, as it became apparent that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, cited as cause for war, did not in fact exist,
Newsweek
observed that “intelligence failure” was a Bush family legacy:

During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of neocon outside “experts” to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B— which included future President George W.’s Iraq War strategist Paul Wolfowitz—produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated . . . Iraq is part of a pattern. In each of these cases, arguments about the threat posed by a country rest in large part on the character of the regime. The Team B report explains that the CIA’s analysis was flawed because it was based on too much “hard data”—meaning facts.
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Besides the scrubbing operation and the cooking of intelligence to order, Poppy oversaw some intriguing new projects. He enlisted the Saudis to provide financing for agency covert operations that Congress had barred or refused to fund. In effect, Bush privatized U.S. covert operations. This program, which will be detailed in chapters 13 and 14, offered tangible benefits to the Saudis, permitted the continuation of questionable CIA activities, and as we shall see, also enriched Poppy’s circle back in Texas.

Farming out CIA operations was risky business, however. In September 1976, Washington was rocked, literally, by a car bombing on D.C.’s Embassy Row that killed Orlando Letelier, the former ambassador of Chilean president Salvador Allende and a critic of Augusto Pinochet’s military regime. Letelier’s American colleague Ronni Moffitt, also died. Bush insisted that the U.S. government had no knowledge of, nor hand in, this act of terrorism.

But subsequent Chilean investigations and trials showed that the assassination had been carried out by former CIA contract employee Michael Townley, a U.S. expatriate who had gone to work for Pinochet’s intelligence chief.

The strangest part was that Townley, who had been on the State Department watch list as a potential terrorist, had nevertheless managed to freely enter the United States before the assassination. It was an eerie foreshadowing of what would happen in the years leading up to September 11, 2001, when at least one of the hijackers would enter the United States despite being on a CIA watch list. Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978 while the Democrat Jimmy Carter was in the White House; his Chilean handlers were convicted in 1993, after democracy had returned to that country. The former Chilean secret police chief admitted that his orders had come from Pinochet.
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But the crime was committed on Poppy’s turf, and on Poppy’s watch—by one of the agency’s former hirelings.

Plenty to Digest

The biggest and most controversial assassination was also back in the spotlight—and again, there were CIA strands in the picture. Thanks to a flurry of investigations as George Bush took over at CIA, eyes were turning back to the unsolved JFK murder. And to Dallas.

Although Poppy couldn’t remember where he had been on November 22, 1963, and couldn’t be bothered to recall his old friend George de Mohrenschildt’s precise role in the matter or in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, as CIA director he began paying keen attention to the resurgent assassination investigations.

Director Bush composed a rather strange internal memo asking for a copy of a report concerning a visit by Jack Ruby (killer of Lee Harvey Oswald— Kennedy’s alleged assassin) to the reputed Mafia leader Santo Trafficante Jr.; two years after Bush left the CIA directorship, Trafficante would admit to a House panel that he participated in a CIA-directed 1960 operation to assassinate Castro. Trafficante was also believed by some to have had a role in the Kennedy assassination. (Another mob figure of interest to Kennedy assassination investigators, Sam Giancana, was killed in 1975 by an unknown gunman shortly before he was scheduled to testify about the plots against Castro.)

In his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Trafficante would say that he had been recruited for the Castro project by fellow mobster John Rosselli, who had testified in 1975 before the Church Committee about efforts to kill Castro. In April 1976, while Poppy was CIA director, Rosselli was again called before the Church Committee, this time to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Three months later, the committee decided to recall Rosselli for additional testimony. But by the time he was called, he had already been missing for several days. His decomposing body was later found inside a fifty-five-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfounding Bay near Miami. He had been strangled and shot, and his legs had been sawed off.

Against this backdrop of new interest in assassinations in general and particularly in possible links between the efforts to rub out Castro and the killing of JFK, George de Mohrenschildt resurfaced.

In January 1976, he wrote to Willem Oltmans, a freelance Dutch television reporter whom he had met eight years earlier. Oltmans’s reason for maintaining contact with de Mohrenschildt has been a subject of some speculation, including among his Dutch media colleagues. His profile at times appears less that of the typical left-leaning Dutch journalist and more suggestive of a U.S. intelligence agent. Former colleagues of Oltmans, who is deceased, described him to me as a complex and mysterious figure. As will become clear, Oltmans was a cipher to one and all, sometimes seeming to be determined to expose the truth, and sometimes to do the opposite. Perhaps he was something of a free agent, pursuing a particular course yet unhappy about it. But one thing is certain: just as de Mohrenschildt helped steer Oswald, to a lesser extent Oltmans did the same for de Mohrenschildt.

Oltmans was the son of an affluent family with a history in colonial Indonesia. A Dutch citizen, he had graduated in the same Yale University class as William F. Buckley, and was a strident anti-Communist. Though he had no apparent connections to Dallas, Oltmans was drawn into conservative circles in that city shortly after Allen Dulles’s forced resignation and about the time that the CIA’s Dallas officer J. Walton Moore began talking to George de Mohrenschildt about Lee Harvey Oswald. Oltmans’s reason for visiting at that time was an invitation to give occasional lectures to women’s groups. Those female auxiliaries played important support roles in Dallas’s highly politicized and archconservative elite, as did the White Russian community, the independent oilmen, and the military contractors and intelligence officers.

Oltmans’s name appears on a schedule of upcoming speakers at the Dallas Woman’s Club published in the
Dallas Morning News
in October 1961. The leadoff speaker for that season: Edward Tomlinson, “roving Latin American editor” for
Reader’s Digest
.

Oltmans’s next invitation to speak to the Dallas ladies appears to have been in January 1964, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. At that time, Oltmans met Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother on a plane (a coincidence, he said). She mentioned to him her suspicions about the fact that the Dallas police had interrogated her at length about her son but failed to record the important biographical details she provided them. She told Oltmans that she suspected a conspiracy at work.