Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (66 page)

In 2006 I interviewed Mark Vozar, a partner in CVC, a little-known oil exploration company that was created to serve as a subcontractor for W.’s companies. Vozar told me that Bill Gammell and Cairn Energy Management also provided substantial funding for CVC.
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Vozar said Gammell covered CVC’s entire overhead and all salaries and promoted some Bush oil deals abroad. Vozar said Gammell wrote his checks to Bush, who then transferred the money into CVC. There also appeared to be a geopolitical backstory to the investments in W.’s oil ventures, full of names from Zapata, British Petroleum (now BP), and Scottish entities, that suggested more than the normal marketplace at work.
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George W. and Bill remained close, and the two talked the day Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994. The following year, Bill Gammell, whose company vice chairman was a former Labour energy minister, renewed his relationship with British Labour leader and soon-to-be prime minister Tony Blair.

Bill Gammell’s ties to Blair date back to prep school in Edinburgh, where the two had been friends and basketball teammates. Gammell arranged the initial meeting between the two world leaders, and Bush’s first words to the British prime minister were: “I believe you know my old friend, Bill Gammell.”
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W. would mention his family’s connection to the Gammells in a 2005 Oval Office interview with the
Times
of London. In answer to a question about whether he planned to eat haggis on a forthcoming trip to the U.K., W. talked about “a fellow named James Gammell,” his “fabulous family” and their beautiful sheep farm in Glen Isle. He discussed past business deals with Billy Gammell, an “oil and gas guy” who used to visit Midland, Texas, and became “a very successful entrepreneur.”
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The British reporter quickly moved on to a question about golf.

W.’s reference to the Gammells in such an innocuous context is a typical Bush family device. Get the information out so it is no longer news, to ensure the trail stops there. Journalists will continue to construe the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain as based on fellowship and history. The CIA and oil connections loom as unseemly mood breakers, and so remain unexamined.

Either Gammell was an extremely visionary businessman or he had great connections—or both. One way or the other, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, Gammell’s Cairn was soon making a fortune off oil in India—a country not noted for its prospects in that regard. These Western relationships with India got a boost when George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton and replaced the United States’ tough stance on the South Asian country’s nuclear weapons program with one that was more forbearing.
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Meanwhile, an odd political twist: Bill’s father, Jimmy, once was a director of the Bank of Scotland. There he mentored Peter Burt, who, as chairman of the Bank of Scotland in 1999, named Reverend Pat Robertson to head a new joint venture in the United States, in which Robertson’s followers would form the initial customer base. Is it possible that Burt was doing this deal to reward Robertson for bringing the Christian conservatives, who formed one third of the GOP base, into the fold of the Bush campaign? Of course, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns noted, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men” often go awry: the Bank of Scotland deal fell apart over U.K. public outrage concerning Robertson’s views, in particular his remark that Scotland was “a dark land” overrun by homosexuals.

Blair’s decision to back Bush enthusiastically on Iraq appears to have paid dividends. In 2008, when Iraq’s oil ministry began handing out no-bid development contracts to a select group, one of the lucky parties was BP—a company that had as much influence in the Blair government as American oil companies had in the Bush-Cheney White House. Blair surrounded himself with at least a dozen executives from BP. In 1997, for example, he appointed BP chair David Simon to a newly created position, minister of trade and competitiveness in Europe. The prime minister maintained such a close relationship with BP’s CEO Lord Browne that newspapers dubbed the giant oil company “Blair Petroleum” (although some wondered if it wouldn’t be more fitting to call the British government the British Petroleum government).
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Another of Blair’s closest confidantes and aides, an old friend from his native Edinburgh named Anji Hunter, left her job at 10 Downing Street in November 2001 to become director of communications at BP. Blair said he was “sad” over losing such a close confidante after thirteen years, but Hunter’s timing was fortuitous, as discussions were already under way about invading Iraq.
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According to the
Observer
, Bush raised the issue of removing Saddam with British support over dinner with Blair just nine days after September 11.
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Where such old-school ties did not exist, the Bush administration used hardball against allies that would not go along with its wartime objectives. According to a 2008 book by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz (with a foreword by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan), the so-called Coalition of the Willing was anything but willing. Muñoz notes that in the march-up to the invasion, the White House virtually declared war on allies who did not fall into line. The administration threatened trade reprisals, spied on them, and demanded that U.N. envoys who resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war be recalled.
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Making the Case

The news media, opposition politicians, and even popular entertainers faced intense pressure, overt and implied, to support the invasion. When political comedian Bill Maher questioned whether terrorists who turned themselves into missiles were really “cowardly” as opposed to those who launch missiles from afar, expressions of outrage came quickly. “People need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” said presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer.
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The controversy over Maher’s remarks was widely believed to be a factor in the later cancellation of his show.

Fury followed ABC News anchor Peter Jennings’s musing after the September 11 attacks that “the country looks to the president on occasions like this to be reassuring to the nation. Some presidents do it well, some presidents don’t.” Syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh declared that Jennings had questioned Bush’s character; ten thousand angry phone calls and e-mails flooded into ABC.
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Aided by a wave of such fervor—and also by the largely inaccurate, administration-fed reports by
New York Times
reporter Judith Miller that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—the Bush administration launched its invasion.

Waging war was one thing; winning the propaganda war was another. As Frank Rich details in his book
The Greatest Story Ever Sold
, the White House became ever more vigilant (and creative) in controlling its message. The administration even gave its invasion a cinematic title: Shock and Awe. “Onscreen the pyrotechnics of Shock and Awe looked like a distant fireworks display, or perhaps the cool computer graphics of a
Matrix
-inspired video game, rather than the bombing of a large city. None of Baghdad’s nearly six million people were visible.”
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Those in charge made the war appear bloodless, justified, and unimpeachable. What was not to like? Networks like CNN, “mindful of the sensibilities of our viewers,”
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agreed to minimize the blood and guts, and former first lady Barbara Bush applauded. “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen?” she asked on
Good Morning America
. “It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
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The memory hole also devoured recollections of how the first President George Bush had used propaganda and lies to excite the American public to support an earlier war with Iraq. In October 1990, a new entity calling itself the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, but in reality a creation of the public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton, held hearings in order to substantiate claims of Iraqi human rights violations.

The committee heard a particularly moving testimony from a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah, who described the horrors she witnessed in a Kuwait City hospital: “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”
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The media gave the story major play. Poppy used it to help justify the war that would begin three months later. It turned out, however, that the girl was actually a member of the Kuwaiti royal family—the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States. The vice president of Hill and Knowlton had even coached Nayirah, whose entire testimony was eventually deemed false by investigators.
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Great Moments in Chutzpah

Once the 2003 invasion had taken place, with the predictable portrayal of a magnificent battle with no blood or human toll, it was time for the next stage of pageantry. Here, the Bush team was able to enjoy the sort of accolades showered upon Margaret Thatcher after the British victory in the tiny Falklands War.

The quick dispatch of Saddam was crowned first with the symbolic toppling of the dictator’s statue, followed by an even more stunning photo op: W. appearing to land a fighter jet on board an aircraft carrier that appeared to be at sea somewhere in relation to the war effort. A large banner proclaimed MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Almost none of it was true. The plane, renamed
Navy One
, was normally used for refueling. The aircraft carrier was not far out at sea and nowhere near the war—it was in fact just off the coast of San Diego, California. And the mission, it goes without saying, was far from accomplished. But it made for good television, and the media at first lapped it up.

As the war dragged on and it became apparent that the main justification— weapons of mass destruction—did not exist, the national mood turned and the media became more skeptical. It grew clear that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with September 11.

The emergent truth about Saddam’s Iraq—that it had not posed a substantial threat to the United States—raised any number of important questions that got little attention in the national discourse. Some of these were strategic:

• If al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were the threats, why was Saddam Hussein attacked, removed, and executed instead?

• If Saddam Hussein was the principal threat, why was an enormous and hugely expensive Homeland Security apparatus constructed to defend against an ongoing threat from al-Qaeda?

One question went right to the heart of the American political process:

• If George W. Bush and his team were so egregiously wrong on such a significant decision, and if they had deliberately distorted and exaggerated a virtually nonexistent threat from Saddam, and if American troops and innocent Iraqis had died or been maimed as a result, why were there no consequences for Bush and his team?

But one question touched on personal morality, and therefore had the potential to become a public-opinion-changing lightning rod: What was a guy who had apparently skipped out on military service, and ditched his National Guard service prematurely, doing sending thousands of National Guardsmen into combat in a foreign country for a war initiated through deception?

And why, after so many years, if Bush had fulfilled his military obligation as he was supposed to, was it so incredibly difficult to verify that seemingly simple fact?

The answer to these questions harkens back to the same skillful perception management and psy-ops that enabled the administration to sell the invasion in the first place. It also enabled W. to banish the ghosts of his own less-than-admirable past. The personal, it turned out, was political indeed.

The Guard—Again?

During the 2000 election, W.’s National Guard record did not catch on with the mainstream press despite the
Boston Globe
report that seemed to definitively establish that Bush had failed to show up for a year of service.
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The Gore campaign did not aggressively question Bush on the matter, perhaps because Gore himself was vulnerable for exaggerating the risks of his own service as a military journalist in Vietnam. Gore’s supporters repeatedly tried to raise the issue, but it never gained traction.

Several journalists did pursue the story, including Mary Mapes, a Dallas-based CBS News producer. In 1999, Mapes had to drop her inquiries into W.’s military service because of conflicting assignments. Five years later, however, her dogged pursuit of the Bush Guard story would explode into an enormous scandal that changed the election, traumatized CBS News, and destroyed her career and that of her colleagues, including the anchorman Dan Rather.