Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (77 page)

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.