Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (88 page)

Outside the documentary record provided to the Subcommittee by the CIA, there is additional material, consisting of BCCI documents, testimony from BCCI officials and insiders, and extrinsic, circumstantial and historic information describing other substantial contacts between BCCI and the intelligence community. These include contacts between BCCI and: former U.S. intelligence officials, including a former head of the CIA; former and current foreign intelligence officials; and individuals engaged in covert operations on behalf of the United States government, including in the Iran/Contra affair. In addition, the Subcommittee has received allegations of meetings between former CIA director William Casey and BCCI’s head, Agha Hasan Abedi.

5
. Connally ended up ninety-three million dollars in debt and declared bankruptcy; see “Real EstateWoes Force Connally Bankruptcy,”
New York Times
, August 1, 1987.

6
. Craig Unger,
House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most
Powerful Dynasties
(New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 34.

7
. Lance effectively became an employee of FGB’s controlling shareholder, a fellow named George Olmsted. A retired Army general who had headed up the China section of the OSS (predecessor to the CIA), during World War II, Olmsted went on to serve as a top Pentagon official involved with supplying materiel to allied Asian countries in the cold war. In 1948, along with Allen Dulles and former secretary of state Edward Stettinius, Olmsted helped create a curious shipping venture called International Registries Incorporated (IRI). In 1976, when Poppy Bush was CIA director, IRI/Liberian Services moved its headquarters to Reston, Virginia. Long rumored to be a CIA front, it registered ships owned by the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos (who had been close to Poppy Bush’s friends Al Ulmer and Allen Dulles) and even brokered deals for Zapata Offshore.

Olmsted was a founder of the powerful defense-contractor-backed anti-Communist group Committee on the Present Danger. In 1953, at the same time that Allen Dulles took over the CIA, Olmsted left the military and began assembling a financial empire, including insurance companies and banks. In retrospect, this entity looks a lot like an apparatus for managing the enormous sums required for an intelligence agency, or at least the off-the-books aspects of one. In that sense, it may have been a precursor to BCCI and other such financial institutions.

8
. 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.

9
. Abboud, who is Lebanese American, was forced out in 1980 after five years as head of First National Bank of Chicago, which was ultimately acquired by Chase Bank. In 1991, after three years of large losses, Houston’s First City Bank Corp. of Texas replaced him. Thomas C. Hayes, “Abboud Out as Chief at Houston’s First City,”
New York Times
, March 28, 1991.

10
. “The Sharpening Battle Over Bert Lance,”
Time,
August 1, 1977. Abboud would also show up on the board of the National Bank of Washington, where Poppy’s national security adviser and close friend Brent Scowcroft was heavily invested. (Jeff Gerth, “Scowcroft Sold Military Holdings Months Before Persian Gulf War,”
New York Times
, June 18, 1991.) Abboud would later appear as a savior of Harken Energy, an oil company that had George W. Bush on its board.

11
. James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz,
A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around
the World
(New York: Pocket, 1992), pp. 32–33.

12
. Abedi in particular could not acquire the National Bank of Georgia because it was a national bank, regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—and the then-comptroller, John Heiman, a former superintendent of New York State Banking, knew enough about Abedi to keep him out of the country.

13
. “Lance’s Mysterious Rescuer,”
Time
, January 9, 1978.

14
. Beaty and Gwynne,
The Outlaw Bank
, p. 22.

15
. Ibid., pp. 195–96.

16
. George Lardner Jr., “Carter Criticized on Billy,”
Washington Post
, September 30, 1980.

17
. E-mail from Bill White to the author, May 7, 2008.

18
. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), pp. 473–74; James A. Bill,
The Eagle and the Lion:
The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 331; Charlotte Dennett, “Suffering in Silence,”
Nation
, December 12, 1980; Peter Dale Scott,
The
Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
,
pp. 80–92.

19
. Raymond Bonner,
Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy
(New York: Times Books, 1987), p. 335.

20
. Gary Sick,
October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan
(New York: Three Rivers, 1991), p. 12.

21
. Robert Parry, “Original October Surprise (Part 3),”
Consortium News
, October 19, 2006.

22
. CBC interview with Bill White by Bob McKeown,
The Fifth Estate
, aired October 29, 2003.

23
. Per court documents, after Salem bin Laden died in a plane crash in 1988, Mahfouz took over his airport interests.

24
. Thomas B. Edsall and Ted Gup, “The Lake Resources Inc. Account,”
Washington Post
, March 7, 1987.

25
. David Johnston, “North’s Notebook Is Played Down,”
New York Times
, May 10, 1990.

26
. CBC interview with Bill White.

27
. According to campaign-finance disclosure reports.

28
. In order to deal with the disruption to his business and personal life caused by the onslaught of civil litigation and criminal charges, White had to take a leave of absence from the Naval Reserves at a time when he needed only four more years to qualify for his retirement. When the litigation was finally over and he applied for reinstatement to complete the remaining four years of reserve duty, he was advised that the Navy would not let him back in because he had been passed over for promotion. This occurred because he was not actively attending drills at the time that the promotion board met. The Navy’s policy is “up or out”: anyone not making rank is discharged from the service.

29
. CBC interview with Bill White.

30
. Jerry Urban, “Feds Investigate Entrepreneur Allegedly Tied to Saudis,”
Houston Chronicle
, June 4, 1992.

31
. Jerry Urban, “Banking Scandal Figure Seeks to Claim Airport Contract,”
Houston Chronicle
, September 10, 1994.

32
. Author interview with Bill White, November 14, 2006.

15: THE HANDOFF

1
. Author interview with Neil Bergt, April 16, 2008.

2
. Jo Thomas, “The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio: A Modest Summer in Alaska,”
New York
Times
, October 21, 2000.

3
. Ibid.

4
. Author interview with Bill White, November 14, 2006.

5
. When I called the O’Neills, Mrs. O’Neill asked if the White House had authorized them to speak to me.

6
. George Lardner Jr. and Lois Romano, “At Height of Vietnam, Bush Picks Guard,”
Washington
Post
, July 28, 1999.

7
. At the time, Bath was chairman of the aviation committee for the Houston Chamber of Commerce,and in that position he frequently chose the speakers who addressed chamber luncheons. The big oil companies and the larger independents had their own corporate aviation departments, so Jim Bath’s position on the chamber’s aviation committee gave him real clout.

8
. CBC interview with Bill White.

9
. E-mail to the author from Bill White, August 3, 2008.

10
. Antonia Felix,
Laura: America’s First Lady, First Mother
(Avon, MA: Adams, 2002), p. 67.

11
. Bill Minutaglio,
First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999). p. 184.

12
. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Learning How to Run: A West Texas Stumble,”
New York Times
, July 27, 2000.

13
. Hance went on to serve six years, and when Bush became governor, Hance even became a Bush enthusiast, switching to the Republican Party.

14
. Kelley,
The Family
, p. 424.

15
. Author interview with Wright Ohrstrom, August 3, 2006.

16
. Kevin Sack, “George Bush the Son Finds That Oil and Blood Do Mix,”
New York Times
, May 8, 1999.

17
. Author interview with James Lee Brown, June 24, 2006.

18
. CBC interview with Bill White.

19
. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne “A Mysterious Mover of Money and Planes,”
Time
, October 28, 1991.

20
. About $150,000 in today’s dollars.

21
. The DeWitts became a prominent Cincinnati family, along with Bush family friends the Tafts(founders of Skull and Bones and descendants of a president) and the Mallons (Neil Mallon ran Dresser Industries). Over the years, DeWitt and broadcasting executive Dudley Taft have been part of a small circle that co-invested in many ventures; both DeWitt and Dudley Taft graduated from Yale in the early ’60s.

22
. Reinsurance is a little-known specialty, but can be extraordinarily profitable. Companies get a portion of the premiums paid by insurance customers in return for agreeing to cover any extraordinary losses. Because reinsurance is handled offshore, it is virtually tax-free. There is even a provision that permits some companies to register as nonprofits and invest unlimited amounts of money in the reinsurance company, collecting tax-free profits that can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

23
. The company was founded by a DeWitt-Reynolds vice president named J. Thomas Markham,with DeWitt and Reynolds as major shareholders.

24
. Author interview with Marion Gilliam, May 18, 2007. Gilliam was well connected to the British royal family. His mother-in-law, Marie-Antoinette Ladd, had been tutor to Queen Elizabeth and her sister when they were young, and her son had become the queen’s art curator. Gilliam’s father-in-law, William C. Ladd, had been a major figure in the intelligence community—and had for a time been the principal American contact with the British intelligence official Kim Philby, who would later and sensationally be unmasked as a double agent when he defected to the Soviet Union. His family’s history in America went back to the mid-1600s; they were good friends of the Kentucky Mortons—Senator Thruston B. Morton, Yale ’29 (whose son Thruston Jr. is Skull and Bones ’54). Morton Sr. was chairman of the RNC from 1959 to ’61 and close to both Prescott Bush and Richard Nixon. His brother, Mary land representative Rogers C. B. Morton (Yale, RNC chairman under Nixon from 1969 to ’71, and secretary of the interior and commerce), was close with Poppy Bush.