Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (90 page)

23
. Allin’s wartime job was to inspect and secure military ports over a third of the world, including the strategic oil reserve of Iran. (Allin is an enormously important if little-remembered figure. From 1919 to 1931 he was director and chief engineer of the Port of Houston, helping this landlocked city become the fifth biggest port in the United States, while in the process helping to reshape the modern oil industry.) Benjamin Casey Allin III,
Reaching for the Sea
(Boston: Meador, 1956), p. 19.

24
. Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer,
The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 76.

25
. Rudy Abramson,
Spanning the Century: The Life of W. Averell Harriman, 1891–1986
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992), p. 451.

26
. Douglas MacArthur and his milieu showed up in myriad ways. After Kennedy sacked Allen Dulles over the Bay of Pigs affair, he turned to MacArthur, who warned him that he had unleashed powerful forces. “The chickens are coming home to roost,” MacArthur told Kennedy, according to presidential aide Theodore Sorensen, “and you happen to just have moved into the chicken house.” Meanwhile, General Charles Willoughby, a pronounced racist and anti-Semite who had been MacArthur’s chief of intelligence in the Pacific, had joined forces with H. L. Hunt, the leader of the anti-Kennedy group in Dallas at the time of the assassination.

27
. A 1939 Manila directory lists Whitney as president of Casamac Inc.; VP of Southern Cross Mining Corp.; president of Abra Mining Co.; chairman of the board of Consolidated Mines; and department commander of the American Legion.

28
. After a period, Quasha became the deputy administrator.

29
. Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave’s decades-long investigations of the Yamashita goldsaga have been criticized for minor historical and linguistic inaccuracies, but their book
Gold
Warriors: The Covert History of Yamashita’s Gold—How Washington Secretly Recovered It to Set
Up Giant Cold War Slush Funds and Manipulate Foreign Governments
(Bowstring Books, 2002) has a CD-ROM appendix containing over nine hundred megabytes of documentary evidence.
Booklist
noted, “The Seagraves, reputable authors of East Asian histories, advance considerable sourcing for their claims, some of which, however, rely precariously on the word of single individuals, while others are anonymous.” Writing in the
London Review of Books
, the author and historian Chalmers Johnson noted the Seagraves’ stylistic shortcomings, while still calling
Gold Warriors
“easily the best guide available to the scandal of ‘Yamashita’s gold.’ ”

30
. Seagrave and Seagrave,
Gold Warriors
, p. 4. McCloy, a member of the Warren Commission, was a longtime deputy to the Rockefeller family. Stimson was a Skull and Bones alumnus and good friend of Prescott Bush. Lovett, too, was Skull and Bones as well as a friend—and business partner—to Prescott. Anderson, a Texas native and treasury secretary during Eisenhower’s second term, served on the board of the Bush family’s Dresser Industries.

31
. Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 182.

32
. Charles Maechling, “Camelot, Robert Kennedy, and Counter-Insurgency: A Memoir,”
Virginia
Quarterly Review
, Summer 1999, pp. 438–58.

33
. Evan Thomas,
The Very Best Men
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 271.

34
. For a thorough account of the U.S.-Marcos relationship, see Raymond Bonner,
Waltzing with a
Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy
(New York: Times Books, 1987).

35
. James Hamilton-Paterson,
America’s Boy: The Marcoses and the Philippines
(London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 147.

According to the Seagraves, Marcos’s close associate Amelito Mutuc had claimed that Marcos had recovered fourteen billion dollars’ worth, principally from a single site, although the Seagraves assert that was just part of the Japa nese war loot Marcos acquired. As noted in
Gold
Warriors
, some believe that the Japanese treasure story is untrue, but utilized by the Marcoses themselves as a way of explaining Ferdinand’s vast private wealth, “which in fact came from far more disreputable dealings, cheatings and carpetbaggings in the aftermath of the war.” The accepted importance of the Philippines as a strategic location does not by itself seem to adequately explain the American intelligence apparatus’s apparent obsession with both the islands and with gold.

36
. During the 1960s and part of the ’70s, the Philippines was the free world’s second-largest producer of gold after South Africa—with half a dozen major mines and output exceeding even that of the United States and Canada. For many years, the gold was sent abroad for refining. But in 1975, a world-class domestic refinery was built. The Briton James Hamilton-Paterson, who has lived in the Philippines on and off since 1979 and authored
America’s Boy
, a biography of Marcos, asserts that this was not only so the Philippines could finally refine its own domestic production, but also “so that bars of Japanese and other gold could be re-smelted into untraceable bullion before being spirited away to Swiss banks.” He quotes an unnamed figure from the Philippines gold industry: “By law the gold had to be sold to the Central Bank. Theoretically, between about 1977 and 1982 Marcos was in a position to ‘buy’ all the gold mined and refined in the Philippines at a discount. Practically, he could steal the lot.” On page 341 of
Gold Warriors
, the Seagraves quote a Marcos crony asserting that in 1973, the first full year of martial law, Marcos was able to steal as much gold as he wanted; and that proof of this was that in that year, Manila’s gold reserves dropped by 45 percent (or twenty-five tons).

37
. It is unknown how much gold Marcos sold to the Central Bank. But, according to the Sea-graves’
Gold Warriors
, “Most of his gold was already refined, and once in the Central Bank could be moved directly into the international market—if a way could be found to disguise it from the inevitable statisticians, a question of complicating the paper chase.” Based on what they were told by gold industry officials, the Seagraves go on to explain that Marcos began a program to lease quantities of dormant bullion to banks—and that this was actually cover for Marcos to move large quantities of “black gold” (i.e., gold unacknowledged by world markets) out of the Philippines. They also cite eyewitness accounts of Marcos’s personal plane ferrying gold to a Zu rich bank, and way bills that they say document the use of commercial planes for that purpose as well.

38
. “Together Again,”
Time
, July 13, 1981.

39
. Jeffrey Toobin, “The Dirty Trickster,”
New Yorker
, June 2, 2008.

40
. Ed Rollins with Tom DeFrank,
Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics
(New York: Broadway, 1996), pp. 214–15.

41
. In later years, Poppy would serve on the advisory board of Barrick Gold Company, which minesfor strategic metals in Central Africa.

42
. As strange as a “Communist Takeover Fund” sounds, NATO actually created stay-behind networks all over Eu rope after World War II. One example is a secret paramilitary force called Operation Gladio, which was originally set up to resist a potential Communist takeover in Italy. See Daniel Williams, “Italy Was Warned of Iraq Attack; Report of Threats to Nasiriyah Base Were Disregarded,”
Washington Post
, December 8, 2003. It then helped spark right-wing military coups in Greece and Turkey on NATO’s behalf. See Craig Unger, “The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed,”
Vanity Fair
, July 2006.

43
. Russ Baker and Adam Federman with response by Alan G. Quasha and Terence R. McAuliffe,“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,”
Nation
, November 5, 2007.

44
. Nugan Hand had been involved in drug-trafficking operations that originated in Southeast Asiaduring the Vietnam War. When the bank got into trouble in the Philippines, its operatives turned to Quasha for legal help. According to one Nugan Hand salesman, Quasha gave them atypical legal advice—urging them to flee the country. “He said, ‘You could wind up in jail.’ ” See Jonathan Kwitny,
The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company), p. 36.

45
. Steve Dvin, “Homer Williams Develops Opportunity with Wits, Charm,”
Oregonian
(Portland, Oregon), July 5, 1998.

46
. Ibid.

47
. Jeff Gerth, “Marcos U.S. Bank Dealings Modest,”
New York Times
, March 22, 1986.

48
. William Glaberson, “The Marcos Verdict; The ‘Wrong’ Court,”
New York Times
, July 3, 1990.

49
. Robert Trigaux, “Bush Built Success on Harken Sale,”
St. Petersburg Times
, July 21, 2002.

50
. According to SEC filing “Axp Selected Series Inc N-30D,” SEC File 811-04132, March 31, 2003. Available online at
www.secinfo.com/dsvr4.a44.c.htm
.

51
. L. J. Davis, “Where Are You Al?”
Mother Jones
, November–December 1993.

52
. Most of the Harken shares handled by UBS were snapped up by Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudireal estate magnate, who bought the stock through a Netherlands Antilles shell company. Though he became Harken’s third-largest stockholder, with a 17.6 percent stake, he rarely met with company officials, instead sending a representative to sit on the Harken board. Back in Saudi Arabia, Bakhsh was a business partner of Ghaith Pharaon, the fellow who had partnered with Jim Bath in Main Bank, and whom the Federal Reserve had labeled a “front-man” for BCCI. (Harken filings from the 1990s, though enormously complicated, seem to show additional UBS involvement with the company through partnerships with affiliated Harken entities.)

53
. In an interview, Senn said: “ ‘Petty apartheid,’ the physical separation of the races, is about to disappear. The grand scheme of apartheid, a wholesale democratic solution including ‘one man–one vote’ will, however, take time . . . ‘One man–one vote’ to me is not a world religion.”
Khulumani et al. v. Barclays National Bank et al.
brief, available at
www.kosa.org/documents/Swiss_campaign_amici_curiae.pdf

54
. Alexander L. Taylor III, “Swiss Secrets Are Put to a Vote,”
Time
, May 28, 1984.

55
.
www.kosa.org/documents/Swiss_campaign_amici_curiae.pdf

56
. Anton Rupert also launched Quadrant Management Inc., a corporate takeover and reorganization firm that principally manages the U.S. assets of a company called North American Resources, a company that is a joint venture between the Quasha family and Financière Richemont SA, a Swiss tobacco and luxury goods company that had just formed, and whose board Quasha joined. Financial interests were held by a Bermuda-based trust controlled by his mother. Thus, Quasha was deeply involved with a network of Swiss, Luxembourg, American, and offshore entities centered on this relationship. The main function of the consortium appeared to be twofold: controlling natural resources (timber, etc.) and assembling baubles for the rich under one corporate roof.

57
. Amoco had already advanced in talks with Bahrain and had an inside track. The tiny emirate,strongly allied with Saudi Arabia, hadn’t hit paydirt since 1932, but seismic surveys showed a large undersea geological formation—potentially worth billions.

58
. Quasha insisted that the deal had nothing to do with the Bush connection. Yet Harken’s exploration chief, Monte Swetnam, recalled to the
Wall Street Journal
mentioning names of company directors to the Bahrainis, including invoking W.’s name at least twice. See Thomas Petzinger Jr., Peter Truell, and Jill Abramson “Family Ties: How Oil Firm Linked to a Son of Bush Won Bahrain Drilling Pact,”
Wall Street Journal,
December 6, 1991. Whatever role the Bush connection played during the negotiations, it seems likely that it was the basis for Harken’s entry into those negotiations in the first place.