GEORGE H.W. BUSH IS 93 TODAY � A HISTORY LESSON ON ELITES IN AMERICA
by M M
WHO WHAT WHY Happy Birthday, Poppy Bush! For us, the Bush
family, and particularly George H.W. �Poppy� Bush, has been, in a way, a gift. We have
learned more about elites in America, about the secret history of covert operations, about
the fragile balance between money and democracy � just from studying this clan.
Raise a glass to the man himself, 93 today.
On this occasion, in Bush 41�s honor, we present a revealing excerpt from my book,
Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America�s Invisible Government and the Hidden History
of the Last Fifty Years.
Note: Although the story below does not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted
and exhaustively sourced. (This excerpt, which was originally posted in 2013, comes from
Chapter 3 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication.
For additional excerpts, please start here.)
Introduction by Russ Baker
Bones_logo
Skull and Bones
In 1945, with the end of the war, George H. W. �Poppy� Bush entered Yale University.
The CIA recruited heavily at all of the Ivy League schools in those days, with the New
Haven campus the standout. �Yale has always been the agency�s biggest feeder,� recalled
CIA officer Osborne Day (class of�43), �In my Yale class alone there were thirty-five
guys in the agency.� Bush�s father, Prescott, was on the university�s board, and the school
was crawling with faculty serving as recruiters for the intelligence services . . . Yale�s
society�s boys were the cream of the crop, and could keep secrets to boot. And no secret
society was more suited to the spy establishment than Skull and Bones, for which Poppy Bush,
like his father, was tapped in his junior year. Established in 1832, Skull and Bones
is the oldest secret society at Yale, and thus at least theoretically entrusted its
membership with a more comprehensive body of secrets than any other campus group. Bones
alumni would appear throughout the public and private history of both wartime and peacetime
intelligence . . .
When Bush entered Yale, the university was welcoming back countless veterans of the OSS
to its faculty. Bush, with naval intelligence work already under his belt by the time he
arrived at Yale, would have been seen as a particularly prime candidate for recruitment.
Bonesmen Have All the Muscle
Out of Yale, Bush went directly into the employ of Dresser Industries, a peculiar, family-connected
firm providing essential services to the oil industry. Dresser has never received the scrutiny
it deserves. Between the lines of its official story can be discerned an alternate version
that could suggest a corporate double life . . .
The S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Company had been a small, solid, unexceptional outfit,
. . . [when it found] eager buyers in Prescott Bush�s Yale friends Roland and W. Averell
Harriman � the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman � who had only recently set
up a merchant bank to assist wealthy families in such endeavors. At the time, Dresser�s
principal assets consisted of two very valuable patents in the rapidly expanding oil industry.
One was for a packer that made it much easier to remove oil from the ground; the other was
for a coupler that made long-range natural gas pipelines feasible. Instead of controlling
the oil, Dresser�s strategy was to control the technology that made drilling possible.
W.A. Harriman and Company, which had brought Prescott Bush aboard two years earlier, purchased
Dresser in 1928.
Prescott Bush and his partners installed an old friend, H. Neil Mallon, at the helm. Mallon�s
primary credential was that he was �one of them.� Like Prescott Bush, Mallon was
from Ohio, and his family seems both to have known the Bushes and to have had its own set
of powerful connections. He was Yale, and he was Skull and Bones, so he could be trusted
. . .
Hiring decisions by the Bonesmen at the Harriman firm were presented as jolly and distinctly
informal, with club and family being prime qualifications . . . Under Mallon, the company
underwent an astonishing transformation. As World War II approached, Dresser began expanding,
gobbling up one militarily strategic manufacturer after another. While Dresser was still engaged
in the mundane manufacture of drill bits, drilling mud, and other products useful to
the oil industry, it was also moving closer to the heart of the rapidly growing military-industrial
sector as a defense contractor and subcontractor. It also assembled a board that would epitomize
the cozy relationships between titans of industry, finance, media, government, military, and
intelligence � and the revolving door between those sectors . . .
what-they-dont-tell-you-about-oil-industry-tax-breaksPoppy Gets his Hands Oily
After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy headed out to visit �Uncle Neil� at Dresser
headquarters, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched the inexperienced Yale grad
and Navy vet, with his wife Barbara and firstborn George W. in tow, to Odessa, the remote West
Texas boomtown that, with neighboring Midland, was rapidly becoming the center of the oil
extraction business.
Oil was certainly a strategic business. A resource required in abundance to fuel the
modern navy, army, and air force, oil had driven the engine of World War II. With the
end of hostilities, America still had plenty of petroleum, but the demands of the war had
exhausted many oil fields. As President Roosevelt�s secretary of the interior and later his petroleum
administrator for war, Harold Ickes had warned in 1943, �If there should be a World War
III it would have to be fought with someone else�s petroleum, because the United States
wouldn�t have it.� . . . Ickes�s eye was then on Saudi Arabia.
If the young George H.W. Bush understood anything about the larger game and his expected role
in it, he and his wife Barbara certainly did not let on to the neighbors in those early
days in dusty West Texas . . . Poppy�s initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses and
painting machinery used for oil drilling, but he was soon asked to handle more challenging
tasks . . .
Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives
. . . Continuing his whirlwind �training,� Dresser transferred Bush to California, where
the company had begun acquiring subsidiaries in 1940. Poppy has never written or spoken
publicly in any depth about the California period of his career. He has made only brief
references to work on the assembly line at Dresser�s Pacific Pump Works in the Los
Angeles suburb of Huntington Park and sales chores for other companies owned by Dresser.
In later years, when criticized for his anti-union stands, he would pull out a union card which
he claimed came from his membership in the United Steelworkers Union. Why Bush joined
the Steelworkers (and attended their meetings) is something of a mystery, since that union
was not operating inside Pacific Pump Works.
To be sure, the company was not just pumping water out of the ground anymore. During World
War II, Pacific Pump became, like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm
supplied hydraulic-actuating assemblies for airplane landing gear, wing flaps, and bomb
doors, and even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While in California training for Dresser, Poppy, the pregnant Barbara, and little George
W. were constantly on the go, with at least five residences in a period of nine months
� Huntington Park, Bakersfield, Whittier, Ventura, and Compton. Poppy was often absent,
according to Barbara, even from their brief-tenure outposts. Was he truly a Willy Loman, peddling
drill bits, dragging a pregnant wife and a one-year-old child with him? Or was he doing
something else? Although �ordinary� scions often toil briefly at the bottom, Bush was
no ordinary scion.
Bush would so effectively obscure his life that even some of his best friends seemed
to know little about what he was actually doing � though they may have intuited it.
A longtime friend of Bush�s said that Bush probably would have been happiest as a career
intelligence officer. Another longtime Bush associate told a reporter anonymously that
Poppy�s own accounts of various periods in his life �are often off 10 to 30 percent
� there is a certain reserve, even secretiveness.�
From Dallas, with Love
In 1950, during the time Poppy Bush squired a Yugoslav Communist around the oil fields
for Dresser Industries, the cold war got hot in an unexpected quarter when North Korean
Communist forces launched an invasion of the south. Their attack had not been even vaguely
anticipated in the National Intelligence Estimate � from the fledgling CIA � which had arrived
on the president�s desk just six days before. Heads rolled, and in the ensuing shake-up,
Allen Dulles became deputy director in charge of clandestine operations, which included
both spying and proactive covert operations. For the Bushes, who had a decades-long personal
and business relationship to the Dulles family, this was certainly an interesting development.
The Dulles and Bush clans had long mixed over business, politics, and friendship, and the
corollary to all three � intelligence. Even as far back as World War I, while Dulles�s
uncle served as secretary of state, Prescott�s father, Samuel Bush, oversaw small arms manufacturing
for the War Industries Board, and young Allen played a crucial role in the fledgling intelligence
services operations in Europe. Later, the families interacted regularly as the Bush
clan plied their trade in investment banking and the Dulleses in the law.
In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas which, besides being
an oil capital, was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy
elite. Though a virtual unknown on his arrival, Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the
conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the non-profit Council
on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. Started in 1918, the World
Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council
on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen Dulles had just resigned to take his
post at the CIA.
A September 1951 organizing meeting at Mallon�s home featured a group with suggestive connections
and affiliations. It included Fred Florence, the founder of the Republic National Bank,
whose Dallas office tower was a covert repository for CIA-connected ventures; T. E. Braniff,
a pioneer of the airline industry and member of the Knights of Malta, an exclusive, conservative,
Vatican-connected order with longtime intelligence ties; Fred Wooten, an official of the First
National Bank of Dallas, which would employ Poppy Bush in the years between his tenure
as CIA director and vice president; and Colonel Robert G. Storey, later named as liaison between
Texas law enforcement and the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President
Kennedy
Soon the group moved even closer to the center of power. General Dwight Eisenhower . . . had
responded to entreaties from a GOP group that included the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush,
as well as Allen and John Foster Dulles�.With Ike the Republican nominee, they all scrambled
for seats on his train. The Dulleses were key advisers. Prescott Bush was backing Ike
and mounting what would be a successful race for a Senate seat from Connecticut. Prescott�s
son George H. W. Bush was not left out. He became the Midland County chairman of the
Eisenhower-Nixon campaigns in both 1952 and 1956. With the West Texas city at the center
of the oil boom, young George functioned as a crucial link between the Eastern Establishment,
the next Republican administration, and Midland�s oil-based new wealth.
Following Ike�s decisive victory, the Dulles brothers obtained effective control of foreign
policy: John Foster became Ike�s secretary of state, and Allen the director of the Central
Intelligence Agency. The rest of the administration was filled with Bush allies, including national
security adviser Gordon Gray, a close friend of Prescott�s, and Treasury Secretary Robert
B. Anderson, a sometime member of the Dresser Industries board.
Eisenhower, with no track record in civilian government and little enthusiasm for the daily
grind, was only too happy to leave many of the operational decisions to these others
. . . Some of those businessmen taking it upon themselves to help chart the course were
from the Dallas group. Shortly after Ike took office, Mallon�s Council of World Affairs
announced its intention to send fifteen members on a three-month world tour, for meetings
with what the group characterized as �responsible� political and business leaders. Shortly after
the group returned, Dulles came to visit with the Dallas council chapter
At the time, the CIA was in the process of creating plausible deniability as it began
what would be a series of efforts to topple �unfriendly� regimes around the world,
including those in Guatemala and Iran. Since the CIA�s charter severely constrained the
domestic side of covert operations, agents created a host of entities to serve as middlemen
to support rebels in countries targeted for regime change. During the early days of Dresser
in Dallas � and of Zapata Petroleum � Dulles was just beginning to experiment with �off
the books� operations. Eventually, by the seventies and eighties, when Poppy Bush ran
the CIA and coordinated covert operations as vice president, hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of such entities had been created.
The Bones of Zapata Petroleum
In 1953, as Dulles was building his global machine, Poppy Bush launched his own enterprise,
with help from Dulles, Mallon, and Poppy�s maternal uncle Herbert Walker�.
Bush got money from Uncle Herbie (George Herbert Walker Jr., Skull and Bones, 1927), an investment
banker. Uncle Herbie also was instrumental in bringing in others, including Eugene Meyer,
a Yale graduate and owner of the influential Washington Post. Meyer was one of many media
titans, such as Prescott�s good friend and fellow Bonesman Henry Luce, founder of Time
magazine, and William Paley of CBS (on whose board Prescott sat), who shared an interest
in intelligence. In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Carl Bernstein, famed for breaking the Watergate
story in the Washington Post, states that both Luce and Paley cooperated regularly with
the CIA, and even mentions his own paper�s history with the agency, though he does not
fully probe the Post�s intelligence connections.
The news business, the policy business, and the intelligence business had a lot in common:
they were all about whom you knew and what you knew. In fact, so was the oil business.
The Bushes� skill at cultivating connections was evident in 1953, when Poppy joined forces
with a couple of brothers, Hugh and Bill Liedtke, to form Zapata Petroleum. Based on a �hunch�
of Hugh Liedtke�s, the company drilled 127 consecutive �wet� holes, and the firm�s
stock exploded from seven cents a share to twenty-three dollars a share.
Pirates of the Caribbean
. . . Mallon would play a crucial role for Dulles by introducing him to the powerful
new-moneyed oil elites in Dallas that would, along with a separate group in Houston, become
the leading funders of off-the-books covert operations in Latin America. They would commence
with efforts to overthrow Latin American and Caribbean leaders in the 1950s. The efforts
would continue, under Poppy Bush, with Iran-contra in the 1980s.
Zapata Offshore . . . [was] launched by Poppy in 1954, just as the U.S. government, under
an administration dominated by the Dulles-Bush circles, began auctioning offshore mineral
rights . . .
In 1958, Zapata Offshore�s drilling rig Scorpion was moved from the Gulf of Mexico
to Cay Sal Bank, the most remote group of islands in the Bahamas and just fifty-four
miles north of Isabela, Cuba. The [Cay Sal] island had been recently leased to oilman
Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties, as well as his own �private CIA.�
By most appearances, a number of CIA-connected entities were involved in the operation. Zapata
leased the Scorpion to Standard Oil of California and to Gulf Oil. CIA director Dulles had previously
served as Gulf�s counsel for Latin America. The same year that Gulf leased Bush�s platform,
CIA veteran Kermit �Kim� Roosevelt joined Gulf�s board. This was the same Kermit Roosevelt
who had overseen the CIA�s successful 1953 coup against the democratically elected Iranian
prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after Mossadegh began nationalizing Anglo-American
oil concessions. It looked like the Bush-CIA group was preparing for operations in the
Caribbean basin.
The offshore platforms had a specific purpose. �George Bush would be given a list of names
of Cuban oil workers we would want placed in jobs,� said one official connected to
Operation Mongoose, the program to overthrow Castro. �The oil platforms he dealt in were
perfect for training the Cubans in raids on their homeland.�
The importance of this early Bush connection with Cuba should not be ignored in assessing
his connections to contemporaneous events. For example, it sheds light on the 1963 memo
from J. Edgar Hoover discovered by reporter Joseph McBride. The memo, which mentioned
a briefing about Cuban activity in the wake of the JFK assassination, had been given to
�George Bush of the CIA.� Years later, many figures from the Bay of Pigs operation
would resurface in key positions in administrations in which Poppy Bush held high posts, and during
his presidency. Others would show up in off-the-books operations run by Poppy�s friends and associates.
George H. W. Bush did not, however, limit himself to the Caribbean. This period of his
life was characterized by frenetic travel to all corners of the world, though Zapata
had only a handful of rigs. The pattern would continue through his entire career. He set
up operations for Zapata Offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, Borneo,
and Medell�n, Colombia. Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company,
which began his close association with the Kuwaiti elite.
Facing Fidel
That a lot of what was labeled �national security� work was largely about money � making
it, protecting it � was fairly transparent. Through the story of the Bushes and their
circle runs a thread of entitlement to resources in other countries, and anger and disbelief
when others challenged that claim.
Upon coming to power in 1959, Fidel Castro began to expropriate the massive properties
of large foreign (chiefly American) companies. The impact fell heavily on American corporations
that had massive agricultural and mineral operations on the fertile island, including
Brown Brothers Harriman, whose extensive holdings included the two-hundred-thousand-acre Punta
Alegre beet sugar plantation. After Castro took power, the Eisenhower administration
began a boycott of Cuban sugar, which is a crucial component of the island�s economy.
The Cubans in turn became increasingly dependent on the USSR as supplier of goods and protector.
Poppy swung into gear the same year that Castro began nationalizing [American] properties.
He severed his ties to the Liedtkes by buying out their stake in Zapata Offshore, and then
moved its operations to Houston � which, unlike the remote Midland-Odessa area, had
access to the Caribbean through the Houston Ship Channel. Meanwhile, back in Washington,
after extensive planning, the Bay of Pigs project began with Eisenhower�s approval
on March 17, 1960 . . .
Beyond providing a staging area for Cuban rebels, Zapata Offshore appears to have served
as a paymaster. �We had to pay off politicians in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and elsewhere,�
said John Sherwood, chief of CIA anti-Castro operations in the early 1960s. �Bush�s
company was used as a conduit for these funds under the guise of oil business contracts
. . . The major breakthrough was when we were able, through Bush, to place people in PEMEX
� the big Mexican national oil operation.�
Zapata filings �inadvertently destroyed�
The complicated PEMEX affair began in 1960, when Zapata Offshore offered a lucrative secret
partnership to a competing Mexican drilling equipment company, Perforaciones Marinas del
Golfe, or Permargo. George H. W. Bush did not want this relationship exposed, even decades
later. When investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny tried to document Bush�s precise
involvement with Permargo for a 1988 article, he was told by an SEC spokeswoman that Zapata
filings from 1960 to 1966 had been �inadvertently destroyed� several months after Bush became
vice president . . .
Evidence that Zapata Offshore was more than just Poppy Bush�s oil company surfaced in
the years that followed. Bush increasingly spent his time on politics, and others were
brought in to transform the company into a larger entity that could more credibly run
global operations . . . Bush�s reward for all his troubles may have come in 1965, when
one of the company�s rigs was ostensibly lost in Hurricane Betsy. For the first time
in its history, the insurance giant Lloyds of London paid out an oil-platform disaster
claim without physical evidence. Zapata received eight million dollars for a rig that had cost
only three million. The fate of the rig remains a mystery. Poppy�s brother Bucky recalled
the fears expressed by Zapata offshore staff that it would be impossible for an insurance
claim to be paid because of the absence of any wreckage. But Poppy himself was calm,
reassuring his people that �everything was going to be all right.� . . .
The financials of Zapata, like those of latter-day Enron, were almost impossible to understand.
This appears to have been by design. A bit of this can be gleaned from the words of the
company�s former executive Bob Gow, another in a small army of Bush loyalists who show
up repeatedly in the family story � and by extension the nation�s.
What Was Zapata?
Bob Gow may be the only person in American history to be employed by one future president
(Poppy Bush � at Zapata) and to later employ another (George W. � at Gow�s post-Zapata
agricultural mini-conglomerate Stratford of Texas)�.
In 2006, I traveled to Mexico, to the western Yucatan, and met with Gow� I also obtained
Gow�s self-published memoirs, the five hundred pages of which include much about Zapata,
bamboo, beeswax, and catfish, but manage to say little about the Bushes and their doings.
Gow did, however admit that he did some spying for the CIA�
Gow was a member of the country�s mostly invisible elites�
Bob Gow and Ray Walker [cousin of George H.W. Bush] would room together again at Yale, and
both would be inducted into the 1955 class of Skull and Bones�
Gow�s recruitment by the Bushes illustrates the kind of opportunities that come to those
of the �right sort� and possessed of the appropriate discretion�
Gow portrays Bush as traveling constantly when he was Zapata chief, and far from connected
when on premises . . . Though Gow has little to say in his book about the company�s underlying
operations or Poppy�s role in them, he proudly notes Zapata�s complex web of foreign ventures.
In all probability, the foreign operations had dual functions. Since Zapata was set up
with guidance from Neil Mallon, it is likely that the overseas undertakings were modeled
in part on Dresser�s. According to the in-house history of Dresser, one of the company�s
bolder moves was a then-innovative tax strategy that involved a separate company in the tiny
European principality of Liechtenstein. �A considerable [benefit] was the fact that no
American taxes had to be paid on international earnings until the money was returned to the
United States.� That is, if the money was ever returned to the United States. And there
was another characteristic of funds that were not repatriated: they were out of sight of
federal authorities. There was no effective way to know where they went ultimately, or
for what purposes.
That was Dresser. Now, Zapata, according to Gow: �Zapata, at that time, consisted of
a number of foreign corporations incorporated in each county where our rigs operated . . . It
was largely the brainchild of the tax department at Arthur Andersen and the tax lawyers at
Baker and Botts . . . Until the profits were brought back to the United States, it was
not necessary at that time to pay U.S. taxes on them. Because of the way Zapata operated
around the world, it seemed as though it never would be necessary to pay taxes As time passed
and Zapata worked in many other countries, Zapata�s cash was in the accounts of a large
number (dozens and dozens) of companies located in almost all the countries around the world
where Zapata had ever drilled.�
Whether Zapata was partially designed for laundering money for covert or clandestine
operations may never be known. But one thing is certain: spy work depends, as much as anything,
on a large flow of funds for keeping foreign palms greased. It is an enormously expensive
business, and it requires layers and layers of ostensibly unconnected cutouts for the
millions to flow properly and without detection.
So what, exactly, was Zapata? Was it CIA? Gow won�t say. Although in his memoirs he
freely admits that he served the CIA later on, he strives mightily to avoid extensive
discussion of the Bush clan . . .
Then I asked Gow about allegations that Zapata Offshore had played a role in the Bay
of Pigs invasion: �Any comments on those?�
Gow hesitated a moment, smiled just a bit, and then replied, �No.�
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