by Russ Baker
In March 1975, more than eleven years after Henry Luce had purchased the Zapruder film and removed it from circulation, the film was finally shown to a national audience in its entirety. These images spawned a new round of questions regarding the Warren Commission’s findings. That September, one of Church’s subcommittees was given a staff of nine to investigate the intelligence agencies with respect to the JFK assassination. The subcommittee interviewed over fifty witnesses and gained access to five thousand pages of intelligence agency material.12 The probe left many lingering questions, but it ran out of steam due to lack of witness cooperation.
Home at Last
On November 1, 1975, while U.S. envoy George H. W. Bush was with his wife, Barbara, riding bicycles through Beijing, he was approached by a breathless messenger with a telegram. It was from Henry Kissinger, and it informed Bush that the president was about to appoint him director of the Central Intelligence Agency.13
The current director, William Colby, had been too candid and forthcoming. Without consulting Nixon or Ford, he had released to the Justice Department the 693-page “Family Jewels” document, and confirmed details after it was leaked to New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh.14 Colby was not the one to hold the fort during the coming onslaught; and his ouster was part of what came to be called the “Halloween Massacre,” in which the White House rid the administration of elements it deemed undesirable. The orchestrators were Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s young chief of staff, and his deputy, Dick Cheney.
After the putsch, Rumsfeld would become defense secretary and Cheney would take Rumsfeld’s post. The new national security adviser, taking Kissinger’s place, was Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. Finally, the moderate Vice President Rockefeller was removed from the ticket for the upcoming 1976 reelection campaign.
And whose idea was this dramatic reshuffling? “I did it totally on my own,” the relatively moderate Ford assured the press. “It was my decision. I fitted the pieces together and they fitted excellently.”15 This was hardly convincing, since the net effect was to re-empower elements of the security-intelligence elite that had been shunted aside by Nixon and was seriously threatened by the post-Watergate cascade of disclosures.
Ushered into control in one fell swoop was a group that would periodically surface in top positions in Republican administrations over the next three-plus decades. Under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney became defense secretary, with Scowcroft again serving as national security adviser. Under George W. Bush, Cheney returned to power, this time as vice president, and with Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, engineered the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The appointment that on the surface made the least sense was the decision to place Poppy Bush at the head of the CIA. Why install a purported intelligence virgin—and, moreover, a fellow widely regarded as a lightweight—in this highly sensitive post, and in this period of intense pressure on the agency? The newspapers at the time seemed bewildered, though unwilling to say so explicitly. In an unsigned profile headlined “A Breezy Head of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times struggled to find some achievements. “As a chief American representative in China, George Bush has succeeded, at least in a limited degree, in erasing the image that many persons in Peking had of America as an elitist country. Instead of formal dinners and receptions, the Bushes entertain by serving soft drinks and popcorn while showing old movies.”16 Another Times article noted that on a visit to China, Kissinger “did not set aside any time for consultations with Mr. Bush before plunging into dealings with Chinese leaders.”17
Yet, just as his brief and undistinguished congressional service had supposedly qualified him for the United Nations, and his unexceptional United Nations service somehow qualified him for the China post, George H. W. Bush’s brief experience in China was now invoked as somehow qualifying him to run the CIA. The central assumption in all this was that Poppy did not have an intelligence background. To some, this was seen as a liability, to others an asset. But no one considered the possibility that his supposed lack of experience in spycraft was, in fact, part of that craft, and his long-running cover story.
Indeed, it was unlikely that with all the Sturm und Drang over intelligence, the kind of person that George H. W. Bush appeared to be in public could possibly be the choice of insiders and hard-liners. There had to be more to it. Looking back at old clippings from that period, one can see the tide of inquiry just barely lapping at the story.
Several articles mentioned that Bush had been on the receiving end of largess from the Townhouse fund (covered in chapters 10 and 11), but they failed to inquire into his deeper connections. And there was absolutely no discussion of how Poppy Bush had devoted a substantial chunk of his adult life to intelligence-connected activity. Even the barest hint of this would not emerge until many years later, with Joseph McBride’s little-noticed Nation article mentioning “George Bush of the CIA.”
The Townhouse problem was mitigated by Poppy’s old friend Leon Ja-worski during the Senate’s confirmation hearings. Speaking at a convention of former FBI special agents in Houston, Jaworski gave Bush a clean bill of health on the Townhouse matter: “This was investigated by me when I served as Watergate special prosecutor. I found no involvement of George Bush and gave him full clearance. I hope that in the interest of fairness, the matter will not be bandied about unless something new has appeared on the horizon.”18
Later, in 1980, when Poppy was campaigning for the presidency and he was asked about the townhouse fund, he always answered that Leon Jaworski had cleared him: “The answer came back, clean, clean, clean.”19 Not mentioned, perhaps because it was not widely known, was the close relationship between Bush and Jaworski, or Jaworski’s own CIA ties—as noted in chapter 11. This mutual admiration resurfaced at Jaworski’s funeral, where Bush, Richard Nixon’s supposedly loyal retainer, served as an honorary pallbearer for the man who played a key role in driving Nixon from office.
Despite having dodged all the possible bullets related to his questionable personal connections, Poppy nevertheless had a difficult time with the Senate confirmation process. Because of his partisan background and his aspirations to higher office, he was a somewhat controversial choice for a post that required at least the appearance of political neutrality. Senator Frank Church expressed his concern that a political figure would lead what was intended to be the “least political and most sensitive agency in Washington.”20
Moreover, Bush was being mentioned as a possible running mate for Ford in 1976. “It is wrong for [Bush] to want both positions, even in a Bicentennial year,” said Church, only half joking.21 In response to such criticism, Ford drafted a letter announcing that Bush would not seek the vice presidency. “[Bush] urged that I make this decision,” Ford’s letter asserted. “This says something about the man and about his desire to do this job for the nation.”22 Bush himself laid it on even thicker. “Old-fashioned as it may seem to some, it is my duty to serve my country,” Bush told the Senate Armed Services Committee.23 The Senate eventually approved Bush by a vote of 64 to 27.
Immediately, Poppy was recognized by elite leaders of other intelligence services as to the manner born. As Count Alexandre de Marenches, head of French intelligence, writes in his memoirs:
Mr. Bush was introduced to me by the French ambassador to the United Nations in a handwritten note. “He is a real gentleman,” the ambassador wrote to me, “born of an old New England family who has had a respect from birth for the kinds of fundamental moral values that we both share.”
Shortly after this note arrived, George Bush turned up in Paris. It was March 1976. From the first moment, we got along famously. Our first meeting took place in my office at our headquarters, over a wonderful lunch prepared by our French Navy chef. I still remember the soufflé. Bush was accompanied by his principal aide, General Vernon Walters, who was and remains one of the most extraordinary diplomats and intelligence analysts in the West. Alas, their hands were very much tied by the corrosive and systemic failin
gs of the American intelligence system.
When he returned to Washington, I quickly received a charming, handwritten note:
Dear Friend:
. . . the luncheon was spectacular, but the conversation and getting your impressive views on the troubled world surpassed even that delectable soufflé. An added dividend was Barbara’s great feeling of warmth for your charming wife . . .
sincerely, George B.24
AS CIA DIRECTOR, Poppy was a busy man. On the one hand, he needed to repeatedly trot over to Capitol Hill to mollify members of Congress. On the other hand, he needed to help craft the CIA’s response to the Church Committee, which was on the warpath over the agency’s wrongdoing and excesses. One solution to the scrutiny was simply to scrub the files, and there was precedent for this. Before then-director Helms left the CIA, he had ordered the destruction of files on mind-control experiments and hundreds of hours of secretly recorded tapes of his own conversations.25
Senator Frank Church, at least, seemed to have an inkling that something was afoot. “There is no question in my mind,” he said, “but that concealment is the new order of the day.”26
Upon Bush’s nomination, former president Nixon, clearly unwitting to Poppy’s recent role in his demise, had offered him one bit of advice: “You will be tempted greatly to ‘give away the store’ in assuring the members of the Senate Committee that everything the CIA does in the future will be an open book,” he wrote. “I think you will be far better off to stand up and strongly defend the CIA and the need to maintain, particularly, its covert activities.”27 Bush’s handwritten response to these unintentionally ironic remarks suggested that the toppled leader had little to fear. “I couldn’t agree more,” Bush wrote. “We must not see the Agency compromised further by reckless disclosure.”28
FOR SOMEONE WHO supposedly knew nothing about intelligence, Poppy made quite an impression on other professionals in the field. As Count de Marenches noted, “The Americans, in my opinion, are the least prepared of all. Few of the heads of American intelligence with whom I came in close contact . . . ever fully understood . . . [the] most basic axioms of war or espionage or geopolitics in the age of South-North conflict. Perhaps the one who came closest was George Bush.”29
Something truly epochal was going on—but it entirely evaded the ken of the media and public. After sequestering Poppy in China during the bloody aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, Ford brought him back to be the chief spy. And then he handed Bush an unprece dented mandate.
Shortly after Poppy took over the CIA—on February 17, 1976—Ford announced a major reorganization that increased both the agency’s authority to conduct controversial operations and its director’s authority over the larger intelligence community, including agencies that were part of the Defense Department. The New York Times reported that Bush now had more power than any other director of Central Intelligence since the creation of the CIA.30
Bush wielded this heightened power on behalf of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had so famously warned against in his valedictory speech. Politicizing the process of intelligence analysis, he imposed a systematic bias that supported a new harder line toward the communist bloc. This was a direct reversal of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente.
Under the guidance of Rumsfeld, Cheney, a young Paul Wolfowitz, and others who had ascended in the Halloween Massacre, Poppy began finding ways to get around the analysts who did not sufficiently hype the Soviet threat. To that end he created a second analytical team, which produced alarming estimates of Soviet military capabilities. The concept was known as Team A/Team B.
In this way, Poppy was the father of the analytical gamesmanship his son would use to justify war with Iraq nearly three decades later—under the guidance of the same Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz. That makes it particularly ironic that during W.’s presidency, Poppy was widely characterized as the cautious one who was privately troubled by his son’s bumptious foreign policy.
In 2003, as it became apparent that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, cited as cause for war, did not in fact exist, Newsweek observed that “intelligence failure” was a Bush family legacy:
During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of neocon outside “experts” to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B— which included future President George W.’s Iraq War strategist Paul Wolfowitz—produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated . . . Iraq is part of a pattern. In each of these cases, arguments about the threat posed by a country rest in large part on the character of the regime. The Team B report explains that the CIA’s analysis was flawed because it was based on too much “hard data”—meaning facts.31
Besides the scrubbing operation and the cooking of intelligence to order, Poppy oversaw some intriguing new projects. He enlisted the Saudis to provide financing for agency covert operations that Congress had barred or refused to fund. In effect, Bush privatized U.S. covert operations. This program, which will be detailed in chapters 13 and 14, offered tangible benefits to the Saudis, permitted the continuation of questionable CIA activities, and as we shall see, also enriched Poppy’s circle back in Texas.
Farming out CIA operations was risky business, however. In September 1976, Washington was rocked, literally, by a car bombing on D.C.’s Embassy Row that killed Orlando Letelier, the former ambassador of Chilean president Salvador Allende and a critic of Augusto Pinochet’s military regime. Letelier’s American colleague Ronni Moffitt, also died. Bush insisted that the U.S. government had no knowledge of, nor hand in, this act of terrorism.
But subsequent Chilean investigations and trials showed that the assassination had been carried out by former CIA contract employee Michael Townley, a U.S. expatriate who had gone to work for Pinochet’s intelligence chief.
The strangest part was that Townley, who had been on the State Department watch list as a potential terrorist, had nevertheless managed to freely enter the United States before the assassination. It was an eerie foreshadowing of what would happen in the years leading up to September 11, 2001, when at least one of the hijackers would enter the United States despite being on a CIA watch list. Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978 while the Democrat Jimmy Carter was in the White House; his Chilean handlers were convicted in 1993, after democracy had returned to that country. The former Chilean secret police chief admitted that his orders had come from Pinochet.32 But the crime was committed on Poppy’s turf, and on Poppy’s watch—by one of the agency’s former hirelings.
Plenty to Digest
The biggest and most controversial assassination was also back in the spotlight—and again, there were CIA strands in the picture. Thanks to a flurry of investigations as George Bush took over at CIA, eyes were turning back to the unsolved JFK murder. And to Dallas.
Although Poppy couldn’t remember where he had been on November 22, 1963, and couldn’t be bothered to recall his old friend George de Mohrenschildt’s precise role in the matter or in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, as CIA director he began paying keen attention to the resurgent assassination investigations.
Director Bush composed a rather strange internal memo asking for a copy of a report concerning a visit by Jack Ruby (killer of Lee Harvey Oswald— Kennedy’s alleged assassin) to the reputed Mafia leader Santo Trafficante Jr.; two years after Bush left the CIA directorship, Trafficante would admit to a House panel that he participated in a CIA-directed 1960 operation to assassinate Castro. Trafficante was also believed by some to have had a role in the Kennedy assassination. (Another mob figure of interest to Kennedy assassination investigators, Sam Giancana, was killed in 1975 by an unknown gunman shortly before he was scheduled to testify about the plots against Castro.)
In his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Trafficante would say that he had been recruited for the Cast
ro project by fellow mobster John Rosselli, who had testified in 1975 before the Church Committee about efforts to kill Castro. In April 1976, while Poppy was CIA director, Rosselli was again called before the Church Committee, this time to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Three months later, the committee decided to recall Rosselli for additional testimony. But by the time he was called, he had already been missing for several days. His decomposing body was later found inside a fifty-five-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfounding Bay near Miami. He had been strangled and shot, and his legs had been sawed off.
Against this backdrop of new interest in assassinations in general and particularly in possible links between the efforts to rub out Castro and the killing of JFK, George de Mohrenschildt resurfaced.
In January 1976, he wrote to Willem Oltmans, a freelance Dutch television reporter whom he had met eight years earlier. Oltmans’s reason for maintaining contact with de Mohrenschildt has been a subject of some speculation, including among his Dutch media colleagues. His profile at times appears less that of the typical left-leaning Dutch journalist and more suggestive of a U.S. intelligence agent. Former colleagues of Oltmans, who is deceased, described him to me as a complex and mysterious figure. As will become clear, Oltmans was a cipher to one and all, sometimes seeming to be determined to expose the truth, and sometimes to do the opposite. Perhaps he was something of a free agent, pursuing a particular course yet unhappy about it. But one thing is certain: just as de Mohrenschildt helped steer Oswald, to a lesser extent Oltmans did the same for de Mohrenschildt.