by Russ Baker
A Saudi connection to Bath’s refueling facility emerged as a result of a lawsuit filed by Bath’s former wife, Sandra, in the early 1990s. According to documents revealed in the suit, the Saudi bank controlled by bin Mahfouz claimed ownership of 90 percent of the shares in Southwest Airport Services, as compensation for a default by Jim Bath on a loan granted him for his airport parking company, which went bankrupt in 1989. However, Sandra Bath alleged that the bank was merely trying to seize control of the lucrative Southwest Airport Services as a favor to her ex-husband.31
Under President George W. Bush, Air Force One continued to use the facility.32
CHAPTER 15
The Handoff
I don’t understand how poor people think.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, CONFIDING IN
REVEREND JIM WALLIS
AS GEORGE W. BUSH MOVED FROM college through adulthood, his activities fulfilled a kind of Bush family pattern of fuzzy implausibility. Things were not quite what they appeared at first to be.
A series of improbable choices and opportunities presented themselves— extraordinary ones even by the standards of his privileged life. Thus it was that in 1973, Bush, having inexplicably managed to opt out of the final two years of his military service obligation, instead began playing basketball with and giving pep talks to inner-city youth at Houston’s Professionals United for Leadership League (PULL). As noted in chapter 8, this appeared to be some kind of compulsory (albeit rather pleasant) “community service” gig.
Then he entered Harvard Business School. That W. would again essentially pull rank on what must certainly have been hundreds of better-qualified and considerably more motivated applicants should really be no surprise to students of the system. From Harvard’s understandable perspective, even if W.’s association with the school was not likely to confer any additional distinction upon the school itself, it did not hurt to have the son of the incoming chairman of the ruling Republican Party on the premises.
Yet even this opportunity for conventional success did not play out in a conventional manner. At the end of his first year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his classmates were taking summer internships with Wall Street firms and major corporations, George W. Bush was braving the wilds of the North. This could have been publicly spun in the same way as Poppy’s decision to head off to the oil patch: as an appealing act of individuality, initiative, and grit. But this intriguing if short sojourn was left out of the bland résumé of W.’s past that was offered up for public consumption as he sought political office.
It turns out there was a reason for this reticence.
That summer of 1974, Bush flew to Fairbanks, Alaska, where he began working for Alaska International Industries, a company with airline and construction operations on the ground floor of the eight-hundred-mile trans-Alaska pipeline boom. It was a potlatch for all concerned: pipeline workers drove off with trucks from work sites and flew home to the Lower 48 with duffel bags full of stolen tools, with few adverse consequences. There was money for all.
How and why did W. get the job? As with virtually every other position in his life, someone—whose identity is not always clear—provided a boost. “He was actually a political hire,” explained Neil Bergt, owner of the privately held Alaska International, in a 2008 interview.1 Bergt said that someone from a Houston construction company with which he did business had called him and “asked us if we could put George Bush’s kid to work for the summer, give him a summer job.”
Nothing unusual about that, and, according to Bergt, W. did real work and was pretty good at it. “The bank was always bugging me for a business plan, and gee, I didn’t have a business plan in those days,” said Bergt. “I asked him if he could write a business plan. He said yeah . . . He knew enough about writing a business plan to ask the right questions and put it together . . . in a business plan format, and produced a nice-looking document . . . I enjoyed reading it, frankly.”
Why Bush wanted to work at this particular company, or why someone thought he ought to, is a question with no clear answer at this date. A woman who met W. at a wedding in 1976 recalls asking him about Alaska. He replied, “Juneau’s O.K. if you like mildew growing between your toes.”2
One could argue that Alaska wasn’t a bad place to be for someone looking to get into the oil business. Yet even Bergt can’t help speculating about why W. was there. “I’ve often wondered what he did to piss somebody off and get sent to Alaska over the summer,” he said. “Why he’d be working for a chick-enshit company up in Alaska . . . The only thing that’s ever crossed my mind is whether he was up here this summer he was supposed to be in the National Guard someplace.”
In fact, Bergt’s hunch might not be far off the mark. In the summer of 1974, W. should have been completing his six-year Air National Guard service obligation. What better place to remain off the radar than some mildewed Alaskan backwater? This could also explain why W. has omitted this work experience from his slim pre-politics résumé. Otherwise, why hide a job your boss thought you were good at?
Well, maybe because of the company’s spookier aspects. In our conversation, Bergt described his company’s activities in those days. These included refueling stops in Baghdad and business transacted with the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and other leaders of what he described as “these weird countries.”
“We were all over the world,” Bergt said. “And we did all kinds of weird stuff.” He described doing off-the-books work not authorized by the Democratic president. “We did some spying for the CIA after Jimmy Carter went in, gutted the CIA, and almost ruined them. They came to people like me because they didn’t have any money, and by law they couldn’t be in some countries—Libya, for one. We were still flying into Tripoli, and they asked us if we would count the number of MIGs on the runway, stuff like that.
“We did some work for the CIA in Guatemala . . . [when] Reagan was president,” said Bergt. “The CIA had a captive airline, Southern Air Transport, and the only time we would ever get any call from them was when there was some kind of overspill . . . I think we may have gotten involved with Ollie North’s funding of that [illegal Iran-contra] operation when Congress had refused . . . and then Ollie went to Iran . . . We hauled boots and pants.” Bergt said he would have absolutely flown weapons if asked. “When my government calls . . . The politics of it, that’s irrelevant to me.”
“They would never admit they were CIA,” Bergt said of one outfit that contracted with his firm. “They were a company out of New York. I remember one time they got an address. We hired somebody to go check it out, and it was an empty lot.
“The CIA wanted to do business . . . and they wanted to debrief some crew members and it was always in the southeast corner of Hyde Park, on the bench, in a trench coat, and the London Times under my arm. . . . It was like out of a bad movie.”
Whatever he was doing that summer of 1974, W. kept the details to himself. Even later, when he was desperate for professional credentials, he did not speak of this job, just as he rarely mentioned his earlier international travels for Bob Gow’s company, Stratford. As a result, none of the three principal biographies that were published during the 2000 campaign made any mention of his Alaskan sojourn. Reporters who traveled on his campaign plane could not recall his ever talking about it.
Bush’s interlude in the forty-ninth state did attract fleeting public notice during his first presidential campaign, when Alaska Republicans produced a leaflet for local distribution that referred to him as a “former Alaska resident.” Playing to local audiences with even the most meager connection is a common political tactic. But given their many secrets, that is a tricky game for a Bush to play.
Probably prompted by the leaflet, a short account of W.’s time in Alaska appeared in the state capital newspaper, the Juneau Empire, in September 2000. The New York Times followed up with a lengthier piece, based on original reporting and written with a tone of polite suspicion. But that article did not appear until October, just a few weeks befor
e the election, and the story gained no traction.3 (Bergt said that when word reached Poppy that a reporter was checking out an unfounded rumor that Alaska International had given W. the job in return for a favor with federal aviation authorities, the elder Bush, believing Bergt to have been the source, angrily rang him up. “George Senior was pissed off,” Bergt recalled. “He lit into me: ‘What the hell is going on?’ I had to calm him down . . . Man, he could chew at you.”)
Asked during the 2000 campaign about Alaska International and its business dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency and the shah of Iran, Dan Bartlett, a Bush spokesperson, said W. was unaware of those clients. “The only thing he knew the company was doing was flying freight in C-130s to the north Alaskan slope,” Bartlett said. “That is the extent of his knowledge.”
Bartlett speculated that Bush hadn’t spoken of the job before because it had occurred so long ago and was so uneventful that it didn’t seem worth mentioning. Yet Bush chose to cite a number of other jobs that were equally short and decidedly more banal—from delivering mail at a Houston law firm to working for a stockbroker to selling sporting goods. It was only the Alaska position and the Stratford foreign travel about which he kept strictly mum.
In any case, given Poppy’s expressed concerns about his eldest son, it is likely that Bush Sr. had a role in arranging W.’s Alaska job. Yet, in typical fashion, the senior Bush left no fingerprints. It would not be wise for him to reveal connections with the Central Intelligence Agency, even indirect ones, in the summer of 1974, since he would not become publicly associated with the agency, as director, for another year and a half.
Starting at the Bottom . . . of the Top
Soon enough, it was Graduation Day, 1975. America’s top companies made a beeline for the Harvard Business School. They were looking for talent— but they did not see it in W.
“Did you know that George W. Bush is the only Harvard Business School graduate that I know of who ever left there without a goddamned job?” asked Bill White, former business partner of W.’s friend Jim Bath and himself a Harvard Business School graduate. “He had fifty-three job interviews with Fortune 500 companies, McKinsey and Company, Booz Allen, everybody wants Harvard people. But Bush came back to [Texas] with no job!”4
Well, perhaps. But opportunity knocked just as it had for his father—in Midland, the land of his early youth. Emulating his father, as he would do time and again, he became what is known in West Texas parlance as a landman— convincing landowners to turn over the rights to potential drilling sites on their property, as Poppy himself had briefly done in the early 1950s. Fittingly, this involved a kind of rudimentary intelligence work: finding out who had a good handle on where oil deposits might be.
Thus W. joined dozens of other hopeful souls at the county courthouse, sifting through records to see who owned certain pieces of property on which others might wish to drill, and then persuading the landowners to part with their mineral rights. This was a tricky business, and one that required just a bit of a respectable front, at least a business card with a decent local address. For this, friends of his father’s with offices in a downtown petroleum building turned over to W., rent-free, their water cooler room, where he used old soda crates for chairs. Beyond that, he didn’t do much to knock out the West Texas locals. He dressed like a rumpled preppy, in wrinkled shirts and loafers with their tassels falling off. Friends of his father’s got him into the Petroleum Club and the Country Club, and he worked the system. He initially called his modest venture Bush Oil. But he soon displayed a flash of his irreverent humor and incorporated under the just slightly disguised title of Arbusto— Spanish for “Bush.”
An Early Political Ambition
There is some reason to think that W.’s sojourn in Midland was at least partly a political ploy. For one thing, before making his move he flew out to the dusty West Texas city for a chat with Poppy’s longtime political aide Jimmy Allison. At that time Allison was the publisher of the local newspaper. He knew W.’s strengths—and weaknesses—better than most, having been assigned to keep an eye on him in Montgomery, Alabama, just a few years before, when W. had abruptly bailed out of his flying obligations. Some of W.’s closest friends also moved back to or settled in Midland around the same time: Joey O’Neill, Charlie Younger, and Don Evans, who would form a kind of inner circle for Bush and remain staunch loyalists throughout his life. Indeed, all would tell stories to inquiring reporters that helped shape the Bush narrative the public came to know.5
W. had just enough time to scrape together the cash to take a small position in one drilling deal when, in July 1977, the area congressman, Democrat George Mahon, announced he was retiring. This was exciting news, and perhaps not unexpected; the man had held the seat for four decades. It represented a singular opportunity in Poppy Bush’s ongoing project of converting Texas to the GOP column. The longest-serving Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation was giving up his seat in an extremely conservative area—and one where Poppy’s son just happened to be hanging out his shingle.
For the many Americans who became aware in the 1990s that there was “another George Bush” with political ambitions, it might be surprising to learn that W. considered himself prepared for public office as early as 1971.6 Back then, just three years out of university, W. had flirted with running for the Texas legislature, but was discouraged by his father, who thought he first needed to establish himself. Given Poppy’s own rapid political rise, it might seem strange that he would be the one dispensing such advice. But even in his younger days, the father seemed more mature and accomplished than his unseasoned and impatient son.
W.’s 1978 congressional campaign, unfolding as Poppy was in the planning stages of his 1980 presidential campaign, could be seen as a kind of test run of the money machine for the larger cause. Indeed, it’s likely that the donors understood what they were investing in. W.’s campaign raised $450,000—at that time an astronomical amount. Thus, twenty-two years before his presidential candidacy, at a time when his own father was preparing for a losing presidential race, the people who mattered were already betting smart money on George W. Bush’s long-term prospects, or at least responding to the entreaties of his famously persistent father.
Asked later about his fund-raising success, W. explained that he had relied on his parents’ Christmas card list. For context, one must consider that this document combined the cachet of an all-American social register and the heft of a big-city phone book. W.’s 1978 donor list, which goes on for pages, is a who’s who from Midland, Houston, and Dallas—and includes entries substantiating the Bush family’s long-standing ties to national elites. Contributors included William Ford of the Ford Motor Company; Robert Taft (whose ancestor was a founder of Skull and Bones); Frank Shakespeare, the longtime CBS president who headed the government’s propaganda entity Radio Liberty; and a massive outpouring from every corner of the oil and energy industry. W.’s future defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld also contributed.
Bath also helped Bush by introducing him to big-money people in Houston. This included members of the Houston Chamber of Commerce, where Bath was a major player.
One day in 1978, Bath picked up his business partner Bill White en route to a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.7 “As we were driving downtown, he said, ‘Bill, I can’t wait for you to meet the guest speaker . . . the two of you are cut from the same cloth. You’re both fighter pilots. You’re both Harvard Business School graduates. You’re going to love this guy.’ ”8
White recalls that day, on which he first met George W. Bush, several months after White had moved to Texas:
I’ll never forget as long as I live, it was the first time I saw somebody dress in a suit wearing high-heeled cowboy boots. And it just struck me as a guy who was desperately trying to be six foot tall, irrespective of his natural height. Somehow he equated importance with height, which I thought was ludicrous because most of the fighter pilots that I flew with were shorter in stature, but were guys who were
seven feet tall in my mind’s eye because they had integrity, confidence and they didn’t care about the superficial.
My observation was that he was not comfortable around people who were “looking down” on him. I think that if you check the Presidential cabinet appointments and study photos of W. with his staff that you’ll see what I mean. The company surrounding the President in 99% of the photo ops that I see are carefully staged to make W. look like “the big man.”9