by Russ Baker
For a time, the world rallied around the United States. Americans generally backed Bush and what seemed his decisive and appropriate response to the attack: an assault on al-Qaeda and the ruling Taliban regime of its host country, Afghanistan. Yet, as time passed, Bush’s poll numbers gradually eroded, at least in part due to the failure to capture Osama bin Laden. By the spring of 2002, the White House political team was growing concerned, and others were beginning to speculate as to what an administration devoted to the so-called permanent campaign might do next.
Former Texas GOP political director and political consultant Royal Masset recalls what went through his head. “In the spring, I said, ‘Karl is going to push the war button—because that is going to resuscitate George. It will be good for the midterm elections.’ The Karl Rove I know would have been pushing the war for all it was worth.”14
Iraq
Things might have gone differently if it were easier to bring a historical perspective to news reporting. The public would then have grasped the fundamental hypocrisy of the administration’s building a case against Saddam. Throughout the Reagan–Poppy Bush years, the White House had been an eager backer of Saddam. The two administrations had provided millions of dollars in aid and had permitted the export of U.S. technology that Iraq used to build a massive arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons.15 George W. Bush would repeatedly express outrage over Saddam’s 1988 gassing of the Kurds, neglecting to mention that Donald Rumsfeld, now his defense secretary, had visited and talked business deals with Saddam back in the eighties—and that the Reagan and Poppy Bush administrations continued to support the Iraqi dictator after the gassing.16 The larger goal, however, was a so-called balance of terror that would prevent any country from gaining ascendancy in the strategic Gulf region, and so the United States actually provided materiel and intelligence to both sides in the brutal, nearly decade-long Iraq-Iran war, in which over a million people died.
In a paradoxical twist, when W. sought to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he cited those same weapons—without mentioning that his own father had helped to provide them. He also failed to mention what many proliferation experts correctly believed: that most or all of those weapons had been destroyed as part of Saddam’s scale-down after the imposition of the no-fly zones and President Clinton’s own threats to invade.
Surprisingly, the United States’ secret relationship with Saddam Hussein goes back even further—a remarkable forty years. This information was published by the wire service UPI in April 2003, shortly after the invasion, while U.S. forces were hunting for the reviled Saddam Hussein, but it was generally ignored.17 The report noted:
U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials . . . While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.
The article noted that Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy and participated in a U.S.-backed cold war coalition. But when Qasim decided to withdraw from the alliance and began warming up to the USSR, CIA director Allen Dulles publicly declared that Iraq was “the most dangerous spot in the world.”
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim . . . In Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam’s apartment and put him through a brief training course . . . Even then Saddam “was known as having no class. He was a thug—a cutthroat.”
. . . During this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy . . . In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup . . . But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq’s communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun–toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down.
Saddam Hussein is hardly the only dictator whom the United States essentially created, long supported, and then turned on when circumstances changed. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, a longtime CIA asset, was another. Poppy, as Ford’s CIA director and then as Reagan’s vice president, had fostered a relationship with the notorious drug trafficker during the seventies and eighties, even keeping him on the U.S. payroll at more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.18 But Noriega did not always do as the Americans wanted. While Noriega sold arms and provided intelligence to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, he refused to supply weapons to the U.S.-backed contras to help overthrow the Managua government.19
According to Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Noriega insisted to him that he had had the best of relations with Bush for years. But Noriega told Birns that at an airport meeting in Panama shortly before the invasion, he had had a spat with Vice President Dan Quayle when he refused to commit Panama to a more confrontational role in fighting against Washington’s Central American enemies. Birns, who was in Panama as Noriega’s “honorable enemy” guest only hours before the U.S. invasion and was arguably the last American to meet with Noriega before U.S. troops arrived, told me that the Panamanian strongman was bitter because after years of servitude to Washington’s various regional crusades, Bush was unceremoniously dumping him.20
As former head of French intelligence Count Alexandre de Marenches puts it in his memoirs:
If it’s proved that Noriega was on the US payroll, then it was a shameful mistake . . . Never use shady characters . . . I expressed this philosophy to George Bush . . . Now years later, the worst nightmare has come to haunt the Americans—a protracted and messy jury trial following a lethal and embarrassing military operation in Panama—all designed to get rid of the rat they should never have hired in the first place . . . If you do, after all, hire the rat, and are ultimately forced to get rid of him, then by all means do so quickly and permanently.21
Though Jimmy Carter had agreed to return the Canal Zone to Panama by 2000, that did not mean Poppy was willing to give up influence in the tropical republic. At the end of 1989, Poppy ordered an invasion of the country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds and the imposition of a more compliant government.
Twisting Arms
For W., one benefit of turning attention toward Iraq and touting Saddam as a major threat was to take the world’s eye off more than a few potentially embarrassing balls. What, for example, had led to 9/11? What about the U.S. role during the 1970s and ’80s in creating a global mujahideen force as surrogates in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union? Or the objective of actually fostering the USSR’s Afghan invasion in the first place by baiting the Soviets into what Zbigniew Brzezinski hoped would be quicksand for the Communists? These global gambits, acknowledged in memoirs of key decision makers, including Brzezinski, have seldom been widely discussed or generally understood.22
Then there was the politicization of intelligence, which began under Poppy Bush’s CIA directorship with his creation of the “Team B” that sought to refute the agency analysts who had accurately determined that the USSR was already in decline. Some intelligence analysts had also warned— only to be ignored—about the risk of creating an extremist Islamic force armed to the teeth.
And there was the simple fact that fifteen of nineteen hijackers on September 11 were Saudis. What could or should the Saudi government have known about these people? And what about the deep and long personal relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family? All the public ever learned, thanks in good part to the film Fahrenheit 9/11, was how W.’s administration showed remarkable diligence in spiriting Saudi royals out of the United
States right after 9/11—an operation about which the administration has maintained silence.
And what of the manner in which the 9/11 attack itself was handled— most notably the failure to act on intelligence leads in advance and the competing accounts of the activities of Vice President Cheney in those crucial minutes and hours after the attack? And what of the mystery of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s equally peculiar actions, including his odd decision to “assist” at the scene of the Pentagon attack rather than assume command?23 There were so many questions, and all they did was undermine confidence in the competency and candor of the administration.
Absent a distraction, the media and a few public intellectuals were bound to raise such potentially embarrassing topics. Indeed, some did—but a war always takes center stage.
Help, Britannia
Put aside the compromising connections and troubling pre-9/11 history with Islamic fundamentalism. There was still the simple fact that al-Qaeda was an elusive military target—an amorphous fighting group that could not be pinned down to a single geographical location. By contrast, Iraq was easy to find on a map and Saddam a bona fide villain who could be taken out with telegenic flair.
However, not everyone agreed about the nature of the Iraqi threat, and so the Bush administration faced a huge public relations challenge. In its response, truth—not surprisingly—was the first casualty. Appearing on CNN, Condoleezza Rice warned: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”24 And Colin Powell delivered his dramatic show-and-tell presentation on Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction—complete with a vial of “anthrax” as a prop. Though no U.N. action followed, the United States could hardly be seen to act alone.25 It needed an appearance of broad international support, and that meant allies. The most important, by far, would be the former (post–World War I) ruler of Iraq, Great Britain.
The affection felt by the Bushes and their friends for the British Isles has been remarked on by numerous authors. It is manifested in a variety of ways, from a passion for Scottish tartans to claims of distant blood relationships to the queen. The Bush family moneyman, William Farish, even stables Queen Elizabeth’s horses in Kentucky and was dispatched by President George W. Bush as ambassador to the Court of St. James. And the guardians of royalty returned the favor. The publishing director of Burke’s Peerage enthused that while other presidents had royal connections, “none [are] as royal as George Bush.” Aspirants to royalty, the Bushes owed deference to the real thing. “While no American presidential family can actually be royal,” writes Kevin Phillips, “the Bushes’ triple predilection for royal genealogy, restoration, and an unacknowledged dynasty is an extraordinary coincidence.”26
As always with the Bush family, there were long-standing relationships that helped smooth cooperation in sensitive areas. One little-understood factor in the role Britain played in the “coalition” that invaded Iraq was the personal relationship between George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Many were surprised that Blair, a Labour Party politician who had gotten on famously with Clinton, quickly developed a similar rapport with Bush. But once again, there was a backstory, this one involving a mutual friend of both Blair and Bush. The story also involved oil.
Going back several generations, the Bush family has been close friends with a powerful Scottish banking family, the Gammells. After World War II, J. A. H. Gammell ran the British military mission to Moscow, while Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush’s business partner, was the U.S. ambassador there. Gammell’s son, James “Jimmy” G. S. Gammell of Edinburgh, somehow became close with Poppy, and was an early investor in Bush-Overbey, one of Poppy’s first intelligence-tinged “business” ventures in Midland, Texas, in the early 1950s. This same Jimmy Gammell would head the investment firm Ivory and Sime, of which one former staffer told a Scottish newspaper: “The joke [around here] was that we were the CIA’s station in Scotland.”27
The Gammells and Bushes remained close, and Poppy seemed to want to further develop this relationship. Poppy visited the Gammells while on “business trips”—accompanied by young George W. Those repeat visits to the Gammell farm in Perthshire, Scotland, would yield a friendship between W. and Jimmy Gammell’s son, Bill. In 1959, when W. was thirteen, Poppy sent him to spend the summer with the Gammells. Apparently he made a big impression on Bill, who was just seven at the time.
After a career as a Scottish rugby star, Bill Gammell went into business— eventually gaining the type of success that got him dubbed “the JR Ewing of Scotland” by the London Observer.28 In 1980, the young Gammell, who like W. had spent his college summers on Texas oil rigs, set up Cairn Energy Management to look for North American oil and gas deals for Scottish high rollers. His first deal was as one of W.’s earliest investors, supposedly after W. traveled to Scotland to pitch the idea. For their stake in Arbusto Energy, Gammell and his investors got back just twenty cents on the dollar, but there were no hard feelings—in 1983, W. was back in Scotland for Bill’s wedding.
In 2006 I interviewed Mark Vozar, a partner in CVC, a little-known oil exploration company that was created to serve as a subcontractor for W.’s companies. Vozar told me that Bill Gammell and Cairn Energy Management also provided substantial funding for CVC.29 Vozar said Gammell covered CVC’s entire overhead and all salaries and promoted some Bush oil deals abroad. Vozar said Gammell wrote his checks to Bush, who then transferred the money into CVC. There also appeared to be a geopolitical backstory to the investments in W.’s oil ventures, full of names from Zapata, British Petroleum (now BP), and Scottish entities, that suggested more than the normal marketplace at work.30
George W. and Bill remained close, and the two talked the day Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994. The following year, Bill Gammell, whose company vice chairman was a former Labour energy minister, renewed his relationship with British Labour leader and soon-to-be prime minister Tony Blair.
Bill Gammell’s ties to Blair date back to prep school in Edinburgh, where the two had been friends and basketball teammates. Gammell arranged the initial meeting between the two world leaders, and Bush’s first words to the British prime minister were: “I believe you know my old friend, Bill Gammell.” 31
W. would mention his family’s connection to the Gammells in a 2005 Oval Office interview with the Times of London. In answer to a question about whether he planned to eat haggis on a forthcoming trip to the U.K., W. talked about “a fellow named James Gammell,” his “fabulous family” and their beautiful sheep farm in Glen Isle. He discussed past business deals with Billy Gammell, an “oil and gas guy” who used to visit Midland, Texas, and became “a very successful entrepreneur.”32 The British reporter quickly moved on to a question about golf.
W.’s reference to the Gammells in such an innocuous context is a typical Bush family device. Get the information out so it is no longer news, to ensure the trail stops there. Journalists will continue to construe the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain as based on fellowship and history. The CIA and oil connections loom as unseemly mood breakers, and so remain unexamined.
Either Gammell was an extremely visionary businessman or he had great connections—or both. One way or the other, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, Gammell’s Cairn was soon making a fortune off oil in India—a country not noted for its prospects in that regard. These Western relationships with India got a boost when George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton and replaced the United States’ tough stance on the South Asian country’s nuclear weapons program with one that was more forbearing.33
Meanwhile, an odd political twist: Bill’s father, Jimmy, once was a director of the Bank of Scotland. There he mentored Peter Burt, who, as chairman of the Bank of Scotland in 1999, named Reverend Pat Robertson to head a new joint venture in the United States, in which Robertson’s followers would form the initial customer base. Is it possible that Burt was doing this deal to reward Robertson for bringing the Christian conservatives, who formed one third of the GOP b
ase, into the fold of the Bush campaign? Of course, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns noted, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men” often go awry: the Bank of Scotland deal fell apart over U.K. public outrage concerning Robertson’s views, in particular his remark that Scotland was “a dark land” overrun by homosexuals.
Blair’s decision to back Bush enthusiastically on Iraq appears to have paid dividends. In 2008, when Iraq’s oil ministry began handing out no-bid development contracts to a select group, one of the lucky parties was BP—a company that had as much influence in the Blair government as American oil companies had in the Bush-Cheney White House. Blair surrounded himself with at least a dozen executives from BP. In 1997, for example, he appointed BP chair David Simon to a newly created position, minister of trade and competitiveness in Europe. The prime minister maintained such a close relationship with BP’s CEO Lord Browne that newspapers dubbed the giant oil company “Blair Petroleum” (although some wondered if it wouldn’t be more fitting to call the British government the British Petroleum government).34