Thomas J. Devine
CIA
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close
personal and business relation****p for decades with a CIA staff
employee who, according to those CIA do***ents, was instrumental in
the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s,
and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and
witting commercial asset" of the agency.
Submitted by fedup 2007-01-10 01:35:06
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's
original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint
efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his
agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75
memo describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush."
The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays
out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial
cover beginning in 1963.
"Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata
Oil," the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata cor****ate filings do not
seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may
have been covert. Yet other do***ents do show Thomas Devine on the
board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January,
1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover
officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in
1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from
Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was
seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after
the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist
allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-
positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was
making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard,
using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based
Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the
Bushes strongly sup****ted.
The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow
Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that
Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.
Indeed, Zapata's annual re****ts ****tray a bewildering range of global
activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off
Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his
autobiography, Bush declares that "I'd come to the CIA with some
general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts
as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN
ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.
Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J.
Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two
men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after
the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as "Mr.
George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" and the other as
"Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency."
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