One offends only those from whom one takes fields and houses in order
to give them to new inhabitants =97 who are a very small part of that
state. And those whom he offends, since they remain dispersed and
poor, can never harm him, while all the others remain on the one hand
unhurt, and for this they should be quiet; on the other, they are
afraid to err from fear that what happened to the despoiled might
happen to them.
---- Machiavelli and U.S. Politics
THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND GHW BUSH
Once again, we can perceive the workings of lie, hypocrisy, and half-
truth. The lie is that, when someone seizes the belongings of another,
the slate somehow is wiped clean and the new property holder will be
secure in the newfound wealth. The truth is that seized property is
stolen property.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley &
Anton Chaitkin
CHAPTER VIII-b - THE BAY OF PIGS AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
An FBI do***ent identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November,
1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July,
1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for
president.
"...JM/WAVE ...proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the
Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries,
suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy cor****ations, blind drops,
detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers,
airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a
false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the
cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach
in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA's
largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the
[...] building complex reads: US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT
DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY.
Donald Freed, Death in Wa****ngton (West****t, Connecticut, 1980), p.
141.
The review offered so far of George Bush's activities during the late
1950's and early 1960's is almost certainly incomplete in very
im****tant respects. There is good reason to believe that Bush was
engaged in something more than just the oil business during those
years. Starting about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the
spring of 1961, we have the first hints that Bush, in addition to
working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been a participant in
certain covert operations of the US intelligence community.
Such participation would certainly be coherent with George's role in
the Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers, Harriman
networks. During the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman
circles have always maintained a sizable and often decisive presence
inside the intelligence organizations of the State Department, the
Treasury Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of
Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the
Harriman and related Anglophile financier factions of Wall Street have
generally regarded those parts of the state apparatus dealing with
intelligence and covert operations as their own very special property,
property which had to be kept seeded with control networks in order to
be effectively steered from above. For George Bush to interface with
the intelligence community while ostensibly engaged in his business
career would be coherent with that well-established pattern.
A body of leads has been assembled which suggests that George Bush may
have been associated with the CIA at some time before the autumn of
1963. According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, "a source with close
connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started
working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a
cover for clandestine activities." 1 By the time of the Kennedy
assassination, we have an official FBI do***ent which refers to "Mr.
George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency," and despite official
disclaimers there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man
in the White House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible
covert operator hinges on four points, each one of which represents
one of the great political and espionage scandals of postwar American
history. These four cardinal points are:
1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April 16-17,
1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA's "Miami Station" (also
known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the
amphibious landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the
leader****p of Theodore Shackley, became the focus for Operation
Mongoose, a series of covert operations directed against Castro, Cuba,
and possibly other targets.
2. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on
November 22, 1963, and the coverup of those responsible for this
crime.
3. The Watergate scandal, beginning with an April, 1971 visit to
Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth anniversary of the Bay
of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White House Special
Investigations Unit (the "Plumbers" and later Watergate burglars) from
among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans.
4. The Iran-contra affair, which became a public scandal during
October-November 1986, several of whose central figures, such as Felix
Rodriguez, were also veterans of the Bay of Pigs.
George Bush's role in both Watergate and the October surprise/Iran-
contra complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book.
Right now it is im****tant to see that thirty years of covert
operations, in many respects, form a single continuous whole. This is
especially true in regard to the dramatis personae. Georgie Anne Geyer
points to the obvious in a recent book: "...an entire new Cuban cadre
now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard
Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would,
in the next quarter century, pop up, often decisively, over and over
again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were
Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the
****tuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans
played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into
the Persian Gulf." 2 Felix Rodriguez tells us that he was infiltrated
into Cuba with the other members of the "Grey Team" in conjunction
with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find
directing the contra supply effort in central American during the
1980's, working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George
Bush. 3 Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show
up in Bush's 1979-80 presidential campaign.
To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great
political scandals attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool
of personnel. They are a significant extent the handiwork of the same
crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate forward and backward
in time the individuals and groups of individuals who appear as the
cast of characters in one scandal and compare them with the cast of
characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones that
have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a
confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacopo
Arbenz in 1954, as an im****tant part of the chain of command in the
Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas
on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of
Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after all, were contained in
Howard Hunt's safe, the contents of which were so conventiently "deep
sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)
George Bush is demonstrably one of the most im****tant protagonists of
the Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra.
Since he appears especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay
of Pigs holdovers, it is surely legitimate to wonder when his
association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might have started.
1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata
Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel
Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was
now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where
Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a
frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's estate on
Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe
Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations
in the Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official "red
Studebaker" biographical material and the Zapata Offshore annual
re****ts are extremely cryptic.
The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers,
Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter
Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and
other Anglophile financiers who had directed the US intelligence
community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the back
yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a
powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which
George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of
birthright.
During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began
to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action
against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally
constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational
center for the Eisenhower regime's project of staging an invasion of
Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles organized, armed,
trained, trans****ted, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called
Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had
air sup****t from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was
crushed by Castro's defending forces in less than three days.
Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles,
Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no cir***stances
whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces
against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the
news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep
Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned
about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in
the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban
gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.
Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and
there around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the
code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs
veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used
by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: "So perhaps the Pentagon referred
to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not." 5 But Hunt does not
tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt's
Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer,
were of course "deep-sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code
name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have
been "Don Eduardo," roughly the Spanish equivalent of "Mr. Edward" or
perhaps "Mr. Ed." 6
According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code
name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan
was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan's
promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on
March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with
Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might respond that
Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right,
and the subject of a recent Hollywood movies starring Marlon Brando.
As J. Hugh Liedtke had observed, he was the classic figure for the
revolutionary-***-bandit. A more knowledgeable Bushman might argue
that the main landing beach, the Playa Giron, is located south of the
city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninula, on the south coast of Cuba.
Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which
was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the
Garcia Steam****p Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido,
Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels,
which were outfitted as trans****t ****ps, there were two somewhat
better armed fire sup****t ****ps, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some
sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft
Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to
the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen
George Bush's habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and,
in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster,
and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the
appearance of names like "Zapata," Barbara, and Houston can by itself
only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.
After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was
great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506,
some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being
released from Castro's prisoner of war camps. There was also great
animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.
During the early 1950's, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief
in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE
veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch,
Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit
named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member
who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account
written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the
following tirade about the Bay of Pigs:
No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a
profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of
the US-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April
1961.
Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis,
guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our
Dominican Republic intervention. Castros' beachhead triumph opened a
bottomless Pandora's box of difficulties that affected not only the
United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody
and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been
toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially
wrong decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy
administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a
tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into
the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.9
Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy's
fault, and not the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard
Bissell, who had designed it and recommended it. After the
embarrassing failure of the invasion, which never evoked the hoped-for
spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his
Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles Cabell
(whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).
During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply
suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military
escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy
sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For
this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest
Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost
ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an
account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the
veteran general warned the young president that there were elements
inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic
motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from
within. MacArthur's warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy
were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various
tentacles in the intelligence community.
It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the
latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to
Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, "The chickens
are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the
chicken house." 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson,
MacArthur "warned [Kennedy] against the committment of American foot
soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this
advice." 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M.
Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying
MacArthur, who wrote that "MacArthur expressed his old view that
anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of
Asia] should have his head examined." 12 MacArthur restated this
advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned
from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.
Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional military opinion highly, and
used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for
escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited
those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur
that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then
he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing
escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of
President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones
overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William
Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and
theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush
during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and
challenging Kennedy to "muster the courage" to try a second invasion
of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was
growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley's many satellites.
Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of
Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War
II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this
complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small
army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to
one account, there were at least 55 dummy cor****ations to provide
employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives.
There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat
repair shops, and party boats for fi****ng and other entertainments.
There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas.
There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead
Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were
assigned to the University of Miami and other educational
institutions.
The raison d'=EAtre of the massive capability commanded by Theodore
Shackley was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and
assassinations to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special
effort to eliminate Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these
operations from US territory, flagrant and extensive violation of
federal and state laws was the order of the day. Do***ents regarding
the incor****ation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns
were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for
Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives
moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The
Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws
were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were massively
violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes
and boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when
they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running
activities of the covert operatives were beginning to attract
attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida
towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it
achieved during the 1980's, when it became as notorious as Chicago
during Prohibition.
It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons
for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial
oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of sup****t from
continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the
murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted
escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was
committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American
University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more
stable path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military
superiority demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince
Moscow to accept a policy of world peace through economic development.
Kennedy was interested in the possibilities of anti-missile strategic
defense to put an end to that nightmare of mutually assured
destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former
employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had
denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or
perhaps abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency
by the Wall Street and London interests controlling the Federal
Reserve System. If re-elected to a second term, Kennedy was likely to
have re-asserted presidential control, as distinct from Wall Street
control, over the intelligence community. There is good reason to
believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar Hoover from his self-
appointed life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency to
presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was
committed to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural
impact of which was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above
all, Kennedy was acting like a man who thought he was president of the
United States, violating the collegiality of oligarchical trustee****p
of that office that had been in force since the final days of
Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two younger brothers who might
succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond the control of the
Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades. George Bush
joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these
points.
After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was
alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present,
possibly together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the
truth of these allegations has never been finally established. Both
Hunt and Sturgis were of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later
appear center stage in Watergate. There were also allegations that
Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of six to eight derelicts who were
found in boxcars sitting on the railroad tracks behind the grassy
knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded up and taken in for
questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the assassination. Some
suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in the assassination.
Some of these allegations were at the center of the celebrated 1985
defamation case of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which a Florida federal
jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department and
County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the "derelicts" in
question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this
question. But these allegations and theories about the possible
presence and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were
sufficiently widespread so as to compel the Commission on CIA
Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) to
attempt to refute them in its 1975 re****t. 14
According to George Bush's official biography, he was during 1963 a
well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president of
Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican
Organization, sup****ting Barry Goldwater as the GOP's likely 1964
presidential candidate, while at the same time actively preparing his
own 1964 bid for the US Senate. But during that same period of time,
Bush may have shared some common acquaintances with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Between October, 1962 and April, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his
Russian wife Marina were in frequent contact with a Russian emigr=E9
couple living in Dallas: these were George de Mohrenschildt and his
wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy
assassination, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed at length about his
contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977, the discrediting of
the Warren Commission re****t as a blatant coverup had made public
pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination
irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview
de Mohrenschildt once again. But in March, 1977, just before de
Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the
House committee's staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His
death was quickly ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him
alive was Edward Jay Epstein, who was also interviewing de
Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination for an upcoming book.
Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination who enjoyed
excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA. If de
Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us about
his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight
into Bush's activities during this epoch.
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt rejected the finding of suicide in her
husband's death. "He was eliminated before he got to that committee,"
the widow told a journalist in 1978, "because someone did not want him
to get to it." She also maintained that George de Mohrenschildt had
been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs. 15 After de
Mohrenschildt's death, his personal address book was located, and it
contained this entry: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also
Zapata Petroleum Midland." There is of course the problem of dating
this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland
to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps
this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the
number: "4-6355." There are, of course, numerous other entries,
including one W.F. Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City,
William S. Paley of CBS, plus many oil men, stock brokers, and the
like. 16
George de Mohrenschildt recounted a number of different versions of
his life, so it is very difficult to establish the facts about him.
According to one version he was the Russian Count Sergei de
Mohrenschildt, but when he arrived in the United States in 1938 he
carried a Polish pass****t identifying him as Jerzy Sergius von
Mohrenschildt, born in Mozyr, Russia in 1911. He may in fact have been
a Polish officer, or a correspondent for the Polish News Service, or
none of these. He worked for a time for the Polish embassy in
Wa****ngton DC. Some say that de Mohrenschildt met the Chairman of
Humble Oil, Blaffer, and that Blaffer procured him a job. Other
sources say that during this time de Mohrenschildt was affiliated with
the War Department. According to some accounts, he later went to work
for the French Deuxi=E8me Bureau, which wanted to know about petroleum
ex****ts from the United States to Europe.
De Mohrenschildt in 1941 became associated with a certain Baron
Konstantin von Maydell in a public affairs venture called "Facts and
Film." Maydell was considered a Nazi agent by the FBI, and in
September 1942 he was sent to North Dakota for an internment that
would last four years. De Mohrenschildt was also re****tedly in contact
with Japanese networks at this time. In June, 1941, de Mohrenschildt
was questioned by police at ****t Arthur, Texas, on the suspicion of
espionage after he was found making sketches of ****t facilities.
During 1941 de Mohrenschildt applied for a post in the US Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). According to the official account, he was
not hired. Soon after he made the application, he went to Mexico where
he stayed until 1944. In the latter year he established his name as de
Mohrenschildt, jettisoning the German version of von Mohrenschildt,
and began study for a master's degree in petroleum engineering at the
University of Texas. According to some accounts, during this period de
Mohrenschildt was investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence
because of alleged communist sympathies. After the war, de
Mohrenschildt worked as a petroleum engineer in Cuba and Venezuela,
and in Caracas he had several meetings with the Soviet ambassador.
During the postwar years he also worked in the Rangely oil field in
Colorado. During the 1950's, after having married Winifred Sharpless,
the daughter of an oil millionaire, de Mohrenschildt was active as an
independent oil entrepreneur.
In 1957, de Mohrenschildt was approved by the CIA Office of Security
to be hired as a US government geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia.
Upon his return he was interviewed by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA's
Domestic Contact Service, with whom he remained in contact. During
1958, de Morhenschildt visited Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; during 1959 he
visited Africa again and returned by way of Poland. In 1959 he married
Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former ballet dancer and dress designer who
had been born in Manchuria, where her father had been one of the
directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. During the summer of 1960,
George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told their friends that they were
going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles along Indian trails
from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal destinations
was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of the Bay of
Pigs invasion in April, 1961, after which they made their way home by
way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the Mohrenschildts
returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey
Oswald, who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the
Soviet Union in June, 1962. By this time de Mohrenschildt was also
frequenting Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he
introduced the Oswalds. Admiral Bruton was the former director of
naval communications, and had superintended a comprehensive
modernization and reorganization of the navy's means of keeping in
touch with ****ps, planes, missiles, submarines, and the like.
It is established that between October, 1962 and late April, 1963, de
Mohrenschildt was a very im****tant figure in the life of Oswald and
his Russian wife. Despite Oswald's lack of social graces, de
Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society, took him to parties,
assisted him in finding employment, and much more. It was through de
Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt, a young
German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, an
expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the
University of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological
profile of Oswald. Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings
during one of her many estrangements from Oswald. According to some
accounts, de Mohrenschildt's influence on Oswald was so great during
this period that he could virtually dictate im****tant decisions to the
young ex-marine simply by making suggestions. Oswald was in awe of de
Mohrenschildt, according to some.
According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald's
alleged April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-
wing General Edwin Walker. According to Marina, de Mohrenschildt once
asked Oswald, "Lee, how did you miss General Walker?" On April 19,
George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April
29 the CIA Office of Security found that it had no objection to de
Mohrenschildt's acceptance of a contract with the Duvalier regime of
Haiti in the field of natural resource development. De Mohrenschildt
appears to have departed for Haiti on May 1, 1963. In the meantime
Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to New Orleans.
According to Mark Lane, "there is evidence that de Mohrenschildt
served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions." Much
of the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on
the idea that he was a baby sitter, handler, case officer, or control
agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence agency. 17 De
Mohrenschildt's pedigree evokes haunting parallels to the typical
figures of the PERMINDEX networks of Georges Mandel, Ferenc Nagy, Max
Hagerman, Max Seligman, Carlo d'Amelio, Lewis Mortimer Bloomfield, and
Clay Shaw, to which public attention was called during the
investigations of New Orleans district attorney James Garrison.
It is therefore highly interesting that George Bush's name turned up
in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt. The Warren
Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that George de
Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence agencies.
This included ignoring the well-developed paper trial on de
Mohrenschildt as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a US
asset abroad. The Warren Commission concluded:
The Commission's investigation has developed no signs of subversive or
disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildts.
Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by the Commission
has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to
subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence
linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy.
18
On the day of the Kennedy assassination, FBI records show George Bush
as re****ting a right-wing member of the Houston Young Republicans for
making threatening comments about President Kennedy. According to FBI
do***ents released under the Freedom of Information Act,
On November 22, 1963 Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, 5525 Briar, Houston, Texas,
telephonically advised that he wanted to relate some hear say that he
had heard in recent weeks, date and source unknown. He advised that
one JAMES PARROTT had been talking of killing the President when he
comes to Houston.
PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is
active in politics in the Houston area.
According to related FBI do***entation, "a check with Secret Service
at Houston, Texas revealed that agency had a re****t that PARROTT
stated in 1961 he would kill President Kennedy if he got near him."
Here Bush is described as "a reputable businessman." FBI agents were
sent to interrogate Parrott's mother, and later James Milton Parrott
himself. Parrott had been discharged from the US Air Force for
psychiatric reasons in 1959. Parrott had an alibi for the time of the
Dallas shootings; he had been in the company of another Republican
activist. According to press accounts, Parrott was a member of the
right-wing faction of the Houston GOP which was oriented towards the
John Birch Society and which opposed Bush's chairman****p. 19 According
to the San Francisco Examiner, Bush's press office in August, 1988
first said that Bush had not made any such call, and challenged the
authenticity of the FBI do***ents. Several days later Bush's spokesman
said that the candidate "does not recall" placing the call.
One day later after he re****ted Parrott to the FBI, Bush received a
highly sensitive, high-level briefing from the Bureau:
Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 22, 1963
Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the
Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the
Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might
capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid
against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy might herald a change in US policy, which is not true.
Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami
area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban
community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did
not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the
feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only
to the US but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for
unauthorized action against Cuba.
An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and
who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that
those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President
may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and,
although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.
The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr.
George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William
Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by
Mr. W.T. Forsyth of this Bureau.
William T. Forsyth, since deceased, was an official of the FBI's
Wa****ngton headquarters; during the time he was attached to the
Bureau's subversive control section, he ran the investigation of Rev.
Martin Luther King. Was he also a part of the FBI's harassment of Dr.
King? The efforts of journalists to locate Captain Edwards have not
been successful.
This FBI do***ent identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November,
1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July,
1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for
president. McBride's source observed: "I know [Bush] was involved in
the Caribbean. I know he
was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy
assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups
were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA."
20 When pressed for confirmation or denial, Bush's spokesman Stephen
Hart commented: "Must be another George Bush." Within a short time the
CIA itself would peddle the same damage control line. On July 19, 1988
in the wake of wide public attention to the re****t published in The
Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA
policy of refusing to confirm or deny re****ts that any person is or
was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated press
that the CIA believed that "the record should be clarified." She said
that the FBI do***ent "apparently" referred to a George William Bush
who had worked in 1963 on the night ****ft at CIA headquarters, and
that "would have been the appropriate place to have received such an
FBI re****t." According to her account, the George William Bush in
question had left the CIA to join the Defense Intelligence Agency in
1964.
For the CIA to volunteer the name of one of its former employees to
the press was a shocking violation of traditional methods, which are
supposedly designed to keep such names a closely guarded secret. This
revelation may have constituted a violation of federal law. But no
exertions were too great when it came to damage control for George
Bush.
George William Bush had indeed worked for the CIA, the DIA, and the
Alexandria, Virginia Department of Public Welfare before joining the
Social Security Administration, in whose Arlington, Virginia office he
was employed as a claims representative in 1988. George William Bush
told The Nation that while at the CIA he was "just a lowly researcher
and analyst" who worked with do***ents and photos and never received
interagency briefings. He had never met Forsyth of the FBI or Captain
Edwards of the DIA. "So it wasn't me," said George William Bush. 21
Later, George William Bush formalized his denial in a sworn statement
to a federal court in Wa****ngton, DC. The affidavit acknowledges that
while working at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February
1964, George William Bush was the junior person on a three to four man
watch ****ft which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. But, as George
William Bush goes on to say,
I have carefully reviewed the FBI memorandum to the Director, Bureau
of Intelligence and Research, Department of State dated November 29,
1963 which mentions a Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence
Agency....I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as
information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was
at the CIA. In fact, during my time at the CIA. I did not receive any
oral communications from any government agency of any nature
whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy
assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI.
Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George
Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum.
22
So we are left with the strong suspicion that the "Mr. George Bush of
the CIA" referred to by the FBI is our own George Herbert Walker Bush,
who, in addition to his possible contact with Lee Harvey Oswald's
controller, may thus also join the ranks of the Kennedy assassination
cover-up. It makes perfect sense for George Bush to be called in on a
matter involving the Cuban community in Miami, since that is a place
where George has traditionally had a constituency. George inherited it
from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and later passed it
on to his own son, Jeb.
NOTES
1- Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July
16, 1988.
2- Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerilla Prince (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
3- Felix Rogriquez, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon and Shuster,
1989).
4- On Pluto, see the East German study by Guenter Schumacher,
Operation Pluto (Berlin, Deutscher Militaerverlag, 1964).
5- E. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day (New Rochelle: Arlington House,
1973), p. 214.
6- Secret Agenda.
7- For Operation Zapata, see Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years:
Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books,
1991), p. 89.
8- For the names of the ****ps at the Bay of Pigs, see Quintin Pino
Machado, La Batalla de Giron (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 1983), pp. 79-80. This source quotes one ****p as the Barbara
J." See also Schumacher, Operation Pluto, pp. 98-99. See also Peter
Wyden, Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Shuster,
1979), which also has the Barbara J. According to Quintin Pino
macahdo, the Houston had been given the new name of Aguja (Swordfish)
and the Barbara that of Barracuda for the purposes of this operation.
9- Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day, pp. 13-14.
10- Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 329.
11- Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 723.
12- Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), p. 339.
13- See Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red (New
York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 112 ff.
14- Re****t to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within
the United States (Wa****ngton: US Goverment Printing Office, 1975),
pp. 251-267.
15- Jim Marrs, "Widow disputes suicide," Fort Worth Evening Star-
Telegram, May 11, 1978
16- A photocopy of George de Mohrenschildt's personal address book is
preserved at the Assassination Archives and Research Center,
Wa****ngton, DC. The Bush entry is also cited in Mark Lane, Plausible
Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), p. 332.
17- For de Mohrenschildt, see Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, Edward Jay
Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (London:
Hutchinson, 1978); C. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot
to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981); and Robert Sam
Anson, "They've Killed The President!" (New York: Bantam, 1975).
18- Re****t of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President
Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 262.
19- Miguel Acoca, "FBI: 'Bush' called about JFK killing," San
Francisco Examiner, August 25, 1988.
20- Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July
16/23, 1988, p. 42
21- Joseph McBride, "Where Was George?", The Nation, August 13/20,
1988, p. 117.
22- United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil
Action 88-2600 GHR, Archives and Research Center v. Central
Intelligence Agency, Affidavit of George William Bush, September 21,
1988.
|
