NSA bosses feared releasing Gulf of Tonkin intel would draw ''uncomfortable comparisons'' with Iraq

[Octafish]

36. More from John Pilger...

According to the Pentagon Papers, the United States moved in secret to “disassociate” France from the levels of command, in southern Vietnam and to assume direct American control. This task was assigned to the newly formed CIA which, during the summer of 1954, invented a “republic of Vietnam” with Saigon as its capital. This was known by those assigned to the task as “creating the master illusion.”

— John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.183 - 184

The Dulles brothers and Nixon got a lot of people killed who shouldn't have died -- innocent people. Guess who was looking for oil in Vietnam?

CIA Helped Bush Senior In Oil Venture

By Russ Baker on Jan 7, 2007
WhoWhatWhy.com

Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, 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.

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 corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine’s role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents 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.

CONTINUED...

http://whowhatwhy.com/2007/01/07/cia-bush-senior-oil-venture/

And some DUers think the Bush family and the lot for whom they labor are A-OK.