Bush Sr. early CIA ties revealed.

[fooj]

http://realnews.org/rn/content/zapata.html

A Real News Exclusive
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.

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.

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 supported.
<snip>

Guess this is why he totally lost it at Ford's funeral. He sounded like a raving madman.

Pretty interesting read, IMO.

[bdamomma]

1. I would love to see Pappy and Jr. sharing the same cell

beating up on each other.

[fooj]

3. What a visual.

:rofl:

"Mano y mano"...LOL!

[LiberalFighter]

10. Not beating each other up

Would want to see Pappy walloping the hide off of junior that junior can't sit down for a month.

[acmavm]

2. Did anyone ever really believe a damn thing that's come out

of the mouth of anyone named bush?

Good grief, Grandpappy Prescott dealt with the Nazis. THAT SAYS IT ALL.

[Imagevision]

4. And shrub is trying to out-do his ole man? - never happen!

Poppy was deep throat -- until he heard Bob Woodward would reveal the true source of who Deep throat really was after this person died. So Poppy finds and buys the flunky to step forward taking full credit for being the Deep Throat character
so Bush's GOP wouldn't suffer in future elections. Talk about opening a can of worms.

Of yes, the reason Poppy blew the whistle on Nixon was because the Dick promised Poppy the VP. slot when he came up for re-election but it never happened!

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

5. Well, Duh.

did anyone not know this?

[texanwitch]

6. Damn right.

How else did he become the head of the CIA.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. Not an agency known for allowing outsiders

in at any level, let alone the directorship.

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. Ummm...looks like the Bush's past has finally caught up with them.

[seafan]

9. Poppy has many skeletons in his closet.

From http://realnews.org/rn/content/zapata.html"> Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed

By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project

January 8, 2007

.....

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.”

When this document was first uncovered in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."

.....

And from Chapter 9 of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:

.....

This FBI document 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 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 report published in The Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports 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 document "apparently" referred to a George William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at CIA headquarters, and that "would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report." 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 documents 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 Washington, 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 shift 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.

.....

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 leadership 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.

.....

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 important 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.

.....