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          Mon, 04 Jan 1993 03:42:37 est
Date: Mon Jan  4 03:42:20 est 1993
From: "John Covici" <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Reply-To: "John Covici" <[email protected]>
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
To: [email protected]
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 16
Status: O
X-Status:
CHAPTER 13, Part I

CHAIRMAN GEORGE IN WATERGATE


In November 1972, Bush's ``most
influential patron,'' Richard Nixon,@s1
won reelection to the White House for a
second term in a landslide victory over
the McGovern-Shriver Democratic ticket.
Nixon's election victory had proceeded
in spite of the arrest of five White
House-linked burglars in the offices of
the Democratic National Committee at
the Watergate building in Washington,
early on June 17 of the same year. This
was the beginning of the infamous
Watergate scandal, which would
overshadow and ultimately terminate
Nixon's second term in 1974.
  After the election, Bush received
a telephone call informing him that
Nixon wanted to talk to him at the Camp
David retreat in the Catoctin Mountains
of Maryland. Bush had been looking to
Washington for the inevitable personnel
changes that would be made in
preparation for Nixon's second term.
Bush tells us that he was aware of
Nixon's plan to reorganize his cabinet
around the idea of a ``super cabinet''
of top-level, inner cabinet ministers
or ``super secretaries'' who would work
closely with the White House while
relegating the day-to-day functioning
of their executive departments to
sub-cabinet deputies. One of the big
winners under this plan was scheduled
to be George Shultz, the former Labor
Secretary, who was now supposed to
become ``Super'' Secretary of the Treasury.
Shultz was a Bechtel executive who went
on to be Reagan's second Secretary of
State after Al Haig. Bush and Shultz
were future members of the Bohemian
Club of San Francisco and of the
Bohemian Grove summer gathering.
  Bush says he received a call from
Nixon's top domestic aide, John
Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman told Bush
that George Shultz wanted to see him
before he went on to meet with Nixon at
Camp David. As it turned out, Shultz
wanted to offer Bush the post of
undersecretary of the treasury, which
would amount to {de facto}
administrative control over the
department while Shultz concentrated on
his projected super secretary policy
functions.
  Bush says he thanked Shultz for
his ``flattering'' offer, took it under
consideration, and then pressed on to
Camp David.@s2

  Bush Takes RNC Chair

  At Camp David, Bush says that
Nixon talked to him in the following
terms: ``George, I know that Shultz has
talked to you about the Treasury job,
and if that's what you'd like, that's
fine with me. However, the job I really
want you to do, the place I really need
you, is over at the National Committee
running things. This is an important
time for the Republican Party, George.
We have a chance to build a new
coalition in the next four years, and
you're the one who can do it.''@s3
  But this was not the job that
George really wanted. He wanted to be
promoted, but he wanted to continue in
the personal retinue of Henry
Kissinger. ``At first Bush tried to
persuade the President to give him,
instead, the number-two job at the
State Department, as deputy to
Secretary Henry Kissinger. Foreign
affairs was his top priority, he said.
Nixon was cool to this idea, and Bush
capitulated.''@s4
  According to Bush's own account,
he asked Nixon for some time to ponder
the offer of the RNC chairmanship.
Among those whom Bush said he consulted
on whether or not to accept was Rogers
C.B. Morton, the former congressman
whom Nixon had made Secretary of
Commerce. Morton suggested that if Bush
wanted to accept, he insist that he
continue as a member of the Nixon
cabinet, where, it should be recalled,
he had been sitting since he was named
ambassador to the United Nations.
Pennsylvania Senator Hugh
Scott, one of the Republican
congressional leaders, also advised
Bush to demand to continue on in the
cabinet: ``Insist on it,'' Bush recalls
him saying. Bush also consulted
Barbara. The story goes that Bar had
demanded that George pledge that the
one job he would never take was the RNC
post. But now he wanted to take
precisely that post, which appeared to
be a political graveyard. George
explained his wimpish obedience to
Nixon: ``Boy, you can't turn a
President down.''@s5 Bush then told
Ehrlichman that he would accept, if he
could stay on in the cabinet. Nixon
approved this condition, and the era of
Chairman George had begun.
  Of course, making the chairman of
the Republican Party an ex-officio
member of the President's cabinet seems
to imply something resembling a
one-party state. But George was not
deterred by such difficulties.
  While he was at the U.N., Bush had
kept his eyes open for the next post on
the way up his personal {cursus
honorum.} In November of 1971 there was
a boomlet for Bush among Texas
Republican leaders who were looking for
a candidate to run for governor.@s6
  Nixon's choice of Bush to head the
RNC was announced on December 11, 1972.
The outgoing RNC Chairman was Senator
Bob Dole of Kansas, an asset of the
grain cartel, but, in that period, not
totally devoid of human qualities.
According to press reports, Nixon
palace guard heavies like Haldeman and
Charles W. Colson, later a central
Watergate figure, were not happy with
Dole because he would not take orders
from the White House. Dole also tended
to function as a conduit for grassroots
resistance to White House directives.
In the context of the 1972 campaign,
``White House'' means specifically
Clark MacGregor's Committee to Re-Elect
the President (CREEP), one of the
protagonists of the Watergate
scandal.@s7 Dole was considered
remarkable for his ``irreverence'' for
Nixon: ``[H]e joked about the Watergate
issue, about the White House staff and
about the management of the Republican
convention with its `spontaneous
demonstrations that will last precisely
ten minutes.'|''@s8
  Bush's own account of how he got
the RNC post ignores Dole, who was
Bush's most serious rival for the 1988
Republican presidential nomination.
According to Dole's version, he
conferred with Nixon about the RNC post
on November 28, and told the President
that he would have to quit the RNC in
1973 in order to get ready to run for
reelection in 1974. According to Dole,
it was he who recommended Bush to
Nixon. Dole even said that he had gone
to New York to convince Bush to accept
the post. Dole sought to remove any
implication that he had been fired by
Nixon, and contradicted ``speculation
that I went to the mountaintop to be
pushed off.'' What was clear was that
Nixon and his retainers had chosen a
replacement for Dole, whom they expected
to be more obedient to the commands of
the White House palace guard.
  Bush assumed his new post in
January 1973, in the midst of the trial
of the Watergate burglars. He sought at
once to convey the image of a pragmatic
technocrat. ``There's kind of a narrow
line between standing for nothing and
imposing one's views,'' Bush told the
press. He stressed that the RNC would
have a lot of money to spend for
recruiting candidates, and that he
would personally control this money.
``The White House is simply not going
to control the budget,'' said Bush. ``I
believe in the importance of this job
and I have confidence I can do it,'' he
added. ``I couldn't do it if I were
some reluctant dragon being dragged
away from a three-wine luncheon.''@s9
  Bush inaugurated his new post with
a pledge that the Republican Party,
from President Nixon on down, would do
``everything we possibly can'' to make
sure that the GOP was not involved in
political dirty tricks in the future.
``I don't think it is good for politics
in this country and I am sure I am
reflecting the President's views on
that as head of the party,'' intoned
Bush in an appearance on {Issues and
Answers.}@s1@s1
  Whether or not Bush lived up to
that pledge during his months at the
RNC, and indeed during his later
political career, will be sufficiently
answered during the following pages.
But now Chairman George, sitting in
Nixon's cabinet with such men as John
Mitchell, his eyes fixed on Henry
Kissinger as his lodestar, is about to
set sail on the turbulent seas of the
Watergate typhoon. Before we accompany
him, we must briefly review the complex
of events lumped together under the
heading of ``Watergate,'' so that we
may then situate Bush's remarkable and
bizarre behavior between January 1973
and August of 1974, when Nixon's fall
became the occasion for yet another
Bush attempt to seize the
vice-presidency.

  The Watergate Coup

  By the beginning of the 1990s, it
has become something of a commonplace
to refer to the complex of events
surrounding the fall of Nixon as a coup
d'e@aatat.@s1@s2 It was, to be sure, a
coup d'e@aatat, but one whose
organizers and beneficiaries most
commentators and historians are
reluctant to name, much less to
confront. Broadly speaking, Watergate
was a coup d'e@aatat which was
instrumental in laying the basis for
the specific new type of
authoritarian-totalitarian regime which
now rules the United States. The
purpose of the coup was to rearrange
the dominant institutions of the U.S.
government so as to enhance their
ability to carry out policies agreeable
to the increasingly urgent dictates of
the Morgan-Rockefeller-Mellon-Harriman
financier faction. The immediate
beneficiaries of the coup have been
that class of technocratic
administrators who have held the
highest public offices since the days
of the Watergate scandal. It is obvious
that George Bush himself is one of the
most prominent of such beneficiaries.
As the Roman playwright Seneca warns
us, the one who derives advantage from
the crime is the one most likely to
have committed it.
  The policies of the Wall Street
investment banking interests named are
those of usury and Malthusianism,
stressing the decline of a productive
industrial economy in favor of savage
Third World looting and anti-population
measures. The changes subsumed by
Watergate included the abolition of
government's function as a means to
distribute the rewards and benefits of
economic progress among the principal
constituency groups, upon whose support
the shifting political coalitions
depended for their success. Henceforth,
government would appear as the means by
which the sacrifices and penalties of
austerity and declining standards of
living would be imposed on a passive
and stupefied population. The
constitutional office of the President
was to be virtually destroyed, and the
power of the usurious banking elites
above and behind the presidency was to
be radically enhanced.
  The reason why the Watergate
scandal escalated into the overthrow of
Nixon has to do with the international
monetary crisis of those years, and
with Nixon's inability to manage the
collapse of the Bretton Woods system
and the U.S. dollar in a way
satisfactory to the Anglo-American
financial elite. One real-time observer
of the events of these years who
emphasized the intimate relation
between the international monetary
upheavals on the one hand and the
{peripetea} of Nixon on the other was
Lyndon LaRouche. The following comments
by LaRouche are excerpted from a July
1973 commentary on the conjuncture of a
revaluation of the deutschemark with
John Dean's testimony before Senator
Sam Ervin's Watergate investigating
committee: ``Last week's newest
up-valuation of the West German D-Mark
pushed the inflation-soaked Nixon
Administration one very large step
closer toward `Watergate'
impeachment. Broad bi-partisan support
and press enthusiasm for the televised
Senate Select Committee airing of
wide-ranging revelations coincides with
surging contempt for the government's
handling of international and domestic
financial problems over the past six
months.''
  LaRouche went on to point out why
the same financiers and news media who
had encouraged a coverup of the
Watergate scandal during 1972 had
decided during 1973 to use the break-in
and coverup as a means of overthrowing
Nixon: ``Then came the January
[1973] Paris meeting of the
International Monetary Fund. The world
monetary system was glutted with over
$60 billions of inconvertible reserves.
The world economy was technically
bankrupt. It was kept out of actual
bankruptcy proceedings throughout 1972
solely by the commitment of the U.S.A.
to agree to some January, 1973 plan by
which most of these $60 billions would
begin to become convertible. The
leading suggestion was that the excess
dollars would be gradually sopped in
exchange for IMF Special Drawing Rights
(SDRs). With some such White House IMF
action promised for January, 1973, the
financial world had kept itself more or
less wired together by sheer political
will throughout 1972.
  ``Then, into the delicate January
Paris IMF sessions stepped Mr. Nixon's
representatives. His delegates
proceeded to break up the meeting with
demands for trade and tariff
concessions--a virtual declaration of
trade war.
  ``Promptly, the financial markets
registered their reaction to Mr.
Nixon's bungling by plunging into
crisis.
  ``To this, Mr. Nixon shortly
responded with devaluation of the
dollar, a temporary expedient giving a
very brief breathing-space to get back
to the work of establishing dollar
convertibility. Nixon continued his
bungling, suggesting that this
devaluation made conditions more
favorable for negotiating trade and
tariff concessions--more trade war.
  ``The financiers of the world
weighed Mr. Nixon's wisdom, and began
selling the dollar at still-greater
discounts. Through successive crises,
Mr. Nixon continued to speak only of
John Connally's Holy Remedies of trade
and tariff concessions. Financiers
thereupon rushed substantially out of
all currencies into such hedges as
world-wide commodity speculation on a
scale unprecedented in modern history.
Still, Mr. Nixon had nothing to propose
on dollar convertibility--only trade
wars. The U.S. domestic economy
exploded into Latin American style
inflation.
  ``General commodity speculation,
reflecting a total loss of confidence
in all currencies, seized upon basic
agricultural commodities--among others.
Feed prices soared, driving meat,
poultry, and produce costs and prices
toward the stratosphere.
  ``It was during this period, as
Nixon's credibility seemed so much less
important than during late 1972, that a
sudden rush of enthusiasm developed for
the moral sensibilities of Chairman Sam
Ervin's Senate Select
Committee.''@s1@s3
  As LaRouche points out, it was the
leading Anglo-American financier
factions which decided to dump Nixon, and
availed themselves of the preexisting
Watergate affair in order to reach
their goal. The financiers were able to
implement their decision all the more
easily, thanks to the numerous
operatives of the intelligence
community who had been embedded within
the Plumbers from the moment of their
creation in response to an explicit
demand coming from George Bush's
personal mentor, Henry Kissinger.
  Watergate included the option of
rapid steps in the direction of a
dictatorship, not so much of the
military as of the intelligence
community and the law enforcement
agencies, acting as executors of the
will of the Wall Street circles
indicated. We must recall that the
backdrop for Watergate had been
provided first of all by the collapse
of the international monetary system,
as made official by Nixon's austerity
decrees imposing a wage and price
freeze starting on the fateful day of
August 15, 1971. What followed was an
attempt to run the entire U.S. economy
under the top-down diktat of the Pay
Board and the Price Commission.
  This economic state of emergency
was then compounded by the artificial
oil shortages orchestrated by the
companies of the international oil
cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all
in the wake of Kissinger's October 1973
Middle East War and the Arab oil
boycott.
  In August 1974, when Gerald Ford
decided to make Nelson Rockefeller, and
not George Bush, his vice
president-designate, he was actively
considering further executive orders to
declare a new economic state of
emergency. Such colossal economic
dislocations had impelled the new
Trilateral Commission and such
theorists as Samuel Huntington to
contemplate the inherent
ungovernability of democracy and the
necessity of beginning a transition
toward forms that would prove more
durable under conditions of aggravated
economic breakdown. Ultimately, much to
the disappointment of George Bush,
whose timetable of boundless personal
ambition and greed for power had once
again surged ahead of what his peers of
the ruling elite were prepared to
accept, the perspectives for a more
overtly dictatorial form of regime came
to be embodied in the figure of Vice
President Nelson Rockefeller. Skeptics
will point to the humiliating
announcement, made by President Ford
within the context of his 1975
``Halloween massacre'' reshuffle of key
posts, that Rockefeller would not be
considered for the 1976
vice-presidential nomination. But
Rockefeller, thanks to the efforts of
Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette
``Squeaky'' Fromme, each of whom
attempted to assassinate Ford, had
already come very close to the Oval
Office on two separate occasions.
  Ford himself was reputedly one of
the most exalted freemasons ever to
occupy the presidency. Preponderant
power during the last years of Nixon
and during the Ford years was in any
case exercised by Henry Kissinger, the
de facto President. The preserving of
constitutional form and ritual as a
hollow facade behind which to realize
practices more and more dictatorial in
their substance was a typical pragmatic
adaptation made possible by the ability
of the financiers to engineer the slow
and gradual decline of the economy,
avoiding upheavals of popular protest.
  But in retrospect, there can be no
doubt that Watergate was a coup
d'e@aatat, a creeping and muffled cold
coup in the institutions which has
extended its consequences over almost
two decades. Among contemporary
observers, the one who grasped this
significance most lucidly in the midst
of the events themselves was Lyndon
LaRouche, who produced a wealth of
journalistic and analytical material
during 1973 and 1974. The roots of the
administrative fascism of the Reagan
and Bush years are to be found in the
institutional tremors and changed power
relations set off by the banal farce of
the Watergate break-in.

  Hollywood's Watergate

  In the view of the dominant school
of pro-regime journalism, the essence
of the Watergate scandal lies in the
illegal espionage and surveillance
activity of the White House covert
operations team, the so-called
Plumbers, who are alleged to have been
caught during an attempt to burglarize
the offices of the Democratic National
Committee in the Watergate office
building near the Potomac. The supposed
goal of the break-in was to filch
information and documents while
planting bugs. According to the
official legend of the {Washington
Post} and Hollywood, Nixon and his
retainers responded to the arrest of
the burglars by compounding their
original crime with obstruction of
justice and all of the abuses of a
coverup. Then, the {Washington Post}
journalists Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein, dedicated partisans of the
truth, blew the story open with the
help of Woodward's mysterious source,
Deep Throat, setting into motion the
investigation of the Senate committee
under Sam Ervin, leading to impeachment
proceedings by Rep. Peter Rodino's
House Judiciary Committee which
ultimately forced Nixon to resign.
  The received interpretation of the
salient facts of the Watergate episode
is a fantastic and grotesque distortion
of historical truth. Even the kind of
cursory examination of the facts in
Watergate which we can permit ourselves
within the context of a biography of
Watergate figure George Bush will
reveal that the actions which caused
the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced to
the simplistic account just summarized.
There is, for example, the question of
the infiltration of the White House
staff and of the Plumbers themselves by
members and assets of the intelligence
community whose loyalty was not to
Nixon, but to the Anglo-American
financier elite. This includes the
presence among the Plumbers of numerous
assets of the Central Intelligence
Agency, and specifically of the CIA
bureaus traditionally linked to George
Bush, such as the Office of
Security-Security Research Staff and
the Miami Station with its pool of
Cuban operatives.

  Who Paid the Plumbers?

  The Plumbers were created at the
demand of Henry Kissinger, who told
Nixon that something had to be done to
stop leaks in the wake of the
``Pentagon Papers'' affair of 1971. But
if the Plumbers were called into
existence by Kissinger, they were
funded through a mechanism set up by
Kissinger clone George Bush. A salient
fact about the White House Special
Investigations Unit (or Plumbers) of
1971-72 is that the money used to
finance it was provided by George
Bush's business partner and lifelong
intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the
president of Pennzoil. Bill Liedtke was
a regional finance chairman for the
Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, and
he was one of the most successful.
Liedtke says that he accepted this post
as a personal favor to George Bush. In
1972, Bill Liedtke raised $700,000 in
anonymous contributions, including what
appears to have been a single
contribution of $100,000 that was
laundered through a bank account in
Mexico. According to Harry Hurt, part
of this money came from Bush's bosom
crony Robert Mosbacher, now Secretary
of Commerce. According to one account,
``two days before a new law was
scheduled to begin making anonymous
donations illegal, the $700,000 in
cash, checks, and securities was loaded
into a briefcase at Pennzoil
headquarters and picked up by a company
vice president, who boarded a
Washington-bound Pennzoil jet and
delivered the funds to the Committee to
Re-Elect the President at ten o'clock
that night.''@s1@s4
  These Mexican checks were turned
over first to Maurice Stans of the
CREEP, who transferred them in turn to
Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy. Liddy
passed them on to Bernard Barker, one
of the Miami station Cubans arrested on
the night of the final Watergate
break-in. Barker was actually carrying
some of the cash left over from these
checks when he was apprehended. When
Barker was arrested, his bank records
were subpoenaed by the Dade County,
Florida district attorney, Richard E.
Gerstein, and were obtained by
Gerstein's chief investigator, Martin
Dardis. As Dardis told Carl Bernstein
of the {Washington Post,} about
$100,000 in four cashier's checks had
been issued in Mexico City by Manuel
Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent lawyer
who handled Stans's money-laundering
operation there.@s1@s5 Liedtke
eventually appeared before three grand
juries investigating the different
aspects of the Watergate affair, but
neither he nor Pennzoil was ever
brought to trial for the CREEP
contributions. But it is a matter of
more than passing interest that the
money for the Plumbers came from one of
Bush's intimates and, at the request of
Bush, a member of the Nixon cabinet
from February 1971 on.
  The U.S. House of Representatives
Banking and Currency Committee, chaired
by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, soon
began a vigorous investigation of the
money financing the break-in, large
amounts of which were found as cash in
the pockets of the burglars.
  Patman confirmed that the largest
amount of the funds going into the
Miami bank account of Watergate burglar
Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since
the Bay of Pigs invasion, was the
$100,000 sent in by Texas CREEP
chairman William Liedtke, longtime
business partner of George Bush. The
money was sent from Houston down to
Mexico, where it was ``laundered'' to
eliminate its accounting trail. It then
came back to Barker's account as four
checks totaling $89,000 and $11,000 in
cash. A smaller amount, an anonymous
$25,000 contribution, was sent in by
Minnesota CREEP officer Kenneth
Dahlberg in the form of a cashier's
check.
  Patman relentlessly pursued the
true sources of this money, as the best
route to the truth about who ran the
break-in, and for what purpose. CREEP
National Chairman Maurice Stans later
described the situation just after the
burglars were arrested as made
dangerous by ``... Congressman Wright
Patman and several of his political
hatchet men working on the staff of the
House Banking and Currency Committee.
Without specific authorization by his
committee, Patman announced that he was
going to investigate the Watergate
matter, using as his entry the banking
transactions of the Dahlberg and
Mexican checks. In the guise of
covering that ground, he obviously
intended to roam widely, and he almost
did, but his own committee, despite its
Democratic majority, eventually stopped
him.''
  These are the facts that Patman
had established--before ``his own
committee ... stopped him.''
  The anonymous Minnesota $25,000
had in fact been provided to Dahlberg
by Dwayne Andreas, chief executive of
the Archer Daniels Midland grain
trading company.
  The Texas $100,000, sent by
Liedtke, in fact came from Robert H.
Allen, a mysterious nuclear weapons
materials executive. Allen was chairman
of Gulf Resources and Chemical
Corporation in Houston. His company
controlled half the world's supply of
lithium, an essential component of
hydrogen bombs.
  On April 3, 1972 (75 days before
the Watergate arrests), $100,000 was
transferred by telephone from a bank
account of Gulf Resources and Chemical
Corp. into a Mexico City account of an
officially defunct subsidiary of Gulf
Resources. Gulf Resources' Mexican
lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre,
withdrew it and sent back to Houston
the package of four checks and cash,
which Liedtke forwarded for the CIA
burglars.@s1@s6
  Robert H. Allen was Texas CREEP's
chief financial officer, while Bush
partner William Liedtke was overall
chairman. But what did Allen represent?
  In keeping with its strategic
nuclear holdings, Allen's Gulf
Resources was a kind of committee of
the main components of the London-New
York oligarchy. Formed in the late
1960s, Gulf Resources had taken over
the New York-based Lithium Corporation
of America. The president of this
subsidiary was Gulf Resources Executive
Vice President Harry D. Feltenstein,
Jr. John Roger Menke, a director of
both Gulf Resources and Lithium Corp.,
was also a consultant and director of
the United Nuclear Corporation, and a
director of the Hebrew Technical
Institute. The ethnic background of the
Lithium subsidiary is of interest due
to Israel's known preoccupation with
developing a nuclear weapons arsenal.
  Another Gulf Resources and Lithium
Corp. director was Minnesotan Samuel H.
Rogers, who was also a director of
Dwayne Andreas's Archer Daniels Midland
Corp. Andreas was a large financial
backer of the ``Zionist lobby'' through
the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
B'nith.
  Gulf Resources Chairman Robert H.
Allen received the ``Torch of Liberty''
award of the Anti-Defamation League in
1982. Allen was a white Anglo-Saxon
conservative. No credible reason for
this award was supplied to the press,
and the ADL stated their satisfaction
that Mr. Allen's financing of the
Watergate break-in was simply a
mistake, now in the distant past.
  From the beginning of Gulf
Resources, there was always a
representative on its board of New
York's Bear Stearns firm, whose partner
Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., pioneered
leveraged buyouts and merged with
Bush's Henry Kravis.
  The most prestigious board member
of Allen's Gulf Resources was George A.
Butler, otherwise the chairman of
Houston's Post Oak Bank. Butler
represented the ultra-secretive W. S.
(``Auschwitz'') Farish III, confidant
of George Bush and U.S. host of Queen
Elizabeth. Farish was the founder and
controlling owner of Butler's Post Oak
Bank, and was chairman of the bank's
executive committee as of 1988.@s1@s7
  A decade after Watergate, it was
revealed that the Hunt family had
controlled about 15 percent of Gulf
Resources shares. This Texas oil family
hired George Bush in 1977 to be the
executive committee chairman of their
family enterprise, the First
International Bank in Houston. In the
1980s, Ray Hunt secured a massive oil
contract with the ruler of North Yemen
under the sponsorship of then-Vice
President Bush. Ray Hunt continues in
the 1991-92 presidential campaign as
George Bush's biggest Texas financial
angel.
  Here, in this one powerful Houston
corporation, we see early indications
of the alliance of George Bush with the
``Zionist lobby''--an alliance which
for political reasons the Bush camp
wishes to keep covert.
  These, then, are the
Anglo-American moguls whose money paid
for the burglary of the Watergate
Hotel. It was their money that Richard
Nixon was talking about on the famous
``smoking gun'' tape which lost him the
presidency.

  The Investigation Is Derailed

  On Oct. 3, 1972, the House Banking
and Currency Committee voted 20-15
against Chairman Wright Patman's
investigation. The vote prevented the
issuance of 23 subpoenas for CREEP
officials to come to Congress to
testify.
  The margin of protection to the
moguls was provided by six Democratic
members of the committee who voted with
the Republicans against Chairman
Patman. As CREEP Chairman Maurice Stans
put it, ``There were ... indirect
approaches to Democratic [committee]
members. An all-out campaign was
conducted to see that the investigation
was killed off, as it successfully
was.''@s1@s8
  Certain elements of this infamous
``campaign'' are known.
  Banking Committee member Frank
Brasco, a liberal Democratic
congressman from New York, voted to
stop the probe. New York Governor
Nelson Rockefeller had arranged a
meeting between Brasco and U.S.
Attorney General John Mitchell. Brasco
had been a target of a Justice
Department investigation for alleged
fraud and bribery since 1970, and
Mitchell successfully warned Brasco not
to back Patman. Later, in 1974, Brasco
was convicted of bribery.
  Before Watergate, both John
Mitchell and Henry Kissinger had FBI
reports implicating California
Congressman Richard Hanna in the
receipt of illegal campaign
contributions from the Korean Central
Intelligence Agency. Hanna surprised
Patman by voting against the
investigation. Hanna was later (1978)
convicted for his role in the Koreagate
scandal in 1978.
  The secretary of Congressman
William Chappell complained in 1969
that the Florida Democrat had forced
her to kick back some of her salary.
The Justice Department, holding this
information, had declined to prosecute.
Chappell, a member of the Banking
Committee, voted to stop Patman's
investigation.
  Kentucky Democratic Congressman
William Curlin, Jr. revealed in 1973
that ``certain members of the committee
were reminded of various past political
indiscretions, or of relatives who
might suffer as a result of [a]
pro-subpoena vote.''
  The Justice Department worked
overtime to smear Patman, including an
attempt to link him to ``Communist
agents'' in Greece.@s1@s9
  The day before the committee vote,
the Justice Department released a
letter to Patman claiming that any
congressional investigation would
compromise the rights of the accused
Watergate burglars before their trial.
  House Republican leader Gerald
Ford led the attack on Patman from
within the Congress. Though he later
stated his regrets for this vicious
campaign, his eventual reward was the
U.S. presidency.
  Canceling the Patman probe meant
that there would be no investigation of
Watergate before the 1972 presidential
election. The {Washington Post}
virtually ended reference to the
Watergate affair, and spoke of Nixon's
opponent, George McGovern, as
unqualified for the presidency.
  The Republican Party was handed
another four-year administration. Bush,
Kissinger, Rockefeller and Ford were
the gainers.
  But then Richard Nixon became the
focus of all Establishment attacks for
Watergate, while the money trail that
Patman had pursued was forgotten.
Wright Patman was forced out of his
committee chairmanship in 1974. On the
day Nixon resigned the presidency,
Patman wrote to Peter Rodino, chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee,
asking him not to stop investigating
Watergate. Though Patman died in 1976,
his advice still holds good.

  The CIA Plumbers

  As the late FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover told the journalist Andrew Tully
in the days before June 1972, ``By God,
he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men
working for him that I'd kick out of my
office. Someday, that bunch will serve
him up a fine mess.''@s2@s0 The CIA men
in question were among the Plumbers, a
unit allegedly created in the first
place to stanch the flow of leaks,
including the Jack Anderson material
about such episodes as the December
1971 brush with nuclear war discussed
above. Leading Plumbers included
retired high officials of the CIA.
Plumber and Watergate burglar E. Howard
Hunt had been a GS-15 CIA staff
officer; he had played a role in the
1954 toppling of Guatemalan President
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and later had
been one of the planners in the Bay of
Pigs invasion of 1961. After the
failure of the Bay of Pigs, Hunt is
thought to have been a part of the
continuing CIA attempts to assassinate
Castro, code-named Operation Mongoose,
ongoing at the time of the Kennedy
assassination. All of this puts him in
the thick of the CIA Miami station. One
of Hunt's close personal friends was
Howard Osborne, an official of the CIA
Office of Security who was the
immediate superior of James McCord. In
the spring of 1971 Hunt went to Miami
to recruit from among the Cubans the
contingent of Watergate burglars,
including Bernard Barker, Eugenio
Marti@aanez, and the rest. This was two
months before the publication of the
``Pentagon Papers,'' leaked by Daniel
Ellsberg, provided Kissinger with the
pretext he needed to get Nixon to
initiate what would shortly become the
Plumbers.
  Another leading Watergate burglar
was James McCord, a former top official
of the CIA Office of Security, the
agency bureau which is supposed to
maintain contacts with U.S. police
agencies in order to facilitate its
basic task of providing security for
CIA installations and personnel. The
Office of Security was thus heavily
implicated in the CIA's illegal
domestic operations, including
``Cointelpro'' operations against political
dissidents and groups, and was the
vehicle for such mind-control
experiments as Operations Bluebird,
Artichoke, and MK-Ultra. The Office of
Security also utilized male and female
prostitutes and other sex operatives
for purposes of compromising and
blackmailing public figures,
information gathering, and control.
According to Hougan, the Office of
Security maintained a ``fag file'' of
some 300,000 U.S. citizens, with heavy
stress on homosexuals. The Office of
Security also had responsibility for
Soviet and other defectors. James
McCord was at one time responsible for
the physical security of all CIA
premises in the U.S. McCord was also a
close friend of CIA Counterintelligence
Director James Jesus Angleton. McCord
was anxious to cover the CIA's role; at
one point he wrote to his superior,
General Gaynor, urging him to ``flood
the newspapers with leaks or anonymous
letters'' to discredit those who wanted
to establish the responsibility of
``the company.''@s2@s1 But according to
one of McCord's own police contacts,
Garey Bittenbender of the Washington, D.C.
Police Intelligence Division, who
recognized him after his arrest, McCord
had averred to him that the Watergate
break-ins had been ``a CIA operation,''
an account which McCord heatedly denied
later.@s2@s2
  The third leader of the Watergate
burglars, G. Gordon Liddy, had worked
for the FBI and the Treasury. Liddy's
autobiography, {Will,} published in
1980, and various statements show that
Liddy's world outlook had a number of
similarities with that of George Bush:
He was, for example, obsessed with the
maintenance and transmission of his
``family gene pool.''
  Another key member of the Plumbers
unit was John Paisley, who functioned
as the official CIA liaison to the
White House investigative unit. It was
Paisley who assumed responsibility for
the overall ``leak analysis,'' that is
to say, for defining the problem of
unauthorized divulging of classified
material which the Plumbers were
supposed to combat. Paisley, along with
Howard Osborne of the Office of
Security, met with the Plumbers, led by
Kissinger operative David Young, at CIA
headquarters in Langley, Virginia on
August 9, 1971. Paisley's important
place on the Plumbers' roster is most
revealing, since Paisley was later to
become an important appointee of CIA
Director George Bush. In the middle of
1976, Bush decided to authorize a group
of experts, ostensibly from outside
the CIA, to produce an analysis which
would be compared with the CIA's own
National Intelligence Estimates on
Soviet capabilities and intentions. The
panel of outside experts was given the
designation of ``Team B.'' Bush chose
Paisley to be the CIA's ``coordinator''
of the three subdivisions of Team B.
Paisley would later disappear while
sailing on Chesapeake Bay in September
of 1978.
  In a White House memorandum by
David Young summarizing the August 9,
1971 meeting between the Plumbers and
the official CIA leaders, we find that
Young ``met with Howard Osborn and a
Mr. Paisley to review what it was that
we wanted CIA to do in connection with
their files on leaks from January 1969
to the present.'' There then follows a
14-point list of leaks and their
classification, including the frequency
of leaks associated with certain
journalists, the gravity of the leaks,
and so forth. A data base was called
for, and ``it was decided that Mr.
Paisley would get this done by next
Monday, August 16, 1971.'' On areas
where more clarification was needed,
the memo noted, ``the above questions
should be reviewed with Paisley within
the next two days.''@s2@s3
  The lesser Watergate burglars came
from the ranks of the CIA Miami station
Cubans: Bernard Barker, Eugenio
Marti@aanez, Felipe de Diego, Frank
Surgis, Virgilio Gonza@aalez and
Reinaldo Pico. Once they had started
working for Hunt, Marti@aanez asked the
Miami station chief, Jake Esterline, if
he was familiar with the activities now
being carried out under White House
cover. Esterline in turn asked Langley
for its opinion of Hunt's White House
position. A reply was written by Cord
Meyer, later openly profiled as a Bush
admirer, to Deputy Director for Plans
(that is to say, covert operations)
Thomas Karamessines. The import of
Meyer's directions to Esterline was
that the latter should ``not ...
concern himself with the travels of
Hunt in Miami, that Hunt was on
domestic White House business of an
unknown nature and that the Chief of
Station should `cool it.'|''@s2@s4

  Notes for Chapter 13

  1.
Fitzhugh Green, {George Bush:
An Intimate Portrait} (New York:
Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 137.

  2.
George Bush and Victor Gold,
{Looking Forward} (New York: Doubleday,
1987), pp. 120-21.

  3.
{Ibid.,} p. 121.

  4.
Green, {op. cit.,} p. 129.

  5.
Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush,
Plucky Lad,'' in {Texas Monthly,} June
1983.

  6.
{Dallas Morning News,} Nov. 25,
1971.

  7.
{Washington Post,} Dec. 12,
1972.

  8.
{Ibid.}

  9.
{Washington Post,} Jan. 22,
1973.

  11.
{Washington Post,} Jan. 22,
1973.

  12.
See for example Len Cholodny and
Robert Gettlin, {Silent Coup} (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).

  13.
Lyn Marcus, ``Up-Valuation of
German Mark Fuels Watergate Attack on
Nixon,'' {New Solidarity,} July 9-13,
1973, pp. 10-11.

  14.
See Thomas Petzinger, {Oil and
Honor} (New York: Putnam, 1987), pp.
64-65. See also Harry Hurt's article
mentioned above. Wright Patman's House
Banking Committee revealed part of the
activities of Bill Liedtke and
Mosbacher during the Watergate era.

  15.
Carl Bernstein and Bob
Woodward, {All the President's Men}
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974),
present the checks received by Barker
as one of the ways they breached the
wall of secrecy around the CREEP, with
the aid of their anonymous source
``Bookkeeper.'' But neither in this
book nor in {The Final Days} (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1976), do
``Woodstein'' get around to mentioning
that the Mexico City money came from
Bill Liedtke. This marked pattern of
silence and reticence on matters
pertaining to George Bush, certainly
one of the most prominent of the
President's men, is a characteristic of
Watergate journalism in general.
  For more information regarding
William Liedtke's role in financing the
CREEP, see Hearings Before the Select
Committee on Presidential Campaign
Activities, 93rd Congress, including
testimony by Hugh Sloan, June 6, 1973;
and by Maurice Stans, June 12, 1973;
see also the Final Report of the
committee, issued in June, 1974.
Relevant press coverage from the period
includes ``Stans Scathes Report,'' by
Woodward and Bernstein, {Washington
Post,} Sept. 14, 1972; and ``Liedtke
Linked to FPC Choice,'' United Press
International, June 26, 1973. Liedtke
also influenced Nixon appointments in
areas of interest to himself.

  16.
{New York Times,} Aug. 26,
1972 and Nov. 1, 1972.

  17.
Interview with a Post Oak Bank
executive, Nov. 21, 1991. See also
{Houston Post,} Dec. 27, 1988.

  18.
Maurice H. Stans, {The Terrors
of Justice: The Untold Side of
Watergate} (New York: Everest, 1978).

  19.
Stanley L. Kutler, {The Wars
of Watergate: The Last Crisis of
Richard Nixon} (New York: Knopf,
distributed by Random House, 1990), pp.
229-33.

  20.
See Jim Hougan, {Secret
Agenda} (New York: Random House, 1984),
p. 92.

  21.
Ervin Committee Hearings, Book
9, pp. 3441-46, and Report of the Nedzi
Committee of the House of
Representatives, p. 201, cited by
Hougan, {op. cit.,} p. 318.

  22.
Nezdi Committee Report, pp.
442-43, quoted in Hougan, {op. cit.,}
p. 261.

  23.
Hougan, {op. cit.,} pp. 46-47.

  24.
 Ervin Committee Final Report,
pp. 1146-49, and Hougan, {op. cit.,}
pp. 131-32.

----         John Covici
         [email protected]

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