Edwin Pauley's Role in American Fascism

Excerpt (pps. 356-376) from:

The Secret War Against the Jews
by John Loftus & Mark Aarons ©1994

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New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press

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CHAPTER 16--THE MEXICAN CONNECTION

The history books say that George Bush was a war hero, a Texas entrepreneur, then a senior figure in several Republican administrations. As president, he worked for a kinder, gentler nation. Our sources in the intelligence community said that the American public knows more about Kurt Waldheim's background than they do about President Bush's. George was himself one of the "old spies."[1]

The American voters who read Bush's 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, certainly would have had no idea about many of the seamier sides to his family background, his business and espionage activities, and his political career. It was a thoroughly sanitized version of history. But does that make him a bad man?

According to a recent history, Spider's Web, by Alan Friedman, George Bush
was certainly a devious man. The American arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia begun by Carter were illegally diverted to Iraq soon after Reagan and Bush took office. Once American arms started going to the Arabs, only a few regimes, such as Gadhafi's Libya, could not obtain shipments. It was Bush himself who arranged the financing, established the policy, and created the covert arms network that backed Saddam Hussein .[2]

As discussed in the last chapter, when Bush was director of the CIA in the 1970s, the Agency published false oil data to justify the arming of the Arab nations. After Bush returned to office in the 1980s, his arms-for-oil agenda became clear. According to Friedman's analysis of CIA files, U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil increased twelvefold to over 1 million barrels a day, which helped finance Iraq's war machine .[3]
From the beginning, Bush's policy was clearly tilted toward the Arabs and away from Israel. In 1981, when the Israelis destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak, Bush was the first world leader to say that Israel needed to be punished.[4] Even after Iraq turned American weapons against Israel in the Gulf War in 1991, Bush refused to permit Israeli pilots to defend their country for fear it would irritate the other Arab nations. The Israeli intelligence officers we spoke to regard Bush as their most vicious American opponent since Allen Dulles.[5]

There is, however, no consensus among the Western intelligence community. Some of our sources agree with the Israelis that George Bush was the last, and the worst, of the Dulles clique that brought the CIA into discredit.[6] Others say that George Bush is a good man with bad friends. His only major character flaw was an excessive personal loyalty to friends and family. Bush himself was ignorant of the plotting that went on around him.[7]

Although it is true that your friends will do you more damage than your enemies, at some point Bush's defense of ignorance wears a bit thin. A joke going around during the Iran-Contra scandal said that "The two biggest lies in Washington are that Ronald Reagan was in the loop and George Bush was out of it." Because of the importance of Bush's role in the history of covert operations against Israel, we discuss his background in some detail. It is a history that has never been revealed fully before.

In this chapter we consider the following allegations:

• Bush's father and grandfather worked with Allen Dulles to finance the Third Reich and then, when war broke out, cloaked their activities under the cover of intelligence operations.
• George Bush established an oil leasing business in Texas, the biggest client of which was Edwin Pauley, Dulles's confidant, Nixon's bagman, and a front man for CIA money laundering. Bush himself played a minor role in CIA covert operations from the early 1960s.
• Through Pauley, Nixon recruited Bush to handle a variety of sensitive assignments. Bush later asked Nixon to resign for fear that the Watergate investigations might uncover further scandals.
• While not anti-Semitic, Bush was definitely anti-Israeli and pro-Arab, abias that colored American oil and arms policy in the Middle East.

The real story of George Bush starts well before he launched his own career. It goes back to the 1920s, when the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of  Wall Street were first making their deals with the Nazis. To understand Bush's role as a senior official of the Republican party, as head of the CIA, as U.S. vice president, and then, ultimately, in the White House, it is important to trace the Bush family roots right back to the beginning of the secret espionage war against the Jews.

Bush's family, say many of the former intelligence officers we interviewed for this chapter, was nothing to be proud of. The family, and especially his grandfather and father, dragged him into some dirty business, and he stayed with it too long, trying to make a bad thing good.[8]

George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert "Bert" Walker, a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street. The obituary in The New York Times, which recorded Walker's death in 1953, mainly highlighted his sporting achievements, in both golf and horse racing, and his role in financing the "new" Madison Square Garden in the mid-1920s.[9]

Apart from disclosing that "Grandfather Walker" came from "a devout Catholic family," was named after the poet George Herbert, and formed his own investment firm, George Bush revealed practically nothing about his grandfather in his autobiography.[10] However, there was another, far seamier side to George Walker. Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. As mentioned in earlier chapters, there were American contributors as well.

Some Americans were just bigots and made their connections to Germany through Allen Dulles's firm of Sullivan & Cromwell because they supported fascism. The Dulles brothers, who were in it for profit more than ideology, arranged American investments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to ensure that their clients did well out of the German economic recovery. "Dulles clearly emphasized projects for Germany ... and for Mussolini's fascist state . . .All told, these and more than a dozen similar transactions had a combined value in excess of a billion dollars."[11]

Sullivan & Cromwell was not the only firm engaged in funding Germany.  According to The Splendid Blond Beast, Christopher Simpson's seminal history of the politics of genocide and profit, Brown Brothers, Harriman was another bank that specialized in investments in Germany. The key figure in the firm was Averell Harriman, a dominating figure in the American establishment, who for almost half a century helped form many of Washington's major foreign policies. Some of his allies in this latter endeavor who also served on the firm's board included Robert Lovett [married to the daughter of the senior partner of Brown Brothers, the investment bank W.Averell Harriman and his brother merged their investment banking firms with in 1931 to form Brown Brothers Harriman], who as previously discussed worked closely with James Forrestal to lead the State Department's revolt against Truman's pro-Zionist policy during the UN debate on the partition of Palestine, and George Bush's father, Prescott, who later became a U.S. Senator.[12]

The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through the Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors.[13] "Bert" Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York.[14]

In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine.[15] As we shall see, there is substantial evidence to support this charge.

While the United States languished in the Depression, Walker made millions for his clients by investing in Germany's economic revival. He decided to quit W. A. Harriman in 1931, to concentrate on his own firm, G. H. Walker, while his son-in-law stayed behind to run the show for Harriman. Some say that Walker left George Bush's father holding the bag. Others say that Bush specialized in British investors in Nazi Germany, while Walker handled the Americans.[16]

In that same year Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking.

Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States.[17] The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking. In an elaborate corporate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averell Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush.[18]

In order to understand the character of the firm, it should be recalled that
Brown Brothers, Harriman had a bad reputation, even among international
bankers, as hard-nosed capitalists who exploited every opportunity for profit
in a harsh and ruthless manner. In a November 1935 article in Common Sense,

By Gen. Smedley Butler

retired marine general Smedley D. Butler blamed Brown Brothers, Harriman for having the U.S. marines act like "racketeers" and "gangsters" in order to exploit financially the peasants of Nicaragua.[19]

At some point, Prescott Bush must have realized that his father-in-law was, to put it mildly, a very shady character. A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's "Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States."[20] Walker did not know it, but one of his American employees, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress. Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent. As previously mentioned, Harkins kept up the pretense of being an ardent Nazi sympathizer, while reporting to Naval Intelligence on the shipping company's deals with Nazi intelligence.[21]

To this day, we do not know if Prescott Bush stayed on board out of loyalty to his father-in-law or because the money was so good. Instead of divesting the Nazi money, Bush hired a lawyer to hide the assets. The lawyer he hired had considerable expertise in such underhanded schemes. It was Allen Dulles. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936. In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as "Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock."
As discussed in Chapter 3, Standard Oil of New Jersey had completed a major stock transaction with Dulles's Nazi client, I. G. Farben. By the end of January 1937 Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account: "Brown Brothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock." Schroder, of course, was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The "Rock" were the Rockefellers of Standard Oil, who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. By May 1939 Dulles handled another problem for Brown Brothers, Harriman, their "Securities Custodian Accounts."[23]

If Dulles was trying to conceal how many Nazi holding companies Brown Brothers, Harriman was connected with, he did not do a very good job. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, word leaked from Washington that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in time of war. In February 1942 George Bush's father, who was by then the senior managing partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman, tried to wrap himself in the American flag. He became the national chairman of the United Service Organization's
annual fund campaign, which raised $33 million that year to provide entertainment for Allied troops.[24]

The cover story did not work. The government investigation against Prescott Bush continued. just before the storm broke, his son, George, abandoned his plans to enter Yale and enlisted in the U.S. Army. It was, say our sources among the former intelligence officers, a valiant attempt by an eighteen-year-old boy to save the family's honor.[25]

Young George was in flight school in October 1942, when the U.S. government charged his father with running Nazi front groups in the United States. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being in effect held for enemy nationals. Union Banking, of course, was an affiliate of Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Bush handled the Hairrimans' investments as well.[26]

Once the government had its hands on Bush's books, the whole story of the intricate web of Nazi front corporations began to unravel. A few days later two of Union Banking's subsidiaries-the Holland American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporationalso were seized. Then the government went after the Harriman Fifteen Holding Company, which Bush shared with his father-in-law, Bert Walker, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Silesian-American Corporation. The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort.[27]

In the midst of the patriotic fervor over the war, it must have been a crushing experience for young George to know that his father and grandfather were among the men who helped finance Hitler's war machine. Little wonder that Bush made no mention of the whole affair in his autobiography. Still, his relatives were very lucky not to have gone to jail. Like Dulles, they volunteered to become spies for the war effort. George's grandfather, Bert Walker, went to Supreme Allied Headquarters in London to advise on covert "psychological operations." Prescott Bush's clients, including the Thyssens, fled to Switzerland, where they joined Dulles's anti-Hitler underground.[28]

Prescott himself had served in Military Intelligence during World War I, liaising with the British. According to our sources, he was trained by Stewart Menzies, later head of the British secret service during World War II.[29] Menzies knew that there were too many British investors in Brown Brothers, Harriman to make an issue out of their aid to Nazi Germany. It was better to bury the scandal.

By 1945 young George was a bona fide war hero, a fact that his father later used to good advantage in his successful run for the U.S. Senate. Like another naval hero, Jack Kennedy, who was also the son of an infamous Nazi supporter, George's war experience changed him, even as it redeemed the family's good name. The man who came back from the war was very different from the boy who had left.

George had grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, an upper-class New York bedroom community. Greenwich was such a notorious hotbed of anti-Semitism that it became the site for the film A Gentleman's Agreement, which graphically exposed the prejudice against Jews held by many members of the nation's elite.


After the war, when George returned to Yale University, the school openly acknowledged that it had a policy to restrict the number of Jewish students in each class. Prescott Bush was a trustee at the time. The 1945 Annual Report of the Board of Admissions mentions a "Jewish problem" at Yale and publicly states that "the proportion of Jews . . . has somewhat in-creased and remains too large for comfort."[30] Apparently, Jews were good enough to fight for the United States, but Jewish veterans need not apply to Yale.
Such bigotry was appalling to young George. Our sources obtained access to George Bush's private files in Yale's most exclusive secret society, the Skull and Bones Club. George was in favor of admitting both blacks and Jews to this venerable institution.[31] The sources we interviewed on George's early life say it was a dig at his father, who was not the most racially progressive member in the history of the club.[32]

In 1949 the Skull and Bones class, which George Bush helped to select, finally succeeded in voting away all racial and religious barriers to membership. George's vote in 1948 for admitting Jews to the next Skull and Bones club was not his only act of rebellion against his father's generation. After graduation he shunned a seat with Brown Brothers, Harriman and asked for a job in China, as far away from Wall Street as he could get.

His father, who was also on the board of Dresser Industries, arranged it. There have been rumors that George's trip to China was somehow connected with espionage. True, Dresser has provided cover for CIA operatives over the years, but George's trip was strictly business.[33] it should be noted, however, that among George's classmates were a number of people who left college to work on intelligence operations with his father's friend, Allen Dulles.[34]

Try as he did, George Bush could not get away from Dulles's crooked corporate network, which his grandfather and father had joined in the 1920s. Wherever he turned, George found that the influence of the Dulles brothers was already there. Even when he fled to Texas to become a successful businessman on his
own, he ran into the pirates of Wall Street.

One of Allen Dulles's secret spies inside the Democratic party later became George Bush's partner in the Mexican oil business. Edwin Pauley, a California oil man, was, like James Forrestal, one of Dulles's covert agents in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Like Forrestal, Pauley was a "big business" Democrat. The parallels didn't end there.[35]

During Roosevelt's presidency, Pauley was a major Democrat fundraiser and held a series of top posts, including treasurer of the Democratic party's National Committee.[36] He was also director of the Democratic convention in 1944 and had an unrivaled reputation as a man who could shake a great deal of money out of the oil companies, which were notoriously right-wing and pro-Republican. Pauley also had the loyalty of President Truman, especially for his role in getting him the delegate numbers to replace Henry Wallace as vice president in 1944, which ultimately took Truman to the White House when Roosevelt died in 1945.[37] Unfortu-nately, Truman's gratitude was not enough to sweep Pauley's dirt under the carpet.

The truth is that Pauley was committed to profit and, like the Dulles brothers, could not distinguish between his own interests and his public duties. During World War II he was in the perfect position to assist the Dulles clique in their Nazi oil deals. it was Pauley who recommended that Roosevelt appoint Interior Secretary Harold Ickes to the post of Petroleum Administrator for War, although Pauley later came to regret that action bitterly. Ickes, in turn, made Pauley his special adviser.[38]

Ickes Diary

Ickes's choice of Pauley, and several other top oil men, to hold key positions puzzled many liberals in the Roosevelt administration. Ickes believed that unless the oil companies were part of wartime policyrnaking,
they "would take the bit in their teeth and run away with it given any chance."[39] Pauley and Ickes made a good team, at least while the war still hung in the balance. They worked to organize the Petroleum Administration for War, and more important for Allen Dulles, Pauley also held the key position of Petroleum Coordinator of Lend-Lease Supplies for the Soviet Union and Britain.[40]

There is some evidence that Ickes used Pauley, an independent oil man, as a counterbalance to the major oil corporations. For example, during the war Pauley had several run-ins with the foreign petroleum coordinator, Max Thornburg. He just happened to be a senior executive of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which, as previously discussed, was owned by Rockefeller and I. G. Farben and was secretly sending oil to Hitler. While the war raged, Pauley and Thornburg fell to squabbling about Mexican oil, which had been nationalized in the 1930s, when the U.S. giants were thrown out.

In this particular fight, Pauley was supported by Ickes, who believed that the major companies were more interested in ensuring their profitable reentry into Mexico than they were in exploiting Mexican oil for the war effort. Pauley, then working for the Petroleum Administration while he pushed his own private interests in Mexico, could not have put it better himself.[41] Pauley's real concern, however, was not to help the war effort but to gain a share of Mexican oil profits. After the war he did so, in partnership with a young independent oil producer by the name of George Bush.

Despite the obvious conflict of interests, in April 1945 Truman appointed Pauley as the U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, with the rank of ambassador. Simultaneously, he was made industrial and commercial adviser to the Potsdam Conference, "where his chief task was to renegotiate the reparations agreements formulated at Yalta." As one historian noted, the "oil industry has always watched repa rations activities carefully."[42] There was a lot of money involved, and much of it belonged to the Dulles brothers' clients.

As previously discussed, the Dulles brothers were still shifting Nazi assets out of Europe for their clients as well as for their own profit. They didn't want the Soviets to get their hands on these assets or even know they had existed. Pauley played a significant role in solving this problem for the Dulles brothers. The major part of Nazi Germany's industrial assets was located in the zones occupied by the West's forces. As Washington's man on the ground, Pauley managed to deceive the Soviets for long enough to allow Allen Dulles to spirit much of the remaining Nazi assets out to safety. Although Pauley knew that the Soviet zone contained less than one-third of Germany's industrial assets, as official U.S. representative he insisted to his colleagues on the Reparations Committee it controlled 50 percent.[43]

Pauley, a key player in the plan to hide the Dulles brothers' Nazi assets, then moved into another post where he could help them further. After successfully keeping German assets in Fascist hands, Pauley was given the job of "surveying Japan's assets and determining the amount of its war debt."[44] Again, it was another job that was crucial to the Dulles clique's secret financial and intelligence operations.[45]

In January 1946 Truman nominated Pauley as undersecretary of the navy. The move was "intended by ... Truman as a steppingstone to his succeeding James Forrestal as [Navy] Secretary."[46] It also was designed to balance U.S. oil interests against the Zionists and their wealthy American-Jewish backers. Despite the strength of his support for the Jews, Truman was signaling that there was room for a strong oil voice in his administration. Pauley's nomination, however, ignited considerable political controversy, which eventually helped force him out of political life in 1947.[47]

Finally, the liberal Ickes had had enough of Pauley's machinations. Ickes decided that he would not lie to get Pauley's nomination endorsed by the Senate.[48] When his nomination came up before Senator Charles Tobey's Naval Affairs Committee for ratification, Pauley met his match, as evidence of his political bribes and "black bag" fund-raising operations for the Democrats began to seep out. Although the oil lobby, supported by President Truman, pulled out all stops to frustrate Tobey and make him abandon the hearings, Pauley finally had to retreat. But at least the coverup was safe for a few more years yet, as the most damaging parts of Pauley's work for the oil companies did not emerge during the hearings.[49]

The most explosive allegations about Pauley's political bribes came from Ickes himself. it cost both men their jobs, prompting Ickes's resignation and, a short while later, Pauley's withdrawal from the navy job.[50] Despite pressure from Truman, Ickes was only too eager to tell Tobey's committee exactly the sort of scandal in which Pauley had been involved.
When he testified, Ickes claimed that Pauley had promised to raise $300,000 for the Democratic party from among Californian oil men, if the federal government would drop a court case to establish that offshore oil title belonged to Washington and not to the state of California.[51]


At the time, Pauley was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Like Forrestal, he hated the fact that the Democrats were dependent on Jewish financial contributions. Large bribes from the oil companies, which happened also to suit their business interests, could tip the party away from the Zionists. Pauley also just happened to hold two key government oil posts at the time of his bribe offer. His arm-twisting tactics on the federal suit had been widely noted in the Washington bureaucracy. Evidence emerged at the Senate hearings that confirmed Ickes's claims and contradicted Pauley's own statement, made under oath, that he had never made such bribery attempts.[52]

Red Flag to a Bull

If the hearings went on, the whole corrupt business eventually might seep out. When Pauley denied the bribery charge, it was like a red rag to the bull called Harold Ickes. No one was going to call him a liar and get away with it. Invited to reappear at the hearings, this time Ickes gave the committee chapter and verse. But if he had hoped for Truman's backing, he miscalculated.[53]

Indeed, despite Truman's support for the Zionists, the president was playing a careful balancing game with the oil companies. This time the oil companies won. Truman strongly and publicly supported Pauley and "questioned the accuracy and loyalty of Ickes's charges." The president had Ickes's resignation a few days later and promptly accepted it, "with alacrity and delight."[54] But the damage was done, and in "the face of further embarrassment to the Administration and certain rejection by the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Pauley reluctantly requested that his nomination be withdrawn."[55]

It may have worked out for the best for Truman, who had enough trouble in 1948 convincing the American electorate that his administration wasn't toeing the oil companies' line about Israel, without having Edwin Pauley around his neck. Yet another scandal erupted around Pauley in 1947, which finally ended his political career and forced his retirement from public life. He now strictly worked behind the scenes, although, as we shall see, he continued as a secret Republican agent inside the Democratic party.[56]

Pauley went back to the oil business and, some years later, became an important factor in the secret war against the Jews. In fact, Pauley had a significant influence on George Bush's business career in Texas. In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum, which:  ... teamed up with Howard Hughes to expand oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Pauley Petroleum discovered a highly productive offshore petroleum reserve and in 1959 became involved in a dispute with the Mexican Government, which considered the royalties from the wells to be too low.[57]

According to our sources in the intelligence community, the oil dispute was really a shakedown of the CIA by Mexican politicians. Hughes and Pauley were working for the CIA from time to time, while advancing their own financial interests in the lucrative Mexican oil fields. Pauley, say several of our sources, was the man who invented an intelligence money-laundering system in Mexico, which was refined in the 1970s as part of Nixon's Watergate scandal. At one point CIA agents used Pemex, the Mexican government's oil monopoly, as a business cover at the same time Pemex was being used as a money laundry for Pauley's campaign contributions;[58] As we shall see, the Mexican-CIA connection played an important part in the  development of George Bush's political and intelligence career.

There was a substantial CIA presence in Mexico since at least the 1950s. Pemex was a perfect place to recruit agents of influence inside the Mexican government. Mexico became part of the "revolving door" between the oil industry and the intelligence community. One of the famous oil men-turned-agents was William F. Buckley, Jr., like Bush, a Skull and Bones alumnus, whose boss in Mexico was [E.] Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame.[59]

According to Regardie's magazine, the CIA-Mexican oil connection lasted for many years.[60] In the early 1980s, Pemex was listed as employer for another Bill Buckley, before he returned to the Middle East as CIA station chief. This Bill Buckley was to play a major role with George Bush in the Iran-Contra scandal and became a key figure in money laundering through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, which played an important part in the anti-Israeli intelligence operations of the 1980s.

Pauley, say the "old spies," was the man who brought all the threads of the Mexican connection together. He was Bush's business associate, a front man for Dulles's CIA, and originator of the use of Mexican oil fronts to create a slush fund for Richard Nixon's various campaigns.[61]

There is clear evidence that Pauley, the conservative Democrat, played on both sides of the political fence. In 1972, after Nixon promised "a favorable climate for oil," the Campaign to Reelect the President (CREEP), together with Attorney General John Mitchell's secret "Finance Committee," collected at least $5 million in illegal cash donations from the oil companies. Some of Nixon's political bribe money came directly from Edwin Pauley himself.[62]

Although it is not widely known, Pauley, in fact, had been a committed, if "secret," Nixon supporter since 1960. It should be recalled that Nixon tried to conceal his Mexican slush fund during the Watergate affair by pressuring the CIA into a "national security" cover-up. The CIA, to its credit, declined to participate. Unfortunately, others were so enmeshed in Pauley's work for Nixon that they could never extricate themselves. According to a number of our intelligence sources, the deals Bush cut with Pauley in Mexico catapulted him into political life. In 1960 Bush became a protege of Richard Nixon, who was then running for president of the United States.[63]

 Bush's road to Mexico had begun innocently enough. After working in the oil equipment leasing business for Dresser Industries for several years, George Bush went out on his own. He
 "packed up his red 1947 Studebaker and set off for Texas," ending up in Midland, which soon became the "oil capital of west Texas." Bush began at the bottom, as a trainee painting pumping equipment, but didn't stay there for very long. He soon "caught the fever" and "formed an independent oil company in partnership with other ambitious young men no less eager to make money."[64]

In the mid-1950s, in partnership with such friends as Hugh Liedtke, Bush established Zapata Petroleum. Bush had energy and ambition, but he also had some family connections. One such contact led to a very lucrative deal with Eugene Meyer, the Jewish publisher of The Washington Post, whom he had met
previously because Brown Brothers, Harriman "managed a lot of his accounts."[65] But Zapata had a much more powerful friend than Meyer.  George Bush's company leased oil rigs to Edwin Pauley and took a commission from all the oil Pauley pumped out of the Gulf of Mexico. Pauley was, according to a lengthy article in Barron's, George Bush's most important customer.[66] The "old spies" say Bush lost his virginity in the oil business to Edwin Pauley.[67]

In those days, Bush's business manager, Wayne H. Dean, owned a ranch extending across the international border into Mexico, thus qualifying Zapata as a "Mexican resident" corporation. In 1959 the Mexican government changed the rules and said that oil companies had to be run by Mexican nationals. It looked as if Bush's company would lose its most lucrative account, Pauley's Pan-American Petroleum Company. Instead, Bush, Pauley, and Dean met with their Mexican contact, Diaz Serrano, and worked out a deal.[68]

According to Barron's, Serrano was not above bending a few rules for his American friend George Bush, who apparently felt the same way about Serrano. Without telling his own shareholders in Zapata, Bush set up a new joint venture, Permargo, with Serrano at the helm, but with Bush associates holding secret control of a hidden 50 percent American share through a Mexican lawyer. Bush later sold Zapata's rig, the Nola 1, to Permargo, which took over the lucrative Pauley drilling contract.[69]

The only losers, said Barron's, appear to have been Bush's shareholders in Zapata. It is hard to know for sure, since the Securities Exchange Commission "inadvertently" destroyed all of the records for Permargo and Zapata for the period between 1960 and 1966. The destruction occurred shortly after Bush was
sworn in as vice president in 1981.[70]

The Zapata-Permargo deal also caught the attention of Allen Dulles, who, the "old spies" allege, was the man who recruited Bush's company as a part-time purchasing front for the CIA. Zapata provided commercial supplies for one of Dulles's most notorious operations, the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was nothing terribly dramatic: Bush's company leased a few cargo vessels and shipped some CIA cargo as oil drilling equipment.[71] Coincidentally, all of Zapata's Securities Exchange Commission files for this period were "inadvertently destroyed" as well.[72]

Mandatory Reading

Fletcher Prouty, a former U.S. intelligence official who worked on CIA support activities, says some circumstantial evidence implicates President George H. W. Bush as a contract agent supplying the CIA team for the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to Prouty, two of the CIA supply ships were named the Houston and the Barbara J., in honor of Bush's home and wife. As further evidence, Prouty asserts that the Cuban resupply mission was code named "Operation Zapata," the name of Bush's oil company in Texas. Prouty's
credibility, however, has been widely attacked because of his consultancy to Oliver Stone's film JFK.[73]

In 1988 The Nation magazine stumbled across an FBI memorandum dated November 29, 1963, reporting that "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" had been briefed about the reaction of the Cuban exile community to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Nation added that 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."[74]

The Nation's allegation that Bush's oil business worked for the CIA in 1960 matches Barron's description of the timeframe for Bush's creation of Permargo. When The Nation article appeared, Bush refused to be quoted directly on the Mexican-CIA connection, although his spokesman denied that he had anything to do with the CIA until he became its head in 1975. The CIA response to the article was both prompt and deceptive: It claimed the CIA agent working with the Cuban exiles in 1963 was in fact named George William Bush, clearly not the man running for president in 1988.[75] The CIA had thrown a red herring to the press. When The Nation tracked down George William Bush, it discovered that in 1963, he was a social work trainee in Hawaii and had nothing whatsoever to do with J. Edgar Hoover's briefing of the other George Bush of the CIA on the Cuban exiles' reaction to the Kennedy assassination. Even after he joined the CIA George William didn't even know anyone involved with the Bay of Pigs.[76] On the other hand, President George Bush had a wide assortment of Bay of Pigs' veterans among his close friends and associates, among them Felix Rodriguez, who later worked for Bush and Oliver North on the Iran-Contra program.[77]

Another intelligence agent with ties to Bush was George de Mohrenschildt.[77]
He had the names of all Zapata team members in his address book, including
Pauley, Dean, and even the home address of "Bush, George H. W. (Poppy) 1412
W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum, Midland 4--6355."[79]There is some reason to suspect that de Mohrenschildt was still working on both oil and intelligence matters at the time he was dealing with George Bush and Zapata.[80]

The most intriguing of Bush's early connections was to Richard Nixon, who as vice president had supervised Allen Dulles's covert planning for the Bay of Pigs. For years it has been rumored that Dulles's client, George Bush's father, was one of the Republican leaders who recruited Nixon to run for Congress and later convinced Eisenhower to take him on as vice president.[81] There is no doubt that the two families were close. George Bush described Nixon as his "mentor." Nixon was a Bush supporter in his very first tilt at
politics, during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964, and turned out again when he entered the House two years later.[82]

After Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he ordered a general house cleaning on the basis of loyalty. "Eliminate everyone," he told John Ehrlichman about reappointments, "except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause."[83] Nixon knew what he was talking about. At the time, Bush had already been offered a senior post in the Treasury Department, under George Shultz, but Nixon wanted him elsewhere. According to Bush's account, the president told him that "the place I really need you is over at the National Committee running things."[84] So, in 1972, Nixon appointed George Bush as head of the Republican National Committee.

It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon's promise to make the "ethnic" emigres a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972 Nixon's State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states. Bush's tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor's 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party's official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush's campaign allies were the
emigre Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States.[85]

It seems clear that George Bush, as head of the Republican National Committee in 1972, must have known who these "ethnics" really were.[86] Columns by Jack Anderson and others had already made it clear, in 1971, that Nixon was a little too close to the Fascist groups. The Nazis for Nixon problem was one of those scandals that Bush inherited when he took over the Republican National Committee.

Although our intelligence sources are not unanimous on this point, several say that George Bush was included among the handful of people who knew about Nixon's deal to bring the Fascist groups into the Republican party in 1972.[87] Indeed, since Bush was the head of the National Committee, he was in the best position to supervise the transfer of the campaign staff's ethnic Fascists into the Republican party's own organization. A 1976 memo to Republican National Committee co-chairman Robert Carter contains an even more
damning implication.

During Bush's time as Republican National Committee chairman, he appointed
Colonel Jay Niemczyk as director of the party's ethnic Heritage Groups.
Niemczyk's memo, to Robert Carter praised Bush as having "added needed
strength and impetus" to the Republicans' ethnic recruitment effort. Niemczyk
reported that Bush "had full knowledge of" and, in the words of the memo, provided 'total support' for the party's ethnic Heritage Groups" (emphasis added).[88]

As head of the Republican National Committee, it seems likely that Bush did have "full knowledge," as did Richard Johnson of the State Department, that the ethnic Fascists were being coddled because the ethnic groups were useful to get out the vote in several key states. As previously outlined, in 1972 Johnson told the Australians that a selected group of American politicians had been briefed about the sensitivity of certain Fascist groups, such as the Croatian Ustashis.

If a lower-level State Department official like Johnson knew what was going on, it is likely that the head of the party-George Bush-would have been advised about the true background of the Croatians and the other emigres in the party. As Johnson noted, the American government was advising Republican leaders not to attend Croatian gatherings on April 10—the memorial day for Hitler's creation of the Fascist Croatian state.[89]

When taken in conjunction with the earlier Australian report, and the Washington Post revelation that Nazis were being used for U.S. campaign purposes, the Republican memo confirming Bush's "full knowledge" of the ethnic campaign looks like a "smoking gun" as far as Bush's personal complicity is concerned. Nearly twenty years later, and after exposes in several respectable newspapers, Bush continued to recruit most of the same ethnic Fascists, including Pasztor, for his own 1988 ethnic outreach program when he first ran for president.

According to a number of our sources in the intelligence community, it was Bush who told Nixon that the Watergate investigations might start uncovering the Fascist skeletons in the Republican party's closet.[90] Bush himself acknowledges that he wrote Nixon a letter asking him to step down.[91] The day after Bush did so, Nixon resigned.

Bush had hoped to become Gerald Ford's vice president upon Nixon's resignation, but he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN. Nelson Rockefeller became vice president and chief damage controller. He formed a special commission in an attempt to preempt the Senate's investigation of the intelligence community. The Rockefeller Commission into CIA abuses was filled with old OPC hands like Ronald Reagan, who had been the front man back in the 1950s for the money-laundering organization, the Crusade for Freedom, which was part of Dulles's Fascist "freedom fighters" program.[92]

Although Governor Reagan may have been out of the loop in 1975, Rockefeller certainly knew all about the old Nazi connection, having counter-blackmailed Ben-Gurion at the time of the UN debate about the partition of Palestine. In 1947 Rockefeller had been able to keep the Nazi scandal under control, and
except for the occasional leak, it had stood up ever since. But by 1975 his damage control operation was floundering. In December Bush was brought back to become head of the CIA. After all, he had previous experience with protecting the Agency from the Watergate investigation.

According to our sources, it was Bush who, as head of the Republican National Committee from 1972 to 1974, told Nixon that he could not shift the blame for the Mexican slush fund to the CIA without wrecking the intelligence community. The "old spies" say that legitimate CIA operations in Mexico would have been hopelessly compromised if they were tarred with the brush of Nixon's money laundering.[93]

To Bush's credit, he did not allow Nixon to trash the CIA to save himself. On the other hand, Bush may have had his own reasons for blocking any investigation of the Mexican connection; after all, it involved his own
business associate Ed Pauley.[94] In any event, Nixon resigned, and Bush became a hero for standing up for the CIA.

It was this action, and not his peripheral role in the Bay of Pigs or his company's minor role as a cover for CIA supply operations, that endeared George Bush to the Agency. His appointment as director of Central
Intelligence was a big morale boost to an institution that had been severely tarnished by Senate and media exposes of some of its more bizarre practices during the Dulles-Angleton years. Though the practices had been concealed from the employees of the CIA, they were the ones who had taken the blame instead of their political superiors.

According to our sources, the rank and file viewed George Bush as the one man who would stand up to the White House if it ever again tried to politicize the CIA.[95] What these CIA staff did not know was that George Bush was appointed precisely to fend off any more congressional investigations. The nosy investigators had come perilously close to the heart of one of the many Dulles scandals: the recruitment of Nazi money and emigres by the leading lights of the Republican party.[96]

Although many readers will not believe this, our sources insist the regular CIA staff were almost entirely ignorant of the true background of the ethnic Fascists and remain so to this day.[97] During the Eisenhower years, Allen Dulles merged the State Department's Office of Policy Coordination into the CIA, but kept the OPC's emigre operations separate from the CIA's geographical sections. The "freedom fighters" had their own files in the program branch that could be accessed only by a special set of cryptonyms. Before Allen Dulles was fired, he took the cryptonym cross-index with him. To this day, not even the director of Central Intelligence can retrieve an individual's record from the mass of files on Dulles's projects with the Fascist emigres.[98]

After Dulles left, the CIA files on Fascist emigres were a permanent shambles. Angleton remained to put out the occasional fire when someone requested a security check on a suspected Nazi. When Angleton was fired in December 1974, only a handful of people knew where the bodies were buried.[99] Then along came the new CIA director, George Bush, in December
1975, who inherited Dulles's dirty secrets.

Dulles's Nazis kept popping out of the woodwork, and it was getting harder and harder to keep the rest of the CIA in the dark. Ironically, the Vatican itself almost uncovered the story. As previously discussed, Father Robert Graham, the American-born Vatican historian, triggered Angleton's cover-up of the Vessel forgeries. In 1976 Graham had a conversation with Martin Quigley, an Irish-American Catholic from New York. Quigley had served with the Office of Strategic Services in Rome, before Angleton arrived on the scene and took over the Vatican connection. According to our intelligence source on this issue, Quigley told Father Graham an interesting but fairly minor piece of history.[100]

Monsignor Egidio Vagnozzi, from the Japanese desk of the Vatican Secretariat
of State, had given the OSS some information about Japanese peace feelers. Quigley assigned the code name Vessel to Vagnozzi, who later became apostolic delegate to Washington and one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome.

This interesting and innocent bit of trivia intrigued Father Graham, who had written extensively on the Vatican's peace-making efforts during world War II. Graham promptly filed a request for Quigley's OSS reports under the new American Freedom of Information Act. What neither Quigley nor Graham knew was
that Angleton had continued to use the "Vessel" code name after Quigley left. As previously discussed, Angleton had signed cover letters forwarding thousands of forged Vessel reports as part of Dulles's deception program against Roosevelt and Truman.

Father Graham had no idea that Vessel was only one of Angleton's covert operations in postwar Rome. During his takeover of the BritishVatican Ratline to smuggle fugitive Nazis, Angleton also had employed the very same Croatian and Eastern European Fascist organizations whose members Dulles and Nixon later brought into the Republican party in the 1950s and to which Bush had given a permanent home in the early 1970s. Vessel, the Vatican Ratlines, and the Republicans' Heritage Groups were all pieces of the same scandal. The Vatican request for documents threatened to open a very large can of worms.

When the CIA received Father Graham's request for all Vessel reports, the clerks retrieved not just Quigley's innocuous documents, but trunkfuls of highly sensitive intercepts of top-secret Vatican cables. The CIA, of course, did not know that the Vessel cables were forgeries, and Graham's request was brought to the attention of the highest levels of the Agency in 1976. According to our source the most sensitive material could not be released to Father Graham:

By this time, George Bush had become CIA director, and because of the delicate nature of Graham's "semiofficial" request-which was viewed by the CIA, that is, as "a Vatican request"—that apparently would lead him, Graham,to conclude that the OSS had "spied successfully on the pope," it was decided by Bush and others that the Vessel files would have to be carefully reviewed and sanitized.[101]

None of our sources has personal knowledge of whether Bush was aware of the extent to which the Vessel files would reveal the old Nazi smuggling scandal in the Vatican, although they wondered whether Bush's  previous campaign association gave him special knowledge of the ethnic Fascists' background. They do assert that a decision was made "at the highest levels" that the man who made the mess should clean it up.[102]

"Angleton, though publicly disgraced and officially retired on pension, was asked to do the job. He was undoubtedly the most familiar with the material and the 'most responsible'--as he had long dealt directly 'with the Vatican' for the CIA. He was, apparently, paid a fee for reviewing the files, based on his recognized 'expertise.'"[103]

 Thus Angleton, who had been fired in December 1974, was put back on the CIA payroll in 1976. He took one look at the huge pile of Vessel papers and realized it would take months to read and analyze them all. According to one source, Angleton went directly to Bush and explained just how sensitive the Vessel papers were.[104] According to another source, it is not certain that Angleton ever told Bush the whole story.[105] It seems, however, that someone in the CIA gave Angleton permission to violate the Freedom of Information Act and shred many of the Vatican files.[106] But not all the records could be destroyed:

'Eventually, some material would have to be released to Graham, but that material, [Angleton] was apparently informed, could be heavily censored. Moreover, he was given to understand that if other reports really could not be censored, they could be removed from the Vessel files and destroyed. Apparently, Angleton destroyed hundreds of such reports (as he himself reported to certain people). He seemed to have been given a completely free hand.'[107]

No matter how much censorship or shredding took place, Angleton knew that Father Graham would immediately, and correctly, identify some of the Vessel papers as Scattolini forgeries. Angleton contacted his sister Carmen in Rome and obtained Graham's phone number. Then Angleton asked Graham to drop his
Freedom of information request, but Graham refused.[108] He still thought that Vessel meant only the Quigley-Vagnozzi reports.

When, in 1978, Graham finally saw the little that had escaped the shredder, he was astounded to discover Scattolini forgeries. In 1979 Graham tried repeatedly to interview Angleton, who ducked every meeting. Angleton kept denying through intermediaries that he even knew Scattolini. While Father Graham did not know it, the lie could have been easily discredited by a number of people who served in Rome at the time.[109] Keeping the lid on the Angleton-Dulles scandals was becoming harder and harder.

Problems kept popping up for George Bush. In 1976 a militant splinter group of Croatian Fascists hijacked an American airliner, an act that sent all the other intelligence agencies scurrying for background files. As already mentioned, Croatian Ustashis operated the Vatican Ratline for Angleton and then went on to establish the Croatian Heritage Group for the Republican National Committee. The Australian report on Nixon's Nazis had mentioned this very group. Both the hijackers and the Croatian Republican group proclaimed loyalty to Ante Pavelic's Fascist government. Were there more Croatian Fascist terrorists running around in the United States? Somehow the link to the Croatian GOP had escaped the notice of the CIA.[110]

Some people in government, at least, were curious. In 1976, Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzmann specifically asked if any Nazis had ever immigrated to the United States under the CIA's "100 Persons Act," which allows the Agency to bring in up to one hundred agents a year without going through normal immigration procedures."' The true answer was a bit of a problem. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dulles's cronies at the State Department had conned the CIA into sponsoring a handful of VIP emigres for special entry, as a favor to Dulles's Office of Policy Coordination. The CIA did not know that the "emigres" were, in fact, Nazi intelligence officers. But Bush's CIA told Holtzmann that "no war criminals, or terrorists, or persons of that ilk" had ever been admitted by the CIA.[112]

Some of our sources say that it is unfair to accuse Bush of personal knowledge of the Nazi cover-up, insisting that he was brought into the CIA precisely because he was ignorant and could plausibly deny any knowledge of some of the older, darker Dulles scandals.[113] But even if everybody in the U.S. government who knew about the Nazis conspired to keep Bush ignorant of past scandals, the "bumbling Bush" explanation does not explain why the CIA director was not aware of current ones. Somebody in the CIA had to know exactly what was going on in 1976, in order to keep the Nazi cover-up going:

As late as 1976 the agency's practices in this regard were still so blatant that the CIA actually wrote an-unclassified letter to a former CIA contract agent, Edgar Laipenieks, who was then facing deportation from the United States in connection with allegations that he had committed multiple murders, torture and other crimes against humanity at the Central Prison in Riga, Latvia, during the war. "We have been corresponding with the Immigration and Naturalization Service about your status," agency spokesman Charles Savage wrote to Laipenieks on official CIA letterhead. "It is our understanding that INS has advised their San Diego office to cease any action against you. If this does not prove [to be] the case, please let us know immediately. Thank you once again for ... your past assistance to the Agency. Sincerely,"[114]

Laipenieks promptly released this CIA letter to the press. The whole war criminal cover-up was very much a current issue while Bush was CIA director. In fact, some of the Nazis were still working on covert operations in 1976. The Ukrainian groups openly fought with each other over who was receiving the most CIA money. Dimitri Kasmovich, the Nazi police chief in Belarus during World War II, boasted to his fellow collaborators that he was running guns to a new generation of anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Angola.[115]

But, apart from a spot of gunrunning and occasional propaganda from Kasmovich and other Fascists in the World Anti-Communist League, the old Nazis were just too elderly for covert operations. Now they were far more valuable to the Republican National Committee than they were to the CIA. Yet every time the CIA tried to get rid of the tainted emigre groups, someone kept bringing them back. Even when the CIA forced the transfer of Radio Liberty to the State Department, someone on Bush's staff agreed to bring the Dulles era
files on Radio Liberty back to the CIA, where they remain to this day.[116] As a practical matter, the CIA had no operational use for the elderly emigres in Angola. Young agents were needed to fight in the jungle. There had to be another solution. just before Congress ordered a halt to all CIA activities in Angola in 1977, the agency found the answer. Behind the back of Congress and of most of the CIA, U.S. intelligence turned to a little-known firm in London to recruit a private army for the Angolan civil war. Instead of hiring Nazi mercenaries, the CIA hired British mercenaries to evade the congressional ban.

Unfortunately, as we shall see in Chapter 17, the British mercenaries were also working with the Arabs. During Bush's twelve months as CIA director, the secret war against the Jews was entering a particularly nasty phase. British intelligence had replaced its Nazi agents with PLO terrorists. The Angolan operation would lead to a number of other scandals in the 1980s, especially Iran-Contra and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. George Bush may not have realized it, but he was acting more like Allen Dulles all the time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THANKS TO JOHN LOFTUS AND MARK AARONS for their amazing research. The remainder of the book must be read to fully appreciate their massive effort and success in explaining what really happened during this era of our history.

Order now.

The King Alfred Plan and 112th Military Intelligence Group

Former Panther 
Fears Genocide

Ames (Iowa) Daily Tribune, Oct. 9, 1970

WASHINGTON (UP)—A former Black Panther testified Thursday he believes freeways in big cities are
designed for easy access of troops to wipe out blacks and new apartment projects are used to concentrate
minority groups for eradication. Clive De Patten told a House internal security subcommittee hearing some of his beliefs carried over from the 10 months he belonged to the Des Moines, Iowa, chapter, which he joined in April, 1969.

The soft-spoken 19-year-old was the latest in a series of witnesses testifying about operations of the Black Panther Party. Unidentified police officers from Des Moines are scheduled to testify when the hearings resume Tuesday. Committee files showed De Patten is awaiting discharge from the Army because "his non-commissioned officers describe him as a troublemaker who fights and reacts negatively to all orders and policies."

De Patten said the Panther Party teaches its new members in a six-week training period that whites are their
oppressors and Panthers must be prepared for a revolution to overcome the oppressors. He referred to a so-called "King Alfred plan" to wipe out all blacks and discussed it as a factual plan drawn up by the government. The names comes from a fiction book, The Man Who Cried "I Am," by John Williams, and is employed in the fiction as a program of black genocide.

"Freeways are built only for one reason and that's to move tanks and troops easily into the ghettos to wipe out the blacks," De Patten said. "Highrise apartments that are put up for poor people are one method of getting a lot of blacks into one small area so the building can be blown up," De Patten said.

De Patten said he joined the Des Moines chapter of the Black Panthers, which is now called "Black Revolutionary Communist Youth," after he was beaten by police who raided a breakfast-for-children meeting of the Panthers. De Patten said the chapter had 30 to 50 members, whose average age was in the early 20's, but membership dropped sharply after the Panther Headquarters was mysteriously bombed April 26,1969. De Patten said he was convinced the police bombed the quarters. He said when he joined, Charles Smith, was the leader, Charles Knox was deputy minister of education and Michael Harris was Deputy minister of information. De Patten said he eventually became the minister of information.

De Patten told newsmen he quit the Panthers "for personal reasons." He declined to explain the reasons but he did say it was about the same time that the Des Moines chapter "started to pursue the hard core communist line." De Patten said he sympathized with communist goals but that he was not necessarily a communist, although he strongly favored the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS, Wednesday, March 4, 1970

Army's Civilian Spying Said Ended

Army intelligence officers in San Antonio and elsewhere throughout the nation apparently were back conducting only military business Tuesday with the task of destroying computerized files on the political activities of civilians reportedly completed.

The army last week ordered the information it collected in a computer the past three years on persons and organizations considered political activists, potential activists and potential participants in riots, destroyed. A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday the army had completed destroying the files. "Now that the civil disturbance operation has been discontinued, it will give them (Army Intelligence) more time for conducting
security clearances on military personnel," the spokesman reported.

The order to destroy the information, fed into a computer, known as the "Databank of Domestic Political Activities," at Fort Holabird, Md., and supplied from seven Army intelligence units, including one located at Fort Sam Houston and downtown San Antonio, came after U.S. Rep. Cornelius Gallagher, D-N.J., informed the Army he would hold public hearings on the "validity and legality of such a program."

The 112th Military Intelligence Group is located here and was the operation which relayed information to the Data Bank for the 112th Army area although it is not part of the 4th Army. The fact the San Antonio-based 112th was among those units feeding information on the political activities o f civilians from San Antonio was confirmed by Army General Counsel Robert E. Jordan III*, at the pentagon.

Officers in the 112th at Fort Sam Houston and at their downtown offices at the 301 Building, at 301 Broadway (formerly the Manion Building), were unwilling to discuss their operation. They also refused to discuss why the 112th maintained downtown offices as well as a building at Fort Sam Houston, and
newsmen were not allowed inside their second-floor downtown office. Meanwhile, San Antonio Chief
of Police George Bichsel said there was no doubt in his mind same police information had been fed into the Data Bank files.

"From time to time Military Intelligence has checked with the Department on various groups and we always have given them what we had," Bichsel said.

"We share information with the FBI and if they wished they could have given the 112th this information," Bichsel added. He added that the Police Department did not "go around making reports" for the military, but just released information they asked for.

Asked if photographs taken of protestors of multi-family housing in the Edgewood Independent School District outside the Lulac anniversary banquet last Saturday at the Gunter Hotel by policemen were taken for Military  Intelligence, Bichsel said he was positive they were not.

He said his department occasionally photographs individuals and groups involved in protests or demonstrations so the department would have a photo file available for its officers, if ever needed. "This does not imply they (demonstrators) are doing anything unlawful," Bichsel said.

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS Friday, February 26, 1971

By ALICE MURPHY

If Military Intelligence is maintaining a card file on all members of the First Unitarian Church of San Antonio, Church President Glenn Grimes said members have nothing to hide. He said Unitarians are individually controversial and some have taken part in "peaceful demonstrations."

The possibility of such a card file came up when Houston State Rep. Curtis Graves told a Congressional committee Thursday he learned from Walter Birdwell, a former agent of the 112th Military Intelligence Group in San Antonio, that he had not only been a snooping target himself for the past 10 years, but the 112th MI Group had a "card file on every member of the Unitarian Church in San Antonio."

Major Stephen Weiss, public information officer for the 112th, said he had been advised, politely, to have all calls on the matter referred to the Information Office of the Department of the Army in Washington, and gave two telephone numbers there. Neither answered Thursday evening. The present minister of the Unitarian Church, the Rev. Rolfe Gerhardt, could not be reached either. Sources said, however, that any such controversy probably dated back to the tenure of the Rev. Bill DeWolle, who left here April 30,1970. Grimes said his major claim to fame was that he had been president of the San Antonio chapter of the Texas Civil Liberties Union, and after leaving here was president of the Texas ACLU.

Attorney Maury Maverick Jr., a vice chairman of the national advisory committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, described DeWolfe as "a high class, fine man." He said he wished the Unitarian Church here was "half as militant as the Episcopalians," of which he is one. Maverick, who represents a large majority of conscientious objectors in federal court here, said 80 per cent of that clientele had been Roman Catholics and none had been Unitarians.

Rep. Graves' testimony was presented to a Senate subcommittee on Constitutional rights, headed by Sam Ervin, D-N.C. Graves is a Negro. He said that Birdwell also told him the 112th was keeping files on Houston State Sen. Barbara Jordan, boxer Muhammad Ali, several Houston attorneys, and members of the
Ku Klux Klan.

Birdwell is no longer associated with the 112th.

~~~~~~~~~~~

San Antonio Light, October 6, 1972
Lt. Col. Mark A. Miles has been awarded the Legion of Merit upon his retirement at Headquarters, 5th Army. The medal cited Miles' service since April 1970, as deputy commander of the 112th Military Intelligence Group at 5th Army.
~~~~~~~~~~~

U.S. ARMY SURVEILLANCE OF DISSIDENTS, 

1965–1972 RECORDS OF THE U.S. ARMY’S ACSI TASK FORCE

...All in all, this collection provides an excellent look into the difficulties of a state spying on its own citizens. The bureaucratic difficulties are well illustrated in the various documents trying to track the size and the scope of army surveillance, as well as the documents outlining surveillance regulations. The collection provides a
good picture of how divided liberals and conservatives can be over a certain issue, in this case military surveillance, illustrated here through newspaper articles and personal letters. Finally, the difficulties of containing a secretive organization and the worries that go along with it are probed in the various newspaper articles, the congressional investigation, and the recalcitrance the army showed in the face of accusation and investigation.

Other LexisNexis collections that deal with the theme of the state spying on its own citizens are: Surveillance of Radicals in the United States, 1917–1941; The Johnson Administration’s Response to Anti–Vietnam War Activities, Part 1: White House Aides’ Files and Part 2: White House Central Files; The FBI Files on the
American Indian Movement and Wounded Knee; Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans (1917–1925): The First World War, the Red Scare, and the Garvey Movement; FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations; FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, and Break-Ins: The National Security Electronic Surveillance Card File and the Surreptitious Entries File; Records of the National Commission on Violence; The Communist Party USA and Radical Organizations, 1953–1960: FBI Reports From the Eisenhower Library; and Communist Activity in the Entertainment Industry: FBI Surveillance Files on Hollywood, 1942–1958.

112th MI Group, 1970–1971.
Major Topics: Fort Sam Houston surveillance; Oklahoma’s Office of Interagency Coordination.

113th MI Group, 1970–1971.
Major Topics: Local police cooperation with army surveillance; John O’Brien; Niles North High School; Philip Crane; reaction to army surveillance; extent of army surveillance; University of Minnesota; Malcolm Moos; Sam Ervin Jr.; Eugene Eidenberg; Barbara Jordan; Curtis Graves; Walter Birdwell; USAIRR; army
surveillance records; ACLU; Dave Dellinger; King Alfred Plan; Thomas Filkins; army halt on surveillance; Ed Jurenas; Laverne Armstrong; Jesse Jackson; Otto Kerner; Adlai Stevenson III; Abner Mikva; spying at Martin Luther King Jr. funeral; W. Clement Stone.

112th MI Group [January–February 1971].
Major Topics: USAINTC civil disturbance pamphlets; Walter Birdwell; organizations and individuals on file; ACLU; KKK; SDS; Unitarian Church; Curtis Graves; Bob Eckhardt; Cassius Clay; Adlai Stevenson III; Abner Mikva; Otto Kerner; press coverage; army agent undercover as postman; Barbara Jordan; Oklahoma Office of Interagency Coordination.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
JORDAN ROBERT ELIJAH JORDAN, III 
(Age 73) Died on May14, 2010 after a lengthy illness. He is survived by his wife Deborah A. Jordan, of Sarasota; three daughters, Janet Harding, Jennifer Dunnebacke, and Maggie Jordan; one son, Robert E. Jordan IV; 11 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Bob enjoyed being around his family and friends. He was a great storyteller:  favorite topics were college pranks, courtroom comeuppances, and family history. He loved dogs. It was rare to see him out and about without at least one four-legged friend. He maintained a lifelong enjoyment of model trains, both designing layouts and running them for the entertainment of others. 

A well respected member of the legal community, Mr. Jordan was former president of the D.C. Bar, and a former executive committee chairman of and partner at the Washington office of Steptoe Camp; Johnson since 1971. Prior to joining the firm, he served as General Counsel of the Army, Assistant U.S. Attorney, and in enforcement with the U.S. Treasury. He was considered an expert in legal ethics and conflict-of-interest policy making, and chaired two committees for the D.C. Bar Association that dealt with ethics and professional conduct of members. 

He was an Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Military service began with ROTC in college and culminated in the rank of Captain in the Army of the U.S. He was honored to serve as Staff Director, President''s Committee on Equal Opportunity in the Armed Forces, and subsequently Special Assistant for Civil Rights at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he implemented the committee''s recommendations. 

Bob believed in the volunteerism, duty, hard work, and the uplifting power of education. He inspired this in others, leading by example. He could often be found hammering away at a Christmas in April project or personally arguing a pro-bono case for someone who could not afford an attorney. Over the course of his lifetime, he served in many civic and academic leadership positions, including class president at M.I.T. 

A Memorial Service will be held on Tuesday, May 18, at 10:30 a.m. at Toale Brothers, 40 N. Orange Ave., Sarasota. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in his honor to either CASA - Court Appointed Special Advocates or the American Civil Liberties Union.

Published in The Washington Post on May 16, 2010 

 

What Can We Learn from Madeleine Duncan Brown?

Madeleine Frances Duncan was born in 1925 in Dallas--living during the Depression years in a home of just over a thousand square feet with three other siblings plus three other working adults in addition to her parents. Her father was a home builder and carpenter, while her uncle, Guy Duncan, sold insurance and his young wife and her sister clerked in a department store. Their crowded home was two blocks east of South Beckley Street in Oak Cliff. Such as it was, it was a step up for the family, which had begun in tiny Josephine, Texas in Collin County, where George farmed a piece of land before and after World War I.

After Madeleine met Lyndon Johnson in 1948, following the death of her husband James Glynn Brown, she almost immediately began an affair with him and, shortly thereafter, became pregnant, all of which has been summarized in online accounts. She already had one son named Jimmy Glynn Brown, and a second son would be named Steven Mark Brown, with the birth certificate indicating his father was deceased.

According to Madeleine, a lawyer named Jerome Thorn Ragsdale would handle any payments made to her on behalf of Steven. Jerome Ragsdale as a child had been shown on census roll as "J. Thorn." His father was Charles E. Ragsdale, who, according to his obituary, was "born in 1880 in Brownwood and was the son of the late Dr. and Mrs. Paul C. Ragsdale, pioneer Brown County residents. He was a member of the First United Methodist Church of Smithville and was a jeweler and optometrist. He was a Mason, a member of the Lions Club, and a graduate of Brownwood High School and Daniel Baker College."

Jerome's brother, Paul C. Ragsdale, named for their grandfather, was born in Smithville in 1915 but died in New Braunfels. The grandfather of that name was a traveling optometrist and died in a car accident in 1938 in Brownwood, where he had also been a teacher at Daniel Baker College. He had come to Texas in 1868 from South Carolina. Another son, Silas B. Ragsdale, Jerome's uncle, was managing editor of the Galveston newspaper after it was sold by A.H. Belo, and later worked for Gulf Publishing.

Jerome also had a sister named Silky Ragsdale, who in 1951 married Harry Crockett of Smithville, where they resided. Silky had been a debater in high school, and it's entirely possible that her elder brother, Jerome, would have debated against teams coached by Lyndon Johnson when he taught high school in 1930-31. An article from the San Antonio newspaper in 1936, coincidentally shows Silky in the Region 6 competition at the same time Jesse Kellam was filling in for Lyndon Johnson, recently appointed by FDR to National Youth Administration head, at an award ceremony at Southwest Texas State Teachers College.

In Dallas, Ragsdale had a law office in 1943  at #1108 in the Magnolia Building in Dallas, the building with the red Pegasus atop it. By 1945, however, the Dallas city directory lists Jerome T. Ragsdale as a partner in a firm called Gormley, Bohannon, Ragsdale & Prescott, located in Suite 1424 of the Republic Bank Building; in 1947 the firm's address was 1517 Commerce Street, no more than a block or two from one of Jack Ruby's nightclubs.  Partner Ross Bohannon's name would appear in the news early in 1951:

Two Texas Radio
Stations Seeking
Ownership Changes

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4. (AP) -The Communications Commission had on file today applications for changes in interests in two Texas radio stations.

• James G. Olmar [sic; it should be Ulmer] sought control of the East-West Broadcasting Co. which operates KOUL in Fort Worth. He  proposed to buy 566 shares of stock from Johnnie Andrews, M. Ward Dailey, T. C. Christopher, A. B. Culbertson, John C. Griffith, B. A. Ley and Nestor Cuesta.

• KHBR of Hillsboro asked for assignment of a license from the partnership of Ross Bohannon, R. W. Calvert and W. N. Fuey to Ross Bohannon, doing business as the Hill County Broadcasting Co.

R. W. Calvert had previously been Speaker of the Texas Legislature from Hillsboro, a leader of pro-FDR forces during the New Deal and in 1948 had been chairman of the state Democratic executive committee during the election contest over the notorious Box 13 ballot fraud.

A month later Bohannon was subpoenaed by Senator Fulbright to testify before a U.S. Senate committee about improper loans made by President Truman's Reconstruction Finance Corp. (the banking agency previously headed by Jesse Jones under FDR). Fulbright's committee was investigating influence peddling by RFC director E. Merl Young, a long-time crony of President Truman, and a subcommittee report "quoted Bohannon as testifying that Young demanded an $85,000 fee for influence he said he could exert in helping obtain a $10,100,000 loan for one of Bohannon's clients. The report said Bohannon refused to pay the fee and got the loan anyway for Texmass Corp., a Texas and Massachusetts oil development firm headquartered in Dallas. Texmass* later went into receivership after being reorganized into Texas Consolidated Oils Co. Its affairs have be come a hot congressional issue." 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Texmass principals were Arthur W. Kincade of Wichita and Howard A. Cowden of Kansas City. There was a merger which included all producing oil and gas properties of Texmass and the Petroleum Reserve corporation of Dallas and certain pieces owned by Midway Oil, Inc., of Topeka, Kans.; Swiss Oil Co. of Dallas; National Cooperative refinery association of Wichita, Kan., and a number of outside investor interests associated with Texmass--involving leases in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, California and Louisiana.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After Bohannon's testimony was contradicted by Young, the Senate decided there was a further need to question the head of the Democratic National Committee, William M. Boyle, Jr. and former FBI man, Edward P. Morgan, the price enforcement chief about how the Democrats seemed to be peddling favors to the highest bidder.

Both Bohannon and another firm partner, Ross K. Prescott, had grown up in Brownwood and attended Daniel Baker College, where Ragsdale's grandfather had been a teacher, and both had connections to radio or television broadcasting stations, as did Jerome Ragsdale as well, who was a good friend of Jesse Kellam, station manager for Lady Bird Johnson's Austin station. In 1949, Prescott's name had appeared in newspapers in connection with a murder that took place in Alice, Texas--a small border town in a county adjacent to Duval County, where the infamous Box 13 voter election fraud took place. Both counties were within the empire of the "Duke of Duval" George Parr's domain.

In the summer of 1949 a local radio broadcaster named W.H. "Bill" Mason had been antagonizing the powers-that-be in Alice by doing what such powers hate most--telling the truth:

Mason, in his last broadcast, said Smithwick owned an Alice night spot where prostitutes plied their trade. Smithwick was then a deputy sheriff.

District Attorney Sam Reams of Falfurrias said today representatives of the American Newspaper Guild and Texas Independent Broadcasters Association had approached him about a special prosecutor. He said the guild suggested Charles Lieck and Fred E. Semann of San Antonio and the broadcasters suggested Ross K. Prescott of Dallas and Joe H. Tonahill of Jasper.

Ironically, Tonahill would represent Jack Ruby many years later for his murder of Lee Harvey Oswald a few days after President Kennedy's assassination.

The violence of Mason's murder is best captured in the story that appeared in the Lubbock, Texas Avalanche, Aug.,1, 1949 datelined Alice, Tex.:

"We were coming back to town," Saenz related, "and as we approached the Junction of San Felipe at the San Diego highway, Smithwick was driving toward us across the highway and motioned to Mason with his hand to stop. Mason stopped and Smithwick parked his pickup truck parallel to Mason's car. Smithwick got out of his truck and came over to Mason's car, making a hitching motion at his belt as he came.

"Mason raised his hand in a protective manner and leaned back from the window of the car, and as he did so, Smithwick told me to get out of the way or get out of the car or something like that," Saenz said he was opening the door opposite the driver's seat to get out when the shot was fired. "I don't know whether the bullet passed under my leg or over it or what," Saenz said of the .45 caliber slug which tore through Mason's body near the heart. Saenz ran across the street and stood in front of a bar, he said. "I saw Mason get out of his car and run and crawl under the pickup truck.

He got out from beneath the truck and ran across the road, climbed over a low wire fence and ran to the cement dock of the Alice Pipe and Supply company.

"He called for help a couple of times as he ran." Saenz said Smithwick got in his truck and drove off towards town. According to District Attorney Sam Reams, Smithwick apparently drove straight to the jail and placed himself in jail. Mason died in a hospital 30 minutes after he was shot."

As the funeral was being held the following Monday, it was reported that "no further disturbances occurred in Alice since raiders in two automobiles used shotguns Friday night to blast the Rancho Alegro, a night spot on the edge of this South Texas city. Mason had charged in broadcasts that Smithwick owned the Rancho Alegro find had lambasted it as a vice spot."

Ten years later Ross K. Prescott has his office in the Kilgore Hotel, Kilgore, Texas, and was in the process of applying for a new commercial television station, Channel 19, at Oklahoma City in the name of Consolidated Enterprise, Inc. (1961). At the same time, his erstwhile partner, Ragsdale, continued to forward money every month to Lyndon Johnson's girlfriend, Madeleine Duncan Brown.

Eventually her son Steven would become an adult, still unsure of who is father was, and would file for determination of heirship in Ragsdale's estate following his death:

STEVEN MARK BROWN, APPELLANT v. SILKY RAGSDALE CROCKETT, INDIVIDUALLY AND AS ADMINISTRATOR OF THE ESTATE OF JESSE THORN RAGSDALE, APPELLEE

From the District Court of Bastrop County, 21st Judicial District. June 4, 1980
COUNSEL:

• Wynn G. Stanton, Dallas, for appellant.

• Yerger Hill, III, Strother, Davis, Stanton, Musselman & Hill, Dallas, for appellee.

Author: Smith

Jesse Thorn Ragsdale died on July 17, 1978, at Smithville, Texas. On September 18, 1978, appellee and her brother, Paul C. Ragsdale, after posting bond and taking the required oath, were granted letters of administration for the Estate of Jesse Thorn Ragsdale by the County Court of Bastrop County, Texas.

On March 29, 1979, appellant, Steven Mark Brown, filed a "Petition for Determination and Declaration of Heirship" in the Probate Court of Dallas County, where administration of the Estate of Jerome Thorn Ragsdale was pending. Appellant alleged that Jerome Thorn Ragsdale, son of Jesse Thorn Ragsdale [sic] and brother of appellee and Paul C. Ragsdale, was his biological father.

After receiving notice of the contest filed in the Dallas County Probate Court, appellee filed an "Amended Application to Declare Heirship" in the Estate of Jesse Thorn Ragsdale. The amended application provided, in part, as follows:

"VI. Applicant was a party to a suit brought by Madeleine F. Brown claiming a "lost will' which suit was dismissed by the Proponent during trial on the merits . . . in the Probate Court in and for Dallas County, Texas. Applicant believes that Madeleine F. Brown had a son, Steven Mark Brown, who is now asserting . . . that he is the biological child of Jerome T. Ragsdale, Deceased, and Madeleine F. Brown. Attached to the original Application To Declare Heirship  . . . was the Application on which Madeleine F. Brown went to trial, reflecting the relationship claimed by Madeleine F. Brown of her son to Jerome T. Ragsdale. Therefore, Applicant moves the Court to determine who are the heirs to JESSE THORN RAGSDALE's Estate."

Appellee accompanied her amended application with a "Motion to Remove" the cause to the 21st District Court of Bastrop County, pursuant to Tex.Prob.Code Ann.  5(b) (Supp.1980).

Based upon the allegations contained in the amended application, the motion to remove was granted and an order was signed by the county judge transferring the cause to the district court.

The district clerk issued citation by publication and, in addition, issued citation to appellant, who was personally served on May 7, 1979. Appellant made his appearance on May 29, 1979, by filing a written answer consisting of a general denial and an assertion that he was the natural son of appellee's brother, Jerome Thorn Ragsdale.

The issue of heirship thus joined, the district court heard the cause on the merits and determined that appellee and Paul C. Ragsdale were the only heirs of Jesse Thorn Ragsdale. The district court then returned the administration of the estate to the Bastrop County Court.

It is from this final judgment that appellant has perfected this appeal.

Before her death in 2002, Madeleine Brown described in an interview with Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr. a party she attended at the home of Clint Murchison on November 21, 1963.

It gets a little bizarre when Madeleine says, "He (George Owens) was there socially, and of course, Jack Ruby had brought one of the call girls to the meeting." When asked about the call girl, Madeline said, "Her name was Shirley. I know her, but she doesn't want to talk about this." Maybe, she's married now, and maybe, one day she will also tell her story. 
~~~~~~~~~~~

Excerpts from 2001 Interview by John Delane Williams and Gary Severson with Madeleine Duncan Brown:

JDW: Now, the Murchison party. One of the things, I don't know that you ever heard this, but, what is his name, Brown, Walt Brown. One of things he's said is that everything we've heard about the Murchison party has come from you. And no one else who was at the party has said anything.

MB: Gary Barker has come forth, I think. Galen Ross [sic], are you familiar with his new book?

JDW: Galen Ross? [Note: This book is: Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr. (2001). The Elite Serial Killers of Lincoln, JFK, RFK & MLK. Spicewood, TX: RIE.]

MB: Some of them I'm not familiar with. But George Owens that worked for Clint Murchison. He passed away not long ago, and I've known George . . . George went to . . . we didn't have the DFW airport back then [1963]. Dallas only had about 450,000 people. He went out to the Bluebird Airport and George was going on camera to tell the story of what happened. And do you know the day we had that all set up he died suddenly. I mean a bunch of this . . . sometimes I feel bad. 

*** 

GS: Did you know of any family background of Mac Wallace?

MB: Well, I told him [George Owens?], one of our neighbors is Carl Wallace, and Carl and George Owens, who said he picked up Hoover out here at the [Bluebird] airport, were close friends, and if George would have lived long enough, I might have got more information, you know, but this Carl Wallace's father owned the Wallace Plumbing Company here in Dallas, and the Wallace Plumbing Company was in Dealey Plaza that day, I don't know if John had..

GS: That was my next question.

MB: Well anyway, not too long ago, I talked to Carl. He comes by once in a while with his little dog. And I said 'Carl, what happened to your mother and father?' And he said, 'My dad killed himself.' and I wanted to say, when did he kill himself? and eventually, I want to know, why did he kill himself? Knowing what I know about the story, and the background, Big Time.

GS: Could the plumbing company be Wallace-Beard?

MB: I couldn't tell you.

GS: There is some evidence the truck in Dealey Plaza that day was Wallace & Beard.

***

GS: It's so mind-boggling.

MB: You know, I told you about this neighbor, Carl Wallace. He told me enough that in my mind, I keep thinking, George Owens died instantly, you know. What is the connection, really. Why would a man, a prosperous businessman in Dallas, Texas kill himself? You can't help but wonder.