The 40 Committee, which had overseen covert operations, was now to be called the Operations Advisory Group, with its membership reshuffled to include Scowcroft of NSC, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George Brown, plus observers from the Attorney General and the Office of Management and Budget.

An innovation was the creation of the Intelligence Oversight Board (in addition to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board), which was chaired by Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, the old adversary of Charles deGaulle during World War II. The IOB was supposed to be a watchdog to prevent new abuses from coming out of the intelligence community. Also on this board were Stephen Ailes, who had been Undersecretary of Defense for Kennedy and Secretary of the Army for LBJ. The third figure on this IOB was Leo Cherne, who was soon to be promoted chairman of PFIAB as well. The increasingly complicit relationship of Cherne to Bush meant that all alleged oversight by the IOB was a mockery. The average age of the IOB was about 70, leading Carl Rowan to joke that it was a case of Rip Van Winkle guarding the CIA. None of the IOB members, Rowan pointed out, was young, poor, or black.

Believe it or not, Ford also wanted a version of the Official Secrets Act which we have seen Bush supporting: he called for "special legislation to guard critical intelligence secrets. This legislation would make it a crime for a government employee who has access to certain highly classified information to reveal that information improperly." Which would have made the Washington leak game rather more dicey than it is at present.

The Official Secrets Act would have to be passed by Congress, but most of the rest of what Ford announced was embodied in Executive Order 11905. Church thought that this was overreaching, since it amounted to changing some provisions of the National Security Act by presidential fiat. But this was now the new temper of the times.

As for the CIA, Executive Order 11905 authorized it "to conduct foreign counterintelligence activities...in the United States," which opened the door to many things. Apart from restrictions on physical searches and electronic bugging, it was still open season on Americans abroad. The FBI was promised the Levi guidelines, and other agencies would get charters written for them. In the interim, the power of the FBI to combat various "subversive" activities was reaffirmed. Political assassination was banned, but there were no limitations or regulations placed on covert operations, and there was nothing about measures to improve the intelligence and analytical product of the agencies.

In the view of the New York Times, the big winner was Bush: "From a management point of view, Mr. Ford tonight centralized more power in the hands of the Director of Central Intelligence than any had had since the creation of the CIA. The director has always been the nominal head of the intelligence community, but in fact has had little power over the other agencies, particularly the Department of Defense." Bush was now de facto intelligence czar. [fn 35]

Poor Ford was unable to realize that his interest was to be seen as a reformer, not as someone who wanted to re-impose secrecy. When he was asked if his Official Secrets Act could not be used to deter whistle-blowers on future bureaucratic abuses, Ford responded that all federal employees would be made to sign a statement pledging that they would not divulge classified information, and that they could expect draconian punishment if they ever did so.

Congressman Pike said that Ford's reorganization was bent "largely on preserving all of the secrets in the executive branch and very little on guaranteeing a lack of any further abuses." Church commented that what Ford was really after was "to give the CIA a bigger shield and a longer sword with which to stab about."

An incident of those days reveals something of what was going on. Daniel Schorr of CBS, whose name had popped up on the Nixon enemies' list during the Watergate hearings, had obtained a copy of the Pike Committe report and passed it on to the Village Voice. Schorr had attended Ford's press conference, and listened as Ford denounced the leaking of the Pike report. The next day, covering Capitol Hill, Schorr encountered Bush while the new CIA boss was on his way to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A wirephoto of an angry Bush gesticulating at Schorr wound up on the front page of the Washington Star under the headline: "Another Confrontation." With that, Schorr's twenty-year career with CBS was over, and he was soon to face a witchhunt by the House Ethics Committee. Other reporters soon caught on that under the new Bush regime, political opponents would be slammed. (Schorr later speculated about CIA links to CBS owner William Paley; there was no need to look any further than the fact that Harriman had helped to create CBS and that Prescott Bush had been a CBS director during the 1950's, giving the Bushman network a firm presence there.

During these days, the Department of Justice announced that it would not prosecute former CIA Director Richard Helms for his role in an illegal break-in at a photographic studio in Fairfax, Virginia during 1971. The rationale was from the National Security Act of 1947: "the director of central intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure," even if it meant breaking the law to do it. Bush would become a past master of this "sources and methods" clause, which could be used to cover up almost anything.

The Church Committee was still functioning, and was looking into journalists controlled by the CIA, which some senators wanted to expose by name. On the same day as Ford's press conference, Senators Huddleston and Mathias drove out to Langley to confront Bush and demand that he divulge the names of these CIA media assets. The CIA was "not at liberty to reveal the names," Bush told the two senators. Instead, Bush offered documents that generally described the CIA's use of reporters and scholars over the years, but with no names. Senators Baker, Hart, and Mondale then called Bush and urged that the names be made public. Bush refused.

Bush pointed to his statement, made on February 12 as the first public act of his CIA career, removing all "full-time or part-time news correspondents accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodicals, radio or TV network or station" from the CIA payroll. He also claimed that there were no clergymen or missionaries on the CIA payroll at all. As far as the journalists were concerned, in April the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities announced that they had already caught Bush lying, and that at least 25 journalists and reporters were still on the CIA payroll, and the CIA was determined to keep them there. Bush had quibbled on the word "accredited." This limited the purge to accredited correspondents issued news credentials. But this excluded free lance reporters, editors, news executives, and foreign news organizations at all levels. When dealing with Bush, it pays to read the fine print.

The Bush-Kissinger-Ford counteroffensive against the Congressional committees went forward. On March 5 the CIA leaked the story that the Pike Committee had lost more than 232 secret documents which had been turned over from the files of the executive branch. Pike said that this was another classic CIA provocation designed to discredit his committee, which had ceased its activity. Bush denied that he had engineered the leak: "The CIA did not do any such thing. Nothing of that nature at all," Bush told a reporter to whom he had placed a call to whine out his denial. "My whole purpose was to avoid an argument with him," said Bush, although he said that "Pike was the cause of this whole problem under great pressure."

In March Bush had to take action in the wake of the leaking of a CIA report showing that Israel had between 10 and 20 nuclear bombs; the report was published by Arthur Kranish, the editor of Science Trends Magazine. Church, who had Zionist lobby ties of his own and who was in the midst of a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, demanded an investigation: "Can you imagine how a leak of that kind would have been treated if it had come out of the Congress of the United States!" In retrospect, the report may have been some timely window-dressing for Israeli prowess in a Ford regime in which Israel's military value as an ally was hotly contested; a little later Gen. George Brown, the chairman of the joint chiefs, was quoted to be the effect that Israeli and its armed forces had "got to be considered a burden" for the United States.

In April, Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he was just back from a secret visit to three countries in Europe, which he refused to name, during which he conceded that he "might or might not" have met with Frank Sinatra. (Brother Jonathan Bush had said in February that Sinatra had offered his services to the new CIA boss.) Bush praised the CIA in his speech: "It is a fantastic reservoir of discipline in the CIA. Our personnel people say the quality of applications is up. This is an expression of confidence in the agency. Morale is A-one." There was speculation that Bush might have gone to Italy, where terrorist activity was increasing and the Italian Communist Party, profiting from the vogue of "Euro-communism," was rapidly increasing its vote share during 1975-76.

In May, FBI Director Clarence Kelley apologized to the American people for the abuses committed by his secret police. Kelley said that he was "truly sorry" for past abuses of power, all of which were neatly laid at the door of the deceased former director, J. Edgar Hoover. Bush, for his part, aggressively refused to apologize. Bush conceded that he felt "outrage" at the illegal CIA domestic operations of the Watergate era, but that "that's all I'm going to say about it...you can interpret it any way you want." Bush's line was that all abuses had already been halted under Colby by the latter's "administrative dictum," and that the issue now was the implementation of the Rockefeller Commission report, to which Bush once again pledged fealty. Bush had no comment on the Lockheed scandal, which had begun to destabilize the Japanese, German, Italian, and Netherlands governments. The advance of the Italian communists and the Panama canal treaties were all "policy questions for the White House" in his view. Although China was being rocked by the "democracy wall" movement and the first Tien An Men massacre of 1976, Bush, ever loyal to his Chinese communist cronies, found that all that did not add up to anything "dramatically different."

A visit to the Texas Breakfast Club on May 27 found Bush trying to burnish his image as a good guy by talking about the existential dilemmas of a good man in any imperfect world, while pleading for more covert operations all the time. "I know in a limited way there are conflicts of conscience," Bush told the breakfasters. "But we're not living in a particularly moral world. We're living in a world that's not pure black or pure white. We're living in a world where [the US] has to have a covert capability." On the other hand, Bush was "not unconcerned about the constitutional questions that the excesses of the past have raised." "I'm not going to defend the things that were done but I'm not going to dwell on them either." "I'm happy to say I think things are moving away from the more sensational revelations of the past," leaving the CIA as an institution "intact." Necessity, pontificated Bush, sometimes demands "compromise with the purity of moral decisions."

On June 3, the Houston Post touted Bush as a good vice presidential candidate after all, moderate and southern, no matter what Ford had promised to the senate to get Bush confirmed. Bush was mum.

A few days later Bush paid tribute to the Israeli Defense Forces, who had just rescued a group of hostages at Entebbe. Bush denigrated US capabilities in comparison with those of Israel, saying that the US could not match what Israel was able to do: "We do have a very important role in furnishing intelligence to policy makers and our friends on the movement of international terrorists, but to indicate that we have that kind of action capability--the answer is very frankly no." Bush said that his policy on this matter was to fight terrorism with better intelligence, for "the more the American people understand this, the more support the CIA will have." Yet, Bush was unable to stop a terrorist murder in Washington DC, despite the fact that he had personally received a telegram informing him that the assassins were coming to visit him-- scarcely a good example of using intelligence to fight terrorism.

By September, Bush could boast in public that he had won the immediate engagement: his adversaries in the Congressional investigating committees were defeated. "The CIA," Bush announced, "has weathered the storm." "The mood in Congress has changed," he crowed. "No one is campaigning against strong intelligence. The adversary thing, how we can ferret out corruption, has given way to the more serious question how we can have better intelligence."

As Bush never tired of repeating, that meant more covert operations. In the middle of October, Bush spoke once again on this matter to the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association: "We would be stupid to give up covert operations and we are not going to do it as long as I have anything to say about it." Bush claimed that covert operations consumed only 2% of the entire CIA budget but that such operations were necessary because "not everybody is going to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules."

Such was the public profile of Bush's CIA tenure up until about the time of the November, 1976 elections. If this had been the whole story, then we might accept the usual talk about Bush's period of uneventful rebuilding and morale boosting while he was at Langley. We might share the conclusions of one author that "Bush was picked because he could be trusted to provide no surprises. Amiable and well-liked by old CIA hands, he sincerely believed in the agency and its mission. Bush soothed Congress, tried to restore confidence and morale and Langley, and avoided delving too deeply into the agency's darker recesses." [fn 36] Or, we might accept the following edifying summary: '[Bush] had a fundamental loyalty to the agency and its people even though he was an outsider. He was a man with a strong sense of obligation downward. Under him the people of the CIA soon realized that they were not going to be served up piecemeal. He probably did more for agency morale and standing in Congress than any DCI since Allen Dulles. Unlike Colby, who was loyal to the ideal of the CIA rather than to the people, Bush was committed to both. He was a genuine conservative in his politics and his approach, conveying no touch of originality, and was not a man to take initiatives. People knew exactly where they stood with him. He was a classic custodian, and it was this quality that Ford had recognized in him. For Bush being DCI was 'the best job in Washington.'" [fn 37] The spirit of the red Studebaker school of idolatry, we see, had followed Bush to Langley and thence into many standard histories of the CIA.

Reality looked different. The administration Bush served had Ford as its titular head, but most of the real power, especially in foreign affairs, was in the hands of Kissinger. Bush was more than willing to play along with the Kissinger agenda.

The first priority was to put an end to such episodes as contempt citations for Henry Kissinger. Thanks to the presence of Don Gregg as CIA station chief in Seoul, South Korea, that was easy to arrange. This was the same Don Gregg of the CIA who would later serve as Bush's national security advisor during the second vice presidential term, and who would manage decisive parts of the Iran-contra operations from Bush's own office. Gregg knew of an agent of the Korean CIA, Tongsun Park, who had for a number of years been making large payments to members of Congress, above all to Democratic members of the House of Representatives, in order to secure their support for legislation that was of interest to Park Chung Hee, the South Korean leader. It was therefore a simple matter to blow the lid off this story, causing a wave of hysteria among the literally hundreds of members of Congress who had attended parties organized by Tongsun Park, who had become the Perle Mesta of the 1970's when it came to entertaining Congressional bigwigs. Tongsun Park also had a stable of call girls available, and could provide other services. The US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea during this period was Richard Sneider.

The Koreagate headlines began to appear a few days after Bush had taken over at Langley. In February there was a story by Maxine Cheshire of the Washington Post reporting that the Department of Justice was investigating Congressmen Bob Leggett and Joseph Addabbo for allegedly accepting bribes from the Korean government. Both men were linked to Suzi Park Thomson, who had been hosting parties of the Korean Embassy. Later it turned out that Speaker of the House Carl Albert had kept Suzi Park Thomson on his payroll for all of the six years that he had been Speaker. Congressmen Hanna, Gallagher, Broomfield, Hugh Carey, and Lester Wolf were all implicated. The names of Tip O'Neill, Brademas, and McFall also came up. The New York Times estimated that as many as 115 Congressmen were involved.

In reality the number was much lower, but former Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was brought back from Houston to become special prosecutor for this case as well. This underlined the press line that "the Democrats' Watergate" had finally arrived. It was embarrassing to the Bush CIA when Tongsun Park's official agency file disappeared for several months, and finally tuned up shorn of key information on the CIA officers who had been working most closely with Park. Eventually Congressman Hanna was convicted and sent to jail, while Congressman Otto Passman of Louisiana was acquitted, largely because he had had the presence of mind to secure a venue in his own state. A number of other congressmen quit, and it is thought that the principal reason for the decision by Democratic Speaker of the House Carl Albert to retire at the end of 1976 was the fact that he had been touched by the breath of this scandal, which would go into the chronicles as "Koreagate." With this, most of the Congress was brought to heel. We note in passing that when George Bush takes a step up the ladder in Washington, the Speaker of the House is likely to be ousted. Ask Jim Wright.

An interesting sidelight of Koreagate involves then Congressman Edward Derwinksi, today Bush's Secretary of Veteran's Affairs. An article in the Wall Street Journal during this period alleged that federal investigators suspected Derwinksi of informing the Korean CIA that one of their officers was about to defect to the US for the purpose of cooperating with the Koregate investigations. Derwinski denied the accusations, and he was never prosecuted. [fn 38]

With that, the Congress was terrorized and brought to heel. In this atmosphere, Bush moved to reach a secret foreign policy consensus with key Congressional leaders of both parties of the one-party state. According to two senior government officials involved, limited covert operations in such places as Angola were continued under the pretext that they were necessary for phasing out the earlier, larger, and more expensive operations. Bush's secret deal was especially successful with the post-Church Senate Intelligence Committee. Because of the climate of restoration that prevailed, a number of Democrats on this committee concluded that they must break off their aggressive inquiries ("the adversary thing") and make peace with Bush, according to reports of remarks by two senior members of the committee staff. The result was an interregnum during which the Senate committee would neither set specific reporting requirements, nor attempt to pass any binding legislation to restrict CIA covert and related activity. In return, Bush would pretend to make a few disclosures to create a veneer of cooperation. [fn 39] These 1976 deals set the stage for many of the foreign intelligence monstrosities of the Jimmy Carter era. Ever since, the pretense of Congressional oversight over the intelligence community has been a mockery.

One theatre of covert operations in which Bush became involved was Angola. Here a civil war had erupted in 1974 with the end of Portuguese colonial rule, pitting the US-backed UNITA of Jonas Savimbi and the FNLA of Holden Roberto against the Marxist MPLA. In December, 1975 the Senate passed the Clark Amendment, designed to cut off US funding for the military factions. The Clark Amendment passed the House, and a ban on CIA operations in Angola became law on February 9, 1976. The chief of the CIA Angola task force, John Stockwell, later wrote that after February 9, the CIA kept sending planeloads of weapons from Zaire to UNITA forces in Angola, despite the fact that this was now illegal. There were at least 22 of such flights. Also in February, the Bush CIA began making large cash payoffs "to anyone who had been associated with our side of the Angolan war." This meant that President Mobutu of Zaire got $2 million which he was supposed to give to pro-western guerilla factions; Mobutu simply kept the money, and the CIA's guerillas "were left starving," said Stockwell. The Congress found out about Bush's illegal largesse, and subjected him to a series of hostile committee hearings in which full disclosure was demanded. The House Appropriations Committee placed a team of auditors in CIA headquarters to review accounting on the Angola program, which was code named IAFEATURE. On March 12 Bush sent a cable to all CIA stations ordering that no funds be spent on IAFEATURE. One day later, an uninsured cargo plane was shot down inside Angola. Despite this ignominious conclusion, Bush ordered awards and commendations for the 100 CIA personnel who had worked on the program. [ fn 40]

During Bush's first months in Langley, the CIA under orders from Henry Kissinger launched a campaign of destabilization of Jamaica for the purpose of preventing the re-election of Prime Minister Michael Manley. This included a large-scale campaign to foment violence during the election, and large amounts of illegal arms were shipped into the island. $10 million was spent on the attempt to overthrow Manley, and at least three assassination attempts took place with the connivance of the CIA. [fn 41]

The Bush CIA also continued a program in Iran which went under the name of IBEX. This aimed at building and operating a $500 million electronic and photographic capability to cover the entire region, including parts of the USSR. On August 28, 1976, three Americans working on the project were assassinated in Teheran. According to a Washington Post account by Bob Woodward, a month before these killings the former CIA Director and then current US Ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, sent Bush a note complaining about abuses connected with the project, and in particular demanding that Bush investigation corrupt practices which Helms suspected were involved with the project. Helms apparently wanted to be spared more embarrassment in case IBEX were to become the object of a new scandal. [fn 42]

During Bush's CIA tenure, the CIA was found to have conducted electronic surveillance against the representatives of Micronesia, a UN Trusteeship territory in the Pacific that had been administered by the United States, and which was then about to become independent. In a story by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post alleged that the CIA had been bugging the Micronesian government over a four year period with a view to acquiring details of their negotiating strategy in talks with the State Department concerning relations with the United States after independence. The CIA's rebuttal seems to have been that while it would indeed have been illegal to bug the Micronesians if they were US citizens, they were now foreigners, and such bugging had never been restricted.

During Bush's time at the CIA, a series of governments around the world were destabilized by the Lockheed bribery scandal, the greatest multinational scandal of the 1970's. This scandal grew out of hearings before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Frank Church, although separate from the Intelligence Committee mentioned above. A number of Lockheed executives testified that they had systematically bribed officials of allied governments to secure contracts the sale of their military aircraft. This system of unreported payments eventually implicated such figures as former Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, the leader of the most important faction in the Liberal Democratic Party, and Franz Josef Strauss, a former Federal German Defense Minister, Prime Minister of Bavaria, and the leader of the Christian Social Union, then a part of the opposition in the Bundestag in Bonn. Also implicated were a series of Italian Christian Democratic and Social Democratic political leaders, including the then Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the President of the Italian Republic Giovanni Leone, and former Defense Ministers Mario Tanassi of the PSDI and Luigi Gui of the DC. In the Netherlands, Prince Bernhard, the consort of Queen Juliana, was implicated, and virtually no NATO country was spared. The Lockheed scandal, coming as it did out of a milieu full of military intelligence connections, was coherent with a long-term Anglo-American design of destabilizing and weakening allied governments and the political forces that constituted those governments.

Those who have witnessed the ghoulish public love affair between George Bush and the fascist "Iron Lady" of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, may be interested in indications that CIA Director Bush helped to bring Mrs. Thatcher to power. At the beginning of Bush's tenure, the British Prime Minister was Harold Wilson of the Labor Party, who had won two general elections during 1974 and whose term would normally have ended in 1978. But Wilson was destabilized and forced out of office. Although his immediate successor was James Callaghan, also of the Labor Party, Callaghan's cabinet was merely the prelude to the advent of Thatcher, who would remain in power for more than 11 years, until late in 1990. [fn 43]

Bush's implication in the matter is beyond any doubt. Shortly after Bush had arrived at Langley, Prime Minister Wilson dispatched his close friend Lord Weidenfeld to the United States with a confidential letter to be given to Senator Hubert Humphrey. Wilson and Weidenfeld met on February 10, 1976. The letter enumerated the names of a number of MI-5 and MI-6 officers of whom Wilson was suspicious. Wilson's letter requested that Humphrey go to Bush and ask him whether the CIA knew anything about these British counter-intelligence and intelligence officers. Was it possible, Wilson wanted to know, that those named in the letter were actually working with or for the CIA? Were the British officials in league with a CIA faction that was carrying out electronic or other surveillance of Wilson, including in his office in 10 Downing Street? Implied was the further question: was the CIA part of an operation to destabilize Wilson and bring him down?

It is known that Bush took Wilson's letter quite seriously, so seriously that he flew to London to talk to Wilson and assured him that the CIA had not been responsible for any surveillance of the PM. But by the time Bush reached London, Wilson had already resigned in a surprise announcement made on March 16, 1976. What role had the CIA actually played?

The transition from Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher amounts to the replacement of Lord Victor Rothschild's favorite puppet politician of the 1960's with Lord Victor Rothschild's preferred choice for the 1980's. The pretext used to harass Wilson out of office was Wilson's well-known close ties to communists and to the Soviet block, but all of that had been well known back in 1964 when he had come to power for the first time. The pretext appears in all of its irony when we recall that Lord Victor Rothschild was himself the leading candidate to be named as the legendary "Fifth Man" of the KGB-SIS spy team of Philby, Maclean, Burgess, and Blunt.

A leading purveyor of the argument that Wilson was a Soviet asset was James Jesus Angleton, like Bush a Yale graduate. Angleton had been the counterintelligence director of the CIA until 1975, but he had not been very successful. Angleton had always been obsessed by the presence of high-level CIA moles in the US government and his own agency. Angleton was in touch with Peter Wright of MI-5. Wright was also bitterly opposed to Wilson, whom he characterized as a "Soviet-Zionist agent," which was perfectly accurate as far as it went. But again, all that had been clear back in 1964 and even much earlier. Wright had provided Chapman Pincher, a right-wing British journalist and also an asset of Lord Victor, with the material for the book Their Trade is Treachery, a "limited hangout" which provided many interesting facts about the Soviet penetration of British intelligence, but which was mainly designed to keep Lord Victor out of the spotlight. Later Wright's own book, Spycatcher, succeeded even better in protecting Lord Victor by becoming an international success de scandale that allowed Lord Victor to die a natural death without ever having been apprehended by British authorities. The crowning irony is that Philby's old pal Lord Victor, Wright, and the obsessive Angleton were all in a strange united front to vilify Wilson for his links to Soviet intelligence, which were of course massive but which had been well known all along.

The CIA's specific contributions to the destabilization of Wilson included the agency's sponsorship of a book written by a Czech defector named Josef Frolik. This tome accused John Stonehouse, the Postmaster General in Wilson's cabinet, of being an east bloc agent. Stonehouse later attempted to go underground in Australia after feigning suicide. Stonehouse was later found and brought back, although he still asserts his innocence of espionage charges. This affair, complete with a fugitive cabinet minister, was a colossal embarrassment to Wilson.

Wilson, as indicated, was convinced that he was being bugged, possibly with CIA participation. According to Chapman Pincher, "whether this surveillance extended to independent bugging by the CIA and NSA is unknown, although the CIA has denied it. Under the Anglo-American agreement dating back to 1947, there had long been an exchange of surveillance information, including cable and letter intercepts, but it is not impossible that the Americans agencies occasionally undertook activities denied, by writ or circumstances, to the British." [fn 44] In other words, it was easier for the Anglo-American establishment to have the CIA handle the bugging in London, since this was not illegal under the CIA's regulations. Was there reciprocity in this respect? Part of the destabilization of Wilson was run through Private Eye magazine. Another likely participant was Tory activist Airey Neave, who had wanted to replace former Prime Minister Edward Heath with Thatcher when Heath fell in 1974. Ultimately, Thatcher would be the leading beneficiary of the fall of Wilson.

Another government destabilized through the CIA during the same period was the Gough Whitlam Labor Party government of Australia. Whitlam threatened to deprive the CIA of its key Pine Gap electronic listening post after he discovered that the Australian intelligence services had been working with the CIA to bring down Allende. On November 8, 1975, with Bush's likely advent at the CIA already public knowledge, Theodore Shackley dispatched a telegram to the Australian intelligence services threatening to cut off all exchanges, hanging the Australians out to dry. On November 11, in a highly unusual action, the Royal Governor General dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, bringing Malcolm Frase and the conservatives back to power. When Whitlam's Labor Party majority in the lower house responded by voting no confidence in Fraser, the Royal Governor General dissolved the lower house and called a election. It was a coup ordered directly by Queen Elizabeth II, and carried out with Bush's help. In the background of this affair is the Nugan Hand bank, an Anglo-American intelligence proprietary involved with drug money laundering.

One of the most spectacular scandals of Bush's tenure at the CIA was the assassination in Washington DC of the Chilean exile leader Orlando Letelier, who had been a minister in the government of Salvador Allende Gossens, who had been overthrown by Kissinger in 1973. Letelier along with Ronnie Moffitt of the Washington Institute for Policy Studies died on September 21, 1976 in the explosion of a car bomb on Sheridan Circle, in the heart of Washington's Embassy Row district along Massachusetts Avenue.

Relatively few cases of international terrorism have taken place on the territory of the United States, but this was certainly an exception. Bush's activities before and after this assassination amount to one of the most bizarre episodes in the annals of secret intelligence operations.

One of the assassins of Letelier was unquestionably one Michael Vernon Townley, a CIA agent who had worked for David Atlee Philips in Chile. After the overthrow of Allende and the advent of the Pinochet dictatorship, David Atlee Philips had become the director of the CIA's western hemisphere operations. In 1975 Phillips founded AFIO, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which has supported George Bush in every campaign he has ever waged since that time. Townley, as a "former" CIA agent, had gone to work for the DINA, the Chilean secret police, and had been assigned by the DINA as its liaison man with a group called CORU. CORU was the acronym for Command of United Revolutionary Organizations, a united front of four anti-Castro Cuban organizations based primarily in the neighborhood of Miami called Little Havana. With CORU, we are back in the milieu of Miami anti-Castro Cubans whose political godfather George Bush had been since very early in the 1960's. CORU was at that time working together with the intelligence services of Chile's Pinochet, Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner, and Nicaragua's Somoza for operations against common enemies, including Chilean left-wing emigres and Castro assets. Soon after the foundation of CORU, bombs began to go off at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York.

During this period a Miami doctor named Orlando Bosch was arrested, allegedly because he had been planning to assassinate Henry Kissinger, and that ostensibly because of Kissinger's concessions to Castro. During the same period, the Chilean DINA was mounting its so-called Operation Condor, a plan to assassinate emigre opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship and its Milton Friedman, Chicago school economic policies. [fn 45]

It was under these circumstances that the US Ambassador to Chile, George Landau, sent a cable to the State Department with the singular request that two agents of the DINA be allowed to enter the United States with Paraguayan passports. One of these agents is likely to have been Townley. The cable also indicated that the two DINA agents also wanted to meet with Gen. Vernon Walters, the outgoing Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and so the cable also went to Langley. Here the cable was read by Walters, and also passed into the hands of Director George Bush. Bush not only had this cable in his hands; Bush and Walters discussed the contents of the cable and what to do about it, including whether Walters ought to meet with the DINA agents. The cable also reached the desk of Henry Kissinger. One of Landau's questions appears to have been whether the mission of the DINA men had been approved in advance by Langley; his cable was accompanied by photocopies of the Paraguayan passports. (Later on, in 1980, Bush denied that he had ever seen this cable; he had not just been out of the loop, he claims; he had been in China. (The red Studebaker hacks, including Bush himself in his campaign autobiography, do not bother denying anything about the Letelier case; they simply omit it. [fn 46]

On August 4, on the basis of the conversations between Bush and Walters, the CIA sent a reply from Walters to Landau stating that the former "was unaware of the visit and that his Agency did not desire to have any contact with the Chileans." Landau responded by revoking the visas that he had already granted and telling the Immigration and Naturalization Service to put the two DINA men on their watch list to be picked up if they tried to enter the US. The two DINA men entered the US anyway on August 22, with no apparent difficulty. The DINA men reached Washington, and it is clear that they were hardly traveling incognito: they appear to have asked a Chilean embassy official call the CIA to repeat their request for a meeting. According to other reports, the DINA men met with New York Senator James Buckley, the brother of conservative columnist William Buckley of Skull and Bones. It is also said that the DINA men met with Frank Terpil, a close associate of Ed Wilson, and no stranger to the operations of the Shackley-Clines Enterprise. According to one such version, "Townley met with Frank Terpil one week before the Letelier murder, on the same day that he met with Senator James Buckley and aides in New York City. The explosives sent to the United States on Chilean airlines were to replace explosives supplied by Edwin Wilson, according to a source close to the office of Assistant US Attorney Lawrence Barcella." [fn 47] The bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt was of the same type that the FBI believed that Ed Wilson was selling, with the same timer mechanism.

Bush therefore had plenty of warning that a DINA operation was about to take place in Washington, and it was no secret that it would be wetwork. As Dinges and Landau point out, when the DINA hitmen airrived in Washington they "alerted the CIA by having a Chilean embassy employee call General Walters' office at the CIA's Langley headquarters. It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington DC, or anywhere in the United States. It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA." [fn 48] One might say that Bush had been an accessory before the fact.

Bush's complicity deepens when we turn to the post-assassination coverup. The prosecutor in the Letelier-Moffitt murders was Assistant US Attorney Eugene M. Propper. Nine days after the assassinations, Propper was trying without success to get some cooperation from the CIA, since it was obvious enough to anyone that the Chilean regime was the prime suspect in the killing of one of its most prominent political opponents. The CIA had been crudely stonewalling Propper. He had even been unable to secure the requisite security clearance to see documents in the case. Then Propper received a telephone call from Stanley Pottinger, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Pottinger said that he had been in contact with members of the Institute for Policy Studies who had argued that the Civil Rights Division ought to take over the Letelier case because of its clear political implications. Propper argued that he should keep control of the case since the Protection of Foreign Officials Act gave him jurisdiction. Pottinger agreed that Propper was right, and that he ought to keep the case. When Pottinger offered to be of help in any possible way, Propper asked if Pottinger could expedite cooperation with the CIA.

As Propper later recounted this conversation:

Instant, warm confidence shot through the telephone line. The assistant attorney general replied that he happened to be a personal friend of the CIA director himself, George Bush. Pottinger called him "George." For him, the CIA Director was only a phone call away. Would Propper like an appointment? By that afternoon he, [an FBI agent working on the case], and Pottinger were scheduled for lunch with Director Bush at CIA headquarters on Monday. A Justice Department limousine would pick them up at noon. Propper whistled to himself. This was known in Washintgton as access. [fn 49]

At CIA headquarters, "Pottinger introduced Propper to Director Bush, and Bush introduced the two lawyers to Tony Lapham, his general counsel. Then, graciously, the Director said, 'Would you gentlemen care for some sherry?" An old butler in a white coat served sherry and cheese hors d'oeuvres. Then the group moved into the Director's private dining room, where an elegant table was laid on white linen."

There was some polite conversation. Then, when finally called on to state his business, Propper said that the Letelier-Moffitt murders were more than likely political assassinations, and that the investigation would probably move outside the United States into the Agency's realm of foreign intelligence. Therefore, Propper wanted CIA cooperation in the form of reports from within Chile, reports on assassins, reports on foreign operatives entering the United States, and the like. He wanted anything he could get that might bear upon the murders.

If Bush had wanted to be candid, he could have informed Propper that he had been informed of the coming of the DINA team twice, once before they left South America and once when they had arrived in Washington. But Bush never volunteered this highly pertinent information. Instead, he went into a sophisticated stonewall routine:

"Look," said Bush, "I'm appalled by the bombing. Obviously we can't allow people to come right here into the capital and kill foreign diplomats and American citizens like this. It would be a hideous precedent. So, as Director, I want to help you. As an American citizen, I want to help. But, as director, I also know that the Agency can't help in a lot of situations like this. We've got some problems. Tony, tell him what they are."

Lapham's argument went like this, with Bush looking on:

The first problem is that every time we've tried to help Justice in the past, they've screwed us. They always promise us that if we give them this assistance of that assistance, they'll just use it for background, but the next thing we know, they're trying to make a witness out of our source. They're trying to put him in court. We can't attract and hold sources if they're afraid they'll get slapped into court.

"Well, that sounds legitimate to me," said Propper, "but I'm sure we can figure out a way to work around it."

"That's not all," said Lapham. "We got torn to pieces last year for domestic intelligence, so now everybody over here is gun-shy about reporting on Americans or any activities in this country. We can't do it. That's strictly out. The liberals don't like some things we do and the conservatives don't like others, and the way the rule book is now, we stay clean by keeping out of criminal stuff and domestic stuff. You've got a murder here in the states. That's both. That makes it tough."

"I see," said Propper. "But I can't believe there's not some way for you to get into this case. There has to be a way. If somebody comes into the country from overseas and assassinates people here in Washington, that's got to be your kind of work. They might do it again. Who else will stop it?"

"Sure," said Lapham. "That's a security matter. That's ours. But we don't know this is a security matter yet, and we'd have to investigate a crime to find out." [fn 50]

Notice the consummate Aristotelian obfuscation by Lapham, who is propounding a chicken and egg paradox of law and administration. Apart from such sophists, everyone knew that Pinochet was a prime suspect. Lapham and Propper finally agreed that they could handle the matter best through an exchange of letters between the CIA Director and Attorney General Levi. George Bush summed up: "If you two come up with something that Tony thinks will protect us, we'll be all right." The date was October 4, 1976.

Contrary to that pledge, Bush and the CIA began actively to sabotage Propper's investigation in public as well as behind the scenes. By Saturday the Washington Post was reporting many details of Propper's arrangement with the CIA. Even more interesting was the following item in the "Periscope" column of Newsweek magazine of October 11:

After studying FBI and other field investigations, the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier....The agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime."

According to the New York Times of October 12: *

[Ford Administration] intelligence officials said it appeared that the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency had virtually ruled out the idea that Mr. Letelier was killed by agents of the Chilean military junta....[They] said they understood DINA was firmly under the control of the government of Gen. Augusto Pincohet and that killing Mr. Letelier could not have served the junta's purposes....The intelligence officials said a parallel investigation was pursuing the possibility that Mr. Letelier had been assassinated by Chilean left-wing extremists as a means of disrupting United States relations with the military junta.

On November 1. the Washington Post reported a leak from Bush personally:

CIA officials say...they believe that operatives of the present Chilean military junta did not take part in Letelier's killing. According to informed sources, CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation last week with Secretary of State Kissinger, the sources said. What evidence the CIA has obtained to support this initial conclusion was not disclosed.

Most remarkably, Bush is reported to have flown to Miami on November 8 with the purpose or pretext of taking "a walking tour of little Havana." As author Donald Freed tells it, "Actually [Bush] met with the Miami FBI Special Agent in Charge Julius Matson and the chief of the anti-Castro terrorism squad. According to a source close to the meeting Bush warned the FBI against allowing the investigation to go any further than the lowest level Cubans." [fn 51]

In a meeting presided over by Pottinger, Propper was only able to get Lapham to agree that the Justice Department could ask the CIA to report any information on the Letelier murder that might relate to the security of the United States against foreign intervention. It was two years before any word of the July-August cables was divulged.

Ultimately some low-level Cubans were convicted in a trial that saw Townley cop a plea bargain and get off with a lighter sentence than the rest. Material about Townley under his various aliases strangely disappeared from the INS files, and records of the July-August cable traffic with Walters (and Bush) was expunged. No doubt that there had been obstruction of justice, no doubt there had been a cover-up.

On October 6, bombs destroyed a Cubana Airlines DC-8 flying from Kingston, Jamaica to Havana, killing 73 passengers and crew, including the Cuban national fencing team which was returning from Venezuela. Anonymous callers to newspapers and radio stations claimed responsibility for CORU and Operation Condor, while Fidel Castro immediately blamed the CIA. Venezuelan police arrested CORU leaders Orlando Bosch (freed from jail in the US) and Luis Posada Carriles, whom we will later see as an associate of Bush operative Felix Rodriguez in Iran-contra.

During 1976, Ed Wilson, officially retired, had been working with CIA officials on a project to deliver explosives, timers, weapons, and ultimately Redeye missles to Qaddafi of Libya. Wilson was receiving assistance from active duty CIA agents, including William Weisenburger and from Scientific Communications, a CIA front company. Wilson was working with Clines, who was still on the CIA payroll. CIA man Kevin Mulcahy had reported to Theodore Shackley about Wilson's activities, and Shackley had informed deputy director William Wells, who in turned had passed the hot potato on to Inspector General John Waller. The result of this round was a probe of Mulcahy's report under Thomas Cox of Wallers' staff, assisted by Thomas Clines, of all people. On the basis of this in-house investigation, Bush on September 17 decided to pass the entire case on to the FBI.

Another aspect of Wilson's skullduggery was reported to Clines by Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, another fixture of the Enterprise, who complained that Wilson was trying to recruit him for an assassination attempt against "Carlos," the fabled international terrorist. Years later Wilson was given a long jail sentence, while his sidekick Frank Terpil went underground. What is essential here is that under Bush's administration, the CIA and its associated Enterprise and other old boys networks began to run amok along paths that lead us towards the Iran-contra affair and the other great covert action secret wars of the 1980's and 1990's.

During the last days of the Ford Administration, Attorney General Edward Levi had occasion to assert that the CIA's policy of refusing to turn documents and other evidence over to the Justice Department "smacked of a Watergate cover-up." This was in connection with the prosecution of one Edwin Gibbons Moore, who was allegedly trying to sell secret papers to the Soviet Embassy. The Bush CIA had refused to turn over various documents germane to this strange case.

During the Reagan years, Bush was given a much-publicized assignment as head of the South Florida Task Force and related efforts that were billed as part of a "war on drugs." In 1975, President Ford had ordered the CIA to collect intelligence on narcotics trafficking overseas, and also to "covertly influence" foreign officials to help US anti-drug activities. How well did Bush carry out this critical part of his responsibilities?

Poorly, according to a Justice Department "Report on Inquiry into CIA-Related Electronic Surveillance Activities," which was compiled in 1976, but which has only partly come into the public domain. What emerges is a systematic pattern of coverup that recalls Lapham's spurious arguments in the Leletier case. Using the notorious stonewall that the first responsibility of the CIA was to shield its own "methods and sources" from being exposed, the agency expressed fear "that the confidentiality of CIA's overseas collection methods and sources would be in jeopardy should discovery proceedings require disclosure of the CIA's electronic surveillance activities." [fn 52] This caused "several narcotics investigations and or prosecutions...to be terminated."

It was during 1976 that Bush met the Panamanian leader Manuel Antonio Noriega. According to Don Gregg, this meeting took place on the edges of a luncheon conference with several other visiting Panamanian officials.

This all makes an impressive catalogue of debacles in the area of covert operations. But what about the intelligence product of the CIA, in particular the National Intelligence Estimates that are the centerpiece of the CIA's work. Here Bush was to oversee a maneuver markedly to enhance the influence of the pro-Zionist wing of the intelligence community.

As we have already seen, the idea of new procedures allegedly designed to evaluate the CIA's track record in intelligence analysis had been kicking around in Leo Cherne's PFIAB for some time. In June, 1976, Bush accepted a proposal from Leo Cherne to carry out an experiment in "competitive analysis" in the area of National Intelligence Estimates of Soviet air defenses, Soviet missile accuracy, and overall Soviet strategic objectives. Bush and Cherne decided to conduct the competitive analysis by commissioning two separate groups, each of which would present and argue for its own conclusions. On the one, Team A would be the CIA's own National Intelligence Officers and their staffs. But there would also be a separate Team B, a group of ostensibly independent outside experts.

The group leader of Team B was Harvard history professor Richard Pipes, who was working in the British Museum in London when he was appointed by Bush and Cherne. Pipes had enjoyed support for his work from the office of Senator Henry Jackson, which had been one of the principal incubators of a generation of whiz kids and think tankers whose entire strategic outlook revolved around the stated or unstated premise of the absolute primacy of supporting Israel in every imaginable excess or adventure, while frequently sacrificing vital US interests in the process.

The liaison between Pipes' Team B and Team A, the official CIA, was provided by John Paisley, who had earlier served as the liaison between Langley and the McCord-Hunt-Liddy Plumbers. In this sense Paisley served as the staff director of the Team A-Team B experiment. Pipes then began choosing the members of Team B. First he selected from a list provided by the CIA two military men, Lieutenant General John Vogt and Brigadier General Jasper Welch, Jr., both of the Air Force. Pipes the added seven additional members: Paul Nitze, Gen. Daniel Graham, the retiring head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Professor William van Cleave of the University of Southern California, former US Ambassador to Moscow Foy Kohler, Paul Wolfowitz of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Thomas Wolfe of the RAND Corporation, and Seymour Weiss, a former top State Department official. Two other choices by Pipes were rejected by Bush.

Team B began meeting during late August of 1976. Paisley and Don Suda provided Team B with the same raw intelligence being used by National Intelligence Officer Howard Stoertz's Team A. Team B's basic conclusion was that the Soviet military preparations were not exclusively defensive, but rather represented the attempt to acquire a first-strike capability that would allow the USSR to unleash and prevail in thermonuclear war. The US would face a window of vulnerability during the 1980's. But it is clear from Pipes' own discussion of the debate that Team B [fn 53] was less interested in the Soviet Union and its capabilities than in seizing hegemony in the intelligence and think tank community in preparation for seizing the key posts in the Republican administration that might follow Carter in 1980. Pipes was livid when, at the final Team A-Team B meeting, he was not allowed to sit at Bush's table for lunch. The argument in Team B quarters was that since the Soviets were turning aggressive once again, the US must do everything possible to strengthen the only staunch and reliable American ally in the Middle East or possibly anywhere in the world, Israel. This meant not just that Israel had to be financed without stint, but that Israel had to be brought into central America, the Far East, and Africa. There was even a design for a new NATO constructed around Israel, while junking the old NATO because it was absorbing vital US resources needed by Israel.

By contrast, Team B supporters like Richard Perle, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan, were later bitterly hostile to the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was plainly the only rational response to the Soviet buildup, which was very real indeed. The "window of vulnerability" argument had merit, but the policy conclusions favored by Team B had none, since their idea of responding to the Soviet threat was, once again, to subordinate everything to Israeli requirements.

Team A and Team B were supposed to be secret, but leaks appeared in the Boston Globe in October. Pipes was surprised to find an even more detailed account of Team B and its grim estimate of Soviet intent in the New York Times shortly after Christmas, but Paisley told him that Bush and CIA official Richard Lehman had already been leaking to the press, and urged Pipes to begin to offer some interviews of his own. [fn 54]

Typically enough, Bush appeared on Face the Nation early in the new year to say that he was "appalled" by the leaks of Team B's conclusions. Bush confessed that "outside expertise has enormous appeal to me." He refused to discuss the Team B conclusions themselves, but did say that he wanted to "gun down" speculation that the CIA had leaked a tough estimate of the USSR's military buildup in order to stop Carter from cutting the defense budget. That speculation "just couldn't be further from the truth," said Bush, who was thus caught lying neither for the first nor last time in his existence. As if by compulsive association, Bush went on: "That gets to the integrity of the process. And I am here to defend the integrity of the intelligence process. The CIA has great integrity. It would never take directions from a policymaker-- me or anybody else--in order to come up with conclusions to force a President-elect's hand or a President's hand," pontificated Bush with Olympian hypocrisy.

For his part, Henry Kissinger, within a year or two, in an interview with the London Economist, embraced key aspects of the Team B position.

Congress soon got into the act, and George Bush testified at a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 18, 1977. It turned out that Team B and its "worst-case" scenario enjoyed strong support from Hubert Humphrey, Clifford Case, and Jacob Javits. Later it also became clear that Adlai Stevenson, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Subcommittee on Collection, Production, and Quality of Intelligence was also supportive of Team B, along with many other senators such as Moynihan and Wallop. Gary Hart was hostile, but Percy was open to dialogue with Team B.

After the Team B conclusions had been bruited around the world, Pipes became a leading member of the Committee on the Present Danger, where his fellow Team B veteran Paul Nitze was already ensconced, along with Eugene V. Rostow, Dean Rusk, Lane Kirkland, Max Kampelman, Richard Allen, David Packard, and Henry Fowler. About 30 members of the Committee on the Present danger went on to become high officials of the Reagan Administration.

Ronald Reagan himself embraced the "window of vulnerability" thesis, which worked as well for him as the bomber gap and missile gap arguments had worked in previous elections. When the Reagan Administration was being assembled, Bush and James Baker had a lot to say about who got what appointments. Bush was the founder of Team B, and that is the fundamental reason which such pro-Zionist neoconservatives as Max Kampelman, Richard Perle, Steven Bryen, Noel Koch, Paul Wolfowitz and Dov Zakem showed up in the Reagan Administration. For in one of his many ideological reincarnations, George Bush is also a neoconservative himself. What counted for Team B was to occupy the offices, and to dominate the debate. Team B greatly influenced the strategic assumptions and rhetoric of the first Reagan Administration; their one outstanding defeat was the launching of the SDI, and that was administered to them by LaRouche.

In a grim postlude to the Team B exercise, Bush's hand-picked staff director for the operation, John Paisley, the Soviet analyst (Paisley was the former deputy director of the CIA's Office of Strategic Research) and CIA liaison to the Plumbers, disappeared on September 24, 1978 while sailing on Chesapeake Bay in his sloop, the Brillig. Several days later a body was found floating in the bay in an advanced state of decomposition, and with a gun shot wound behind the left ear. The corpse was weighed down by two sets of ponderous diving belts. The body was four inches shorter than Paisley's own height, and Paisley's wife later asserted that the body found was not that of her husband. Despite all this, the body was positively identified as Paisley's, the death summarily ruled a suicide, and the body quickly cremated at a funeral home approved by the Office of Security. Paisley had been involved along with Angleton in the debriefing and managing of Soviet defectors like Nosenko and Nikolai Artamonov/"Shadrin," and various aspects of this case show that the Bush-Cherne Team B had not really ceased its operations after 1976-77, but had continued to function. Some have attempted to identify Paisley as Deep Throat. Others have suggested that he was a KGB mole. Either story, if true, might lead to highly embarrassing consequences for George Bush. [fn 55]

The Shadrin case just mentioned allows us to follow Bush a few steps further into the world of Soviet defectors, exchanges, kidnappings, murders, and other grisly rites of the cold war. Nicolai Artamonov alias Nick Shadrin was a Soviet naval officer who had defected to the west in the 1950's, and who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency. There are indications that Shadrin was encouraged by his US handlers to let himself be contacted by the Soviets so that he could become a double agent. In December, 1975 Shadrin was sent to Vienna by the CIA, where he disappeared. According to some versions, he had been a Soviet agent all along, and went back to Moscow under the orders of the KGB. According to other versions, Shadrin was cynically delivered up by his CIA handlers to certain death at the hands of the KGB within the framework of a dirty operation to enhance the career of another KGB agent who had secretly gone to work for the CIA while remaining with the KGB. [fn 56]

The handling of defectors such as Shadrin represented that part of CIA operations where James Jesus Angleton spun his web, so were are moving through an obfuscated wilderness of mirrors in broaching this subject. But it seems well established that Bush acquired a personal role in the Shadrin affair through his deception of Shadrin's wife, Eva Shadrin, who was desperately seeking to find out what had happened to her husband. With the help of friends, Eva Shadrin appealed for assistance to Senators John Sparkman, and James Eastland, to Speaker of the House Carl Albert, to Pentagon officials and to PFIAB. On February 5, Mrs. Shadrin received a call from Brent Scowcroft saying that the case had been brought to his attention. The same day Gen. Vernon Walters called to say that Scowcroft was meeting with him at that very hour to see what could be done. Bush then appointed CIA Counterintelligence Chief George Kalaris to oversee cooperation with Mrs. Sadrin and her lawyer, Richard Copaken. Kalaris is accused in one published account of this story of having helped to delivered Shadrin into the hands of the KGB. Later, on October 8, 1976 Mrs. Shadrin and Copaken were received by Bush at Langley in a meeting also attended by Kalaris and former CIA employee Chester Cooper. Various possibilities for forcing an exchange of Shadrin were brought up by Mrs. Shadrin, but were ruled out by Bush. Bush also refused to say whether or not Shadrin was on a secret mission for the CIA. Bush did agree to set up a meeting for Mrs. Shadrin with President Ford.

On November 5, Ford received Mrs. Shadrin at the White House. Mrs. Shadrin recalled Ford as "cold and austere," a man whose "eyes seemed glazed over like a bullfrog's while I talked." Ford was unwilling to make any commitment on behalf of Shadrin. In the meantime, Bush had allowed Copaken to interview several CIA clandestine officers, including the last CIA contact to see Shadrin, one Cynthia Hausmann. This was considered a highly unusual favor by the DCI, even though Hausmann's cover had already been blown by Philip Agee. But in the end, Mrs. Shadrin concluded that her husband had been set up by the CIA, and that "she had been a fool to believe anything told her by George Bush...." [fn 57]

Related dimensions of Bush's intrigues at the CIA can only be hinted at. There is for example the case of Ralph Joseph Sigler, an army sergeant who worked as a double agent with the east bloc until he was found brutally murdered by electrocution in a motel in April, 1976. Among Sigler's belongings was a photograph of himself together with CIA Director Bush. [fn 58]

The question raised by these cases was almost universally dodged during the 1988 election campaign: "Do the American people really want to elect a former director of the CIA as their President," as Tom Wicker posed it in the New York Times of April 29, 1988. "That's hardly been discussed so far; but it seems obvious that a CIA chief might well be privy to the kind of 'black' secrets that could later make him-- as a public figure--subject to blackmail." Here is one area where we can be sure that we have only scratched the surface.

As he managed the formidable world-wide capabilities of the CIA during 1976, Bush was laying the groundwork for his personal advancement to higher office and greater power in the 1980's. As we have seen, there was some intermittent speculation during the year that, in spite of what Ford had promised the Senate, Bush might show up as Ford's running mate after all. But, at the Republican convention, Ford chose Kansas Senator Bob Dole for vice-president. If Ford had won the election, Bush would certainly have attempted to secure a further promotion, perhaps to Secretary of State, Defense, or Treasury as a springboard for a new presidential bid of his own in 1980. But if Carter won the election, Bush would attempt to raise the banner of the non-political status of the CIA in order to convince Carter to let him stay at Langley during the period 1977-81 as a "non-partisan" administrator.

Carter and Bush were not destined to get along. Carter wore the mask of the cult of Dionysius, demanding that the secrets of the inner temple be thrown open to the plebs for which he pretended to act as tribune. Bush wore the mask of the temple of Apollo, and argued in public for the sanctity of state secrets and the priority of covert operations while he secretly deployed his own irregular armies. Carter had implicitly attacked Bush during the early phases of the presidential campaign in an August 12 speech in which the Georgian had denigrated the Ford Administration as a "dumping ground for unsuccessful candidates, faithful political partisans, out-of-favor White House aides and representatives of the special interests." That day, Bush had traveled to Plains, Georgia to provide Carter with a five-hour intelligence briefing. Reporters asked Bush about Carter's comments, which elicited a fit of apoplexy from our hero: "That's very interesting," said Bush. We came down here to do a professional job. The President directed me to brief him on intelligence matters. Everything went very well." Carter backed off a day later, saying "I happen to think a lot of George Bush."

In the close 1976 election, Carter prevailed by vote fraud in New York, Ohio, and other states, but Ford was convinced by Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, as well as by his own distraught wife Betty, that he must concede in order to preserve the work of "healing" that he had accomplished since Watergate. Carter would therefore enter the White House.

Bush prepared to make his bid for continuity at the CIA. Shortly after the election, he was scheduled to journey to Plains to brief Carter once again with the help of his deputy Henry Knoche. Early in the morning Bush and Knoche stopped off at the Old Executive Office Building to talk to Budget Director Robert Lynn in order to secure a cash infusion for the CIA, which was facing a budgetary crunch. Bush then dropped in on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and also went into the Oval Office to talk to Ford.

The critical meeting with Carter went very badly indeed. Bush took Carter aside and argued that in 1960 and 1968, CIA Directors were retained during presidential transitions, and that it would make Carter look good if he did the same. Carter signaled that he wasn't interested. Then Bush lamely stammered that if Carter wanted his own man in Langley, Bush would be willing to resign. which is of course standard procedure for all agency heads when a new president takes office. Carter said that that was indeed exactly what he wanted, and that he would have his own new DCI ready by January 21, 1977. Bush and Knoche then briefed Carter and his people for some six hours. Carter insiders told the press that Bush's briefing had been a "disaster." "Jimmy just wasn't impressed with Bush," said a key Carter staffer. [fn 59]

Bush and Knoche then flew back to Washington, and on the plane Bush wrote a memo for Henry Kissinger describing his exchanges with Carter. At midnight, Bush drove to Kissinger's home and briefed him for an hour.

Knoche said later that he was mightily impressed by Bush's long day of meeting the budget director, the president, the vice president, the president-elect and the secretary of state, all on the same day, even if the result had been that Bush was fired. At Bush's 9:30 AM staff meeting in Langley the next day, Knoche and a group of other officials awarded Bush the Intelligence Medal of Merit. "It was a very touching day," said Knoche.

Carter first attempted to make Theodore Sorenson, the former Kennedy intimate, his new CIA Director. It soon became clear that certain circles were determined to block this nomination. The Sorenson nomination was soon torpedoed by a series of leaks, including revelations that Sorenson had been a conscientious objector during World War II, plus accusations that he had taken classified documents with him when he had left the government in 1964. Carter tried to get NATO General Bernard Rogers for the post, but finally had to settle for Navy Admiral Stansfield Turner from his own class at Annapolis.

An important internal CIA issue that arose during Turner's time in Langley was the question of personnel cuts, especially in the operations directorate. To understand Bush's influence on this topic, we must go back to the Watergate era.

During the Schlesinger-Colby period, about 2,000 CIA personnel, representing about 15% of the CIA manpower complement, were dismissed. The method of these firings appears to have been heavily influenced by Shackley and his faction, who argued that CIA personnel who were in danger of being exposed by Philip Agee should be preemptively terminated. There is therefore much reason to think that Shackley and Agee were in cahoots. This purge touched many important posts, which could then be filled by Shackley loyalists. A description of the process is offered by retired CIA agent Joseph Burkholder Smith, who served in the Western Hemisphere division:

A defensive operation was started immediately and every activity, agent, and officer was scrutinized to determine if Agee had already blown them or if he would write about them in his book. A Shackley henchman was installed as chief of operations [was this William Nelson?] and a cryptonym, the Agency's badge of security significance, was assigned to the task of getting rid of the division's operations and much of its office staff-- the pre-Shackley staff, some were quick to point out. They doubted whether so much destruction was necessary, especially since Shackley had a reputation for ruthlessness and for filling key jobs with his favorites.
Whether or not such a vast amount of house cleaning was really necessary, I could not decide. All I knew was that it was dismal work. [...]

Nevertheless, I was disturbed to have to dismiss so many loyal men and upset to have the defenses I kept putting up to try to salvage something of their old lives summarily dismissed by the Star Chamber conducting the purge in Washington. When Agee's book finally appeared, not one of the people I was ordered to fire was mentioned. [fn 60]

All of the CIA's divisions were purged, with justifications offered that ranged from the threat of denunciation by Agee to budget constraints to poor performance to the need to make room for new blood. Schlesinger, who fired 630 officers in five months, was said to be accompanied by bodyguards during this period for fear that some disgruntled covert warrior might exact a horrible revenge.

During Bush's tenure, the same William Nelson apparently mentioned by Smith seems to have suggested that the administrative purge had not gone far enough. In the spring of 1976, when he was about to be replaced by William Wells, Nelson again raised the issue of operations directorate personnel. "There were a lot of people in the DO [Directorate of Operations] who were marginal performers," said Nelson in a 1988 interview. "The low middle. We needed quality, not quantity. I told [Bush] that the lower 25 per cent should be identified and should be encouraged to seek other employment....I said we owed these people a lot but not a lifetime job. He [Bush] put it in his pocket and said he would think about it." [fn 61]

This new round of firings was relegated to Turner, who reportedly was told by Knoche on arriving at the CIA that the agency was "top-heavy." There was the case of Cord Meyer, Knoche said, who had too much rank for the work he was doing. As Turner later recalled, "It was at this point that I learned about a study the espionage [operations] branch itself had done on its personnel situation in mid 1976, while George Bush was DCI. It called for a reduction in the size of the branch by 1350 positions over a five-year period. No action had been taken. Bush had not rejected it, but neither had he faced up to it." [fn 62] Turner then proceeded to abolish 820 jobs, which he claims was accomplished through attrition. Other estimates of the Turner firings range between 820 and 2,800.

The plan Turner implemented was thus according to some the Nelson-Shackley-Bush plan. Certain activities of the intelligence community were being privatized and farmed out to such organisms as the National Endowment for Democracy and other such quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations of Project Democracy. Under Reagan, this privatization of intelligence operations and their increasing assignment to non-governmental organizations was made official through Executive Order 12333.

Otherwise, George Bush used his last days at the CIA for his lifelong pastime, servicing his network. On December 16, he appeared at an awards ceremony in the Bubble at Langley to present a medal to Juanita Moody of the National Security Agency Product Organization staff. [fn 63]

During his year at Langley, Bush was especially forthcoming towards Wall Street, above all towards the family firm. On at least one occasion, Bush gave an exclusive private briefing, including forecasts on the future development of the world energy market, for partners and executives of Brown Brothers, Harriman. Such an incident, it is superfluous to point out, entails the gravest questions of conflict of interest. On another occasion, Bush gave a similar briefing to the board of directors of the Chase Manhattan Bank. [fn 64]

As always, Bush had special attention for Leo Cherne, the source of so much of the policy he implemented at the CIA. On November 8, Bush had called Cherne's attention to a small item in US News and World Report which suggested that "US assessments have so underrated Russia's strategic buildup that a top-secret study is under way to decide whether to strip the CIA of responsibility for the estimates and give it to an independent office answerable directly to the President." Another leak on Team B! Bush told Cherne that "the attached is the kind of publicity that I am sure you would agree is very damaging. I really don't think there is much we can do about it at this point, but I worry about it."

Bush left Langley with Carter's inauguration, leaving Knoche to serve a couple of months as acting DCI. In early February Bush wrote again to Leo Cherne, with whom he was now on a first-name basis:

Thanks for that lovely letter you sent me on Feb. 2nd. I already miss our contacts a lot. I will be leaving for Houston a week from today. [...]
Should you get down that way it would be great to see you. I am joining a couple of Boards that will bring me East from time to time. I hope to keep up my interest in foreign affairs and in national politics. It is quite unclear at the moment how to do these things.

The past has been fantastic; but now I am determined to look to the future. I know it will be full of challenge. I hope it holds frequent contacts with Leo Cherne.

I will follow with interest the President's decisions on PFIAB. Holler if I can ever be of help to you. I value our friendship.

Sincerely, George [fn 65]

Carter abolished PFIAB and fired Cherne from the IOB. George Bush now turned to his family business of international banking.

NOTES:

1. Nathan Miller, Spying for America, (New York, 1989), p. 399.

2. Gerald R. Ford Library, Richard B. Cheney Files, Box 5.

3. See Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (University Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 108-109.

4. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, pp. 115-116.

5. Gerald R. Ford Library, Philip Buchen Files, Box 24. Article is from Houston Post, November 8, 1975.

6. Newhouse News Service article by Saul Kohler, November, 1975, with letter from Ford's press secretary Ron Nessen, at Gerald R. Ford Library, William T. kendall Files, Box 7.

7. Letter from Bush to Stennis, December 12, 1975 in Ford Library, Philip W. Buchen Files, Box 37.

8. Ford Library, Presidential Handwriting File, Box 9.

9. Ford Library, Presidential Handwriting File, Box 9.

10. Collins to Ford, November 12, 1975, Ford Library, John O. Marsh Files, Box 1.

11. Nedzi to Ford, December 12, 1975, Ford Library, John O. Marsh Files, Box 1.

12. Roth to Bush, November 20, 1975, Ford Library, John O. Marsh Files, Box 1.

13. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7

14. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7.

15. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7.

16. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7.

17. US Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Nomination of George Bush to be Director of Central Intelligence, December 15-16, 1975, p. 10.

18. Memo of December 16, 1975 from O'Donnell to Marsh through Friedersdorf on the likely vote in the Stennis Senate Armed Services Committee. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7.

19. Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 7.

20. For an account of the exploitation of the Welch incident by the Ford Administration, see Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry (University Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 161-162.

21. Ford Library, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 8.

22. For an account of the leaking of the Pike Committee report and the situation in late January and February, 1976, see Daniel Schorr, Clearing the Air (Boston, 1977) especially pp. 179-207, and Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, pp. 172-191.

23. A Season of Inquiry, p. 180.

24. A Season of Inquiry, p. 182.

25. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (New York, 1987), p. 12.

26. William Colby, Honorable Men (New York, 1978), p. 452.

27. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, "At CIA, a Rebuilder 'Goes With the Flow,'" Washington Post, August 10, 1988. The biographical information on Knoche is also drawn from a 1-page summary in the Ford Library, William T. Kendall Files, Box 9.

28. On Murphy and Noriega, see Frank McNeil, War and Peace in Central America, (New York, Scribner), p. 278.

29. Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (University Press of America, 1982), pp. 225-226.

30. See John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars (New York, ), Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, 1987), and John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York, 1987).

31. Washington Post, August 10, 1988.

32. William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance (New York, Dial Press), p. 446.

33. Ford Library, Philip W. Buchen Files, Box 2.

34. Memo by Leo Cherne, February 6, 1976, in Ford Library Leo Cherne Papers, Box 1.

35. For Ford's reorganization, see Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, pp. 194-197, and New York Times, February 18, 1976.

36. For Koregate, see Robert B. Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit (New York, Holt Rinheart and Winston, 1980).

37. Nathan Miller, Spying For America: The Hidden History of US Intelligence (New York, Paragon House, 1989), pp. 402-403.

38. Ranelagh, The Agency, p. 632.

39. Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, "Company Man," Mother Jones, October, 1988.

40. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, (New York, 1978).

41. David Corn, "The Same Old Dirty Tricks," The Nation, August 23, 1988.

42. David Corn, "The Same Old Dirty Tricks," The Nation, August 23, 1988.

43. Chapman Pincher, The Spycatcher Affair (New York, 1988), p. 147.

44. For the CIA-Harold Wilson affair, see: David Leigh, The Wilson Plot (New York, 1988); Philip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession (New York, Norton); Richard Deacon, The British Connection (London, Hamish Hamilton); and Chapman Pincher, The Spycatcher Affair (New York, 1988). Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior (New York, 1991) joins the red Studebaker school of historiography on Bush in the Angleton-Wilson affair.

45. Accounts of the Letelier Affairs include John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York, 1980); Donald Freed, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), and Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, "Company Man," Mother Jones, October 1988.

46. See Armstrong and Nason, p. 43.

47. Freed, p. 174.

48. Dinges and Landau, p. 384.

49. Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Labyrinth (New York, 1982), p. 72.

50. Labyrinth, pp. 74-75.

51. Freed, Death in Washington, p. 174.

52. Jefferson Morley, "Bush's Drug Problem- and Ours," The Nation, August 27, 1988.

53. Richard Pipes, "Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth," Commentary, October 1986.

55. Pipes, "Team B," Commentary, October, 1986, p. 34. Pipes makes clear that it was Bush and Richard Lehman who both leaked to David Binder of the New York Times. Lehman also encouraged Pipes to leak. The version offered by William R. Corson et al. in Widows (New York, 1989), namely that Paisley did the leaking, may also be true, but will not exonerate Bush. The authors of Widows are in grave danger of being banished to the red Studebaker school of coverup in that they ignore Pipes' account and its included fingering of Bush as the lead leaker.

55. See William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, Joseph J. Trento, Widows.

56. See Willaim R. Corson et al., Widows, and Henry Hurt, Shadrin: The Spy Who Never Came Back.

57. Henry Hurt, Shadrin, p. 260.

58. Corson, Widows, p. 301.

59. Evans and Novak column, Houston Post, December 1, 1976. For the pro-Bush account of these events, see Nicholas King, George Bush, pp. 109-110.

60. Joseph Burkholder Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York, Putnam), p. 12.

61. Washington Post, August 10, 1988.

62. Admiral Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (Boston, 1985), p. 196.

63. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, p. 250.

64. Washington Post, August 10, 1988.

65. Ford Library, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 1.

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