George H. W. Bush would remain only a year at the head of the CIA, but under his leadership it took on profound changes, resulting in its being further removed from Congress’ oversight. Additionally, the power of the Agency would be reinforced by an executive order from Ford that reorganized the intelligence community by increasing the authority of the CIA over all other agencies of Military Intelligence. Bush’s successor, Stanfield Turner (appointed by Carter in 1976), would again, like William Colby, try to discipline the CIA by removing 600 CIA agents involved in covert operations. But instead of ending covert operations, these measures would simply shift temporarily their control from the CIA to the National Security Council, as is demonstrated by the close collaboration between Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and his assistant Robert Gates, a CIA veteran who would then return as CIA director under President Reagan. Besides, it has been amply proven that firing CIA agents does not suffice to severe their link to the Agency, but may simply provide them with better coverage. As Reagan’s Vice President, Bush maintained close ties with some of his former CIA colleagues, whom he used to carry out secret and illegal operations in Central America. Under Bush discreet supervision, as Vice President then as President, covert activities abroad would also be partly outsourced to foreign military or intelligence services, and self-financed by revenues from weapons and drugs trafficking.



Unlike Johnson and Nixon, both of middle-class origin, George Bush comes from a family two generations into the political and economic upper spheres. The Bush saga is inseparable from that of the Harrimans, who are themselves associated with the Rockefellers since Edward H. Harriman took control of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1898 (for his ruthless ways akin to John D. Rockefeller’s, Harriman was declared an “undesirable citizen” by Theodore Roosevelt and sentenced under the anti-trust laws in 1904). Thanks to the United States’ entry into war in 1917, Samuel Bush, then responsible for the supply of small arms within the War Industries Board, made himself useful to Percy Rockefeller, then owner of Remington Arms. In 1919, Rockefeller rewards Samuel Bush by introducing him into the bank Harriman & Co, founded by Averell Harriman. Prescot Bush, son of Samuel, in his turn would join Harriman & Co after graduating from Yale and being initiated into Yale’s secret society Skull and Bones — in the same class as Roland Harriman, Averell's brother. In 1921, Prescot married the daughter of the president of Harriman & Co, George Herbert Walker (also a member of Skull and Bones), and three years later named his firstborn son: George Herbert Walker Bush. In 1926, Prescot became vice president of Harriman & Co; in 1928, Harriman & Co bought Dresser Industries, a tech producer for the energy and natural resources field, and, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, Harriman’s bank merged with Brown Brothers to form Brown Brothers Harriman (for whom the Dulles brothers would later be lawyers). Prescot Bush developed Dresser into an emergent force in the military-industrial complex during the 1930s, mostly through the acquisition of several arms companies. His son, George H.W. would join with Dresser as well, graduating from Yale and Skull and Bones in 1948. When Dresser moved its headquarters to Dallas in 1950, the reins of the company were entrusted to another Skull and Bones member, Neil Mallon, who would take George under his wing; George would name his first son Neil Mallon Bush. In 1954, George ventured into the petroleum markets with the creation of Zapata Offshore in Houston, which would build offshore platforms in the Caribbean.



The Bush family is part of the capitalist aristocracy, American heir of the robber barons emerged in the late nineteenth century through transportation industries, oil extraction and weapons manufacturing, and deep ties with major banks. Even better than the Rockefellers and Harrimans, and better still than the Dulles, the Bushs managed the merger between finance and politics, bridging Wall Street and Washington. They also typify the influence of the Skull and Bones secret society, whose exclusively WASP members are influential in a range of networks such as the Bilderberg Group. Finally, the Bush legacy embodies the anti-democratic tendencies of this handful of super-rich families from the 20th Century. In 1930, Prescot Bush opposes Roosevelt’s New Deal and is seduced by fascist ideology. In 1942, the Union Banking Corporation, a subsidiary of Harriman & Co, co-directed by Prescot and his stepfather George Herbert Walker, was seized by the Roosevelt administration under the Trading with the Enemy Act, for its links with Fritz Thyssen, the main financier of the Third Reich (as Thyssen boasts in his book, I Paid Hitler). With such a controversial family history, George H.W. Bush probably would never have become President without first flying under the democratic radar as Vice-President.



In addition to his membership in the world of high finance, George Bush represents another aspect of U.S. policy after the war: his link with the Intelligence underworld and the CIA in particular. Before becoming Vice President under Reagan in 1984, Bush was CIA director during the brief presidency of Gerald Ford, as mentioned above. In order to take this position, he swore before Congress to have never previously worked for the CIA. He was lying: a note from November 29th, 1963 by Edgar Hoover with the subject line “Assassination of President Kennedy” mentions that a certain “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” was informed orally of the risk that “some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. Policy”.  The “anti-Castro group” in question is probably the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), or another group armed by the CIA. George H.W. Bush, faced with this note in 1985, denied being the “George Bush” mentioned, but there is more evidence of his secret collaboration with the CIA from 1953 on. One can assume he had been introduced in the Agency by Neil Mallon, whom he considered his “favorite uncle”; according to a letter from his father Prescot Bush dated March 26th, 1953, Mallon was providing services to the CIA, “especially in the procurement of individuals to serve in that important agency”. George Bush was also associated with Thomas Devine through Zapata, who was described in an internal report to the CIA in 1975 (declassified in 1996) as “a former CIA Staff Employee”. It appears as well that Zapata Offshore was instrumental in facilitating the 1961 invasion of the Bay of Pigs — located in the Zapata Peninsula — with Bush contributing to recruitment and financing of Operation 40, in partnership with another Texan oil industry tycoon, Jack Crichton, and working in conjunction with Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban officer deeply involved in the Bay of Pigs.



Even though George Bush has always maintained his faith in the conclusions of the Warren Commission, he could not have been fooled by such a fable. He was 38 years old when Kennedy was assassinated. He had just launched his first campaign for the Senate, violently attacking Kennedy and his policy, and calling for “a new government-in-exile invasion of Cuba”. Curiously, just like Johnson and Nixon, he was in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, the day after attending a late meeting of the American Association of Oil Drilling Contractors at the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel, where members of the Secret Service were also housed. Furthermore, at 1:45 PM, an hour and 15 minutes after the Kennedy assassination, Bush did something odd: he made a phone call to the FBI, pretending to be in the city of Tyler (150 km from Dallas). His call was immediately recorded in a memo (declassified in 1993, but disclosed by the San Francisco Examiner in 1988), saying: “Mr GEORGE H.W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas” called, requesting that the call “be kept confidential”, and reporting that he had heard that a certain James Parrott “has been talking of killing the president”. The memo concludes: “BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, [and] would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63”. Parrot, a harmless young activist of the Houston Republican Club that Bush attended, was quickly exonerated. Given the circumstances, it is difficult to ignore the argument that the true purpose of the telephone call from Bush was to give himself an alibi. As investigator Russ Baker has it: “By telling the FBI he was planning to go there [Dallas], he created a misleading paper trail suggesting that his stay in Dallas was many hours after Kennedy’s shooting, rather than a few hours before”. What was George H.W. Bush trying to hide? Did he know the CIA involved in the assassination, and did he fear being suspected as CIA agent connected to one of the anti-Castro groups most hostile to Kennedy? Knowing the Agency’s procedure, he must have known the CIA would soon point the finger at a “likely” suspect; did he fear to have been chosen for this role? We are, or course, limited to hypotheses.



The last disturbing element linking George H. W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination is a letter addressed to him by George De Mohrenschildt on September 5th, 1976, when he was director of the CIA. De Mohrenschildt felt he was being harassed ever since he sent a few pages of his biography to the Danish journalist Willem Oltmans, and he explains to George Bush, to whom he has already written a first letter and signed: “Your old friend G. DeMohrenschildt”: “Dear George, You will excuse this hand-written letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. […] We are driven to insanity by this situation.  I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadya died from cystic fibrosis over three years ago. I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people – I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more”. Two months later, De Mohrenschildt was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and six months later, in March 1977, he was found dead in his office with a bullet in his head, the same day that a HSCA investigator had contacted him through his daughter.