PJ 51
CHAPTER 5
REC #3 HATONN
WED., JUNE 24, 1992 11:01 A.M. YEAR 5, DAY 313
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 1992
"LEGAL" ATTACK TO SUPPRESS JOURNALS
***URGENT RELEASE FOR READERS***
****I have urgent information for you regarding some of the JOURNALS which have been made available. There is a massive lawsuit against all of us with insisting of confiscation and impounding of all of the Journals named (we will name them). Although there is not a "case" in the circumstance--the court WILL REQUIRE IMPOUNDING AND THAT PRINTING BE STOPPED. AS YOU WILL SEE, THESE ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT JOURNALS AS DEAL WITH TRUTH REGARDING DIVINE SOURCE AND HENCE THE REASON FOR THE "SHUT-DOWN". I CAN ONLY TELL YOU THAT THESE WILL BE THE MOST VALUABLE DOCUMENTS ON THE PLANET AND I HAVE NO OTHER SUGGESTION THAN THAT YOU GET YOUR COPIES IMMEDIATELY!!! (AS LONG AS THERE ARE ONES AVAILABLE BEFORE POSTING OF CEASE AND DESIST ORDER--WHICH BECOMES HARDER BECAUSE ALL MATERIAL HAS BEEN SENT AWAY FROM AMERICA WEST FOR SOME TIME NOW.) IF YOU EVER WISH TO BE ASSURED OF HAVING THEM YOU WILL ACT NOW FOR THE GOVERNMENT CAN TIE UP THE DOCUMENTS FOREVER BUT CANNOT STOP DISTRIBUTION OF THE AVAILABLE PRINTED MATERIAL SENT PRIOR TO POSTING OF NOTICE. I AM SURE THAT ARRANGEMENTS CAN BE MADE FOR SHIPPING EVEN IN ADVANCE OF PAYMENT CLEARANCE IF YOU CALL THE 800 729-4131 number.
THE PAPERS WERE SERVED THIS MORNING AND OUR PEOPLE HAVE NOT EVEN FULLY READ THE CASE PRESENTED. THE PAPERS HAVE BEEN DULY TURNED OVER TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW CENTER BY EXPRESS SHIPMENT. WE WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.
THE JOURNALS IN POINT: AIDS: THE LAST GREAT PLAGUE; GOD SAID: LET THERE BE LIGHT AND CREATION BECAME; I AND MY FATHER ARE ONE--SECRETS OF UNIVERSAL ORDER; ETERNAL QUEST OF MAN; MURDER BY ATOMIC SUICIDE; PHONE HOME, E.T.--REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE--LIKE GOD!; THE SACRED SPIRIT WITHIN--MITAICUYE OYASIN; HUMAN, THE SCIENCE OF MAN--THE SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION AND PROOF OF GOD; and SCIENCE OF THE COSMOS--TRANSFORMATION OF MAN.
PLEASE TAKE NOTE THAT YOUR SPIRITUAL ADVERSARY IS THE FIRST TO RISE AND TRY TO SLAY GOD OF TRUTH--EVEN BEFORE THE ELITE CARTELS. THIS SHOULD TELL YOU AN IMPORTANT BIT OF INFORMATION MORE VALUABLE THAN ALL THE GOLD IN THE UNIVERSE! SO BE IT, I CANNOT FORESEE HOW MUCH TIME THERE IS BUT ASSUME A WEEK FROM THE TIME THIS REACHES YOU IS THE OUTER LIMIT--ONCE SENT FROM LOCATION THE LAW PROTECTS YOUR TRANSACTION.****
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GEORGE BUSH & CIA
CONTINUED
QUOTING CONTINUED:
CIA DIRECTOR BUSH
When Bush became Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the incumbent principal deputy director was Gen. Vernon Walters, a former Army lieutenant general. This is the same Gen. Vernon Walters who was mentioned by Haldeman and Nixon in the notorious "smoking gun" tape already discussed, but who of course denied that he ever did any of the things that Haldeman and Erlichman said that he had promised to do. Walters had been at the CIA since May 1972--a Nixon appointee who had been with Nixon when the then-Vice President's car was stoned in Caracas, Venezuela. Ever since then, Nixon had seen him as part of the old guard. Walters left to become a private consultant in July 1976.
To replace Walters, Bush picked Enno Henry Knoche, who had joined the CIA in 1953 as an intelligence analyst specializing in Far Eastern political and military affairs. Knoche came from the Navy and knew Chinese. From 1962 to 1967, he had been the chief of the National Photographic Interpretation Center. In 1969, he had become deputy director of planning and budgeting and chaired the international CIA committee in charge of computerization. Next, Knoche was deputy director of the Office of Current Intelligence, which produces ongoing assessments of international events for the President and the National Security Council. After 1972, Knoche headed the Intelligence Directorate's Office of Strategic Research, charged with evaluating strategic threats to the U.S. In 1975, Knoche had been a special liaison between Colby and the Rockefeller Com-mission, as well as with the Church and Pike Committees. This was a very sensitive post, and Bush clearly looked to Knoche to help him deal with continuing challenges coming from the Congress. In the fall of 1975, Knoche was to function as Bush's "Indian guide" through the secrets of Langley; he knew "where the bodies were buried".
Knoche was highly critical of Colby's policy of handing over limited amounts of classified material to the Pike and Church committees, while fighting to save the core of covert operations. Knoche told a group of friends during this period: "There is no counterintelligence any more." This implies a condemnation of the congressional committees with whom Knoche had served as liaison, and can also be read as a lament for the ousting of James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA's counterintelligence operations until 1975 and director of the mail-opening operation that had been exposed by various probers.
NORIEGA INVOLVEMENT
Adm. Daniel J. Murphy was Bush's deputy director for the intelligence community, and later became Bush's chief of staff during his first term as vice president. Much later, in November 1987, Murphy visited Panama in the company of South Korean businessman and intelligence operative Tongsun Park, and met with Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Murphy was later obliged to testify to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his meeting with Noriega. Murphy claimed that he was only in Panama to "make a buck", but there are indications that he was carrying messages to Noriega from Bush. Tongsun Park, Murphy's ostensible business associate, will soon turn out to have been the central figure of the Koreagate scandal of 1976, a very important development on Bush's CIA watch.
Other names on the Bush flow chart included holdover Ed-ward Proctor, followed by Bush appointee Sayre Stevens in the slot of deputy director for intelligence; holdover Carl Duckett, followed by Bush appointee Leslie Dirks as deputy director for science and technology; John Blake, holdover as deputy director for administration, and holdover William Nelson, followed by Bush appointee William Wells, deputy director for operations.
[H: I can only urge you, once more, to get the ongoing series of TANGLED WEBS: TANGLED WEBS, VOL, I; TAN-GLED WEBS, VOL. II; THE MOTHER OF ALL WEBS Cr.W. HD; LOOSEN THE KNOTS AND TANGLES (T.W. IV); BLOODSUCKERS OF THE TANGLED WEBS (V); SILENT BLOOD SUCKERS OF THE TANGLED WEBS (VI) and the others as we get them to release point. Remember, chelas, these are JOURNALS and the great value is the continuity of flow and integration of that which is already known. I think there is even some kind of discount if you purchase several--you'll have to check on it.]
William Wells as deputy director for operations was a very significant choice. He was a career covert operations specialist who had graduated from Yale a few years before Bush. Wells soon acquired his own deputy, recommended by him and approved by Bush: This was the infamous Theodore Shackley, whose title thus became associate deputy director for covert operations. Shackley later emerged as one of the central figures of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980's. He is reputedly one of the dominant personalities of a CIA old boys' network known as The Enterprise, which was at the heart of Iran-Contra and the other illegal covert operations of the Reagan-Bush years.
During the early 1960's, after the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley had been the head of the CIA Miami Station during the years in which Operation Mongoose was at its peak. This was the E. Howard Hunt and Watergate Cubans crowd, circles familiar to Felix Rodriguez (Max Gomez), who in the 1980's ran Contra gun-running and drug-running out of Bush's vice-presidential office.
Later, Shackley was reportedly the chief of the CIA station in Vientiane, Laos, between July 1966 and December 1968. Some time after that, he moved on to become the CIA station chief in Saigon, where he directed the implementation of the Civilian Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) program, better known as OPERATION PHOENIX, a genocidal crime against humanity which killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians because they were suspected of working for the VietCong, or sometimes simply because they were able to read and write. [H: Yes indeed, I can only urge you to get the above named JOURNALS for it's all there in one or another of them.] As for Shackley, there are also reports that he worked for a time in the late 1960's in Rome during the period when the CIA's GLADIO capabilities were being used to launch a wave of terrorism in that country that went on for well over a decade. Such was the man whom Bush chose to appoint to a position of responsibility in the CIA. Later, Shackley will turn up as a "speechwriter" for Bush during the 1979-80 campaign.
Along with Shackley came his associate and former Miami Station second in command, Thomas Clines, a partner of Gen. Richard Secord and Albert Hakim during the Iran-Contra operation, convicted in September 1990 on four felony tax counts for not reporting his ill-gotten gains, and sentenced to 16 months in prison and a fine of $40,000.
Another career covert operations man, John Waller, became the inspector general, the officer who was supposed to keep track of illegal operations. For legal advice, Bush turned first to holdover General Counsel Mitchell Rogovin, who had in December 1975 theorized that intelligence activities belonged to the "inherent powers" of the presidency, and that no special congressional legislation was required to permit such things as covert operations to go on. later, Bush appointed Anthony Lapham, Yale '58, as CIA general counsel. Lapham was the scion of an old San Francisco banking family, and his brother was Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine. Lapham would take a leading role in the CIA cover-up of the Letelier assassination case.
Typical of the broad section of CIA officers who were delighted with their new boss from Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones was Cord Meyer, who had most recently been the station chief in London from 1973 on, a wild and woolly time in the tight little island, as we will see. Meyer, a covert action veteran and Watergate operative, writes at length in his autobiography about his enthusiasm for the Bush regime at CIA, which induced him to prolong his own career there.
And what did other CIA officers, such as intelligence analysts, think of Bush? A common impression is that he was a superficial lightweight with no serious interest in intelligence. Deputy Director for Science and Technology Carl Duckett, who was ousted by Bush after three months, commented that he "never saw George Bush feel he had to understand the depth of something.... He is not a man tremendously dedicated to a cause or ideas. He's not fervent. He goes with the flow, looking for how it will play politically." According to Maurice Ernst, the head of the CIA's Office of Economic Research from 1970 to 1980, "George Bush doesn't like to get into the middle of an intellectual debate....he liked to delegate it. I never really had a serious discussion with him on economics." Hans Heymann was Bush's national intelligence officer for economics, and he remembers having been impressed by Bush's Phi Beta Kappa Yale degree in economics. As Heymann later recalled Bush's response, "He looked at me in horror and said, 'I don't remember a thing. It was so long ago, so I'm going to have to rely on you.'"
INTELLIGENCE CZAR: BUSH
During the first few weeks of Bush's tenure, the Ford administration was gripped by a "first strike" psychosis. This had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but was rather Ford's desire to preempt any proposals for reform of the intelligence agencies coming out of the Pike or Church Committees with a pseudo-reform of his own, premised on his own in-house study, the Rockefeller report, which recommended an increase of secrecy for covert operations and classified information. Since about the time of the Bush nomination, an interagency task force armed with the Rockefeller Commission recommendations had been meeting under the chairmanship of Ford's counselor Jack 0. Marsh. This was the Intelligence Coordinating Group, which included delegates of the intelligence agencies, plus NSC, Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), and others. This group worked up a series of final recommendations that were given to Ford to study on his Christmas vacation in Vail, Colorado. At this point Ford was inclined to "go slow and work with Congress".
But on January 10, Marsh and the intelligence agency bosses met again with Ford, and the strategy began to shift toward preempting Congress. On January 30, Ford and Bush came back from their appearance at the CIA auditorium swearing-in session and met with other officials in the Cabinet Room. Attending besides Ford and Bush were Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Edward Levi, Jack Marsh, Philip Buchen, Brent Scowcroft, Mike Duval, and Peter Wallison representing Vice President Rockefeller, who was out of town that day. Here Ford presented his tentative conclusions for further discussion. The general line was to preempt the Congress, not to cooperate with it, to increase secrecy, and to increase authoritarian tendencies.
Ford scheduled a White House press conference for the evening of February 17.
In his press conference of February 17, Ford scooped the Congress and touted his bureaucratic reshuffle of the intelligence agencies as the most sweeping reform and reorganization of the United States' intelligence agencies since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. "I will not be a party to the dismantling of the CIA or other intelligence agencies," he intoned. He repeated that the intelligence community had to function under the direction of the National Security Council, as if that were something earth-shaking and new; from the perspective of Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter we can see in retrospect that it guaranteed nothing. A new NSC committee chaired by Bush was entrusted with the task of giving greater central coordination to the intelligence community as a whole. This committee was to consist of Bush, Kissinger clone William Hyland of the National Security Council staff, and Robert Ellsworth, the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. This committee was jointly to formulate the budget of the intelligence community and allocate its resources to the various tasks.
KISSINGER, SCOWCROFT; IOB
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 OMB.
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 de Gaulle 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 there 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 to chairman of PFIAB as well. The increasingly complicit relationship of Cherne to Bush meant that all alleged oversight by the IOB was a mockery.
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.
FORD EO OPENS DOOR FOR DOMESTIC
COVERT ACTIONS
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 over-reaching, 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 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.
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."
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.
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."
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 moral boosting while he was at Langley.
* * *
Let us take a rest break before we take up the subject of Bush's real agenda.
PJ 51
CHAPTER 6
REC #4 HATONN
WED., JUNE 24, 1992 11:01 A.M. YEAR 5, DAY 313
WEDNESDAY. JUNE 24. 1992
GEORGE BUSH & CIA
CONTINUED
As we move along here I just want you to keep in mind that "Kissinger" will be coming up constantly as the brains behind everything happening--BUT ALSO REMEMBER: THE UNKNOWN PERSON, WALLACE STICKNEY, WHO HEADS FEMA AND WILL CONTROL UNDER DIRECTION OF THOSE SAME HANDS--IS A MEMBER OF KISSINGER'S "KISSINGER AND ASSOCIATES"!!!!
BUSH'S REAL AGENDA
Reality was 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.
KOREAGATE
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 adviser 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.
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. 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 turned up shorn of key information on the CIA officers who had been working most closely with Park.
With "Koreagate", 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 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.
THE LETELIER AFFAIR
One of the most spectacular scandals of Bush's tenure at the CIA was the assassination in Washington, D.C. of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean exile leader. Letelier had been a minister in the Allende government, which 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 Phillips in Chile. Phillips had become the director of the CIA's Western Hemisphere operations after the overthrow of Allende and the advent of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, and its Milton Friedman/Chicago School economic policies. 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.
It was under these circumstances that the U.S. 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.
CHILEAN DC BOMB RULING:
ALLOWED BY DEFAULT
On August 4, on the basis of the conversations between Bush and Vernon 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." Ambassador 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 United States. The two DINA men entered the United States 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 to 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 U.S. Attorney Lawrence Barcella." 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 CIA COVER UP
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 authors John Dinges and Saul Landau point out, when the DINA hitmen arrived 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, D.C., or anywhere in the United States. It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, (Ambassador George) Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA.
Bush's complicity deepens when we turn to the post-assassination cover-up. The prosecutor in the Letelier-Moffitt murders was Assistant U.S. 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 Washington as access."
At CIA headquarters, Pottinger introduced Propper to Director Bush, and Bush introduced the two lawyers to Tony Lapham, his general counsel. 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 Prop-per 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 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 launched into a consummate Aristotelian obfuscation, recounted in Lapham and Propper's Labyrinth. 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.
ELITE MEDIA HELPS COVER
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 U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime."
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 Agents in Charge Julius Matson and the chief of the anti-Castro terrorism squad. According to a source close to the meeting, Bush warned die FBI against allowing the investigation to go any further than the lowest level Cubans.
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 plea bargain and get off with a lighter sentence than the rest. Material about Townley under his various aliases strangely disappeared from the Immigration and Naturalization Service files, and records of the July-August cable traffic with Vernon Walters (and Bush) were expunged. No doubt there had been obstruction of justice; no doubt there had been a cover-up.
TEAM A AND TEAM B
ZIONIST INFLUENCE INFUSED
Now, 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 to markedly enhance the influence of the pro-Zionist wing of the intelligence community.
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 pre-sent 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 Lon-don when he was appointed by Bush and Cherne.
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.
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 U.S. would face a window of vulnerability during the 1980's. But it is clear from Pipes' own discussion of the debate that Team B 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. The argument in Team B quarters was that, since the Soviets were turning aggressive once again, the U.S.A. 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 U.S. resources needed by Israel.
By contrast, Team B supporters like Richard Perle, who served as assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, were 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 demands.
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 talking to the press, and urged Pipes to begin to offer some interviews of his own.
BUSHLIPS AT WORK
Typically enough, Bush appeared on Face the Nation early in the new year, before the inauguration of the new President, Jimmy Carter, to say that he was "appalled" by the leaks of Team B's conclusions. Bush confessed that "outside expertise had 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 Soviet Union's military buildup in order to stop Carter from cutting the defense budget.
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 why such pro-Zionist neoconservatives as Max Kamperlman, Richard Perle, Steven Bryen, Noel Koch, Paul Wolfowitz and Dov Zakem showed up in the Reagan administration.
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 gunshot wound behind the left ear. The corpse was weighted 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 the funeral home approved by the Office of Security.
PARTING SHOTS TO POWER
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.
In the close of the 1976 election, Carter prevailed by vote fraud in New York, Ohio, and other states, but Ford was convinced by William 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 with the help of his deputy Henry Knoche. 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 wasn't impressed with Bush," said a key Carter staffer.
Bush left Langley with Carter's inauguration, leaving Knoche to serve a couple of months as acting DCI. George Bush now turned to his family business of international banking--or so the story goes - -
Let us leave this, please.