George H.W. Bush - long of the CIA and silver-spoon club

[Peter Lemkin]

SEPTEMBER 16, 2013 | RUSS BAKER

GHW BUSH & JFK HIT

What possible connection could there have been between George H.W. Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A. and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people, apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one live wire touch another. Here, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in November, is the first part of a ten-part series of excerpts from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker's bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. The story is a real-life thriller.
Note: Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (The excerpts in Part 1 come from Chapter 2 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication.)
[B]Poppy's Secret[/B]
[B]When Joseph McBride came upon the document about George H. W. Bush's double life, he was not looking for it. It was 1985, and McBride, a former Daily Variety writer, was in the library of California State University San Bernardino, researching a book about the movie director Frank Capra. Like many good reporters, McBride took off on a "slight," if time-consuming, tangent spending day after day poring over reels of microfilmed documents related to the FBI and the JFK assassination. McBride had been a volunteer on Kennedy's campaign, and since 1963 had been intrigued by the unanswered questions surrounding that most singular of American tragedies.[/B]
[B]A particular memo caught his eye, and he leaned in for a closer look. Practically jumping off the screen was a memorandum from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963. Under the subject heading "Assassination of President John F. Kennedy," Hoover reported that, on the day after JFK's murder, the bureau had provided two individuals with briefings. One was "Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency." The other: "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency."[/B]
[B]To:[/B]
[B]Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State[/B]
[B][We have been] advised that the Department of State feels 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… [Our] sources know of no [such] plans… The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[/B]
[B]McBride shook his head. George H. W. Bush? In the CIA in 1963? Dealing with Cubans and the JFK assassination? Could this be the same man who was now vice president of the United States? Even when Bush was named CIA director in 1976 amid much agency-bashing, his primary asset had been the fact that he was not a part of the agency during the coups, attempted coups, and murder plots in Iran, Cuba, Chile, and other hot spots about which embarrassing information was being disclosed every day in Senate hearings.[/B]

[B]For CIA director Bush, there had been much damage to control. The decade from 1963 to 1973 had seen one confidence-shaking crisis after another. There was the Kennedy assassination and the dubious accounting of it by the Warren Commission. Then came the revelations of how the CIA had used private foundations to channel funds to organizations inside the United States, such as the National Student Association. Then came Watergate, with its penumbra of CIA operatives such as E. Howard Hunt and their shadowy misdoings. Americans were getting the sense of a kind of sanctioned underground organization, operating outside the law and yet protected by it. Then President Gerald Ford, who had ascended to that office when Richard Nixon resigned, fired William Colby, the director of the CIA, who was perceived by hard-liners as too accommodating to congressional investigators and would-be intelligence reformers.[/B]
[B]Now Ford had named George H. W. Bush to take over the CIA. But Bush seemed wholly unqualified for such a position especially at a time when the agency was under maximum scrutiny. He had been U.N. ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, and the U.S. envoy to Beijing, where both Nixon and Henry Kissinger had regarded him as a lightweight and worked around him. What experience did he have in the world of intelligence and spying? How would he restore public confidence in a tarnished spy agency? No one seemed to know. Or did Gerald Ford realize something most others didn't?[/B]
[B]Bush served at the CIA for one year, from early 1976 to early 1977. He worked quietly to reverse the Watergate-era reforms of CIA practices, moving as many operations as possible offshore and beyond accountability. Although a short stint, it nevertheless created an image problem in 1980 when Bush ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination against former California governor Ronald Reagan. Some critics warned of the dangerous precedent in elevating someone who had led the CIA, with its legacy of dark secrets and covert plots, blackmail and murder, to preside over the United States government.[/B]
[B][B]"Must be another George Bush"[/B][/B]
[B][B]In 1985, when McBride found the FBI memo apparently relating to Bush's past, the reporter did not immediately follow up this curious lead. Bush was now a recently reelected vice president (a famously powerless position), and McBride himself was busy with other things. By 1988, however, the true identity of "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" took on new meaning, as George H. W. Bush prepared to assume his role as Reagan's heir to the presidency. Joe McBride decided to make the leap from entertainment reportage to politics. He picked up the phone and called the White House.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"May I speak with the vice president?" he asked[/B][/B]
[B][B]McBride had to settle for Stephen Hart, a vice presidential spokesman. Hart denied that his boss had been the man mentioned in the memo, quoting Bush directly. "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." Hart concluded with this suggestion: "Must be another George Bush."[/B][/B]
[B][B]McBride found the response troubling rather detailed for a ritual non-denial. It almost felt like a cover story that Bush was a bit too eager to trot out. He returned to Hart with more questions for Bush:[/B][/B]

• [B][B]Did you do any work with or for the CIA prior to the time you became its director?[/B][/B]
  
• [B][B]If so, what was the nature of your relationship with the agency, and how long did it last?[/B][/B]
  
• [B][B]Did you receive a briefing by a member of the FBI on anti-Castro Cuban activities in the aftermath [of] the assassination of President Kennedy?[/B][/B]
  

[B][B]Within half an hour, Hart called him back. The spokesman now declared that, though he had not spoken with Bush, he would nevertheless answer the questions himself. Hart said that the answer to the first question was no, and, therefore, the other two were moot.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Undeterred, McBride called the CIA. A spokesman for the agency, Bill Devine, responded: "This is the first time I've ever heard this . . . I'll see what I can find out and call you back."[/B][/B]
[B][B]The following day, the PR man was tersely formal and opaque: "I can neither confirm nor deny." It was the standard response the agency gave when it dealt with its sources and methods. Could the agency reveal whether there had been another George Bush in the CIA? Devine replied: "Twenty-seven years ago? I doubt that very much. In any event, we have a standard policy of not confirming that anyone is involved in the CIA."[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]"Apparently" George William Bush[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]But it appears this standard policy was made to be broken. McBride's revelations appeared in the July 16, 1988, issue of the liberal magazine the Nation, under the headline "The Man Who Wasn't There, George Bush,' C.I.A. Operative." Shortly thereafter, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso told the Associated Press that the CIA believed that "the record should be clarified." She said that the FBI document "apparently" referred to a George William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters, and that "would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report." George William Bush, she said, had left the CIA in 1964 to join the Defense Intelligence Agency.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Certainly, the article caused George H. W. Bush no major headaches. By the following month, he was triumphantly accepting the GOP's presidential nomination at its New Orleans convention, unencumbered by tough questions about his past.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]CIA can't find "other" George Bush?[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]Meanwhile, the CIA's Basso told reporters that the agency had been unable to locate the "other" George Bush. The assertion was reported by several news outlets, with no comment about the irony of a vaunted intelligence agency with a staff of thousands and a budget of billions being unable to locate a former employee within American borders.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Perhaps what the CIA really needed was someone like Joseph McBride. Though not an investigative journalist, McBride had no trouble finding George William Bush. Not only was the man findable; he was still on the U.S. government payroll. By 1988 this George Bush was working as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration. He explained to McBride that he had worked only briefly at the CIA, as a GS-5 probationary civil servant, analyzing documents and photos during the night shift. Moreover, he said, he had never received interagency briefings.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Several years later, in 1991, former Texas Observer editor David Armstrong would track down the other person listed on the Hoover memo, Captain William Edwards. Edwards could confirm that he had been on duty at the Defense Intelligence Agency the day in question. He said he did not remember this briefing, but that he found the memo plausible in reference to a briefing he might have received over the phone while at his desk. While he said he had no idea who the George Bush was who also was briefed, Edward's rank and experience was certainly far above that of the night clerk George William Bush.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Shortly after McBride's article appeared in the Nation, the magazine ran a follow-up op-ed, in which the author provided evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency had foisted a lie on the American people. The piece appeared while everyone else was focusing on Bush's coronation at the Louisiana Superdome. As with McBride's previous story, this disclosure was greeted with the equivalent of a collective media yawn. An opportunity was bungled, not only to learn about the true history of the man who would be president, but also to recognize the "George William Bush" diversion for what it was: one in a long series of calculated distractions and disinformation episodes that run through the Bush family history.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]George William Bush Deposes[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]With the election only two months away, and a growing sense of urgency in some quarters, George William Bush acknowledged under oath as part of a deposition in a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit group seeking records on Bush's past that he was the junior officer on a three- to four-man watch shift at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February 1964, which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. "I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA," he said. "In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum." . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B][B] George H.W. Bush: Spy from the age of 18[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]Almost a decade would pass between Bush's election in 1988 and the declassification and release in 1996 of another government document that shed further light on the matter. This declassified document would help to answer some of the questions raised by the '63 Hoover memo questions such as, "If George Herbert Walker Bush was already connected with the CIA in 1963, how far back did the relationship go?"[/B][/B]
[B][B]But yet another decade would pass before this second document would be found, read, and revealed to the public. Fast-forward to December 2006, on a day when JFK researcher Jerry Shinley sat, as he did on so many days, glued to his computer, browsing through the digitized database of documents on the Web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.[/B][/B]
[B][B]On that December day, Shinley came upon an internal CIA memo that mentioned George H. W. Bush [the Bush designated Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)]. Dated November 29, 1975, it reported, in typically spare terms, the revelation that the man who was about to become the head of the CIA actually had prior ties to the agency. And the connection discussed here, unlike that unearthed by McBride, went back not to 1963, but to 1953 a full decade earlier. Writing to the chief of the spy section of the analysis and espionage agency, the chief of the "cover and commercial staff" noted:[/B][/B]
[B][B]Through Mr. Gale Allen . . . I learned that Mr. George Bush, DCI designate has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe. He became aware of this project through Mr. Thomas J. Devine, a former CIA Staff Employee and later, oil-wildcatting associate with Mr. Bush. Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil [sic] [in 1953] which they eventually sold. After the sale of Zapata Oil, Mr. Bush went into politics, and Mr. Devine became a member of the investment firm of Train, Cabot and Associates, New York . . . The attached memorandum describes the close relationship between Messrs. Devine and Bush in 1967-1968 which, according to Mr. Allen, continued while Mr. Bush was our ambassador to the United Nations.[/B][/B]
[B][B]In typical fashion for the highly compartmentalized and secretive intelligence organization, the memo did not make clear how Bush knew Devine, or whether Devine was simply dropping out of the spy business to become a true entrepreneur. For Devine, who would have been about twenty-seven years old at the time, to "resign" at such a young age, so soon after the CIA had spent a great deal of time and money training him was, at minimum, highly unusual. It would turn out, however, that Devine had a special relationship allowing him to come and go from the agency, enabling him to do other things without really leaving its employ. In fact, CIA history is littered with instances where CIA officers have tendered their "resignation" as a means of creating deniability while continuing to work closely with the agency . . .[/B][/B]

[B][B]Devine's role in setting up Zapata would remain hidden for more than a decade until 1965. At that point, as Bush was extricating himself from business to devote his energies to pursuing a congressional seat, Devine's name suddenly surfaced as a member of the board of Bush's spin-off company, Zapata Offshore almost as if it was his function to keep the operation running. To be sure, he and Bush remained joined at the hip . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Devine, like the senior George Bush, is now in his eighties and still active in business in New York. When I reached him in the winter of 2007 and told him about recently uncovered CIA memos that related both his agency connections and his longtime ties to Bush, he uttered a dry chuckle, then continued cautiously.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"Tell me who you are working with in the family," he asked when I informed him I was working on a book about the Bushes. I explained that the book was not exactly an "authorized" biography, and therefore I was not "working" with someone in the family. Moreover, I noted, the Bushes were not known for their responsiveness to journalistic inquiries. "The family policy has been as long as George has been in office, they don't talk to media," Devine replied. But he agreed to contact the Bush family seeking clearance. "Well, the answer is, I will inquire. I have your telephone number, and I'll call you back when I've enquired."[/B][/B]
[B][B]Surprisingly enough, he did call again, two weeks later, having checked in with his old friend in Houston. He explained that he had been told by former president George H.W. Bush not to cooperate. When I spoke to him several months later, he still would not talk about anything though he did complain that, thanks to an article I had written about him for the Real News Project (www.realnews.org), he was now listed in Wikipedia. And then he did offer a few words:[/B][/B]
[B][B]Thomas Devine: I just broke one of the first rules in this game.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Russ Baker: And what is that?[/B][/B]
[B][B]Thomas Devine: Do not complain.[/B][/B]
[B][B]In fact, Devine had little to complain about. At the time, although I was aware that he seemed to be confirming that he himself had been in the "game," I did not understand the full extent of his activities in conjunction with Bush. Nor did I understand the heightened significance of their relationship during the tumultuous event of 1963, to be discussed in subsequent chapters.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]No Business like the Spy Business[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]Before there was an Office of Strategic Services (July 1942-October 1945) or a Central Intelligence Agency (founded in 1947), corporations and attorneys who represented international businesses often employed associates in their firms as private agents to gather data on competitors and business opportunities abroad. So it was only to be expected that many of the first OSS recruits were taken from the ranks of oil companies, Wall Street banking firms, and Ivy League universities and often equated the interests of their high-powered business partners with the national interest. Such relationships like the one between George H. W. Bush and Thomas Devine thus made perfect sense to the CIA . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]By the time George H. W. Bush founded his own company, Zapata Petroleum, it was not difficult to line up backers with long-standing ties to industrial espionage activities. The setup with Devine in the oil business provided Bush with a perfect cover to travel abroad and . . . identify potential CIA recruits among foreign nationals . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]"Poppy" Bush's own role with intelligence appears to date back as early as the Second World War, when he joined the Navy at age eighteen. On arrival at his training base in Norfolk, Virginia, in the fall of 1942, Bush was trained not only as a pilot of a torpedo bomber but also as a photographic officer, responsible for crucial, highly sensitive aerial surveillance . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]After mastering the technique of operating the handheld K-20 aerial camera and film processing, Bush recruited and trained other pilots and crewmen. His own flight team became part bomber unit, part spy unit. The information they obtained about the Japanese navy, as well as crucial intelligence on Japanese land-based defenses, was forwarded to the U.S. Navy's intelligence center at Pearl Harbor and to the Marine Corps for use in planning amphibious landings in order to reduce casualties.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The so-called Operation Snapshot was so hush-hush that, under naval regulations in effect at the time, even revealing its name would lead to court-martial. According to a book by Robert Stinnett, a fellow flier, Admiral Marc Mitscher hit the "bulkhead" when he saw that Bush's team had filed a report in which they actually referred by name to their top-secret project. The three people above Bush in his command chain were made to take razor blades to the pages of the report and remove the forbidden language.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The lesson was apparently not lost on Bush. From that moment forward, as every Bush researcher has learned, Bush's life would honor the principle: no names, no paper trail, no fingerprints. If you wanted to know what Bush had done, you had to have the patience of a sleuth yourself.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Next: Part 2. Viva Zapata[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here; Part 5, here;Part 6, here; Part 7, here; Part 8, here; Part 9, here; Part 10, here.[/B][/B]

[Peter Lemkin]

Bush 41 visits CIA with former CIA director, John Brennan, in 2016. Photo credit: CIA
While Barack Obama and Donald Trump are currently the most recognized names in politics, they have each only put their stamp on America for a very short time.
Another recent president has had a much different impact. As a one-termer with a self-effacing manner who was later supplanted by a livelier fellow with the same name, he has been largely reduced to a historical footnote. But George H.W. Bush and his forefathers had a profound effect on the country's power equation mostly in ways they sought to obscure. With tomorrow's celebration of America's birthday, we thought this a good time to inject a little perspective into the proceedings.
To provide readers with that missing historical background, we present a revealing excerpt from my book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.
Note: Although the story below does not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (This excerpt, which was originally posted in 2013, comes from Chapter 3 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication. For additional excerpts, please start here.)
Introduction by Russ Baker
Correction: A previous version of this posting incorrectly stated that today is Bush's 93rd birthday. That occurred on June 12.

---

[B]Skull and Bones[/B]
[B]In 1945, with the end of the war, George H. W. "Poppy" Bush entered Yale University. The CIA recruited heavily at all of the Ivy League schools in those days, with the New Haven campus the standout. "Yale has always been the agency's biggest feeder," recalled CIA officer Osborne Day (class of'43), "In my Yale class alone there were thirty-five guys in the agency." Bush's father, Prescott, was on the university's board, and the school was crawling with faculty serving as recruiters for the intelligence services . . . Yale's society's boys were the cream of the crop, and could keep secrets to boot. And no secret society was more suited to the spy establishment than Skull and Bones, for which Poppy Bush, like his father, was tapped in his junior year. Established in 1832, Skull and Bones is the oldest secret society at Yale, and thus at least theoretically entrusted its membership with a more comprehensive body of secrets than any other campus group. Bones alumni would appear throughout the public and private history of both wartime and peacetime intelligence . . .[/B]
[B]When Bush entered Yale, the university was welcoming back countless veterans of the OSS to its faculty. Bush, with naval intelligence work already under his belt by the time he arrived at Yale, would have been seen as a particularly prime candidate for recruitment.[/B]
[B][B]Bonesmen Have All the Muscle[/B][/B]
[B][B]Out of Yale, Bush went directly into the employ of Dresser Industries, a peculiar, family-connected firm providing essential services to the oil industry. Dresser has never received the scrutiny it deserves. Between the lines of its official story can be discerned an alternate version that could suggest a corporate double life . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]The S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Company had been a small, solid, unexceptional outfit, . . . [when it found] eager buyers in Prescott Bush's Yale friends Roland and W. Averell Harriman the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman who had only recently set up a merchant bank to assist wealthy families in such endeavors. At the time, Dresser's principal assets consisted of two very valuable patents in the rapidly expanding oil industry. One was for a packer that made it much easier to remove oil from the ground; the other was for a coupler that made long-range natural gas pipelines feasible. Instead of controlling the oil, Dresser's strategy was to control the technology that made drilling possible. W.A. Harriman and Company, which had brought Prescott Bush aboard two years earlier, purchased Dresser in 1928.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Prescott Bush and his partners installed an old friend, H. Neil Mallon, at the helm. Mallon's primary credential was that he was "one of them." Like Prescott Bush, Mallon was from Ohio, and his family seems both to have known the Bushes and to have had its own set of powerful connections. He was Yale, and he was Skull and Bones, so he could be trusted . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Hiring decisions by the Bonesmen at the Harriman firm were presented as jolly and distinctly informal, with club and family being prime qualifications . . . Under Mallon, the company underwent an astonishing transformation. As World War II approached, Dresser began expanding, gobbling up one militarily strategic manufacturer after another. While Dresser was still engaged in the mundane manufacture of drill bits, drilling mud, and other products useful to the oil industry, it was also moving closer to the heart of the rapidly growing military-industrial sector as a defense contractor and subcontractor. It also assembled a board that would epitomize the cozy relationships between titans of industry, finance, media, government, military, and intelligence and the revolving door between those sectors . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Poppy Gets his Hands Oily[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy headed out to visit "Uncle Neil" at Dresser headquarters, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched the inexperienced Yale grad and Navy vet, with his wife Barbara and firstborn George W. in tow, to Odessa, the remote West Texas boomtown that, with neighboring Midland, was rapidly becoming the center of the oil extraction business.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Oil was certainly a strategic business. A resource required in abundance to fuel the modern navy, army, and air force, oil had driven the engine of World War II. With the end of hostilities, America still had plenty of petroleum, but the demands of the war had exhausted many oil fields. As President Roosevelt's secretary of the interior and later his petroleum administrator for war, Harold Ickes had warned in 1943, "If there should be a World War III it would have to be fought with someone else's petroleum, because the United States wouldn't have it." . . . Ickes's eye was then on Saudi Arabia.[/B][/B]
[B][B]If the young George H.W. Bush understood anything about the larger game and his expected role in it, he and his wife Barbara certainly did not let on to the neighbors in those early days in dusty West Texas . . . Poppy's initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses and painting machinery used for oil drilling, but he was soon asked to handle more challenging tasks . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives . . . Continuing his whirlwind "training," Dresser transferred Bush to California, where the company had begun acquiring subsidiaries in 1940. Poppy has never written or spoken publicly in any depth about the California period of his career. He has made only brief references to work on the assembly line at Dresser's Pacific Pump Works in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Park and sales chores for other companies owned by Dresser. In later years, when criticized for his anti-union stands, he would pull out a union card which he claimed came from his membership in the United Steelworkers Union. Why Bush joined the Steelworkers (and attended their meetings) is something of a mystery, since that union was not operating inside Pacific Pump Works.[/B][/B]
[B][B]To be sure, the company was not just pumping water out of the ground anymore. During World War II, Pacific Pump became, like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm supplied hydraulic-actuating assemblies for airplane landing gear, wing flaps, and bomb doors, and even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[/B][/B]
[B][B]While in California training for Dresser, Poppy, the pregnant Barbara, and little George W. were constantly on the go, with at least five residences in a period of nine months Huntington Park, Bakersfield, Whittier, Ventura, and Compton. Poppy was often absent, according to Barbara, even from their brief-tenure outposts. Was he truly a Willy Loman, peddling drill bits, dragging a pregnant wife and a one-year-old child with him? Or was he doing something else? Although "ordinary" scions often toil briefly at the bottom, Bush was no ordinary scion.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Bush would so effectively obscure his life that even some of his best friends seemed to know little about what he was actually doing though they may have intuited it. A longtime friend of Bush's said that Bush probably would have been happiest as a career intelligence officer. Another longtime Bush associate told a reporter anonymously that Poppy's own accounts of various periods in his life "are often off 10 to 30 percent … there is a certain reserve, even secretiveness."[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]From Dallas, with Love[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]In 1950, during the time Poppy Bush squired a Yugoslav Communist around the oil fields for Dresser Industries, the cold war got hot in an unexpected quarter when North Korean Communist forces launched an invasion of the south. Their attack had not been even vaguely anticipated in the National Intelligence Estimate from the fledgling CIA which had arrived on the president's desk just six days before. Heads rolled, and in the ensuing shake-up, Allen Dulles became deputy director in charge of clandestine operations, which included both spying and proactive covert operations. For the Bushes, who had a decades-long personal and business relationship to the Dulles family, this was certainly an interesting development.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The Dulles and Bush clans had long mixed over business, politics, and friendship, and the corollary to all three intelligence. Even as far back as World War I, while Dulles's uncle served as secretary of state, Prescott's father, Samuel Bush, oversaw small arms manufacturing for the War Industries Board, and young Allen played a crucial role in the fledgling intelligence services operations in Europe. Later, the families interacted regularly as the Bush clan plied their trade in investment banking and the Dulleses in the law.[/B][/B]
[B][B]In 1950, Dresser was completing a corporate relocation to Dallas which, besides being an oil capital, was rapidly becoming a center of the defense industry and its military-industrial-energy elite. Though a virtual unknown on his arrival, Neil Mallon quickly set about bringing the conservative titans of Dallas society together in a new local chapter of the non-profit Council on World Affairs, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active. Started in 1918, the World Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations, the presidency of which Allen Dulles had just resigned to take his post at the CIA.[/B][/B]
[B][B]A September 1951 organizing meeting at Mallon's home featured a group with suggestive connections and affiliations. It included Fred Florence, the founder of the Republic National Bank, whose Dallas office tower was a covert repository for CIA-connected ventures; T. E. Braniff, a pioneer of the airline industry and member of the Knights of Malta, an exclusive, conservative, Vatican-connected order with longtime intelligence ties; Fred Wooten, an official of the First National Bank of Dallas, which would employ Poppy Bush in the years between his tenure as CIA director and vice president; and Colonel Robert G. Storey, later named as liaison between Texas law enforcement and the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Soon the group moved even closer to the center of power. General Dwight Eisenhower . . . had responded to entreaties from a GOP group that included the Rockefellers and Prescott Bush, as well as Allen and John Foster Dulles….With Ike the Republican nominee, they all scrambled for seats on his train. The Dulleses were key advisers. Prescott Bush was backing Ike and mounting what would be a successful race for a Senate seat from Connecticut. Prescott's son George H. W. Bush was not left out. He became the Midland County chairman of the Eisenhower-Nixon campaigns in both 1952 and 1956. With the West Texas city at the center of the oil boom, young George functioned as a crucial link between the Eastern Establishment, the next Republican administration, and Midland's oil-based new wealth.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Following Ike's decisive victory, the Dulles brothers obtained effective control of foreign policy: John Foster became Ike's secretary of state, and Allen the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The rest of the administration was filled with Bush allies, including national security adviser Gordon Gray, a close friend of Prescott's, and Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, a sometime member of the Dresser Industries board.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Eisenhower, with no track record in civilian government and little enthusiasm for the daily grind, was only too happy to leave many of the operational decisions to these others . . . Some of those businessmen taking it upon themselves to help chart the course were from the Dallas group. Shortly after Ike took office, Mallon's Council of World Affairs announced its intention to send fifteen members on a three-month world tour, for meetings with what the group characterized as "responsible" political and business leaders. Shortly after the group returned, Dulles came to visit with the Dallas council chapter . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]At the time, the CIA was in the process of creating plausible deniability as it began what would be a series of efforts to topple "unfriendly" regimes around the world, including those in Guatemala and Iran. Since the CIA's charter severely constrained the domestic side of covert operations, agents created a host of entities to serve as middlemen to support rebels in countries targeted for regime change. During the early days of Dresser in Dallas and of Zapata Petroleum Dulles was just beginning to experiment with "off the books" operations. Eventually, by the seventies and eighties, when Poppy Bush ran the CIA and coordinated covert operations as vice president, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such entities had been created . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]The Bones of Zapata Petroleum[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]In 1953, as Dulles was building his global machine, Poppy Bush launched his own enterprise, with help from Dulles, Mallon, and Poppy's maternal uncle Herbert Walker….[/B][/B]
[B][B]Bush got money from Uncle Herbie (George Herbert Walker Jr., Skull and Bones, 1927), an investment banker. Uncle Herbie also was instrumental in bringing in others, including Eugene Meyer, a Yale graduate and owner of the influential Washington Post. Meyer was one of many media titans, such as Prescott's good friend and fellow Bonesman Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine, and William Paley of CBS (on whose board Prescott sat), who shared an interest in intelligence. In a 1977 Rolling Stone article, Carl Bernstein, famed for breaking the Watergate story in the Washington Post, states that both Luce and Paley cooperated regularly with the CIA, and even mentions his own paper's history with the agency, though he does not fully probe the Post's intelligence connections . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]The news business, the policy business, and the intelligence business had a lot in common: they were all about whom you knew and what you knew. In fact, so was the oil business. The Bushes' skill at cultivating connections was evident in 1953, when Poppy joined forces with a couple of brothers, Hugh and Bill Liedtke, to form Zapata Petroleum. Based on a "hunch" of Hugh Liedtke's, the company drilled 127 consecutive "wet" holes, and the firm's stock exploded from seven cents a share to twenty-three dollars a share . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Mural by Jose Clemente Orozco
[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Pirates of the Caribbean[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]. . . Mallon would play a crucial role for Dulles by introducing him to the powerful new-moneyed oil elites in Dallas that would, along with a separate group in Houston, become the leading funders of off-the-books covert operations in Latin America. They would commence with efforts to overthrow Latin American and Caribbean leaders in the 1950s. The efforts would continue, under Poppy Bush, with Iran-contra in the 1980s.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Zapata Offshore . . . [was] launched by Poppy in 1954, just as the U.S. government, under an administration dominated by the Dulles-Bush circles, began auctioning offshore mineral rights . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]In 1958, Zapata Offshore's drilling rig Scorpion was moved from the Gulf of Mexico to Cay Sal Bank, the most remote group of islands in the Bahamas and just fifty-four miles north of Isabela, Cuba. The [Cay Sal] island had been recently leased to oilman Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties, as well as his own "private CIA."[/B][/B]
[B][B]By most appearances, a number of CIA-connected entities were involved in the operation. Zapata leased the Scorpion to Standard Oil of California and to Gulf Oil. CIA director Dulles had previously served as Gulf's counsel for Latin America. The same year that Gulf leased Bush's platform, CIA veteran Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt joined Gulf's board. This was the same Kermit Roosevelt who had overseen the CIA's successful 1953 coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after Mossadegh began nationalizing Anglo-American oil concessions. It looked like the Bush-CIA group was preparing for operations in the Caribbean basin.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The offshore platforms had a specific purpose. "George Bush would be given a list of names of Cuban oil workers we would want placed in jobs," said one official connected to Operation Mongoose, the program to overthrow Castro. "The oil platforms he dealt in were perfect for training the Cubans in raids on their homeland."[/B][/B]
[B][B]The importance of this early Bush connection with Cuba should not be ignored in assessing his connections to contemporaneous events. For example, it sheds light on the 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover discovered by reporter Joseph McBride. The memo, which mentioned a briefing about Cuban activity in the wake of the JFK assassination, had been given to "George Bush of the CIA." Years later, many figures from the Bay of Pigs operation would resurface in key positions in administrations in which Poppy Bush held high posts, and during his presidency. Others would show up in off-the-books operations run by Poppy's friends and associates.[/B][/B]
[B][B]George H. W. Bush did not, however, limit himself to the Caribbean. This period of his life was characterized by frenetic travel to all corners of the world, though Zapata had only a handful of rigs. The pattern would continue through his entire career. He set up operations for Zapata Offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, Borneo, and Medellín, Colombia. Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company, which began his close association with the Kuwaiti elite.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Facing Fidel[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]That a lot of what was labeled "national security" work was largely about money making it, protecting it was fairly transparent. Through the story of the Bushes and their circle runs a thread of entitlement to resources in other countries, and anger and disbelief when others challenged that claim.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Upon coming to power in 1959, Fidel Castro began to expropriate the massive properties of large foreign (chiefly American) companies. The impact fell heavily on American corporations that had massive agricultural and mineral operations on the fertile island, including Brown Brothers Harriman, whose extensive holdings included the two-hundred-thousand-acre Punta Alegre beet sugar plantation. After Castro took power, the Eisenhower administration began a boycott of Cuban sugar, which is a crucial component of the island's economy. The Cubans in turn became increasingly dependent on the USSR as supplier of goods and protector.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Poppy swung into gear the same year that Castro began nationalizing [American] properties. He severed his ties to the Liedtkes by buying out their stake in Zapata Offshore, and then moved its operations to Houston which, unlike the remote Midland-Odessa area, had access to the Caribbean through the Houston Ship Channel. Meanwhile, back in Washington, after extensive planning, the Bay of Pigs project began with Eisenhower's approval on March 17, 1960 . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Beyond providing a staging area for Cuban rebels, Zapata Offshore appears to have served as a paymaster. "We had to pay off politicians in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and elsewhere," said John Sherwood, chief of CIA anti-Castro operations in the early 1960s. "Bush's company was used as a conduit for these funds under the guise of oil business contracts . . . The major breakthrough was when we were able, through Bush, to place people in PEMEX the big Mexican national oil operation."[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Zapata filings "inadvertently destroyed"[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]The complicated PEMEX affair began in 1960, when Zapata Offshore offered a lucrative secret partnership to a competing Mexican drilling equipment company, Perforaciones Marinas del Golfe, or Permargo. George H. W. Bush did not want this relationship exposed, even decades later. When investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny tried to document Bush's precise involvement with Permargo for a 1988 article, he was told by an SEC spokeswoman that Zapata filings from 1960 to 1966 had been "inadvertently destroyed" several months after Bush became vice president . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Evidence that Zapata Offshore was more than just Poppy Bush's oil company surfaced in the years that followed. Bush increasingly spent his time on politics, and others were brought in to transform the company into a larger entity that could more credibly run global operations . . . Bush's reward for all his troubles may have come in 1965, when one of the company's rigs was ostensibly lost in Hurricane Betsy. For the first time in its history, the insurance giant Lloyds of London paid out an oil-platform disaster claim without physical evidence. Zapata received eight million dollars for a rig that had cost only three million. The fate of the rig remains a mystery. Poppy's brother Bucky recalled the fears expressed by Zapata offshore staff that it would be impossible for an insurance claim to be paid because of the absence of any wreckage. But Poppy himself was calm, reassuring his people that "everything was going to be all right." . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]The financials of Zapata, like those of latter-day Enron, were almost impossible to understand. This appears to have been by design. A bit of this can be gleaned from the words of the company's former executive Bob Gow, another in a small army of Bush loyalists who show up repeatedly in the family story and by extension the nation's.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]What Was Zapata?[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]Bob Gow may be the only person in American history to be employed by one future president (Poppy Bush at Zapata) and to later employ another (George W. at Gow's post-Zapata agricultural mini-conglomerate Stratford of Texas)….[/B][/B]
[B][B]In 2006, I traveled to Mexico, to the western Yucatan, and met with Gow… I also obtained Gow's self-published memoirs, the five hundred pages of which include much about Zapata, bamboo, beeswax, and catfish, but manage to say little about the Bushes and their doings. Gow did, however admit that he did some spying for the CIA…[/B][/B]
[B][B]Gow was a member of the country's mostly invisible elites…[/B][/B]
[B][B]Bob Gow and Ray Walker [cousin of George H.W. Bush] would room together again at Yale, and both would be inducted into the 1955 class of Skull and Bones…[/B][/B]
[B][B]Gow's recruitment by the Bushes illustrates the kind of opportunities that come to those of the "right sort" and possessed of the appropriate discretion…[/B][/B]
[B][B]Gow portrays Bush as traveling constantly when he was Zapata chief, and far from connected when on premises . . . Though Gow has little to say in his book about the company's underlying operations or Poppy's role in them, he proudly notes Zapata's complex web of foreign ventures. In all probability, the foreign operations had dual functions. Since Zapata was set up with guidance from Neil Mallon, it is likely that the overseas undertakings were modeled in part on Dresser's. According to the in-house history of Dresser, one of the company's bolder moves was a then-innovative tax strategy that involved a separate company in the tiny European principality of Liechtenstein. "A considerable [benefit] was the fact that no American taxes had to be paid on international earnings until the money was returned to the United States." That is, if the money was ever returned to the United States. And there was another characteristic of funds that were not repatriated: they were out of sight of federal authorities. There was no effective way to know where they went ultimately, or for what purposes.[/B][/B]
[B][B]That was Dresser. Now, Zapata, according to Gow: "Zapata, at that time, consisted of a number of foreign corporations incorporated in each county where our rigs operated . . . It was largely the brainchild of the tax department at Arthur Andersen and the tax lawyers at Baker and Botts . . . Until the profits were brought back to the United States, it was not necessary at that time to pay U.S. taxes on them. Because of the way Zapata operated around the world, it seemed as though it never would be necessary to pay taxes . . . As time passed and Zapata worked in many other countries, Zapata's cash . . . was in the accounts of a large number (dozens and dozens) of companies located in almost all the countries around the world where Zapata had ever drilled."[/B][/B]
[B][B]Whether Zapata was partially designed for laundering money for covert or clandestine operations may never be known. But one thing is certain: spy work depends, as much as anything, on a large flow of funds for keeping foreign palms greased. It is an enormously expensive business, and it requires layers and layers of ostensibly unconnected cutouts for the millions to flow properly and without detection.[/B][/B]
[B][B]So what, exactly, was Zapata? Was it CIA? Gow won't say. Although in his memoirs he freely admits that he served the CIA later on, he strives mightily to avoid extensive discussion of the Bush clan . . .[/B][/B]
[B][B]Then I asked Gow about allegations that Zapata Offshore had played a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion: "Any comments on those?"[/B][/B]
[B][B]Gow hesitated a moment, smiled just a bit, and then replied, "No."[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]Next: [B]Part 3. Where was Poppy on November 22, 1963?[/B][/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here; Part 5, here;Part 6, here; Part 7, here; Part 8, here; Part 9, here; Part 10, here.[/B][/B]

[Tom Scully]

Let us tie the whole gang in....shall we?

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....sh-friend/
Started by Guest Tom Scully, April 8, 2012
..............

http://books.google.com/books?id=pD6qyySpU...rch_s&cad=0
Amiraqa and the New American Century‎ - Page 88
by Chris Wogan - Social Science - 2004 - 380 pages
...Investors in Bush's early oil ventures included drug store magnate (Rite Aid) and PNAC-member Lewis Lehrman, George L. Ball (head of EF Hutton Inc), George L. Ohrstrom, venture caplitalist William H. Draper III, John D. Macomber (CEO of Celanese Corp), Russell E. Reynolds, Salem bin Laden, James Baker III (who held many positions for both Reagan and Bush Sr) Philip Uzielli, Stephen Kass, and Khalid bin Mahfouz of the BCCI (identified as a defendant in the 9/11 families' lawsuit against finaciers of 9/11), among others. Draper and Macomber both held the position of head of the Export Import Bank (Eximbank) during both the Reagan and Bush administrations, the Eximbank being essential in the arming of Iraq....

http://ww2.fairfaxtimes.com/cms/archives...?id=202318
Pamela B. Ohrstrom
Middleburg equestrienne Pamela Braga Ohrstrom died last week in New York following a lengthy illness.
A prominent horse show rider and avid foxhunter, Ohrstrom was integral in the interior design of the National Sporting Library prior to its grand re-opening in 1999. Like former husband George L. Ohrstrom of The Plains, she was president of the local Orange County Hunt and sat on the board of the NSL.
She was also married to J. Carter Brown, for 23 years director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Ohrstrom also served as co-chair of the advisory committee of the Museum of Hounds and Hunting at Morven Park in Leesburg.
She is survived by two adult children and her mother, Mary Braga of Middleburg.

http//www.nytimes.com/1986/07/25/obituaries/b-rionda-braga.html
B. RIONDA BRAGA - Obituary - NYTimes.com
Jul 25, 1986 B. Rionda Braga, a sugar merchant and former president of the ... He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Sayles Booker; two sons, David, ... N.Y.; a daughter, Pamela Brown of Washington, and four grandchildren

Survivors include his wife, Jacqueline Ohrstrom of The Plains; his sister, Magalen O. Bryant of Middleburg; a son from his first marriage, George F. Ohrstrom of New York; a son from his second marriage, Clarke Ohrstrom of The Plains; two children from his third marriage, Winifred O. Nichols of McLean and Wright Ohrstrom of New York; and five grandchildren.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...A9639C8B63
Paid Notice: Deaths
OHRSTROM, GEORGE L. JR.
Published: October 10, 2005
OHRSTROM--George L. Jr. 1927-2005. George Lewis Ohrstrom Jr., of The Plains, Virginia, died at his home on Thursday, October 6, 2005. Mr. Ohrstrom was born on June 9, 1927 in Bronxville, NY, the second of three children of George L. Ohrstrom, Sr. and Emma Riggs Ohrstrom. He grew up in Greenwich, CT. Mr. Ohrstrom was graduated from St. Paul's School, in New Hampshire, in 1945 and from Princeton University in 1950, following two years in the Marine Corps. In the early 1950s he worked at the State Department and in the intelligence services. ......

George Ohrstrom was an usher in Peter Matthiessen's (of the Paris Review and the CIA) wedding, as was the sister-in-law of Richard Ober of CIA. Usher Thomas Guinzburg would later hire Jackie Onassis. He was Matthiessen's Yale roommate and presented as not being witty to Matthiessen's CIA affiliation, but Guinzburg's father was OSS minister of propaganda (OWI) and immediately after WWII led a US intelligence program intended to influence what would and would not be suitable subject matter for publication.....

................

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-...fbfdec1a78
In equine-crazy Middleburg, a horse magazine sale stirs controversy
By Ian Shapira | photos by Matt McClain August 17, 2013
They've bemoaned it at the saddlery shop in downtown Middleburg. They've talked about it at the tack place across the street. Loyal readers of the Chronicle of the Horse have even grilled one of the magazine's reporters about her publication's future while she was on a morning trail ride.
.........
His grandfather, George L. Ohrstrom Sr., purchased the Chronicle from two local horse enthusiasts in 1952. (The New York investor also founded what is now called the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg in 1954.)
George L. Ohrstrom Jr. became chief executive of his father's investment house. A classmate of George H.W. Bush's while growing up in Connecticut, Ohrstrom Jr. later invested in George W. Bush's Texas oil business.
He nearly made his family a household Washington name in the 1960s when he tried and failed to buy the Washington Redskins......

http://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/a...isher-dies
Peter Winants, Racing Publisher, Dies

• May 20, 2009 1:19 PM
  
• International, Northeast Region
  

.............
Winants attended Princeton University, where he befriended the late George L. Ohrstrom Jr., who later became the owner of The Chronicle of the Horse. He served in the Army during World War II and later during the Korean War when he trained as a paratrooper.
Winants freelanced for The Maryland Horse, covering events and photographing stallions at breeding farms for ads. He followed the remarkable steeplechase horse, Jay Trump, and his career with his camera as the rags-to-riches horse won the English Grand National and the Maryland Hunt Cup in 1965, a feat no other horse had accomplished. On the return from England, Winants wrote an article on Jay Trump that The Maryland Horse published, thus branching out into journalism. In 1966, he published his first book, Jay Trump: A Steeplechasing Saga.
In 1972, Winants was hired as editorial assistant at The Chronicle of the Horse, and in 1975, Ohrstrom named him publisher/editor. Winants updated the weekly equestrian publication, while still also writing, editing, and photographing. He published his second book through The Chronicle in 1988, Flatterer: A Story of a Steeplechase Champion. He traveled throughout the United States and Britain photographing and writing profiles of foxhunts for The Chronicle.....


http://www.nytimes.com/1964/08/02/miss-l...leton.html
Miss Lydia Spencer Married To Bissell Jenkins Middleton
Special to The New York TimesAUG. 2, 1964
VANCOUVER, Wash., Aug. 1 Miss Lydia Spencer, daugh*ter of Mrs. Spencer Biddle of Biddies' Landing and the late Mr. Biddle was married at the home of her mother this after*noon to Bissell Jenkins Middle*ton. He is a son of Mrs. E. Willoughby Middleton of Roch*ester and the late Mr. Middle*ton.
The Rev. John R. Anschutz of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in Georgetown, Wash*ington, D. C, performed the ceremony.
Erskine B. Wood gave his niece in marriage. She had her sister, Mrs. Richard s. Marshall,
as matron of honor. E. Wil*loughby Middleton Jr. served as best man for his brother.
Mrs. Middleton attended the Katherine Branson School in Ross, Calif., and graduated from the Catlin School in Port*land, Ore., and from Bryn Mawr College. She attended Oxford University and was with the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington.
Her husband graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of Cottage Club.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/art...tml?nav=E8
..........
Lydia Middleton Nursery School Teacher
Lydia Biddle Middleton, 73, who taught nursery school at the Langley School in McLean from 1977 to 1989, died Nov. 16 at her home in Great Falls. She had cancer.
....................
Mrs. Middleton was born in Portland, Ore., and raised in Vancouver, Wash. As a teenager, she worked for her father's lumber company, piloting a seaplane to remote logging areas.
She was a 1952 graduate of Bryn Mawr College and attended Oxford University to study philosophy, politics and economics.
At Oxford, she was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to serve as a case officer in Helsinki. She settled in the Washington area in 1960 and left the CIA in 1963. She briefly worked at the White House during Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, helping to process clearances for political appointees.....
https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/edwar...E2%80%9946
Edward Willoughby Middleton Jr. '46
E. Willoughby "Wib" Middleton died Oct. 11, 2003, after a long illness, in Rochester, N.Y., where he lived and worked most of his life.
........
The class sends sympathy to Nancy and their four children, Edward III, Elizabeth, Anne, and Thomas; to his brothers, Jenkins '48 and Jack '53; and his cousin, Tom '48.
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/42159048/
Ottawa, Canada
Monday, September 28, 1959
..........
Unitarian Church . Ceremony The marriage of Miss Ann Joy Wigglesworth and Mr, John Llewellyn Clemmit waa solemnised on Saturday afternoon in " the Unitarian Church of Ottawa. The bride is the daughter of the Ambassador of the United States to Canada and Mrs. Richard B. Wiggles-worth and granddaughter -of the late Mr. and Mrs. George Wlggleswortn of Milton, Mais., and Mr. Percy New-hall Booth and th lat Mrs. Booth of Louisville, Ky. Mr. Cleotmitt is the aon of Mrs, Tayloe Rogers and th late Mr. John Henry Clemmitt and stepson of Mr. Taylo Rogers, all of Roanoke, Va. H is th grandson of th lat Mr. and Mrs. Llovd Wynne-Roberts of Williamsburg, Vs., and the late Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Clemroitt of Baltispor. Md. Rev. Vivian T. Pomeroy, Minister Emeritus of the First Unitarian Parish of Milton, Maaa., performed the reremony, assisted by Rev, Howard Box, minuter of the Unitarian Church of Ottawa. Bride's Attendant. The Ambassador gave his daughter in marriage and Miss Mary Dtxweil Wigflee-worth waa maid of honor for her sister. The bridesmaida were Miss Jan Booth Wig-gleewortb, youngest ' sister of the bride, and Misa Julia Mengel Booth of Louisville, Ky., cousin of the bride. Misa Henrietta Hall Wiggles-worth of Ipswich, Mats., also cousin of the bride, waa flower girl. Mr. Robert N. Crispe of Shurlork Row, Berks., England, was best man for hia cousin and the ushers were Mr. Robert L Hoke of Cran-hury. NJ. and Mr. William B. Macomber, Mr. B. Jenkins Middleton. Mr. Charles S. Warner and Mr. John -W. Warner, all of Washington. For her wedding the bride chose a iwft of ivory satin allkfashioned on clasaical ' hoes. Thi-f itted bodice, with long tapered sleeves, had a circlet neckline appliqued , with heirloom lace and th full skirt extended into a court train. She wore her great-grandmother's wedding veil and carried casrsd bouquet of whit Butterfly orchids and atephanotis. ' Her attendants' wor identically atyled dresaea of aand , colored faille with matching velveteen' headbands. They d :, i 1 A-.;i " W a asW MR. AND MRS. J, carried shower bouquets of bronre and yellow chrysanthemums, th flower girl wor a frock of yellow silk organza with a wreath of miniature ivy in' her hair and carried a basket of chrysanthemums, ivy and ahatta daisies. Reception At Embassy. After the ceremony reception was held at the United Statea Embassy residence. Following a wedding trip in Canada, he couple will resid. in Wsshingtnn.


Princeton Alumni Weekly - Volume 55 - Page 108 - Google Books Result
https://books.google.com/books?id=sRFbAAAAYAAJ
1954
Johnny Stevens, Jim Worth Co-chairmen Reunions stirred us with plans for 15th .... Johnny Clemmitt has become associated with Alexander Brown and Sons,

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/135592668/
Rochester, New YorkMonday, January 7, 1952..............
Rochester Man Takes In St. Louis Ceremony jVrtISS Rebecca Duanc Mastin, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. E. Vernon Mastin of St. Louis, Mo., became the bride of Gil-man Perkins, son of Mr. and Mrs. Oilman Craig Perkins of East Ave., at 5:30 p. m. Saturday in the Church of St, Michael and St. George in St. Louis
Mrs. Gilman F'crkins M I Jr A m III attendant and carried pink and white carnations.....

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/139108773/
Miss Mastm Married To Gilman Perkins Continued From Page One
.....Ushers were Seymour H. Knox, Buffalo, N.Y., Thomas J. Devine, Huston Hunting, Richard Harris Jr., Mr. Ward and , B. Jenkins Middleton, all of Rochester;
John Otis Baxter, Philadelphia; Cpl. Anthony M. O'Connor, New York, and Elzey G. Burkham Jr., St. Louis. The reception was given at the Mastin home, 40 Portland place. Guests were received in the living room before the fireplace where an arrangement of white flowers covered the mantel. Mrs. Mastin chose for her daughter's wedding a green changeable taffeta gown with a square neckline marked by a standing collar.....

... A reception followed at the Mas- tin home. : Mrs. Perkins is a giaduale of Ben- nett Junior College, Mr. Perkins of St. Paul's School and Princeton L'ni- versity.

(Allendale classmate of Tom Devine)
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/136223084/
Rochester, New York Sunday, June 15, 1952
.........
M. Harris Jr. nRICK Presbyterian Church white flowers for the all-white there at 5 p. m. yesterday when Mrs. Edwards Slocum of East Pasadena, became the wife of Rich-. ard Macy Harris Jr., http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/democra...=173887446
son of Mr. i and Mr. Richard Macy Harris of Klmwood Ave. The candlelight ceremony was performed by the Rev. Harold E. Nicely. The bride wore white-ribbed taffeta with collar and cuffs of heirloom lace and the full skirt fell into a court train. A cap of lace held her veil of heirhiom lace and illusion and the carried lilies of the valley with a white orchid. Mist Peggy Hargiave and Miss Barbara Slocum, lister of the bride, were the maids of honor, and the matrons of honor were Mrs. Mars-den E. Fox, also a sister of the bride, and Mrs. Thomas F. Siebcrt. ! Miss Molly Slocum, daughter of Ave. and James H. Slocum Mrs. Harris is a graduate of Miss Porter'i School, Farmington, Conn., and Briarcliff Junior College. Mr. Harris was graduated from St. Mark's School and attended the University of Rochester
Lawrence Cory Harris was best man. The ushers were John Rae of Binghamton,- Jenkins Middleton, Harper Sibley Jr., Hawlev Ward, Ciilman Perkins, Donald Clark, Thomas Siebert, Huston Hunting, John Macomher and Thomas Devine.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/137747920/
Rochester, New York Sunday, August 3, 1952.......
Louise Wolcott Devine Becomes Bride of John Bucknell
Louise Wolcott Devine, daughter of Mrs. Adrian G. Devine and the late Mr. Devine of F.lmwood Ave., became
the bride of John Adaison Cobb Bucknell, son of Mr. and Mrs Howard Bucknell 2nd of Myrtle Hall, Bluemont, Va., in a cere mony which took place at 5 p. m. yesterday at the home of her mother.The Rev. Georee Norton.the ceremony. The bride was attired in ivory taffeta, the sleeves made of heirloom rose point lace and the high neckline edged with the lace. The skirt was full, with wide panels of rosepoint lace forming panniers over the hips and falling to a deep dip in the back, and it was completed by a short train. A cap of lace held her three-quarter length veil of nylon net and she carried white orchids with stephanotis. Mrs. E. Tyler Welch of New York City was matron of honor. She wore a dress of dusty pink shantung, with a band of copper beech leaves in her hair. She carried a bouquet of white majestic daisies and deep pink daisies, with copper beech leaves. The bridesmaids were Mrs. Richard Castle and Mrs. John King of Rochester, Mrs. Howard Bucknell 3rd of Washington, D. C, and Mrs. C. Fenno Hoffman of Burlington, Vt. They were dressed in dusty pink shantung and carried white majestic daisies with copper beech leaves. Howard Bucknell of Washington, D. C, was best man. The ushers were Francis Gowan, William Macomber and William Crane, also of Washington, Peter Winants of Baltimore and Gilman Perkins of Rochester. A reception in the home followed the ceremony.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....ent=173133
Guest Tom Scully Posted October 11, 2009
Early in the new thread, started here; http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....opic=14879
a photo of a 1947 obituary is displayed, showing that the woman described in this wedding announcement is Devine's sister,
John Addison Cobb Bucknell, Princeton '49, wed Devine's sister in August, 1952. The thread linked above also contains info showing that
in the 1940's, Thomas Devine's home addresis Rochester, NY was not far from the homes of John and William Macomber and of Joseph F. Dryer:
.........
John AC Bucknell's father, Howard had served as ranking US diplomat in Madrid in 1940, and in a lower capacity, by 1943 at the US Embassy in London.

Quote
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?um=1&...resident+it%26tNew Special Assistant To IT&T. President
- New York Times - Dec 12, 1944
....President Howard Bucknell Jr. Howard Bucknell Jr., former Minister Counselor of the American Embassy in London and Minister since January, 1944, ...

Devine's brother-in-law, John Bucknell was lost in June, 1961, in an incident apparently not covered in the Washington Post or in the NY Times. It is probably impossible
to know if Bucknell was also serving as an intelligence officer in Bern, under official cover (the wedding announcement shows, in 1952, he was serving under the US military occupation command, "in a civilian capacity."), or whether Bucknell was a victim of cold war intrigue. Given what little we know, the sudden death of 33 years old John Bucknell is a curious event.

Quote
http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q=j...nG=Search+BooksForeign service journal‎ - Page 8
by American Foreign Service Association - Political Science - 1961
L. John AC Bucknell, a Foreign Service Reserve Officer and son of Howard
Bucknell, FSO-retired, was drowned off the island of Corsica, on June 10.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=joh...n&scoring=a
Body of American Attache Found
Pay-Per-View - Los Angeles Times - ProQuest Archiver - Jun 12, 1961
IThe body of John Bucknell, 133. political attache at the IU.S. Embassy in Bern miss-. ing since he went undersea fishing Friday, was fo u n d Sunday washed ...

In the same year, 1973, William B. Macomber, Jr., served in Devine's wedding as his best man, and Macomber's brother, John, hired Devine as a VP at Celanese Corp.:...

Tom Devine's maternal grandmother was a first cousin of John D Rockefeller III's father-in-law, Elon Hooker.
Louise Wolcott Hooker Dodge https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg...=102334174
At M.I.T. in 1944, Tom Devine was a Sigma Chi fraternity house mate (16 total house mates) with later Priscilla Johnson CIA handler,
Garry Coit.

Devine's father Adrian was president of Allendale Columbia School in a Rochester, NY suburb. Joseph F Dryer Jr's brother Peter was a classmate
of Devine. Peter Dryer left to attend Choate Academy in 1942, along with nine others in the class of 20 boys. Devine was yearbook editor of his class of 1944, graduating in that year along with his nine remaining classmates.

According to author Joan Mellen, both Tom Devine and Joseph F Dryer, Jr. separately met with George DeMohrenschildt in NYC on 25 April, 1963,
less than two weeks after DeMohrenschildt later claimed Lee Harvey Oswald shot at Gen. Edwin Walker in Dallas. Devine was reporting to CIA,
Dryer, Jr. claimed a CIA contact of his informed him that the secretary accompanying Clemard Joseph Charles and DeMohrenschildt was reporting to CIA. Joan Mellen said that Dryer, Jr. admitted to her that Tom Devine had been his best friend in Rochester only after her book which heavily attributed Dryer, Jr., had gone to the printer.

Devine had also been a director of Robert G. Stone, Jr.'s (son-in-law of Godfrey S. Rockefeller) Stonetex Corp. for quite some time. Stone, Jr. was suspected of using the Harvard endowment investment fund to bail out Allen Quasha/George W. Bush Harken Energy.
1944

[Tom Scully]

Two things need to be said. I took every lead I read in Russ Baker's book that struck me as new information I was unaware of before
Russ Baker published it in Family of Secrets, to reinvigorate and further advance my research. I built on what Russ published.

In my last post, Bissel Jenkins Middleton is intertwined with Gilman Perkins, Tom Devine, and William B. Macomber.

The details I shared in my last post included B. Jenkins Middleton's 1964 marriage to CIA's Lydia Spencer, daughter of

So, for whatever it is worth, we now know she was assigned by CIA to Helsinki in autumn, 1959, and that the CIA described her by her
pre 1964 last name in a 1970 dated CIA memo, discussing her interaction with KGB in October, 1959.
Her actual name after her 1964 marriage was Lydia Spencer Middleton. One more example in which Tom Devine touches on so many
facets, in real time. Garry Coit, Bush, DeMohrenschildt, and Bissel Jenkins Middleton, future spouse of a CIA agent assigned to Helsinki
in October, 1959.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html...4&tab=page
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https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html...8&tab=page
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