From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: part 21
Date: 1 Oct 92 20:32:46 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

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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
Ehrlichman 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 internal 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 Commission, 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 had become number two on Colby's
staff for the coordination and
management of the intelligence
community. According to some, 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.@s1@s4 
   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.@s1@s5 
   Other names on the Bush flow chart
included holdover Edward 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. 
   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 1980s. 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 1960s, 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 1980s
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. As for Shackley, there are also
reports that he worked for a time in
the late 1960s 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 coverup of the Letelier
assassination case.@s1@s6 
   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.@s1@s7 
   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.'|''@s1@s8 

   Intelligence Czar
 
   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 O. 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.@s1@s9 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. 
   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 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. 
   The Official Secrets Act would
have to be passed by Congress, but most
of the rest of what Ford announced was
embodied in Executive Order 11905.
Church thought that this was
overreaching, since it amounted to
changing some provisions of the
National Security Act by presidential
fiat. But this was now the new temper
of the times. 
   As for the CIA, Executive Order
11905 authorized it ``to conduct
foreign counterintelligence activities
... in the United States,'' which
opened the door to many things. Apart
from restrictions on physical searches
and electronic bugging, it was still
open season on Americans abroad. The
FBI was promised the Levi guidelines,
and other agencies would get charters
written for them. In the interim, the
power of the FBI to combat various
``subversive'' activities was
reaffirmed. Political assassination was
banned, but there were no limitations
or regulations placed on covert
operations, and there was nothing about
measures to improve the intelligence
and analytical product of the agencies. 
   In the view of the {New York
Times}, the big winner was Bush: ``From
a management point of view, Mr. Ford
tonight centralized more power in the
hands of the director of Central
Intelligence than any had had since the
creation of the CIA. The director has
always been the nominal head of the
intelligence community, but in fact has
had little power over the other
agencies, particularly the Department
of Defense.'' Bush was now de facto
intelligence czar.@s2@s0 
   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 morale boosting while he was at
Langley. 

   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. 
   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.@s2@s1 

   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 1960s. 
   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.@s2@s2 
   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.''@s2@s3 The bomb
that killed Letelier and Moffitt was of
the same type that the FBI believed
that Ed Wilson was selling, with the
same timer mechanism. 
   Bush therefore had plenty of
warning that a DINA operation was about
to take place in Washington, and it was
no secret that it would be wetwork. As
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.''@s2@s4 
   Bush's complicity deepens when we
turn to the post-assassination coverup.
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.''@s2@s5 
   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 Propper that he
had been informed of the coming of the
DINA team twice, once before they left
South America and once when they had
arrived in Washington. But Bush never
volunteered this highly pertinent
information. Instead, he went into a
sophisticated stonewall routine: 
``|`Look,' said Bush,
`I'm appalled by the bombing.
Obviously we can't allow people to come
right here into the capital and kill
foreign diplomats and American citizens
like this. It would be a hideous
precedent. So, as director, I want to
help you. As an American citizen, I
want to help. But, as director, I also
know that the Agency can't help in a
lot of situations like this. We've got
some problems. Tony, tell him what they
are.'|'' 
   Lapham 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. 
   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 Agent in Charge Julius
Matson and the chief of the anti-Castro
terrorism squad. According to a source
close to the meeting, Bush warned the
FBI against allowing the investigation
to go any further than the lowest level
Cubans.''@s2@s6 
   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
coverup. 

   Team A and Team B
 
   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 present and argue for its own
conclusions. On the one, Team A would
be the CIA's own National Intelligence
Officers and their staffs. But there
would also be a separate Team B, a
group of ostensibly independent outside
experts. 
   The group leader of Team B was
Harvard history professor Richard
Pipes, who was working in the British
Museum in London when he was appointed
by Bush and Cherne. 
   The liaison between Pipes's 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 U.S.S.R. to unleash and
prevail in thermonuclear war. The U.S.
would face a window of vulnerability
during the 1980s. But it is clear from
Pipes's own discussion of the
debate,@s2@s7 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.@s2@s8 
   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 has enormous
appeal to me.'' He refused to discuss
the Team B conclusions themselves, but
did say that he wanted to ``gun down''
speculation that the CIA had leaked a
tough estimate of the 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 Kampelman,
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 a funeral home
approved by the Office of Security. 

   Parting Shots
 
   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 1980s. 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 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 just wasn't impressed with
Bush,'' said a key Carter
staffer.@s2@s9 
   Bush and Knoche then flew back to
Washington, and on the plane Bush wrote
a memo for Henry Kissinger describing
his exchanges with Carter. At midnight,
Bush drove to Kissinger's home and
briefed him for an hour. 
   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. 
     
Notes for Chapter XVI
 

   14.
 William Colby, {Honorable Men}
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978),
p. 452.
 
   15.
 On Murphy and Noriega, see
Frank McNeil, {War and Peace in Central
America} (New York: Scribners, 1988), p.
278.
 
   16.
 See John Prados, {Presidents'
Secret Wars} (New York: William Morrow,
1986); Powers, {op. cit.}; and John
Ranelagh, {The Agency: The Rise and
Decline of the CIA} (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1987).
 
   17.
 Cord Meyer, {Facing Reality:
From World Federalism to the CIA}
(Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1982), pp. 225-26.
 
   18.
 {Washington Post}, Aug. 10,
1988.
 
   19.
 Ford Library, Philip W. Buchen
Files, Box 2.
 
   20.
 For Ford's reorganization, see
Johnson, {op. cit.}, pp. 194-97, and
{New York Times}, Feb. 18, 1976.
 
   21.
 Scott Armstrong and Jeff
Nason, ``Company Man,'' {Mother Jones},
October 1988.
 
   22.
 See Armstrong and Nason, {op.
cit.}, p. 43.
 
   23.
 Freed, {op. cit.}, p. 174.
 
   24.
 Dinges and Landau, {op. cit.},
p. 384.
 
   25.
 Taylor Branch and Eugene M.
Propper, {Labyrinth} (New York: Viking
Press, 1982), p. 72.
 
   26.
 Freed, {op. cit.}, p. 174.
 
   27.
 Richard Pipes, ``Team B: The
Reality Behind the Myth,''
{Commentary}, Oct. 1986.
 
   28.
 {Ibid.}, p. 34. Pipes makes
clear that it was Bush and Richard
Lehman who both leaked to David Binder
of the {New York Times.} Lehman also
encouraged Pipes to leak. The version
offered by William R. Corson, Susan B.
Trento and Joseph J. Trento in {Widows}
(New York: Crown, 1989), namely that
Paisley did the leaking, may also be
true, but will not exonerate Bush.
 
   29.
 Evans and Novak column,
{Houston Post}, Dec. 1, 1976. For the
pro-Bush account of these events, see
Nicholas King, {George Bush: A
Biography} (New York: Dodd, Mead &
Company, 1980), pp. 109-10.
 


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com

Newsgroups: alt.activism,alt.desert-storm,alt.politics.clinton