Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (44 page)

In fact, both George W. and Jim Bath have played along, with the men portraying their dual suspensions as minor matters, and as commonplace.
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“It happens all the time, especially in the Guard,” Bath told the author Craig Unger. “In a regular squadron it is real easy to get your physical, but in a Guard unit, it is a different kettle of fish because the flight surgeon is also a civilian . . . The base is a ghost town except when the whole unit is there. When you fall out of requirements, it is no big deal, you are simply not able to be on the flying schedule. That is it, full stop.”

But in fact, being suspended is apparently not a minor matter, and such a lapse would have been highly unusual for any unit member; for two men to be suspended at the same time for the same reason was extraordinary. When I asked General Belisario J. Flores (Ret.), a former assistant adjutant general of the Texas Air National Guard, he told me that suspensions for missing flight physicals were rare. Moreover, he said, he had never, in all his years with the Texas Air National Guard, heard of two members of the same unit being suspended from flying for failure to take physicals, much less at the same time.
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From the point of view of the National Guard, which had invested so much time and money in these men, it defies reason that the punishment for missing a physical exam would be suspension from flying. For such an offense, I was told by a cross-section of military people, a crack flier like Bath would most likely have been ordered to take the exam at a later date.

For someone like Bush, who had not completed his compulsory military service, the consequences could have been more severe; indeed, a Guardsman in this situation without Bush’s connections might have found himself ordered to Vietnam, where the war at this time was very much a hot one. (Logic alone suggests that if everyone knew they could abandon their obligations during an unpopular war by simply not taking a medical exam, the drain on the military would be substantial.)

According to General Flores, the ongoing failure to take a required physical would definitely have triggered disciplinary action. In a 2004 interview, Flores told me: “If a person does not fulfill his training requirements, he is counseled by his commander, then meets a board, and then the case is forwarded for further action.” He said that a special board would have to be convened, and during this time the person suspended from flying would continue to serve in a nonflying capacity. In any event, a record of the board proceedings should have been created. Yet no such record regarding the disposition of the Bush and Bath cases has ever been released. Nor is it even known to exist.

Was there more to Bush’s grounding than simply nerves?

When reporters raised allegations that Bush had been grounded for using drugs, Bath characterized it as a “bogus issue.” Bath has declined to publicly explain precisely why he and Bush—whom he calls “Geo,” after the name on his Guard uniform—had failed to take their physicals. “I’m telling you that it [drug use] did not happen. It is beyond laughable. I wasn’t with him 24/7, but Geo did not use drugs. Geo did not use drugs, and I really know the facts.”
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Actually, as noted in chapter 8, the facts were a little more complicated in W.’s case. And they certainly were in Bath’s. His own divorce proceedings involved allegations by his ex-wife of his use of cocaine and its detrimental effects on his business and personal life.

While the grounding came back to inconvenience W. decades later at a key moment in his political career, it seems not to have hurt Jim Bath. To the contrary. Within a few short years, at a turning point for the American intelligence establishment under Poppy Bush, a man with no particular experience in finance or administration became the investment manager for the scions of two of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia and the world.

Drilling Deep for Answers

Was Jim Bath connected to American intelligence, in an official or unofficial capacity? Craig Unger’s 2002 interview is the only in-depth one that Bath ever gave. I had a couple of brief conversations with Bath, in which he declined to answer any questions on the record. Unger wrote that Bath “equivocated.” “There’s all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA],” Bath said. “It runs the whole spectrum, maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve—I don’t think you’re going to find them talking about it. Were that the case with me, I’m almost certain you wouldn’t find me talking about it.”
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Once the business relationship between Bath and his partner Bill White had turned into a fractious legal battle, a curious White decided to research Bath’s hints of a secret agent past, and used the phone book to find a local number for Houston’s CIA outpost.

“I hooked up a Radio Shack tape recorder to my office phone and called the number. I gave my name in a familiar, friendly tone of voice like I was one of the boys. I told the man who answered that I was working with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and that I was attempting to locate Jim Bath. He was apparently caught off guard and assumed that I was with one of the federal alphabet agencies, as he never asked for credentials. He responded without hesitation, saying in effect: ‘Oh, it’s been a few years now since we’ve heard from Bath. Give me a minute and I’ll pull his file.’ After a short delay he came back on the line and told me that Bath’s file had been sent to DC.” When White called again to request the file, he was given the runaround.
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To understand the roots of this tangled tale, in which the Bushes’ friend Jim Bath turns an unexpected order for an outmoded plane into a relationship with representatives of the most powerful oil empire in world history, one has to look back seventy years or so, to the foundations of the American relationship with the House of Saud.

Friends with Benefits

The friendship of the Saudis has long been sought by Westerners. Even before Americans got into the kingdom, the British were there. In the 1930s, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Azizibn Saud, was advised by British expatriate St. John Philby. A former British intelligence operative who “went native,” Philby represented King Saud in negotiations with foreign suitors eager to explore for oil beneath the shifting sands. The wily Briton soon realized that the Americans were showing more interest than were the British, and so—much to Britain’s everlasting regret—he helped negotiate Saudi Arabia’s first oil contract with a premier American company, Standard Oil of California (SoCal), one of the spin-offs of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil Company.

Philby advised the king to give SoCal a sixty-year exclusive contract for exploration and extraction along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It didn’t hurt the company’s standing that it was quietly compensating Philby on the side. In 1938, SoCal struck oil in commercial quantities. Shipments abroad commenced the next year.

World War II firmly established oil as the preeminent strategic resource, and the United States and the Soviet Union as the world’s two superpowers. As one member of an official U.S. delegation visiting Saudi Arabia in 1944 put it, “The oil in this region is the greatest single prize in all history.” The delegation was led by Everette DeGolyer, a central player in the Dallas oil crowd who was back then a deputy to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in the Petroleum Administration for War.
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In February 1945, Abdul Aziz met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on board the USS
Quincy
in the Suez Canal, and the two cemented what would become one of the most consequential agreements in world history: the trade-off of oil for security.
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This led to the establishment of a U.S. training mission in Saudi and the onset of a long-term U.S. military aid program, one that continues to this day. As part of that assistance, the United States helped create the modern Saudi army as well as the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), a rival organization responsible for internal security and protection of the royal family.
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The allure of the seemingly unlimited Saudi petroleum deposits (and of the profits the kingdom was beginning to amass) beckoned increasingly as the limits of domestic U.S. oil production became apparent. Moreover, the United States increasingly looked like a good bet as protector of the Saudi royal house, especially after the humiliation of the British and French in the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 led to a deepening of America’s commitment to the Saudis.

The rise of the nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser and his dalliance with the Soviets, coupled with fears of rebellion in Saudi Arabia, led to U.S. military support of Saudi Arabia in the Yemeni Civil War (1962–70). President Kennedy was the first to order U.S. troops into the kingdom, during the Yemeni crisis.

But the outright defense of Gulf states by the U.S. military would soon end. In response to growing public distaste for American military entanglements in the developing world, the Nixon Doctrine (1969) declared that the United States would no longer bear the main responsibility for the defense of Gulf states. Rather than sending troops to protect developing countries, the Nixon administration sent billions of dollars’ worth of equipment. This led to even greater U.S. military investment in Saudi Arabia. During this time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was charged with constructing a new headquarters for SANG.

As the Saudis became cognizant of the full extent of their natural riches, they took steps to gradually get control of them, and especially the revenue they produced. The vehicle for this was Aramco, which was SoCal’s postwar consortium that included Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, and later, as a nationalized Saudi-controlled concern, Saudi Aramco, the world’s richest oil company. The turning point came during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which the Nixon administration tilted decisively in support of Israel, after which Saudi Arabia nationalized its oil deposits. In response the United States turned to new ways of maintaining the relationship, and in the process retain access to Saudi oil supplies on favorable terms. Mostly, this meant a kind of mutually beneficial shotgun marriage between the two highly dissimilar cultures, which brought more military dependence and increased financial and personal ties.

Saudi Arabia would become—and remains today—the leading recipient of U.S. arms and military services, far exceeding Israel and all other U.S. allies. Much of this assistance goes to SANG rather than the army, and therefore is intended specifically to protect and sustain the Saudi royal family.
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This military assistance extended to pilot training. Previously, the United States had concentrated on training its own aircrews for operations over Saudi Arabia. Now it was equipping and training the Saudi Royal Air Force to operate Saudi aircraft—planes that had been purchased from the United States.
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This was an approach that President Richard Nixon also favored: take care of the despotic rulers who sat upon these thrones of petroleum, equip and train their military, and direct juicy contracts to U.S. defense contractors at the same time. The Pentagon convinced the Saudis to buy Lockheed’s new F-104 Starfighter, the first service combat aircraft designed to fly at twice the speed of sound.

The United States hosted Saudi princes and other Saudi scions in American universities, fostering deeper personal ties as well as inculcating American-style values and perspectives on such topics as economics and investing. The princes, exposed to American planes, fell in love with the toys—and then with others, including American ranches, mansions, and the like.

One aspect of this deepening bond was the increasing frequency with which Saudi princes came to United States for education and military training. The latter was a crucial aspect of the effort to protect the royal family from kingdom intrigues and plots and to reinforce Saudi dependence on the U.S. military. For example, in 1970, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, a grandson of the late king Abdul Aziz, was at Perrin Air Force Base near Sherman, Texas, in the Dallas area, being trained as a fighter pilot on the F-102.
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Access to the world’s most expensive toys—American high-performance aircraft, and even spacecraft—was a significant attraction to the Saudi princes. Bandar’s father, the longtime Saudi defense secretary Prince Sultan, was training in Houston at NASA and became the first foreign national to fly on the American Space Shuttle in 1985.
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Bandar became the Saudi ambassador to the United States in 1983 while Poppy Bush was vice president and remained in the post for twenty-two years. Bandar would grow so close to the Bush family that W. nicknamed him “Bandar Bush.”
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In 1973, the evolution of the U.S.-Saudi relationship quickened. Paradoxically, this heightened cooperation emerged from discord. U.S. support for the Israeli victory in the Yom Kippur War prompted the Arab nations to embargo oil and gas deliveries to the United States. Politicians felt the wrath of voters fed up with long lines at the gas pump and considerably higher prices.
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Saudi revenues increased dramatically, as the selling price of Saudi crude nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 1974.
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