Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (87 page)

12
. National Guard Bureau, Aeronautical Order, no. 87, September 29, 1972.

13
. Craig Unger, “Mystery Man,” Salon.com, April 27, 2004.

14
. Author interview with General Belisario Flores (Ret.), August 30, 2004.

15
. Unger, “Mystery Man.”

16
. Unger,
House of Bush, House of Saud
, p. 34.

17
. E-mail to author from Bill White, May 17, 2008.

18
. Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
(New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 393.

19
. That same year, in Washington, the son of Abdul Aziz’s adviser St. John Philby, Kim Philby, ahigh-ranking British intelligence officer, met with Lieutenant Commander William Conkling Ladd of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The meeting was an important one to discuss collaboration between Britain and the United States on intelligence concerning Russia and Communism. The meeting represented the formal launching of postwar intelligence cooperation and would lead to the founding of an American civilian intelligence service, the Central Intelligence Agency. Philby was the official representative of British intelligence in Washington, and in the ensuing years he would often dine with Allen Dulles. Kim Philby would later be unmasked as a notorious Soviet double agent. Lieutenant Commander Ladd’s daughter, Olivia, would marry a Wall Street operator named Marion Gilliam. Marion Gilliam would end up involved in a little-known company called Lucky Chance Mining, one of whose directors would be George W. Bush.

20
. Michael Klare,
Blood and Oil
(New York: Henry Holt, 2004), p. 41.

21
. Ibid., p. 41.

22
. The Saudis had become alarmed over Egypt’s relentless bombardments of Yemen, just south of Saudi Arabia, using Soviet-supplied weapons. Worried that Egyptian nationalist president Nasser would extend his influence into southern Arabia, the Saudis decided to beef up their own defenses.

23
. That was the same plane George W. Bush was flying, and at the same exact time. Bandar, who had a very real reason for developing military skills as a guardian of his family’s sometimes-threatened hold on power, would fly for seventeen years, while Bush would quit after two.

24
. The interest on the part of privileged and connected Saudis in coming to the United States to learn to fly made the practice seem routine by the time some nonroyal Saudis began arriving in the United States to do the same—the men who became the pilots of the hijacked craft on 9/11. There are no known connections between the royal pilots and the terrorists—indeed, the 9/11 pilots are dedicated to bringing down the Saudi royal family. Nevertheless, the general U.S. effort to accommodate Saudis wishing to learn to fly is believed by some to have lowered security standards in general in a way that may have inadvertently made it easier for the hijackers to gain visas.

25
. Bandar’s rise to prominence had begun in 1981, when he came to the United States to argue before Congress for the sale of AWACs (airborne control and warning systems) and F-15 equipment to the Saudis. Part of his strategy was to carry around with him a photo of his grandfather Abdul Azizibn Saud, who had negotiated the original concession with the United States in 1933 and had developed a particularly warm friendship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II. Ever since then, Saudi princes had toured the United States, studied in its colleges, trained in its military bases, and received overall red carpet treatment. But this visit by Prince Bandar was particularly noteworthy. For now, the Saudis were seriously trying to counterbalance the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress. By engaging in an intensive lobbying campaign coordinated by Bandar, they won Senate approval of the AWAC sale, 52–48. It was a milestone in Saudi-U.S. relations.

26
. A significant if little-discussed by-product of the embargo was the extent to which American oilcompanies themselves reaped the profits of quadrupled oil prices. By 1974, Exxon overtook General Motors as the biggest American corporation in gross revenues, with its competitors following closely behind.

27
. “Annual Oil Market Chronology Energy Data, Statistics and Analysis,” available through the Energy Information Administration at
www.eia.doe.gov
.

28
. In March 1973, an American firm, Vinnell Corporation, was hired by the Department of Defenseto “modernize” the Saudi National Guard, and has ever since played a major role in the kingdom’s internal security. Vinnell had a long history of association with U.S. intelligence and had been involved in arming and supplying Chinese anti-Communist forces in the 1940s. See also: Matt Gaul, “Regulating the New Privateers: Private Military Service Contracting and the Modern Marque and Reprisal Clause,”
Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review
, June 1998; Dan Briody,
The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).

In 1992, Vinnell along with its parent company, BDM, were acquired by the Carlyle Group. Frank C. Carlucci, a former secretary of defense under President Reagan, was chairman of BDM for most of the 1990s. Carlucci also served as Reagan’s national security adviser and a deputy director of the CIA from 1978 to ’81; he headed the Carlyle Group from 1992 until 2003.

29
. John Perkins,
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
(San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2004), p. 12.

30
. For more on the symbiotic relationship between American big oil and its even bigger Saudi brethren, and those who serve them, see, generally, John MacArthur, “The Vast Power of the Saudi Lobby,”
Harper’s
, April 17, 2007; and Unger,
House of Bush, House of Saud
.

31
. Steven Emerson,
The American House of Saud
(New York: Franklin Watts, 1985), pp. 112–13.

32
. Nixon had labeled as priorities the deregulation of natural gas, development of nuclear energy,and faster exploitation of offshore oil and gas deposits.

33
. Dr. Pinkney C. Walker was dean of the University of Missouri school of business administration. A leading Democrat had criticized Walker’s appointment, complaining that he was too close to the power industry. See Robert Bryce,
Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron
(New York: Public Affairs, 2004) for more on Walker’s own relationship with George W.

34
. Lay’s boss was Under Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton, who was pushing for deregulation of naturalgas prices.

35
. Beaty and Gwynne, “A Mysterious Mover of Money and Planes.”

36
. Pharaon’s Houston-based mini-conglomerate, Arabian Services Corporation, had a majority stake in the Sam P. Wallace Company, a Dallas-based mechanical contracting concern that in 1983 pleaded guilty to paying bribes of nearly $1.4 million to a government official in Trinidad and Tobago and was fined $530,000. See
: U.S. v. Sam P. Wallace Company, Inc.
(Cr. No. 83-0034) (PG), D.P.R., 1983; also see the
Annual Report of the Security and Exchange Commission
, 1981, SEC, available at
www.sec.gov/about/annual_report/1981.pdf
.

37
. Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne,
The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI
(New York: Random House, 1993), p. 274. Beauty and Gwynne call this statement a certifiable lie. As the BCCI scandal broke, Beaty and Gwynne, then
Time
magazine correspondents, quote another
Time
reporter covering the story as writing, “There is a feeling that someone in Washington is trying to cut a deal on BCCI; that they don’t really want the U.S. Attorney’s offices to return indictments because that would muck up their ability to do some sort of overall package deal.”

38
. The nephew who killed King Faisal, Faisal bin Musa’id, studied at several American universities,including UC Berkeley, and was described as having drug problems and having undergone psychiatric treatments. In both Saudi Arabia and the Arab world in general, popular belief holds that Faisal bin Musa’id was some kind of a pawn in a Western conspiracy.

39
. Anthony Cave Brown,
Oil, God and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 306.

40
. Walters does not say what he was doing in that period. His memoirs end at the moment heleaves the CIA. He does not say where he went next. See Vernon A. Walters,
Silent Missions
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978). Walters was an aide to Averell Harriman during the early days of the cold war.

41
. This figure is highly imprecise and does not include untold private transactions, of which there have clearly been many. It comes from Unger’s
House of Bush, House of Saud
. In an appendix, Unger totals up $1.4 billion worth of publicly identifiable business transacted between the Saudi royal family and businesses tied in various ways—some closer than others—to the Bush family and its associates. These include dealings with Dick Cheney’s old firm Halliburton, donations to Bush senior’s presidential library, and investments in the Carlyle Group. Poppy Bush has served as a senior adviser to Carlyle, and James Baker, his former secretary of state, has been a Carlyle senior partner, while Baker’s law firm defended the House of Saud in a lawsuit brought by relatives of victims of September 11.

42
. CBC interview with Bill White by Bob McKeown,
The Fifth Estate
, aired October 29, 2003.

43
. Ibid.

44
. Ibid.

45
. Ibid.

46
. Unger,
House of Bush
,
House of Saud
, p. 23.

47
. JB&A was incorporated in Texas in 1976.

48
. In sworn depositions taken during a legal dispute, Bath admitted that he served as a trustee for the bin Laden family and fronted for three other wealthy Saudi businessmen. He also admitted that he received a 5 percent personal ownership interest, in lieu of immediate cash compensation, in the businesses he purchased on behalf of the Saudis: “The investments were sometimes in my name as trustee, sometimes offshore corporations and sometimes in the name of a law firm,” he said. “It would vary.”

49
. Vinson & Elkins would later defend Enron and provide major “bundled” donations to W.’spresidential campaign.

50
. CBC interview with Bill White.

14: POPPY’S WEB

1
. Cited on George W. Bush’s application for Air Force flight training, AF 65, May 28, 1968.

2
. Funds from those accounts would find their way to support two of the 9/11 hijackers, and Riggs secretly handled the ill-gotten gains of Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s brutal military dictator. Riggs began a relationship with Poppy’s brother Jonathan Bush in 1970, when his company began offering Riggs money-management advice. In 1997, Riggs bought out Jonathan’s firm, and in 2000, while serving as a major fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, he was appointed the head of Riggs Investment Management Co. Riggs finally closed its doors in 2005 after being fined twenty-five million dollars for violation of money-laundering laws.

3
. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne,
The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI
(New York: Random House, 1993), p. 250.

4
. Casey died two years before the initial raid on BCCI, which occurred in 1988.

The 1992 Senate “Kerry” Committee report states in its introduction: