Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (36 page)

Networking, especially among university alumni, is neither new nor, on its own, worthy of concern. The existence of several members of the same university fraternal organization on the board of a company dealing with an international power of such murderous reputation as the Nazis could be a mere coincidence. Alarmists raise another possibility: the networking was agenda-based, connecting successive generations of very wealthy and highly privileged families whose career-oriented sons belonged to a society pledged to exceptional levels of secrecy and focused on financial and political manipulation on a global scale. This would apply if the organization itself were consciously oriented towards these activities or if its interests reflected the agenda of the families who dominated it, especially in the critical years between 1920 and 1980.

The latter possibility—the idea that an organization could maintain its focus across several generations—raises the specter of a conspiracy among Skull & Bones members to effect its secretive goals. This likelihood is dismissed by skeptics who note that, among the hundreds of surviving Skull & Bones members, many have revealed insights into its operations but none has hinted at such a broadly based conspiracy. Yet, as events such as the collapse of WorldCom, and the exposed relationship between Enron executives and its auditors Arthur Andersen revealed, it takes only a few well-placed individuals to orchestrate an activity that involves an entire organization and benefits a selected few.

Besides, it's not only the administration by Skull & Bones members of ubc and other organizations that's of interest and concern; it's also evidence of sly manipulation of the media and government, such as coverage of the demise of Union Banking, Hitler's Wall Street financier.

The year 2003 saw the publication of
Duty, Honor, Country,
a glowing tribute to Prescott S. Bush by Mickey Herskowitz, a Houston, Texas, sportswriter. Author Herskowitz had produced
previous books on celebrities such as cowboy film star Gene Autry, tv commentator Howard Cossell and baseball hero Mickey Mantle, men he admired with a level of adulation matching his apparent reverence for Prescott Bush.

In glowing prose,
Duty, Honor, Country
traces the career of this father of one U.S. president and grandfather of a state governor and another president as he blazes the political trail for his offspring, winning a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1952 and acting as a political confidant for Richard M. Nixon.

Throughout the tale, the book is an uncritical paean to the Bush family patriarch, one that any Beverly Hills public relations firm would take pride in producing on behalf of a client. In one mild effort to present an objective portrait of his subject, Herskowitz refers to a front-page story that appeared in the New York
Herald-Tribune
during World War ii, revealing close connections between Union Banking and Nazi Germany. “Thyssen Has $3,000,000 Cash in New York Vaults,” the headline announced, followed by the sub-head: “Union Banking Corporation May Hide Nest Egg for High Nazis He Once Backed.” The article, written by
Herald-Tribune
reporter M. J. Racusin, provided details of ubc's connection with Thyssen along with the speculation: “Perhaps it wasn't Herr Thyssen's money at all, some persons suggest. Maybe he sent it here for safekeeping for some of the Nazi bigwigs—perhaps for Goering, for Goebbels, for Himmler, or even Hitler himself.”

Whoever had a right to claim the money—no evidence surfaced to suggest that it was anyone but Thyssen—the revelation was an embarrassment for everyone, especially Prescott Bush who already had expressed his political ambitions.

According to Herskowitz, ubc president Prescott Bush took immediate action when the story broke. “[He] acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill.”

Then the fawning Herskowitz notes:

“Earlier that year [Bush] had accepted the chairmanship of the uso (United Service Organizations). He traveled the country over the next two years raising millions for the National War Fund and… putting himself on the national stage for the first time… [and] boosting the morale of U.S. troops.”

The records show that Bush indeed jumped aboard the uso bandwagon in the spring of 1942. Unfortunately, Herskowitz makes a critical error of timing in his subject's favor. The
Herald-Tribune
article, he states, appeared in the summer of 1942, suggesting that Prescott Bush had already assumed an anti-Nazi stance with his participation in the uso several months earlier. How could anyone question the patriotism of a Wall Street financial heavyweight who takes an active role in supporting U.S. troops (the U.S. joined the war effort against Germany in December 1941) well in advance of a revelation that might have put his ethics in doubt?

But the
Herald-Tribune
revelation did
not
appear in the summer of 1942, as Herskowitz stated. It appeared on Thursday, July 31, 1941, a fact that Herskowitz could not have missed, since he quoted directly from the article itself. In that context, Bush made his patriotic move to the uso
after
the appearance of the story connecting him and his bank with a Nazi regime that was well advanced in its murder of millions of innocent civilians and Allied soldiers. No longer an obvious altruistic enlistment, Bush's move now appears more like frantic fence mending, and Herskowitz's story looks like a conscious whitewash.

Bush and his ubc cronies managed to sweep other dusty smudges under the rug wherever possible, as indicated by this innocuous one-line announcement that appeared in the financial pages of the December 16, 1944, issue of the
New York Times
:

The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.

The announcement conveniently ignored the fact that ubc had been taken over by the U.S. federal government under the Trading with the Enemy Act more than two years earlier, and that 120 Broadway was actually the address of the Office of the Alien Property Custodian. By this time, of course, Prescott Bush and his other Skull & Bones cronies had moved on, parading on behalf of Victory Bonds in their starched shirts and wrapped in Old Glory, ready to assume the next stage in their shining careers which, in Bush's case, included election to the U.S. Senate.

It's this apparent financial/political linkage among Skull & Bones members that alarms many people. With so much smoke swirling among both the organization and the U.S. federal service, they contend, there has to be some fire. Predictably, and most disturbingly, the secret Skull & Bones society has made its biggest impact on that most influential of all government-administered secret societies, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Consider this partial list of Bonesmen associated with the U.S. intelligence community via the Office of Strategic Services (oss) and the cia during their careers:

By definition, Bonesmen are bright, ambitious and, based upon their membership in the secret society, eminently qualified to serve in a covert organization like the cia. On the surface, this makes a good deal of sense. Concerns arise, however, when layers of secrecy concealing many Bonesmen associations and activities are peeled away, revealing suggestions of extracurricular clandestine actions and evidence of remarkable coincidences.

Remember Russell Trust Association, the official corporate name of Skull & Bones? According to records of the state of Connecticut, where the organization was registered, Russell Trust Association no longer exists. But of course it does, since Skull & Bones remains more active and, apparently, more solvent than ever. The parent organization of Skull & Bones is now known as rta Incorporated, a name it surreptitiously assumed at 10:15 am, April 14, 1961.

It's an interesting date and time, because less than two hours later the cia launched its self-financed and self-directed invasion of Cuba, resulting in the disastrous Bay of Pigs debacle. The cia's mastermind of this folly was Richard Drain, a Bonesman of ’43. The White House liaison was McGeorge Bundy, Skull & Bones ’40, working closely with his brother William P. Bundy, Skull & Bones ’39, at the State Department. Together, these three cooked up one of the great foreign misad-ventures in U.S. history, boosting Cuba's prestige in the Third World, highlighting Fidel Castro's claims of U.S. imperialism, and leading directly to the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world has yet come to nuclear war.

The timing of the change in corporate identity and the Bay of Pigs invasion could be dismissed as coincidence, but with the
perspective of history and our knowledge of cia operations over the years, there may be a more practical explanation.

While no one has revealed the source of funding that enabled 1500 Cuban Americans to launch the invasion, suspicion remains that it was the U.S. government, via a cia operations group. Without a defined conduit, however, a financial linkage cannot be verified. And without an existing Russell Trust Association, any record of a potential involvement of the Skull & Bones parent organization as covert manager of the funds was neatly erased on the morning of the invasion. One fact remains, however: the individual who handled the paperwork on the name changeover and the incorporation of rta was Howard Weaver, a ’45 Bonesman who had conveniently retired from covert work at the cia less than two years earlier.

Coincidences grow curioser and curioser. George H.W. Bush may or may not have been working on behalf of the cia in the years between 1958 and 1966, encompassing the timing of Bay of Pigs. His official record identifies him only as chairman of the board and president of Zapata Offshore Oil, a company headquartered in Houston, Texas. Without some experience in espionage, however, Bush's selection as cia director in 1974 seems strange to say the least, and more than one reliable source has claimed the Zapata company was a cover for cia operations.

In any case, Zapata happens to be the cia's code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion and, for an extra measure of conspiracy spice, two of the support vessels for the operation were identified as the
Houston
and the
Barbara
. The latter designation is intriguing because, during his World War ii escapades as a pilot, Bush named every aircraft for his wife, the indomitable Barbara Bush.

Three generations of the Bush family—one senator and two presidents—all proudly declared their association with Skull & Bones.

Another coincidence involves the same former president George H.W. Bush and the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. One week after that calamitous event, an official fbi document noted that information on possible Cuban exile involvement in the president's death had been received “orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W.T. Forsyth of this Bureau.”

When a reprint of this document appeared in the July 1988 issue of
The Nation
, on the cusp of Bush's run for the U.S. presidency, the cia quickly issued a statement claiming that “Mr. George Bush” was not really the current candidate for the highest office in the land but a different man with a similar name: George William Bush. This appeared to deflect suspicion about the presidential candidate's hidden career as a spook, but only until George William Bush emerged from obscurity to admit that yes, he had once been employed by the cia among other government offices, but only as a low-level research and analyst clerk. He also blew the cia's claim out of the water with an affidavit swearing,