Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

← Nazis Conducting Arizona Border Patrols; Connected to Sponsor of Arizona Immigration Bill   |   Islamist Elements Behind Violence, Kyrgystan Government Says →

FTR #711 Interview (#1) with Russ Baker, Author of “Family of Secrets”

Posted by Dave Emory ⋅ June 22, 2010Post a comment Email This Post Email This Post Print This Post Print This Post
Tags  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lis­ten:
MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

Jour­nal­ist Russ Baker has authored Fam­ily of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment and the Hid­den His­tory of the Last 50 Years–a poten­tially deci­sive, multi-generational polit­i­cal his­tory and analy­sis of the Bush fam­ily. This first inter­view of six con­ducted with the author chron­i­cles the gen­e­sis of the Bush dynasty, high­light­ing the family’s busi­ness and polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships with pow­er­ful Wall Street inter­ests, the Har­ri­man busi­ness empire, in par­tic­u­lar. Russ Baker, Fam­ily of Secrets, and this series of six inter­views illus­trate and ana­lyze the net­works of pow­er­ful cor­po­rate and national secu­rity inter­ests that have man­i­fested the Bush fam­ily and, in turn, been advanced by them.

Through­out the deal­ings of gen­er­a­tions of Bushes, one finds the petro­leum busi­ness, spy­craft and the syn­the­sis of pop­u­lar elec­toral pol­i­tics with covert oper­a­tions. Set­ting forth impor­tant episodes in the ascent of George H.W. (“Poppy”) Bush, this pro­gram notes his pro­found involve­ment with the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the fun­da­men­tal, sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between his busi­ness ven­tures and an appar­ent life­long career as an intel­li­gence offi­cer. After recount­ing Prescott Bush’s work for pow­er­ful invest­ment bank­ing firm Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man, the pro­gram under­scores his son George’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence going back to his work for an ONI photo analy­sis unit dur­ing World War II. After the war, “Poppy” (George H.W.) Bush uses fam­ily pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions to become estab­lished in Texas.

From work with oil drilling firm Dresser Industries–headed by Har­ri­man crony and fel­low Yale “Bones­man” Henry Neil Mal­lon–Poppy moves on to head his own out­fit, Zap­ata Off­shore Petro­leum. Launched with the aid of CIA vet­eran Thomas Devine, Zap­ata appears to have been lit­tle more than an intel­li­gence front. Not prof­itable, Zap­ata encom­passed a range of oper­a­tions and ven­tures that appear to have advanced the inter­ests of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and pow­er­ful eco­nomic forces it serves. Among the sig­nif­i­cant areas of involve­ment for Zap­ata was Latin Amer­ica, espe­cially Cuba and the anti-Castro efforts of the CIA.

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is Baker’s analy­sis of Poppy’s behav­ior vis a vis the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. At loss to explain his exact where­abouts and activ­ity at the time Pres­i­dent Kennedy was assas­si­nated, the elder George Bush appears to have been involved with the assas­si­na­tion. Closely asso­ci­ated with the intel­li­gence and cor­po­rate milieu that dis­patched JFK, Poppy was cer­tainly in Dal­las the evening before the assas­si­na­tion and may very well have been there on the very day of the killing. His inabil­ity to account for his behav­ior on that fate­ful day and his evi­dent and sophis­ti­cated efforts to obscure his tracks are sug­ges­tive of guilt.

Close to Richard Nixon through­out his polit­i­cal career, Poppy Bush appears to have been piv­otally involved with the intel­li­gence forces that delib­er­ately ousted Nixon in the Water­gate affair, itself inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the events of 11/22/1963 and the Bay of Pigs milieu.

The saga of the Bush clan, as well as the evo­lu­tion of the power elite struc­ture to which they belong, have imprinted that fam­ily with cer­tain his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal “themes”–themes that can be clearly iden­ti­fied in the nature and legacy of the polit­i­cal career of George W. Bush. Read a Mini-Review of the Book.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Analy­sis of the use of the rhetor­i­cal cliche “con­spir­acy the­ory” to actively sup­press dis­cus­sion of clan­des­tine oper­a­tions; syn­op­sis of key ele­ments of the “Old Boy Net­work” and East­ern Estab­lish­ment; Henry Neil Mallon’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence and national mat­ters; Mallon’s close rela­tion­ship with CIA direc­tor and Sul­li­van and Cromwell asso­ciate Allen Dulles; Dulles’s pedi­gree in the Wall Street and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment; Poppy Bush’s rela­tion­ship to Oswald intel­li­gence babysit­ter George De Mohren­schildt; Poppy’s use of a memo to the FBI to pro­vide him­self with a con­ve­nient cover for his activ­i­ties on 11/22/1963; the evo­lu­tion of Dresser Indus­tries into Hal­libur­ton (headed for a time by Dick Cheney, polit­i­cal crony of both Poppy and Dubya); syn­op­sis of the close polit­i­cal rela­tion­ship between LBJ and Poppy; Poppy’s selec­tion of Judge Manuel Bravo, a close LBJ asso­ciate, to head Zap­ata Off­shore Petroleum’s (land­locked) Medellin, Colum­bia office; the role of Hal­libur­ton the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon blowout in the Gulf of Mex­ico; the pro­fes­sional and his­tor­i­cal links between the Bush fam­ily and the Gam­mells, a pow­er­ful Scot­tish bank­ing fam­ily who are, in turn, closely con­nected to the milieu of for­mer British PM Tony Blair and BP; the role of the milieu of narcotics-smuggling and intelligence-connected banks to the pro­fes­sional ascent of the younger George Bush; George W. Bush’s dec­la­ra­tion to a Texas in jour­nal­ist that if affored the oppor­tu­nity, he intended to invade Iraq.

Discussion

4 comments for “FTR #711 Interview (#1) with Russ Baker, Author of “Family of Secrets””

  1. Your last show about the bush fam­ily was very inter­est­ing. Par­tic­u­larly if its true that H.W.Bush can not recall where he was when the Pres­i­dent Kennedy was assas­si­nated. ( I was read­ing about Sirhan Sirhan and was stunned to find out that the judge in his case went by the name of Her­bert V. Walker,) I was won­der­ing can there be any con­nec­tion between this judge and this famous Bush crime fam­ily.
    Allen

    Posted by Allen | June 27, 2010, 4:42 pm

  2. Russ Baker is the kind of jour­nal­ist work­ing in the field of polit­i­cal con­spir­a­cies (Deep Social-Political Net­work­ing) who reminds of Peter Dale Scott, the late Gary Webb, and Kevin Phillips, all of whom use sub­stan­tive doc­u­men­ta­tion to sup­port the grotesque diag­no­sis that all is not well in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal cul­ture and has not been for a long time. That plu­to­crats are deeply con­nected, and that they use ambi­tious pla­toons of mer­i­to­crats (Chomsky’s New Man­darins) and the plain naive to carry out their vio­lent strate­gies appears all too true.

    Posted by J. Edward Tipre | July 1, 2010, 1:05 pm

  3. Thank you so much for all of your work, Dave Emory, and for the pod­casts, which is about the only way I can catch up with your work. Is there any chance you could post #‘s 711–716? I am read­ing Russ Baker’s Fam­ily of Secrets, just lis­tened to #730, and would really like to hear the rest of the inter­views with Baker. His sen­ti­ments at the end of #730, about how learn­ing who is really run­ning things helps us to live hap­pier lives (I would say it releases us from the matrix), is a sen­ti­ment I have tried to com­mu­ni­cate to oth­ers, and have given up on. Most peo­ple want to stay in the matrix, sadly.

    Posted by bikegata | December 27, 2011, 9:22 pm

  4. Sul­li­van & Cromwell: the go-to New York law firm for banks fac­ing reg­u­la­tory scrutiny. Classy:

    Exclu­sive: Reg­u­la­tors irate at NY action against StanChart

    By Car­rick Mol­lenkamp and Emily Flit­ter and Karen Freifeld

    NEW YORK/LONDON | Wed Aug 8, 2012 12:41am EDT

    (Reuters) — The Trea­sury Depart­ment and Fed­eral Reserve were blind­sided and angered by New York’s bank­ing regulator’s deci­sion to launch an explo­sive attack on Stan­dard Char­tered Plc over $250 bil­lion in alleged money laun­der­ing trans­ac­tions tied to Iran, sources famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion said.

    By going it alone through the order he issued on Mon­day, Ben­jamin Lawsky, head of the recently cre­ated New York State Depart­ment of Finan­cial Ser­vices, also com­pli­cates talks between the Trea­sury and London-based Stan­dard Char­tered to set­tle claims over the trans­ac­tions, sev­eral of the sources said.

    Lawsky’s stun­ning move, which included releas­ing embar­rass­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions and details of the bank’s alleged defi­ance of U.S. sanc­tions against Iran, is rewrit­ing the play­book on how for­eign banks set­tle cases involv­ing the pro­cess­ing of shad­owy funds tied to sanc­tioned coun­tries. In the past, such cases have usu­ally been set­tled through nego­ti­a­tion — with pub­lic sham­ing kept to a minimum.

    In his order, Lawsky said Stan­dard Chartered’s deal­ings exposed the U.S. bank­ing sys­tem to ter­ror­ists, drug traf­fick­ers and cor­rupt states.

    But the upset expressed by some fed­eral offi­cials, who were given vir­tu­ally no notice of the New York move, may pro­vide ammu­ni­tion for Stan­dard Char­tered to por­tray the alle­ga­tions as com­ing from a rel­a­tively new and over-zealous regulator.

    But, given the con­tent of the order — which described Stan­dard Char­tered as a “rogue insti­tu­tion” that “schemed” with the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment and hid from law enforce­ment offi­cials some 60,000 secret trans­ac­tions over nearly 10 years — the bank may need to come up with a strong defense.

    ...

    NO QUIET DEAL

    Stan­dard Char­tered, which sought the advice of one of New York’s top law firms, had hoped that com­ing clean and turn­ing over inter­nal records to fed­eral reg­u­la­tors would yield a set­tle­ment, sources said.

    Those records also were turned over to New York’s bank reg­u­la­tor, which last year was com­bined with an insur­ance agency to cre­ate the new finan­cial watch­dog headed by Lawsky, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor and aide to New York Gov­er­nor Andrew Cuomo.

    Lawsky’s aim, accord­ing to the sources, was to cast more light on a bank’s alleged trans­gres­sions. His agency, these peo­ple said, wasn’t inter­ested in a quiet pact of the sort reached by fed­eral author­i­ties in recent years.

    In 2010, for exam­ple, Bar­clays Plc paid $298 mil­lion in a set­tle­ment with reg­u­la­tors includ­ing the Trea­sury Department’s sanc­tions reg­u­la­tor and the Man­hat­tan dis­trict attorney’s office. The bank, in set­tle­ment doc­u­ments, said it coop­er­ated in the probe.

    Bar­clays, like Stan­dard Char­tered, was advised by Sul­li­van & Cromwell, known as the go-to New York law firm for banks fac­ing reg­u­la­tory scrutiny. The Bar­clays set­tle­ment, while receiv­ing news cov­er­age, was a fairly bland doc­u­ment that listed the bank’s trans­ac­tions but few insider details, such as emails. Other banks, includ­ing Credit Suisse and ING, have set­tled in much the same way with U.S. regulators.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 8, 2012, 6:32 pm

Post a comment

FROM THE LECTURE SERIES

Asimo - RobotThe Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich The shape of things to come. Read more »