Com­ment: The bril­liant new book Fam­ily of Secrets by Russ Baker ana­lyzes the devel­op­ment of Harken Energy, one of George W. Bush’s energy com­pa­nies. Detail­ing the many strange aspects of the company’s devel­op­ment, Baker posits that the firm may well have been a money-laundering vehi­cle for pow­er­ful, reac­tionary inter­ests around the world.

Dis­cussing the Mar­cos gold (much of it com­ing from the Golden Lily trea­sure accord­ing to the Sea­graves), Baker asks a very impor­tant question:

” . . . If all this gold was going some­where, we have to ask: Was some of it going into Harken Energy, where George W. Bush was deeply involved? Cer­tainly [attor­ney] Alan Quasha had a rela­tion­ship with his father that some­what par­al­leled that of W. and Poppy’s. . . .

. . . .When Alan Quasha took con­trol of Harken in 1983, he was essen­tially an unknown and a small-timer. Sev­eral years later, he appeared to be on top of the world. Did gold and/or Marcos’s bil­lions have any­thing to do with this? What about Harvard’s role? [Har­vard Uni­ver­sity was another major investor in Harken.] It is pos­si­bly a coin­ci­dence that Robert G. Stone of the Har­vard Cor­po­ra­tion also served on the board of the Gold Fund of the invest­ment giant Scud­der Invest­ments. The Gold Fund was estab­lished in 1988, shortly after Stone brought Harvard’s money into Harken. Four years later, Harken chair­man Alan Quasha joined the board of Amer­i­can Express’s AXP Pre­cious Met­als Fund. . . .” (Fam­ily of Secrets; pp. 349–351.)

Read a mini-review of this remark­able book.