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.