Even 40 years later, the stress placed on secrecy
about operations he took part in while he was "sheep-dipped" in the Alabama Guard make him
reluctant to talk. "I didn't train anyone, frankly," he finally
told us, when pressed on the role of
the American 'trainers' in Central America. "I was expected to fly combat."
From an Air Guard base in Montgomery, where a
decade later George W Bush will, Zen-like, both be and not be, Barry Seal
participated in Caribbean and Central American operations which included
the assassination on May 30, 1961 of Dominican Republic dictator Raphael
Trujillo, whose limo was ambushed returning from a rendezvous with his mistress.
Operatives who were there can still be found who will retail, anonymously,
colorful anecdotes about the "hit." There's more information in "Barry
& 'the boys:' The CIA the Mob & America's Secret History."
"Shut up before you get shot"
"Seal worked for General Reid Doster, who assembled
a CIA Air Force that eventually numbered 80 fliers. Seal's
Alabama Guard ‘work’ took him, two months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, to
Guatemala, where he sent another postcard home, this
time bearing a picture of a volcano towering over a deep green jungle.
A daredevil pilot with whom George
W. Bush was said to have later been acquainted, Seal had also been
drilled on the importance of secrecy concerning his Alabama assignment. He sent
a postcard home from Montgomery in June of 1961, (bearing the picture of the
“Albert Pike Motel” which boasted of being “completely air-conditioned!”)
On the back he wrote, “Just call me a freedom
rider! I’d better shut up before I get shot!”
A decade later another member of the Alabama
Guard, George W. Bush, will also be working in Central America.
Barry Seal was flying cover at the Bay of Pigs
from Guatemala. George W. was said to have been buying tropical plants
there. Was there something "special" about
the Alabama Guard?
We continued digging, especially after reading a
quote from a Bush friend about the man we're beginning to think of as “George the
Green.”
Once or twice a month, the friend stated, Bush
would announce that he had flight duty and off he would go, leaving his nursery
duties to go fly his F-102. "It was really quite amazing,” Peter Knudtzon told
the New York Times. “Here was this young guy making acquisitions of tropical
plants and then up and leaving to fly fighter planes."
We find this image amazing as well. It makes Bush
sound a little like Clark Kent, changing costumes on the fly. Knudtzon told
the Times, “’We traveled to all kinds of peculiar places, like Apopka, Florida,
which was named the foliage capital of the world,’ continued the Zapata alumnus
who was Stratford's executive vice president and Bush's immediate boss.”
Very seldom does anything in the New York Times
make our jaw drop. But the phrase "continued the Zapata alumnus" did.
“A Zapata alumnus?” Selling plants?
Where was George?
For those tuning in late, Zapata Drilling, the
offshore oil company owned by George Bush Sr., has been repeatedly alleged by
researchers to have been a
CIA front, used to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. Even if this notion is dismissed as a
fantasy, this question remains:
What kind of career path leads from offshore oil
exploration to buying tropical plants?
Since nothing about this story so far seemed to make any
sort of business sense, we recalled the words of an executive who worked for
Rudi Dekkers. Charlie Voss, called the “bookkeeper’ at
Huffman in news accounts, is in reality a retired C-130 pilot. When we asked him why
none of Dekker's many money-losing aviation enterprises made any sense, he replied,
“Sometimes when things don’t make business sense, it’s because they
do make sense, just in some other way.”
Like so many businesses associated with friends
of the Bush family, Stratford of Texas, the young George W.’s employer,
went bankrupt in such spectacular fashion it later inspired a
case study at the Harvard Business School. (Unfortunately for George W, it came
after he had already graduated.) So it can't be that 'the boys' at the plant
nursery were born to raise orchids, can it?
Reinforcing this point is the amazing fact that
the plant nursery co-worker of George W's interviewed by the New York
Times wasn’t the only Zapata alumni at Stratford of Texas. The firm’s
owner, who had personally hired the young future President to go tramping around
Central America looking for hot opportunities in plant nurseries, had
himself spent an eight-year stint as V.P. and President of Bush Sr.'s
Zapata Drilling, during exactly the years--between '61 and' 69--that the CIA was
most active in the Caribbean Basin.
Houston businessman Robert H Gow was
a long-time friend of the Bush family, stated published reports. In a profile of Bush’s early years for
the 2000 campaign, Texas Monthly called Gow “a Yale man who had roomed with the
senior Bush's cousin Ray in college.”
While there have been numerous reports of the
large numbers of Yale alumni who have gone from New Haven, Connecticut to
Langley, Virginia, home of the
CIA, Gow's Yalie background proves nothing by itself. But it becomes more
suggestive when combined with the startling information that Robert H. Gow is also—like both George W. and his father, George, Sr—
a member of the dread bete noir of every conspiracy theorist who can
afford a tin foil hat... Skull and Bones.
It does give one pause.
“Yet Skull and Bones was not relegated entirely
to George W.'s past after he graduated. In 1971, having been rejected by the
University of Texas Law School and needing a job, Bush called a Bonesman, Robert
H. Gow,” read a May 1, 2000 Atlantic Monthly story by Alexandra Robbins.
Robbins is selling only a “modified limited
hangout” version of Skull and Bones (for the real truth, see our buddy Kris
Millegan's
Fleshing Out Skull & Bones). But
even she felt constrained to mention
George W.’s continuing business affiliations with other Bonesmen... “Gow, who later
told The Washington Post that his Houston-based agricultural company had not
been looking for anyone at the time, hired Bush as a management trainee,”
Robbins wrote. “In 1977, when Bush formed Arbusto Energy, his first company, he
once again applied to Skull and Bones for financial aid.”
Well now.
We would have to have ourselves a little
“look-see” into Robert Gow. And although we were taught by our mother to speak only
well of people, after poking through Robert Gow’s curious history and
its links to America’s own recent secret history, we
think even mom would sign off on this statement:
“There are
so many red flags in Robert Gow’s background that it looks like May Day in Red Square.”
Next week, we'll put some flesh on
the Bones. |