Who is Robert H Gow?
Here are a few more interesting highlights—and
lowlights--of Robert Gow’s career:
Gow’s company entered into what must have been a
truly unique joint venture with the Jamaican Government, reported the Aug 29,
1973 Wall Street Journal with a suitably straight face, “to grow
floricultural crops in Jamaica.”
Could there be anything more reeking of elite
deviance (a condition existing when the elite in a society come to believe
that the rules don't apply to them) than
a deal to raise “floricultural crops” in fragrant and fertile Jamaica…with the Jamaican Government’s
own blessing?
Ja be good, mon. We be goin' to Babylon by
Cadillac.
Still looking for new worlds to conquer, Robert Gow’s
interesting little company suffered the misfortune the next
year of being accused—along with
the Nat'l Broiler Mktg Assn and 36 other companies—of conspiring to fix prices
in the U.S. market for broiler chickens to state and local governments,
said the Mar 4, 1975 New
York Times.
Close Bush family friend and George W's 1971
employer (in what Bush later called his 'first real job') was accused of conspiracy,
using inside information provided by colluding Government officials.
Unbowed, the plucky Gow partnered with a private
corporation located in McLean, Virginia developing “pollution free, low-cost
energy sources,” certainly a noble pursuit. The private corporation’s
address a stones-throw from the CIA should not be held against it.
"Wolf Cookies for Everyone!"
"Turns
water into wine! First time. Every time!"
However, the fact that the firm’s hot new “low-cost energy source” involved
nothing more laborious than mixing water with gasoline is
suspicious... Scams with funny twists like this have long been
a 'spook' specialty. Looking for gold coins underneath the ocean... specializing
in recovering virgin timber from the bottom of the Great Lakes.. While researching
Barry & 'the boys”
we
came across one Colorado-based CIA-front company claiming it had a process that could turn water into
gold.
Investors inevitably lose their shirts
in such ventures.
Sure enough things began to slide quickly downhill,
business-wise, for Robert Gow’s company, which posted a loss of 80% of its net
worth, and then reported sadly that it was left with “a staggering $80.7million
debt and equity of only $4.7 million."
We have a feeling the 'smart money' got out in
time.
When Gow’s Stratford of Texas tanked it did so in such
spectacular fashion it inspired a case study at the Harvard
Business School. Scam-wise, Robert Gow was well ahead of
his time. Long before Enron and Global Crossing made the claim de rigueur
for companies being “busted-out,” Gow regretfully cited “possible audit
adjustments” to explain that losses might 'substantially increase.
"Audit adjustments” seem the bane of a certain
class of American industrialists, many of
whom, surprisingly, are well-acquainted with
the Bush family.
Remember "The Enterprise?"
Now begins Robert Gow's Golden Era... his business career
during the “go-go” ‘80’s.
During the Iran Contra hearings it was revealed
that CIA Director Bill Casey, then-Vice President George Bush and Ollie North,
as they were preparing to go to war, in November of 1982, in Nicaragua, had been
using an off-the-books self-funding mechanism which North testified was called
“The Enterprise.”
At exactly this same time Robert Gow bought
himself an oil company, called Lezak Energy Group.
He renamed it “Enterprise Oil
and Gas.”
But wait. There’s more.
Robert Gow’s connections to U.S. intelligence and
military agencies come into even-clearer focus several years later, when another
Gow-helmed company, SI Diamond, is formed, to "solicit federal research grants and
solve technical problems for the government.” Soon the lucky company is given a big
friendly helping hand by President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, Brilliant
Pebbles.
“MCC, SI Diamond's partner in this project, isn't
small potatoes,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “The massive,
government-subsidized consortium of the country's largest electronics
corporations was fired up in the mid-1980s as a direct response to Japan's
dominance in leading edge technologies.”
Recapped Aerospace Daily on May 28, 1992, “The (company’s) process was developed with
funding from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (now known as the
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization or BMDO).”
In the midst of
all this sound and fury signifying nothing...or at least nothing legitimate, Robert Gow somehow developed an abiding fascination with a region
which is said by drug officials to have become prominent at about this same time in the
transshipment of narcotics from South America to the United States: The Yucatan.
This is no doubt just coincidence.
Gow was
making dentures in Merida, paying Mexican workers $4 a
day, and denture-wearing seniors caught wind of it and brought it to the
attention of the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida’s retirement
heartland. “Many dentists don't know the teeth were made in
Mexico because CHS (a Gow company) has bought up dental labs in various cities
and made them into franchises,” the paper reported. "We don't hide it from
them," Gow told the Times. But "we don't like to shock them with the whole
idea."
'Home Team Spooks' at Leisure
Then just two years ago Gow was profiled in Texas
Monthly about his latest Yucatan obsession...
“AT AGE 66, ROBERT GOW could be enjoying a
well-earned life of leisure in Houston--puttering around the links with friends
at the club or spinning stories on a River Oaks patio about his exploits as a
jungle-adventure guide. Retired from a series of enterprises ranging from
offshore oil drilling to producing dental crowns and industrial diamonds, he
could be confining his yen for risk-taking to the occasional poker game,” said
the magazine's Feb 2000 issue.
“But Gow, who used to enjoy ratcheting up the
adrenaline flow for the travelers he led into the wilds of Mexico -- and who was
once in business with former president George Bush and was briefly George W.'s
boss – is caught up in his most ambitious venture ever."
Robert Gow at age 66, was in the Yucatan--he
says-- to grow bamboo.
Imagine that.
We've heard about gentlemen farmers of a certain
age retiring to raise horses. Or cattle. But bamboo was a new one
on us. His bamboo venture would hardly fit a conventional business plan, Gow
admitted.
"There were two big questions we had to answer,"
Gow said. "The first was whether Dendrocalamus strictus (bamboo)
would grow in the Yucatan..."
Texas Monthly says he's still working on the
answer to the second question: What are we going to do with all that bamboo?"
Gow’s
inexplicable "fascination" with the Yucatan once again had led him into business ventures
which Gow himself says make no sense. "If one of my students had
suggested planting bamboo in the jungle, I would have given him a D," he said.
There has been an undeniable eclecticism in
Mr. Gow’s business career. In fact, the scope of it is positively
breathtaking in its incoherence: from offshore oil exploration in
the Gulf of Mexico to growing orchids in Guatemala to cutting
“floricultural crops” deals with the Jamaican government to “fixin’ the chicken bidness' to a small piece
of Star Wars largesse...Now Gow was rounding it all out with a stint as a genteel plantation owner
in the Mexican Yucatan.
Absent the discovery of a parking permit for the
CIA’s Langley headquarters in the pocket of George W’s old Guard uniform, Gow's
career--which only makes sense if looked at as
“cover”-- amply demonstrates that George W. Bush was working, in 1971, for a
spook.
A 'home team spook.'
What does all this have to do
with current events like 9/11?
For answers we turned to the story of an important 'player' in the
saga of George W Bush in the National Guard, James Bath.
Bath was mustered out of the Texas National Guard—and allegedly into the
CIA—exactly one month from when George W Bush allegedly goes through the same
process. Bath's story is entwined with George W's for the next twenty years,
almost as if they worked for the same company... from the Texas
Guard to BCCI to Saudi money allegedly funnelled into George W. Bush’s first
fledgling oil venture, Arbusto, and then later into Bush’s failing Harken
Energy, from people who increasingly are being fingered as having participated
in the attack on America September 11, 2001.
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