Josh Messite, Editor at Negation Magazine, traces the roots of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” it justified all the way back to mid-century efforts by Saudi and American reactionary elites to violently suppress threats to their domestic and international dominance. Read Part 1 here. 

Long Live the House of Saud

In the period leading up to the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was the world’s leading exporter of crude oil and Salafi jihadism. The Saudi royal family began their “special relationship” with the American ruling class when Saudi Arabia’s brutal, brilliant, battle-scarred warrior-king and founding father Abdulaziz Al-Saud met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) aboard a US Navy cruiser in 1945, seven years after geologists from California discovered oil in the Saudi desert. Muslim pilgrims making hajj to Mecca and Medina were the traditional revenue stream of the ruler who called himself the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” but that income wasn’t enough for the soaring-but-indebted House of Saud. To make ends meet, the conqueror who united four regions of the Arabian Peninsula into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia extended an invitation to oil prospectors from the United States. American doctors had treated him and his relatives with compassion and professionalism during his rise to power, an experience that contributed to his perception of Americans as hard-working, entrepreneurial, and disinterested in political interference or military occupation in the Arabian Peninsula. This distinguished the United States from the British Empire, which King Abdulaziz correctly perceived as a meddling colonial power, and from the atheistic Soviet Union, which in 1938 found its heathen diplomats banished from Saudi Arabia, despite the USSR having been the first government to officially recognize the Islamic monarchy in 1926. Out of respect to Abdulaziz Al-Saud — whose legitimacy partially depended on his family’s centuries-long alliance with the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect which frowns on the consumption of alcohol — President Roosevelt managed to go without his customary cocktail for the duration of their meeting in Egyptian waters. As reported by Rachel Bronson in her 2006 book Thicker Than Oil, Abdulaziz saw FDR as a “good person,” a “giant,” and “the greatest man of the century,” Roosevelt saw Abdulaziz as a “powerful man” of “great majesty and dignity,” and “the two seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s company.” The meeting became tense, however, when Abdulaziz needled FDR about America’s support for Zionism. The Saudi king urged Roosevelt to resettle the displaced European Jews back in Europe and to oppose the creation of a Jewish state in the Arab world instead of “forcing the Arabs to pay for the crimes of Adolf Hitler” by allowing the Zionists to colonize Palestine. In a letter to his cousin/mistress, FDR noted in passing that Abdulaziz brought enslaved Africans with him to the historic summit. 

The slave-holding king died in 1953, and Crown Prince Faisal bin Abdulaziz (nominally) abolished slavery in November 1962. That reform was part of Faisal’s attempt to avoid the fate of the Yemeni Mutawakkilite Kingdom, which had been overthrown in the September 1962 Sana’a revolution; the Soviet-backed military officers led by Abdullah Al-Sallal declared the end of slavery in the new “Yemen Arab Republic” (commonly known as “North Yemen”). The Yemeni rebels were inspired by the secular-nationalist revolution launched by Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “Free Officers” against the Egyptian monarchy on July 23rd, 1952. The 1962 rebellion in Sana’a provoked a long, messy, extremely-lethal North Yemeni civil war between Saudi-backed counterrevolutionary royalists and Egyptian-backed progressive republicans. Liberal President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) stuck to his “very deep personal convictions” which favored the revolutionary developmentalists.¹ Kennedy refused to give in to pressure from Pentagon advisers, pro-Israel lobbyists, oil executives (especially Dallas oilman Jack A. Crichton), Saudi royals (especially Crown Prince Faisal), and CIA officials (especially Mideast Division Chief James H. Critchfield) to repudiate Nasserist Egypt and join the British and Israelis in funding and arming the North Yemeni counterrevolutionaries. JFK and his like-minded State Department continued sending large aid packages to nationalist Egypt and granted official recognition to the Yemen Arab Republic. But President Kennedy was shot to death in November 1963, and his successor Lyndon Johnson admired Faisal bin Abdulaziz, strongly opposed Nasserism, and escalated the flow of American weapons to Saudi armed forces, just as he countermanded Kennedy-era plans by escalating the American war in Vietnam. 

A significant number of disillusioned Saudi military officers defected to Cairo, Sana’a, and Beirut during the North Yemeni war. In July 1958, the British-backed Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq had been overthrown by nationalist Iraqi military officers.²  The House of Hashim and the House of Saud had gone to war for control over the Hejaz a few decades earlier, but the Saudis did not celebrate the defeat of their rivals in Baghdad — monarchs throughout the Arab world rightfully feared the domino effect of secular-republican uprisings set off by the Egyptian Free Officers. The revolutionary wave extended into the Saudi palaces: Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz and his liberal faction of “Free Princes” started flirting with Nasserism in 1958, emancipated their enslaved household workers, and spent the next few years in the Republic of Lebanon and the Republic of Egypt, making the rest of the royal family look weak and backwards. Crown Prince Faisal, who became Saudi Arabia’s “Prime Minister” in 1958, believed in the use of political reforms, technological development, and economic modernization to combat the two radical challenges to his kingdom: Nasser-inspired pan-Arab nationalism and Soviet-inspired Marxism-Leninism. Faisal also helped pioneer the use of reactionary “pan-Islamism” as a direct response to secular republicanism and atheistic socialism, a strategy Pakistani General Zia would adopt after overthrowing his country’s left-wing government in 1977. In the late-‘60s, those threats became even more concerning to the Saudi elites: a coalition of pan-Arab nationalists and Marxist-Leninists in the port city of Aden drove the British colonizers out of the southern strip of the Arabian Peninsula and founded the “People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen” (commonly known as “South Yemen”) in November 1967. In June 1969, the left-wing South Yemeni faction led by Abdul Fattah Ismail and Salim Rubai Ali outmuscled the Nasserist faction led by Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi and turned South Yemen into the only Marxist-Leninist state in the Arab world. 

These developments might have triggered the downfall of the Saudi monarchy if not for a reshuffling at the top that placed the House of Saud back in competent hands. Merciless, disciplined, and clever Crown Prince Faisal seized the throne from his gluttonous, lecherous, alcoholic, “good-for-nothing” older brother King Saud Al-Saud in 1964 and crushed two efforts to overthrow the royal family in 1969. The June 1969 coup attempt was led by high-ranking Saudi military officers at the Dhahran Air Base who belonged to a secular-nationalist movement alongside multiethnic Aramco oil workers and educated members of the Saudi middle-class striving to create a “Republic of the Arabian Peninsula.” The military plot to seize power by assassinating King Faisal and Prince Sultan was foiled by the Saudi security services with only a few hours to spare thanks to a well-timed tip from the CIA, which operated out of the American consulate in Dhahran. Soviet scholar Alexei Vasiliev noted in his magisterial History of Saudi Arabia that Dhahran Air Base commanders Daud al-Rumaih and Said Umari were incarcerated and tortured to death for their roles in organizing the secular-republican coup against the Wahhabist monarchy. In his 2015 book The Other Saudis, Toby Matthiesen reported that the other failed revolution later that year was explicitly leftist, included Saudi women, established a base of support in the Shia villages and towns in the Eastern Province, and formed links with radical underground movements in Palestine, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. The Saudi leftists — led by Dr. Anwar Thabit and Mirza al-Khunaizi — were inspired by the newly-empowered Marxist-Leninists in South Yemen and by the successful September 1969 Benghazi revolution led by Muammar Gaddafi against Libyan King Idris as-Senussi. King Faisal incarcerated thousands and executed scores of Saudi rebels in the aftermath of the defeated revolts. It’s difficult for me to refrain from imagining just how different the world would be if the Saudi uprisings of 1969 had succeeded.

The Saudi royal family had been rich since the late-‘40s, but Saudi Arabia didn’t transcend its impoverished nomadic past and become a wealthy and cohesive nation-state until after the 1973-1974 oil embargo arranged by the Saudi-led Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries caused global oil prices to skyrocket. King Faisal wouldn’t get to enjoy the economic fruits of his diplomatic labor, however — he was assassinated by a young Berkeley-educated psychedelic-dabbling nephew with murky motives in March 1975. Six days before Faisal was shot in the head by his “deranged” relative, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with the king in Riyadh to persuade him to stop obstructing Kissinger’s peace talks between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Faisal hated the State of Israel and never trusted Kissinger. President Gerald Ford eulogized Faisal as a “close friend of the United States” whose “wisdom and stature earned the respect of the entire world,” but the State of Israel saw the anti-Zionist Saudi king (who often claimed that “Communism is a Zionist creation” and distributed copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) as an “anti-Jewish zealot who financed Arab wars and terrorism.” The Israeli government and media reacted to “the unexpected death of a powerful enemy” with “a noticeable sense of relief.” Israeli officials expressed optimism that the assassination of Saudi Arabia’s “single-minded” and “religiously-extreme” ruler “would moderate that country’s savage vehemence in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Indeed, the wing of the House of Saud that inherited power after Faisal’s death told the CIA’s Riyadh Station Chief that they were far more worried about secular nationalism and Marxism-Leninism than they were about Zionism — a clear departure from Faisal’s worldview. Egypt and Israel signed a diplomatic agreement six months after Faisal was mysteriously assassinated.

President Nasser had said in 1964 that he planned to do everything in his power to “ensure that Faisal would be Saudi Arabia’s last king,” but it wasn’t meant to be. Nasser’s third heart attack killed him in September 1970, his conniving successor Anwar Sadat was secretly on the Saudi-CIA payroll, and the House of Saud retained its grasp on power after the unexplained killing of their king. Sadat’s “Corrective Revolution” in May 1971 cleansed the Egyptian government of leftists and pan-Arab nationalists. Threats to the Saudis’ south were neutralized — the Marxist-Leninist rebels in the mountainous Dhofar province on the coast of the Arabian Sea were defeated by the Sultanate of Oman in 1976; North Yemen’s modernizing President Ibrahim al-Hamdi was assassinated in 1977, paving the way for the corrupt opportunist Ali Abdullah Saleh to take power; and South Yemen’s revolutionary leader Salim Rubai Ali was overthrown and executed in 1978. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq named the city of “Faisalabad” and a Pakistani Air Force base in Karachi after his assassinated ally. During the reign of King Faisal’s younger brothers — sickly but likable King Khalid bin Abdulaziz and hedonistic but intelligent Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz — the House of Saud bought full control of the largest proven oil reserves in the world (until Venezuela surpassed them in 2011) and became America’s largest source of foreign oil. In 1979, the year the brutal, oil-rich, American-backed Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran was overthrown and replaced by anti-American Shia extremists, oil rents comprised a whopping 87% of Saudi Arabia’s GDP as the Kingdom ramped up supply to compensate for the missing Iranian exports. In addition to Arabian petroleum and US dollars, the Saudis and Americans built their post-1974 relationship on pricey weapons deals and anti-Communist covert activities in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Chad, Angola, Somalia, and Italy. 

The Saudis’ strongest American allies were the members and associates of the Bush Dynasty, a family that should be understood as nothing more than a particularly-crude and WASPy appendage of the American Deep State. The ground for the Saudi-Bush alliance was paved when George H. W. Bush graduated from Yale University in 1948 and moved to Midland, Texas to work for his father Prescott’s friend from the “Skull and Bones” secret society, H. Neil Mallon. Mallon was the president of the Dresser Industries energy company, which later merged with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. Prescott Bush was a “stern” and “scary” 6’4” 250 lb behemoth, a suspected Apache-grave desecrator, a military intelligence officer, an investment banker, a board-member of the CBS radio network, a participant in the fascist “Business Plot” to overthrow newly-elected President Roosevelt in 1933-1934, a talented singer, a financier of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and construction of the Nazi war machine, and a US Senator from 1952 to 1963. 

Who Killed John F. Kennedy?

Prescott Bush’s German business interests were represented by prominent Republican Party lawyer John Foster Dulles, who played a “central role in channeling funds from the United States to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.” In 1953, John Foster Dulles became the US Secretary of State and his brother Allen Dulles became the Director of the CIA for the new Eisenhower-Nixon Administration. According to Prescott Bush, George’s new boss Neil Mallon was “well known to Allen Dulles, and has tried to be helpful to him in the CIA, especially in the procurement of individuals to serve in that important agency.” In 1955, George named his third son “Neil Mallon Bush.” When President John F. Kennedy fired Allen Dulles following the disastrous CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Prescott Bush described himself as “sick at heart and angry.” Prescott told Allen Dulles’ widow in 1969 that he had “never forgiven the Kennedys” (even though both JFK and his brother Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy had been assassinated by that point). President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) — a corrupt and famously power-hungry Texan Senator who had a bitter and tense relationship with the Kennedy brothers — appointed Allen Dulles to the “Warren Commission” created to combat rampant speculation that Johnson’s predecessor had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy. Johnson was friends with Senator Prescott Bush and inspired “such great respect” in Congressman George H. W. Bush that he became the only Republican politician to attend the send-off when LBJ left the White House in shame in January 1969. At President Gerald Ford’s funeral in 2007, former-President Bush Sr. declared: “the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final, definitive say on this tragic matter.”

The US House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-1979) wasn’t convinced by the Johnson-Dulles-Ford–Warren conclusion that alleged “lone gunman” Lee Harvey Oswald was lying when he told reporters that he was a “patsy” who “did not kill the President” shortly before Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed him in a Dallas police station. Bush Senior’s successor had suspicions, too — when Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he asked his trusted (and corrupt) Associate Attorney General Webster “Webb” Hubbell to compile as much information on the Kennedy assassination as Hubbell could get his hands on. In his 1997 memoir, the former Mayor of Little Rock reported that he “wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting” — it seems the CIA refused to grant the Clinton Administration access to certain classified documents concerning the Kennedy assassination. When H. W. was president, he denied ever having made any attempts to review the CIA’s files on the murder of JFK, but that was a lie. Gossip-biographer Kitty Kelley reported in her 2004 book The Family that Bush Sr. actually “requested information — not once, but several times — on a wide range of questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination” when he was the Director of the CIA in 1976. Apparently George H. W. Bush was not as confident in the official explanation of President Kennedy’s death as he publicly pretended to be.

Even President Lyndon Johnson admitted that the Warren Commission report did not “have the final, definitive say” that Bush would claim it had — in 1971, LBJ told journalist Leo Janos: “I never believed that Oswald acted alone.” President Johnson “used to go around saying” that he saw Kennedy’s death as “divine retribution,” karmic revenge for JFK’s role in the assassination of pro-American South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem three weeks before Kennedy was killed. In 1967, LBJ privately informed his Chief of Staff W. Marvin Watson that he was “convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination” of JFK and “felt that the CIA had something to do with this plot,” but in his 1971 interview with Janos for The Atlantic, Johnson tried to pin the assassination on Fidel Castro. Allen Dulles died in 1969, Warren Commission member/LBJ-mentor Sen. Richard Russell (D-Ga.) died in 1971, Warren Commission member/House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.) went missing in 1972, Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.) died in 1972, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also died in 1972, Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, and Chief Justice/Commission Chair Earl Warren died in 1974. In March 1979, the bipartisan House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) announced that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” and that “anti-Castro Cubans” in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas “might have been involved in the assassination.” JFK cracked down on anti-Castro Cuban raids and cut off financial support for anti-Castro terrorist groups in an effort to ease tensions with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis in late-1962. President Kennedy explained his thinking to a teenaged intern/mistress: “I’d rather my children be Red than dead.” The far-right Cuban exiles interpreted this de-escalation as a betrayal and viewed JFK as an enemy of their cause.

The Role of the Deep State in The Big Event

The anti-Castro Cubans weren’t the only violent reactionaries credibly suspected of involvement in the assassination of the reformist American president. Antonio Veciana, a CIA asset and leader of the CIA-trained Cuban terrorist organization “Alpha 66,” told an HSCA investigator in 1976 that a CIA official who called himself “Maurice Bishop” met with Lee Harvey Oswald several times and introduced Veciana to Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. Veciana says that he spoke to Oswald about a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Veciana was shot in the head in an unsolved Miami drive-by in 1979, but he survived, and in 2014 the Cuban terrorist admitted that “Maurice Bishop” was actually Texan William & Mary alum/failed Broadway actor David Atlee Phillips, the CIA’s Chief of Cuban Operations. Phillips reportedly “wanted to kill” Kennedy in 1963 for leading the American Empire down the path of weakness. Before becoming the CIA’s Cuban-terrorism supervisor (and allegedly meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald), David Phillips collaborated with the Dulles brothers, CIA officer David Sánchez Morales, and CIA officer/Watergate burglar E. Howard “Big Ears” Hunt to overthrow leftist Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and replace him with a right-wing military dictatorship in June 1954. The destruction of the Árbenz government in Guatemala and of the left-wing nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran (a coup orchestrated by the Dulles brothers in early-1953) were the opening salvos in the CIA’s endless war against foreign and domestic threats to American world domination. 

Near the end of his life, David Phillips/Maurice Bishop gave former HSCA investigator Kevin Walsh his insider opinion on the murder of JFK: “My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” Was Phillips referring to himself? He had insisted for years that he was in Mexico City when President Kennedy was killed, but when he was dying of lung cancer in the ‘80s, Phillips confessed to his brother that he had actually been in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. In 2003-2004, terminally-ill CIA veteran E. Howard Hunt told his son that he, his buddy David Phillips, CIA Miami Operations Chief David Morales, CIA Covert Action director Cord Meyer, CIA “Executive Action” [Assassination] director William King “Bill” Harvey, and CIA agent/fellow Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini Sturgis worked with anti-Castro Cuban terrorists and a “French gunman on the grassy knoll” (most likely Jean Rene Souètre)³ to plan, coordinate, execute, and cover up the assassination of President Kennedy. Hunt said that CIA operatives referred to the plot to shoot JFK in Dallas as the “Big Event.”

When CIA Assassination Director Bill Harvey died in June 1976 — shortly after instructing his CIA-officer wife to burn all of his papers — his Washington Post obituary described him as both “the most controversial clandestine operator in CIA history” and as “America’s James Bond.” When the HSCA asked CIA covert-operations official John M. “Jack” Whitten (alias “John Scelso”) in a classified 1978 deposition if he had “any idea what would be in those papers that Mr. Harvey would be so interested to conceal,” Jack Whitten replied sarcastically: “He was too young to have assassinated McKinley or Lincoln…” Ten years later, CIA officer F. Mark Wyatt claimed that an inebriated Bill Harvey told him on the morning of November 22nd, 1963 that he didn’t “want to sober up today; this is the day the goddamned president is gonna get himself killed!” Wyatt, who was Harvey’s Operation Gladio deputy in Italy, mentioned to journalist Fabrizio Calvi that he had always found it odd that Harvey traveled to Dallas for reasons he refused to explain shortly before President Kennedy was assassinated there. HSCA investigator Dan Hardway saw “ZR/RIFLE” Chief Harvey as a “prime suspect” in the assassination; the Kennedys demoted Harvey — characterized by Whitten as a “thug” and by Howard Hunt as a “brain-addled pistol-toting drunk” — in February 1963. According to Kennedy-family confidante Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Bobby Kennedy “found Harvey and his meaningless melodrama detestable” while Harvey “hated Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.” Dan Hardway told journalist Jeff Meek: “If there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and it did not involve Bill Harvey, I’d be surprised.” Hardway revealed to historian Anthony Summers that “the feeling of some of the CIA people we talked with was that Harvey was heavily involved with the organized crime figures. The feeling was that he was out of control and may have worked with organized crime figures to murder JFK.” 

But was Bill Harvey really an “out of control” rogue agent, or was he merely a ruthless patriot following outrageous orders? Back in August 1960, CIA Director Allen Dulles had commissioned Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, Tampa mob boss Santo Trafficante, and legendary Mafia “fixer” Johnny Rosselli to assassinate Fidel Castro. Giancana and Trafficante were both on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list at the time, but the CIA has always been attracted to the idea of delegating controversial and high-risk covert operations to unscrupulous subcontractors who could obscure the American government’s direct role in instigating world-historical violence. Bill Harvey was given command of the CIA-Mafia joint operation in November 1961 and Richard McGarrah “Dick” Helms joined the anti-Castro plotting when he became the CIA’s Director of Operations in February 1962. Dick Helms was an Allen Dulles protégé and David Atlee Phillips mentor with an under-the-radar style whose power within the Company exceeded that of his Kennedy-appointed boss, Republican industrialist John A. McCone. President Johnson promoted Helms to the top CIA job in June 1966. Helms worked with William J. Casey in the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA’s predecessor) during World War II and became Director Casey’s unofficial adviser during the Reagan years. In his apparent deathbed confession, Howard Hunt did not incriminate his two heroes — Dick Helms, whom Hunt “idolized” (according to David Phillips), and Allen Dulles, whose October 1963 book was ghostwritten by Hunt. Hunt believed Dulles’ “long career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images.” Although he had been fired from the CIA two years earlier, Dulles spent November 22nd, 1963 at the CIA’s Camp Peary site in Williamsburg, Virginia. According to Dan Hardway, “The Farm” in Williamsburg “was basically an alternative CIA headquarters, from which Dulles could direct ops.” Dulles had been hanging out in Texas with Bush-mentor Neil Mallon from October 25th to October 29th of 1963, and Dulles had a “power call” with Prescott Bush and Dick Helms on December 11th, 1963. 

Even as President Kennedy approved plots against Castro, JFK also spent the final months of his presidency/life working with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and State Department official William Attwood to “establish back-channel communications” between DC and Havana, quietly constructing the foundation for peaceful coexistence between capitalist America and socialist Cuba in case Castro continued to fend off American efforts to overthrow him. In 1966, a high-ranking member of the Kennedy Administration told the New York Times that a “shaken” JFK had expressed a post-Bay-of-Pigs desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” But Kennedy believed it would be impossible for him to simply abolish the CIA, so instead he attempted to “get it under control.” CIA Operations Chief Helms actively resisted Kennedy’s meddling and adamantly opposed any and all efforts to negotiate with the Castro government, unwilling to stop short of the annihilation of America’s Marxist-Leninist neighbor. Would Helms sign off on a proposal to assassinate the cocky politician his operatives saw as a traitor to the empire? Would Dulles give his approval to the liquidation of a reckless liberal who stripped him of his official power and publicly humiliated him after leaving his men to die at the hands of the Commies on a Cuban beach? Would Harvey, Phillips, Morales, and Hunt have taken such bold action without authorization from the leaders they worshipped?

Mob Ties

Maybe David Phillips and E. Howard Hunt were merely guilty-by-association, while Bill Harvey and David Morales were more concerned with the interests of their Mafia associates than the approval of their CIA supervisors? The Italian-American Mafia’s fingerprints are all over the Kennedy assassination. From October 1962 to June 1963, a Santo Trafficante henchman/anti-Communist activist named John V. Martino was enlisted by Giancana-agent Johnny Rosselli to participate in the CIA’s efforts to reverse the Cuban Revolution and reinstall an American puppet regime in Havana. Shortly before his death in August 1975, Martino told Newsday reporter John Cummings that “he’d been part of the assassination of Kennedy” and that “he had himself met Oswald several weeks before the assassination” (in the company of FBI Counterintelligence agent James J. O’Connor). Martino also told his business partner Fred Claasen that “the anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for.” Shortly before JFK was assassinated, Martino said to his wife: “Flo, they’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him when he gets to Texas.”

On June 19th, 1975 — the day before Congressional staffers were scheduled to escort mob boss Sam Giancana from Chicago to DC to testify about his relationship with the CIA — Giancana was shot by a silenced .22-caliber pistol once in the back of the neck and six times in the mouth. Not very subtle. The murder weapon was found on the side of the road a few miles away from Giancana’s home and traced to a gun shop in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami. Shortly before his death, Giancana warned Rosselli not to trust Santo Trafficante. In his 1992 book Double Cross, Giancana’s brother Chuck claimed that Sam once confessed to him that the Mafia and the CIA “took care of Kennedy together.” Giancana’s daughter Antoinette strongly suspects that the CIA was involved in the killing of her “loose-end” father. 

On June 24th, 1975, Johnny Rosselli told the Senate Intelligence Committee about his high-level involvement in the CIA’s early-‘60s attempts to assassinate Castro. In mid-1976, Rosselli was subpoenaed to testify about the Kennedy assassination and told Washington Post investigative reporter Jack Anderson that “Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald.” Rosselli and Ruby met up in Miami twice in October 1963. Rosselli even mentioned the infamous “grassy knoll” in his 1976 talks with Anderson. Four years earlier, President Nixon had ordered E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to “explore the matter” of assassinating Jack Anderson and making it look like an accident or a heart attack, but Nixon’s plot against the pesky journalist ultimately didn’t go forward. The Washington Post reported that Bill Harvey was deeply troubled by Anderson’s coverage of the Rosselli angle. CIA Director Helms tapped Anderson’s phone. Rosselli told the HSCA that he “was taking a great risk in testifying” because he was “worried about retaliation” and feared for “his safety and his life.” Rosselli “refused to identify any of the Cubans who were involved in the assassination plots” and was “reluctant to mention Santo Trafficante by name.” The Congressional investigators noticed that “Rosselli’s demeanor was visibly affected whenever testimony or interview focused or attempted to focus on Santo Trafficante.” In July 1976, “Handsome Johnny” Rosselli was drugged, strangled, shot, stabbed, castrated, “dismembered, stuffed into an oil drum, and tossed off the coast of Florida.” That wasn’t the end of the violent cover-up. A Giancana hitman named Charles Nicoletti had been “responsible for drawing up CIA-ordered plans for the assassination of Castro” from 1961 to 1963. In 1977, Nicoletti was summoned to tell the HSCA about his CIA work, but he never got the chance — he was shot in the head three times at point-blank range while sitting in his car. Historian Lamar Waldron noted in his 2008 book Legacy of Secrecy that several firsthand accounts placed Rosselli and Nicoletti in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. In addition to David Phillips and fascist “sharpshooter” Jean Souètre, Howard Hunt was probably in Dallas, too, although Hunt initially swore that he had been in Washington, DC on that day. Did Richard Helms know that his protégés were secretly nearby when the president’s motorcade was ambushed? The HSCA concluded in 1979 that “a particular organized crime leader or a small combination of leaders… might have formulated an assassination conspiracy” against President Kennedy, and that “the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in such an assassination plan were Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante.” The involvement of Trafficante and the CIA in the murders of Giancana, Rosselli, and Nicoletti has never been proven. 

A prominent anti-Castro Cuban exile named José Alemán Jr. told journalist George Crile III in 1976 that Santo Trafficante had promised him in September 1962 that President Kennedy was going to “get what was coming to him” and was “going to be hit” before he could be re-elected. But Trafficante (whose collaboration with the CIA did not end in 1963) kept his mouth shut when the HSCA interviewed him in 1978 and died of natural causes in 1987. In April 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) had arranged for Trafficante’s close friend Carlos Marcello — the Mafia boss in New Orleans and Dallas — to be arrested and illegally deported, but Marcello returned to the US two months later on a plane flown by his freaky personal pilot David Ferrie. The HSCA found that “the Kennedy administration brought about the strongest effort against organized crime that had ever been coordinated by the Federal Government.” Marcello’s criminal enterprise was so large and profitable that it literally “made more money than General Motors” in the early-‘60s. Although the Kennedy brothers signed off on the CIA’s plots to assassinate the leader of Cuba, Dick Helms did not tell them (or even CIA Director McCone) that the Mafia’s role in covert Cuban operations continued after May 1962, and the Kennedys did not intend to allow Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana to reopen their casinos in Cuba if the revolutionary government 90 miles south of Florida was destroyed. Marcello and Trafficante had both donated $500,000 to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1960. Shortly before Trafficante died in 1987, he reportedly told his lawyer Frank Ragano (who was also the lawyer of mobbed-up Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa): “Carlos [Marcello] fucked up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should have killed Bobby.” 

Bobby Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Walter Sheridan that he thought Carlos Marcello was a driving force behind the murder of his brother. According to Las Vegas businessman Edward N. Becker — an associate of Johnny Rosselli — Marcello drunkenly indicated in September 1962 “that he was going to have President Kennedy murdered in some way” and spoke of “using a ‘nut’ to do the job” and take the blame. But Marcello strongly denied Ed Becker’s allegations in a 1978 HSCA session and died of natural causes in 1993. However, when Marcello was incarcerated for bribery in a Texas prison in the ‘80s, he confessed to his cellmate (a snitch for the FBI) that he had personally met with Lee Harvey Oswald — the “nut” from New Orleans who allegedly “did the job” in Dallas. Oswald’s uncle/“substitute father” was a high-ranking member of Marcello’s illegal gambling operation in New Orleans, and Oswald was closely tied to David Ferrie, who gave flight training to Cuban CIA assets, agitated against Communism, recruited future CIA drug-trafficker Barry Seal as a teenager, and abused underage boys (with legal impunity) when he wasn’t flying Marcello around. David Ferrie died in suspicious circumstances in February 1967. Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby “idolized” Trafficante’s Havana casino manager Lewis McWillie and had social and financial ties to Marcello’s director and deputy director of Dallas operations, Joseph Civello and Joseph Campisi. Lamar Waldron discovered that in December 1985, Marcello made the following statement to his FBI-informant cellmate about the death of John F. Kennedy: “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself!”

David Morales, Imperial Boomerang

Carlos Marcello wasn’t the only alleged assassination-plotter who later bragged about killing Kennedy. There was also CIA black ops specialist David Morales, a friend and drinking buddy of Johnny Rosselli. Howard Hunt described Morales as an “amoral” “cold-blooded killer” — he was an ultra-reactionary monster who loved America and was very good at murdering its enemies. During his twenty years with the CIA, Morales helped run the “Phoenix Program” counterinsurgency in Vietnam which organized the torture and execution of tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians suspected of collaborating with the Communists; he helped the government of Uruguay deploy death squads to murder the members, supporters, and families of the radical Tupamaros National Liberation Movement; and he claimed to have been involved in the death of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende. Morales bragged that he once sabotaged the parachutes of local allies in Latin America whom he suspected of being Communists right before they jumped out of a plane — he said that he waved goodbye to the potential Reds as they plummeted to their deaths. He was known to rant and rave about cowardly President Kennedy’s responsibility for the deadly failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1973, Morales ended one of his tirades about JFK by drunkenly confessing to his Arizona lawyer Robert “Bob” Walton, Walton’s wife, and a childhood friend from Arizona named Ruben Carbajal that “we took care of that son of a bitch.” In 1975, Morales told American diplomat Wayne S. Smith that President “Kennedy got what was coming to him.” According to Bob Walton, Morales once boasted: “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard” — a reference to the June 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. RFK told his inner circle that his brother’s murderers would only be brought to justice if he became president; apparently Bobby planned to use his executive power to investigate the suspected assassination plotters in the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban-exile circles. When RFK announced his intention to challenge incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 on an anti-Vietnam-War platform, Jackie Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger that she expected her brother-in-law to meet the same violent fate as her husband. 

Was David Morales involved in proving Jackie right? He certainly had the LAPD connections and mob ties to pull it off. Los Angeles cops intimidated witnesses who presented evidence that convicted assassin Sirhan Bishara Sirhan did not act alone and destroyed the crime-scene evidence indicating that 12-14 shots had been fired at RFK; the pistol of the “lone gunman” only carried eight bullets. Sirhan was standing a few feet away from RFK and faced the front of the potential-president’s body; the bullet that killed Bobby Kennedy was fired into the back of his head at point-blank range. Lamar Waldron reported that Dave Morales had previously presented Bill Harvey with a scheme to have an assassin shoot Fidel Castro with a handgun at close-range in the kitchen pantry of a busy restaurant, a plot suspiciously similar to the ambush in a mob-owned hotel’s crowded kitchen pantry that prevented Bobby Kennedy from becoming president instead of Richard Nixon in 1968. 

Sirhan Sirhan was a deeply-indebted racetrack gambler and hypnosis–enthusiast who had been under covert federal surveillance for at least six months by the time he shot at Bobby Kennedy; the CIA and Army Intelligence files on Sirhan have never been released.⁴ Grant B. Cooper — the crooked defense attorney who instructed Sirhan to plead guilty and explain his role in the assassination as a reaction to RFK’s support for Israel — was a member of Johnny Rosselli’s legal team. The close collaboration between Rosselli and Dave Morales on anti-Castro action had blossomed into a genuine friendship between the Mafia bigshot and the CIA hitman. When President Johnson heard that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, LBJ jotted down: “[La] Cosa Nostra,” “Send in to get Castro planning,” and “Ed Morgan,” the name of another Rosselli lawyer.⁵ 

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton both stored gruesome photographs from RFK’s autopsy in their personal safes. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy described Director Hoover as a “dangerous” and “frightening” “psycho,” while FBI COINTELPRO official William Sullivan said that his boss hated RFK more than anyone else in American politics, including Martin Luther King Jr. Angleton’s CIA colleagues told Shane O’Sullivan that they were shocked to find the autopsy pictures and did not know “why it was appropriate for CIA staff files to contain them.” Was historian David Talbot correct to speculate that Hoover and Angleton kept the gory photos of Bobby Kennedy’s corpse as a war trophy?

Assuming the CIA’s top assassin wasn’t lying when he claimed to be involved in both Kennedy assassinations, it’s hard to believe that David Morales was a “rogue agent” who defied the CIA’s chain of command and took “executive action” without orders to do so. Morales’ daughter remembered that he “did whatever he was told… He did everything for the Company. His family wasn’t his life — the Company was his life.” She described her father as the CIA’s “peon,” getting his hands dirty for the benefit of his public-facing bosses. CIA anti-labor-union specialist Edwin P. Wilson called Morales “the best operator the Agency ever had.” CIA assassination unit officer Thomas G. Clines recalled: “If the US government as a matter of policy needed someone or something neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people.” In spite of that loyalty, Morales admitted to Bob Walton that he believed “his own people” might try to kill him because he “knew too much.” Wayne Smith told HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi that “Dave had a reputation for being indiscreet when he had a few drinks in him,” and the State Department official told researcher Noel Twyman that “the CIA was getting very worried about Morales when he’d get to drinking; he would get a very loose tongue.” Morales died suddenly at the age of 52 in May 1978, a few days after a trip to DC and a few weeks before he was set to give testimony to the HSCA. The night before his heart stopped working, Morales told Ruben Carbajal: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Ever since I left Washington I haven’t been feeling very comfortable.” The CIA had a vast stockpile of nearly-undetectable poisons designed to mimic the effects of a fatal heart attack. Like Dave Morales, Bill Harvey died of a heart attack in the post-Watergate ‘70s while Congress was investigating the CIA’s early-‘60s assassination programs, although Harvey, like Morales, didn’t do his heart any favors with his drinking and eating habits. Carbajal attempted to visit Morales at a hospital in Tucson, but “they wouldn’t let no one in, they had his room surrounded by sheriff’s deputies.” Morales’ wife JoAnn did not give permission for an autopsy to determine the terrifying hitman’s cause of death, and she refused to discuss the circumstances of his death with her brother-in-law Albert Morales. Carbajal believed that the CIA poisoned David Morales and forced/bribed JoAnn Kerrigan Morales to decline an autopsy and keep her mouth shut. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

In the aftermath of his brother’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy sunk into despair, “frantic that his own actions as attorney general against Cuba or the Mob might inadvertently have led to his brother’s murder.” Immediately after the assassination, RFK called an unidentified CIA official and asked: “Did your [agency] have anything to do with this horror?” Later that day, RFK “confronted CIA Director John McCone, asking him point-blank whether the agency had killed” the president. RFK came to believe that “the government’s clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother.” He told an anti-Castro Cuban exile named Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams that “one of your guys did it.” In an unpublished manuscript uncovered after David Phillips’ death in 1988, the CIA’s Chief of Cuban Operations admitted that JFK was killed using “precisely the plan we had devised against Castro” at Varadero Beach (with help from Mafia hitman Charles Nicoletti). Lamar Waldron persuasively suggests that David Morales and Johnny Rosselli coordinated the murder of RFK five years later using a different plan they had devised against Castro. It appears Malcolm X was even more correct than he realized when he described the first Kennedy assassination as “the chickens coming home to roost.” The same reactionary violence that the Kennedy brothers authorized in Cuba would end their lives in Dallas and Los Angeles.

The concept of “chickens coming home to roost” brings to mind Négritude theorist Aimé Césaire’s definition of fascism as the application of colonialist procedures in Europe which had previously been applied to non-European peoples in countries like Vietnam, Madagascar, Algeria, and India. Césaire agreed that Nazism was “the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms,” but he emphasized a truth Westerners “hide from themselves”: that before the rest of Europe became fascism’s “victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism [abroad] before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it… that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.” Several American intelligence officers who helped overthrow the president of Guatemala and attempted to overthrow the leader of Cuba were involved in the successful plots to kill the President of the United States and his presidential-candidate brother; the CIA’s barbarism in Latin America “boomeranged” back into the heart of the empire. Césaire added: “at the present time (1955), the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed — far surpassed, it is true — by the barbarism of the United States.” The contradiction between JFK’s sincere liberal ideals and his responsibilities as the leader of the barbaric American Empire was resolved in Dealey Plaza.

Schemers and Killers

Documents released in 2017 revealed that Soviet intelligence officials were even less impressed by the Warren Commission than the HSCA was. The USSR’s spies and analysts believed that “there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the [American] ‘ultra-right’ to effect a coup,” and the KGB also had evidence “purporting to indicate” that Vice President Lyndon Johnson himself was complicit in this internal coup d’état. German-American Soviet intelligence asset Joachim Joesten concluded that the killing “was a military-type operation with firing from both front and rear” which involved CIA-backed “Cuban assassins,” received a “mandate” from closeted ultra-right US Army General Edwin Walker and “reactionary oil billionaires such as H. L. Hunt,” and got the “go-ahead signal” from Vice President Johnson, H. L. Hunt’s ally. 

Why would oil executives and Pentagon officials want to kill their own president? In January 1963, JFK announced plans to close a massive tax loophole called the “oil depletion allowance”; when LBJ took office, he shelved the Kennedy tax reform that had infuriated his Texas oil buddies. As for the oil barons’ ideological allies/business partners in the Pentagon, tensions over JFK’s sympathies for left-wing nationalists in countries like Egypt, Yemen, and Indonesia reached a boiling point in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy’s top generals were so eager for “US military intervention in Cuba” that they drafted a March 1962 plan called “Operation Northwoods” to “blow up a US ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba,” “causing a helpful wave of national indignation;” to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington” by “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots;” to orchestrate “hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft;”  and/or to “create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.” In 1963, US military leaders proposed a plan to produce a “Cuban” false-flag attack on either Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago — members of both the US-led Organization of American States and the British Commonwealth — providing the US and the United Kingdom with justification to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. The Pentagon even suggested a plan to “bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo,” instigating an assault on an American military base and sacrificing the lives of American citizens for the sake of the long-term dominance of the American Empire over its spheres of influence. Much to their dismay, President Kennedy rejected all of his military commanders’ proposals to violently and covertly manufacture a pretext to “commence large-scale US military operations” in Cuba, a pseudo-retaliatory attack they hoped would include nuclear strikes. 

Operation Northwoods was probably inspired by Italian fascist/military intelligence operative Guido Giannettini, who conducted a three-day seminar on “false flag terrorism” for Pentagon and CIA officials a few months before the anti-Castro conspiracy was proposed. Operation Northwoods was presented to JFK by his highest-ranking military official, General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had previously sickened Kennedy by proposing a preemptive mass-scale nuclear surprise attack on the Soviet Union and China which would kill hundreds of millions of people (JFK’s reaction: “And we call ourselves the human race”). Lemnitzer started his career as an occupying soldier in the Philippines and later helped Allen Dulles shield Nazi commanders from postwar prosecution. Kennedy fired Lemnitzer as his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September 1962, but the general landed on his feet; Nazi-collaborating West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer arranged for Lemnitzer to become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 1963. 

Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, another proponent of nuclear war between the US and USSR, described the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis as “the greatest defeat in our history” and compared Kennedy’s “cowardly” openness to coexistence with Castro’s Cuba to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen called General LeMay his “least favorite human being.” Gen. LeMay was “close friends” with a well-connected mobster from Chicago named Charles Baron who was Meyer Lansky’s casino manager in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In 1968, Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay ran for Vice President on the third-party ticket of Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace, but LeMay’s vocal support for the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War turned him into an electoral liability for Wallace. One of LeMay’s Air Force subordinates, the “unstable” and “sadistic” General Thomas Power, once said: “Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!” 

Like Allen Dulles, assassination-suspect Edwin Walker (a Dallas resident)⁶ had been dishonorably discharged by President Kennedy. General Walker loathed the “Kennedy dynasty and dictatorship” and publicly “challenged” JFK to “liquidate that scourge that has descended upon the island of Cuba.” In May 1963, Gen. Walker told a crowd in New Orleans: “It’s harder every day to tell the difference between Kennedyism and Communism.” 

When Marina Oswald was questioned about her husband Lee, her Russian-to-English translator was selected for her by right-wing military intelligence official/Dallas oilman Jack A. Crichton. The translator was Ilya Mamantov, an anti-Communist activist and a Dallas oil company agent. Investigative journalist Russ Baker described Mamantov’s translations of Marina Oswald’s statements as “embellished” and “far from literal,” while Peter Dale Scott described the translations put forward by Colonel Crichton’s hand-picked interpreter as outright “falsified.” 

In discussions of possible US military involvement in the JFK assassination, fingers have also been pointed at ultra-right Major-General Charles A. Willoughby, who was a close friend of Allen Dulles and an ally of H. L. Hunt and his fellow Dallas oilman Clint Murchison Sr. in the Christian jihad against the atheistic Communists and secular “doves.” General Douglas MacArthur affectionately referred to Charles Willoughby — a noble-born German and an active supporter of far-right Spanish dictator Francisco Franco — as “my little fascist.” In his groundbreaking 2021 book Coup in Dallas, investigative journalist HP “Hank” Albarelli Jr. presented compelling evidence that Charles Willoughby was the director of a “kill squad” composed of ultra-reactionary US Army veterans, including rumored CIA-hitman Col. Joseph Young “Jack” Canon, self-proclaimed “psychopathic killer” Col. Charles “Boots” Askins Jr., and anti-Communist propagandist/contract assassin Robert Emmett Johnson. Albarelli discovered a 1963 datebook written by a shadowy French CIA asset in Louisiana named Pierre Lafitte which suggests that Charles Willoughby’s “Z Unit” operatives — Jack Canon, Boots Askins, and Emmett Johnson — were in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 and participated in the assassination of JFK, an operation that was apparently code-named “The Lancelot Project” at the highest levels of the CIA and US military. Pierre Lafitte also mentioned Willoughby’s henchman Emmett Johnson in the context of an oil industry lawyer named Herbert Itkin, who was a Mafia informant for the FBI and an intelligence asset of Allen Dulles and Bill Harvey. Lafitte indicated that Willoughby was in communication with his Nazi buddy Otto Skorzeny — the employer of French assassin Jean Souètre — in October 1963. Otto Skorzeny had decades-long ties to ousted CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Operations Director Dick Helms, CIA Coup Director Frank Wisner, and CIA Assassination Director Bill Harvey; CIA officer E. Howard Hunt implied that Skorzeny’s paramilitary trainer Jean Souètre was the shooter on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. Skorzeny collaborated on an oil venture with Jack A. Crichton only four years after the Nazi war criminal escaped from a detention camp and fled to Francoist Spain. In an April 1963 datebook entry, Lafitte mentions Jean Souètre and General Edwin Walker in the context of “New Orleans” and “arms.” Charles Willoughby and Edwin Walker were both in the “military high command” of a group called the “Council for Statehood/Congress of Freedom,” which the FBI described as a far-right organization determined “to eliminate — by force, if necessary — all Jewish people in government.” The Miami Police Department discovered that Willoughby and Walker’s “Congress of Freedom” organized a meeting in April 1963 (the month Souètre apparently met with Gen. Walker in New Orleans in regard to weapons) to discuss the assassination of numerous political leaders, including President Kennedy.  

When Charles Willoughby retired from the military, he went to work for the Hunt Oil Company as a corporate agent in Salazar-era Portugal’s colonies in Africa. H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison Sr. teamed up to recruit Willoughby’s boss/idol Douglas MacArthur to run for president back in 1952. H. L. Hunt told an attorney about his idea to develop private “kill squads” to conduct assassinations for him. Jack A. Crichton became a director of the H. L. Hunt Foundation in July 1963 and met with the foundation’s namesake on November 23rd, 1963. Oswald-killer Jack Ruby gave one of his nightclub employees a ride to H. L. Hunt’s office on the day of the JFK assassination. The Murchisons, H. L. Hunt, and his sons William Herbert, Nelson Bunker, and Lamar Hunt actually had a friend in common with Jack Ruby: Dallas media mogul/Yale graduate Gordon McLendon, a Democratic frenemy of George H. W. Bush and a collaborator with fellow-Texan David Atlee Phillips on a CIA public relations project. Gordon McLendon spent November 24th, 1963 with Clint Murchison Jr. and Bedford Wynne, the co-founders and original owners of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Lamar Hunt came up with the idea for the National Football League’s “Super Bowl” and founded the Kansas City Chiefs football team, which is still owned by the descendants of H. L. Hunt. Bedford Wynne — the mobbed-up co-founder of “Six Flags Theme Parks” — provided Marina Oswald with the Dallas lawyers who crafted her statements, and Clint Murchison Jr. had financial ties to both Carlos Marcello and Lyndon Johnson. Hunts, Murchisons, and Wynnes enjoyed gambling at the “Top O’ Hill Terrace” between Dallas and Fort Worth run by Lewis McWillie, a “close friend” of Jack Ruby and an employee of Santo Trafficante. The Soviet conclusion that LBJ green-lit the assassination that made him president (and ended the threatening investigation into his criminal aide Bobby “Little Lyndon” Baker) was corroborated by E. Howard Hunt; in a hand-written memo and tape recording that he gave to his son, Howard Hunt claimed that “CIA peon” David Morales directly confirmed that Vice President Johnson had approved the Dallas murder plot.

When Richard Nixon chose lazy and stupid Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his Vice President in 1968, “Tricky Dick” explained the “surprising” selection to his staffers as “assassination insurance.” In the aftermath of the Watergate break-in, President Nixon told his Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman that the revelation of Howard Hunt’s role in Watergate “will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things… This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”⁷  A week after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon instructed Bob Haldeman to warn CIA Director Richard Helms that the FBI’s investigation into Watergate could “open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate — for the CIA, for the country, and for American foreign policy.” When Haldeman conveyed the president’s coded threat to use his “Bay of Pigs” “trump card” to drag the CIA down with him if they refused to sabotage the Watergate investigation, the soft-spoken, courteous, “aloof,” “dapper” “gentleman” Dick Helms “absolutely shocked” Nixon’s Chief of Staff by exploding into a blind rage. A couple years after resigning, Nixon explained his “cryptic remarks” about the “whole Bay of Pigs thing” as a reference to an unnamed CIA operative’s attempt to disclose classified information about the Company’s anti-Castro covert operations, but in Haldeman’s 1978 memoir, Nixon’s right-hand man claimed that “in all of those references to the Bay of Pigs, Nixon was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.” 

The Political Education of George H. W. Bush

In The Liberal Hour, historians G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot reported that Texas Republican George H. W. Bush called on President Kennedy to “muster the courage” to atone for his role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco by authorizing a full-scale American attack on Cuba. George Bush Sr. was actually in Dallas on the day President Kennedy’s skull was blasted open, although Bush would later make the remarkable claim that he was one of the 5% of American adults born before 1955 who were unable to recall exactly where they were when JFK was assassinated. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo indicating that information on anti-Castro Cuban activities in the aftermath of the assassination had been “orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” on November 23rd, 1963, but H. W. unequivocally denied working for the CIA prior to becoming its leader in January 1976. That was almost certainly a lie.

Bush did privately acknowledge his decades-long relationship with spooky Swedish-Russian aristocrat George de Mohrenschildt — the Nazi spy, Dallas oilman, H. Neil Mallon associate, and CIA asset who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s “closest friend” in the final year of Oswald’s short and confusing life. de Mohrenschildt’s Deep State links are dizzying. He “provided valuable foreign intelligence” to Richard Helms. He played a peripheral role in the CIA’s anti-Castro operations in early-1963. His personal attorney was a CIA operative/military intelligence officer named Charles R. Norberg who was friendly with Allen Dulles and familiar to Bush. Charles Norberg knew Otto Skorzeny and Pierre Lafitte from his time in the military, helped run the Truman Administration’s sinister “Psychological Strategy Board,” then pioneered the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program. de Mohrenschildt was connected to anti-Kennedy mob boss Carlos Marcello through his business ties with Louisiana gangster Herman Beebe. de Mohrenschildt and Jack Ruby had the same prominent right-wing Dallas landlord — Leo F. Corrigan Jr. Leo Corrigan owned The Stoneleigh Hotel, which was where Pierre Lafitte and the Skorzenys always stayed when they were in Dallas. Corrigan’s son-in-law/property manager Ed Jordan was Lamar Hunt’s Dallas Cowboys board-member, and Corrigan Properties was located in the same office building as the Hunt Oil Company. On the day of the JFK assassination, Jack Ruby met with Ed Jordan and requested a meeting with Leo Corrigan Jr. Corrigan was the business partner of Robert G. Storey Jr., an associate of Bill Harvey and Pierre Lafitte who was in contact with those anti-Kennedy plotters the week of the assassination. R. G. Storey was an oil industry lawyer/military colonel who participated in Neil Mallon’s anti-Communist “Dallas World Affairs Council,” worked for Allen Dulles’ Warren Commission, and sat in on the government interrogation of his friend Corrigan’s commercial-tenant Jack Ruby. Fifty years later, George Bush Jr. was the guest of honor at a philanthropic luncheon hosted by Leo Corrigan III.

In addition to Neil Mallon, George de Mohrenschildt and H. W. Bush were connected through Jack Alston Crichton. Crichton — born on a cotton plantation in Louisiana — was the Army Intelligence official/segregationist politician who collaborated with de Mohrenschildt on pre-revolutionary Cuban oil ventures, fruitlessly lobbied the Kennedy Administration to back the North Yemeni monarchists, provided Marina Oswald with her “incompetent” translator, and unsuccessfully joined forces with George Bush Sr. against the Texas Democrats in the 1964 elections. Jack Crichton later revealed that approximately half of the members of the Dallas-based Army Intelligence unit he commanded were also members of the Dallas Police Department. One such dual-carder was Pat Gannaway, the Dallas Police Captain who helped plan the logistics of Kennedy’s presidential motorcade and was the first person to publicly identify Oswald as JFK’s assassin. In October 1963, Capt. Gannaway told a local reporter that organized crime did not exist in Dallas, a lie so blatant that it sets off alarm bells, especially in light of local Marcello capo Joe Civello’s friendly relations with the Dallas Police Department. Another member of the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment was Crichton’s close friend George L. “Lonnie” Lumpkin, the Dallas Deputy Police Chief who drove the pilot car in JFK’s final motorcade. Right before the ambush, Deputy Chief Lumpkin made an unscheduled stop to talk to three police officers standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository, but none of the cops mentioned this conversation in their post-assassination reports. 

Besides George Bush Sr., Crichton and de Mohrenschildt were also connected through Col. Frank “Brandy” Brandstetter, who was another member of Crichton’s military intelligence unit in Dallas, a friend of David Atlee Phillips and Gordon McLendon, and a business associate of Santo Trafficante in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Colonel Brandstetter met with Pierre Lafitte in Dallas two days before JFK was killed. The fascist Frenchman was also in frequent communication with Jack Crichton in the weeks leading up to the assassination. When Crichton and Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny went into business in 1952, another member of their Madrid-Dallas deal was an oilman named Joe Zeppa. Zeppa was with George H. W. Bush in East Texas when President Kennedy was shot, and the Nazi-collaborating Texan capitalist flew the Bushes back to Dallas after the JFK hit succeeded. Crichton and de Mohrenschildt both knew Ilya Mamantov, Marina Oswald’s suspicious translator, although Mamantov ruined his relationship with de Mohrenschildt by falsely accusing his fellow right-wing Russian exile of being an undercover Communist. When George H. W. Bush unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 1970, his campaign chairman in the suburbs north of Dallas was Ilya Mamantov. Yet another point of overlap for Crichton and de Mohrenschildt was Colonel D. Harold Byrd, a right-wing Texas oilman who was a friend of Clint Murchison Sr. and CIA Deputy Director Charles P. Cabell (brother of Dallas Mayor/CIA asset Earle Cabell; fired from the CIA by JFK alongside his mentor Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs invasion). D. Harold Byrd was a member of Neil Mallon’s “Texas Crusade for Freedom” and Mallon was a member of Byrd’s corporate board. Byrd owned the iconic Texas School Book Depository and George de Mohrenschildt helped Lee Harvey Oswald get his job in that building overlooking Dealey Plaza on October 14th, 1963. 

In 1976, both Jack A. Crichton and George de Mohrenschildt reached out to CIA Director Bush for favors. Crichton asked Bush if he could find some time to play tennis with him, and H. W. offered to set up a doubles match at the Ford White House tennis court, but de Mohrenschildt’s request was considerably less wholesome and Bush’s response to the former Nazi agent was considerably less helpful. de Mohrenschildt wrote Director Bush a distressed letter complaining that he had been placed under constant surveillance after he “tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald,” which “must have angered a lot of people.” de Mohrenschildt pleaded with Bush to “do something to remove this net around” him and his wife, confessing: “we are driven to insanity by the situation.” But H. W. assured the anti-Communist spy that he had found no “indication of interest in your activities on the part of federal authorities in recent years.” de Mohrenschildt’s wife described him as “a man who didn’t know how to shut up.” On March 29th, 1977 — the same day Chicago mobster/CIA asset Charles Nicoletti was shot to death — George de Mohrenschildt:

• started an interview with well–connected Reader’s Digest reporter Edward Jay Epstein;
• told Epstein that he had befriended Oswald at the request of a CIA official in Dallas named J. Walton Moore;
• received notice that the House Select Committee on Assassinations wanted him to testify about his activities in the early-‘60s; and 
• “apparently” killed himself while Epstein waited for him to return from his lunch break to continue talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. 

Instead of asking de Mohrenschildt what he was doing when he befriended Lee Harvey Oswald, perhaps the HSCA investigators should have asked the “suicidal” White-Russian nobleman how he was doing. CIA Dallas Field Office Chief James Walton Moore “neither confirmed nor denied” his six-year-long relationship with de Mohrenschildt, but Moore strongly denied that he had encouraged the Russian oilman he may or may not have known to pursue a friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald from 1961-1963. Jim Moore and George de Mohrenschildt were connected through the CIA official’s handball partner/intelligence asset, a Russian-American military colonel/Texas oilman named Lawrence Orlov. In an entry dated October 27th, 1963, CIA agent Pierre Lafitte mentioned Jim Moore’s friend Orlov in the context of de Mohrenschildt’s CIA-aligned business partner Herbert Itkin and CIA Assassination Director Bill Harvey (who was in Dallas for suspicious reasons around that time, according to his deputy in Rome). Edward Jay Epstein, the last person to meet with de Mohrenschildt before he was “killed by a shotgun blast” to the head, endorsed the story put forward by CIA Director of Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton that Oswald was actually a loyal Communist who killed Kennedy as revenge for America’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, a counter-narrative designed to provoke a “retaliatory” attack on Cuba (much like Operation Northwoods). Angleton had an “extensive file” on Herbert Itkin, Itkin’s CIA handler in 1963 was an Angleton aide/CIA-Mafia liaison named Mario Brod, and an Angleton staffer told journalist Dick Russell that his boss placed de Mohrenschildt under CIA surveillance in the early-‘70s.

Anti-Castro terrorist sponsor/Connecticut Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce made arrangements for newly-appointed CIA Director Bush to meet with “disgraced CIA spymaster” James Jesus Angleton in 1976 to help H. W. “get up on things.” Jim Angleton was Allen Dulles’ closest friend in the CIA, and Clare Boothe Luce was the person who first introduced Henry Kissinger to Richard Nixon. In Coup in Dallas, Hank Albarelli uncovers new evidence that appears to demonstrate that Angleton’s “reckless and irresponsible” right-hand man Tracy Barnes — the project manager of the Guatemalan coup and the Bay of Pigs invasion — was directly involved in a successful operation to set Lee Harvey Oswald up as a “patsy” for the JFK assassination. Tracy Barnes was E. Howard Hunt’s boss in the CIA’s mysterious “Domestic Operations Division.” A CIA officer named Robert D. Morrow claimed that Tracy Barnes ordered him to purchase several Mannlicher-Carcano rifles and walkie-talkies and then deliver the equipment to David Ferrie in August 1963. According to Morrow, Barnes initially told him that the guns would be used by the CIA to overthrow liberal Dominican President Juan Bosch, but Barnes later implied that the weapons could be used in operations against “anybody, right up to the President” of the United States. On October 25th, 1963, Pierre Lafitte wrote a datebook entry reminding himself to call Jim Angleton and Gen. Edwin Walker now that Otto Skorzeny had confirmed for him that “Oswald was set in place.” Lafitte noted that he met with Tracy Barnes, Ilse Skorzeny, and “Hitler’s banker” Hjalmar Shacht at Leo Corrigan’s Stoneleigh Hotel on November 7th, 1963. Tracy Barnes called Allen Dulles on November 14th, 1963, the same day Pierre Lafitte indicated that Barnes met with Jack A. Crichton, and then Barnes called Dulles again on November 18th. On the day of the assassination, Pierre Lafitte reacted to the fatal shooting of Dallas police officer JD Tippit 45 minutes after the Kennedy shooting with the following note-to-self: “ask J. A. [Jim Angleton] who is Tippit.” Jack Crichton later offered Tippit’s sons full scholarships to Texas A&M University, but neither of them took him up on it. Like Prescott, H. W., and George W. Bush, Jim Angleton and Tracy Barnes were members of a prestigious secret society at Yale University. Angleton’s father Hugh was a Mussolini-sympathizing lieutenant colonel in the US Army who maintained friendly relations with the Italian fascist regime. Congresswoman Luce, who told Jim Angleton that she saw him as a “living legend,” had an affair with fascist assassination-suspect General Willoughby. She was also a close associate of assassination-suspect David Atlee Phillips. Her husband was Henry Luce, a Yale Skull and Bones member, pro-Mussolini propagandist, close friend of Allen Dulles, originator of the concept of the “American Century,” and founder/Editor-in-Chief of Time magazine. Edward Jay Epstein’s interrupted meeting with de Mohrenschildt in 1977 was commissioned by Reader’s Digest editor Charles Foulton “Tony” Oursler II, a right-wing religious nut who promoted Angleton’s anti-Communist conspiracy theories about Oswald. Like Reagan-era CIA Director Bill Casey, Jim Angleton and Clare Boothe Luce were both members of the “Sovereign Military Order of Malta,” a sinister and secretive Catholic lay organization. When the HSCA asked CIA official Jack Whitten in 1978 if he had “any reason to believe that Angleton might have had ties to organized crime,” potentially leading Angleton to shift the Warren Commission’s focus away from Giancana, Marcello, and Trafficante, Whitten confirmed that Angleton had “ties to the Mafia” and “would not want to double cross” his mob associates. Pierre Lafitte’s datebook suggests that Angleton’s sidekick Tracy Barnes met with Santo Trafficante and Bill Harvey in New Orleans in August 1963. Shortly before Angleton’s death in 1987, “The Spider” told investigative reporter Joseph Trento: 

the CIA… played with lives as if we owned them… Fundamentally, the founding fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you were to be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it… Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, [CIA Operation Paperclip Director] Carmel Offie, and [CIA Coup Director] Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.

While putting together her 1994 memoir, former First Lady Barbara Bush apparently dug up a perplexing letter she had written on the day Kennedy was shot which remarked on the “rumors flying” around Texas and expressed her Angletonian hope that the “horrid assassin” was “not some far-right nut, but a ‘commie’ nut.” Rumors have flown around about George Bush Senior’s involvement in both the Bay of Pigs invasion and “Operation 40,” a CIA-supervised “secret army” of far-right Cuban assassins and drug-traffickers set up by Allen Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon to overthrow Castro’s left-wing nationalist government in 1960 (Castro didn’t embrace Marxism-Leninism until December 1961). Alleged Kennedy assassination participants Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, David Sánchez Morales, and Frank Fiorini Sturgis were all involved in Operation 40. A CIA officer associated with Operation 40 named Donald P. Gregg later became H. W.’s National Security Advisor and Iran-Contra middleman. Cuban Operation 40 agent/Bay of Pigs participant Félix Rodríguez was accused of funneling $10 million in cocaine profits to the Nicaraguan Contras for Vice President Bush. The CIA’s 1962-1965 Miami Station Chief, Ted “Blond Ghost” Shackley (described in his obituary as “cold and weird”), helped Bush and Reagan sabotage President Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran. Shackley later served as one of Bush’s Iran-Contra liaisons. Shackley, Dave Morales, Bill Harvey, Jim Angleton, and Dick Helms were all involved in covert anti-Communist operations in postwar Germany. In his 1972 book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, investigative journalist Alfred W. McCoy reported that Ted Shackley and Dave Morales negotiated a deal with Santo Trafficante in 1968 to help the CIA’s allies in Laos smuggle heroin into the United States. Don Gregg and Félix Rodríguez helped coordinate the transportation of Golden Triangle heroin on CIA-owned “Air America” helicopters. Shackley was also the CIA’s Phoenix Program Director, making him directly responsible for the extrajudicial executions of more than 20,000 Vietnamese people. Before he became a Phoenix Program “adviser,” Félix Rodríguez worked with the Bolivian military dictatorship, Dave Morales, and Nazi child-murderer Klaus Barbie to capture and kill Che Guevara. Rodríguez stole the watch off the wrist of Che’s corpse and wore it for the rest of his life. While running the infamous “JM/WAVE” station in Miami — second in size only to the CIA’s Langley headquarters — Ted Shackley personally assisted his “mentor and friend” Bill Harvey in transferring high-powered rifles equipped with scopes to Johnny Rosselli and the Cuban terrorists to be used against Castro… or maybe JFK. This is the milieu that produced George H. W. Bush. 

He’d Do Anything for the Cause 

A CIA spokesman was neither able to “confirm nor deny” that George Bush Sr. — an intelligent and ambitious Yale graduate who bridged the gap between Northeastern finance capital and Texas oil wealth — “did any work with or for the CIA” in the early-‘60s. In a Washington Post obituary entitled “Bush Practiced A CIA Omertà That May Have Died With Him,” investigative reporter Tim Weiner wrote that Bush Sr. was “the last president who truly believed in the CIA’s Cold War code: Admit nothing, deny everything.” So here’s what we know for sure about this secretive and dishonest right-wing millionaire’s rise to power: George Herbert Walker Bush served as the Midland County chairman of the Eisenhower-Nixon presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956, became the chairman of the Houston Republican Party in February 1963, got elected to Congress for the first time in 1966, became President Nixon’s Ambassador to the UN in 1971, took over as the chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973, then became President Gerald Ford’s de facto US Ambassador to China in 1974 and his CIA Director in 1976. 

When notoriously-paranoid Richard Nixon decided in November 1972 to fire/demote the potential traitors in his administration (including Richard Helms), Nixon ordered his aides to “eliminate the politicians. Except George Bush. He’d do anything for the cause.” Nixon was right. In September 1976, CIA Director George Bush allowed the Pinochet regime to work with anti-Castro Cuban exiles and Italian fascist/Operation Gladio agent Stefano Delle Chiaie to carry out a car bombing that killed a Chilean leftist and his young American colleague in the heart of Washington, DC’s Embassy Row. Screenwriter Oliver Stone based the car bombing mission assigned to fictional Cuban drug-trafficker Tony Montana in the 1983 movie Scarface on the 1976 Chilean-Cuban terror plot in DC. Bush’s CIA lied to reporters and hid evidence from the FBI to protect their Chilean allies from facing consequences and to cover up the CIA’s complicity in the terrorist attack on American soil. Three weeks later, Cuban CIA assets Luis Posada-Carriles and Orlando Bosch arranged for two bombs to be planted on Cubana Flight 455. The explosions and subsequent crash killed all 73 people on the Cuban jetliner. Bush’s CIA had “concrete advance intelligence” about the terror plot against civilian targets on the commercial flight — possibly from Posada-Carriles himself — and decided to let it happen. In the ‘80s, Posada-Carriles would work with Félix Rodríguez to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras. 

Like Posada-Carriles, a CIA asset named Roger Edwin Moore was involved in the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist camps and worked with Félix Rodríguez to supply the Nicaraguan Contras. In the ‘90s, Roger E. Moore (who had several aliases) befriended a racist US Army veteran named Timothy McVeigh and funded his construction of an enormous explosive device. In early-April 1995, Moore wrote McVeigh a letter (with instructions to burn after reading) which included the following line: “Plan is to bring the country down, and have a few more things happen, then offer the 90% a solution.” A government informant named Carol Howe warned her handlers that a German associate of McVeigh in Oklahoma named Andreas Karl Strassmeir “talked frequently about blowing up federal buildings with bombs,” but the federal government did not take action to prevent the brewing terror plot. Strassmeir claimed that his move to the US was sponsored by “a former CIA guy”/military colonel named Vincent Petruskie who “was stationed in Berlin during the Cold War.” An attorney for the CIA admitted that Strassmeir “had an undefined relationship with the agency.” The truck bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19th, 1995 killed 168 people, including 19 children and three pregnant women. A CIA pilot/Contra supplier named Dave Hollaway helped Andy Strassmeir escape the US after the OKC bombing “out of fear that the government might jail” the terrorist son of a German Transportation Minister/grandson of a co-founder of the German Nazi Party. Did federal officials enable or even instigate the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history?

If so, the Oklahoma City bombing wasn’t the first time the American security apparatuses knowingly allowed terrorists to conduct a successful attack on American civilians. The CIA-sanctioned assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in 1976 — part of the CIA’s “Operation Condor” program to optimize and amplify the political violence meted out by right-wing dictatorships in Latin America — is remembered as “the first state-sponsored international terrorist attack on US soil.” The shocking bloodshed that Director Bush green-lit instead of preventing was also “the most significant terror attack in Washington until 9/11.” 

Cells Interlinked Within Cells Interlinked 

The Bushes’ post-WWII pivot from New England to Texas to take advantage of the Lone Star State’s massive oil boom led the family to build extremely strong and deep ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was constructing financial, logistical, social, and political links between Jeddah and Houston, a city perceived by elite Saudis as “the Mecca of capitalism.” During his tenure in the Reagan Administration (1981-1989), George H. W. Bush was mockingly nicknamed the “Saudi Vice President” — the Saudis were a match made in heaven for the anti-Communist oilman, dealmaker, and covert-operations mastermind. He formed an affectionate friendship with new Saudi King Fahd, worked well with elegant Safari Club member and BCCI shareholder Prince Turki bin Faisal, and became so close to Turki’s charming first-cousin/brother-in-law Prince Bandar bin Sultan that the Bushes considered the Saudi Ambassador “almost family” and called him “Bandar Bush.” Their bond reached new heights when Bush Sr. succeeded Reagan in 1989; long-time CIA official Bruce Riedel remembered that the British-educated son of an enslaved 16-year-old girl with dark skin and the Royal Governor of Riyadh “was in the Bush White House every other day and in some periods every day. It was a very, very close relationship, and I think the President and Bandar genuinely liked each other.” After Bush Sr. lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton in November 1992, Bandar consoled his “friend for life” through letters, phone calls, and trips on his royal Dallas-Cowboys-themed jet to Kennebunkport, Houston, and Aspen. “Poppy” Bush was also recovering from the loss of his mother, his dog, his boat, and his mistress, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who “stopped being in his life” after an 18-year semi-secret relationship when devious Hillary Clinton mentioned the Republican incumbent’s affair with his beloved aide in a pre-election interview. By airing out Bush’s dirty laundry, the Clintons prevented a repeat of the 1988 election, when H. W. avoided a highly-probable defeat at the hands of Democratic Senator Gary Hart after Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater set up an infidelity scandal that tanked Hart’s seemingly-unstoppable presidential campaign and destroyed his political career. Ambassador Bandar was there for Bush Sr. again on election night in 1994, watching H. W. “work the phones” as George W. Bush unexpectedly won the Texas governor race and Jeb Bush unexpectedly lost the Florida governor race (Jeb tried again and won in 1998). In late-1997, Prince Bandar met with George Bush Jr. to help him prepare to run for president in 2000; W. told the Saudi Ambassador that his father gave him the following advice: “before you make up your mind, go and talk to Bandar.” That same year, Bandar generously donated $1 million to Bush Sr. to help him build his Presidential Library on the Texas A&M University campus — H. W. was buried on the library’s grounds when the decrepit creep keeled over in 2018. 

The Bush Boys Grow Up

George Bush Jr. graduated from Yale in 1968, got arrested for cocaine possession in 1972, graduated from Harvard Business School in 1975, got pulled over for drunk driving in 1976, and started his first business, “Arbusto Energy,” in 1977. Arbusto (Spanish for “bush”) received funding from two significant Saudis in 1979 when Texas businessman, Bush family friend, and alleged CIA operative James R. Bath secured a joint investment for W.’s oil and gas exploration company from BCCI director Khalid bin Mahfouz and Osama’s fun-loving oldest brother Salem bin Laden. The new head of the bin Laden family had been named after Khalid’s father, Salem bin Mahfouz, a Yemeni merchant in the port city of Jeddah who became the primary banker of the House of Saud in the early-‘50s. Khalid’s father was the closest friend of Salem and Osama’s enterprising one-eyed father, Mohammed bin Laden, a fellow immigrant from the Hadhramaut region in south-eastern Yemen who became the official construction contractor of King Abdulaziz in 1950. When the 25-year-old heirs of two of the richest non-royal families in Saudi Arabia came to America to do business after the 1974 boom in oil rents, they trusted “larger-than-life” James Bath with their money. Bath’s daughter Lisa told Joseph Trento that she has fond memories of dinners in their Houston home jointly attended by George W. Bush, Salem bin Laden, and Khalid bin Mahfouz. 

After Jeb Bush graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Latin American Studies in 1974, he got a job at Texas Commerce Bank working for James Bath’s duck-hunting companion, shrewd Texan elite James A. Baker III, who was H. W.’s closest friend in Houston, three-time campaign manager, and 1989-1992 Secretary of State. In 1977, Jim Baker’s company sent Jeb down to Venezuela to “help set up” Texas Commerce Bank’s new office in Caracas and “manage hundreds of millions of dollars flowing out of the Venezuelan oil fields.” In 1979-1980, Baker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, Houston banker Ben Love, and Houston real estate billionaire Gerald D. Hines collaborated on the development and construction of the “Texas Commerce Tower,” a Houston skyscraper designed by I. M. Pei and decorated by an elderly Joan Miró that remains the tallest building in Texas. In 1981, Jim Baker became President Reagan’s Chief of Staff and Jeb Bush moved to Miami, where he got involved with anti-Castro Cuban terrorists (including Orlando Bosch) and Nicaraguan drug-smuggling Contras. 

In late-1985, CIA-asset Barry Seal reportedly bragged to his military intelligence associate Terry Reed that he had obtained a DEA videotape of George W. Bush and Jeb Bush picking up a shipment of cocaine on a Miami airstrip. Seal believed the “neutralizing material” on the “Bush boys” that he supposedly possessed would make him “untouchable,” but it seems he overplayed his hand — Seal was killed by Colombian assassins two months later. The Louisiana state police lieutenant assigned to the murder investigation recalled that the FBI seized the evidence that the Baton Rouge cops found in the trunk of Seal’s Cadillac — including “documents, tapes, briefcases, and boxes” — and refused to hand it over to the Colombian hitmen’s lawyers. The FBI Director at that time was William Hedgecock Webster, who later served as George Bush Senior’s CIA Director and as George Bush Junior’s Homeland Security Advisor. Webster had previously disobeyed regulations by declining to notify the Secret Service when John Hinckley Jr. was arrested on gun-possession charges in 1980 while stalking President Jimmy Carter; Hinckley was considering an attempt on Carter’s life before Ronald Reagan’s surging poll numbers convinced the wannabe assassin to switch targets.⁸ Federal guidelines require the FBI to send written reports on any such incidents to the Secret Service, but Director Webster explained to Congress that he decided not to warn the presidential guard about Hinckley’s suspicious behavior because he was worried about flooding “the Secret Service with excessive data.” When the judge in the Barry Seal murder case threatened to hold the FBI in contempt of court unless they complied with the subpoena, defense attorney Sam Dalton said that Webster’s Bureau produced some of the confiscated evidence, including Seal’s wallet, which contained the private phone number of Vice President George H. W. Bush. The future president and the executed drug-smuggler might have met as early as 1960 — both men have been linked to the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban “Operation 40” program. Sam Dalton suspected that the CIA was complicit in the murder of their favorite cocaine trafficker; the MAC-10 used for the Seal hit was procured by Jose Coutin, a CIA asset in Miami with ties to the Nicaraguan Contras. Seal’s lawyer Lewis Unglesby claimed that two weeks before his client’s head and chest were perforated by a machine gun, Seal called Vice President Bush and threatened to testify against him and Iran-Contra mastermind Oliver North unless Bush made Seal’s legal troubles go away. Seal’s Air Force Intelligence colleague Terry Reed says that he was put in touch with Seal by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, and Reed also claims that Félix Rodríguez was involved in Seal’s operations. The Colombians reportedly told another lawyer named Richard Sharpstein that they had been commissioned to kill Barry Seal by Oliver North. Seal wrote his own epitaph: “A rebel adventurer, the likes of whom, in previous days, made America great.”

Bill Clinton probably greeted the news of Barry Seal’s death with relief — while Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas, a railroad town in Arkansas called Mena (near the Texas border, a few hours away from Dallas) was the base of Seal’s government-protected cocaine operations. Seal and Clinton shared a lawyer: Richard Ben-Veniste, a mobbed-up Democratic Party bigshot who defended Seal against felony drug charges, arranged a meeting between Seal and Vice President Bush, defended President Clinton against the Whitewater fraud allegations, then served as an appointee to the 9/11 Commission at the request of Democratic Senators George J. Mitchell, Tom Daschle, and Hillary Clinton. A shady Clinton personal friend/campaign donor and alleged sex-trafficker named Dan Lasater laundered Barry Seal’s drug profits. Lasater was a business associate of fellow Clinton donor Jackson T. Stephens, the finance billionaire who negotiated BCCI’s entry into the American banking sector. Governor Clinton’s younger brother Roger was convicted of cocaine distribution in 1985, and Roger Clinton got his supply from Lasater, Seal’s Little Rock business partner. Terry Reed says that he was formally introduced to Seal in 1983 by Dan Lasater while Roger Clinton was present. When Bill Clinton was asked about Seal’s Mena airbase in 1994, “Slick Willie” played dumb, firmly denying that Vice President Bush, Oliver North, and the CIA had looped him into their Arkansas drug trafficking scheme. Clinton was never the “Washington outsider” he pretended to be — the wealthy uncle who funded the beginning of Clinton’s political career was a key cog in Carlos Marcello’s gambling operations, and Bill reportedly worked as a CIA informant when he was a university student in the late-‘60s. 

Family Friends

When Jim Baker became Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary in 1985, Khalid bin Mahfouz paid $200 million to buy out Baker’s share in the Texas Commerce Tower, which is currently owned by JPMorgan Chase. In 1986, Khalid bin Mahfouz became BCCI’s biggest shareholder, completing the Saudi takeover of the initially-Pakistani financial institution (which accumulated Emirati startup capital by supplying Abu Dhabi’s Al-Nahyan Dynasty with sex-trafficked Pakistani teenagers). When BCCI was founded in 1972, the Pakistani and Saudi GDPs were basically equivalent; by 1986, the Saudi GDP was 2.7x larger than the Pakistani GDP even though the Pakistani population (95.2 million people) was 6.9x larger than the Saudi population (13.8 million people). In 1988, Salem bin Laden, family man that he was, arranged for Khalid bin Mahfouz to send Osama bin Laden hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund his little brother’s holy war in Afghanistan, which Salem had been personally publicizing, funding, supplying, and arming for years. In 1991, Khalid bin Mahfouz, his son Abdulrahman, and a Jeddah businessman named Yassin Abdullah Kadi — who was “family friends” with Al-Qaeda co-founder Wa’el Julaidan — started the Muwafaq Foundation, a charity which has been accused of facilitating millions of dollars in donations to Al-Qaeda’s terror networks. In the spirit of fairness to George Bush Junior’s business partners/dinner companions, however, it should be noted that the bin Mahfouz family hasn’t been personally implicated in the transfer of funds to Islamist terrorists through their organization, and that Al-Qaeda didn’t start to congeal until a few months after Salem bin Laden’s May 1988 death in a Texas plane crash. Other members of the bin Laden family argue that Salem, an irreligious Western-oriented businessman who was “best friends” with pro-American King Fahd, would have disagreed with his devout brother from a lower-status mother that “Saudi Arabia has become an American colony,” that a “Judeo-Christian alliance” was waging war “against the Muslim world in its entirety, aiming to get rid of Islam itself,” or that “the urgent fight was against Communism, but the next target was America.” 

Osama was echoing his Egyptian ally Ayman al-Zawahiri, who conceived of the Afghan jihad coordinated by CIA Director Bill Casey and Vice President George Bush as “a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe: the United States.” For reasons that remain unclear, al-Zawahiri’s lieutenant Ali Mohamed decided to inform American military intelligence officers in mid-1993 that Osama bin Laden was planning to overthrow the House of Saud; Lawrence Wright reported in The Looming Tower that the FBI requested the Pentagon’s notes from their San Jose meeting with Ali Mohamed, only to hear from the Department of Defense that the relevant records “had been lost.” Fahd started to respond to Osama’s Wahhabist agitation in June 1993 by pressuring the bin Ladens to sever their financial ties with their fanatical relative. The branches that were closest to Fahd and the Americans distanced themselves from Osama (which is not to say that they cut him off), and the royal family sent several bin Laden relatives to visit Osama in Khartoum with orders to “ask him to stop and return to Saudi Arabia to apologize to King Fahd.” Stubborn Osama refused to back down, so the bin Laden family saved face with their royal and Western allies by publicly denouncing Osama in February 1994. King Fahd stripped him of his Saudi citizenship in March 1994 (on grounds of “irresponsible behavior” and “refusal to obey instructions”). In July 1994, Osama started printing and distributing pamphlets condemning King Fahd, Prince Sultan, and future-King Salman for corruption and “waging war against Islam.” There were rumors that Saudi intelligence was behind an attempt to assassinate Osama in Sudan, but Hosni Mubarak’s ruthless Egyptian intelligence service seems like a more probable culprit (Osama and al-Zawahiri tried to kill Mubarak in June 1995), and Prince Turki’s chief analyst Saeed Badeeb told Lawrence Wright that the Saudi government “never tried to assassinate Osama. We only wanted to cool him down.” Prince Bandar told journalist Robert Lacey that he regarded Osama as a “young, misguided kid… not a threat to the system, not a threat to anyone.” Some members of the internally-divided bin Laden family picked Osama’s anti-Western Salafi purity over Salem and King Fahd’s pro-Western secular hedonism — Osama’s nephews Abdullah Awad bin Laden and Omar Awad bin Laden were directly connected to Al-Qaeda recruitment and fundraising efforts in Falls Church, Virginia, and they probably provided support to several of the 9/11 hijackers who spent time there in 2001. 

The Bush family didn’t keep the Saudis to themselves — their domestic political allies had their own connections to the Saudi ruling class. During his time as the CEO of Dallas-based oil services corporation Halliburton (October 1995-July 2000), Dick Cheney was so close to Bandar bin Sultan that the Saudi prince and his wife Haifa invited the Cheney family to their daughter’s wedding. Soon after 9/11, Saudi Aramco gave Halliburton an exclusive $140 million development contract. Before joining the second Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice was on the Chevron board of directors — her primary responsibility was negotiating deals for the oil company in Kazakhstan (Dick Cheney was on the Kazakh government’s Oil Advisory Board at the time) and other strategic locations in post-Soviet Central Asia, but Chevron also collaborated with Saudi Aramco on several projects. Rice’s mentor from her years as a Stanford University academic was Brent Scowcroft, a Henry Kissinger disciple who served as Bush Senior’s National Security Advisor and celebrated his protege’s ascent to that same position in December 2000 by joining Bush Sr. for a hunting trip on Prince Bandar’s 2,000 acre estate near Oxford, England. 

Ambassador Bandar, described by New Yorker journalist Elsa Walsh as “cunning, secretive, and ruthless,” sent $130,000 to Osama Yousef Basnan, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent in Southern California who was identified by the FBI as an “ardent Osama bin Laden supporter” with ties to Omar “Blind Sheikh” Abdel-Rahman from Basnan’s time in Falls Church, Virginia. After receiving money from Prince Bandar and his wife — Turki’s sister Princess Haifa bint Faisal — Osama Basnan befriended and assisted the 9/11 hijackers who just so happened to live in the same exact suburban San Diego housing complex as him. Small world. Two days after the attacks that he and his wife “unwittingly” financed, Bandar smoked cigars with W., Cheney, and Rice on the White House balcony. 

JFK and 9/11

In 1963 and 2001, the most reactionary factions of the American imperial elite believed that the United States was deviating from its rightful trajectory and ceding ground to its geopolitical enemies. In the years leading up to both of those historic inflection points, a network with nodes in the CIA, Pentagon, Republican Party, oil industry, and defense industry became convinced that the weakness and/or treachery of their less-hawkish domestic rivals posed an existential threat to America’s post-WWII position atop the global power system. The imperial maximalists of the early-‘60s used anti-Castro Cubans, Italian-American mobsters, and European fascists to insulate themselves from the extreme measures that were taken to reverse America’s apparent decline. Did the Saudi elites play a similar “plausible deniability” role for their American political allies at the turn of the 21st century, or did the unspeakably-wealthy Saudis simply corrupt their greedy American friends? 

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

1. Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, 2006 (Oxford University Press), p. 84.
2. Iraq’s revolutionary-nationalist president Abd al-Karim Qasim would be overthrown and executed in a brutal 1963 coup by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party (with the support of CIA Nazi recruiter James H. Critchfield).
3. In 1997, internet communities devoted to cracking the case of the JFK assassination scared the CIA into undertaking a frenzied attempt to determine whether highly-sensitive documents regarding suspected-shooter Jean Rene Souètre had been declassified. It was a false alarm — the vast majority of the CIA’s files on Souètre remain classified. A March 1964 briefing on Souètre that was requested by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover has also never been released to the public. Some of the online conspiracy theorists who sent the CIA into a panic believed that Souètre was one of the “clandestine assets in Europe” codenamed “QJ/WIN” who had been recruited into Bill Harvey’s ZR/RIFLE assassination program for the purpose of American “non-attributability” in case of exposure. The CIA terminated its QJ/WIN contract in April 1964, a month after nervous French President Charles de Gaulle asked the FBI to look into Jean Souètre, who was an operative of the fascist “Organisation Armée Secrète” (OAS) dedicated to violently overthrowing de Gaulle after he failed to retain colonial control of Algeria. Souètre learned how to kill people as a special-operations commando in French-occupied Algeria. President Kennedy supported Algerian independence. In 1975, CIA Miami Station Chief Ted Shackley told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that QJ/WIN “has something to do with Spain.” In the early-‘60s, Souètre worked as the lead instructor for Nazi Special Operations Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny at a “School of Commando Tactics” in Francoist Spain that was frequented by US Special Forces troops. The CIA official Bill Harvey put in charge of “QJ/WIN” recruitment was Arnold Silver, who personally recruited Otto Skorzeny to work as an American intelligence asset back when the captured Nazi commander was still a prisoner of war at Camp King in Germany. Jean Souètre reportedly met with E. Howard Hunt in Madrid in April 1963; linked up with far-right US military general Edwin Walker in Dallas later that month; briefed CIA officials in Lisbon about assassination attempts against de Gaulle in May 1963; attended anti-Castro Cuban training camps near New Orleans and Miami; met Frank Sturgis in Louisiana; showed up in Mexico City in mid-November 1963; then arrived in Dallas the week of the JFK ambush. According to the FBI, Souètre left Texas for Mexico in a CIA-owned plane flown by Bill Harvey’s pilot/friend Joe Silverthorne on November 23rd, 1963.
4. Lamar Waldron, Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, 2008 (Berkeley, California: Counterpoint Press), p. 650.
5. According to Ted Van Dyk, who was Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s aide and speechwriter, Humphrey arranged for a well-regarded brain surgeon to be flown into Los Angeles to attempt to save RFK’s life, but President Johnson canceled the flight as soon as he found out, a decision that horrified Humphrey (even though Bobby Kennedy’s death secured the Democratic Party presidential nomination for Humphrey). LBJ paced around the Oval Office making phone calls as RFK’s condition worsened, repeatedly asking the Secret Service: “I’ve got to know, is he dead? Is he dead yet?”
6. In April 1963, a bullet was fired into General Walker’s home, but the ultra-right military commander was not hit. After Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, his widow Marina Oswald told investigators that her husband had tried and failed to murder Edwin Walker. Marina Oswald’s incriminating testimony is treated as a historical fact, but there’s reason to doubt that the story is that simple. An eyewitness told the FBI that he saw two men — neither of whom resembled Oswald — fleeing the scene of the Walker shooting into a getaway car. Oswald didn’t have a car because he didn’t know how to drive. One of General Walker’s aides told investigators that he had seen two “Cuban or dark-complexed men” casing Walker’s house and “peeking in windows” before the shot was fired. In an interview with the Warren Commission, J. Edgar Hoover acknowledged the possibility that “associates of General Walker” had been involved in the bizarre “shooting.” Why would Marina Oswald accuse her dead husband of attempting to assassinate the far-right general if Lee didn’t actually do it? In 1964, Marina said: “the FBI agents knew that I was afraid” of being deported back to Russia and “exploited that for their own purposes in a very clever, contrived way.” Years later, Marina told the San Jose Mercury News that she believed Lee “worked for the American government” as an undercover agent and had been “caught between two powers — the government and organized crime.”
7. E. Howard Hunt’s wife Dorothy — a fellow CIA operative — died in a suspicious plane crash in December 1972 while she was transporting either $10,000 or $2 million in Watergate hush-money, depending on who you believe. Nixon’s “dirty-tricks” man Charles W. Colson stated that the CIA “killed Dorothy Hunt” to prevent her from revealing Company secrets, but it’s possible that Colson only blamed the CIA to deflect responsibility away from the Nixon Administration. The Hunts blackmailed the Nixon White House until Dorothy’s death, at which point Howard Hunt decided to take the fall and plead guilty to the Watergate burglary. Howard and Dorothy Hunt’s children believe that their mother’s plane was sabotaged, and one of them told a reporter that he suspected the Nixon White House had ordered the killing of Dorothy Hunt (and 45 other people whose lives ended when United Airlines Flight 553 went down over Chicago).
8. When John Hinckley Jr. — the mentally-ill son of a devout-Christian Dallas/Denver oilman —  shot Ronald Reagan in March 1981, eyebrows were raised by the Hinckley family’s long friendship with Vice President Bush’s family; Neil Bush had dinner plans with John Hinckley’s prosperous brother Scott the day after the shooting. George W. Bush acknowledged that it was “certainly conceivable” that he had met Reagan’s shooter during his failed Congressional campaign three years earlier. John Hinckley Jr. read Nazi literature, attended a memorial for American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell in St. Louis, and got expelled from several Neo-Nazi groups for being “too violent.” One Neo-Nazi remembered that Hinckley “kept trying to get people to go out and shoot people,” leading the fascists to believe that Hinckley was a “federal undercover agent.” If the explosive “Devastator” bullet that hit Reagan in the chest had entered his body just a couple inches further right, George Bush Sr. would have automatically become president in 1981 instead of waiting to run against Republican primary challengers and the Democratic nominee for the chance to take office in 1989. Bush campaign donor John Warnock “Jack” Hinckley Sr. was the president of a CIA-backed anti-Communist Christian charity called “World Vision International.” Jack Hinckley —described by his pastor as an “ultra-conservative redneck Republican” and described by his company chairman as a “typical mid-America all-American man” — was a “strict and authoritarian” businessman who was “not close” to his children and frequently belittled his troubled son. Jack Hinckley’s company president said that he “didn’t even know [John] existed.” According to Russ Baker, Jack Hinckley was notified that his oil company could face a $2 million Department of Energy penalty on the day Reagan was shot by Hinckley’s son — apparently the hefty penalty “never materialized” after the attempted assassination. The failed assassin’s defense attorney was Edward Bennett Williams, who previously defended Richard Helms when the former CIA Director was charged with lying to Congress about the Company’s role in overthrowing President Allende. Ed Williams also defended Sam Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, and LBJ-bagman Bobby Baker before representing Hinckley. Prison guards confiscated what appeared to be letters Hinckley wrote to co-conspirators in his failed assassination attempt, but the FBI concluded that the apparent conspiracy had been completely imaginary. Jack Anderson — the Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter whom Helms wiretapped and Nixon thought about killing — received a strange tip from a man who identified himself as an Iranian intelligence asset and claimed that he had warned the Secret Service of Hinckley’s plans to shoot Reagan; according to Anderson’s staffers, the Secret Service confirmed that the supposed Iranian agent (whose pseudonym, “Tony Rollini,” sounded more Italian than Persian) had advance knowledge of the assassination attempt. A right-wing Nixon-appointed federal judge named Barrington D. Parker Sr. barred everyone involved in the case from sharing the contents of Hinckley’s prison letters. When George Bush Jr. became president, one of the first federal judges he appointed was Barrington D. Parker Jr. The details of the conspiracy Hinckley either imagined or participated in have never been reported on by the media, the psychiatric records generated during his stay in a mental hospital used by the CIA for its MK/ULTRA behavior-modification experiments have never lost their “secret” status, and the 22 pages of documents relating to the individuals and organizations associated with John Hinckley Jr. have never been released by the FBI.