The Barreling Bushes: Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest
January 11, 2004
By Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips' new book, "American
Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the
House of Bush," has just been published by Viking Penguin.
WASHINGTON — Dynasties in American politics are
dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well
see it with the Clintons and we're certainly seeing it with
the Bushes. Between now and the November election,
it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four
generations of the current president's family have
embroiled the United States in the Middle East through
CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks,
inherited war policies and personal financial links.
As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the
U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent
Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik
of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore
oil wells. Over the four decades since then, the
ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S.
political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with
Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family
even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family
black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s.
How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9/11 and then distorted the
U.S. response to Islamic terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a
dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty.
The first family member lured by the Middle East's petroleum wealth was George
W. Bush's great-grandfather, George H. Walker, a buccaneer who was president
of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. In the 1920s, Walker and his firm
participated in rebuilding the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of
current-day Iraq. As senior director of Dresser Industries (now part of
Halliburton), Walker's son-in-law Prescott Bush (George W. Bush's grandfather)
became involved with the Middle East in the years after World War II. But it was
George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, who forged the dynasty's
strongest ties to the region.
George H.W. Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. He
went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to
have either an oil or CIA background. This helps to explain his persistent bent
toward the Middle East, covert operations and rogue banks like the Abu
Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which came
to be known by the nickname "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International." In
each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran,
Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued
policies that helped make the Middle East into the world's primary destination for
arms shipments.
Taking the CIA helm in January 1976, Bush cemented strong relations with the
intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked
closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King
Faisal and an early BCCI insider. After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush
became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares
and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry
Gurwin in their 1992 book "False Profits," Bush "traveled on the bank's behalf
and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several
Middle Eastern institutions."
Once in the White House, first as vice president to Ronald Reagan and later as
president, George H.W. Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered
scandals. It's never been entirely clear what Bush's connection was to the
Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran, some
BCCI-financed, helped illegally fund the operations of the anti-Sandinista Contra
rebels in Nicaragua. But in 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh asserted
that Bush, despite his protestations, had indeed been "in the loop" on multiple
illegal acts.
Much clearer was Bush's pivotal role, both as vice president and president, in
"Iraqgate," the hidden aid provided by the U.S. and its military to Saddam
Hussein's Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran during the 1980s. The U.S. is
known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for
weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons.
As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 "Nightline" program
after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George
[H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and
supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's
Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
During these years, Bush's four sons — George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin —
were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti
and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was
becoming a convenient family money spigot.
Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late
1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American
representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) — billionaire
Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put
$50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using Bin Laden-Bin
Mahfouz funds.
In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the
ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought
out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy. The Wall Street
Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding
Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's
ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with
Harken — all since George W. Bush came on board — likewise raises the
question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."
Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major
contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine
reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank,"
concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in
steering the oil-drilling contract to the president's son." The web entangling the
Bush presidencies was already being spun.
Second son Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida, spent most of his time in the
early and mid-1980s hobnobbing with ex-Cuban intelligence officers, Nicaraguan
Contras and others plugged into the lucrative orbit of Miami-area front groups for
the CIA. But he too had some Middle East connections. Two of his business
associates, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and Camilo Padreda, both indicted for
financial dealings, were longtime associates of Middle Eastern arms dealer, BCCI
investor and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Prosecutors dropped the case
against the two, and a federal judge ordered Padreda's name expunged from the
record. But a few years later Padreda, a former Miami-Dade County GOP
treasurer, was convicted of fraud over a federally insured housing development
that Jeb Bush had helped to facilitate. Jeb Bush also socialized with Adbur
Sakhia, the Miami BCCI branch chief and later its top U.S. official.
Neil Bush, most famous for the scandal surrounding the corrupt practices of
Colorado's Silverado Savings & Loan, where he served as a director during the
1980s, also picked plums from Persian Gulf orchards. In 1993, after his father
left the White House, Neil went to Kuwait with his parents, brother Marvin and
former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. When his father left, Neil stayed to
lobby for business contracts, and after returning home evolved a set of lucrative
relationships with Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel. One of their
ventures, Ignite!, an educational software company, also included representatives
of at least three ruling Persian Gulf families.
The Bush family's Middle Eastern commercial focus is further exemplified by
Marvin, the youngest brother of the current president. From 1993 to 2000 he
was a major shareholder, along with Mishal Youssef Saud al Sabah, a member of
the Kuwaiti royal family, in the Kuwait-American Corp., which had holdings in
several U.S. defense, aviation and industrial security companies.
George H.W. Bush's own Persian Gulf relationships kept expanding. While
serving in the Reagan White House during the 1980s, he was known in the
Middle East as "the Saudi vice president," and a New Yorker article last year
described the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. as "almost a member of the [Bush]
family." Indeed, many saw the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait as an
outgrowth of Bush's close ties to the oil industry and to Persian Gulf royal
families, who felt threatened by Saddam Hussein's expansionism.
After losing his bid for a second term as president, Bush joined up in 1993 with
the Washington-based Carlyle Group. Under the leadership of ex-officials like
Baker and former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, Carlyle developed a
specialty in buying defense companies and doubling or quadrupling their value.
The ex-president not only became an investor in Carlyle, but a member of the
company's Asia Advisory Board and a rainmaker who drummed up investors.
Twelve rich Saudi families, including the Bin Ladens, were among them. In 2002,
the Washington Post reported, "Saudis close to Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense
minister … were encouraged to put money into Carlyle as a favor to the elder
Bush." Bush retired from the company last October, and Baker, who lobbied
U.S. allies last month to forgive Iraq's debt, remains a Carlyle senior counselor.
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