Family Of Secrets - The Bush Dynasty & America's Invisible Government

Russ Baker's Family of Secrets book is probably the most explosive Bush dynasty book available because of the five years of investigative reporting he put into researching it. I'm still working my way through the interviews to understand the power matrix between the Harriman's, Prescot Bush and Herbert Walker families for example but one thing Russ states that all my research confirms is these power elites are mid ranking lieutenants and officers. The real string pullers are so powerful they are unknown and the closest I've come to a name I don't know is a Webb (or Web) family in Australia. That comes from a trusted source but no supporting evidence or supplementary information so I have no idea who it relates to.

Here's the blurb from interviewer Dave Emory's site:

Jour­nal­ist Russ Baker has authored Fam­ily of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment and the Hid­den His­tory of the Last 50 Years–a poten­tially deci­sive, multi-generational polit­i­cal his­tory and analy­sis of the Bush fam­ily. This first inter­view of six con­ducted with the author chron­i­cles the gen­e­sis of the Bush dynasty, high­light­ing the family’s busi­ness and polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships with pow­er­ful Wall Street inter­ests, the Har­ri­man busi­ness empire, in par­tic­u­lar. Russ Baker, Fam­ily of Secrets, and this series of six inter­views illus­trate and ana­lyze the net­works of pow­er­ful cor­po­rate and national secu­rity inter­ests that have man­i­fested the Bush fam­ily and, in turn, been advanced by them.

Through­out the deal­ings of gen­er­a­tions of Bushes, one finds the petro­leum busi­ness, spy­craft and the syn­the­sis of pop­u­lar elec­toral pol­i­tics with covert oper­a­tions. Set­ting forth impor­tant episodes in the ascent of George H.W. (“Poppy”) Bush, this pro­gram notes his pro­found involve­ment with the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the fun­da­men­tal, sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between his busi­ness ven­tures and an appar­ent life­long career as an intel­li­gence offi­cer. After recount­ing Prescott Bush’s work for pow­er­ful invest­ment bank­ing firm Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man, the pro­gram under­scores his son George’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence going back to his work for an ONI photo analy­sis unit dur­ing World War II. After the war, “Poppy” (George H.W.) Bush uses fam­ily pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions to become estab­lished in Texas.

From work with oil drilling firm Dresser Industries–headed by Har­ri­man crony and fel­low Yale “Bones­man” Henry Neil Mal­lon–Poppy moves on to head his own out­fit, Zap­ata Off­shore Petro­leum. Launched with the aid of CIA vet­eran Thomas Devine, Zap­ata appears to have been lit­tle more than an intel­li­gence front. Not prof­itable, Zap­ata encom­passed a range of oper­a­tions and ven­tures that appear to have advanced the inter­ests of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and pow­er­ful eco­nomic forces it serves. Among the sig­nif­i­cant areas of involve­ment for Zap­ata was Latin Amer­ica, espe­cially Cuba and the anti-Castro efforts of the CIA.

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is Baker’s analy­sis of Poppy’s behav­ior vis a vis the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. At loss to explain his exact where­abouts and activ­ity at the time Pres­i­dent Kennedy was assas­si­nated, the elder George Bush appears to have been involved with the assas­si­na­tion. Closely asso­ci­ated with the intel­li­gence and cor­po­rate milieu that dis­patched JFK, Poppy was cer­tainly in Dal­las the evening before the assas­si­na­tion and may very well have been there on the very day of the killing. His inabil­ity to account for his behav­ior on that fate­ful day and his evi­dent and sophis­ti­cated efforts to obscure his tracks are sug­ges­tive of guilt.

Close to Richard Nixon through­out his polit­i­cal career, Poppy Bush appears to have been piv­otally involved with the intel­li­gence forces that delib­er­ately ousted Nixon in the Water­gate affair, itself inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the events of 11/22/1963 and the Bay of Pigs milieu.

The saga of the Bush clan, as well as the evo­lu­tion of the power elite struc­ture to which they belong, have imprinted that fam­ily with cer­tain his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal “themes”–themes that can be clearly iden­ti­fied in the nature and legacy of the polit­i­cal career of George W. Bush. Read a Mini-Review of the Book.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Analy­sis of the use of the rhetor­i­cal cliche “con­spir­acy the­ory” to actively sup­press dis­cus­sion of clan­des­tine oper­a­tions; syn­op­sis of key ele­ments of the “Old Boy Net­work” and East­ern Estab­lish­ment; Henry Neil Mallon’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence and national mat­ters; Mallon’s close rela­tion­ship with CIA direc­tor and Sul­li­van and Cromwell asso­ciate Allen Dulles; Dulles’s pedi­gree in the Wall Street and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment; Poppy Bush’s rela­tion­ship to Oswald intel­li­gence babysit­ter George De Mohren­schildt; Poppy’s use of a memo to the FBI to pro­vide him­self with a con­ve­nient cover for his activ­i­ties on 11/22/1963; the evo­lu­tion of Dresser Indus­tries into Hal­libur­ton (headed for a time by Dick Cheney, polit­i­cal crony of both Poppy and Dubya); syn­op­sis of the close polit­i­cal rela­tion­ship between LBJ and Poppy; Poppy’s selec­tion of Judge Manuel Bravo, a close LBJ asso­ciate, to head Zap­ata Off­shore Petroleum’s (land­locked) Medellin, Colum­bia office; the role of Hal­libur­ton the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon blowout in the Gulf of Mex­ico; the pro­fes­sional and his­tor­i­cal links between the Bush fam­ily and the Gam­mells, a pow­er­ful Scot­tish bank­ing fam­ily who are, in turn, closely con­nected to the milieu of for­mer British PM Tony Blair and BP; the role of the milieu of narcotics-smuggling and intelligence-connected banks to the pro­fes­sional ascent of the younger George Bush; George W. Bush’s dec­la­ra­tion to a Texas in jour­nal­ist that if affored the oppor­tu­nity, he intended to invade Iraq.