Bush, Bath, Bones, & BCCI: The Ties That Bind

IMAGE: Welcome To Terrorland - A NEW BOOK BY DANIEL HOPSICKER
PRE-ORDER YOUR SIGNED COPY TODAY, RECEIVE IT BEFORE THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH
http://www.madcowprod.com/books.html

PLUS: The MadCowMorningNews has begun airing, on Conspiracy Tonight, Episode 2 – Rudi Dekker Walks! FBI Shuts Down Boston Terror Investigation. What Really Happened At Tora Bora.

What makes finding the truth about George W. Bush’s National Guard service more than just an exercise in “opposition research,” as Bush partisans claim, is that the answer may reveal uncomfortable truths striking at the heart of our notions of who we are as a nation, and inimical to prospects for American democracy.

If the story of Bush in the Guard is ultimately merely a matter of a smirking son of privilege lounging poolside sipping a multi-colored drink with a little umbrella while America’s less ‘fortunate sons’ are clocking-in and suiting up down at the Air Guard Base, we admit to being shocked— shocked! — at yet-another shameless abuse of power.

But we think something larger and much darker is still being hidden.

Lurking in Bush’s fuzzy Guard history lies the chilling prospect that the “lost periods” in Bush’s chronology contains a stomach-wrenchingly sick and twisted truth confirming the hoariest cliché of ‘conspiracy theorists': that multiple generations of certain ‘blue-blood’ Eastern families (like Bush’s) run intelligence agencies like the CIA as if they were a ‘family business.’

In 1971, while Richard Nixon's re-election committee was committing the felonies they will be indicted for the next year, and CIA pilot Barry Seal is conspiring with the Mexican Air Force in a CIA plot to invade Cuba he will be induced for the next year, George W. Bush was either a) scouting orchids for a plant nursery or b) working for the CIA in Central America.

Let's look at the evidence for 'b.'

“There are so many red flags in Robert Gow’s background that it looks like a rally in Red Square,” we said, ending Pt. I. And certainly going from President of Zapata Offshore in 1969 to heading a plant nursery in Houston a year later is a good start on what's known as a ”checkered business career.”

If Robert Gow was in the ‘spook business,’ having a business career that makes no business sense wouldn't necessarily be a negative. Gow’s various business enterprises would make sense…just in some other way.

They would be “cover.” They would provide, in intelligence parlance, a ‘legend.'

Gow grew up in Massachusetts, studied engineering at Yale, and according to Texas Monthly, “still retains the trace of a patrician Yankee accent although he has lived in Texas since 1962. That year he came south to join Zapata Offshore, the oil business then headed by George Bush.”

Gow and George Bush Sr. worked closely together. Extremely closely...When the elder Bush began looking for someone to buy his Zapata stake, after deciding to run for Congress in 1966, he turned, according to Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward in the August 11, 1988 Washington Post, to Gow.

In looking for evidence of Robert Gow’s associations to American covert intelligence, this is a rather auspicious place to start.

Who is Robert H Gow?

Here are a few more interesting highlights—and lowlights--of Robert Gow’s career:

Gow’s company entered into what must have been a truly unique joint venture with the Jamaican Government, reported the Aug 29, 1973 Wall Street Journal with a suitably straight face, “to grow floricultural crops in Jamaica.”

Could there be anything finer, we wondered, than a deal to raise “floricultural crops” in fragrant and fertile Jamaica…with the Jamaican Government’s own blessing?

Ja be good, mon. We be goin' to Babylon by Cadillac.

Still looking for new worlds to conquer, Robert Gow’s interesting little company suffered the misfortune the next year of being accused—along with the Nat'l Broiler Mktg Assn and 36 other companies—of conspiring to fix prices in the U.S. market for broiler chickens available for purchase by state and local governments, according to the New York Times on March 4, 1975. A conspiracy like that must have been--excuse the pun--'hatched' with inside information provided by colluding Government officials. Gow's Central American experience would no doubt have stood his company in good stead here.

Unbowed, the plucky Gow next partnered with a private corporation located in McLean, Virginia developing “pollution free, low-cost energy sources.” This is certainly a noble pursuit, and the private corporation’s address a stones-throw from the CIA should certainly not be held against it.

Turns water into wine! First time. Every time!"

However, the fact that the firm’s hot new “low-cost energy source” involved nothing more laborious than mixing water with gasoline does seem a little suspicious.

Scams with funny twists like this have long been a 'spook' specialty. They look for gold coins underneath the ocean or specialize in recovering virgin timber from the bottom of the Great Lakes. While researching Barry & the boys” we came across one Colorado-based CIA-front company claiming it had a process that could turn water into gold. Even allowing that the firm was using pure clean Rocky Mountain water, this does seem quite a claim.

Investors inevitably lose their shirts in such ventures. And sure enough things began to slide quickly downhill, business-wise, for Robert Gow’s company, which posted a loss of 80% of its net worth, and then reported sadly that it was left with “a staggering $80.7million debt and equity of only $4.7 million."

We hope the 'smart money' got out in time. We have a feeling it did.

When Gow’s Stratford of Texas tanked it did so in such spectacular fashion that the failure inspired a case study at the Harvard Business School. And amazingly, we discovered that Robert Gow was well ahead of his time. Long before Enron and Global Crossing made the claim de rigueur for companies being “busted-out,” Gow had regretfully cited “possible audit adjustments” to explain that losses might 'substantially increase.

"Audit adjustments” seem the bane of a certain class of American industrialists, as has been recently well-documented, many of them surprisingly well-acquainted with the Bush family.

Remember "The Enterprise?"

Now begins Robert Gow's Golden Era... his business career during the “go-go” ‘80’s.

During the Iran Contra hearings it was revealed that CIA Director Bill Casey, then-Vice President George Bush and Ollie North, as they were preparing to go to war, in November of 1982, in Nicaragua, had been using an off-the-books self-funding mechanism which North testified was called “The Enterprise.”

At exactly this same time Robert Gow bought himself an oil company, called Lezak Energy Group.

He renamed it “Enterprise Oil and Gas.”

But wait. There’s more.

Robert Gow’s connections to U.S. intelligence and military agencies come into even-clearer focus several years later, when another Gow-helmed company, SI Diamond, is formed, to "solicit federal research grants and solve technical problems for the government.” Soon the lucky company is given a big friendly helping hand by President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, Brilliant Pebbles.

“MCC, SI Diamond's partner in this project, isn't small potatoes,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “The massive, government-subsidized consortium of the country's largest electronics corporations was fired up in the mid-1980s as a direct response to Japan's dominance in leading edge technologies.”

Recapped Aerospace Daily on May 28, 1992, “The (company’s) process was developed with funding from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (now known as the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization or BMDO).”

Finally, in the midst of all this frenetic activity, all this "sound and fury signifying nothing legitimate," Robert Gow somehow developed an abiding fascination with a region said by drug officials to have become prominent at about this same time in the transshipment of narcotics from South America to the United States: The Yucatan.

He began exporting what had been American jobs making dentures to Merida in in Yucatan in 1988, paying Mexican workers $4 a day. Apparently enough denture-wearing seniors caught wind of it to catch the attention of the St. Petersburg Times, located in Florida’s retirement heartland.

“Many dentists don't know the teeth were made in Mexico because CHS (a Gow company) has bought up dental labs in various cities and made them into franchises,” the paper reported. "We don't hide it from them," Gow told the Times. But "we don't like to shock them with the whole idea."

Blue-blood Yankee Gow making a buck paying Mexican’s $4 a day makes a certain historical sense. Still, for the ever-dutiful Gow, it can’t have been much fun.

'Home Team Spooks' at Leisure

Then just two years ago Gow was profiled in Texas Monthly, about his latest obsession in the Yucatan.

“AT AGE 66, ROBERT GOW could be enjoying a well-earned life of leisure in Houston--puttering around the links with friends at the club or spinning stories on a River Oaks patio about his exploits as a jungle-adventure guide. Retired from a series of enterprises ranging from offshore oil drilling to producing dental crowns and industrial diamonds, he could be confining his yen for risk-taking to the occasional poker game.”

“But Gow, who used to enjoy ratcheting up the adrenaline flow for the travelers he led into the wilds of Mexico -- and who was once in business with former president George Bush and was briefly George W.'s boss – is caught up in his most ambitious venture ever,” gushed Carol Flake Chapman, in the Feb 2000 TEXAS MONTHLY.

Robert Gow at age 66, had developed a hankering to return to the Yucatan, this time to grow—can you stand the suspense?—bamboo.

Imagine that.

"There were two big questions we had to answer," he says. "The first was whether Dendrocalamus strictus (bamboo) would grow in the Yucatan..." Texas Monthly says he's still working on the answer to the second question: What are we going to do with all that bamboo?"

This would be funny, except for what 'these people' have done to America and the world during the past thirty years.

We are happy to belabor the point: Gow’s inexplicable "fascination" with the Yucatan led him into business ventures which Gow himself says make no sense.

His bamboo venture would hardly fit a conventional business plan, Gow admitted to Texas Monthly. "If one of my students had suggested planting bamboo in the jungle, I would have given him a D," he says. "For one thing, no business plan could have taken into account the amount of luck and happenstance involved in the venture."

Once we had begun to discern a certain eclecticism in the progress of Mr. Gow’s business career, the scope of it grew until it was positively breathtaking in its incoherence. He went from offshore oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico to growing orchids in Guatemala to cutting deals to a j-v “floricultural crops” deal with the Jamaican government—oh to have been a fly on the wall during that negotiation!—to “fixin’ the chicken bidness' with some of the boys, to a small piece of Star Wars largesse, and now rounding out as a genteel plantation owner in the Mexican Yucatan.

Again, Gow’s career makes no business sense. But it does make sense if it was “cover.” And absent the discovery of a parking permit for the CIA’s Langley headquarters in the pocket of George W’s old Guard uniform, it provides all the evidence we need to form our answer.

From then till now in spookdom

What was George W. Bush doing in Central America in 1971? Working for Robert Gow, who gives every appearance of having been a 'home team spook.'

And it solves a mystery that has never been satisfactorily explained: why the CIA named its Langley, Va. headquarters for George H.W. Bush, whose professional association with the Agency lasted, according to official accounts, just 10 months.

But what , if anything, does all this have to do with current events?

“It is a triumph of chutzpah for Mr. Bush to thwart the investigation into 9/11 at the same time he seeks re-election by promoting his handling of 9/11 and scaring us with the specter of more terrorism,” wrote Maureen Dowd in Sunday’s New York Times, voicing a concern felt by many.

“He's even using 9/11 memorials as the backdrop for his convention in New York. After trying to kill the commission and then trying to put Dr. Strangelove-Kissinger in charge, President Bush and Dick Cheney have done their best to hamper the panel that's the best hope of the 9/11 widows, widowers and orphans to get justice.”

Dowd cites, as have others, the CIA’s inexplicable inability to 'buy a clue' before 9/11.

Clues to an explanation for why this was can be found, we think, as we now turn to 'factor-in' the story of an important 'player' in the saga of George W Bush in the National Guard, James Bath.

Briefly, Bath was mustered out of the Texas National Guard—and allegedly into the CIA—exactly one month from when George W Bush allegedly goes through the same process. (View document here.)

Bath's story takes us from the Texas National Guard to BCCI to Saudi money allegedly funnelled from the bin Laden family into George W. Bush’s first fledgling oil venture, Arbusto, and then later into Bush’s failing Harken Energy.

- Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. About the author. - Email the author.

IMAGE: Welcome To Terrorland - A NEW BOOK BY DANIEL HOPSICKER
PRE-ORDER YOUR SIGNED COPY TODAY, RECEIVE IT BEFORE THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH
http://www.madcowprod.com/books.html

STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the above article. We present this in the interests of research -for the relevant information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping to build bridges between our various investigative communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie before us.

© Scoop Media