DID BUSH HAVE TIES TO BARRY SEAL?

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Why Does George W. Bush Fly in Drug Smuggler Barry Seal's Airplane?
by

Daniel Hopsicker and Michael C. Ruppert

It has all the makings of a major box office thriller: Texas Governor and Republican Presidential contender George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, allegedly caught on videotape in 1985 picking up kilos of cocaine at a Florida airport in a DEA sting set up by Barry Seal…

An ensuing murderous cover-up featuring Seal's public assassination less than a year later by a hit team…the members of which, when caught, reveal to their attorneys during trial that their actions were being directed by then, National Security Council (NSC) staffer - Lt. Colonel Oliver North…

And a private turboprop King Air 200 supposedly caught on tape in the sting with FAA ownership records leading directly to the CIA and some of the perpetrators of the most notorious (and never punished) major financial frauds of the '80s. …Greek shippers paying bribes to obtain loans from American companies that would never be repaid.…An American executive snatching the charred remains of a $10,000 payoff check from an ashtray in an Athens restaurant…Swiss police finding bank accounts used for kickbacks and bribes…

Add to this mix the now irrefutable proof, some of it from the CIA itself, that then Vice President George H.W. Bush was a decision maker in illegal Contra support operations connected to the "unusual" acquisition of aircraft and that his staff participated in key financial, operational and political decisions…

All these events lead inexorably to one unanswered question: How did this one plane go from being controlled by Barry Seal, the biggest drug smuggler in American history, to becoming, according to state officials, a favored airplane of Texas Governor George W. Bush?

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Three months into an exhaustive investigation of persistent reports dating to 1995 that there exists an incriminating videotape of current Republican Presidential front-runner Bush caught in a hastily-aborted DEA cocaine sting, the central allegation remains unproven…

But some startling details have been confirmed, amid a raft of new suspicions emerging from conflicting FAA records. Those records, along with other irrefutable documents, point to the existence of far more than mere happenstance or dark "conspiracy theorist speculations" in the matter of how George W. Bush came to be flying the friendly Texas skies in an airplane that was a crown jewel in the drug smuggling fleet of the notorious Barry Seal. Those documents reveal - beyond any doubt - that in the 1980s Barry Seal, with whom the CIA has consistently denied any relationship, piloted and controlled airplanes owned by the same Phoenix Arizona company, Greycas, which in a 1998 bankruptcy filing, was revealed to have been a subsidiary of the same company that owned the now defunct CIA proprietary airline Southern Air Transport.

The investigation started with a lead into the history of the aircraft (a 1982 Beechcraft King Air 200 with FAA registration number N6308F - Serial Number BB-1014). The handwritten tail number was found in records kept by Seal's widow and later linked to other "hard paper" records left by Seal after his 1986 assassination by "drug traffickers" who were subsequently connected to Oliver North. Those records, including leasing agreements, insurance policies and maintenance records, exhibit a deliberately-confusing "paper trail" of convoluted ownership recalling the 'glory' days of the Iran Contra hearings, where the machinations of American covert intelligence operators were unmasked before a disbelieving public.

Combined with revelations in a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report of Contra-era cocaine trafficking in which the CIA admits to "briefing" then Vice President Bush on how it lied to Congress about cocaine trafficking by its agents, it becomes clear that father and son have common secrets to conceal from the American public. That report, Volume II of the CIA Inspector General's report into allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking can be viewed at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/cocaine2/index.html. A detailed discussion of that report, along with relevant excerpts is available at www.copvcia.com.

Unraveling the plane's tangled and colorful history requires, first, a brief look backwards at the momentous year of 1982, when President Reagan first introduced the public version of "Project Democracy," in which he called for a "crusade for freedom."

What it became instead was a license to murder, loot and steal. This climate was the nursery into which N6308F was born.

"The War of '82"
The detonations had rumbled like Armageddon along the rocky course of the Rio Negro in Nicaragua throughout the night of March 14, 1982... Concrete bridges groaned suddenly under their own weight, crashing in avalanches of black dust in a dark landscape seen through night-vision goggles… In Washington D.C., it was time to break out the champagne. War was breaking out in Central America. Just two days later Barry Seal took possession of the first of many planes supplied to him through CIA Director Bill Casey's "off-the-books" Enterprise.

There were more than 100 U.S. advisers in Honduras by March of 1982. In April, the chief of the Honduran Army, General Gustavo Alvarez, said that his country would agree to U.S. intervention in Central America if it were the only way to "preserve peace."

"Up to March 1982 you could still change your policy," recalled a member of the NSC Core Group In Charge as he spoke to reporters later. "The issue was still the question of support for El Salvador's rebels. If that ended, so could pressure on Managua. But once the first forces of Nicaraguan exiles were trained and set in motion, any real negotiating became much harder. The blowing of the bridges was an announcement."

Throughout 1982, Democrats, fearing that President Reagan was pushing the United States into another Vietnam-style quagmire, tried to cut off aid to the Contras. It was precisely at this time, the height of CIA Director Bill Casey's frenetic efforts to ward off these Congressional efforts, that Barry Seal acquired use of not one but several brand new Beech Craft King Air 200s. Ownership of the planes had been deliberately obscured through a number of convoluted transactions involving Phoenix-based corporations suspected of being "fronts" for General John Singlaub's "Enterprise" activities. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Retired Major General Singlaub organized in early 1982 an American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), called the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF), with a loan from Taiwan. Funding for Seal's planes would come from sources close to those efforts.

"Jack" Singlaub had a long history of involvement in covert operations, beginning with service in the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He had served as CIA Desk Officer for China in 1949 and Deputy Chief of Station in South Korea during the Korean War, and during the Vietnam War he commanded the Special Operations Group Military Assistance Command, Vietnam--Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG), which participated in the CIA's Operation Phoenix assassination program.

Singlaub's efforts, and Seal's as well, had been necessitated by the shocking scandals of the 1970s combined with drastic reductions in "official" CIA capabilities in the Carter years. Until then, the CIA. had controlled a huge network of planes, pilots and companies for use in paramilitary situations. But with the end of the Vietnam War and the public revulsion at disclosures of out of control CIA covert operations, many of those assets (such as the infamous Air America) were dissolved or sold off.

Consequently, when the Reagan Administration sought to expand covert paramilitary operations in Central America and elsewhere, the Agency was forced to rebuild much of its capabilities illegally, relying frequently on outside assets, usually retained under contract, like Barry Seal. The Contra war put everything into high gear.

The CIA and the Army jointly agreed to set up a special aviation operation called "Seaspray," New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh revealed in 1987. [This was old news to local and state police in affected areas. Cops had already seen the cynical (and perhaps intentional) manipulation of this operation flooding America with a river of drugs. When law enforcement authorities debriefed convicted "drug smuggler" Seal in late 1985, one of the cops present brusquely began by stating, "We already know about Seaspray."]

Everybody Will Be There.
The "boys" were getting ready to go to war in the Spring of 1982:

-- CIA agent Dewey Clarridge put a proposition to Contra leader Eden Pastora. "He would become the star of the second revolution as he had been the star of the first," -- John Hull, whom Congressional sources said worked for the CIA since at least the early 1970s, rented a Contra safe house in San Jose, Coast Rica at CIA request. -- Retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord began managing an operation in which Israel shipped weapons captured in Lebanon to a CIA arms depot in San Antonio, Texas, for re-shipment to the Contras. -- Felix Rodriguez drew on his Vietnam experience and wrote a five-page proposal for the creation of an elite mobile strike force, called the Tactical Task Force (TTF), that would "be ideal for the pacification efforts in El Salvador and Guatemala."-- And at this exact same time, in the Spring of 1982, Barry Seal began flying private planes into a then-obscure airport in the secluded mountains of western Arkansas known as Mena. He moved his base of operations from Louisiana to hook up with the CIA, which was anxious to use Seal's fleet of planes to ferry both legal and illegal supplies to Contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica.

Rodriguez dubbed the search and destroy units "Pink Teams" and advocated using napalm and cluster bombs to give them "more destructive power." Rodriguez's proposal included a map of Central America which indicated that Nicaragua would be a target of Pink Team operations (based in El Salvador and Honduras).

Favorably impressed, Vice President George (Poppy) Bush's National Security Advisor Donald Gregg sent Rodriguez's Pink Team plan to then Deputy National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane on March 17, along with a secret one-page memo on "anti-guerrilla operations in Central America."

This was also, according to later Iran-Contra testimony of Medellin Cartel money man Ramon Milian Rodriguez, when he began to launder, at Felix Rodriguez' request, $10 million from the cartel for the Contras. In secret, sworn testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Milian Rodriguez claimed that he had been solicited by his old friend Felix Rodriguez.

Also early in 1982 a new covert unit of the Armed Forces was set up by General Richard Stilwell. Known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), it became a separate entity in the Army's secret world of special operations, with its own commander, a Col. Jerry King. The army's involvement in secret operations would first became known to the House and Senate intelligence committees in early 1982, when they discovered a project known as Yellow Fruit, which ferried undercover Army operatives to Honduras, where they trained Honduran troops for bloody hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua.

Through private front companies, like the ones that supplied Barry Seal with his fleet of smuggling aircraft, Operation Yellow Fruit ferried weapons like rapid-fire cannons to CIA operatives. It was these same operatives who later mined Nicaragua's harbors and raided oil depots, all in violation of Congressional legislation barring the Defense Department and the Agency from taking any action aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas.

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The Army went to outside businessmen and arms dealers to make off-the-books airplane purchases, with funds that had been "laundered" through secret Army finance offices at Fort Meade, Md. More than $325 million was appropriated for the Special Operations Division of the Army between 1981 and the autumn of 1983. Had any of these operations become public then it would have caused enormous political damage to the Reagan Administration's campaign in Central America, according to a 1987 New York Times report by Seymour Hersh.

"Enter CIA Agent Adler Berriman Seal"
The flight plans for Seal's drug enterprise provided the perfect cover for the illicit resupply missions. Seal's planes would fly from Mena to Medellin Cartel airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela, make refueling stops in Panama and Honduras, and then return to Mena, where, en route, the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms in Louisiana.

"His well-connected and officially protected smuggling operation based at Mena accounted for billions in drugs and arms from 1982 until his murder four years later," said Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton in their book Partners in Power. They also reported that coded records of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed Barry Seal on the payroll beginning in 1982.

"My investigation established a conspiratorial period, chronologically, with a first overt act and a last overt act. The first overt act was April 12, 1982," stated Arkansas state criminal investigator Russell Welch, who was charged, he thought, with digging into Seal's Mena activities. Between March and December 1982, according to law enforcement records, Seal fitted nine of his aircraft with the latest electronic equipment, paying the $750,000 bill - as was his custom - in cash.

The effects of Barry Seal's efforts to take weapons one way and bring drugs the other were soon visible, in ruined lives in the U.S. and in the maimed bodies appearing all over Central America.

"Riding the Elephant Herd"
Barry Seal was not alone. When small private planes began to bomb the Nicaraguan capital, resulting in the crash of a Cessna 404 at the Managua airport, an account of how three Cessnas were secretly transported from the New York Air National Guard to Central America for the raid on Managua reached the press. It was later learned that custody of a number of additional planes were moved from the U.S. Air Force in a top-secret Joint Chiefs operation code-named "Elephant Herd," on to the CIA, via a Delaware aviation company where they were armed, and then transferred to their ultimate destination, the Contras.

A senior administration official admitted that small noncombatant military aircraft had been transferred from the Air Force to the Contras through the CIA. One company involved, Summit Aviation, was doing regular business with Barry Seal according to records in his widow's possession. In addition, according to Congressional sources, Summit, known to do Contract work for the CIA, had former CIA personnel on the payroll, and was linked through ownership records to the Cessna that crashed while bombing Managua.

That aircraft, according to FAA records, was purchased by Summit Aviation in October 1982 from Trager Aviation Center in Lima, Ohio. On the same day that Summit purchased the plane, the company sold it to Investair Leasing Corp. of McLean, Va.. Investair, which has an unlisted telephone number, does Contract work for the CIA, according to Congressional sources. Bruce W. Trager, who sold the Cessna to Summit for $308,872, says the deal was "put together" by Patrick J. Foley, Summit's "military director."

In addition to its work for Investair, Summit maintained and modified planes for Armairco, another company involved in covert government projects. Armairco, organized in 1982, also bought several multimillion-dollar Beechcraft King Airs, like Barry Seal's. Those aircraft were purchased directly from Beech in a procedure normally used only for military projects, according to Beech officials and aviation experts.

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When asked whether Armairco's government work included activities in Central America, an Armairco official said, ''That may well be.''


The Beechcraft King Air 200 has been in production since the mid 1970's. A little less than seven hundred of them have been manufactured to date. The twin engine turboprop has a pressurized cabin capable, with different configurations of seating up to nine passengers. It has a cruising speed of approximately 330 mph and a cruising range of more than 1,800 miles. New plane prices in1982 started at around $1,700,000 based on equipment.

N6308F
The convoluted, pretzel-like paper history of the airplane that once belonged to Barry Seal and is today used by Texas Governor George W. Bush begins when the title to the brand new aircraft was first recorded by Portland, Oregon dealer Flightcraft, Inc.

Flightcraft's President, David R. Hinson, a former military and commercial airline pilot active in the Republican Party in Oregon, was, according to The Oregonian, at the time under consideration to head the FAA. The paper stated that Hinson had met with Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole to express interest in the job after travelling to Washington to promote himself for the post. Helping Bill Casey subvert the will of Congress, presumably, did nothing to hurt his chances.

N6308F was spoken for, several times over, even before it arrived at Flighcraft's facilities in the Spring of 1982.

"I don't think we're going to help you - I mean "be able" to help you said a nervous Phil Carrell of Flightcraft, Inc. when contacted for information by FTW. Carrell, a sales executive who was working at Flightcraft when "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" was originally sold, told FTW that as far as he knew any records of the aircraft were no longer in existence. He referred us to the FAA title records for answers. We wish that answers were what we had found.

According to records located by Dan Hopsicker in his investigation, a now defunct Lake Arrowhead, California firm, Ken Miller Aircraft Sales, entered into leasing agreements with developer Eugene Glick in February 1982, two months before the manufacturer's title was transferred to Flightcraft. Ken Miller Aircraft appears nowhere in the FAA title history of the plane. Ken Miller Aviation is also no longer in existence. Nonetheless, in February 1982, Ken Miller Aviation entered into a leasing agreement with real estate magnate Eugene Glick for the brand new aircraft. In that agreement, Glick and his wife agreed to make eighty-four monthly payments of more than $37,000 ($2,835,672) for the airplane which had a new purchase price of $2,010,556. No record linking Ken Miller Aviation to Flightcraft is known to exist.

On paper at least, according to Contracts dating from February of 1982, the plane was owned by a Greyhound Bus Lines subsidiary, Greycas, which in turn leased it to a mysterious Phoenix firm in close proximity to John Singlaub's Enterprise operations named Systems Marketing, Inc." Systems Marketing then leased it to Continental Desert Properties which was the firm owned by Glick. In the final step, Glick leased the plane over to Barry Seal.

In a Contract dated March 21, 1983 N6308F was leased by Continental Desert Properties to Seal's firm Baton Rouge Aviation . Insurance policies found in Seal's private papers confirm that Barry Seal subsequently purchased an insurance policy on the aircraft.

What, exactly, was the purpose of this convoluted ownership record? What was it designed to conceal? The answer lies in the very definition of "tradecraft," a term for what it is that spies and covert operators do to operate in the dark. The "front" companies were in place to act as "cut-outs," layers of insulation, between the spy agency -- in this case Bill Casey's CIA--and the covert operative--, in this case, Barry Seal.

FAA ownership records show that Gene Glick, who lived on Hope Ranch near Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo in Santa Barbara, California, leased "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" as well as several of Barry Seal's other planes during the same years that Seal was most active in drug and weapons smuggling 1982-5. Other documents located by Hopsicker confirm that Glick was also actively helping Seal purchase ocean-going vessels for use in drug smuggling activities and as stationary platforms for the CIA to use off the coast of Nicaragua in covert operations.

An FBI agent had dismissed Glick's importance to Dan Hopsicker, which fueled his suspicions early on. "He's just a money launderer," said Delbert Hahn, who was the Special Agent in Charge of an Inter-Agency Organized Crime Drug Task Force looking into Barry Seal's organization back in the middle 1980s. At least in this case, Glick's behavior was consistent with Iran-Contra "bust out" operations because the lease defaulted in two years. The plane was repossessed.

According to FTW contributing editor Catherine Austin Fitts who, as a former Wall Street investment banker and Assistant Secretary of Housing, served on the Resolution Trust Corporation in the wake of the S&L scandal, "This could have been a substantial cash pay-off to the concerned parties." Fitts, who also served on the "clean-up" committee for BCCI (a bank with abundant connections to CIA covert operations, financial fraud and drug trafficking) observed that the pattern here is typical of those seen by enforcement officials in that era.

“It is worth researching to see if there were substantial cash pay-offs to the concerned parties,” said Fitts. “If the lease were insured at or near its full value and defaulted early as it did here in around two years; if the total value of lease > payments were $2.8 million and if the lessor had paid only $2.1 million for the aircraft then any insurance pay-off or “write down” after only a year or two could have netted a profit of a half million dollars or more for the covert operators. This type of insurance fraud was used routinely during Iran-Contra to finance covert operations”



The CIA Gets Busted --Yet Again
The circle was completed with the discovery that "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot," as well as several other planes used by Barry Seal, was in reality owned by the same company revealed in 1998 bankruptcy proceedings to have owned the notorious CIA airline Southern Air Transport (SAT). Congressional and public records from the era establish Southern Air as a legendary CIA proprietary - second only to Air America - and as being connected to Secord, Singluab, Rodriguez, Casey and George H.W. Bush.

Among its long list of dubious "achievements," Southern Air had owned the C123 used by Seal in the Nicaragua sting operation which made Barry Seal famous. That same aircraft was later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 and the lone survivor Eugene Hasenfus was captured alive by Sandinista soldiers.. That is what started the Iran-Contra scandal to begin with. No one knew--or admitted knowing--just who owned Southern Air Transport back in 1986, although government officials all swore up and down that it wasn't the CIA.

Southern Air's ownership by Greyhound Leasing, which became the entity called Finova, was only disclosed after no one was looking, when SAT went into bankruptcy in 1998. This is the first time the holding company, Finova, has been revealed for what it clearly is, an Agency front, set up in Arizona and headquartered in Canada to escape American financial disclosure requirements.

Suddenly, on June 14, 1984, after passage of the second Boland Amendment and the consolidation of Contra operations under Oliver North the plane was sold twice in one day. According to journalist, producer and author Dan Hopsicker, "This was at a period in time when Barry knew he was on the way out." The plane went first to a mysterious Morgan B. Mitchell of Vale, Oregon, and then to Chevrolet Dealer Merrill Bean of Ogden Utah. Bean, curiously, gave the Dover, Delaware address of the "Prentis Hall [sic] Corporation" on his FAA registration.

Students of the CIA have long been aware of the Agency's affinity for hiding its assets in Delaware shell corporations. But, to be fair, many other companies do so for reasons of convenience. In an interview Bean stated that he had incorporated in Delaware as a legal necessity because of the needs of his investors. "Delaware is a very convenient place for many kinds of corporations to incorporate and many large corporations and multi-nationals do so," Bean told FTW. "Because other companies I was in partnership with were incorporated there I chose to do so also. It was much easier that way and it was a requirement of the partners who were investing."

However, Delaware officials in the Secretary of State's office said that Bean's company, Prentis Hall [not Prentice Hall], does not exist. And in the FAA records connected to Bean's ownership of "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" we find yet another unexplained gap in FAA records. Whenever major mechanical repairs are made on an aircraft, the involved mechanic is required to complete an FAA Form 337. In December 1989, FAA certified mechanic Irvin Strayer installed some routine de-icing equipment on the plane. The mechanic, reviewing what should have been original ownership documents, listed the owner as United Insurance of Ogden Utah. Nowhere in FAA title paperwork does United Insurance appear as an owner. And a spokesman for the Utah State Department of Insurance told FTW that there had never been a United Insurance licensed to do business in the state.

"It was an insurance company that a group of car dealers had formed to handle title and financing and other insurance for car sales," said Bean. "I bought the other guys out of the airplane and had some repairs done before I sold to Corporate Wings."

Someone should have told the FAA. Or perhaps someone changed the FAA's records. Stranger things have happened. Bean does not recall if he changed the records to reflect this or not.

A Likely Suspect
In what will become a long litany of links between Barry Seal's activities and the financial fraud of the 1980's, Merrill Bean was also involved in what The Salt Lake City Tribune called "the worst financial disaster in Utah since the Great Depression." That disaster was the en masse 1980s failure of Utah thrifts -- hybrid financial institutions that offered high interest rates and consumer loans -- and the collapse of the insurance fund that was supposed to protect their deposits.

Because Utah's thrifts were heavily underinsured, the actions of Bean's thrift, Western Heritage Thrift and Loan, left a trail of broken hearts, and broken people.

"We had just moved to Utah from California two years ago," 58-year old Irene Culver told The Salt Lake City Tribune in 1986. "My husband Kent was an aircraft mechanic but he has Parkinson's Disease. We put half our savings in there [Western Heritage] and bought a little fixer-upper with the other half. When the State closed everything, I thought, 'I suppose we're lucky.' My Social Security should start in four years. We were going to put a new roof on and install a gas furnace because the electricity's expensive. Now we can't do it, so we've got half the house closed off."

Bean told FTW, "I was Director of that failed thrift. I came aboard when it was almost going under. And I poured some money into it to try to save it and it didn't happen. I was hoping that my $75,000 that I put into it would help revive it." While admitting that he was on the Board of Directors of Western Heritage, Bean stated emphatically that he was not "a Honcho."

FTW wonders how an obviously savvy businessman who owns several aircraft and car dealerships believed that $75,000 would turn around a failing savings and loan. In The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush, Texas journalist Pete Brewton documented how much of the S&L scandal was connected to Iran-Contra operations and illegal covert operations of the CIA. In many of those schemes a $75,000 or similar "buy-in" might have secured the mighty a seat at a highly-lucrative but completely criminal feeding frenzy.

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'Disappearing' Money

Following the "paper trail" of Barry Seal's King Air 200 revealed connections to some other unsavory perpetrators of the major financial frauds that -- like the S&L scandal -- marred the 1980s. Greyhound Leasing, or "Greycas" for short, was at the center of a huge and seemingly inexplicable financial fraud that, like the half-trillion dollar S&L scandal, no one seemed too concerned about unraveling. The corporation was openly and eventually very publicly looted. Afterwards, company management pretended to be "baffled" as to how it could have happened.

It went down like this:

Greycas Inc. and another Greyhound unit, Greyhound Leasing & Financial Corp., were bilked of over $ 75 million by one Sheldon Player, a former Vernal, Utah, resident assumed to be in the machine and oilfield equipment sales business, who gained the money through fraudulently obtained loans from Greyhound. Greycas then devised an elaborate cover-up scheme to prevent disclosure of details about the loss.

This episode began at the beginning of the 1980's with one $ 600,000 loan. Player and his companies would sell Greycas heavy machine tools, lease them back and then pretend to sublease the expensive devices to end-users. In most cases the machines, which were collateral for the loans, were non-existent.

By 1984, Player had borrowed nearly $ 8 million from Greyhound in the same scheme. That year he asked for $ 40 million in new loans to continue his transactions. A total of $23.5 million had been disbursed by the time the company first got suspicious and confronted Player. He was told the company wanted to inspect the machinery that it was supposed to have owned. Remember, this was a company owned by the CIA front Finova. Player resisted, leading some company executives to wonder about the "integrity of the transactions with Player."

Then, incredibly, despite the company's doubts about Player's credibility and integrity, and in spite of Greycas' inability to make inspections of the equipment, the company lent Player another $ 24 million. In the ensuing months lucky Sheldon Player drew $66 million on the credit line authorized by the company.

This was an Iran-Contra bust-out.

Nice Work if You Can Get It
Anyone who has ever borrowed money for a car or home must admire the chutzpah of Sheldon Player, whom the business press took to calling an "admitted con artist." Yet Player had no history of financial fraud that we could discover before this, which took place at the same time that officers of a Swiss-based subsidiary were defrauding Greycas of another $120 million, in a purportedly unrelated scandal that sent shock waves from Athens to Phoenix.

"Many borrowers failed to make even the initial monthly payment,'' court documents state. The company's accountants wrote that "fraudulent and dishonest acts . . . resulted directly in a loss of $119,684,598." Not so, said the company's hapless General Counsel, who responded, weakly, that the loss has been reduced to a mere $72 million.

The fraud included checks written as bribes on napkins in Swiss restaurants and then set afire… the reported possibility that one of the participants was blackmailing other participants and some mighty upset shareholders who filed lawsuits in Phoenix urging the Greyhound board to take legal action against top officials. The troubling question that puzzled business reporters never were able to answer was this: Why were they giving money away down at Greyhound during the 1980's?

Being Connected Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
The disposition of the resulting criminal trial of Sheldon Player is an illustration of the maxim that in George Bush's America, "Being connected means never having to say you're sorry."

When Sheldon Player was sentenced, he received a five-year sentence. Yup. Five years -- one year for each $13 million he stole. This is clearly a deal that, if offered to regular Americans--as opposed to the CIA-related kind who killed Barry Seal --would have people lining up around the Phoenix Federal Courthouse to sign up. After receiving this draconian sentence Mr. Player was given additional time to settle personal affairs before entering prison. No one can say American justice is not compassionate. And prison, for Mr. Player, consisted of the Lompoc Camp, a minimum-security facility known as one of 10 to 12 "country club" institutions in operation around the nation, according to Dick Murray, community programs manager for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Phoenix.

Former Greycas official Robert Bertrand, who apparently covered up for Player's fraud, lucky fellow, never went to prison. Instead he resigned his position at Greyhound in 1986, and was soon appointed the new President and Chief Executive Officer of Finalco Inc. [Sounds like Finova doesn't it?], an equipment finance and brokerage company which just happens to be based in McLean, Virginia, the home of the CIA.

(Back?) Into the Hands of the Guvnah

Merrill Bean, the Utah Chevy dealer who acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" in 1984 sold the plane in May of 1990 to Corporate Wings of Salt Lake City. Two days later Corporate Wings sold it to Gantt Aviation of Georgetown, Texas, which a month later sold it to the State of Texas Aircraft Pool where it resides today. Johnny Gantt, President of Gantt Aviation told FTW that he probably knew that the State of Texas had a bid out when he acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot". At the time the Governor of Texas was Bill Clements and George "W", a good friend, was owner of the Texas Rangers.

A genial Gantt explained that he had probably been aware that the State was "putting out a bid" for a King Air and scooped up the plane. Press clipping show that Gantt Aviation is a large dealership with a long history of providing planes to the State of Texas. It was a done deal within weeks and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot found the home where it lives happily today.

At the beginning of this article we outlined briefly how a tail number in Barry Seal's papers started this investigation. It actually began when author Terry Reed announced at a Los Angeles public gathering in July, 1999 that a video tape might surface during the 2000 Presidential campaign "showing George W and Jeb arriving at Tamiami Airport in 1985 to pick up two kilos of cocaine for a party. Said Reed, "They flew in on a King Air 200." Subsequent statements made by Barry Seal and recorded in Reed's 1995 book Compromised recount how Seal bragged about how he had video of "the Bush boys" doing coke. Other witnesses located by both writers of this story, who were in relevant official positions in 1985, have confirmed that the described Tamiami sting took place. All, in fear for their lives, have refused to go on the record.

Does George "W" use Zero-Eight-Foxtrot? According to Jerry Daniels, Executive Director of the Texas State Aircraft Pooling Board, "He used to fly on that airplane all the time. He stopped when he became a Presidential candidate because the State won't let you fly its aircraft for political purposes." But FTW learned that if and when Dubyah is back in the state and on state business, he probably will because Dubyah is a licensed pilot and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot is one of his favorites though he doesn't get to pilot much any more.

Said one savvy Pol of George W, "The last thing we need in this country is another President with lingering drug scandals in his past--and maybe present."

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probably quite a good post, but i aint reading it :)

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Who What When Where Why...When Its Convenient

In the official version of George W. Bush’s chronology during his National Guard years is a striking statement which has been totally overlooked in the major media. A timeline of President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard compiled by The Associated Press says, for 1971: “Participates in drills and alerts at Ellington. Begins work for Houston-based agricultural company.”

We always become suspicious when we see the major media get suddenly vague. The AP has no trouble at all with the name of the air base, "Ellington," where Bush was serving. But, about where he was working, they can bring themselves only to say he “works for a “Houston-based agricultural company.”

“A Houston-based agricultural company” is wordy. It's far less work to write “XYZ Company.” So we already knew we would find something juicy hidden here, because reporters are notoriously lazy, and would not have gone to the trouble to construct the line "Houston-based agricultural company" unless prompted to by the exigencies of our capitalist system.

"Reportorial vagueness" is almost always deliberate. The Chicago Tribune, for example, carried a whole story about the mysterious German couple who recruited Mohamed Atta to come to Hamburg from Cairo in 1992. But they never once named the couple. They called them the "M's.

When the media roll over completely on the old “who what when where & why business,” its always for a reason. And the reason is always the same:

Somebody is covering something up.


Tropical Plants and "La Vida Loca" in Houston

“George's job was to travel around the United States and to countries in Central America looking for plant nurseries his company might want to acquire,” read one account.

A profile of George W in 2000 in Texas Monthly said, “George W. Bush’s responsibilities included sizing up plant nurseries for possible acquisition.”

Is it just us? Does anyone else have a problem seeing George W. Bush as Mr. Green Jeans? The idea seems ridiculous on its face, especially as his plant nursery job comes smack dab (as they say in Texas) in the middle of a time when Bush was living la vida loca, partying, boozing, and, persistent rumors allege, doing other drugs as well.

Bush lived at Chateaux Dijon, an apartment complex near the Houston Galleria known for its singles scene, which included water volleyball games in its swimming pools. Friends describe him as taking a hearty approach to his social life, and Bush himself has said famously that he was "young and irresponsible" in Houston, that he "raised a little hell."

We've spent time in Houston. Girls in clubs there don't appear the type to go wild for a man working in a plant nursery. Au contraire.

A jug of wine, a load of bread, and some beautiful pink flowers

Working for a company engaged in the unglamorous plant nursery business could hardly have been seen as a plus in getting girls. Why work there then? Other more dashing pursuits must have been available to young Bush, for those hours when he wasn't patrolling the skies for signs that the Mexican Air Force had launched an all-out attack.

Had it been some kind of aroma therapy? A respite from debilitating drinking bouts amid fragrant and beautiful flowers? Soothing naps underneath baobab trees after throttling screaming warplanes through the wild blue yonder?

Bush, a practical politician in his later years, learned Spanish to court the Hispanic vote. If he spent a year rubbing elbows with horticulturalists, don't you think we'd have heard him boast of this “green” credential?

But where the story really breaks down is here: What did George W. Bush know about tropical plants that made him a horticultural expert sharp enough to be deployed overseas looking for acquisitions?

The question answers itself. The answer is "nothing." So it is not reasonable to conclude that George W. Bush was in the tropical plant business during the year he says he was.

So then, just what business was Bush involved with, while traipsing about Central America with lads from Zapata?


A Coat, a Tie...and a Snub-nosed 38?

Bush himself would later refer to his time at the plant nursery firm as a dull 'coat-and-tie' job, an odd description for a position which entailed jetting to steamy Caribbean capitals chock-full of intrigue.

The MadCowMorningNews uncovered indications that, instead of scouting Spatholottis Plicata (Philippine Ground Orchids) and Strelitzia (Giant Bird of Paradise) tropical shrubs, George W. Bush was serving a ‘tour of duty’ in Central America for a shadowy arm of the U.S. Government which Watergate burglar and disgraced CIA Agent E. Howard Hunt called “Clandestine Services.”

Bush's plant-nursin' jet-flyin' story was the future Presidents “cover” for the unit to which the young second lieutenant was actually detached—officially or otherwise—a massive clandestine U.S. government operation that was going on just then called Operation Condor.

Was George W. Bush working for the spooks?

Such a charge demands evidence, some of which we will shortly present. But first, a little background on the outfit the young George W was so intent on transferring into... the Alabama Guard.


The Secret History of the Alabama Guard

The Alabama Guard, we had discovered while writing “Barry & ‘the boys,’” is rich with the secret history of American covert operations over the last half-century, as far back as 1961, when it was used to “sheep-dipp” (provide legitimate cover) for CIA pilots returning from Guatemala, their base during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Among those pilots was a young man, Barry Seal, who will one day become famous as the biggest drug smuggler in American history.

Although much about the Alabama Guard during this time period still remains veiled, when we interviewed James Harrison, a former member and one of the last remaining living American pilots who flew missions over the Bay of Pigs, we learned that one enduring secret concerns the role American pilots played in it, which went far beyond training exile Cuban pilots and flying combat flights on the last day of the invasion, as the U.S. later admitted.

"Wolf Cookies for Everyone!"


life's a gas when you're in on the joke


Even 40 years later, the stress placed on secrecy about operations he took part in while he was "sheep-dipped" in the Alabama Guard make him reluctant to talk. "I didn't train anyone, frankly," he finally told us, when pressed on the role of the American 'trainers' in Central America. "I was expected to fly combat."

From an Air Guard base in Montgomery, where a decade later George W Bush will, Zen-like, both be and not be, Barry Seal participated in Caribbean and Central American operations which included the assassination on May 30, 1961 of Dominican Republic dictator Raphael Trujillo, whose limo was ambushed returning from a rendezvous with his mistress. Operatives who were there can still be found who will retail, anonymously, colorful anecdotes about the "hit." There's more information in "Barry & 'the boys:' The CIA the Mob & America's Secret History."


"Shut up before you get shot"

"Seal worked for General Reid Doster, who assembled a CIA Air Force that eventually numbered 80 fliers. Seal's Alabama Guard ‘work’ took him, two months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, to Guatemala, where he sent another postcard home, this time bearing a picture of a volcano towering over a deep green jungle.

A daredevil pilot with whom George W. Bush was said to have later been acquainted, Seal had also been drilled on the importance of secrecy concerning his Alabama assignment. He sent a postcard home from Montgomery in June of 1961, (bearing the picture of the “Albert Pike Motel” which boasted of being “completely air-conditioned!”)

On the back he wrote, “Just call me a freedom rider! I’d better shut up before I get shot!”

A decade later another member of the Alabama Guard, George W. Bush, will also be working in Central America.

Barry Seal was flying cover at the Bay of Pigs from Guatemala. George W. was said to have been buying tropical plants there. Was there something "special" about the Alabama Guard?

We continued digging, especially after reading a quote from a Bush friend about the man we're beginning to think of as “George the Green.”

Once or twice a month, the friend stated, Bush would announce that he had flight duty and off he would go, leaving his nursery duties to go fly his F-102. "It was really quite amazing,” Peter Knudtzon told the New York Times. “Here was this young guy making acquisitions of tropical plants and then up and leaving to fly fighter planes."

We find this image amazing as well. It makes Bush sound a little like Clark Kent, changing costumes on the fly. Knudtzon told the Times, “’We traveled to all kinds of peculiar places, like Apopka, Florida, which was named the foliage capital of the world,’ continued the Zapata alumnus who was Stratford's executive vice president and Bush's immediate boss.”

Very seldom does anything in the New York Times make our jaw drop. But the phrase "continued the Zapata alumnus" did.

“A Zapata alumnus?” Selling plants?


Where was George?

For those tuning in late, Zapata Drilling, the offshore oil company owned by George Bush Sr., has been repeatedly alleged by researchers to have been a CIA front, used to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. Even if this notion is dismissed as a fantasy, this question remains:

What kind of career path leads from offshore oil exploration to buying tropical plants?

Since nothing about this story so far seemed to make any sort of business sense, we recalled the words of an executive who worked for Rudi Dekkers. Charlie Voss, called the “bookkeeper’ at Huffman in news accounts, is in reality a retired C-130 pilot. When we asked him why none of Dekker's many money-losing aviation enterprises made any sense, he replied, “Sometimes when things don’t make business sense, it’s because they do make sense, just in some other way.”

Like so many businesses associated with friends of the Bush family, Stratford of Texas, the young George W.’s employer, went bankrupt in such spectacular fashion it later inspired a case study at the Harvard Business School. (Unfortunately for George W, it came after he had already graduated.) So it can't be that 'the boys' at the plant nursery were born to raise orchids, can it?

Reinforcing this point is the amazing fact that the plant nursery co-worker of George W's interviewed by the New York Times wasn’t the only Zapata alumni at Stratford of Texas. The firm’s owner, who had personally hired the young future President to go tramping around Central America looking for hot opportunities in plant nurseries, had himself spent an eight-year stint as V.P. and President of Bush Sr.'s Zapata Drilling, during exactly the years--between '61 and' 69--that the CIA was most active in the Caribbean Basin.

Houston businessman Robert H Gow was a long-time friend of the Bush family, stated published reports. In a profile of Bush’s early years for the 2000 campaign, Texas Monthly called Gow “a Yale man who had roomed with the senior Bush's cousin Ray in college.”

While there have been numerous reports of the large numbers of Yale alumni who have gone from New Haven, Connecticut to Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, Gow's Yalie background proves nothing by itself. But it becomes more suggestive when combined with the startling information that Robert H. Gow is also—like both George W. and his father, George, Sr— a member of the dread bete noir of every conspiracy theorist who can afford a tin foil hat... Skull and Bones.

It does give one pause.

“Yet Skull and Bones was not relegated entirely to George W.'s past after he graduated. In 1971, having been rejected by the University of Texas Law School and needing a job, Bush called a Bonesman, Robert H. Gow,” read a May 1, 2000 Atlantic Monthly story by Alexandra Robbins.

Robbins is selling only a “modified limited hangout” version of Skull and Bones (for the real truth, see our buddy Kris Millegan's Fleshing Out Skull & Bones). But even she felt constrained to mention George W.’s continuing business affiliations with other Bonesmen... “Gow, who later told The Washington Post that his Houston-based agricultural company had not been looking for anyone at the time, hired Bush as a management trainee,” Robbins wrote. “In 1977, when Bush formed Arbusto Energy, his first company, he once again applied to Skull and Bones for financial aid.”

Well now.

We would have to have ourselves a little “look-see” into Robert Gow. And although we were taught by our mother to speak only well of people, after poking through Robert Gow’s curious history and its links to America’s own recent secret history, we think even mom would sign off on this statement:

“There are so many red flags in Robert Gow’s background that it looks like May Day in Red Square.”

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by beds

probably quite a good post, but i aint reading it :)

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Its not finished... :P

there is a saying on the internet:

"TLDR"

which stands for

TO
LONG
DIDN'T
READ

If its to do with Ruskys let me know so I can Ill Mitch the thread up (still not got round to finishing that video yet Sal :P)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AdamGB

Quote:

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Originally Posted by beds

probably quite a good post, but i aint reading it :)

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Its not finished... :P

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that was the end of the first article, under that is another

bedtime over here, i cant read that!