“You can understand why George fit in so well at the CIA,” said Osborne Day, “when you understand that he was one of them . . . and they loved him.”
George approached every job he ever had with the exuberance of a carney barker. At the CIA, he knew he was supposed to restore agency morale. He began with a media offensive to try to make the CIA more palatable to the public. Within his first two weeks on the job he scheduled editorial conferences in New York City and Washington, D.C., with
The New York Times
, the
Daily News
,
The Wall Street Journal
,
Newsweek
,
Time
, the
Washington Star
, and
Women’s Wear Daily
.
A CIA memo from the
Time
luncheon on February 23, 1976, indicated that the magazine had submitted a story for agency approval. When the agency objected,
Time
canceled the story. The CIA information specialist Angus Thuermer briefed George on the matter:
Murray Gart [acting editorial director] is the one who cancelled—when we gave him the implications of the story—a piece about CIA Chiefs of Stations: ’twas to have been a little series of thumbnail sketches. Horrible. We have been able to help
Time
on a corporate basis, as it were, when their businessmen junkets around the world have taken place. Gart was terribly concerned about the businessmen’s security in the Middle East, for example. Our people kept alert.
A cozy relationship had existed for many years between news organizations and the CIA, which had once used reporters as secret agents. The agency also had sent employees abroad under the cover of being accredited to American news organizations. These revelations roiled newsrooms as journalists felt their credibility had been compromised. George urged the news organizations to “bury the past” and keep the names of their reporter-spies secret.
When William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, invited George for lunch on February 4, 1976, he did so as a courtesy to his friendship with George’s late father. Prescott had helped financially structure the company when he was at Brown Brothers Harriman and served on the CBS board for many years. The luncheon, supposed to be a lovefest, quickly turned into a slugfest when George was challenged about the CIA policy of using American reporters as spies. He tried to play down the seriousness of a journalist’s serving two masters and stressed that the agency would keep the names secret. The CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite objected.
“The names should be put on the table for the protection of those not guilty of such behavior,” he said.
Sensing the outrage—and knowing how important it was, personally and professionally, to keep the media on his side—George returned to the agency, where CIA lawyers quickly retooled the policy. The next day George announced that the CIA would no longer hire newsmen working for American publications to do undercover work; nor would the agency recruit clergy to help gather intelligence: “It is the agency policy not to divulge the names of cooperating Americans. In this regard the CIA will not make public now or in the future the names of any cooperating journalists or churchmen.”
George said he did not think using reporters and clergymen for spy purposes was improper but he did recognize the unique position of religion and press freedom in the Constitution. He said the new CIA ban was simply “to avoid any appearance of improper use by the agency.”
A few days later George, still working the media, appeared on
Meet the Press
and talked about the role of the CIA in the nation’s security. Watching him was the singer Frank Sinatra, who decided he would offer his services to the agency. Sinatra told his television producer, Paul W. Keyes, to arrange a meeting for him with the director. George was intrigued by Sinatra’s proposition and agreed to fly to New York City the next day. He invited the singer and his producer for drinks at his brother’s apartment in Gracie Square. He then called Jonathan.
“Are you ready for some guests, including Frank Sinatra, in your apartment at 6:30 p.m.?”
George had hoped to keep his meeting with Sinatra out of the press because he did not want to deal with the political consequences of socializing with a man known to be connected to organized crime. Sinatra had introduced John F. Kennedy to Judith Campbell Exner. She had testified before the Church Intelligence Committee that Sinatra also had introduced her to the Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. Her sexual adventures with all three men established a direct link between the White House and the Mafia. She later would claim to have carried messages from Kennedy to Giancana to assassinate Fidel Castro. In light of these gangland ties, the director of the CIA might have thought twice before meeting with Frank Sinatra, but George could hardly wait to meet the Mafia’s favorite movie star.
George showed up early at his brother’s apartment on February 23, 1976, accompanied not by Barbara but by Jennifer Fitzgerald. They had flown together from Washington to New York City on a government plane.
“It was a great evening,” recalled Jonathan Bush. “Sinatra made a very sincere and generous offer to help the CIA in any way possible. He said he was always flying around the world and meeting with people like the Shah of Iran and eating dinner with Prince Philip and socializing with the royal family of Great Britain. He emphasized time and again that his services were available and that he wanted to do his part for his country . . . I thought it was kind of nice of Frank Sinatra. He was very natural and I was spellbound.”
The sixty-one-year-old singer talked about his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and spoke with great feeling about his family and his love of children and his love of country.
“We all feel that way,” said George.
When Sinatra offered again to put his personal contacts to work for the good of the United States, George tried to be humorous. “There is some special work you could do for us in Australia, Frank.”
Luckily for George, the singer, known for his violent temper, laughed at the allusion to his much-publicized concert tour. Sinatra had lacerated Australia’s press as “a bunch of bums and parasites who have never done an honest day’s work in their life.” He called the men “a bunch of fags” and the women “buck-and-a-half hookers.” His coarse comments caused such an uproar that the country’s 114 unions went on strike, and the stagehands, waiters, and transport workers refused to work for him, forcing Sinatra to cancel his tour.
Over drinks that evening the singer dazzled the Bush brothers, who were enthralled to be in his presence. “We felt like applauding after he left,” Jonathan said. “We had a big laugh about it and then we all got smashed.”
Up to that point, George’s closest contact with Hollywood had been Jerry Weintraub, the producer. They had become friends when Weintraub married the singer Jane Morgan, who grew up in Kennebunkport, not far from the Bushes’ summer retreat. The producer became George’s staunchest supporter in Hollywood, where he entertained the Bushes at dinner parties and raised thousands of dollars for George’s various political campaigns, and later for those of young George.
From the outside George Herbert Walker Bush looked as straight as a rep tie, but over the years he had tiptoed outside the confines of his regimented world to walk on the wild side. “He liked to sneak out here to make the rounds with Jerry and hang out with movie stars,” said a well-known screenwriter. Years later, Weintraub was dubbed by
Spy
magazine as George Bush’s “most embarrassing friend.” George called him “Mr. Hollywood.”
George was equally entranced with being director of the CIA. “It’s the most exciting job I’ve had to date,” he told friends. He signed personal letters “Head Spook.” Like a little boy with a Halloween costume, he even tested agency disguises by wearing a red-haired wig, false nose, and thick glasses to conduct an official meeting. “He got a big kick out of that,” said Osborne Day.
George monitored all media references to the agency and did not hesitate to request secret files. According to CIA memos released under the Freedom of Information Act, he seemed especially curious about information pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In one memo, dated September 15, 1976, he asked his deputy director to look into the news accounts that linked Lee Harvey Oswald’s assailant, Jack Ruby, to the mobster Santos Trafficante. Bush wrote: “A recent Jack Anderson story referred to a November 1963 CIA cable, the subject matter of which had some UK journalist observing Jack Ruby visiting Trafficante in jail (in Cuba). Is there such a cable? If so, I would like to see it.”
In a memo dated September 9, 1976, George asked about another Jack Anderson column that said CIA records showed the former CIA Director John McCone had briefed Lyndon Johnson about the JFK assassination and suggested that “the Cubans may have been behind the assassination.” George wrote in the margin of the column: “Is this true?”
A few days later he received a five-page CIA memorandum that disputed the allegations.
Still another memo, dated October 4, 1976, concerned an article saying that contrary to sworn testimony by Richard Helms, there was a CIA document that indicated a low-level CIA official had once considered using Oswald as a source of intelligence information about the Soviet Union. George wrote: “Will this cause problems for Helms?”
Years later, when George became President of the United States, he would deny making any attempt to review the agency files on the JFK assassination. When he made this claim, he did not realize that the agency would release eighteen documents “in full” and “in part” that showed he had indeed, as CIA director, requested information—not once but several times—on a wide range of questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination.
As CIA director, George testified before Congress fifty-one times during his 355-day tenure. By then he had perfected the “bending” and “stretching” of truth that he had first noted in his RNC diary. George was as smooth as an eel slithering through oil. His lies on behalf of the CIA ranged from outright falsehoods and adamant denials to obfuscations and evasive omissions.
He dragged his feet in providing information to Justice Department prosecutors in their case against Richard Helms, who had lied to Congress about the CIA’s role in the 1973 military coup in Chile.
He covered up the CIA’s lies to Congress about Cuban involvement in Angola, and he denied the CIA had planted false propaganda in the U.S. press about the Soviets in Angola.
He pushed the Justice Department to prosecute the
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward for publishing the first account of CIA electronic surveillance of government representatives in Micronesia. Bush maintained that Woodward had violated the Signals Intelligence Act, which makes it a felony to publish any classified information. Yet Bush withheld the CIA files that would have proved the agency’s involvement. So the Justice Department dropped the case against the journalist.
He refused to cooperate with the investigation into the Washington, D.C., bombing of the car of the former Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, that killed Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a colleague from the Institute of Policy Studies. The murder was directed by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s secret service, and the CIA knew that two of the assassins were in the United States at the time of the bombing. Needing to cover up the CIA’s involvement with the Chilean secret service, George directed the agency to leak the story that the bombing was the work not of the obvious suspects but of leftists looking to create a martyr for their cause.
“Look, I’m appalled by that bombing,” George told Justice Department lawyers. “Obviously we can’t allow people to come right here into the capital and kill foreign diplomats and American citizens like this. It would be a hideous precedent. So as director, I want to help you. As an American citizen I want to help. But as director I also know that the Agency can’t help in a lot of situations like this. We’ve got some problems.” George then turned to the CIA’s general counsel. “Tell them what our problems are.”
When George took his oath of office, he swore to uphold the laws of the country, which as of February 1976 included Executive Order 11905, known as the assassination ban: “No employee of the U.S. Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in political assassination.”
In an interesting confluence of history, the assassination ban was relaxed in 2001 by his son George W. Bush, then President, who authorized the agency to seek the death of Osama bin Laden and members of Al Qaeda after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In 2002 President Bush also said he was prepared to rescind the ban in order to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
As director of the CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush never appeared at any congressional hearing or intelligence briefing without at least three agency experts. “I had serious contact with him when he was CIA director because I was the point man for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff for dealing with the intelligence community,” said Pat Holt. “We were George and Pat in those days. He came up to talk to the chairman and the ranking Republican member and me when he wanted covert action. In contrast to his predecessor [William Colby], who always came alone, George always brought people with him . . . But he was more forthcoming than most, and I found him right up there in the top rank of CIA directors whom it was easiest to get along with . . . But he was certainly not in the top rank of CIA directors like Colby and Helms who were informed and knowledgeable. Those guys were in a class by themselves. Both had come out of OSS and into the CIA . . . real pros. George was hardly a pro.”
George confirmed his amateur status as “Head Spook” when he flew from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and bounded off the plane with Representative Barry Goldwater’s suitcase, leaving his own behind. The Associated Press reported the “mix up” and wondered if the CIA director felt the same embarrassment a spy feels when he loses his underwear.