GEORGE BUSH'S EARLY ASSOCIATION WITH CIA
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Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570010-1
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RIPPUB
Original Classification:
K
Document Page Count:
26
Document Creation Date:
December 22, 2016
Document Release Date:
May 22, 2012
Sequence Number:
10
Case Number:
Publication Date:
July 14, 1988
Content Type:
OPEN SOURCE
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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 (301) 656-4068
STAT
PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
Interview and Viewer Call-In
July 14, 1988 9:00 A.M.
George B"ush's Early Association with CIA
Washington, D.C.
BRIAN LAMB: Joseph McBride, you have a lead article in
this week's Nation magazine that starts off like this: "Vice
President George Bush's resume is his most highly touted asset as
a candidate. But a recently discovered FBI memorandum raises the
possibility that, like many resumes -- it raises that
possibility, but like many resumes, it omits some facts the
applicant would rather not talk about. Specifically, that the
worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1963, more than a
decade before he became its Director."
Why did you care about this?
JOSEPH MCBRIDE: Well, originally I was researching the
Kennedy assassination and I was looking through FBI files that
were released about ten years ago under the Freedom of Informa-
tion Act, and I just came across George Bush's name. And it was
a surprise to me. I didn't really know that he was with the CIA
back then. And, however, I assumed at the time that I found this
document that everybody must know this. And it was just stated
in the document that J. Edgar Hoover had written to the State
Department a week after the assassination to summarize a briefing
that was given to,: quote, Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency, and it was about the reaction of the anti-Castro
Cuban exiles in Miami to the assassination.
And it kind of piqued my interest that George Bush was
involved, but I put it aside. And when he started running for
President, in the current campaign, I began reading a lot more
about his background, and I noticed that nobody was referring to
this experience that he had. Obviously, everybody knows that he
became Director in 1975, but nobody was commenting on the earlier
period. And so I began studying this very carefully and found
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? . NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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out, according to his autobiography, he doesn't mention this
period. And there is a biography of him written by one of his
aides in 1980, and everybody says he was just an oilman at the
time, in the late '50s to the early '60s.
So, I began doing a story on this. And this office
denies this report, but I have sources who confirm that it was
indeed the Vice President.
LAMB: What difference does it make?
MCBRIDE: Well, that's a good question. I mean I've
been on some -- there's been a lot of interest in this story the
last couple days and I've been on several shows in different
parts of the country, radio shows and things. And some people --
people who like George Bush apparently think it's, you know, an
asset to him. They think it's one more reason they might vote
for him.
So, if you like the CIA, maybe there isn't anything
wrong with it. But if you don't like the CIA, maybe there is
something wrong. So I guess it's kind of a referendum on what
people think of the CIA.
But basically, there's other issues. I mean why doesn't
he admit this? That's an important issue. Why is he keeping
this a secret?
LAMB: Let me read a paragraph that you wrote in this
issue, and this is the issue dated July 16/23. A two-week --
what is it, a biweekly?
MCBRIDE: In the summer it comes out every two weeks,
and this came out on Monday, hit the stands Monday.
LAMB: "Informed of this memorandum, the Vice
President's spokeman Stephen Hart asked, 'Are you sure it's the
same George Bush?' After talking to the Vice President, Hart
quoted him as follows: 'I was in Houston, Texas at the time and
involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was
running for the Senate in late '63. Must be another George
Bush,' added Hart."
MCBRIDE: Well, this is what they said about -- this was
maybe ten days ago when I first called them about the story. I
was almost done with the story and I wanted to check their
response. I asked Mr. Hart if he had any evidence that there was
another George Bush, and he admitted that he didn't. He just was
speculating.
And then I called the CIA and I spoke to a spokesman
there, who told me that -- first of all, he seemed very surprised
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STAT
STAT
day and he said, "I can neither confirm nor deny." That's all
J
when I told h-im about this memo. Then he called back the next
said about the possibility of another George Bush and I said
And then I told him what the Vice President's office had
Could you check to see if there was another one back in t
early '60s?"
And he seemed kind of confused, flustered. And he said,
"Twenty-seven years ago? I doubt it very much." He says, "In
any case, we can't comment on whether somebody was connected
with the CIA."
So, that's where that thing wound up. But nobody has
mentioned this other George Bush since the story hit the media on
Sunday.
LAMB: Is there a chance that you're not right or that
it is not the same George Bush?
MCBRIDE: Well, I'm leaving the benefit of the doubt
open, although I do have sources who were close to the
intelligence community who tell me that it's the same person.
However, you know, I'm trying to leave him the benefit of the
doubt, if somebody would come forward and prove that he's the
other George Bush. I do think it's quite unlikely.
But I wrote the article to raise the question more than
to, you know, set the words in stone.
LAMB: Why did Nation put it as their lead story this
MCBRIDE: Well, I guess you'd have to ask them. But I
just -- this' all happened rather quickly. I just sent them the
article about a week or ten days ago. And I think it's -- from
the response we're getting from the public, it's quite a topic of
conversation.
LAMB: Okay. Put the worst case on it. Let's say this
is accurate. What does it mean?
MCBRIDE: Well, you know, there's a lot of questions.
What was the CIA doing in the early '60s? All kinds of things.
And Bush himself, when he was confirmed in 19 -- when he had his
confirmation hearings in 1975 as Director of the CIA, criticized
the CIA for some of the activities they had done in the early
'60s, such as the assassination plots against foreign leaders,
Castro in particular. And he said it was morally offensive to
him that the CIA had done these things, and he vowed that he
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would not indulge in those kind of practices as Diector. And he
criticized what he called the excesses'of the CIA. And this was
around the time the Church Committee was investigating these
plots, and there was a lot of highly critical comment in the
public about the CIA at the time.
So, I -- this is speculation as to why he wouldn't want
to admit this period of activity. If it is true, it creates a
problem for him because he hasn't admitted this all these years.
And I can see -- I mean there is a need for secrecy with agents
of the CIA. Nobody disputes that. But if you're running for
President, that's a whole different ball of wax, I think,
because I think we have a legitimate need to know everything
about Dukakis,'Jackson, Bush. And I'd like to know whatever they
did.
I mean if there's a period in Dukakis's past where we
don't know what he did for several years, I think that would be a
problem too.
LAMB: Go back and go over the years again. And what
was Mr. .Bush doing, according to your information, and what years
was he attached to the CIA?
MCBRIDE: Well, that isn't totally determined. Accor-
ding to his official resume, he was in the oil business from the
late '50s through 1966 in Texas, and it was based in Houston. It
was a company called the Zapata Offshore Company. And according
to the biography of him and the autobiography, he was focusing
his activities on the Caribbean and off the coast of South
America in those years, in the early '60s. And he was active in
the Republican Party. The first activity he mentions is 1956, he
was doing some work for Eisenhower, just campaign volunteer work.
In '62, he became the Chairman of the Harris County
Republican Party in Houston and did that for a couple of years,
and in '64 ran for the Senate against Ralph Yarbrough and was
defeated. Then he became congressman for two terms, and then he
lost to Lloyd Bentsen in 1970 after Bentsen beat Yarbrough in the
primary.
So, that's what's officially known. But my sources tell
me that Bush began working with the CIA in '60 or '61. So he
apparently, and my sources confirm this, was using this oil
business as a cover for activities that were clandestine.
LAMB: Tell us about The Nation. We've had the editor.
MCBRIDE: Victor Navasky.
LAMB: Victor Navasky on a program before. We talked to
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him at great length. As a matter of fact, I think I remember him
saying he went to school with Michael .Dukakis.
MCBRIDE: Oh. I didn't know that.
LAMB: The Nation. Describe what kind of a magazine it
is, if somebody had not read it.
MCBRIDE: Well, it's been around since 1865 and it has a
very high reputation. And I was impressed by the fact that three
weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, they broke the story. And
very few other American publications -- The New York Times
wouldn't run the story, for example. They had the story, and
President Kennedy persuaded them not to run it. And Kennedy
later said it was a mistake. But The Nation Had the Story. And,
you know, I'm impressed by things like that. They're a pretty
gutsy publication.
LAMB: Have you written for them before?
MCBRIDE: No. This is the first time I've done that.
LAMB: And you live in Los Angeles.
MCBRIDE: That's right.
LAMB: How long ago did you get this information?
MCBRIDE: Well, as I was mentioning, I was doing some
research on the Kennedy assassination. This was some time ago.
Actually, I think a couple of years ago that I was going through
all these documents. There's a hundred thousand pages of FBI
files on the assassination that were released in '77 and '78, and
anybody can go look at them. They're either at the FBI or on
microfilm in a lot of libraries. And I was going through this
microfilm stuff, and a lot of it is chaff. You know, there's a
lot of letters and clippings and field reports of different
kinds. But there's a tremendous amount of real revealing
information in these files, and very few people seem to have
looked at these things.
I found some articles. At the time these came out, the
stories said that the press didn't seem very interested. Like
about ten reporters showed up to look at the material. And then
the next day in The New York Times and The Washington Post, there
were stories that there were no surprises in his batch of
documents. Well, nobody can look at a hundred thousand documents
in one or-two days. So I don't know how they could say there are
no surprises.
LAMB: Actually, when did you look at these documents?
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MCBRIDE: This was a couple years ago, two or three
years ago, I think.
LAMB: And you just found this particular...
MCBRIDE: Well, I was saying, I found -- this was just a
document that was a peripheral kind of thing at the time, because
I thought, "Well, it's interesting George Bush is mentioned in
this document," but I didn't attach great significance to it
because I wasn't familiar enough with his background to realize
that this was not common knowledge.
LAMB: What kind of reaction are you getting when you go
on talk shows or call-in shows from the public, and also from the
journalists?
MCBRIDE: Well, I'm getting -- apparently, it's a
subject of great fascination around the country. Oddly enough, I
was on a show in Pittsburgh a couple of days ago, and people
called in and they were saying that it was terrific, you know,
great, that they were going to vote for Bush even more now
because they liked the fact that he was with the CIA longer than
they thought, you know. One man says it gives him an aura of
mystery which he didn't have before, a kind of romantic
derring-do quality. And another person said it destroys his wimp
factor for all time.
LAMB: What's your reaction to that when you hear it?
MCBRIDE: Well, that's okay. I mean I think it's people
see it according to how they see the CIA.
I think that there are certain issues that people might
miss. For example, the question of accountability and secrecy.
You know, it's like with the Gary Hart thing. There are two
issues. One is he went off on the boat with the model. And the
second one is that he didn't tell us about it. You know.
So, it's not exactly a question, do you like the CIA,
or don't you like the CIA? It's more a question of why won't
Bush tell us more about this.
LAMB: _ Give us your reaction to what Mr. Bush's
office -- or, how Mr. Bush's office treated you when you came in
with the questions. I know you-specifically quote them in here.
But what was the general feeling you had when you talked to them?
MCBRIDE: Well, they were quite polite, but they were a
little -- you know, I think that they would like to just brush it
off and hope the story goes away. And the reaction they gave to
the other media after my story appeared was almost word-for-word
what they told me. They just said, you know, the quote you read
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about how he was in the oil business, and just deny it.
But, so far, I haven't seen any evidence of Bush being,
you know, really grilled by the press on this. He's appeared a
few places, but he hasn't -- as far as I know, he hasn't been put
on the spot by a Sam Donaldson or anybody like that.
LAMB: Time to go to the phones. Our special guest, who
is based in Los Angeles, is Joe McBride. He's a free-lance
writer, has written a biography of Frank Capra, soon to be out.
MCBRIDE: Yeah. It'll be out
in a few months.
LAMB: He's lived in Los Angeles for about 15 years,
worked as a screenwriter and a reporter for Daily Variety, a
trade magazine, also was a reporter for the Wisconsin State
Journal in Madison, Wisconsin and for the Riverside Press
Enterprise in California. Attended the University of Wisconsin
in Madison, 1965-1969.
And it's hard to see -- and we will take a phone call
here very shortly -- but this is printed in The Nation, and
you've got a larger version of it. I'll hold it up here because
it's real hard to read it. Although I'm not sure it makes a
whole lot of difference, because the camera can get real close on
this.
What is this?
MCBRIDE: Well, that's the FBI document. It's a memo
from J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department, November 29th,
1963, on the assassination of President Kennedy. And in the last
paragraph there, there is a reference to George Bush of the
Central Intelligence Agency.
LAMB: You're talking about this?
MCBRIDE: Right down there. Yeah.
LAMB: Right here. And we'll get a closeup of that so
that our audience can see it. We should have that here, right
where my finger is..
MCBRIDE: That's right.
LAMB: A reference to-George Bush.
What do you plan to do with this story next?
MCBRIDE: Well, I'm here to follow up on it, and just
checking around to see what else I can turn up.
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LAMB.- Okay. Let's go to the phones. First call for
this hour.
New York City. Go ahead, please.
MAN: I think it's quite interesting that this issues
seems to surface [unintelligible] fashion. It was just over a
month ago that a young woman reporter on your morning show was
saying that one of the aspects of George Bush's resume which he
could tout over the country was the fact that he had been CIA
Director. And at that time I did call to express a point of view
which I'd like to try and briefly reinforce and see what Mr.
McBride's reaction.
In the British court system, much as a butcher may be
prized as a useful profession, he is not permitted to serve on a
jury. The belief being that the nature of his work, through no
fault of his own, may desensitize him to the nature of suffering.
And it seems to me that with respect to our CIA, through no
fault of these -- through no fault of their own, these patriotic
individuals are subjected to a type of training which teaches
them to do a lot of things which the CIA is known for doing. And
it may be all for America, but it is very often things which we
would tend to consider illegal if they were done in our own
country.
LAMB: How does this relate to George Bush, sir?
MAN: Well- what I'm getting to is the idea that
perhaps, just as the British feel that a butcher, though he may
be prized as a useful profession, should not serve on a jury, we
might come to a point where we consider the need to carefully
cordon off the CIA from the rest of our civilian government.
LAMB: Okay. Thanks.
MCBRIDE: Well, as I understand, I guess the question
is, does being in the CIA possibly disqualify you from being
President or holding political office? Is that the gist of it?
It's kind of a curious paradox that George Bush's
background, whenever he was appointed to an important job, which
he was appointed to a whole succession of jobs, as U.N. Ambassa-
dor, liaison officer to China, head of the Republican National
Committee, etcetera, people would always say, "Well, what is his
background? What is his experience?" And the U.N. thing, for
example, people said, "Why is he qualified? What foreign policy
experience does he have? He's just a two-term congressman who
was defeated for the Senate," and all this. And apparently he
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had a lot of background that we didn't know about that accounts
for the Presidents appointing him to all these positions.
But the criticism that he got back then was that he was
too much of a politician, and not a diplomat and not a
professional intelligence man, etcetera. And it's very ironic,
in light of this information, apparently the people who appointed
him knew something that we didn't know, and even the members of
Congress didn't know.
So, now the question is the other way around. Is an
intelligence man the kind of person we want for President? I
think there's some serious questions about that. Because, you
know, Tom Wicker said in The New York Times a couple of months
ago that a CIA man could be blackmailed as President because of
things that he knows and things that he might have been involved
in, or something like that.
LAMB: Pampa, Texas, for Joe McBride.
MAN: ...I have a couple of questions, or a couple of
comments, I guess. It seems that McBride is editorializing as
much as he is producing facts. And I don't know what difference
it makes if George Bush later became head of the CIA and was a
member of it some nearly 40 years ago. So I don't think -- I
just don't know what difference it makes, unless it's just a
matter of trying to get publicity for himself.
Number two, I don't think that people are real inter-
ested in the fact that Bentsent is going to be a Vice President
candidate for the Democrats. And I think that, from my viewpoint
and from this area in Texas, I don't think that Bentsen is going
to help the Democratic Party one iota.
LAMB: Okay, sir. Thank you.
Is this a publicity stunt on your part?
MCBRIDE: Oh, no. I mean I'm really interested in
trying to find out, just for my own personal interest, what goes
on behind the scenes of our country. There's a lot of things in
the last 20-30 years that we didn't know about that we're
happening that.-'- you know, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
Watergate, all kinds of things that if we had known at the time
what was going on, we might have voted differently.
And I think this could be a case of we're being asked to
vote for a man for President we don't know a lot about. I mean
we don't really know much about what he's been doing for the last
seven years as Vice President, and he doesn't like to talk about
it.
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I was reading the other day that one of his aides was
saying that Bush, off-camera, apparently is kind of an
interesting guy to talk to. He's a relaxed, kind of candid
fellow. But when he gets on-camera, he gets tense and stiff and
all that. And the reason is that he doesn't like to be quoted
for the record, is what the aide said.
And so maybe he has a problem talking about his record.
And I think that -- you know, I'd like to know, if we're going to
vote for somebody for President, what his qualifications are.
LAMB: This is the article in The Nation magazine for
this week.
We go to Beverly Hills, California.
MAN: I wish the public will get something -- the public
should know something which Mr. -- this gentleman doesn't
explain. The Nation is a very leftist, communist-oriented
magazine. There's a writer there by the name of Cockburn, an
English guy, who's father used to be one of the heads of the
British Communist Party.
Here in Beverly Hills, we call The Nation "The Communist
Manifesto," by the way.
Regarding the article about Vice President Bush, his
office never denied it. They said "no comment." I wish you'd
get that fact straight.
Number two, you never criticize the-KGB. You never
criticize the KGB being in Nicaragua and organizing the
one-billion-dollar armament which the Nicaraguan government is
getting.
The point is here: Thank God we have the CIA. If the
Communists, the Russians have the KGB, we'd better have the CIA.
And if Mr. Bush worked at that time, that is a secrecy. He never
denied it. He said "no comment."
LAMB: Okay. Let's ask Joe McBride if that's true.
MCBRIDE: Well, I just want to say something about The
Nation. I mean I think it's kind of a McCarthyite tactic to call
The Nation a communist-oriented publication, whatever he said. I
mean certainly it's more on the left than not. But I think it's
a very independent-minded magazine.
And one reason I thought of The Nation is I admire a
book by Victor Navasky called "Naming Names," which is a terrific
sudy of the McCarthy period and the blacklist in Hollywood, in
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11
which he denounces the kind of statement that was just made about
communist witch-hunting.
Second of all, he says Bush's office does not deny the
charge. I don't know. What they said to me, this business about
Bush says, "I was an oilman. I was running for the Senate,"
period. And then I called back, because we wanted to get them to
expand on this a little more. This was before the article
appeared. And the spokesman said that Bush had said, "I don't
know. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." But
then they said, "Well, maybe you shouldn't quote this," or
whatever.
But I notice that in the press since then there have
been statements, "The Vice President issued a denial through his
spokesman."
LAMB: I read a quote in your article from Stephen Hart
of Mr. Bush's office: "I am a spokesman. However you want to
write it, the answer is no regarding Bush's alleged 1963
involvement with the CIA."
MCBRIDE: Yeah. It's a little -- they are denying it,
but they aren't putting out a lot of words from the Vice
President himself. I sense a certain effort to distance himself
from the denial a little bit.
LAMB: Roanoke, Virginia, you're on with Joe McBride.
MAN: Two points. Okay, one, could George Bush still be
under oath of confidentiality, where he cannot reveal he was a
member of the CIA?
Also, as the man before mentioned, that the CIA is too
desensitized to serve in political office. Wouldn't it also
exclude war veterans, like John Kennedy and George Washington,
who would also be severely desensitized?
LAMB: All right,
sir. Thank you.
MCBRIDE: Is he under an oath? I gather that they do
feel that they have an oath that they should not reveal things
that they know from their years as CIA people.
An interesting thing to think about. During the Warren
Commission investigation, there was a secret session of the
commission, which was later declassified, in which they were
discussing' the question, could Lee Harvey Oswald have worked for
the CIA? There was a lot of talk about this. And they asked
Allen Dulles, who was one of the commissioners -- he was a former
Director of the CIA -- would the CIA ever admit if Oswald had
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been an agent? And Dulles said that the CIA would not admit,
even under oath, that somebody had been an informant or an agent.
And the only way they could be persuaded to do otherwise is if
the President of the United States issued a direct order.
LAMB: What about his comparison with John Kennedy and
George Washington?
MCBRIDE: Well, I mean the military is different from
clandestine intelligence. I mean there's no secret that John
Kennedy was in the Navy, for example. I mean books were written
about his Navy service and there were people hasing over the
PT-109 incident. He never covered it up or anything.
LAMB: Auburn, Massachusetts. Go ahead, please.
WOMAN: If anybody's going to do it, The Nation will do
it to start the ball rolling before an election.
You know, early in the '70s, when one of my sons was
flying for the Navy, there was Nixon's impeachment and Church's
investigation into multinationals and the CIA, I was so incensed
that my son was going to go down in flames for a rotten govern-
ment. I was a real person, a mother, that through the '60s and
'70s kept her kids straight away from all the garbage that they
had to see on campus. And I worried my son was going to go down
in flames for a lousy government.
This is nothing new. And I'm glad you're bringing it
out. And I want to ask you a couple of things about Bush's
involvement. Because a few years ago on television, when Reagan
invaded Grenada, he was seeing old friends in Grenada from his
old World War II days as an OSS officer. And we all know that
OSS became part of the CIA. I want you to talk about George Bush
as CIA Director in '75 and '76, when Bill Colby, former CIA
Director, became part of the Nuganhand network as chief counsel,
when Secord and all that bunch worked for George Bush in this
Nuganhand network for the same activity, weapons and drug-
running, like this Iran and Central America thing recently
revealed.
Would you also talk about the taxpayer-funded National
Endowment for Democracy, Ollie North's [unintelligible], as
Reagan bragged about, which has been involved all over the world
to infiltrate and disrupt, create crisis through paid youth
groups, unions, churches, educational institutions, with
corporate. laundering of the monetary contribution, to create
crisis to enable us to overthrow leaders we don't like?
A recent article in The New York Times, 7/10/88, by
Robert [unintelligible] revealing this NED activity right now in
Poland, exactly as we're seeing in Nicaragua, Panama, and other
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Central American countries, all funded by appropriations to the
State Department for Charles Wick, who runs NED money expendi-
tures, who is head of USIA, and to pay for these crooked CIA
activities, for other Ollie Norths,.Secords, and the bunch that
are now being indicted.
LAMB: Okay. We'll let you go at that because we've
got a lot of calls.
MCBRIDE: That's a real complex question, you know.
Gen
erally speaking, I mean one thing I could say is that
this inf
orm
ation about Bush's 25-year, or longer, association
with the
CIA
would certainly raise a lot of questions about the
Iran-Cont
ra
business. And there's been a lot of allegations that
Bush was
inv
olved with the resupply people and Oliver North and
Felix Rod
rig
uez and all these characters. And this would tend to
put this
in
a much clearer perspective. Although, you know, Bush
says he
was
out of the room when Shultz and Weinberger were
objecting
to
the deal, etcetera, etcetera.
So,
you can see patterns in Bush's career more clearly,
perhaps.
And what he did as CIA Director, we don't know much
about that, either. According to Gail Sheehy in this new book
"Character," she says that Bush seems to have left little imprint
on the CIA, and it on him." But this, I think, is just because
we haven't managed to penetrate the secrecy, that history hasn't
caught up with this period. And Bush's spokesman said to me that
Bush doesn't talk much about that period.
So, again, what was he doing back then? We don't know
much about that.
LAMB: Oxnard, California. Go ahead, please.
WOMAN: Offhand, I'd like to congratulate you for -- Mr.
McBride for actually digging into things. It's been my impres-
sion from C-SPAN that the Washington press corps does nothing but
just talk to each other too much and that they don't really go
out and dig for facts. And I think maybe it takes somebody from
the West to be a?little bit more of a nonconformist.
My question, though, is, is it possible that this
brilliant businessman -- they're always talking about how Bush
was such,a great businessman -- that maybe his company was a
front, was a CIA company, and -- do you know what I mean?
MCBRIDE: Yeah. I think that -- well, my source, one of
my sources that worked for the CIA in that period said that Bush
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used it as a -cover for his activities,. and that he would travel
around, and while he was working as an oilman, he would be doing
-- but this is a common thing the CIA does. They have business-
men who -- sometimes they just give information back and forth,
or pass information, or they will do a job here and there for the
CIA. Then they have fronts, which generally means that the
company is a dummy corporation which is really a CIA asset
masquerading as something else.
Now, I don't know enough about Bush's company to make
unequivocal statements about what exactly -- how legitimate the
company was.
LAMB: Joe McBride is a free-lance writer based in Los
Angeles, has an article that leads The Nation magazine for July
16 and 23.
We go next to Tallahassee. Go ahead, please.
MAN: I want to get this straight. Now, this period is
1963 that we're talking about his involvement with the CIA?
MCBRIDE: Well, the document that I found, the hard
black-and-white document, is November 29th, 1963, dealing with
the Kennedy assassination, which took place a week earlier.
MAN: And when did Mr. Bush run for Congress?
MCBRIDE: Well, he ran for the Senate in '64, was
defeated by Yarbrough. And then he was elected in '66 to the
House of Representatives.
MAN: Well, I must tell you, I'm a candidate for public
office here in Florida. And I'm really shocked that someone
could have this kind of information in the background and really
not make it available to the public. I think that's a violation
of public trust. And I'm concerned that Mr. Bush would
essentially hide something of a pretty significant nature.
If you're an intelligence agent and you're running for
Congress, that raises several issues, to my mind, that I think
would have to be:%thoroughly explained. I would like to know if
the individual that was running for public office had severed his
ties with the Agency. Were they getting assistance from the
Agency when they were running for public office?
And this raises a very, very critical issue in my mind,
and I'm a,little disturbed. This does add a troubling edge to
Mr. Bush's background that I hadn't really thought about.
LAMB: Caller, what office are you running for?
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MAN::-I'm running for the local elections office, as a
matter of fact.
LAMB: Which party?
MAN: Democrat Party.
LAMB: Okay. Thanks.
Joe McBride?
MCBRIDE: Well, I agree with the caller that this is
something we should know about. I mean the President of the
United States, we should know everything there is to know. And
secrecy kind of goes by the boards. I mean look at the scrutiny
of people's medical records and marital problems and all these
things which we feel bear on the White House.
And certainly when you're talking about public office,
when this is apparently George Bush's first job with the U.S.
Government, that's important, regardless of what he did at the
CIA. And then we have the question, what was he doing and why
can't we know about this? What activities was he actually
involved in back then?
LAMB: Dunedin, Florida. You're next.
MAN: ...I'm glad to see somebody digging into that
Kennedy assassination and all them CIA boys down there, and
Roosevelt -- Johnson having [unintelligible], and Ruby walking in
and shooting that man in the Los Angeles jail. And I have a
little background with the mob, and I've heard how they let him
in there to shoot Ruby.
And just keep on digging into that deal, and that'll all
come out someday, how they bumped him and the colored leader off,
between the Kennedys and Hoover and Johnson, got the one, CIA,
and Johnson got the other one. So you just keep digging into
that. It'll come out sometime.
Thank you.
LAMB: Thanks, caller.
Your book on Frank Capra. Who is he and why'd you write
MCBRIDE: Well, he's the great movie director who wade
"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Mr. Deeui Goes to Town,"
etcetera. He's a beloved fi~?i;;iaker. "It's a Wonderful Life" is
another film L at he made that everybody talks about all the
IIIe.
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And h-e's a very political figure. Even though the book
is a motion picture book, it's really.more about politics and the
American system. It actually is going to be quite a provocative
book, in its own way.
LAMB: Politically. What do you mean by that?
MCBRIDE: Well, he -- people don't really know Frank
Capra. They think they know that he is a liberal spokesman
for the common man, etcetera. And that's really very misleading.
And the facts of his life are not known because his own
autobiography is largely a work of fiction. And so...
LAMB: So yours is not an approved autobiography.
MCBRIDE: Well, he cooperated with the book, but it's
not an authorized book. I wanted the book to be independent.
But I had him Cooperating with me. He gave m.e a lot of
interviews and things.
LAMB: So, after we read the book, what will be the
label be that we'd put on Mr. Capra? The political label.
MCBRIDE: Well, he's much more conservative than people
think, for example. But he's a very complex man, and his
political views have been shifting and complicated. And he was a
very political artist dealing with myths of American culture.
and "Mr. Smith" is one of the most striking films in Americaa
political history. But the man who wrote that film, for example,
Sidney Blutman (?), was later blacklisted and admitted that he
was a member of the Communist Party, which is a real interesting
paradox, because this is one of the great patriotic films of
American history. And this caused Frank Capra a lot of conster-
nation.
LAMB: Mr. Capra still alive?
MCBRIDE: Yes, he is.
LAMB: He's how old?
MCBRIDE::: Ninety-one.
LAMB: Does he still live in La Quinta?
MCBRIDE: Yes, he does.
LAMB: Merced, California. Go ahead, please.
MAN: Two things. One is, on your program this morning
you managed to come up with a candidate who doesn't know what
he's running for in Florida.
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And the other thing is George and the CIA. And I don't
think that George Bush's participation in the CIA ought to
disqualify him. I think that it ought to open us up just to
examine what he says more closely. For instance, if he said he's
for affirmative action, you know, you've got to question that and
look at it more in depth, no matter what he says, because the CIA
is a master of illusion.
The second thing is, one of the callers hit on, and that
is, was George Bush's successful business ventures done on
business ventures like the Iran arms/Contra scandal with Ollie
North, where millions of dollars of profit were made illegally?
I think his company should probably be examined in detail, using
the Freedom of Information to check on any of the situations that
may be government-related. And if Bush has a clean record, then
he's going to come through, and therefore none of the things
should be held against him. If he doesn't, then it should be
addressed.
MCBRIDE: Yeah. I'would love to see other journalists
pick up the ball on this story, and I gather that some people
are.
You know, I asked to speak to Bush when I was doing the
story, and they said, "There's no way we can let you do that." I
don't know why. But I would love to have access to him myself.
Or failing that, I would love to see the people that cover his
campaign really ask him a lot of searching questions.
Bush, as we know, doesn't like to give too many
interviews. You know, the last big one I remember was the Ted
Koppel thing, which he seemed very uncomfortable doing.
LAMB: Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
MAN: If I called The Nation a neo-Marxist, anti-
democratic publication, that wouldn't make me a McCarthyite,
would it?
Okay. !'think that's pretty well much what it is. But
I haven't read The Nation. Okay.
Since you come from a publication like that and you're
trying to be a credible journalist, wouldn't it give you more
credibility if you gave the names of the sources that you have?
MCBRIDE: Well, I answered the characterization of The
Nation. I mean I'm an independent journalist and...
LAMB: You don't work for The Nation.
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MCBRIDE: No. I just sold: them this article. So it's
not Pike I'm representing The Nation. I'm a free-lance writer
who wrote for The Nation, and I have a high regard for the
magazine. But when the guy says it's neo-Marxist, or whatever,
and then in the next breath he says he's never read it, I don't
know what he's basing this on. I mean...
LAMB: Let me ask him that.
If you've never read it, how do you know what it is?
Unfortunately, he's not there.
MCBRIDE: You know, it's kind of hard to reply to a
charge if somebody hasn't even read the magazine.
please.
LAMB: The next call's from Knoxville, Kentucky.
MAN: Tennessee, sir.
LAMB: That's what I thought. Thank you. Go ahead,
MAN: There is one unspoken underlying thing here that I
seem to detect, and I don't know how many people agree with me.
I think there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of
Americans who believe that John Kennedy was assassinated in
cooperation with some renegade members of FBI and CIA, not
directly acting under the Bureau, but acting in a renegade
status, along with some anti-Castro Cubans. If this be true
--and the rest of that scenario is that after the assassination
the whole CIA and FBI apparatus was thrown into a cover-up
operation to keep this renegade connection with the assassination
quiet.
If that be true, then what we'd really be talking here
would be about a man running for President of the United States
who was an active member of a cover-up of the death of another
President. And I'm sure this is the underlying thought of many,
many people who listen out there.
And I would think it would be very important to find out
where Mr. Bush was during this period. And I think maybe the
fact that he's so anxious to cover this up is an indication, in
itself, that it needs to be looked into more deeply.
LAMB: Thank you.
MCBRIDE: Well, I don't want to get into speculation
about, you know, Bush's knowledge of the assassination. The CIA
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conducted its own investigation after the event.. And obviously,
here we have a week after the assassination, Bush is being
briefed by the FBI on things. And this document wasn't public
knowledge for ten years.
So, obviously, there were
-- this was never published in the
things of that sort.
things that were going on that
Warren Commission records or
So he -- you know.
LAMB: So it's clear to our audience, though. You have
the document that says that George Bush was a member of the CIA
-- a George Bush was a member of the CIA in 1963. And you also
have his office saying he was not.
MCBRIDE: That's right.
The question was more, you know, should he talk more
about what he knows about the investigation of the assassination?
LAMB: Where was he at the time of the assassination?
MCBRIDE: Yeah. What did he know about the investiga-
tion? The source that I quote in the article said that he knows
that Bush was involved in the suppression of things after the
Kennedy assassination. And he went on to say that they were
worried that these anti-Castro groups would conduct unauthorized
raids against Cuba and attempt to blame it on the CIA. And as we
know, there were a lot of anti-Castro people who were conducting
raids against Cuba with the support of the CIA for a couple years
there, small raids. And then there were the assassination
attempts against Castro.
This memo says that they were -- the tone of the memo is
that they were hoping that these people will not conduct raids
now that the President has been assassinated. And they were
afraid that these people would take this as a signal that we were
now going to move against Castro, and they didn't want them to do
that.
So, it's -- there's a lot of questions and mysteries
about this.
LAMB: Joe McBride is our guest. We go next to Tacoma,
Washington.
WOMAN: I resent the implication that he's making here.
I live in a town of 150,000 people, and there are three George
Bushes alone. He's assuming that this is the George Bush who's
running for President. I suggest he check other phone books.
The statistics will prove out that there's going to be several
hundred thousand.
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Thank=-you.
MCBRIDE: Well, as I said before, I leave the question
partly open. I give him the benefit of the doubt. And, you
know, I put the question to the CIA and to Bush's office. But I
did check it with reliable sources, and they.said it is the same
person.
LAMB: What does it do to you if it turns out they prove
that it's not?
MCBRIDE: Well, I wrote the article as a question mark.
I didn't write it as, you know, as a message from God or
anything. It's a question mark raising a legitimate question
during the campaign: Is this the same person? And if not, I say
in the article that they really ought to come forward and prove
that it's not and tell us who this other person is. But so far
they haven't done that.
LAMB: Atlanta, Georgia. Go ahead, please.
MAN: There are two things, Mr. McBride, worth
repeating. A CIA agent signs a secrecy agreement before becoming
active in the field vowing not to divulge the fact that he was
ever a member of the CIA. Okay.
Another thing. Hoover would have never put the real
name of a member of the CIA in a memo.
And one other thing, Mr. McBride. The CIA, by charter,
is not sanctioned to operate in the United States. Hoover knew
that and would have not involved any CIA operative in a memo,
directly or indirectly.
Now, if there's any truth in your allegation, the name
George Bush was a cryptonym used by a person other than George
Bush.
I'd like to have you answer one question. Do you think
coming forth with an article without definite proof that it is a
true story is despicable, or is not despicable?
LAMB: What do you think, caller? Caller, what do you
MAN: I think it is.
LAMB: Mr. McBride?
MCBRIDE: Well, as I just said, I have sources who I
trust who told me that it's the same man, and I checked this out.
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However, I quo-t-e the Vice President's' side.. I'm not -- you know,
I gave him every opportunity to comment, and I asked to speak to
him personally. I wasn't trying to not get his side of the
story.
And I mean when he says that the CIA doesn't conduct
domestic operations, it's well know that in that era they had a
whole station in the Miami area with several hundred American
operatives dealing with hundreds of Cubans, conducting these
raids and all-kinds of other things. So that was kind of a
fiction. And then there were many other things they did that
were domestic which they were not technically supposed to do.
LAMB: New York City. You're next.
MAN: I'd like to ask your guest, I've heard some
reports recently that there's evidence that some people, some
journalists have that George Bush had met with Iranian
representatives before Reagan took office, and in fact in that
meeting had worked out with them for them to hold on to the
American hostages until after Reagan was nomi -- took office. I
was wondering if you'd heard anything about that.
MCBRIDE: Well, there's been a lot of talk and articles
about this so-called October surprise, which I guess is what
you're referring to. For an example, the book "Out of Control"
by, Leslie Cockburn talks about this supposed deal the Reagan
Administration made before they were elected, that once -- if the
hostages were kept until after the election, they would make an
arms deal.
I don't have anything to say about Bush's alleged
involvement. I was curious where you get the information or what
-- have you read this?
LAMB: He's not with us anymore.
Westchester, California. Go ahead, please.
MAN: Mr. McBride, do you believe that George Bush's
election is part of a CIA bloodless coup of the United States?
LAMB: D'o.you, caller?
MAN: At one time I did. I don't think so now. When he
was first running against Ronald Reagan, I thought so. And I
don't think so at this time.
LAMB: Okay.
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MCBRIDE: Well, I mean that's strong language.
I mean there's concern, getting back to what we said
before, the CIA, should they be involved in American politics?
And if this is true that Bush were a longtime CIA man, what does
that say about -- if he becomes President, will he have a special
relationship with the CIA? Will he be doing more clandestine
things than the Presidents normally do? It raises a whole ball
of wax.
LAMB: Virginia Beach, Virginia. Go ahead, please.
MAN: I'm referring now to the caller a little while ago
that talked about The Nation being neo-communist, I guess was the
word he used, and if this wasn't a form of McCarthyism that is
being employed by Mr. McBride. Which, to me, is a form of
planting seeds of doubt in the minds of the public, because Mr.
McBride has been very vague, extremely so, in trying to pin down
whether this is the Vice President Bush or another Bush, as this
lady who called from Tacoma, I guess it was.
Anyway, I have a comment. And I think that this man and
some of these other liberal media types are operating more as
nosy people rather than as investigative people. And maybe the
public doesn't want to hear anything that's nosy. We want the
facts, and we want hard facts. We don't want this routine of
taking that label McCarthyism and turning it around, which is
what the liberals do when they're attacked.
LAMB: All right, sir.
Thank you.
MCBRIDE: Well, I mean one thing maybe I should point
out. This might make the guy who just called think things are a
little more complex. Back in 1982, I wrote a show for the USIA
called "Let Poland Be Poland." It was a television special that
went all around the world, which was, you know, Ronald Reagan's,
under his aegis. The Warsaw army newspaper said the script of
the show was written by, quote, that degenerate cowboy, Ronald
Reagan.
So, I don't think that I'm a card-carrying communist,
radical, or whatever the person wants to say. I think I'm 'just
an independent journalist trying to find out the truth.
And I think that -- I mean nosy. I don't know what he
thinks is important for us to find out if we aren't interested in
the history of people running for President. I think that,
actually, very little has been written about Bush's background.
People don't seem to have gotten to the bottom of it.
I mean like while I've been doing this book on Frank
Capra, I realized how little known this man is to the public,
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even though he's a very familiar figure, been on the cover of
Time magazine, and television specials about. him. And I wrote
one myself.
LAMB: You're talking about Frank Capra?
MCBRIDE: Frank Capra. This was very educational for
me, that I spent four years studying the totally deceptive public
record of this guy, and finding out the real truth that lay
behind the image. There's a tremendous mythical component to a
lot of American public figures.
LAMB: Do you think he was. devious in his ways of
preventing the American people from knowing what he was really
all about?
MCBRIDE: To a certain degree. His autobiography is
very deceptive, as all autobiographies are. But his is -- and
the people in Hollywood like to write fictional treatments of
their lives and touch them up and improve them. But in a lot of
cases, what we think we know about him is totally the opposite of
,what's true.
LAMB: Corpus Christi, Texas. Go ahead, please.
WOMAN: Brian, this gentleman is outrageous. This is
one instance where he has mentioned his sources over and over
again. Who are the sources? He's been asked that three times
now this morning. And we need to know who his sources are.
The gentleman calling before is correct. The American
people are no longer going to take fairy tales. They want facts.
They'll make up their minds.
Please give us your sources. Then Brian can have them
on and they can provide the proof that this George Bush is
actually George Bush running for President.
And also the second thing. I watched an interview with
Frank Capra, and he spoke in depth about his background and what
all he went through and the films that he made during World War
II as his part of the war effort and everything that he went
through. It seems to me that this gentleman, and The Nation in
general, is strictly -- I think they used to call it yellow
journalism.
And also, are you going to do the same type of in-depth
background check on Michael Dukakis?
LAMB: All right, Corpus Christi. Thanks for the call.
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MCBRIDE: Well, I would love to see Dukakis's background
explored as thoroughly as possible.- I'm not personally doing
that, but I just happened to find this thing on Bush.
I mean my sources, aside from J. Edgar Hoover, who is a
pretty good source, as a journalist, we don't reveal sources that
are given to us in confidence. And certainly when you deal with
people who are in the intelligence community, it would be highly
dangerous for them to be revealed as sources.
So, I don't want to talk about my sources, but it's a
reliable person. And I have other'sources besides him. So, I
don't want to go into that. And I made it clear in the article,
you know, what kind of background the person has.
But, you know, the article, as I stated before, largely
deals with this memorandum. And the burden of proof, it seems to
me, is on Bush's people to come up with the other George Bush if
there is such a person.
McBride.
LAMB: Santa Fe, New Mexico. You're on with Joe
MAN: I'm a professor at the University of New Mexico
and I'm a political scientist. And I would like to say that,
yes, I do read The Nation from time to time, and it is a
neo-Marxist magazine.
Secondly, Mr. McBride, I think you should disclose your
resources to make your article, or your story, a little more
creditable. The fact that you just say so, I don't believe
that's enough for me.
And another thing, that Mr. Bush being with the CIA, or
if he was or was not with the CIA, back in the '70s, whenever, or
the '60s, so what? I mean who cares? I mean this is not a big
thing, is it? I mean why have you decided to make a story about
this?
And last but not least, I would hope that somebody from
your magazine would do something on Mr. Bensten [sic]. Because,
outside of Texas,. nobody knows who he is.
LAMB: All right,
sir. Thank you.
MCBRIDE: Sure. I mean, you know, I'm for investigating
everything about everybody that's going to be President or Vice
President. I mean if Gary Hart is no longer running for Presi-
dent because he didn't tell the truth about that he spent a
weekend with a model, it shows that the American public has a
real aversion to people not leveling with us. And that's a kind
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of a relatively trivial matter.. But the issue there was not that
he spent a weekend with the model, but why wasn't he telling us
the truth?
And here we have George Bush on a much more serious,
profound question.
LAMB: Huntsville, Alabama. Go ahead, please.
'MAN: I'd like to say that I find this kind of reporting
particularly distasteful. I see a serious double standard here.
For instance, you're asking George Bush to come clean and tell
everything he knows about this situation. Yet you have been
given several opportunities to do the very same thing about your
own sources, and you've refused to do so.
please.
MCBRIDE: Well, let me -- could I ask the caller...
MAN: I've got a couple other more comments, if I could,
I find something else rather difficult to appreciate,
and that is that. you've invited others to jump on the bandwagon
and to help blow this thing up, while you sit back and sort of
take credit for a story.
And the other thing that concerns me is that you read
this article two years ago, and I'm supposed to believe that
you're so naive, you didn't know who George Bush was at that
time. But now that he's the presidential c.andidate for the
Republican Party, all of a sudden this story becomes something
that's jogged in your mind.
Those three things bother me. And I'm going to hang up
and listen to your response.
Thank you.
MCBRIDE: I would have liked to have asked the caller
why I should reveal my source. This is a thing in journalism
that is quite accepted practice. In certain kinds of stories,
you can only get, people to talk, especially in* very sensitive
positions, if they will be quoted as an unidentified thing. The
people in the Reagan Administration do this all the time.
Sources -- you know, "high sources in the Justice Department," or
the State Department, or whatever. Background briefings, you
know.
If you had to rely on quoted sources all the time, you
would not be able to get certain facts.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570010-1
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570010-1
What was the last question? It' was interesting. He was
-- the last thing he said. Oh, why I waited two years on it.
LAMB: Yeah.
MCBRIDE: I mean he says I was naive, I didn't know who
Bush was. I knew who George Bush was, but I didn't know a great
deal about Bush's background. But his autobiography came out
last September, for example -- it was just published in paperback
and so I had the chance to read that when it came out. And I
was surprised that he hadn't gone into this, and this piqued the
thing in my mind.
LAMB: We're running out of time. We've got a
Pittsburgh call, and that'll be our last call.
MAN: It amazes me how the left-wingers always try to
say that Kennedy's assassination was due to a right-wing group.
Oswald was definitely a communist. He lived in Russia and he
visited the Soviet Embassy before the assassination. Ruby knew
that he had cancer and would never go to the electric chair, and
he paid off his debts to the Mafia by assassinating Oswald. And
I think that all these facts ought to be out.
And I think your connection with Bush and the Kennedy
assassination is a figment of your leftist imagination.
LAMB: Thank,you, sir. We are just about out of time.
Final comment?
MCBRIDE: Well, it's not a figment of my imagination
that this memo is about the assassination, and J. Edgar Hoover
wrote it and it mentions George Bush. I mean it doesn't -- I'm
just presenting the memo as it appears, and I'm not speculating
about more that's behind it. And as I say, the burden of proof
is now on the Bush camp, I think.
LAMB: We're out of time. And our guest has been Joe
McBride, who has written a free-lance article for The Nation, in
this issue, and this is the July 16/23 issue. It's the lead
story here, "George Bush: CIA Operative?" And that's a
question mark.
Mr. McBride is from Los Angeles, a free-lance writer, as
we said. He's lived there for 15 years. He has a book coming
out on Frank Capra in a short while. And he's originally from
Wisconsin area, where he attended the University of Wisconsin it
Madison and also worked for the Wisconsin State Journal.
Thank you very much.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/23: CIA-RDP99-01448R000401570010-1