Russ Baker | Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty and America’s Invisible Government

00:04 These puppet masters almost surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something they're planning to You've thoroughly tested every last horse Just didn't think you'd know the less you really do That's true, Dr. Zayas Edward without TAT Cause we know they're lying to us just don't look Without TAT The higher side Jack shows All right, people. By now we know all too well that hidden behind the facade of democracy are the dynastic families that make up the bricks and mortar of the power pyramid. Groomed from a young age pre-approved for the finest schools and inducted into their elusive and exclusive secret societies We see the same names in faces fast tracked to wealth power and control while the rest of us are force fed The American Dream like an overstuffed Christmas goose

01:06 And among your Rockefellers, Morgans, DuPonts and Windsors you have the Bushes. One of the more public-facing families when it comes to America's puppet masters but with deep roots in the oil industry, The Skull & Bone Society and the CIA should it be any wonder that both a father and son and nearly brother have wedged their way into the highest office of the land like it wasn't no thing? Well today we're going to hold the bushes under the microscope with Russ Baker who is the well-accomplished founder and editor of the great news site WhoWhatWhy.org, an author of the biggest and best book I've seen on the bushes weighing in at a little over 500 pages Family Of Secrets The Bush Dynasty America's Invisible Government And The Hidden History Of The Last 50 Years It's an honor and pleasure to welcome in a journalist who's digging deeper than most these days Russ Maman Welcome To The Higher Side Thank you very much Great to be here

01:54 Thanks for doing it. I know your book's been out for a few years now, but it's no less important and when trying to identify some of the hidden hands that are working in the American machine start us off by talking about the journey because this is pretty massive undertaking what drove you focus on the bushes and dig so much deeper than most others have? Well, it goes back to 2003 as the Iraq war was about to get underway and I could see that the Bush administration wanted to go to war and it was clear to me that they were creating a justification. I couldn't understand why the press couldn't see it 2004. I was covering Bush's re-election sort of astonished at the fact that despite his having clearly

02:40 allied about uh... the basis for the war that there he was running for re-election and doing pretty well and i saw how uh... you was able to suppress various potential scandals about himself and also to put on the defensive john kerry a man who otherwise should have dominated that election especially since uh... it was coming out that bush's vietnam war record was very questionable and carry was known to have been on a swift boatman very dangerous service and so i was surprised at how well the bushes did too sort of bottle up their problems in put carry on the defensive and i did some reporting on that two thousand four that got me more and more interested the bush family itself but i began saying

03:24 How are they able to bottle all these things up? That then got me trying to ask questions about them and their own trajectory to power. The larger constellation of people who supported them, abetted them were behind them and that just got me asking questions that led me not just at George W Bush but also his father, George HW Bush, and then at the grandfather. trying to understand the whole family's remarkable relationship to American history. And that really was an open-ended inquiry led to the five years that I spent on Family of Secrets. Hmm, and so obviously we know The Bushes are a multi generational dynasty how far back were you able to take this family? I went back quite a few generations. The first indications I saw

04:13 a fledgling power center go all the way back to the sort of mid 1800s. I can't remember how much of this ended up in the book or on the cutting room floor because i just had so much good stuff, but But basically, I saw a ancestor who had relocated to Rochester New York where he became a town clerk and befriended somebody who was involved with the founding of Skull & Bones. And that was very very important to me and then the son of that man say it was his son or grandson was a minister to some of the wealthiest congregations in America He really got to know all the right people

04:56 There were indications that he himself may have been involved in the Navy with early intelligence work. He already showed a guy by the name of James Bush, Reverend James Bush. Then we go to his son. We get pretty quickly to the Bush who then moves to Columbus, Ohio where he gets into the manufacturing of parts for the railroad industry and gets hooked up to not one but two branches. That's a Samuel Bush of the Rockefeller family, that's where we start seeing that level of connection very visible. Then that man himself gets sent to Washington to become the main point man for the

05:40 procurement of small arms for world war one he has been chosen by these dynasties that du ponce and what have you who own these giant arms manufacturing companies and want to make sure that uh... the u s does get into world war one and that their products are in play there also families like the rockefellers is a lot of we're looking strategically at this spoils looking at the tremendous oil supplies to be had, places like Azerbaijan became part of the former Soviet Union. Generation after generation then Samuel Bush's son Prescott Bush who goes to school at Yale and is in skull and bones and befriends

06:23 the Herriman Brothers and they then go into business with an investment banking firm called Brown Brothers Herriman which becomes one of the major private and very discreet banks of this super wealthy with operations all over the world including tentacles into the bankers that bankrolled Adolf Hitler. It's an astonishing journey for that family and it's a family that themselves were never really all that wealthy, but they certainly were powerful. They certainly were the go-to people for those who were extremely wealthy in terms of being able to carry out their agendas.

07:03 Yeah, and you do such a great job in the book. I love those earlier threads because they are kind of the hardest to get ahold of but from listening to your previous interviews and reading the book, I've heard that their family goes back to someone being an informant in the Civil War one ancestor was burned at the stake as a witch another one was made to walk the plank by pirates so some people have been kinda wise to their game over the years it seems It's an interesting story. I think there is another book in going back to the very, very early family history certainly. Host And shows like this call it conspiring and business circles call it networking but that really has been one of their key tools hasn't it? Dr. John Sands That's right. I mean I think most successful people understand the singular importance of connections and what some people call conspiracy I think is really

07:59 the ultimate in working connections, developing working connections and maintaining those networks and relationships. The Bush family was absolutely unsurpassed by the time you got to George HW or Poppy Bush. even seeing this in the form of things like his christmas card list which i've got a member what it had its intended thousands of people would get christmas cards for them every year but they just maintain these tremendous networks most of us you know may be made talk to that if u of our relatives or something but i mean they stayed in touch with every single one on every level you know the kennedy's also were fairly good at it but the bush is really work

08:39 totally unsurpassed in keeping track of everybody theyíve ever met. Not just that, but of course there are the ways in which these people cooperate so you see the joining of various kinds of associations, some of them overt and some of them covert. You see them running certain channels into certain kinds of military service more elite people like Prescott Bush appears to have worked in military intelligence of World War I, just like his grandfather in the Navy. And so you see those kind of patterns and you see them joining the social groups many cases these kinds quasi or fully masonic enterprises. You see them certainly in their business ventures and the choices that they married very similar to what the royal families of Europe would do

09:28 careful calculations in that regard and so they really work to the maximum. This of course is exactly the sort of framework which enables you do things outside of the public eye. pieces of the puzzle that I knew least about and it was one of the key questions. I had for you, I wrote down a quote from your book where you say that understanding the role of Brown Brothers Harriman is central to understanding the Bush legacy and the vast if unprecedented influence of The Bush's inner circle can you elaborate on them at all? Is there anything more to say on that other than of course they financed the German side of World War II to an extent

10:11 yeah i mean brown brothers chairman was originally the brown brothers a bank and uh... this came to came out of the mills of england they came to america they were involved in all sorts of things you cotton trade some connections to be confederacy and that they ended up banking on the east coast baltimore and then other places and this beat with a very important pillar of the Anglo-aristocracy connections into America, and then the Harrimans were this railroad dynasty. When the old man E. H. Harriman died, his two young sons at that time in college

10:55 took over this whole thing and they had all of its money and all of this corporate power we're not sure what to do with it and they then brought in a man named george herbert walker yet this was the father-in-law prescott bush and he wasn't prominent investment banker based in saint louis he was actually one of the most important money figures in america though very little known in general and uh... key was brought in the moved to new york and they emerged a hair of men's into brown brother became brown brothers here man and then press got bush was brought any that really it became a partner there brown brothers here a man because it was private it was not publicly traded did not have to do the kinds of filings at public companies did was able to are very discreetly handle the monies of some of the most

11:48 exclusive families in this country and the brown brothers if you go back even before it was proud brothers here a man it was already involved in shaping much of american policy confide a ability to nineteen twenty two issue of the nation magazine the cover story was the who's called the republic of brown brothers and it was about how they were so influential they're almost like a country unto themselves they could get the u s government to invade nicaragua when their clients companies like that united fruit standard for you know what have you were threatened their interest were threatened by the uh... the people's of those countries who work put upon rather severely virtually enslaved working under horrible conditions big governments of those countries so throughout central america much in south america where really what they call these banana republic

12:42 governments, they were often put into power and sustained by the forces like United Fruit and so on. In turn, outfits like Brown Brothers Harriman and then major corporate law firms of the sorts like Sullivan and Cromwell, the firm out of which Allen and John Dulles came. This is how all these people got to know each other. Then you see John Foster Dulles becomes the Secretary of State under Eisenhower. His brother Allen becomes the most influential director of the early Central Intelligence Agency. He's a close friend of Prescott Bush.

13:21 All of these entities are fundamentally focused on protecting the wealth and the interests and the power, of this relatively small number of families that were and continue to dominate America. Yeah, it is a fascinating story how they do this. And you mentioned Yale and the Skull & Bones Society which is that bullet point is about as far as a lot of people dig when it comes to these connections they know that he was in skull and bones but That's about it! And that is an organization built for high-level networking Did skull and bones come up beyond just a club they were in while in college?

14:00 You know i certainly it's a secret society and they're all sworn not to reveal too much about the details there are several books on scotland both my sense was that. You know people poopoo these things if you start talking about them they kind of try to make fun of you but what i always say is look, The people who were members didn't think that it was something to be poo-pooed. They put great store in getting in and being a member, they thought this is extremely important now unless you want to dismiss them as silly people those who went on to becoming some of the most powerful and influential people in America I think we oughta take it seriously and respect it

14:38 and what it was well that that you know that's hard to say what it is that part of the state i think certainly people join these things for a sense of belonging to just like they joined fraternities and sororities they want to be accepted by other by elite they wanna get a leg up there's a sense of you know if your special here the elect in no are you joining and you have to make certain sacrifices you have to presumably do certain rituals, in many cases skull and bones and others humiliate or debase yourself to prove how badly you want to be in. Then you swear oaths of loyalty and secrecy and once youíve done that thatís a lifelong thing.

15:23 Flash forward to the 2004 presidential election where the extraordinary set of circumstances were that the nominees for two major parties were both from Yale and were both members of Skull & Bones. Even John Kerry, a liberal, when asked about it said he it's secret i can't talk about now you know what does that mean they were obviously able to face off in a pretty tough campaign against each other but uh... for example a carry seemed in some cases the sort of hold this fire some people thought he might have wanted p had not done so and you do wonder what they have on each other at what they've agreed to do and not to do with their notion of united splitting up the pie and all that stuff it is not all that well understood and i think all of these

16:09 secret organizations deserve much, much more scrutiny. Yeah I mean obviously from what i've heard blackmail plays a huge role in these secret societies you know you get somebody to do something embarrassing like you mentioned or something uncouth and then if you put that person into a position of power years later you've got that dirt on them so if you put people in powerful positions and then you stay in the shadows You can get them to do a lot, to not have those dirty secrets from back in the day revealed. That's right and there is no question that blackmail particularly relating to sexual matters but also other things has played an important role in American politics maybe less so if you go back to the 19th century and part of 20th century where the press

17:02 had an understanding that they were not to speak about certain things. They remained quiet about, for example, Franklin Roosevelt's health and John F Kennedy's health. There were many things they did not talk about. Many if not most of the presidents had lovers but they didn't talk about them. At some point that changed and as it began to change all bets were off because because America is famous for its somewhat Victorian mores in public at least, put these people very much on the defensive and they understood that if they were to get into power or remain in power that they could not

17:44 afford for any of these things to come out. So yes, blackmail is very important and all we have to do is look at people like Gary Hart and John Edwards and Ted Kennedy and go on and on and on. These things when they came out really damaged them kept them from becoming president so the ability to ensure that whatever there was about you that perhaps made you all too human to make sure that did not come out, I think was part of all this. Certainly in the course of my research, I've seen all sorts of things about George W Bush and his father and the grandfather and so on that never did come out and that the public to this day doesn't know about it. Perhaps it was these networks that were protecting them

18:32 Yeah, and there are some great revelations in the book. Obviously we're going to get to them but one more question about kind of the older generations and wealth creation tell us about dresser industries this is one of the places where Prescott seemed to make at least a little bit of his money as I understand right? Yeah, Dresser Industries went back to the early days of the oil industry and it was what became known as an oil services company. It didn't actually prospect or drill for oil or refine petroleum products. It provided all kinds of other things from well drilling equipment and derricks and drills and so forth

19:15 Brown Brothers Harriman took over, bought out Dresser Industries and then they appointed a friend of Prescott Bush to run the company. A fellow by the name of Neil Mallon and you see these names again and again just like George Herbert Walker becomes the name that goes throughout the Bush family they even do it with some other friends so George W. Bush's brother Neil his name is actually Neal Mallon-Bush They named him after this friend of the family, Uncle Neil who really wasn't in the family at all. He and Neil Mellon were basically told that he would run this company. There's a story in my book Family of Secrets about that where he comes back from his young age climbing mountains and traveling around Europe carefree. They just call him in and say okay now you have to run this company

20:07 It's kind of amazing to hear those stories. There is another one with Dick Cheney, where Dick Cheney was out on a hunting trip and while he was out hunting some of the other people in the trip were at The Lodge and they've decided that he is going to take over and run another company called Halliburton and eventually, by the way, Dresser and Halliburton become merged as part of the same company. These are the untold stories about the infrastructure of so much American industry and how these things are connected now. Interested me a great deal because i saw the role that it played very much as a cooperative entity with the american intelligence apparatus and dresser industries not only provided cover for people working in intelligence,

20:58 I found documents where they were briefing or talking to people in the CIA, including Alan Dulles about various enterprises and the Caribbean dealing with Castro and what have you. And they also provided a job for a young George HW Bush when he was starting out and well guess we'll get into that later but ended up that was essentially kind of no show job that was cover for him so that he could do intelligence work Yeah, it must be nice to have the lodge just setting up company after company to put you at the head of which we were also lucky. But to jump ahead a little bit one of the big revelations in family secrets is poppy's secret life and a lot of people know that Poppy Bush HW Bush was director of the CIA for 1 year in 1976 but

21:48 I've heard a lot of researchers suggest that his ties go much deeper, but you actually connect quite a few dots along with another researcher Joseph McBride to make a pretty conclusive case that his ties to the CAA go much deeper don't they? Yeah, I mean McBride and one other person had found some obscure overlooked documents memos that referenced a George Bush as being in the CIA in some capacity dating back to 1963 at the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination and these stories came out

22:27 late 80s as George H.W Bush, then vice president was about to be anointed a president and they were pretty much suppressed but they were important stories I took a close look at that and wonder what did this all mean? Was that the same man or was that not through my research included in fact it was the same man he had in fact been involved with intelligence work not just In 1976, when Gerald Ford appointed him CIA director as a supposed neophyte with no background or particular qualification to be CIA director that never made any sense to me. I started looking at that separately and on my own saying why was this guy made CIA director? That's when I really started looking at these documents that these others had unearthed and trying to do what I could

23:19 figure out what he was doing and what his trajectory was. That got me into looking at some of the early papers of his own oil company called Zapata Oil, concluding to my own satisfaction that the company itself a cover entity for espionage work the pot off shore was at small company that seemed never to turn a profit yet they were traveling all over the world constantly always in the hot spots and often in places where they had no seeming uh... after drilling business and i could see what that wasn't i began to map out george h w bushes connections to all these other fellows who also had gone to these

24:05 Ivy League schools and grown up together. There was no question that they were very important, very high level CIA people and this developed this notion of this whole constellation of the substrata of American power where these corporations and these banks in the soil companies are kind of operating seamlessly with the largely an almost completely opaque mysterious american intelligence apparatus before policy apparatus and so on that i began to see how this was a any all of it together he means uh... perpetuating v influence

24:47 and impact of this relatively small American elite. And with the CIA connections, it's really interesting because something you talk about in the book that I hadn't really considered is that before there was an official CIA or Office of Strategic Services major companies had their own private agents and spies. So it makes perfect sense that when these government agencies opened, they'd hire some of these agents and that's problematic right from the start isn't it? Yeah, and in fact governments always had a stream of intelligence if you want to call it that reports that they used even without having formal spy agencies. The United States well first of all the military had always served as

25:41 military intelligence that existed for a long time. As long as it's been military, there has always been an intelligence component because scouts and collecting information about the enemy troops have always been a core function of any military. Then on non-military matters you had these companies going abroad, they were doing business and having problems. They were collecting information and conveying it to the American State Department and others through their own networks back home. This was the main method. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt was firmly against creating a non-military peacetime

26:25 intelligence organization he saw it as dangerous a potential threat to democracy was rather prescient i think in that regard but yes they're these these these informal networks and then then what happened was the great american corporations uh... the uh... before motor company coca-cola pepsi cola which united fruit and so on day we're doing essentially their own intelligence gathering and Of course, they had their operations all over the world and their relationships with these leaders and dictators. They had all of your information coming through so that when the CIA was created it was very easy to continue operating through these entities. IBM was another one. Believe it or not, the Singer sewing machine company which is regarded as maybe the world's first multinational corporation were in this game

27:19 Yeah, man. And it's really impressive that you've been able to put all this together and these HW CIA secret life connections because poppy Bush has been Notoriously careful about his paper trail ever since the early days in the Navy hasn't he? He has, and there's a story in Family of Secrets about that. I guess you recall that he had produced some sort of report and sent it in and wrote down a bunch of stuff and was excoriated by his commanding officer who said don't ever put this stuff down on paper! And he certainly took that to heart and became a very secretive man so secretive that he

27:59 He went to great extreme measures to not be implicated in much of anything. We see this playing out in matters like Iran-Contra, where he was a key figure and instigator the bay of pigs invasion where he appears that he was a an important figure there and then as i get into my book indications that something was afoot dallas in nineteen sixty three that george herbert walker bush again it was part of but he was so careful What I do in Family of Secrets is go through some instances where we can actually unravel it. Despite his care, we can see where he's creating alibis and misleading paper trails and so forth but in the end those things are also the things that show what he was really doing

28:58 And you had mentioned Zapata Oil and his partner in starting that up was a guy named Thomas Devine. And he very much was a CIA employee, so you can definitely tell there was an early connection to some degree. I actually was really impressed how personally involved you got with this investigation. You actually called Thomas Devine yourself outside of a little back-and-forth. He was instructed by HW not to cooperate right? That's right. He actually, you know at this point he was I guess well in his 80s or something and he just when i called him he didn't deny anything he sort of was very carefully said oh I see and what is this about? And uh well let me make some calls and get back to you! You know which is exactly what you expect the consummate intelligence officer

29:47 to do. He was sort of unflappable, had no reason to know that I was going to call him but then he actually asked me whether my book was authorized or approved and i thought that was very interesting because the establishment and this is one of the main themes in Family of Secrets throughout my career and a key point that we focus on with our news site who what why dot org uh... is about how the public perceptions are manipulated through a controlled media and and we see it in the form of the book publishing industry that's one component of it where for example there are a book came out not that long ago by the former editor at newsweek and it was very much and and authorized biography of george h w bush even though my book

30:40 was already out for a number of years even though it's a bestseller he completely ignored all the revelations in there and went back to the old stories all the old phony stuff that uh... that uh... the bush has been putting out and of course he unlike me was invited onto all the major television shows on radio and they staggeringly and this is uh... revealing about the fundamental corruption media and not just the media but academia and book publishing it so forth that they are perfectly able to just look at the other way in act like none of this uh... scholarship for research has been done play the game and have these kinds of people on there with their mythologies and so you know they don't they don't go and call the thomas devines and how do you ask

31:28 George Herbert Walker Bush, what he was doing on November 22 1963 in Dallas and why he was having lunch that week with a man named Alfred Ulmer an old friend of his who was the former CIA Bureau chief in a number of countries when there were military coups and attempts to overthrow leaders who the US disapproved of none of that ever seems to make it into those books that are the only ones that most people hear about because they hear about almost all this stuff not through shows like yours but through the traditional media. Right and that is a component we've been looking at a lot recently this PR machine that these elites have rockefeller had a great one and

32:14 The Bushes are obviously no different, but I think a lot of people think these books are just kind of ego service. But clearly they're more than that. They use these books to kind of fudge their backstory and create their alibis in some senses. And you see this pretty clearly when it comes to their military record especially in Poppy Bush's case right? Yes, that's right. When I looked at his World War II service and of course he was a war hero decorated pilot who had survived the downing of this plane, this is all part of what they used when he ran for office and as i began looking at that I was fascinated with that story because he was the pilot, his plane went down, his crew members died and he survived

33:03 Being a journalist, I said that you know i'd like to know more about the particulars there because you know the famous saying that the captain of this ship is to be the last one to leave and I wanted no more about it. And as I looked into what I discovered he had told several different dramatically conflicting versions of what had happened and why he had survived while his crewmates uh... had perished and in fact also that other witnesses including a man in the plane right behind his disputed his story that is playing had been hit and badly do you derailed and that he's uh... had no choice crippled that but to

33:43 but to bail out and his story that when he bailed out, he thought everybody else had already left the plane. That kind of story and then people say ìThatís so distasteful! How can you question somebodyís military record and their heroism?î Itís very selective because course, they had no problem questioning John Kerry's record. Yet the fact is that John Kerry volunteered for swift boat service or whatever you want to say about that was incredibly harrowing type of work and he did it! And yet they were able to raise questions about whether he was a coward and so on...and

34:22 machine that makes some people suspect they went after George McGovern in 1972, though George McGovern had been a flyer in World War II and a hero. They made Nixon out to be a tough guy but he wasn't involved practically at all in World War II. He basically was belatedly got involved because he knew we would have a political career as a sort of a supply officer uh... on a ship and so that this is what they do the they look for the uh... they look for their enemies strengths and they try to turn those into weaknesses All right. Yeah, it's all about perception and another note I had here about Zapata Oil is apparently they had a rig off the coast of Medellin Colombia during some key years and of course we're talking a lot about the CIA connections so it begs the question did drug running come up at all in your investigation of Bush's wealth creation schemes?

35:17 well first of all for the many units very very strict as many in is is not on the coast it's inland and in columbia and as far as i know and and and not an expert on this and i wasn't able to do massive about the research but that what research i could do seemed to be a dam be happy to be corrected on this that back in that period which was the early sixties medellín was not yet uh... an active center in the drug trade so i thought i don't know what to make of that what we found was that at the potter had hired a judge who had helped

35:56 the nineteen forty eight senate election linden johnson this whole other area about the unusual ties between the bushes and johnson though they were extensively from opposite parties they had hired this man judge manuel bravo and then given him this job in medellín colombia at that point there would be a good look like kind of like a no-show job why he they hire them why he went there if they were you know did he to leave the country? Was he looking for a Sinecure?" I don't know that. That all deserves more research, but it was very strange that they hired him and sent him to Colombia and even had an office in Medellin because its not one of the ports where you would expect to find offshore drilling company. It's a curious thing! I figured I just had to ask – I know its not a big part of the book

36:48 But alarm bells start going off when you hear about Medellin, Colombia. And when people start talking about drug running it always tends to come up so... It does and let me just say by the way that I don't want to skirt that issue the CIA has been extremely complicit in the drug trade throughout the world we see that even now with with the poppies in Afghanistan but we saw that very much in Laos where a former Coca-Cola factory had been turned into a giant drug factory, where the planes were being used. The planes of the CIA proprietors were being used to shuttle drugs. We saw that in the allegations regarding the introduction of crack cocaine into America with what we saw with Iran's contra and the role of the drug trade there

37:40 The intelligence world has always moved huge amounts of money. Probably the biggest activity is the term intelligence, which by the way is a misnomer because although that's the most acceptable work that we would see these organizations doing, it's often the most dismissed internally. covert operations or the often illegal aggressive behavior from you know sabotage to blackmail to assassination that often define these organizations and another part in it probably the biggest part of what they do is bribery moving billions of dollars a year

38:23 finance student and labor leaders in journalists all over the world that are uh... it not only supplying information but operating on behalf of so-called american interest and how do you move that money what you can't just move it visibly until you move in another forms whether it's a and i get into all this in my book family of secret i get into the you know they did use of drugs to use of gold, the use of all different substitute forms. There's art, there's property, of course shell companies. There are many different ways of moving this but drugs has been a very important part of that and at minimum these entities including when George HW Bush was running it were very much looking the other way if not explicitly condoning it.

39:17 looking at the Clintons and when Bill was governor of Arkansas, Koch running with the CIA through the airport there. There's a lot of speculation that they were involved in that so I figured i'd ask of course with the CIA connections and another thing that came up in that show on The Clintons is the fact that a lot of their opponents and critics over the years have sometimes gone missing and that came up more than once have you seen any of this kind of thing with The Bush clan? In the sort of work I do, there are so many strange stories and so many situations where key witnesses. My work relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy, we see scores of people who had untimely deaths

40:01 simply vanished from the face of the earth. We see that again and again and again. There was this story about a young woman who supposedly had been impregnated by one of the Bush is out in West Texas. I talked to people who knew about that story, but as far as the young woman, what I was told was that she and her entire family simply vanished. Some vehicles showed up and all of their belongings were put into it and they were never seen again so yes these kind of things definitely do happen. Man, and I've heard you say something to the effect that the Bushes are just the worker bees of the network. And they're obviously some of the most public figures in it but what can you tell us about maybe their bosses?

40:51 Well, you know that everybody's always looking for a cabal of number of people who meet together and control everything in your all these things over the years. In long term here about various groups and families like the Rothschilds and so on and of course all those play role but the reality is that these things shift and which families, individuals or organizations are not necessarily constant. Not everybody is in lockstep and siblings don't always agree and the children don't always want to be involved in the family business in the same way so it makes it difficult to do this kind of work but just to give you an example about a story about

41:42 supreme court justice antonin scalia and the a ranch that he was on very interesting to take a close look at the man whose ranch it was in these are very wealthy people who are not in the limelight we've never heard of them they tend to uh... own companies that you know manufacture yeah his case i don't want to say where there were some kind of think industrial vehicles i believe We donít think about a lot of those industries, things like dresser industries. We donít think about oil derricks and drilling mud and those kinds of things. Today we hear about the Bill Gatesís that

42:21 you know the twitter billionaires the people who make the devices that product apples that we use it that way revere but our lives are made functional and comfortable by the air conditioning equipment and the, Inside our phone are minerals that were mined by other companies and who make all kinds of things, the insulation in our houses. We tend not to think about those things but those are companies and those companies deal very much at the base level of manufacturing and need for a constant flow of resources

43:02 generally often either from places in the United States where there are competing interests, environmental groups and so forth or bringing it from abroad where often the people in that country are being underpaid much against their will for their countries heritage and for their labor. There are all of these interests in maintaining that kind of status quo, that kind of advantage. The Koch brothers – nobody had heard of them or very few people had heard of them more than a few years ago and so we have to be, we need good media, good investigative media and researchers to constantly studying these families, these individuals and it's not that simple. It is very difficult

43:52 Right. Yeah, it seems like a real life Game of Thrones to some extent and you know one of the most suspicious things about poppy Bush is that when questioned he said he just couldn't recall where he was when JFK was shot which you've alluded to a couple times so far and it's got to be rare for any American really but why do you think he's been so coy about where he was at the time? I wanted to know the answer to that or put it another way i simply just wanted to fill in that piece of his history to find out where he was when as a question went where were you when you heard that the president had been shot which is something that anybody who was

44:29 probably five years old or over at that time could answer just like as they could about 9-11 and so forth. I wanted to know where he was, so I went through what I could of his records, papers and books he had written and interviews with him. He's totally silent about it in fact. He's sort of like, he'll have a history and I'll describe it. I'll say in 1962 the US was doing this and early 1963 the US was doing this and then suddenly it's 1964 and I'm like hello? The President of United States was assassinated in one of the more spectacular acts

45:08 of a century of the history of the country, and he's killed in Texas where Mr. Bush lived. Mr. Bush in 1963 was a candidate for the first time for the United States Senate I began taking a close look and the result in my book, Family of Secrets is five chapters in a book about the bush family that goes beers off into the kennedy assassination and uh... did you know the book is dead i'd like to have my people read it and and if there's a lot there we don't time here to go to all the detail but but essentially thats where i began too focus on the indications that he was doing intelligence work in nineteen sixty three years connected to any an array of individuals

46:03 who were involved with the CIA cover corporations and what have you, who were in and out of Dallas at that time. I was astonished to find out that George HW Bush was a lifelong friend of a man by the name of George DeMoran Schild, a Russian émigré from a wealthy Russian family that had problems when the Russian Revolution took place. He was part of a network of very wealthy Russians and emigres who were involved in the early days of the american intelligence apparatus also involved with the oil industry and other such things and jerry's george to mourn chilled and he was a i found a friend of george h w bush dating all the way back to the nineteen uh... thirties when george hw bush with young very young fellow and that uh... george to march of also was a very very close friend of the man who we are told

47:04 shot and killed John F. Kennedy, and that was Lee Harvey Oswald. When I saw that George HW Bush documented that he was a longtime associate and friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's best friend, Bush went on to become the director of the CIA and he has never uttered a word about any of this. I said, well, to begin with that's obviously a sort of malpractice for a person in intelligence work because what could be more important than intelligence work than preventing the President of United States from being assassinated or figuring out who had done it? The fact that he was one step removed from the killer of the president and never saw fit

47:45 look into that or talk about that. That in itself, of course is just an incredible red flag. Mm hmm. Yeah the George DeMoren shield connection is it's pretty telling definitely especially that it goes back so many years before the assassination going back to the 30s I mean they clearly knew each other and there's also strong indications that poppy Bush was actually in Texas at the time of the assassination right? That's right. I discovered a little notice in the newspaper which had clearly been overlooked by everyone, and when I found that I said oh boy because it was a meeting of an oil drillers association being held November 21st, the night before

48:31 The John F. Kennedy was shot at 1230 on November 22 in Dallas, this was the night before, it was a evening meeting and there was George H W Bush speaking at this gathering and so i was able to at least established that he was in dallas the night before we know that the next day early in the afternoon he wasn't another place near dallas we do not know where he was between At what point did he leave Dallas? We know that he was in Dallas the night before. He was near Dallas as of 1 p.m., but we don't know where he was during the intervening hours. We also know that he was meeting with a man who is in charge of CIA coups overseas, and

49:23 We know that he was one step removed from Lee Harvey Oswald. We know that his central running mate when he ran for US Senate, the man who would be the Republican nominee for governor was a high-level military intelligence person closely connected to him and closely connected into not only the military, but also into the Dallas Police Department. And in Family of Secrets I go into this and great detail because it's a lot there pretty complicated. It is but it's been long suspected that the assassination was a CIA operation so wouldn't be surprised if he was involved to some degree

50:01 It's also important to remember that his family were very close personally with Alan Dulles, who was the CIA director who Kennedy had deposed and removed. So Alan Dulles and his network of top people were removed from the CIA and they remained At large in a sense, because they left at the end of 1961 after the failed Bay of Pigs and so forth. In 1962-1963 there were two years in which Alan Dulles and all his top coup plotters were essentially not working

50:37 Again, you've got the Bush family. Prescott Bush and his son George HW very closely tied into that network. It's all documented in tremendous detail in Family of Secrets and there is no question that there was real animus for Kennedy on the part of this group. It's also very interesting to see the details of Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles visited Dallas shortly before Kennedy was killed ostensibly because he was writing a book about intelligence and he was working on the book with e howard hunt another person cia prison very closely tied into all kinds of covert operations alleged to have known some things to bid somewhat waiting perhaps to what happened to john f kennedy

51:23 you see all these strands and everybody knew each other and i'm not suggesting that the cia itself officially or formally was involved in life highly doubt that i don't think that you do those sorts of things on a basis where they can ever be formally connected to any kind of it of a the government agency sure there were plenty of people missy i who after would not have been willing to do something like that but i think that the this group of people were outside now and their friends and colleagues who were inside, perhaps able to help along something that had a lot of different groups that were interested in seeing the president removed.

52:09 and that it goes again into their ties to all these different groups in segments of society and in family secrets i have one whole chapter where i just go into all the different people who were furious with kennedy and and would love nothing better than to see him no longer in the white house Right and great points. It does seem like it's one of their tricks to act as a type of covert parasite or Backseat driver in a sense inside some of these larger organizations because then they're harder to single out You can never really properly pinpoint these people moving within the larger circle So investigators get sloppy and say things like oh, it was the CIA all right

52:50 Okay, well that's not really detailed enough and these string pullers know that. It is another level of security for them! That's actually a fundamental way you just touched on the fundamental way that these things operate because, did the keyword is secret so everything secret that means that even inside an organization most everything is still secret compartmentalize their layers of deception obfuscation there are very few records what records there are often themselves cover what is really going on and this goes back again to george h w's experience in the navy in a world war two where he learned about this that that's what they do and also what they do is it they piggyback on other things and so you don't you try to find natural thing so for example did the alleged role of organized crime in the kennedy assassination well sure the either all of anti-castro cubans or

53:53 the far right in america or the oil industry will show her all of these segments wanted you know they hated kennedy and then we're only too delighted to see him taken out and so did they have an agenda could they have been involved in running perhaps multiple plots absolutely and so that the goal in intelligence workers deniability They always use assets that they don't do it themselves. You almost never have actual CIA payroll employees who are committing murders or anything else, it's always many steps removed and moreover they look for people who

54:39 have our criminals their experience criminals are only happy to do anything to get paid for it and they themselves are easy to discredit if and when they go public because they're criminals man so this is the sort of foolproof way that these things can be done in so for those in the traditional media academia and book publishing or what have you who always put out this line that someone would have talked or it's ridiculous, it's too complicated and could never have been done. They understand almost nothing about how these things are done and are done constantly throughout the world

55:17 I also, before we go, wanted to ask you about your website WhoWhatWhy a little bit. Tell us about that project and some of the stories that you're covering there? I started Who What Why when I began playing around with it right around the time that I was starting to write Family of Secrets. Already then, even before I was shut out with the book, I already had a sense that there were important stories that could not be told in the media. And I experienced that in my years of working for respected news organizations in the United States and around the world. I could see that you had to self-censor, that you could not get into these kinds of

55:57 fascinating and important topics that you and I have been discussing today. And I saw that there was a need to create a whole new media that was not accountable to the establishment, but I also saw that these so-called alternative media wasn't the solution I had in mind either because of the propensity to preach to the converted and to I was seeking to see whether it was possible to create a more pure journalism, closer studying journalism and being told that this is what we ought to aspire toward, I looked for a journalism that was a combination of the best quality of the so-called mainstream media and alternative media meaning as objective, fair

56:52 biased as possible, going in to look at things and open to any discoveries or outcomes regardless of whom it might offend. At the same time being willing to draw conclusions and not Draw a have false equivalency between on the one hand powerful enterprises that are fundamentally self serving and smaller entities that do you have public spirited, missions that are saying non-profits and things like that we realize that we don't want to create equivalency is that when a giant corporation says something it may be true but we understand that their job is to make money at the center keep their their positions

57:40 and that you know it sometimes when a uh... you know an environmental organization someone else's something it may be untrue or exaggerated are serving their own purposes but that the admissions of those two entities are fundamentally different we ought to look at them differently and then uh... there other biases in their agendas and so forth well we talked about and so uh... we try to encompass all of these things and take them all into consideration who what why is a non-profit uh... and unlike a lot of nonprofits we are not taking large sums of money from big establishment foundations we also do not accept any advertisements have any kind and so it is very difficult to do what we do because every penny that week taken in every penny that we paid or writers editors is donated

58:33 by ordinary people by americans and and peoples to minor extent uh... round the world that wherever they may be a their people elsewhere who care about in america having good journalism it affects them too but in any case We have run it on a shoestring, we continue to run it on a shoestring. We're hoping that the donations from people who read our site will continue to grow and people will support us so that we can expand. We are expanding, we'd like to expand much more. We would like to become in major news organization A first or second read if you will where people could go on a daily or even hourly basis

59:10 when something happens in the world and they say, ìI want to know whatís really going on and I want to read quality work by skeptical serious fair-minded diggers.î Thatís what we seek to do but we think it makes us not wholly unique but largely unique in the totality of what we represent. We also like to combine that with liveliness, fun and a bit of sense of humor, edgy headlines and pictures. We're going to keep on experimenting and introducing new concepts all the time. We welcome members of the public who get involved particularly those who have

59:46 any kind of professional skills that any organization, not just a news organization can use. We welcome people in everything from social media to marketing, to management, to technology. We also welcome people who have skills and research or reporting or writing or editing or video all these kinds of things we're going to grow it as a, as a people powered enterprise and we hope and expect to be around for a very long time Amen, man. Noble effort for sure it seems like we have very similar philosophies and the way to do these kind of things and that about does it for us so informative very insightful look at the Bush dynasty way more content than we could cover in just one conversation I really do appreciate your time are there any new projects or websites to point people towards if they want to follow up on you a bit more?

1:00:37 Add the elements are pretty simple who what why dot org or g meeting we are a non profit that's the website we have twitter account. at who what why we have a facebook page we're also on some other social media platforms. We love it when people share our stories through any means that all, the people can donate by going to the site they could volunteer by going inside they could write to us by going to this site I also have that book we just talked about family of secrets which can be bought in bookstores or online various forms including hardback paperback

1:01:18 e-book, audio book and I've got my own Twitter where i have my more personal reflections that's at real Russ Baker R E A L Russ Baker. And I am working on a new book about the assassination of John F Kennedy it's been in the works for number years I'm hoping won't be too many more years before that is out Awesome. Well, great Ross it's a pleasure talking to you keep doing the important stuff that other people won't take care of yourself out there It is a dangerous game Thank you so much. I really appreciate your interest and your thoughtful questions

1:01:54 Boom people, there we go. Good times! Another show in the bag I think I incorrectly said at the beginning whowhatwhy.com but it's actually .org if you haven't figured that out yet You can also look at the links that come with this show and they'll take you right to it But good episode right? Russ does a lot of great stuff but this book Family of Secrets is definitely my Bush family textbook now It's over two inches thick very well sourced It's gonna give you what you need when you start to forget the details of what is so bad about them, if such a thing were even possible.

1:02:29 See, we've talked about Poppy Bush's involvement with the CIA and heavily speculated that it was an older and deeper relationship than the one year where he was director. But it is always good to go back and look at the evidence and paper trail that verifies it We don't want to be hyperbolic or overly speculative because these are things that make us look crazy but people do not listen So I thought this was a return to just what we needed and plus, a guest who knows what he wrote and can have an educated conversation about it is key. This is where I tried to focus my next few guests after a few speculative UFO and life-after-death communication shows they have a place but I'd rather them be A once in awhile type of thing rather than a type of topic and approach that defines us

1:03:19 I'd much rather have something like today's show be the standard. But, I think this was a good time breaking down just how an elite family like the Bushes operates and i'm sure there is obviously more we could go into since this isn't the last time they will come up but it does lay a nice base So do check out whowhatwhy.org for Russ's further geopolitical analysis, hit him up on Twitter let them know you like the show we want the good guests to know they're not speaking into a vacuum We do have people listening out there right? I think so and speaking of listeners i do appreciate your time and i try to be a podcast that doesn't waste it

1:04:01 Some shows are heavily speculation, but I still want to go there. I've heard a few people talking on various podcasts lately and they mock conspiracy theorists and say that they want their standard to be things that we know to be absolutely true And that's a ridiculous Catch-22 standard because then they cite things like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or Operation Northwoods and yeah those are great pieces of evidence that there is a hidden hand manipulating events But these things are so old and the only reason that you feel comfortable talking about them is because they've been verified by the official source. So where does that leave a person like this on something like 9-11? You're just going to wait until 2045, where the government finally comes out and says yeah we did that

1:04:49 Is that day might come when enough time goes by after a few generations it's all new people and they don't really feel responsible for the crimes of old and sometimes they come out but if your standard is. that things need to be verified by official mainstream sources that are controlled by the very people who are perpetrating these crimes, then you're caught in a place where you're never really going to understand what's going on. So you do need to speculate. You do need to look at things like Operation Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin incident and say yeah these are the things we can verify and these are the things that allow me

1:05:27 to realize 9-11 fits a certain template that had been suggested before and carried out before. That's its usefulness, not to say these are real conspiracies and 9-11 is just wild speculation You can't wait to accept these things until they've been proven in the court of law because a lot of times that isn't going to happen It's about recognizing patterns identifying agendas And looking at events and saying, does this fit? Does this further their goals? If it does you can probably assume it wasn't random. You should be able to take an event and say that even though you can't fully verify it based on things in the past and the agenda going forward something's fishy here. Something just doesn't smell right! I know that sometimes the speculation goes too far...I guess that's my point

1:06:17 And that's what a show like this does. It breathes, it goes out maybe a little too far and then it pulls back but we should take what we know and extrapolate further on it not just stop there and think that oh that must be all there is to know Edward Snowden told us all about these surveillance problems with the NSA and they tell me that on the news I think he's a legitimate whistleblower and that's probably the extent of these programs Or, hey I can study history and recognize half a dozen false flags but i'm sure those don't happen anymore. Like that's a really bad approach to things even if you think that we sometimes take it to extremes that seem ridiculous You gotta question everything because personally I say fuck them! I'd rather go too far than not far enough

1:07:05 And what's with these vague statements? You're thinking, Carl would just tell us what you're saying. What are you referring to? Well I'm referring to a lot of things. I'm referring to recent events in Orlando. I'm refering the last week show and i'm just talking about a general approach I like to apply to all these things that's all I'm rambling, but the next show is going to be really interesting in this context. I already recorded it and it goes deeper into the idea of weaponized medicine and vaccines than we ever have before and this author also had quite a lot of documentation and research showing that it goes a lot further than just a tainted polio vaccine in the 50's. I think its gonna be one of those episodes that lights a lot of people up some shows are just primed for big response good or bad? I just know

1:07:51 Today's episode probably didn't surprise a lot of people, but it is good to have some examples and concrete details about this kind of corruption. So when someone asks you at Thanksgiving dinner what is exactly about the Bushes that you hate so much? Now you have a good amount of ammunition and don't even need to invoke 9-11! It's good to be educated and able to back up your points. And thanks guys like Russ doing the hard work to put all together we just have to familiarize ourselves with it But if you like the first hour, you know how to get more. Just sign up for THC Plus for $5 a month and you're getting 5 2-hour shows! I know that everyone is doing this goddamn model now but you just gotta go with the shows that do the best job... And i hope im one of them

1:08:37 In the second hour of today's show, we got into how Richard Nixon was a Bush dynasty puppet. Details about how Poppy Bush groomed and nurtured people within his oil drilling company. The rise of George W. Bush, how he used family connections to climb the political ladder despite the skeletons in his closet and lack of qualifications to run the country. How the Bushes are connected with the Saudi royal family in the Middle East and how that might connect to Al-Qaeda at 9-11 things we're still dealing with today, and honestly just a lot more ammunition for that inevitably awkward holiday family argument. You're gonna have it you might as well win but that's about it for me keep your head up in these troubled times and I'll see you soon your move Bush dynasty and the pathetic puppets drunk on the illusion of power caught in their wicked web Your fucking move

1:09:29 They built a little empire out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited working class But they've overcome their shyness Now we're calling them your highness And the world screams, save me THC They destroyed the bonds of friendship and respect between the only people left Who'd even look them in the eye, laugh and make a fortune Off the same ones that they tortured And the world screamed Save me THC Let's look for Jesus

1:10:31 Some will say, but Mr. Jesus is so far away You're the only one who can tell me if it's true Birds and archers too They built a little empire Fire out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited Working clave overcome their shining Now we're calling them your highness And the world screams Save me, THC Save me, THC