Chapo Trap House - 614a - Best of Texas Live: Poppy, Part 3 (3/28/22)

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Live from Dallas and Houston, we finally deliver the third part of our investigation into the life and times of President George H.W. Bush. This installment looks at his time as head of the C.I.A., his involvement with various figures associated with the Kennedy assassination and its investigation, and his business dealings with various shady Houston financial institutions. Note: I’m splitting this ep into two parts just to make it easier to keep all the Poppy material separated in case I want to collect them down the line, but 614a & b are one ep for all the Chapo archivists out there.

晤める 晤める 晤める 晤める 晤める I thought Matt was going middle Apologies. Yeah, we did the as you might expect bare minimum to prepare for tonight. This is this is a bit but here we are Dallas, Texas. What's going on? Dallas, Texas. This is joy to be with you tonight. Let's fucking go. All right, Dallas,

we're in Dallas tonight. And you know, I thought we would we would investigate local politics here in Dallas. So there's one local politician running for office here in Dallas. And I think is very worthy of all of our support. Can we put them up on the big board there? So I mean, if you have a chance to vote in the RISD board trustee place for election coming up soon, consider, consider dropping, consider dropping your vote for Mr. Lee Harvey. He's a straight shooter. So Dallas obviously, you know, we got we got the boy running for office here. So we thought, you know, okay, well, what's the most we can do for the Dallas show? And by special, I mean, how can we, how can I finally placate our hog fans who've been bothering me about this

for what feels like 10 years now. But I don't know if you notice or not the button that I'm wearing right now. But for those in the back, it says reelect Barbara's husband in 1992. That's right, Dallas, we're talking to Kennedy assassination. So for you guys here tonight, we are premiering part three of Poppy. The greatest Texan of all time, George HW Bush, I think we all agree. The Texans Texan, they called him the most Texan. So just a little to refresh your memory here. When we laughed last left off with our intrepid hero. He was sequestered in China to avoid the fallout of the Watergate scandal that he helped them engineer. Yes. He had just been involved in pulling off what was essentially a kind of intelligence state coup against Richard

Nixon. He was trying to do for policy. No, you can't do that. That's not your job. And and then had just been appointed head of the CIA by Gerald Ford, despite seemingly having no experience whatsoever. I don't know about this business. I'm just happy to be helping. Many people said that he was like a Ted Lasso figure, the CIA. You know, he just he just kind of ended up there. And it's like, well, I mean, I guess this is a mix up, but I'm gonna do the best I can do. He came, he came into the CIA after the church committee. It was sort of a losing team. And they needed to be revived by some good old fashioned positive thinking. Yeah, no, that is actually what happened. Yeah, no, he he got that team on track. To this day, they've had very few bad seasons. This is

fucking with me because I could not think of a contemporary political figure who is more like Ted Lasso than George H. W. Bush. It is uncanny. Yeah, fuck, you just needed the goddamn mustache. He also he also eats pussy too. Is that a Ted Lasso thing? Do that. Yes. So yes, he was brought into sort of clean house after Richard Helms and the rather damaging revelations of the church committee, which revealed, among other things, experiments on human guinea pigs, mind control programs, political assassinations and coups, domestic surveillance run down the list. Now, that and the this is the shit that they were just willing to disclose the family Jewel Helms called it. Yeah. So we check this out. This is once again, thank you to Russ Baker, his book

Family of Secrets for providing much of the information here tonight. But I did want to talk about the there's a New York Times editorial page. There is the editorial section. There was a New York Times editorial to commemorate the fact. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, our new CIA director and you could tell that they were really struggling for things to talk about because they ignored the fact that he had been a CIA agent pretty much his entire adult life. So let's put up the the New York Times article. A breezy head of the CIA, George Herbert Walker easy breezy, baby. Look at him right here. This will be a sort of refresher on the career of a poppy shortly after arriving in P King last fall is chair of the American liaison office. George

Herbert Walker Bush astonished fellow diplomats by arriving at official receptions on a bicycle instead of a Linda limousine just like the Chinese do it or Ted Lasso. He also has a bike. He would do that. Oh my God, if Ted Lasso showed up in Beijing to like ingratiate himself, you know that motherfucker would fucking just ride around on a goddamn bicycle, which is exactly what George at Bar did when they were in Beijing. His mode of travel was typical of the heavy casualness of this one time Texas oil billionaire, no millionaire, whom President Ford named tonight as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The lean and handsome Mr. Bush, who is noted, sorry, who is a noted host and a versatile athlete. This is the guy you just got appointed head of the CIA and they're

like, well, looking down. Well, his wife throws good parties. He could could play baseball. He was played baseball. Yeah. Yeah. Is the product of an aristocratic Connecticut family, his father Prescott Bush served the United States Senate. Yet as chief American representative to the China, George Bush has succeeded at least to a limited degree. I mean, honestly, that's the best kind of degree. Like realistically, I mean, like look at your heart. Are you more like, are you going to succeed to a degree or to a limited degree? We all know instead of formal dinners and receptions, the Bush is entertained by serving soft drinks and popcorn while showing old movies. Last July, for us, they had an American picnic, hot dogs, hamburgers and beer on the grounds of

the American compound. There were door prizes, including an exercise cycle for a corpulent Middle Eastern ambassador. Some fat, like Saudi, like oil sun come through and George Bush is just like, I got you a gift. Here's here's Joan Fonda. Continuing it says, one observer of the Peking scene said recently gets dime square or something. One observer of the Peking scene said recently, George Bush has become a center of attention enough to end affection in the diplomatic community. His friends range from a clerk in the Italian embassy, a tennis partner, to the highest ranking ambassadors. So he has two friends. He made two friends in China. George Bush has often amazed friends and critics with his talent for smiling in the face of keen political

disappointments. He was twice elected to the House in 1966 and 1968, but was defeated for the United States Senate in 1964 and 1970. And three times mentioned in vain as a vice president, so can it. Funny you bring that up. If confirmed by the Senate as director of the central intelligence, Mr. Bush may face the most difficult challenge of his career, since it is a post requiring a low political profile and he is openly ambitious politically. Mr. Bush, who was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, looks far younger than he is. He's a goddamn dime. They're really snack and he is a Pog. They're really in the tank for him in this article. This is like, you know, they're writing about LeBron. They're writing about the Bush here,

talking about how good he is and smiling, these two friends, how he gave soda to everyone at his party. So just the end here, it says here, after the war, he went to Yale where he captained the baseball team and won a five beta Kappa key before graduating in 1948. After that, he built up an oil drilling business in Texas that made him a millionaire. He was married to the former Barbara Pierce. They have five children politics. He said a few years ago is always going to be a part of me. So politics is always going to be a part of him. Can't stop. Can't stop. Won't stop. So, yeah, Gerald Ford, he nominates him to be director of the CIA. And it's funny to think about like he's been mentioned a bit for vice president. He did not sail through the confirmation because,

you know, as the Times article mentions, he had already run for political office a number of times as a Republican and was very much planning to do that again when he was nominated for the position. So to lay people's fears, Gerald Ford issued an official statement on behalf of George Bush that stated that he had at Poppy's urging that stated that he would never ever seek or hold the vice presidential. Never. He would never even think to do such a thing. And honestly, it's disgusting for you to even ask. So he was eventually confirmed. I think like 23 people voted against him, but he was confirmed fairly easily. And after his concern confirmed, obviously the first order of business is help manage the agency's response to the church committee and

it's rather troubling revelations and continue the mission of scrubbing everything like Richard Helms had been doing before he was shown the door. And it just, you know, basically just backing up dump trucks of papers to an incinerator. He took over in 1976 and was given a clear mandate by Gerald Ford, a sweeping reorganization that placed more power in the hands of the director than had ever existed before. Interesting. Strange for a guy with no experience whatsoever in intelligence to suddenly find himself. He's just happy to be there. To suddenly find himself in a bureaucratic visit, an executive bureaucratic position that all of a sudden more power. Oh, sure. You want me to do it? Well, I guess I will. And it also increased the CIA's authority

over other departments, like intelligence, like the Pentagon's DNI and like several other intelligence agencies. It really made clear that the CIA, like they were all subordinate to the CIA and everyone is subordinate to this, this to this Ted Lasso figure who's just been given the given the keys to the kingdom. He's just like, oh, heck, y'all, come on in here, like get around, you know, usually when something's been the subject of tremendous malfeasance, you want to concentrate power within it. I was just thinking, just on the Ted Lasso thing, it is such a funny moment here, because if anybody's listened to a hell of presidents, Gerald Ford really is president football. It's like this moment where it's like president football and that Times report

that's like you would write the exact same profile of somebody you were hiring to coach your local rec league. Yeah, that's you know, it's like meanwhile, they're just creating a charnel house in Central America the entire time and they're like, but he's sure as throw is a good hot dog picnic. President football and president baseball. Exactly. Absolutely. SCI director Bush exercised another Bush family specialty, which is systematically favoring an intelligence that played into hardline conservatives like fears of Russia and the Soviet Union. And I'm talking about, of course, a direct reversal of the Nixon and Kissinger policy of detente in favor of three gentlemen named Paul Wolfelwitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yes, that's correct. He was

oversaw the creation of what was known as the Pentagon's team B. Team B, they're basically like the team B, like they were made up of hardline neoconservatives who had long pillory the central intelligence agency, because their intelligence was too soft on Russia. And in their mind, the problem with the CIA's intelligence is that it was based only on data and not vibes. It was only hard data, no vibes. And you got guys like Wolfelwitz in there. And he's saying, Have I ever been to Russia? No. Do I speak Russian? Definitely not. Do I understand the Russian mindset? Absolutely. And it's only through vibes can something like that be accomplished. No, but like the team B specialty was like the CIA, they would ask for a report from the CIA on

Russia's doomsday weapon. And the CIA would come back and they said, we've put all our intelligence analysts on this and we have found no evidence whatsoever of a Russian doomsday device, i.e. we think it's highly unlikely that one exists. Team B would go, Ah, you see, you fools. The fact that you found no evidence for it is what it assures us that it does exist. Yeah, team B, any time in the teacup years that you would see a conservative fret about a, you know, Iranian submarine that is just miles away from the US coast, they're really playing off the legacy of team B. Team B is in the hearts of every amateur Kremlinologist and Russia expert, whether they're in Ukraine, like Tyrell star, or just state side, typing it up. So yeah, like he had, he oversaw

the guys, like the planted the seeds of what would become like, you know, the Iraq war and like that whole intelligence debacle. But like, I think this underscores here that like, it's kind of the mistake people make when they talk about intelligence, because like, you know, you read accounts of this, and they're like, oh, like they didn't like the CIA intelligence analysts because their intelligence was not biased enough. And it's just like, that's just because the analysts weren't reading the room good enough. I mean, there is no, yes, there is data out there that you can control, you can attempt to draw like what are more or less rational conclusions from. But there is simply no way that an organization like an intelligence gathering

bureaucracy exists in a government such as ours or any in the world, that where intelligence is not going to be subordinate to the politics of the people who surround it. It's always going to be political and there's always going to have an agenda to it. Team B was just like, they had to change the agenda. That's changed the agenda to make it seem like to justify restarting the cold war, essentially. Yeah, after I mean, again, like and keep in mind that Nixon was just he just oversaw Nixon being removed from office more or less because, as Matt said, him and Kissinger attempted to exercise pretty much total control over US foreign policy. That's not a lot. You're not charged. They were cutting out the present. Who do you think you are? The president? Oh,

no. That's adorable. So in addition to cooking the book, scrubbing the record to cover up everything that church committee was looking into and cooking intelligence about Soviet doomsday devices. Poppy oversaw another thing the Bush family specializes in privatizing things. And he oversaw like a near total privatization of US intelligence in the form of getting these Saudis to fund covert actions unapproved by Congress. It's so easy. Oh, no. How are we going to get this approved by Congress? Who gives a shit? Get a suitcase full of diamonds from a Saudi prince. Yeah, the late 70s were the time when Prince Turkey Al-Fazal, who is Bush's equivalent in Saudi intelligence, General Intelligence Directorate, started the policy of Wahhabization, but under

the ages of Saudi intelligence, which was going to places that were near Russian or Russian sympathetic governments and just giving already Muslim populations more money than they'd ever seen to be like, okay, you're Wahhabi now. And then you just put it in the oven, let it sit for about 20 years, and there's new money for the Black Eagle Trust Fund. And by the way, the Saudi funding for CIA covert operatives, that made a shitload. It was a very lucrative racket for many of his cronies here in Texas. In fact, I think many of the buildings here in Dallas are probably built with money that was siphoned off of those operations. So, but here's the problem, though. When it comes to you farming out CIA operations, there's always been a little bit of blowback, as Felix

alluded to, but there's one very specific thing that Poppy oversaw in September of 1976. He was only confirmed that February. But in September of that year, there was a bombing on DC's embassy row. There was a terrorist assassination of the former Chilean ambassador to President Allende, a man named Orlando Letellier. Orlando Letellier, him and an American associate, a woman named Ronnie Moffitt, were assassinated with a car bomb in the middle of Washington, DC. On embassy row, like the highest security place in DC outside of the White House. This is where like every country in the world has their embassy. We've driven past it. Some of them are very impressive. Some of them not, not so much. Can you believe we went from this to Lev Barnas? Yeah,

if you're not, if you're not strapping a bomb to a fucking chassis of a car, what are you even doing? I don't care. Subsequent investigations by Chileans revealed that the assassination had been carried out by a former CIA contractor by the name of Michael Towney at the direction of Chile under Pinochet's DINA, like security director. They're terrifying internal security forces and they carried out this assassination on American soil, including killing an American citizen as part of what was known as Operation Condor, which was this like international program of assassinations that was kind of like Operation Phoenix, but for the Western Hemisphere. And the idea was it was like this fascist spider web that would like, like any

sympathizer of any socialist government, they would touch you in any country that you were in. It didn't matter if they didn't just didn't have to disappear you just because you were in Argentina or Chile or whatever. Yeah, they would kill you in Dupont Circle in Washington DC. Why did they do that? Well, it's because when you kill someone with a car bomb in DC, the CIA tends to take notice of something like that, except George W. But George H W Bush was director of the CIA at the time. And oh, sorry, I was reading here. It says a under direct CIA director George H W Bush leaked for public consumption through Newsweek magazine. He leaked an intelligence assessment to Newsweek magazine, clearing the Chilean government's feared intelligence service,

D I N A, which was then run by Contreras, who is like another very scary guy, relying on the word of Bush's CIA Newsweek reported that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the Latelier assassination. The Central Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts. And because the murder coming with murder was coming while Chile's rulers were wearing wooing US support, it could only damage the Santiago regime. Operation Condor, just a side note, had the benefit for American sickos on the American side in that it was like the greatest direct male child theft ring, probably of all time was like John Negroponte when he was ambassador to Honduras was running a child adoption

racket. Yeah, like orphans who were made by the dirty war that he was running, he was selling to American families through the US Embassy in Honduras. Yeah, yeah, there were there's been a lot of a lot of media made about the theft of babies specifically in Argentina, but they were doing it everywhere the Condor was one last thing about CIA contractor Michael Towney, who planted the car bomb. And this is another sort of another thing that rhymes with the career of George H. W. Bush and his entire family. But would it surprise you to learn that Michael Towney was on the State Department's watch list for international terrorism, but was allowed to enter the country more or less completely unmolested? Does that sound familiar to anyone? And so the

CIA when the CIA said that Oh, no, the Chileans they didn't do this. We know trust us who did it. Their argument was it was communists who are trying to make let's have the a a martyr. It's like they were imagining an international communist movement where they're like, Hey, Orlando, would you willing to like, would you be willing to die like for clout? And he was like absolutely. But unfortunately, Orlando let or Lando let tell yet wasn't the only assassination causing a headache for poppy. There was still the matter of Dallas in 1963 for him to nail shut. I'm gonna I'm gonna read a code now from Russ Baker's book. Although poppy couldn't remember where he has had been on November 22nd 1963 good and couldn't and couldn't be bothered to recall his old friend George

de Maurin Schultz precise. Who's that in the matter and or in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald as CIA director. He began paying keen attention to the resurgent assassination investigations. So poppy composed an internal memo asking after a report regarding a visit by Jack Ruby. This is Jack Ruby to Santo Traficante. It says Traficante two years after Bush left the CIA as director would admit to congressional investigators of being part of a CIA CIA operation to assassinate Castro in the 1960s in 1960. As a side note, I didn't know this until I was researching it for the show today. Sam Giancana was killed in 1975 by an unknown gunman shortly before he was set to testify to the church committee about his role in the many plots against Castro. He was cooking

sausage and peppers. So he came up and b-b-b-bing right there. Just a little bit like a little bit like a mafia flavor to the Kennedy assassination here. Just another quote it says here's a later the committee decided this is a speaking of Traficante said he was brought into the Castro thing by Johnny Roselli and he says later committee decided to recall Roselli for additional testimony when he was called up but by the time he was called he had already been missing for several days. His decomposing body was later found inside a 55 gallons fuel fuel drum floating in Tampa Bay, floating in dumbfounding Bay near Miami. He had been strangled and shot and his legs had been salt off. It is really sad when

someone wants to kill themselves that badly. Just really unfortunate. Call your friends, call your therapist, call any girl that you see. Just don't end up like him. In his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, trafficante would say he had been recruited for the Castro project by fellow mobster John Roselli, who had testified in 1975 before the Church Committee, the Church Committee about efforts to kill Castro. In April 1976, while Poppy was CIA director, Roselli was again called before the Church Committee this time to testify about the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.

Then the oil drum thing happened. So we got a renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination. But that's bad for Poppy. But as we just explained, most of the mob guys who were going to testify were already dead. But there was just one loose thread that dangled out in for Poppy this entire time. And that is his old family friend, George DeMorenchel from right here in Dallas, Texas. In the case you don't remember, George DeMorenchel was a Russian-born petroleum engineer who's like a Zellig figure to the whole Kennedy assassination. He was basically, he was the uncle of President Poppy's prep school roommate at Andover.

He was a friend of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's parents, an associate of Oswald, a notorious womanizer in Bon Vivant, who was rejected by the wartime office of strategic surface for his alleged Nazi sympathies. But yeah, like George DeMorenchel was the guy who like longtime family friends with the Bush family. He has known Poppy since he was in high school pretty much. And he keeps showing up in the life of Poppy H. W. Bush. And he shows up here in Dallas because he basically is the, basically shepherds Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. He shepherds them into this community of Dallas white

Russians and became like their sort of social confidant, a very close friend of theirs. DeMorenchel's wife, Jean, she was the one who claimed to have taken the photo of Oswald in the backyard, if you believe that photo was actually taken. In, okay, so but in, while this is going on in September of 1976, there's a basically like a growing, after the church committee, a growing drumbeat of public interest, not just in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but also in Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy. So after months of debate, the House agreed to open a new investigation into all of them, hence the

House Select Committee on Assassinations. January of that year, so the beginning of the year, like September is when the House Select Committee on Assassinations is finally formed. In January of that year, George DeMorenchel had written to a Dutch TV reporter named William, Willem Altmans, who had struck up a friendship with George years earlier in Dallas when he was speaking to these like women, women's auxiliary groups that were like these fanatically arch-conservative bircher types. And also, sidebar here about Willem Altmans, he was, he did attend Yale and graduated in the same class as William F.

Buckley. So like all these people know each other, it's really amazing. So, so like, so he's talking to this guy, Altmans, who is this weird, like in the writing about him, he's described sort of similar to George DeMorenchel himself, as sort of an intelligence-connected cipher. So he knows, he knows that George DeMorenchel is working on a memoir that he's seeking this Dutch TV reporters held with. So, DeMorenchel is beginning to lose it. And later that year, he wrote this letter to George H.W. Bush, who is serving as the director of the CIA. This is an incredible letter that he wrote his old friend George. Stated Dallas

September 5th. Dear George, you will excuse this handwritten letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes. Our phone bugged and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this, or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadja died from cystic fibrosis over three years ago. I tried to write stupidly and unsuccessfully about Lee H. Oswald, and it must have angered a lot of people. I do not know, but to

punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help, and I will not annoy you anymore. Good luck in your important job. Thank you so much. Sincerely, George DeMorenchel, 2737 Kings Road, apartment 142, if anyone wants to check that out. First floor apartment, pretty tough for a JFK Coke conspirator. You have to, like, you have to fuck up so bad to have, like, known Bush your entire life to have help killed Kennedy and you end up being this guy. It's like Joe Biden's dad missing

out on the great wave of post-war prosperity. Do the biggest bag fumbles of all time. So, obviously, this letter hits, like, the CIA's, like, mail department. I just want to say, Ari Gold was working. I just want to say, if I ever get the chance to write a letter to a secretary-level individual, I'm absolutely going to sign it off. Good luck with your important job. He's like, yeah, he's like a pestering Jewish mom. So, like, imagine, like, yeah, you're in the CIA mail department and you get a handwritten letter from a guy speaking, you know, on very friendly terms with the director of the CIA and the guy happens to be a guy

who is, like, more associated with the Kennedyist fascination than anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. So, it's, like, routed around the agency and, like, all these notes are appended to it and then it finally gets across director Bush's desk with this memo. Mr. Bush, do you know this individual? This is a side note to the director. And then in an internal CIA note, George H. W. Bush responded, I do know this man, DeMoren Schult. I first met him in the early 40s. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later, he surfaced in Dallas in the 50s, maybe. He got involved in some controversial dealings in Haiti. Then he

surfaced when Oswald shot the prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of President Kennedy. So, that's, like, I love that response because this is the head of the CIA who doesn't really recall much of anything about a close family friend who was that close to the guy who supposedly killed the president. But he refers to his controversial dealings in Haiti. I love that that's, like, such intelligence, OPSEC, because he's talking about, like, well, I recall he did some controversial things in Haiti and not the vastly more controversial dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald. So, George Bush, director of the

CIA, actually penned a personal response to George. It reads as such, Dear George, please forgive the delay in my reply to your September 5th letter. It's time to thoroughly explore the matters you raised. Let me first say that I know it must have been difficult for you to seek my help in the situation outlined in your letter. I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter's tragic death a few years ago and the current poor state of your wife's health. I was extremely sorry to hear of these circumstances. In your situation, I can well imagine how the attentions you described in your letter

affect both you and your wife. However, my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of federal authorities in recent years. The flurry of interest that has attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long since subsided. I can only suspect that you have become newsworthy in quotation marks again and in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination and thus may be attracting the attention of people in the media. I hope this letter has been of some comfort to you, George, although I realize I am unable to answer your question completely.

Thank you for your good wishes on my new job. As you can imagine, I'm finding it interesting and challenging. Very surely yours, George Bush, director. Okay, so Dallas, Texas, would it surprise you to learn that George DeMorenschild's life took a turn for the worse after sending the director of the CIA? What? No, but he asked his old friend for help. In November of that year, just one month after writing the letter, George's wife had him committed to a mental institution for three months at where? Dallas Parkland Hospital. That's right. You might remember Parkland as the hospital Kennedy was rushed to after getting his head

blown off. Okay, so his wife went upon admitting to him, claimed that he had attempted suicide three times. It's just important to get that on the record. He had been attempting suicide three times already, so if he ever pulls it off, just know there's a precedent there. He claimed, yeah, he attempted suicide, was hearing voices, and believed that the FBI and Jewish mafia was out to get him. Literally everyone but the CIA. And so his wife had him committed in which he was treated with electroshock therapy. Years, a year after a spoiler alert, George DeMorenschild kills himself, or kills himself, a year after his death, though,

his wife would go on to tell a journalist a very different story about what precipitated George's hospitalization. I'm reading family of secrets here. She claimed that a doctor had appeared in Dallas for a brief period and administered injections to him. Following those injections, he said, George suffered a nervous breakdown, at which point she decided to have him hospitalized. The doctor, she claimed, vanished into thin air. I'll also note here, Jeanne DeMorenschild, George's wife, was also longtime friends with former CIA director Richard Helps. So I just want to close it out here with just

like, just a little bit about the circumstances surrounding George DeMorenschild's death. So in 1977, Bush leaves the CIA because, you know, people, like, he had a very, very short tenure as CIA director. He begged, because, you know, the Republicans lost the election, and he begged Carter to allow him to extend his tenure and really get done the reforms that he really was trying to implement. That didn't work. Carter Candom pointed to this guy, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to reform the CIA. And he was a long-time Navy guy who actually did want to reform the CIA. And in Houston, we'll get into what

happened to the Carter administration for going up against the Bushes. But, so, remember the Dutch TV producer, TV reporter Willem Ultman? So he returned to Dallas in 1977, and like, Morenschild contacted him, and he began to hint that he was writing something and wanted to tell Ultman something troubling. When he first sees Morenschild for the first time in years, he is shocked at, like, how fucking, how bad it's gotten. Like, this guy's like, he looks like, he looks haggard. He's paranoid. He, like, used to be a man of some, of some vigor. And it was an active tennis partner. And now he was

a fucking complete wreck. And then he starts telling Ultman all this shit about how he knew Jack Ruby, and was a very compartmentalized part of a plot of Texas oilmen and intelligence operatives to kill John F. Kennedy in Dallas. He begs Ultman to take him out of the country, and, and then Ultman takes him to his home in Amsterdam. He puts him up at his house and helps him edit the memoir he's working on called, I am a Patsy, I am a Patsy, both in exclamation points. This goes fine. What does that mean? This goes fine for a couple of days until Ultman, keep in mind himself, also somewhat

intelligence adjacent, says an old friend who is a Soviet diplomat will be joining them for lunch. The man arrives, and Warren Schultz said he'd like to take a brief walk, a brief constitutional before lunch. Who doesn't like to do that? So he leaves the house and never returns. He goes to Belgium and then gets a flight back to Florida. And, and one of the things that was found on him at the scene of his body, like on his body, was an affidavit that he had prepared accusing Ultman of betraying him. And when you think about this in the context of, like, how George DeMoren Schultz knew Lee Harvey Oswald and the role

he played here in Dallas with Mr. Oswald, sort of shepherding him around ex-Russians, and then the whole thing of white Russians, but also the whole thing about Oswald being introduced to, like, arch-conservative anti-communist Russians after being an American who fucking... It was very weird. Went to the Soviet Union, renounced his American citizenship, and joined a communist country. Then married the daughter of a KGB general, then it comes home, and it's like, hey, here are, like, arch-reactionaries hanging out with them. And it was cool for some reason. But just like, in the context of why he says, like, so this, this Dutch

TV guy is like, oh my, like, he's losing his mind. He's starting to tell him all this shit about the Kennedy assassination. And then his friend says, oh, I have a friend of mine coming by. He's an ex-Soviet diplomat. You think in George DeMoren Schultz's mind he began to feel like Oswald in that, like, all of a sudden you're being placed around Soviet intelligence operatives, you're being placed around Soviets, so that when you end up killing someone or kill yourself, you know, the narrative is incredibly presented about your associations and contacts. So he returns to Florida, and the House Select Committee on

Assassination learns of this, and sends one of their investigators to interview him. A man named, like, this is not made up, one of the coolest names ever, Gaten Fonze. Gaten Fonze, he learns that Gaten Fonze is on the way to interview him while he is being interviewed by Edward J. Epstein, no relation, of Reader's Digest magazine. He kills himself later that afternoon. And then the one, he blows his head off with a shotgun, and then the other, the other part about that story I really love, is that in Bill O'Reilly's book, Killing Kennedy, he invents a story about how when he was a TV producer here in Dallas, he found out

that Moran Schultz would return to the United States and found out, he claims he found at the house he was staying at, and he says that he was knocking on the door going, come out, pinhead! As the guy put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off. I just think he killed himself because he didn't want to talk to Bill O'Reilly. Well, that's the funny thing, it's like, that's the story you're telling. It's like, yeah, this guy blew his head off instead of talking to me. So just, and sorry, there's one last detail about the circumstances of his suicide. The shotgun that he used to kill himself was placed in the guest room that he was staying in

by the proprietor of the house. A loaded shotgun was placed in his bedroom because she said she heard strange noises the other night. I mean, whatever, it's Texas, I buy it. There's basically like, there's this whole constellation of people that the FBI investigated after the George de Moran Schultz suicide, including a guy named Jim Savage, who was an executive at Transcontinental Drilling Company who knew both Poppy and George de Moran Schultz. Jim Savage was someone who, uh, Moran Schultz gave his car to to drive from the airport back home. Uh, he'd worked with the Moran Schultz and he'd also been a friend and

colleague. Uh, no, he worked for a company called Kermige, which was, uh, for the Senator Robert Kerr, who was a colleague of Prescott Bush. In 1952, Savage, uh, gave Poppy Bush a tour of Kermige before he started Zapato Petroleum. And what do you know, the Kermige Oil Company was very instrumental in setting up George Bush very nicely in the oil business. Uh, Jim Savage's supervisor at Kermige was a guy named George Kitchell, who was also good friends with Poppy and helped him launch his political career in Houston in the early 1960s. Years after the assassination, Kitchell confirmed that he was friends with both Poppy and

Morgan de Moran Schultz, but he didn't know that the other two knew each other. Don't you hate it when, you know, friends are friends? But check this out. Here's, here's, here's the last thing I'm gonna drop through tonight. This is just the last weird connection here. George Kitchell's brother was the FBI agent that Poppy George HW Bush called on November 22nd, 1963, to warn him about threats made on Kennedy's life here in Dallas. So, now this is part of, like, all just like creating his backstory, this cover here. He just, like, it was about right-wing groups that were making death threats to Kennedy in Dallas. So, he was like, day of,

he was like, oh, shit. Let me just contact my good friend's brother who works to the FBI and just get this story on the record real quick. So, that is part one of part three of Poppy, Dallas, Texas. We are gonna take a quick break. We're gonna have a quick intermission. Please get a drink. Please sip your bartenders. We'll be back in the second half with Texas Boys Pendejo Time. We got Jake and Thomas with us tonight. So, chill out. We'll be back in a little bit. So, that's enough about Dallas. Fuck Dallas, right? Let's get it going. Let's talk about George. Let's talk about Poppy Bush's connections to the city of Houston. So, Poppy leaves the CIA in 1977.

After a very brief tenure, and of course, he begged Jimmy Carter to let him stay on, to, you know, continue the important work he was doing. So, he leaves government and goes back to the old family business, banking. But he does it here in Texas. He is hired as a special consultant to the first international bank shares of Dallas, which was at the time Texas's largest bank holding company. Under his reign, FIB acquired 50 banks and was only turned down by the Federal Reserve one time. Quick side note, first international bank shares of Dallas is owned by close family friends of FBI director J Edgar Hoover. 14 months after being hired as a special consultant,

FIB went bankrupt and was bailed out by the government for $3.5 billion. But let's talk about another Texas bank. Main bank of Houston. It's a small charming community bank with only about 58 million in deposits, which was between October 1978 and December 1979, buying $10.4 million a month in new $100 bills. Main bank of Houston is notable here for two reasons. One, because one of the principal investors was a Bush family crony by the name of Jim Bath. He was a guy who met and befriended George W. Bush during their service together in Vietnam in the Air National Guard. But two, and probably more importantly, it was the first time a joint Texan-Saudi banking partnership was done publicly.

Just two months after Poppy became CIA director, Jim Bath started an aircraft brokerage firm. And he became acquainted with, because they wanted to buy planes from him, two scions of two very wealthy Saudi families, the Bin Mahfouzes, and of course the Bin Laden's. The principal investors in Main Bank of Houston were Jim Bath, Khalid Bin Mahfouzes, another Saudi named Geith Farron, and one more guy, former Texas governor John Connolly. So I just think about this like, sorry about getting you shot, John, but here's a really sweet banking job I've got lined up for you after that magic bullet went through your wrist. Reading here from Family of Secrets, what most distinguished the tiny Main Bank was the highly

unusual amount of cash the bank dispersed, more than $10 million a month in $100 bills. The authorities often consider such untraceable money flows to be signs of criminal activity, particularly money laundering often connected with drugs. Cash, however, is also the principal tool of covert operations. Students of history will note that this bank is operating in the same time frame as Saudi intelligence is ramping up its Wahhabization policy of dumping maybe some of those fresh $100 bills in hotspots around the world where U.S. and Saudi enemies exist. Main Bank of Houston, however, was merely a minnow compared to the Leviathan, known as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or the world's sleaziest bank.

Khalid bin Mahfouz owned 20% of BCCI, and Gaith Farron, one of the principal investors in Main Bank of Houston, was understood to be their frontman in the United States. BCCI was founded in the early 70s and shuttered in 1991, but forgotten now for a time was probably the biggest financial fraud and criminal conspiracy in human history. Reading more from Russ Baker, he describes it as a vast entity connected to the Pakistani military regime and key Gulf states with banks and branches in 73 countries, including 50 developing ones. Although its founder, Aga Hassan Avedi, along with his top brass, emphasized their Muslim religiosity, the institution would apparently do anything for anyone willing to pay for their services needed to be kept quiet. These ranged

from helping Pakistan obtain a nuclear bomb to financing secret arms deals on behalf of the West while simultaneously serving as a money distribution network for many terrorist organizations. Some of their most famous clients include Saddam Hussein, terrorist mastermind Abu Nadal, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and the elusive heroine kingpin of Asian's Golden Triangle, Kun Sa. I didn't know he had so many Noriega heads in the audience tonight. Abu Nadal, probably the biggest loser in that list, he pops up again in another poppy related thing when Oliver North is testifying before Congress on Iran Contra, and they ask him why he has all this cash, why he took all this money, and he starts fake crying and says that Abu

Nadal threatened to kill him so he needed to buy a home security system. Despite having, and this is how evil this bank truly is, despite having a fucking, a murderer's row of star banking clients, which also included Masad, the MI6, and CIA, most of the, like deposits, like most of the funding was actually from ordinary people in developing countries, particularly in the form of remissions from guest workers from the Philippines working in Gulf countries. And when BCCI collapsed, millions of their patrons, many of whom were guest workers, lost what little they had of their life savings. Now, by 1988, in the last year of poppy's reign as vice president, the Manhattan DA, Robert Morgenthau informed the city of London, where BCCI was chartered,

that he was seeking to indict it as a Ponzi scheme. In order to avoid a run on the bank and MI6, the Bank of England closed BCCI. Now, almost every attempt by multiple countries to unravel the extent of this criminal empire ran into a wall called national security. Investigating it would simply compromise the secrets of their clients, aka the Pakistani military, the Masad CIA, and MI6. The man in charge of investigating BCCI in America, that's right, Robert Mueller. Would it surprise you to learn that his investigation turned up no evidence of the U.S. government enabling this vast criminal conspiracy? If he had looked a little harder, though, he might have found records of meetings between the BCCI's founder, Abedi, and at the time Reagan CIA director

William Casey. Journalists alleged dozens of meetings between the two and alleged that they struck a deal to make BCCI the major conduit for covert operations. It was the way to launder millions of dollars in funds that had not been authorized by Congress. Another way around the old church committee. And here's another little thing. The guy in charge of regulating BCCI, when people believed it was just a bank and not a criminal conspiracy, the assistant secretary for enforcement under the Reagan Bush administration was a man named John Walker, Poppy's cousin, George H.W. Bush's cousin. So here's where it gets good. We talked about how he had a hand in stitching up Kennedy and Nixon. But keep in mind, he was out of office at this point and was very sore at

the fact that Jimmy Carter and the Democrats had taken the White House, which is always the real prize. And not only that, Jimmy Carter had appointed a guy named Stansfield Turner to be the director of the CIA, who genuinely was an outsider to the intelligence community. So here's what he does. He basically ensnares, or it's like the people connected to him, ensnare the director of Carter's office of budget management and budget in a banking scandal. And they would use it in their effort to retake the White House in 1980. The guy named Bert Lance was Carter's OMB director. And around that, like around the early in the Carter administration, the Senate began looking into a dodgy bank loan. He got to ensure compliance with the terms of a stock purchase in the Bank

of Georgia. I'm sorry, this is very dry. We're talking about banking here, but this is Houston. All of you, these are Dallas endures. There's banks everywhere in this country. So because of that scandal, Bert Lance resigns in 1977. And that's where Poppy and his friends step in. Lance is out of work and broke his shit. So imagine his surprise when Aga Hassan Abedi and Gaith Ferron are interested in buying Lance's bank stock, which was okay because Lance had already been approved by American regulators. Lance, of course, enthusiastically agreed and essentially became the unwitting middleman for the introduction of the BCCI into the American banking system. So if anyone investigated this, Lance's name would be front

and center and not far off from his friend and former business partner, Jimmy Carter. So you begin to see why Carter's attempts to open up the books on the CIA went absolutely nowhere. Also, little known fact, Jimmy Carter's idiot brother was also involved in an arms deal with Gaddafi and was given classified intelligence by Brzezinski, Mika's dad's a big new. So this is really what takes us from the end of Nixon to the beginning of the Reagan administration. Ladies and gentlemen, that is Poppy part three. And that takes us to our act two. We'll have a brief intermission, get some drinks, we'll be back with a pendejo time, boys, in act two. Houston, Texas,

sit tight, we'll be back in a little bit.