just summarized. There is, for example, the question of the infiltration of the White House staff and
of the Plumbers themselves by members and assets of the intelligence community whose loyaltywas not to Nixon, but to the Anglo-American financier elite. This includes the presence among the (^)
Plumbers of numerous assets of the Central Intelligence Agency, and specifically of the CIA
bureaus traditionally linked to George Bush, such as the Office of Security- Security Research Staff
and the Miami Station with its pool of Cuban operatives.
The Plumbers were created at the demand of Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon that something had
to be done to stop leaks in the wake of the "Pentagon Papers" affair of 1971. But if the Plumbers
were called into existence by Kissinger, they were funded through a mechanism set up by Kissinger
clone George Bush. A salient fact about the White House Special Investigations Unit (or Plumbers)
of 1971-72 ilifelong intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the president of Pennzoil. Bill Liedtke was a regional finances that the money used to finance it was provided by George Bush's business partner and
chairman for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, and he was one of the most successful,
reportedly exceeding his quota by the largest margin among all his fellow regional chairmen.
Liedtke says that he accepted this post as a personal favor to George Bush. In 1972, Bill Liedtke
raised $700,000 icontribution of $100,000 tn anonymous contributions, including what appears to have been a singlehat was laundered through a bank account in Mexico. According to Harry (^)
Hurt, part of this money came from Bush's bosom crony Robert Mosbacher, now Secretary of
Commerce. According to one account, "two days before a new law was scheduled to begin making
anonymous donations illegal, the $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities was loaded into a
briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters and picked up by aWashington- bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re- elect the President company vice president, who boarded a (^)
at ten o'clock that night." [fn 14]
These Mexican checks were turned over first to Maurice Stans of the CREEP, who transferred them
in turn to Watergate burglar Gordon LMiami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final Watergate break- in. Barker was actuallyiddy. Liddy passed them on to Bernard Barker, one of the (^)
carrying some of the cash left over from these checks when he was apprehended. When Barker was
arrested, his bank records were subpoenaed by the Dade County, Florida district attorney, Richard
E. Gerstein, and were obtained by Gerstein's chief investigator, Martin Dardis. As Dardis told Carl
Bernstein of the Washington Post, about $100,000 iMexico City by Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent lawyer who handled Stans' money-n four cashier's checks had been issued in
laundering operation there. [fn 15] Liedtke eventually appeared before three grand juries
investigating the different aspects of the Watergate affair, but neither he nor Pennzoil was ever
brought to trial for the CREEP contributions. But it is a matter of more than passing interest that the
money for the Plumbers came from one of Bush's intimates and at the request of Bush, a member ofthe Nixon Cabinet from February, 1971 on. How much did Bush himself know about the activities
of the Plumbers, and when did he know it?
The U.S. House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat
Wright Patman, soon began a vigorous investigation of the money financing the break-in, largeamounts of which were found as cash in the pockets of the burglars. Chairman Patman opened the (^)
following explosive leads: Patman confirmed that the largest amount of the funds going into Miami
bank account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since the Bay of Pigs invasion,
was the $100,000 sent in by Texas CREEP chairman William Liedtke, longtime business partner of
George Bush. The money was sent from Houston down to Mexico, where it was "laundered" toeliminate its accounting trail. It then came back to Barker's account as four checks totalling $89,000 (^)
and $11,000 in cash. A smaller amount,an anonymous $25,000 contribution, was sent in by
Minnesota CREEP officer Kenneth Dahlberg in the form of a cashier's check.
Patman relentlessly pursued the true sources of this money, as the best route to the truth about who