were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in
Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf." 2 Felix Rodriguez tells us
that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the "Grey Team" in
conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find
directing the contra supply effort in central American during the 1980's, working
under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush. 3 Theodore
Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in Bush's 1979-80
presidential campaign.
To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great political scandals
attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are a
significant extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to
extrapolate forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of
individuals who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal and compare them
with the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones
that have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a
confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacopo Arbenz
in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in the Bay of Pigs, as a
person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot,
and as one of the central figures of Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after
all, were contained in Howard Hunt's safe, the contents of which were so
conventiently "deep sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)
George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the
Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra. Since he appears
especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers, it is surely
legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might
have started.
1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore
headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in
Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work
took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations.
George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's
estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe
Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the
Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official "red Studebaker" biographical
material and the Zapata Offshore annual reports are extremely cryptic.
The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers,
Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant
Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile
financiers who had directed the US intelligence community long before there had
been a CIA at all. And, in the back yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and
under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being