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
- 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 is that the money used
to finance it was provided by George Bush's business partner and lifelong intimate friend,
Bill Liedtke, the president of Pennzoil. Bill Liedtke was a regional finance 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 in anonymous contributions, including what appears
to have been a single contribution of $100,000 that 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 a company vice president, who boarded a Washington-
bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re- elect the President 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 Liddy. Liddy passed them on to
Bernard Barker, one of the Miami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final
Watergate break- in. Barker was actually 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 in four cashier's checks had been issued in Mexico
City by Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent lawyer who handled Stans' money-
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 of the 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, large amounts 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