During the early 1960's, after the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley had been the head of the CIAMiami Station during the years in which Operation Mongoose was at its peak. This was the Howard (^)
Hunt and Watergate Cubans crowd, circles familiar to Felix Rodriguez (Max Gomez), who in the
1980's supervised gun-running and drug-running out of Bush's vice presidential office.
Later, Shackley was reportedly the chief of the CIA station in Vientiane, Laos, between July 1966and December 1968. Some time after that he moved on to become the CIA station chief in Saigon, (^)
where he had directed the implementation of the Civilian Operations and Rural Development
Support (CORDS) progra, better known as Operation Phoenix, a genocidal crime against humanity
which killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians because they were suspected of working for
the Vietcong, or sare also reports that he worked for a time in the late 1960's in Rome, during the period when theometimes simply because they were able to read and write. As for Shackley, there
CIA's GLADIO capabilities were being used to launch a wave of terrorism in that country. Such
was the man that Bush chose to appoint to a position of reponsibility in the CIA. Later, Shackley
will turn up as a "speech writer" for Bush during the 1979-80 campaign.
Along with Shackley came his associate and former Miami station second in command, Thomas
Clines, a partner of General Richard Secord and Albert Hakkim during the Iran-contra operation,
convicted in September 1990 on four felony tax counts for not reporting his ill-gotten gains, and
sentenced to 16 months in prison and a fine of $40,000.
During Bush's tenure Shackley's circles were mightliy remoralized. In particular Ed Wilson, a
veteran of Shackley's Miami station, now a retired CIA officer who worked closely with serving
CIA personnel to organize gun running, sex operatives, and other activities, plied his trade
undisturbed. The Wilson scandal, which had grown up on Bush's watch, would begin to explode
only during the tenure of Stansfield Turner, under Carter.
Another career covert operations man, John Waller, became the Inspector General, the officer who
was supposed to keep track of illegal operations. For legal advice, Bush turned first to holdover
General Counsel Mitchell Rogovin, who had in December 1975 theorized that intelligence activities
belonged to the "inherent powers" of the Presidency, and that no special Congrewas required to permit such things as covert operations to go on. Later Bush appointed Anthonyssional egislation
Lapham, Yale '58, as CIA General Counsel. Lapham was the scion of an old San Francisco banking
family, and his brother was Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine. Lapham would take a
leading role in the CIA coverup of the Letelier assassination case. [fn 29]
Typical of the broad section of CIA officers who were delighted with their new boss from Brown
Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones was Cord Meyer, who had most recently been the station chief
in London from 1973 on, a wild and wooly time in the tight little island, as we will see. Meyer, a
covert action veteran and Watergate operative, writes at length in his autobiography about his
enthusiasm for the Bush regime at CIA, which induced him to prolong his own career there: I again seriously thought of retiring from the Agency but the new atmosphere in CIA's Langley
headquarters changed my mind. George Bush had been appointed by President Ford to succeed
Colby as DCI in January, and by the time of my return he had completely dispelled the fears that
had been aroused by his former political connections. Having served in the Congress as a
Republican representative from Texas and having recently been chairman of the RepublicanNational Committee, he was initially viewed with suspicion as an ambitious politician who might (^)
try to use the Agency for partisan purposes. However, he quickly proved by his performance that he
was prepared to put politics aside and to devote all his considerable ability and enthusiasm to
restoring the morale of an institution that had been battered enough by sucessive investigations.
Instead of reaching outside for defeated Republican candidates to fill key jobs, he chose from within
frankie
(Frankie)
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