The Bush CIA also continued a program in Iran which went under the name of IBEX.
This aimed at building and operating a $500 miilion electronic and photographic
capability to cover the entire region, including parts of the USSR. On August 28, 1976,
three Americans working on the project were assassinated in Teheran. According to a
Washington Post account by Bob Woodward, a month before these killings the former
CIA Director and then current US Ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, sent Bush a note
complaining about abuses connected with the project, and in particular demanding that
Bush investigation corrupt practices which Helms suspected were involved with the
project. Helms apparently wanted to be spared more embarrassment in case IBEX were to
become the object of a new scandal. [fn 42]
During Bush's CIA tenure, the CIA was found to have conducted electronic suveillance
against the representatives of Micronesia, a UN Trusteeship territory in the Pacific that
had been administered by the United States, and which was then about to become
independent. In a story by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post alleged that the CIA had
been bugging the Micronesian government over a four year period with a view to
acquiring details of their negotiating strategy in talks with the State Department
concerning relations with the United States after independence. The CIA's rebuttal seems
to have been that while it would indeed have been illegal to bug the Micronesians if they
were US citizens, they were now foreigners, and such bugging had never been restricted.
During Bush's time at the CIA, a series of governments around the world were
destabilized by the Lockheed bribery scandal, the greatest multinational scandal of the
1970's. This scandal grew out of hearings before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Frank
Church, although separate from the Intelligence Committee mentioned above. A number
of Lockheed executives testified that they had systematically bribed officials of allied
governments to secure contracts the sale of their military aircraft. This system of
unreported payments eventually implicated such figures as former Japanese Prime
Minister Kakuei Tanaka, the leader of the most important faction in the Liberal
Democratric Party, and Franz Josef Strauss, a former Federal German Defense Minister,
Prime Minister of Bavaria, and the leader of the Christian Social Union, then a part of the
opposition in the Bundestag in Bonn. Also implicated were a series of Italian Christian
Democratic and Social Democratic political leaders, including the then Prime Minister
Giulio Andreotti, the President of the Italian Republic Giovanni Leone, and former
Defense Ministers Mario Tanassi of the PSDI and Luigi Gui of the DC. In the
Netherlands, Prince Bernhard, the consort of Queen Juliana, was implicated, and virtually
no NATO country was spared. The Lockheed scandal, coming as it did out of a mileu full
of military intelligence connections, was coherent with a long-term Anglo-American
design of destabilizing and weakening allied governments and the political forces that
constituted those governments.
Those who have witnessed the ghoulish public love affair between George Bush and the
fascist "Iron Lady" of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, may be interested in indications
that CIA Director Bush helped to bring Mrs. Thatcher to power. At the beginning of
Bush's tenure, the British Prime Minister was Harold Wilson of the Labor Party, who had
won two general elections during 1974 and whose term would normally have ended in