NEW DOCS REVEAL BUSH SENIOR STARTED OIL COMPANY WITH CIA OFFICIAL

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RUSS BAKER, REAL NEWS - Newly released internal CIA documents assert
that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged
from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer. Bush has long
denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community
prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under
President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a
'real shocker.'

But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close
personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee
who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the
establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who
would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting
commercial asset" of the agency.

According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's
original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint
efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency
position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo
describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush." The
memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how
Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover
beginning in 1963.

"Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,"
the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to
reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been
covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an
affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a
year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.

http://www.realnews.org/stories/2007-06-01_bushcia.html

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