George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

things, shielding Bush from the defect that Governor Scranton had pointed out years
before- the lack of administrative ability. Nevertheless, Woodward and Pincus [fn 27]
portray the Knoche appointment as getting mixed reviews within the CIA, and quote
Admiral Daniel J. Murphy's view that the Knoche nomination was "not popular." For
Woodward and Pincus Knoche was "a personable, tennis-playing giant of a man."
The Admiral Daniel J. Murphy just mentioned was Bush's deputy director for the
intelligence community, and later became Bush's chief of staff during his first term as
vice president. Much later, in November, 1987, Murphy visited Panama in the company
of South Korean businessman and intelligence operative Tongsun Park, and met with
Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Murphy was later obliged to testify to the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee about his meeting with Noriega. Murphy claimed that he was only
in Panama to "make a buck," but there are indications that he was carrying messages to
Noriega from Bush. Tongsun Park, Murphy's ostensible business associate, will soon turn
out to have been the central figure of the Koreagate scandal of 1976, a very important
development on Bush's CIA watch. [fn 28]
Other names on the Bush flow chart included holdover Edward Proctor and then Bush
appointee Sayre Stevens in the slot of Deputy Director for Intelligence; holdover Carl
Duckett and then Bush appointee Leslie Dirks as Deputy Director for Science and
Technology; John Blake, holdover as Deputy Director for Administration; and holdover
William Nelson, followed by Bush appointee William Wells, Deputy Director for
Operations .
William Wells as Deputy Director for Operations was a very significant choice. He was a
career covert operations specialist who had graduated from Yale a few years before Bush.
Wells soon acquired his own deputy, recommended by him and approved by Bush: this
was the infamous Theodore Shackley, whose title thus became Associate Deputy Director
for Covert Operations. Shackley later emerged as one of the central figures of the Irancontra
scandal of the 1980's. He is reputedly one of the dominant personalities of a CIA
old boys' network known as The Enterprise, which was at the heart of Iran-contra and the
other illegal covert operations of the Reagan-Bush years.
During the early 1960's, after the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley had been the head of
the CIA Miami 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 1966 and 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
sometimes simply because they were able to read and write. As for Shackley, there are