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| Gordon Gray, the shadowy assistant to the President for national security affairs, Prescott Bush's closest executive branch crony and golf partner along with Eisenhower. By 1959-60, Gray had Ike's total confidence and served as the Harrimanites' monitor on all U.S. military and non-military projects. | | Submitted by fedup | 2008-06-14 22:00:08 | Prescott Bush worked throughout the Eisenhower years as a confidential ally of the Dulles brothers. In July 1956, Egypt's President Gamel Abdul Nasser announced he would accept the U.S. offer of a loan for the construction of the Aswan Dam project. John Foster Dulles then prepared a statement telling the Egyptian ambassador that the U.S.A. had decided to retract its offer. Dulles gave the explosive statement in advance to Prescott Bush for his approval. Dulles also gave the statement to President Eisenhower, and to the British government.[16]
Nasser reacted to the Dulles brush-off by nationalizing the Suez Canal to pay for the dam. Israel, then Britain and France, invaded Egypt to try to overthrow Nasser, leader of the anti-imperial Arab nationalists. However, Eisenhower refused (for once) to play the Dulles-British game, and the invaders had to leave Egypt when Britain was threatened with U.S. economic sanctions.
During 1956, Senator Prescott Bush's value to the Harriman-Dulles political group increased when he was put on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush toured U.S. and allied military bases throughout the world, and had increased access to the national security decision-making process.
In the later years of the Eisenhower presidency, Gordon Gray rejoined the government. As an intimate friend and golfing partner of Prescott Bush, Gray complemented the Bush influence on Ike. The Bush-Gray family partnership in the "secret government" continues up through the George Bush presidency.
Gordon Gray had been appointed head of the new Psychological Strategy Board in 1951 under Averell Harriman's rule as assistant to President Truman for national security affairs. From 1958 to 1961, Gordon Gray was national security chief under President Eisenhower. Gray acted as Ike's intermediary, strategist and hand-holder, in the President's relations with the CIA and the U.S. and allied military forces.
Eisenhower did not oppose the CIA's covert action projects; he only wanted to be protected from the consequences of their failure or exposure. Gray's primary task, in the guise of "oversight" on all U.S. covert action, was to protect and hide the growing mass of CIA and related secret government activities.
It was not only covert projects which were developed by the Gray-Bush-Dulles combination; it was also new, hidden structures of the United States government.
Senator Henry Jackson challenged these arrangements in 1959 and 1960. Jackson created a Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations, which investigated Gordon Gray's reign at the National Security Council. On January 26, 1960, Gordon Gray warned President Eisenhower that a document revealing the existence of a secret part of the U.S. government had somehow gotten into the bibliography being used by Senator Jackson. The unit was Gray's "5412 Group" within the administration, officially but secretly in charge of approving covert action. Under Gray's guidance, Ike "|`was clear and firm in his response' that Jackson's staff not be informed of the existence of this unit [emphasis in the original]."[17]
Several figures of the Eisenhower administration must be considered the fathers of this permanent covert action monolith, men who continued shepherding the monster after its birth in the Eisenhower era:
• Gordon Gray, the shadowy assistant to the President for national security affairs, Prescott Bush's closest executive branch crony and golf partner along with Eisenhower. By 1959-60, Gray had Ike's total confidence and served as the Harrimanites' monitor on all U.S. military and non-military projects.
British intelligence agent Kim Philby defected to the Russians in 1963. Philby had gained virtually total access to U.S. intelligence activities beginning in 1949, as the British secret services' liaison to the Harriman-dominated CIA. After Philby's defection, it seemed obvious that the aristocratic British intelligence service was in fact a menace to the western cause. In the 1960s, a small team of U.S. counterintelligence specialists went to England to investigate the situation. They reported back that the British secret service could be thoroughly trusted. The leader of this "expert" team, Gordon Gray, was the head of the counterespionage section of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for Presidents John Kennedy through Gerald Ford.
• Robert Lovett, Bush's Jupiter Island neighbor and Brown Brothers Harriman partner, from 1956 on a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lovett later claimed to have criticized--from the "inside"--the plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Lovett was asked to choose the cabinet for John Kennedy in 1961.
• CIA Director Allen Dulles, Bush's former international attorney. Kennedy fired Dulles after the Bay of Pigs invasion, but Dulles served on the Warren Commission, which whitewashed President Kennedy's murder.
• C. Douglas Dillon, neighbor of Bush on Jupiter Island, became Undersecretary of State in 1958 after the death of John Foster Dulles. Dillon had been John Foster Dulles's ambassador to France (1953-57), coordinating the original U.S. covert backing for the French imperial effort in Vietnam, with catastrophic results for the world. Dillon was Treasury Secretary for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
• Ambassador to Britain Jock Whitney, extended family member of the Harrimans and neighbor of Prescott Bush on Jupiter Island. Whitney set up a press service in London called Forum World Features, which published propaganda furnished directly by the CIA and the British intelligence services. Beginning in 1961, Whitney was chairman of the British Empire's "English Speaking Union."
• Senator Prescott Bush, friend and counselor of President Eisenhower.
Bush's term continued on in the Senate after the Eisenhower years, throughout most of the aborted Kennedy presidency.
In 1962, the National Strategy Information Center was founded by Prescott Bush and his son Prescott, Jr., William Casey (the future CIA chief) and Leo Cherne. The center came to be directed by Frank Barnett, former program officer of the Bush family's H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The center conduited funds to the London-Based Forum World Features, for the circulation of CIA-authored "news stories" to some 300 newspapers internationally.[18]
killtown.911review.org/bushbio/chapter4.html
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