"Then, two days before Christmas, the CIA chief in Athens, Richard Welch was gunned down in front of his home by masked assassins as he returned home with his wife from a Christmas party. A group calling itself the "November 19 Organization" later claimed credit for the killing." -Tarpley & Chaitkin
The Year 1975. The man going through a grueling nomination process to head the CIA: George Bush. By all accounts his nomination was dead. There were too many whispers of his involvement with the illegal hush money of Watergate. He was too partisan and was rumored to be waiting for the GOP VP nomination in '76. Everyone understood this was a part-time post to keep him idling in Washington. And the CIA was on the rack post-Watergate for all its black ops.
There was the Rockefeller Commission. The Senate "Church" Committee. The House "Pike" Committee. All with their sites on the CIA. They callled it the "Year of Intelligence".
"Bush's floor leader was Strom Thurmond, who supported Bush by attacking the Church and Pike Committees. 'That is where the public concern lies, on disclosures which are tearing down the CIA," orated Thurmond, "not upon the selection of this highly competent man to repair the damage of this over-exposure.' ...In further debate on the day of the vote, January 27, Senator Biden joined other Democrats in assailing Bush as "the wrong appointment for the wrong job at the wrong time."
"It was the day after Bush's confirmation that the House Rules committee voted 9 to 7 to block the publication of the Pike Committee report. The issue then went to the full House on January 29, which voted, 146 to 124, that the Pike Committee must submit its report to censorship by the White House and thus by the CIA. At almost the same time, Senator Howard Baker joined Tower and Goldwater in opposing the principal final recommendation of the Church Committee, such as it was, the establishment of a permanent intelligence oversight committee."
Bush 41 used the Welch assassination to defuse the two committees' hunt after the CIA and resurrect his dead nomination as CIA director. How ironic that his ascendency to power in Washington was over Welch's dead body and the Identities Protection Act that came later as a direct result of Welch's death is now in play with Shrub. That the CIA was being rescued from Congressional oversight by the right and not defamed by it as they are now by his son. Bush 41 must be very dissappointed.
All quotes from:George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography -
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
Update: 1/04/06
Here's another interesting twist:
Notice the mention of Strom Thurmond above? Well it seems in the late 80's it came out that his phone calls were actually listened upon by the NSA. A Patriotic right-wing conservative was considered suspect enough to gather intelligence on. Illegally mind you:
If Margaret Newsham's testimony is confirmed by the ongoing Congressional investigation, then the NSA has been behaving illegally under US law--unless it can prove either that Thurmond's call was intercepted completely accidentally, or that the highly patriotic Senator is actually a foreign spy or terrorist. Moreover NSA's international phone tapping operations from Menwith Hill and at Morwenstow, Cornwall, can only be legal in Britain if special warrants have been issued by the Secretary of State to specify that American intelligence agents are persons to whom information from intercepts must or should be given. This can not be established, since the government has always refused to publish any details of the targets or recipients of specific interception warrants.
Somebody's Listening -
Duncan Cambell at New Statesman
Feel free to post anymore historical oddities related to the evolution of the Intelligence apparatchiks.