Colonel J. C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sends a confidential memorandum to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argues that in Cuba there exists a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries."

As a result of this memorandum Dulles establishes Operation 40, named so because originally there are 40 CIA agents involved in the operation. The group is presided over by Vice President Richard Nixone. Tracy Barnes becomes operating officer of what is also called the Cuban Task Force.

Dr. Hubbard's experiments with plants come to the attention of Garden News, to which publication he reveals his conviction that plants feel pain. He demonstrates by connecting an E-meter to a geranium [also done with tomatoes?] with crocodile clips, tearing off its leaves and showing how the needle of the E-meter oscillates as he does so. The Garden News story, "PLANTS DO WORRY AND FEEL PAIN," describes LRH as a "revolutionary horticultural scientist." [IMPORTANT NOTE: See chronology entry for 1 c. July c. 1968, where CIA contractor Cleve Backster--later to become instrumental in connection with the CIA's "remote viewing" program--gains notoriety for doing polygraph experiments with plants that are near duplicates of what LRH has done in these experiments. His name has also been misspelled "Baxter," as in the following description: "San Diego polygrapher Cleve Baxter, the founder of the CIA's polygraph unit." --Christopher Anderson, Staff Writer, Boulder, Colorado "Daily Camera."]

Quoted from the source:

On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. Thereafter, in the last Eisenhower years, with Castro as a target and universal pretext, the fatal Cuban-vectored gangster section of the American government was assembled.

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.

* "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.

* "CIA Director Allen Dulles," Bush's former international attorney.

* "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.

* "Ambassador to Britain Jock Whitney," extended family member of the Harrimans and neighbor of Prescott Bush on Jupiter Island.

* "Senator Prescott Bush," friend and counselor of President Eisenhower.

...Averell Harriman...had no post in the Eisenhower administration. Yet he was perhaps more than anyone the leader and the glue for the incredible evil that was hatched by the CIA in the final Eisenhower years: a half-public, half-private Harrimanite army, never since demobilized, and increasingly associated with the name of Bush.

Following the rise of Castro, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contracted with the organization of Mafia boss Meyer Lansky to organize and train assassination squads for use against the Cuban government. Among those employed were John Rosselli, Santos Trafficante, and Sam Giancana. Uncontested public documentation of these facts has been published by congressional bodies and by leading Establishment academics. [22]

Quoted from the source:

The 1958 annual report notes that, with no major discoveries made, 1958 had been "a difficult year." It was, of course, the year of the brutal Eisenhower recession. SCORPION, VINEGAROON, and NOLA I, the offshore company's three drilling rigs, could not be kept fully occupied in the Gulf of Mexico during the whole year, and so Zapata Offshore had lost $524,441, more than Zapata Petroleum's own loss of $427,752 for that year. The Liedtke viewpoint was reflected in the notation that "disposing of the offshore business had been considered." The great tycoon Bush conceded in the Zapata Offshore annual report for 1958: "We erroneously predicted that most major [oil] companies would have active drilling programs for 1958. These drilling programs simply did not materialize...." In 1990, Bush denied for months that there was a recession, and through 1991 claimed that the recession had ended, when it had, in fact, long since turned into a depression. His current blindness about economic conjunctures would appear to be nothing new.

By 1959, there were reports of increasing personal tensions between the domineering and abrasive J. Hugh Liedtke, on the one hand, and Bush's Uncle Herbie Walker on the other. Liedtke was obsessed with his plan for creating a new major oil company, the boundless ambition that would propel him down a path littered with asset-stripped corporations into the devastating Pennzoil-Getty-Texaco wars of a quarter-century later. During the course of this year, the two groups of investors arrived at a separation that was billed as "amicable," and which in any case never interrupted the close cooperation among Bush and the Liedtke brothers. The solution was that the ever-present Uncle Herbie would buy out the Liedtke-Tulsa 40 percent stake in Zapata Offshore, while the Liedtke backers would buy out the Bush-Walker interest in Zapata Petroleum.

For this to be accomplished, George Bush would require yet another large infusion of capital. Uncle Herbie now raised yet another tranche for George, this time over $800,000. The money allegedly came from Bush-Walker friends and relatives. [18] Even if the faithful efforts of Uncle Herbie are taken into account, it is still puzzling to see a series of large infusions of cash into a poorly managed small company that had posted a series of substantial losses and whose future prospects were anything but rosy. At this point it is therefore legitimate to pose the question: Was Zapata Offshore an intelligence community front at its foundation in 1954, or did it become one in 1959, or perhaps at some later point? This question cannot be answered with finality, but some relevant evidence will be discussed in the following chapter.

George Bush was now the president of his own company, the undisputed boss of Zapata Offshore. Although the company was falling behind the rest of the offshore drilling industry, Bush made a desultory attempt at expansion through diversification, investing in a plastics machinery company in New Jersey, a Texas pipe lining company, and a gas transmission company; none of these investments proved to be remunerative.

Quoted from the source [NOTE: Absolutely no date for this; needs one]:

"JM/WAVE ... proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA's largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the ... building complex reads: U.S. GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY."

-- Donald Freed, "Death in Washington" (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141.

...1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida strait.

The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers who had directed the U.S. intelligence community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the backyard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of birthright.

...Operation Zapata

During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower administration began to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime's project of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro's defending forces in less than three days.

[NOTE: To establish what Parrott was doing for CIA when meetings of the Special Group started being weekly]

THOMAS A. PARROTT: [I]n 1957 [I] was assigned as the so-called Board Assistant to Allen Dulles for the Operations Coordinating Board. Each of the principals of the OCB had an assistant. ...This other Special Group thing was not very active during the first year or two and it really didn't get into the kind of operation that has since become [sic] until 1959, the beginning of 1959 [see 1 c. February c. 1959], when President Eisenhower directed the group to meet at least once a week. Before that it had met quite sporadically. There had not been much form to the meetings.

MR. SCHWARZ: What function did you play in connection with the Special Group?

THOMAS A. PARROTT: I was the Secretary.

MR. SCHWARZ: And for what period of time did you have that?

THOMAS A. PARROTT: From '57 until October of '63. [NOTE: Parrott seems to be lying about when he terminated in this capacity. See Parrott written documents and dates.] But as I say between '57, the middle of '58 and the beginning of '59 there was very little activity.