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Craig Unger Biography

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“A senior member of the Washington diplomatic corps, Bandar has played racquetball with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the late seventies. He had run covert operations for the late CIA director Bill Casey that were so hush-hush they were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was the man who stashed away thirty locked attache cases that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. And for two decades, Bandar built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.”

IntelligencePolitical ScienceCiaSaudi ArabiaEspionagePolitics Of The United StatesBushCovert Operations
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“It was often said that he was in the CIA, but [James] Bath denied that to Time. Later, he equivocated. "There's all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA]," he says. "It runs the whole spectrum, maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve- I don't think your're going to find them talking about it.”

CiaEspionageBushEspionage CultureCarlyle Group
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“Bush had been warned about using Noriega as an asset by the legendary head of French Intelligence, Count Alexandre de Marenches, who warned him with regard to Noriega, "My own philosophy has always been that when you have something particularly dirty to do, you hire a gentleman to do it. If the gentleman is persuaded that what we are contemplating is an act of war, and by extension an act of patriotism, then we will find some very good people to work for us. By contrast, if we hire a thug, then eventually we will be compelled to kill the thug in one way or another because eventually we would be blackmailed by him.”

CiaEspionageGeorge H W BushEspionage CultureTradecraftDgseNoriega
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“Widely hailed as the most popular director of Central Intelligence since Allen Dulles, Bush had enormous support within the Agency. As the campaign got under way, Reagan-Bush posters appeared all over CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, many cut in the middle with only the right side, the Bush side, on display.”

PoliticsCiaDeep StateBushHistory PoliticsGeorge H W BushPolitical CampaignsEspionage CultureLangley
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“IN 1993, after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put an end to smoking in the White House, Bill Clinton would sometimes retreat there to smoke a cigar in a celebratory moment, as he did after the United States rescued a soldier in Bosnia.”

SmokingWhite HouseTobaccoHillary ClintonClinton Administration
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“The Bohemian Grove has held secret meetings for the global elite since 1873 in a redwood forest of northern California. In addition to Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, members have included James Baker, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Rockefeller, William Casey, and Henry Kissinger. Each year, the members don red, black, and silver robes and conduct a ritual in which they worship a giant stone owl.”

Political ScienceOccultismDeep StateHistory PoliticsSecret SocietiesGlobal EliteBohemian Grove
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“Oil, they had discovered, could be used as a weapon. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia took on the position Texas itself had once had and became the swing oil producer for the great industrial nations of the world. The biggest transfer of wealth in human history was under way. Hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues poured into the Saudi Kingdom. The Saudis were drowning in petrodollars.”

Political ScienceSaudi ArabiaPetroleumOil IndustryWealth AccumulationHistory PoliticsPetroleum IndustryPetroleum Politics
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“But if arming Iran to support Israel was insane, the flip side of the policy, in the long run at least, was truly demented: Weinberger and Shultz favored defending Saudi Arabia and the enormous U.S. oil interests there by secretly bolstering the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As a result of their efforts, billions of dollars in aid and weapons were funneled to Saddam's regime.”

IraqIranPolitics Of The United StatesU S HistorySaddam HusseinEspionage CultureOil WarsPresident Regan
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“BCCI's ascendancy was also due to business practices that were highly unusual in the staid world of banking. Other banks gave toaster ovens to new depositors; BCCI provided prostitutes... The report says that the woman was reputed to have first won the attention of the royal family "by arranging to get virgin women from the villages from the ages of 16 to 20... According to one U.S. investigator with substantial knowledge of BCCI's activities, some BCCI officials have acknowledged that some of the females provided some members of the Al-Nahyan family were young girls who had not yet reached puberty, and in certain cases, were physically injured by the experience. The official said that former BCCI officials had told him that BBCI also provided males to homosexual VIPs.”

ProstitutionPedophiliaPedophile NetworkInternational BankersChild TraffickingBanking SectorPakistan United States RelationsMiddle Eastern History
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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“Secret agreements between the Saudis and various U.S. presidents dated back to the early postwar era and continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a pact between President Harry Truman and King Ibn Saud in 1947, the United States vowed to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it was attacked. Likewise, in 1963, President Kennedy sent a squadron of fighter jets to protect Saudi Arabia when Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to kill members of the Saudi royal family.”

HistoryInternational RelationsSaudi ArabiaPolitics Of The United StatesHistory Of The United StatesKennedyTruman Administration
Book:House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
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