graphic from Samizdat European Counter Network

Skull and Bones a capsule history and an intimate peek at one section of the US Ruling Class

Lets forget the mind bubbles you get from the bosses' TV, radio, film, and "news"papers. Here's a primer on the way it really is, a look behind the curtain at some of the bosses that really boss. This glimpse is not the whole picture; it concerns only one important segment of the ruling class: the Skull and Bones. This secret society, based at Yale University in the US, has been crucially important in recent history and has deeply effected the lives of virtually every person on the planet.

Check out the following little peak into the reality of our times. . .

Yale, Professor of History, Gaddis Smith, said, "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." And "Bonesman" have been foremost among the "spooks", virtually building the CIA into a "haunted house."

F. Trubee Davison (Skull and Bones '18), was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other Bonesmen connected with the "intelligence community" are: William Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49); V. Van Dine ('49); James Buckley ('44); Bill Buckley ('50); Hugh Cunnigham ('34); Hugh Wilson; Reuben Holden; Charles R. Walker; "Yale's unofficial Secretary of War," Robert D. French ('10); Archibald MacLiesh ('15); Dino Pionzio ('50), CIA Deptuy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow; William and McGeorge Bundy; Richard A. Moore ('3?); Senator David Boren ('63); Senator John Kerry; and of course George Bush. Bush "tapped" Coffin, who, tapped Buckley.

A few other prominent Bonesmen are:
Henry Luce ('20), Time-Life; John Thomas Daniels, founder Archer Daniels Midland; Gifford Pinchot ('89); President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester, Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser ('96); Harold Stanley ('08), founder Morgan Stanley, investment banker; Alfred Cowles ('13), Cowles Communication, Henry P. Davison ('20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust; Thomas Cochran ('04) Morgan partner; Senator John Heinz; Pierre Jay ('92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; George Herbert Walker, Jr. ('27), financier and co-founder of the NY Mets; Artemus Gates ('18), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company; William Draper III, the Defense Department, UN and Import-Export Bank; Dean Witter, Jr., investment banker; Senator Jonathan Bingham; Potter Stewart ('36), Supreme Court Justice; Senator John Chaffe; Harry Payne Whitney ('94), married Gertrude Vanderbilt, investment banker; Russell W. Davenport ('23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list; Evan G. Galbraith, Ambassador to France and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley; Judge John Steadman, the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia; Richard Gow ('55), president Zapata Oil (George Bush's company); Amory Howe Bradford ('34), married Carol Warburg Rothschild and was general manager for the New York Times ; C. E. Lord ('49), Comptroller of the Currency; Winston Lord ('59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and a Clinton assistant Secretary of State; John Lilley, ambassador to China.

The Tomb

George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights at Yale in the strange companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones Society. ⁶

Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership, George was the last one to be notified of his selection -- this honor is traditionally reserved for the highest of the high and mighty.

His father, Prescott Bush, several other relatives and partners, and Roland and Averell Harriman, who sponsored the Bush family, were also members of this secret society....

The order was incorporated in 1856 under the name "Russell Trust Association." By special act of the state legislature in 1943, its trustees are exempted from the normal requirement of filing corporate reports with the Connecticut secretary of state.

As of 1978, all business of the Russell Trust [which founded Skull and Bones] was handled by its lone trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started with Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George Bush's father.

Each year, Skull and Bones members select ("tap") 15 third-year Yale students to replace them in the senior group the following year. Graduating members are given a sizeable cash bonus to help them get started in life. Older graduate members, the so-called "Patriarchs," give special backing in business, politics, espionage and legal careers to graduate Bonesmen who exhibit talent or usefulness.

The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale campus is a stone building resembling a mausoleum, and known as "the Tomb." Initiations take place on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an island owned by the Russell Trust Association), with regular reunions on Deer Island and at Yale. Initiation rites reportedly include strenuous and traumatic activities of the new member, while immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin. More important is the "sexual autobiography": The initiate tells the order all the sex secrets of his young life. Weakened mental defenses against manipulation, and the blackmail potential of such information, have obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among members.

The loyalty is intense. One of Bush's former teachers, whose own father was a Skull and Bones member, told our interviewer that his father used to stab his little Skull and Bones pin into his skin to keep it in place when he took a bath.

Members continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on their psycho-sexual thoughts to their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer sitting in a coffin. This has been the case with President George Bush, for whom these ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond the psychological manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very solid political reasons for Bush's strong identification with this cult....

Skull and Bones -- the Russell Trust Association -- was first established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.

There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.

But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut. The blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop, and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years.

Opium and Empire

The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.

Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire.

The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-styled "bluebloods" or Brahmins of Boston's north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing, and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families, under the direct protection of the British navy and British imperial finance. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes, and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell (and British) auspices....

Samuel and William Huntington Russell were quiet, wary builders of their faction's power. An intimate colleague of opium gangster Samuel Russell wrote this about him:

"While he lived no friend of his would venture to mention his name in print. While in China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost as a hermit, hardly known outside of his factory [the Canton warehouse compound] except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua [Chinese security director for the East India Company], but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home with well-earned wealth he lived hospitably in the midst of his family, and a small circle of intimates. Scorning words and pretensions from the bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; hating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted on for every good work which did not involve publicity."

The Russells' Skull and Bones Society was the most important of their domestic projects "which did not involve publicity."

... Yale was the northern college favored by southern slaveowning would-be aristocrats. Among Yale's southern students were John C. Calhoun, later the famous South Carolina defender of slavery against nationalism, and Judah P. Benjamin, later secretary of state for the slaveowners' Confederacy....

In 1832-33, Skull and Bones was launched under the Russell pirate flag.

Among the early initiates of the order were Henry Rootes Jackson (S&B 1839), a leader of the 1861 "Georgia" Secession Convention and post-Civil War president of the Georgia Historical Society; ... John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 "Louisiana" Secession Convention;... and William Taylor Sullivan Barry (S&B 1841), a national leader of the secessionist wing of the Democratic Party during the 1850s, and chairman of the 1861 "Mississippi" Secession Convention.

Alphonso Taft was a Bonesman alongside William H. Russell in the Class of 1833. As U.S. attorney general in 1876-77, Alphonso Taft helped organize the backroom settlement of the deadlocked 1876 presidential election. The bargain gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency (1877-81) and withdrew the U.S. troops from the South, where they had been enforcing blacks' rights.

Alphonso's son, William Howard Taft (S&B 1878), was U.S. President from 1909 to 1913. President Taft's son, Robert Alphonso Taft (S&B 1910), was a leading U.S. senator after World War II; his family's Anglo-Saxon racial/ancestral preoccupation was the disease which crippled Robert Taft's leadership of American nationalist "conservatives."

Leading Bonesmen

Other pre-Civil War Bonesmen were:

"William M. Evarts "(S&B 1837), Wall Street attorney for British and southern slaveowner projects, collaborator of Taft in the 1876 bargain, U.S. secretary of state 1877-81;

"Morris R. Waite "(S&B 1837), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1874-88, whose rulings destroyed many rights of African-Americans gained in the Civil War; he helped his cohorts Taft and Evarts arrange the 1876 presidential settlement scheme to pull the rights-enforcing U.S. troops out of the South;

"Daniel Coit Gilman "(S&B 1852), co-incorporator of the Russell Trust; founding president of Johns Hopkins University as a great center for the racialist eugenics movement;

"Andrew D. White "(S&B 1853), founding president of Cornell University; psychic researcher; and diplomatic cohort of the Venetian, Russian and British oligarchies;

"Chauncey M. Depew "(S&B 1856), general counsel for the Vanderbilt railroads, he helped the Harriman family to enter into high society....

"Irving Fisher "(S&B 1888) became the racialist high priest of the economics faculty (Yale professor 1896-1946), and a famous merchant of British Empire propaganda for free trade and reduction of the non-white population. Fisher was founding president of the American Eugenics Society under the financial largesse of Averell Harriman's mother.

"Gifford Pinchot "(S&B 1889) invented the aristocrats' "conservation" movement. He was President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester, substituting federal land-control in place of Abraham Lincoln's free-land-to-families farm creation program. Pinchot's British Empire activism included the Psychical Research Society and his vice presidency of the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912....

"Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser "(S&B 1896), owner of vast tracts of American forest, was a follower of Pinchot's movement, while the Weyerhaeusers were active collaborators of British-South African super-racist Cecil Rhodes. This family's friendship with President George Bush is a factor in the present environmentalist movement.

"Henry L. Stimson" (S&B 1888) was President Taft's secretary of war (1911-13), and President Herbert Hoover's secretary of state (1929-33). As secretary of war (1940-45), Stimson pressed President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. This decision involved much more than merely "pragmatic" military considerations. These Anglophiles, up through George Bush, have opposed the American republic's tradition of alliance with national aspirations in Asia. And they worried that the invention of nuclear energy would too powerfully unsettle the world's toleration for poverty and misery. Both the United States and the atom had better be dreaded, they thought.

The present century owes much of its record of horrors to certain Anglophile American families which have employed Skull and Bones as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their lawyers, the Lords and Tafts and Bundys.

The politically aggressive Guaranty Trust Company, run almost entirely by Skull and Bones initiates, was a financial vehicle of these families in the early 1900s. Guaranty Trust's support for the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions overlapped the more intense endeavors in these fields by the Harrimans, George Walker, and Prescott Bush a few blocks away, and in Berlin.

[risephoenix note: I've seen a few references, as above, to support of the Bolsheviks. Unlike the fully documented evidence of support and encouragement for the Nazis which can be found in George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography and elsewhere, I have never seen any details in reference to alleged support of the Bolsheviks. It may be that these capitalists were seeking profit where no others dared venture or that they sought to intervene as a kind of "trojan horse" in the revolution or both. But, completely contrary to the conclusions drawn by some of the pro-capitalist wacky right, it is certain that these capitalists were not in support of the most successful enemies of capitalism up to that time: the Bolsheviks.
If anyone can supply information or links with details of this alleged early "support" of the Bolsheviks, please e-mail it to me so I can make fuller information available to the Net.]

Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by the circles of Averell Harriman. They displaced remaining traditionalists such as Douglas MacArthur from power in the United States.

For George Bush, the Skull and Bones Society is more than simply the British, as opposed to the American, strategic tradition. It is merged in the family and personal network within which his whole life has been, in a sense, handed to him prepackaged.

Britain's Yale Flying Unit

During Prescott Bush's student days, the Harriman set at Yale decided that World War I was sufficiently amusing that they ought to get into it as recreation. They formed a special Yale Unit of the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, at the instigation of "F. Trubee Davison". Since the United States was not at war, and the Yale students were going to serve Britain, the Yale Unit was privately and lavishly financed by F. Trubee's father, Henry Davison, the senior managing partner at J.P. Morgan and Co. (the official financial agency for the British government in the United States). The Yale Unit's leader was amateur pilot Robert A. Lovett. They were based first on Long Island, New York, then in Palm Beach, Florida.

The Yale Unit has been described by Lovett's family and friends in a collective biography of the Harriman set:

"Training for the Yale Flying Unit was not exactly boot camp. Davison's father ... helped finance them royally, and newspapers of the day dubbed them "the millionaires' unit." They cut rakish figures, and knew it; though some dismissed them as diletantes, the hearts of young Long Island belles fluttered at the sight....

"[In] Palm Beach ... they ostentatiously pursued a relaxed style. 'They were rolled about in wheel chairs by African slaves amid tropical gardens and coconut palms,' wrote the unit's historian.... 'For light exercise, they learned to glance at their new wristwatches with an air of easy nonchalance'.... [Lovett] was made chief of the unit's private club, the Wags, whose members started their sentences, 'Being a Wag and therefore a superman'....

"Despite the snide comments of those who dismissed them as frivolous rich boys, Lovett's unit proved to be daring and imaginative warriors when they were dispatched for active duty in 1917 with Britain's Royal Naval Air Service." ⁷

Lovett was transferred to the U.S. Navy after the United States joined Britain in World War I.

The Yale Flying Unit was the glory of Skull and Bones. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, and their 1917 Bonesmates selected for 1918 membership in the secret order these Yale Flying Unit leaders: "Robert Lovett, F. Trubee Davison, Artemus Lamb Gates," and "John Martin Vorys." Unit flyers "David Sinton Ingalls" and F. Trubee's brother, "Harry P. Davison" (who became Morgan vice chairman), were tapped for the 1920 Skull and Bones.

Lovett did not actually have a senior year at Yale: "He was tapped for Skull and Bones not on the Old Campus but at a naval station in West Palm Beach; his initiation, instead of being conducted in the 'tomb' on High Street, occurred at the headquarters of the Navy's Northern Bombing Group between Dunkirk and Calais." ⁸

Some years later, Averell Harriman gathered Lovett, Prescott Bush, and other pets into the utopian oligarchs' community a few miles to the north of Palm Beach, called Jupiter Island.

British Empire loyalists flew right from the Yale Unit into U.S. strategy-making positions:

"F. Trubee Davison was assistant U.S. secretary of war for air from 1926 to 1933. David S. Ingalls (on the board of Jupiter Island's Pan American Airways) was meanwhile assistant secretary of the navy for aviation (1929-32). Following the American Museum of Natural History's Hitlerite 1932 eugenics congress, Davison resigned his government Air post to become the museum's president. Then, under the Harriman-Lovett national security regime of the early 1950s, F. Trubee Davison became director of personnel for the new Central Intelligence Agency.

"Robert Lovett was assistant secretary of war for Air from 1941-45. "Lovett's 1918 Bonesmate, Artemus Gates (chosen by Prescott and his fellows), became assistant navy secretary for air in 1941. Gates retained this post throughout the war until 1945. Having a man like Gates up there, who owed his position to Averell, Bob, Prescott, and their set, was quite reassuring to young naval aviator George Bush; especially so, when Bush would have to worry about the record being correct concerning his controversial fatal crash.

Other Important Bonesmen

""Richard M. Bissell, Jr." was a very important man to the denizens of Jupiter Island.

He graduated from Yale in 1932, the year after the Harrimanites bought the island. Though not in Skull and Bones, Bissell was the younger brother of William Truesdale Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., was a powerful Yale alumnus, and the director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. There, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society, a Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA's cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure known as "MK-Ultra."

Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He worked as an assistant or adviser to Averell Harriman in various government posts between 1942 and 1952, participating in the Harriman clique's takeover of the Truman administration.

Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA director in 1953, Bissell was one of his three aides. The great anti-Castro covert initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents -- and the detailed management of the invasion of Cuba, and of the assassination planning, and the training of the squads for these jobs, was given into the hands of Richard M. Bissell, Jr.

This 1961 invasion failed. President Kennedy refused to give air cover at the Bay of Pigs. Fidel Castro survived the widely discussed assassination plots against him. But the initiative succeeded in what was probably its core purpose: to organize a force of multi-use professional assassins.

The Florida-trained killers stayed in business under the leadership of Ted Shackley. They were all around the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They kept going with the Operation Phoenix mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with Middle East drug and terrorist programs, and with George Bush's Contra wars in Central America.

"Harvey Hollister Bundy" (S&B 1909) was Henry L. Stimson's assistant secretary of state (1931-33); then he was Stimson's special assistant secretary of war, alongside Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett of Skull and Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman.

Harvey's son "William P. Bundy" (S&B 1939) was a CIA officer from 1951 to 1961; as a 1960s defense official, he pushed the Harriman-Dulles scheme for a Vietnam war. Harvey's other son, "McGeorge Bundy" (S&B 1940) coauthored Stimson's memoirs in 1948. As President John Kennedy's director of national security, McGeorge Bundy organized the whitewash of the Kennedy assassination, and immediately switched the U.S. policy away from the Kennedy pullout and back toward war in Vietnam.

"There was also "Henry Luce," a Bonesman of 1920 with David Ingalls and Harry Pomeroy. Luce published "Time" magazine, where his ironically named "American Century" blustering was straight British Empire doctrine: Bury the republics, hail the Anglo-Saxon conquerors. "William Sloane Coffin," tapped for 1949 Skull and Bones by George Bush and his Bone companions, was from a long line of Skull and Bones Coffins. William Sloane Coffin was famous in the Vietnam War protest days as a leader of the left protest against the war. Was the fact that he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency embarrassing to William Sloane?

This was no contradiction. His uncle, the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin (S&B 1897), had also been a "peace" agitator, and an oligarchical agent. Uncle Henry was for 20 years president of the Union Theological Seminary, whose board chairman was Prescott Bush's partner Thatcher Brown. In 1937, Henry Coffin and John Foster Dulles led the U.S. delegation to England to found the "World Council of Churches", as a "peace movement" guided by the pro-Hitler faction in England.

The Coffins have been mainstays of the liberal death lobby for euthanasia and eugenics. The Coffins outlasted Hitler, arriving into the CIA in 1950s. "Amory Howe Bradford" (S&B 1934) married Carol Warburg Rothschild in 1941. Carol's mother, Carola, was the acknowledged head of the Warburg family in America after World War II. This family had assisted the Harrimans' rise into the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in concert with the Sulzbergers at the "New York Times," they had used their American Jewish Committee and B'nai Brith to protect the Harriman-Bush deals with Hitler.

This made it nice for Averell Harriman, just like family, when Amory Howe worked on the Planning Group of Harriman's NATO secretariat in London, 1951-52. Howe was meanwhile assistant to the publisher of the "New York Times," and went on to become general manager of the "Times."

Thus, we could be assured of "responsible news coverage," with due emphasis on the necessary role of "moderates" named Harriman and Bush. Other modern Bonesmen have been closely tied to George Bush's career. "George Herbert Walker, Jr." (S&B 1927) was the President's uncle and financial angel. In the 1970s he sold G.H. Walker & Co. to White, Weld & Co. and became a vice president of White, Weld; company heir William Weld, the original federal prosecutor of Lyndon LaRouche and current Massachusetts governor, is an active Bush Republican.

Publisher "William F. Buckley" (S&B 1950) had a family oil business in Mexico. There, Buckley was a close ally to CIA assassinations manager E. Howard Hunt, whose lethal antics were performed under the eyes of Miami Station and Jupiter Island.

"David Lyle Boren" (S&B 1963) ... was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1979 and became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Though a Democrat (who spoke knowingly of the "parallel government" operating in Iran-Contra), Boren's Intelligence Committee rulings have been (not unexpectedly) more and more favorable to his "Patriarch" in the White House.

Among the traditional artifacts the Skull and Bones collected and maintained within the High Street Tomb are human remains of various derivations. The following concerns one such set of Skull and Bones.

Geronimo, an Apache faction leader and warrior, led a party of warriors on a raid in 1876, after Apaches were moved to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona territory. He led other raids against U.S. and Mexican forces well into the 1880s; he was captured and escaped many times.

Geronimo became a farmer and joined a Christian congregation. He died at the age of 79 years in 1909, and was buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Three-quarters of a century later, his tribesmen raised the question of getting their famous warrior reinterred back in Arizona.

Ned Anderson was Tribal Chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe from 1978 to 1986. This is the story he tells: ⁹

Around the fall of 1983, the leader of an Apache group in another section of Arizona said he was interested in having the remains of Geronimo returned to his tribe's custody. Taking up this idea, Anderson said that the remains properly belonged to his group as much as to the other Apaches. After much discussion, several Apache groups met at a kind of summit meeting held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The army authorities were not favorable to the meeting, and it only occurred through the intervention of the office of the Governor of Oklahoma.

As a result of this meeting, Ned Anderson was written up in the newspapers as an articulate Apache activist. Soon afterwards, in late 1983 or early 1984, a Skull and Bones member contacted Anderson and leaked evidence that Geronimo's remains had long ago been pilfered -- by Prescott Bush, George's father. The informant said that in May of 1918, Prescott Bush and five other officers at Fort Sill desecrated the grave of Geronimo. They took turns on guard while they robbed the grave, taking items including a skull, some other bones, a horse bit and straps. These prizes were taken back to the Tomb, the home of the Skull and Bones Society at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. They were put into a display case, which members and visitors could easily view upon entry to the building.

The informant provided Anderson with photographs of the stolen remains, and a copy of a Skull and Bones log book in which the 1918 grave robbery had been recorded. "The informant said that Skull and Bones members used the pilfered remains in performing some of their Thursday and Sunday night rituals, with Geronimo's skull sitting out on a table in front of them"....

Through an attorney, Anderson asked the FBI to move into the case. The attorney conveyed to him the Bureau's response: If he would turn over every scrap of evidence to the FBI, and completely remove himself from the case, they would get involved. He rejected this bargain, since it did not seem likely to lead towards recovery of Geronimo's remains.

Due to his persistence, he was able to arrange a September, 1986 Manhattan meeting with Jonathan Bush, George Bush's brother. Jonathan Bush vaguely assured Anderson that he would get what he had come after, and set a followup meeting for the next day. But Bush stalled -- Anderson believes this was to gain time to hide and secure the stolen remains against any possible rescue action.

The Skull and Bones attorney representing the Bush family and managing the case was Endicott Peabody Davison. His father was the F. Trubee Davison mentioned above, who had been president of New York's American Museum of Natural History, and personnel director for the Central Intelligence Agency. The attitude of this Museum crowd has long been that "Natives" should be stuffed and mounted for display to the Fashionable Set. Finally, after about 11 days, another meeting occurred. A display case was produced, which did in fact match the one in the photograph the informant had given to Anderson. But the skull he was shown was that of a ten-year-old child, and Anderson refused to receive it or to sign a legal document promising to shut up about the matter.

Anderson took his complaint to Arizona Congressmen Morris Udall and John McCain III, but with no results. George Bush refused Congressman McCain's request that he meet with Anderson.

Anderson wrote to Udall, enclosing a photograph of the wall case and skull at the "Tomb," showing a black and white photograph of the living Geronimo, which members of the Order had boastfully posted next to their display of his skull. Anderson quoted from a Skull and Bones Society internal history, entitled "Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration, 17 June 1933, by The Little Devil of D'121."

"From the war days [W.W. I] also sprang the mad expedition from the School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that brought to the T[omb] its most spectacular 'crook,' the skull of Geronimo the terrible, the Indian Chief who had taken forty-nine white scalps. An expedition in late May, 1918, by members of four [graduating-class years of the Society], Xit D.114, Barebones, Caliban and Dingbat, D.115, S'Mike D.116, and Hellbender D.117, planned with great caution since in the words of one of them: 'Six army captains robbing a grave wouldn't look good in the papers.'

The stirring climax was recorded by Hellbender in the Black Book of D.117: '... The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards.... Finally Pat[riarch] Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat[riarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself....

We quickly closed the grave, shut the door and sped home to Pat[riarch] Mallon's room, where we cleaned the Bones. Pat[riarch] Mallon sat on the floor liberally applying carbolic acid. The Skull was fairly clean, having only some flesh inside and a little hair. I showered and hit the hay ... a happy man...."

The other grave robber whose name is given, Ellery James, we encountered in Chapter One -- he was to be an usher at Prescott's wedding three years later. And the fellow who applied acid to the stolen skull, burning off the flesh and hair, was "Neil Mallon." Years later, Prescott Bush and his partners chose Mallon as chairman of Dresser Industries; Mallon hired Prescott's son, George Bush, for George's first job; and George Bush named his son, "Neil Mallon Bush," after the flesh-picker.

In 1988 the "Washington Post" ran an article entitled "Skull for Scandal: Did Bush's Father Rob Geronimo's Grave?" There was a small quote from the 1933 Skull and Bones "History of Our Order": "An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and ... Bush entered and started to dig...." and so forth, but neglected to include other names beside Bush.

According to the "Washington Post," the document which Bush attorney Davison tried to get the Apache leader to sign, stipulated that Anderson agreed it would be "inappropriate for you, me [Jonathan Bush] or anyone in association with us to make or permit any publication in connection with this transaction." Anderson called the document "very insulting to Indians." Davison claimed later that the Order's own history book is a hoax, but during the negotiations with Anderson, Bush's attorney demanded Anderson give up his copy of the book.

Bush crony Fitzhugh Green gives the view of the President's backers on this affair, and conveys the arrogant racial attitude typical of Skull and Bones:

"Prescott Bush had a colorful side. In 1988 the press revealed the complaint of an Apache leader about Bush. This was Ned Anderson of San Carlos, Oklahoma [sic], who charged that as a young army officer Bush stole the skull of Indian Chief [sic] Geronimo and had it hung on the wall of Yale's Skull and Bones Club. After exposure of 'true facts' by Anderson, and consideration by some representatives in Congress, the issue faded from public sight. Whether or not this alleged skullduggery actually occurred, "the mere idea casts the senior Bush in an adventurous light."

George Bush's crowning as a Bonesman was intensely, personally important to him....

Survivors of his 1948 Bones group were interviewed for a 1988 "Washington Post" campaign profile of George Bush. The members described their continuing intimacy with and financial support for Bush up through his 1980s vice presidency. Their original sexual togetherness at Yale is stressed:

The relationships that were formed in the "Tomb" ... where the Society's meetings took place each Thursday and Sunday night during the academic year, have had a strong place in Bush's life, according to all 11 of his fellow Bonsemen who are still alive.

Several described in detail the ritual in the organization that builds the bonds. Before giving his life history, each member had to spend a Sunday night reviewing his sex life in a talk known in the Tomb as CB, or "connubial bliss"....

"The first time you review your sex life.... We went all the way around among the 15, said Lucius H. Biglow Jr., a retired Seattle attorney. "That way you get everybody committed to a certain extent.... It was a gradual way of building confidence."

The sexual histories helped break down the normal defenses of the members, according to several of the members from his class. William J. Connelly Jr. ... said, "In Skull and Bones we all stand together, 15 brothers under the skin. [It is] the greatest allegiance in the world."....

5. Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: An Intimate Portrait", (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 48.

6. Among the sources used for this section are:

Skull and Bones membership list, 1833-1950, printed 1949 by the Russell Trust Association, New Haven Connecticut, available through the Yale University Library, New Haven.

Biographies of the Russells and related families, in the Yale University Library, New Haven, and in the Russell Library, Middletown, Connecticut.

Ron Chernow, "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance", (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).

Anthony C. Sutton, "How the Order Creates War and Revolution", (Phoenix: Research Publications, Inc., 1984).

Anthony C. Sutton, "America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones", (Billings, Mt:, Liberty House Press, 1986).

Anton Chaitkin, "Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman", second edition, (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985).

Anton Chaitkin, "Station Identification: Morgan, Hitler, NBC," "New Solidarity", Oct. 8, 1984.

Interviews with Bones members and their families.

7. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made -- Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy", (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 90-91.

8. "Ibid.", p. 93.

9. Interview with Ned Anderson, Nov. 6, 1991.

10. Quoted in Ned Anderson to Anton Chaitkin, Dec. 2, 1991, in possession of the present authors.

11. Article by Paul Brinkley-Rogers of the "Arizona Republic", in the "Washington Post", Oct. 1, 1988.

12. Green, "op. cit.", p. 50.

13. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, "Bush Opened Up To Secret Yale Society," "Washington Post", August 7, 1988.