Yale University's Historical CIA Connection

Coincidentally, former President Bush I, current U.S. President Bush II and 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton are Yale University alumni, as was former Warren Commission member and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.

Yale University and its alumni have long played an influential role in relation to the CIA. According to Cloak and Gown: Scholars In The Secret War by Robin Winks, “Rightly or wrongly, a historian could, in assessing the link between the university and the agency, declare in 1984 that Yale had influenced the CIA more than any other university had…”

During the years when George W. Bush II’s father attended Yale and excelled as an Ivy League athlete, “Skip Walz, Yale crew coach from 1946 to 1950, working simultaneously for the university and for the Central Intelligence Agency on a salary of $10,000 from each, laid his arms on the shoulders of athletic young men, introducing them to official recruiters who would apply the appropriate persuasion,” according to Cloak and Gown. The same book also noted that Yale Crew Coach Walz “looked for bright undergraduates in other sports than crew as well, who were going into business careers after graduation, so that they might use their business connection as a cover” and “Once every three weeks he would meet with a CIA agent at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, passing on names and evaluations.” Coincidentally, after his graduation from Yale University in 1948, Bush I began his business career and, along with a major Chevron/Gulf stockholder in the early 1990s named J. Hugh Liedtke, founded Zapata/Pennzoil in the early 1950s.

In addition to being an athletic young man at Yale in the late 1940s, Bush I (like his son) was a member of the Skull & Bones society at Yale. Cloak and Gown noted that “Yale’s most prestigious social life turned on secret societies, of which perhaps Skull and Bones was the most exclusive” and that “It was widely rumored that the secret societies were recruiting grounds as well,” for the CIA.

Although former President Bush I claimed on the Establishment’s television screen in the early 1990s to be opposed to discrimination against women, on May 20, 1991, the New York Times reported on its back pages that “Mr. Bush” belonged “to only four clubs, and they” were “men-only organizations: the Alibi Club, the Alfalfa Club, the Bohemian Club and Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that recently locked its crypt rather than admit women.”

After 1980, George W. Bush II’s father, former President Bush I, sought to play down his 1970s membership in David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission. In his 1989 book, The Right Place, The Right Time, former NYU Trustee, former Time Inc. director and former Trilateral Commission member Hedley Donovan recalled:

“When I congratulated George Bush on his election as vice-president in 1980, I said I hoped he didn’t mind receiving correspondence from a member of the Trilateral Commission, to which he belonged. He scrawled a card of thanks and said, `Sh-sh-sh’ about the Trilateral stuff.’ I have kept this exchange secret until now.”

(Downtown 6/24/92)

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