Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade and returned to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.

A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep school and joined a secret society at age twelve).

Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and became the primary American opium smuggler. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.

One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.

To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the state. Hegel called the state the "march of God in the world" and the "final end". This final end, Hegel said, "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state." Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in Hegellianism. Hegellian philosophy was very much in vogue during William Russell's time in Germany.

When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with Alphonso Taft ('33). According to information acquired from a break-in to the "tomb" (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, "Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University.... General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here." So class valedictorian William H. Russell, along with fourteen others, became the founding members of "The Order of Scull and Bones," later changed to "The Order of Skull and Bones".

The secretive Order of Skull and Bones exists only at Yale. Fifteen juniors are "tapped" each year by the seniors to be initiated into next year's group. Some say each initiate is given $15,000 and a grandfather clock. Far from being a campus fun-house, the group is geared more toward the success of its members in the post-collegiate world.

The family names on the Skull and Bones roster roll off the tongue like an elite party list -- Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps, Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Bush, Lovett and so on.

William Russell went on to become a general and a state legislator in Connecticut. Alphonso Taft was appointed U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of War (a post many "Bonesmen" have held), Ambassador to Austria, and Ambassador to Russia (another post held by many "Bonesmen"). His son, William Howard Taft ('87), is the only man to be both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

George Bush, Skull & Bones and the JFK Assassination

Rodney Stich's book "Defrauding America" tells of a "deep-cover CIA officer" assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit "had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy" from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The people on the tapes were "[Nelson] Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, [Lyndon] Johnson of Texas, George Bush and J. Edgar Hoover."

Could George Bush be involved in the JFK assassination?

In 1963, Bush was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company. He denied the existence of a note sent by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When news of the note surfaced, the CIA first said they never commented on employment questions, but later relented said yes, a "George Bush" was mentioned in the note, but that it was "another" George Bush, not the man who took office in the White House in 1988.

Some intrepid reporters tracked down the "other" George Bush and discovered that he was just a lowly clerk who had shuffled papers for the CIA for about six months. He never received any interagency messages from anybody at the FBI, let alone the Queen Mary.

It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.

Many say that George Bush was high up on the CIA ladder at the time, running proprietorial vehicles and placed in a position of command, responsible for many of the Cubans recruited into "service" at the time. All through the Iran-Contra affair, Felix Rodriguez, the man who captured and had Che Guevara killed for the CIA, always seemed to call Bush's office first.

From The Realist (Summer, 1991):

"Bush was working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion.... A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion....

"George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed Director by former Warren Commission director and then president Jerry Ford in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush's role..."

On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the 'smoking gun' conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their connection to 'the Bay of Pigs thing.' Haldeman, in his book "The Ends of Power", reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as 'the Bay of Pigs'.

On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the 'Cubans' and the 'Texans.' The 'Texans' were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination."