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James Bath
Last Updated: January 12, 2009

James Bath
 
Shortly before he became beard for the illicit affairs of terror-linked Saudi Sheikhs and US Presidents, young James was George W Bush’s wingman buddy in the Texas Air National Guard. In August 1972, while the Vietnam War raged, the two of them were suspended from flying. They’d failed to show up for their scheduled physical exam at Texas’ Ellington Field, which for the first time had included drug testing. Many official records for the following year were reported accidentally destroyed, but certain documented facts survived.

Most notably, George W’s military whereabouts from June till October ‘72 have never been established, and he received no pay during that period. It was later learned that Bush was doing community service at a Houston inner-city project during those months. Reports that he was court-ordered there after a drug arrest have never been proven.

Neither Bush nor Bath ever regained National Guard flight clearance, and both received early discharges in 1973. Bush went to Harvard Business School, and Bath joined an investment firm with Lan Bentsen, son of another Texas politician, then Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Two years later George Bush Sr was appointed head of the CIA, and Bath moved into stealth orbit around the Bush family international sphere, doing private deals in exchange for US policy.        

All of twenty-eight years old, with no known business skills, James Bath became the U.S. financial representative for Saudi billionaire colleagues of the Bush family. One of them was The Bin Laden Group, headed by Salem Bin Laden, Osama’s brother. The Bin Ladens would later be major investors with George Sr’s Carlyle Group. Back in 1976, Bath’s first brokerage for the Bin Ladens was in George W’s oil company Arbusto (Spanish for Bush). Another Bath-chosen investment for the Bin Ladens was the purchase of the Houston Gulf Airport, in Bush’s hometown.

That same year, 1976, Bath began fronting for another oil-powerful Saudi billionaire, also just two degrees from both Al Qaeda and the Bushes, named Khalid bin Mahfouz.

Private banker for the Saudi royals, Mahfouz founded "Muwafaq Foundation", later known as "Blessed Relief," officially identified as front group for  Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and Hamas. Mahfouz was also principal shareholder of the international criminal enterprise named BCCI. This $20 billion dollar shell game laundered money for narcotics cartels, terror groups, dictators, and covert CIA operations such as Reagan/Bush’s Iran-Contra conspiracy.

Bath was made a BCCI Director, and through this global organized crime firm, millions of dollars were funneled not only to the Bushes, but to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as well. Federal authorities looked the other way until 1991, when Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau finally shut it down, calling it the “largest financial fraud in world history”.

In the interim, Bath was a whirling dervish with Saudi magnates’ money. With Mahfouz and others (including former Treasury Secretary John Connally) he bought Houston’s Main Bank. It was later discovered that during the late ‘70s, this small community bank, with with only $56 million in deposits, had been buying $10 million a month in fresh $100 bills. Neither the source nor the destination of the cash purchases was ever discovered. Bath’s former partner Bill White, in lawsuits against him, charges that Bath bragged about being CIA protected, and invoked US national security in his responses to the litigation with White.  

Bath’s clients bought the Bank of Georgia, owned by President Carter’s former Budget Director Bert Lance. Carter was the bank’s largest borrower, and his loans were later “restructured”.  Then, beginning in 1982, BCCI, through an undisclosed subsidiary, started buying up other banks throughout the country.

To overcome ongoing legal challenges from federal regulators, BCCI in the late ‘80s was represented by Arkansas’ Rose Law Firm partner Hillary Clinton. Then Governor Bill Clinton’s biggest contributor, Jackson Stephens, was BCCI’s financial broker, and he later arranged a $3 million dollar loan for Clinton’s first Presidential Campaign.

In 1985 Bath registered a company called Southwest Airport Services in Texas. As if somehow preordained, the new firm was contracted to refuel US military aircraft at the then Bin Laden- owned Houston Gulf Airport.

Southwest Airport Services was also chosen to fuel military planes (including Air Force One) at Houston’s Ellington Field where, ironically, Bath and George W had been suspended from flying. It was later reported that the military’s use of Southwest, with its  60% fuel markup, instead of the government’s own airport facility, needlessly squandered many millions of taxpayers’ dollars’

Less than two years later, Bath client Khalid Mahfouz and his partner Abdullah Bakhsh arranged a $25 million bailout of Harken Energy, another George W. Bush oil venture. Both Mahfouz and Bakhsh appear on the “Golden Chain,” a document  seized in a 2002 Bosnian anti-terror raid that’s been introduced by US prosecutors as a list of  Al Qaeda’s top 20 financiers.

Young James Bath, the Saudis’ inexplicably chosen financial guru, also put Mahfouz’ money into formation of an aircraft brokerage firm, which since 1981 did more than $150 million in sales and leases to Middle Eastern royalty. “Skyway Aircraft Leasing” was registered by Bath in the Cayman Islands under a corporate shell named I.C. Inc. That same shell was used later in the‘80s by Oliver North and BCCI, as cash-conduit for the illegal Iran/Contra operation.

As first reported by the Houston Post’s Pete Brewton, also author of The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (1992), Skyway Aircraft Leasing changed its name in 1987, after the Washington Post exposed the Iran-Contra scandal. The company then became the officially Saudi-owned “Skyways International”.  

A Boeing 727 operated by Skyways International and owned by Saudi Prince Nayif al-Sha'lan unloaded two tons of cocaine at an airport near Paris in 1999. The Prince is still a fugitive from US and French criminal charges. Prosecutors claim the drug running profits were shared with Islamic terror groups.

At least two other aircraft companies with “Skyway” in their names, behind some smoke and mirrors also connect to James Bath, drug trafficking, the Bush family, the CIA and terror funding.

“Skyway Communication Holdings” was chaired by Michael Farkas, business protégé of fugitive Adnan Khashoggi, infamous arms dealer for the Reagan-Bush Iran/Contra operation, via the unique banking services of Mahfouz’s BCCI.

Brent and Glenn Kovar, a father and son team, ran the small company (before it collapsed as a pump and dump stock scam) under the name “Skyway Aircraft”. Their few planes displayed official-looking insignias, nearly identical to Department of Homeland Security seals, along with the motto “Protection of America’s Skies”. The Kovars boasted about being CIA operatives, and Glenn was inexplicably named head of the GOP Congressional Business Advisory Council, by House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

Skyway’s original investors included fifteen Kuwaitis and Saudis, among them Al Ali Al Sabah, head of the Kuwait National Guard. Two of its planes were also seized in Venezuela-Mexico multi-ton cocaine runs, although there were no arrests.

Skyway’s hangars were a just across the road from the aviation school in Venice, Florida (Huffman Aviation), where 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi took their flight training. Alshehhi had also attended nearby Embry Riddle Flight School, where Yeslam Bin Laden and other Saudi aircraft moguls sent student pilots for training.

In the1990s, members of the bin Laden and bin Mahfouz families became major investors with The Carlyle Group, a multi-billion dollar equity firm whose early marquee names included George H.W. Bush and other Reagan-Bush administration power brokers.

In recent years James Bath has kept a low profile, especially since 9/11/01. Craig Unger put a spotlight on Bath in his book, House of Saud, House of .Bush, and Michael Moore gave him big-screen exposure in his film Fahrenheit 911.

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