The George Bush Avenger Coverup:
a citizen’s appeal to Congress
by Lt. Col. Kenneth L. Hayden
Avenger Books 2003, 535 pp paperback
While working as a lawyer in Michigan, this journalist’s preparation for what he now does included a couple of experiences that started off as deadly dull property law cases which unexpectedly turned into the most complex and interesting affairs, with ramifications well beyond the usual ho-hum stuff of metes and bounds.
Now comes Ken Hayden, a US Army retiree and Panama resident, with a tale of such a case. This one goes way beyond any that this reporter ever saw in his lawyering years. Hayden's book, self-published but soon to be available on Amazon.com and from Barnes & Noble, is not a thriller or a treatise, but rather a collection of letters and legal documents connected by his story and explanations, designed not so much for the mass market as to document his claim to Congress for compensation for some financial losses he took on a real estate investment near Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
Now this reviewer is the sort of guy who can get a chuckle from reading a legal brief in support of a motion to dismiss, or get indignant about an averment in a pleading. It’s understood that these tendencies do not describe just anybody, and that a lot of the legal documents contained in the book would put a lot of people to sleep.
The book's author, a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, spent most of his uniformed career engaged in administrative and personnel management tasks and then worked as a civilian for the US Army for 10 years in budget and personnel management jobs. He thus brings a special set of experiences and understandings to bear. Most people will not know the laws and norms of US military contracting to anything close to the extent that Lietenant Colonel Hayden does, but he fairly well explains the applicable features of these for lay readers.
The story began when Hayden invested his retirement nest egg into some real estate in southern Arizona, then sold it on an installment plan, subject to a trust deed, to a fellow Army veteran. Both Hayden and his buyer looked well set when the TRW corporation contracted with the buyer to use that land for the testing of its experimental remote controlled Hunter drone military observation plane. That contract was with his buyer, but it would have given the buyer the resources to easily make the payments he owed to Hayden.
Then a couple of guys emerged from the shadows, convinced the buyer to sign a contract to sell an essentially undescribed part of the property to them, and, that second contract in hand, went off to harass TRW.
But the deed and conveyance that Hayden had provided that no part of the land could be resold without his permission unless and until the entire purchase price had been paid to him, as it hadn’t been. Looking into the matter, it seemed that the two guys who purported to buy the second part were mere fly-by-night aviation junk dealers who were delivering none of the promised benefits to Hayden’s buyer. Hayden invoked his rights under the trust deed provision and withheld his consent to the subsequent sale, and urged his buyer to take note of the non-performance of the contract the buyer had with the two men and cancel it, advice that was taken.
The next thing, Hayden’s buyer was sued for breach of contract, and shortly after that Hayden was sued for interference with contract rights, before an Arizona court. The amount of damages claimed was astronomical, prompting the basic inquiry of who these guys were and what was their claim all about. The investigation of these two matters, both through court discovery and on his own, form the heart of Hayden’s story.
(In the end, the plaintiffs threw in the towel after two days in court, and one sub-text of this documentary record and Hayden's non-lawyer take on it is the tale of a frivolous lawsuit --- not the sort that the Republicans like to complain about on the campaign trail, wherein someone tries to cash in by suing a wealth person or institution on specious grounds, but instead one of those not unheard-of cases in which rich and powerful interests, either in their own names or as here through cut-out characters, hassle people with fewer material means.)
One of the two men who sued Hayden turned out to be a top CIA test pilot who had assigned to Lockheed, the first person to fly the SR-71 spy plane at top speed. In the course of the story the man’s lawyer disappeared, and it was suggested in court but never actually proven that the client himself died.
(In the process of scoping out the opposition, Hayden found that the man, whom industry publications at one time placed in the White House Situation Room, had been involved in a complex and questionable deal to transfer an aircraft to Peru and had been driven into bankruptcy as a result of the litigation that ensued when the deal went sour. Thus the suggestion of a motive for a faked death.)
Essentially, what the two men’s contract with Hayden’s buyer was about was Lockheed, which had a rival reconnaissance drone project, playing hardball with TRW. In this game Lockheed won the inning, driving TRW to find another test site for its drone.
The exaggerated claim of damages, in turn, flowed from a deal that the two plaintiffs had with the Navy that involved the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida and the private Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. The aim was to find, raise and restore an old Avenger torpedo bomber that a 19-year-old George H. W. Bush sank in Lake Michigan when he made a spasmodic takeoff move during an aircraft carrier training exercise. The retrieved and restored Avenger was to be a dubious exhibit in the public exaltation of the elder Bush’s military record.
For reasons explained by Hayden, something of an expert on military contracting, the $5.4 million contract, commingled between the Navy and the private foundation headed by the elder President Bush, was not only highly illegal. It was part of a long political campaign to puff up the elder Bush’s image as a war hero. It was also part of a series of scandals in which military aircraft and aircraft parts were unlawfully transferred --- often just given away --- sometimes to get around congressional embargoes like the ones then in force about sending military aircraft to certain South American countries, sometimes to be resold without maintenance records to domestic buyers with occasionally tragic results.
(Another story within the story contained in this book is about Hayden’s Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Navy, which the latter stonewalled while the litigation that takes center stage in this story was in progress.)
Digging a bit deeper, Hayden found clues that George W. Bush was involved in these military property transfers, and followed the paper trail of how the man who would become the younger President Bush cultivated connections with major military contractors by collecting large donations for his daddy’s foundation.
Hayden’s book probably won’t be a bestseller, even if the trashy fiction that the Bush team published about John Kerry’s military record has lowered the editorial and commercial bar for military exposés to gutter level. But members of Congress, lawyers, journalists and political activists who share an interest in the ways that the Bushes have historically operated ought to apprise themselves of the facts brought forth in this book.
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