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Scenarios like this cause the mind to reel. Yet where Ferdinand Marcos, the Saudi royal family, and the Shah converge with the son of an American president, in a deal involving large amounts of money, it is not necessary to untangle all the spaghetti strands to sense that something is amiss. Why, to begin with, would a major international bank get involved with a shadowy operation such as Harken? Whatever the reasons, the bank clearly gained influence with a White House that had family connections to the company.

Clues may be found in 1986, which is when George W. Bush joined the Harken board.  It also is the year that Harken’s chairman, Alan Quasha, hooked up with something called Rembrandt Group Holdings, a Swiss-based company headed by a South African billionaire, Anton Rupert.  Rembrandt’s vast portfolio included tobacco, financial services, wines and spirits, gold and diamond mining and luxury goods. Soon after that, Rembrandt took over a small, closely-held Denver company, Frontier Oil. Frontier then announced an $ 85-million "revolving credit facility" with….. Union Bank of Switzerland. UBS again.

Few expect international bankers to be paragons of virtue, but the South African connection highlights a particularly unsavory side.  This was revealed in a series of reports produced by a coalition of Swiss organizations pushing for reparations to post-apartheid South Africa and cancellation of that country’s debt to Switzerland. The group took particular interest in two South African-controlled companies that were established in Switzerland at the time of global economic sanctions against the apartheid regime – and one of these was Rembrandt.

According to one of the reports from Koordination Südliches Afrika, Swiss banks had played an important role “in financing the apartheid state and its corporations from the very beginning” and that “… the two Swiss banks UBS and CS Group have played a special role.”

UBS’s former chairman, Nikolaus Senn, actually had a medal bestowed on him for service to the white regime. When it became inevitable that apartheid would crumble, Senn nevertheless pronounced his doubts about giving blacks the franchise: “‘One man–one vote’ to me is not a world religion.”

The connections here are worth considering. In 1988, while George W. Bush advised his father’s presidential campaign and sat on Harken’s board, Harken chairman Alan Quasha joined the board of Richemont, a new Swiss-based company controlled by the same South African Rupert family that controlled Rembrandt. UBS’s Senn became Richemont’s chairman.

So George W. Bush was joining an obscure company whose constituent parts were tied to the white power structure in South Africa, and also to the evasion of sanctions against that regime via Switzerland. And UBS played a central role in the arrangement. 

The South African regime was not the only one that got in on this money game.  Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator of the Philippines, whose kleptocratic rule was marked by savage human rights abuses and martial law, had a seat at the table too. The father of Alan Quasha, Harken’s chairman, was an American lawyer who lived most of his adult life in the Philippines, and represented clients tied to US intelligence.  He remained an advocate of Marcos to the end. 

Marcos also was moving billions pillaged from the Philippine and American people (via aid to that country) into Swiss accounts. In fact, Phil Kendrick, who sold Harken Energy to Alan Quasha, recalls having heard rumors back then that the money to buy him out came from Marcos himself.   The Bushes and Marcos were famously friendly.  As vice president, George HW Bush visited Marcos’s Philippines during its protracted martial law and declared that country, to considerable subsequent ridicule, a great and vibrant example. “We love you, sir, we love your adherence to democratic principles,” vice president Bush said on that 1981 trip.  And Marcos’s widow Imelda would speak, elliptically, of how the elder Bush had given her husband advice on how to invest “his” fortune. Bush and Marcos even took lessons from the same golf instructor.

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Photo: AFP/Getty Images Back in the 1950s, George W. Bush’s grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, a powerful former banker, was President Eisenhower’s regular golf partner.

It’s all about access—and golf has long played a crucial role. Back in the 1950s, Senator Prescott Bush, father of HW and a powerful former banker himself, used to have unique access to President Eisenhower as his regular golf partner. By the time of Barack Obama’s little-studied invitation to Robert Wolf to round out his foursome, Wolf (and UBS), too, were already on the inside. Early in the Obama administration, Wolf had quietly been appointed to Obama’s Economic Advisory Board. The fact that UBS is now playing a role in the administration of a liberal democratic “reformer” illustrates just how trans-partisan money interests can be.  Though

the board has engendered little media notice besides an Associated Press piece that subtly tried to spark broader curiosity, its makeup alone deserves attention—for what it tells us about the group that had the ear of the President as he embarked upon his change agenda.

One of Wolf’s fellow board members is William H. Donaldson, an old friend of the Bush family who served on the board of the tobacco company Philip Morris for two decades. Donaldson headed the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, which looked after the financial affairs of George W. Bush over the years. Donaldson was one of the directors brought into Frontier Oil when it was taken over by the Quasha-Rembrandt-Bush-UBS group.  President George W. Bush named Donaldson head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where he served from 2001-2005. During that period, he presided over changes requested by investment banks that lessened regulation; among other things, the SEC chose to rely on the banks’ own computer models for risk assessments. "If anything goes wrong," said Harvey Goldschmid, another commissioner at the time, "it's going to be an awfully big mess."

And indeed it is.

The staff director for Obama’s Economic Advisory Board, who also serves as a member of the president’s powerful Council of Economic Advisers, is Austan Goolsbee, who along with Donaldson and Bush shared membership in the exclusive Yale secret society, Skull and Bones. Goolsbee has pretty much stayed out of the news, except for a brief scandal during the 2008 campaign when a Canadian government internal memo characterized Goolsbee as reassuring our Northern neighbors that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just that, “political positioning” that did not reflect the candidate’s real position on globalization. 

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People wonder why, year after year, promise after promise, so little seems to change in Washington. But it is usually left to academics and theoreticians to explain, somewhat abstractly and historically, how powerful institutions continue to influence the course of public affairs irrespective of who is in the White House and what party is in charge. Meanwhile, polls show that most Americans think that banks got a much better deal out of the Bush-Obama rescue-stimulus than the average Joe. And they’re right—but they don’t quite get the real story on how such deals come about.