dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

As the holidays approached, Bush’s confirmation hung in limbo. Then, on December 23, 1975 — eight days after his confirmation hearing — Richard Welch, the CIA’s station chief in Greece, was returning home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Athens when he was assassinated.

Welch had been a relatively easy target for a local militant group known as 17 November. He had been living in the same house used by several previous CIA station chiefs and had been publicly identified in publications in Greece. The group later claimed that its members had been watching him for months.

But the CIA and the Ford White House quickly saw Welch’s murder as a political windfall. At a time when the CIA was under assault from Congress and Bush’s nomination was in peril in the Senate, there was now a dead CIA hero to mourn.

Ford, waiving restrictions, announced that Welch could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The plane carrying his body back home in early January “circled Andrews Air Force Base for three quarters of an hour in order to land live during the Today Show,” according to Johnson’s book.

The CIA and the White House began to exploit Welch’s death to discredit Church and his committee’s work. William Colby, the outgoing CIA director, lashed out at Congress, blaming Welch’s killing on the “sensational and hysterical way the CIA investigations had been handled and trumpeted around the world,” Johnson writes.

There was not a shred of evidence that anything the Church Committee had done had led to Welch’s murder. But the truth didn’t matter to the CIA and the Ford White House, and the campaign to discredit Church and his committee’s investigation worked. After Welch’s murder, public support for the Church Committee waned.

The changed climate proved helpful to Bush. On January 27, 1976, South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond argued for his confirmation by claiming that the public was more concerned by disclosures that “are tearing down the CIA” than by the “selection of this highly competent man to repair the damage of this over-exposure,” according to Johnson’s book. Later that day, Bush was confirmed by a vote of 64-27.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/08/george-hw-bush-cia-director/