After the war he studied economics at Yale University. In 1951 he establishedBush-Overby Oil Development, an oil-drilling business in Texas. Later he joined forces with Thomas J. Devine, a former CIA officer, to create Zapata Oil. Other major investors included Prescott Bush and Bill Liedtke.
In 1954, Zapata Off-Shore Company was formed as a subsidiary of Zapata Oil, with George H. W. Bush as president of the new company. According to Bush’s autobiography, Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, and his son-in-law, Philip Graham, were major investors in the new company.
Zapata Corporation split in 1959 into independent companies Zapata Petroleum and Zapata Off-Shore, headed by Bush, who moved his offices from Midland to Houston. In 1960, Bush created a new company, Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo (Permargo) with Edwin Pauley of Pan American Petroleum. Pauley is alleged to have had close ties to Allen Dulles. During the Second World War Pauley aided the Dulles brothers former clients in shifting Nazi assets out of Europe.
In 1963, Zapata Petroleum merged with South Penn Oil and other companies to become Pennzoil. In his book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty (2009) Russ Baker argues: “For Devine, who would have been about twenty-seven years old at the time, to resign at such a young age, so soon after the CIA had spent a great deal of time and money training him, was, at minimum, highly unusual. It would turn out, however, that Devine had a special relationship allowing him to come and go from the agency, enabling him to do other things without really leaving its employ.”
Thomas J. Devine later rejoined the CIA under non-official cover (NOC) status on 12th June 1963, as a covert commercial asset for Project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM. Joan Mellen points out that: “This CIA document reveals that Thomas Devine had informed George Bush of a CIA project with the cryptonym WUBRINY/LPDICTUM. It involved CIA proprietary commercial operations in foreign countries.”
Mellen goes onto argue that this links George Bush to George de Mohrenschildt and Lee Harvey Oswald. “WUBRINY involved Haitian operations, in which, the documents reveal, a participant was George de Mohrenschildt, the Dallas CIA handler of – Lee Oswald.” Russ Baker interviewed Devine in 2008 and he refused to say whether he was involved with WUBRINY. However, another CIA officer, Gale Allen, confirmed in another interview that Devine did take part in the project.
There is strong evidence that Bush was working for the CIA during this period. Bush also provided information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a proposed assassination attempt by James Parrott ofJohn F. Kennedy. On 29th November, 1963, Bush informed J. Edgar Hoover about a conspiracy involving a group of pro-Castro Cubans in Miami.