Geronimo skullduggery

President George Bush's (43) grandfather, President George Bush's (41) father, dug up and stole Geronimo's skull. Yep, that's desecrating a grave, and the boys have got the dirt on their hands. But that's just all good fun and games at the old boys club at Yale - ta ta, old chap.

Mark Coulter, the Sydney Morning Herald's correspondent in New York, tells the story:

IF JOHN HOWARD wants to stay on the right side of the likely new US ambassador, Robert McCallum, he should avoid asking him if he knows General Russell.

That is the code used by members of one of the world's most powerful and elite secret societies, founded by General William Huntington Russell in 1823. President George Bush is alleged to have used its connections to get his first job.

Mr Bush and Mr McCallum are members of Skull and Bones, the Yale society said to have the skull of the Indian chief Geronimo, dug up by Mr Bush's grandfather, in a glass case. In 2004 both presidential candidates, Mr Bush and John Kerry, were members.

Mr Bush, in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, wrote: "My senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society. So secret, I can't say anything."

The Skull and Bones headquarters is in a windowless stone building on the Yale campus known as the tomb. Each year 15 Bonesmen - and since 1991, Boneswomen - are "tapped", or invited, to join, and put through a bizarre initiation ceremony. Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb, says it includes a devil, a Don Quixote figure and a pope with one foot in a white monogrammed slipper, resting on a stone skull.

New members are required to give their full sexual history to the other 14, which helps to explain and reinforce the extreme code of silence that surrounds the society.

"What I find disturbing about Skull and Bones is that it's basically the most powerful elite alumni network in the US," says Robbins. "It's essentially a form of nepotism that keeps the same people in power, over and over and over again."

She said there was "no way in hell" that George W. Bush would have been in Skull and Bones if his father, the former president George Bush, and his grandfather had not been members.

Robbins said that before she stopped counting she knew of at least 11 Bonesmen whom Mr Bush had appointed to government posts.