Skull & Bones is an amusingly secret society at Yale that picks out 15 Yalies per year for membership for weekly “lemon sessions” in its fortress-like clubhouse on the campus. The 2004 Presidential election featured two Skull & Bones members facing off. George W. Bush’s grandfather Sen. Prescott Bush boasted of stealing Geronimo’s skull to display in the clubhouse.

Other Skull & Bones members included George H.W. Bush in 1948, William F. Buckley in 1950, and Richard Warren Russell in 1951.

Richard Warren Russell was the sparkplug of the Yale crew team that out-rowed Harvard in 1949 for the first time in 14 years. According to Anthony Sutton’s book on Skull and Bones, Russell is listed as a 1951 member.

Members in Skull & Bones have often been said to be associated with the CIA. Buckley, for example, went to work for the CIA in Mexico City after graduation. George H.W. Bush was often said to be the first Director of the CIA who hadn’t been an agent, but there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that the elder Bush had helped out the CIA with logistical assistance from his Mexican offshore oil platforms during the Bay of Pigs.

This stuff doesn’t strike me as terribly scandalous: the CIA had a general inclination to hire from among Old Money elites as being the least inclined to sell out their country since their clans pretty much owned it anyway. Similarly, the British Army had long found its generals among aristocrats, figuring they were less likely to lead a military coup because they already were top dogs. That’s kind of how a deep state is supposed to work.

After graduation, Russell worked for Army counterintelligence for a few years. He went to MIT grad school and became president of James Russell Engineering Works, which may have been a family firm, and founded another company of note. He appears to have lived a long and worthy life and died in 2011.

One of his sons became a doctor, and the doctor’s daughter appears to have married Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

That’s kind of weird.