Mystery Woman

[John Simkin]

In Burton Hersh's new book Bobby and J. Edgar, Hersh writes of Ellen Rometsch ( he spells it with a t ):"She would be linked in future FBI investigations

with the August 1963 suicide of Philip Graham, publisher fo the Washington Post" (p. 364). First I've heard of a possible connection between Philip Graham and

the women Hersh describes--emphasizing her international citizenship skills-- as a "wall-banger of a date." Does anyone know any further details of this

link?

I was unaware of this connection. Phil Graham was with Frank Wisner in the OSS during the war. That is why Wisner brought in Graham to help run Operation Mockingbird. I would not be surprised if th CIA funded the expansion of the Washington Post media empire in the 1950s.

The Quoram Club seems to have been a LBJ/Baker/Hoover operation. However, it is possible that Rometsch was recruited by the CIA in West Germany. I do not believe for a moment that she was really working for the KGB and was part of a "honeytrap" operation against JFK and RFK.

[Robert Howard]

According to Summers, Russo and Blakey, the Republicans had this story and would have used it to prevent JFK from being elected in 1964. They even speculated that he would have been impeached before the election. They added that the assassination of JFK therefore saved his political reputation. In other words, JFK enemies had no motive for killing him.

Well, isn't that special.....

The program, I would venture, is a blend between truth and hack journalism, in the sense that the scandalous aspect of JFK's extra-marital adventures, is gist for the gristmill. The obvious fact, being in the great hereafter, is not much defense against attacks on one's legacy. Nothing written here is intended as a defense of any kind, or refutation of the facts, of JFK's relationship's. In fact, to a great degree, the impeachment could have very likely taken place. But obviously, we will never know. Meanwhile the winners of history, have constructed their mythos or pseudo-reality, with it's underlying psychological spin, "well now that bad man is gone away, we should be glad he was........"

On another note Michael Redfern has written a great deal about the Marilyn/JFK thing without the gossipy tabloid sensationalism, that I have come to despise...What I would mention is that a writer named Michael Redfern wrote a book entitled Celebrity Secrets, which details some very intruiging aspects of Marilyn Monroe and political matters that are of a decidely non-amore nature.....

But considering the omission of some pertinent material referenced above, the program creators, probably would have sooner swallowed cyanide than include Redfern's material, which is, according to Redfern, simply de-classified documents.....

I have no interest in the seamier aspects of the JFK girlfriends, issue. So I probably won't be contributing to this thread, with any of that type of information.

Edited December 23, 2008 by Robert Howard

[Robert Howard]

One constant in the study of history is that "facts change our knowledge of history." I ran across a more than slightly unusual news story from the Dallas Morning News dated February 26, 1947. Written some sixteen years before the assassination of JFK, the article entitled Chatterbox is a "Hollywood goings on" type of affair. It has some rather interesting facts, or allegations, depending on how one chooses to spin it; about Inga Arvad. Those who read the piece will be left to draw their own conclusions.

pl_009082013_1729_23853_402.pdf

The pertinent passage reads......

Inga Arvad sometime Hollywood columnist for The News

has been married "for quite a while" to Tim McCoy

cowboy film star, it was disclosed Tuesday.

How is it that this aspect of Inga Arvad never made it into one of those character assassination

books on JFK?

Edited September 8, 2013 by Robert Howard

[John Simkin]

It is fairly well-known that Bobby Baker used Bill Thompson, a railroad lobbyist, to introduce Ellen Rometsch to John F. Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover became aware of this and in July 1963, FBI agents questioned Rometsch about her past. They came to the conclusion that she was probably a Soviet spy. Hoover actually leaked this information to the journalist, Courtney Evans, that Rometsch worked for Walter Ulbricht, the communist leader of East Germany. A top-level FBI memo written in October, 1963, stated it was "alleged that the President and the Attorney General had availed themselves of services of playgirls."

 

Hoover also leaked the information to Clark Mollenhoff. On 26th October, 1963, he wrote an article in the Des Moines Register claiming that the FBI had "established that the beautiful brunette had been attending parties with congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of Government... The possibility that her activity might be connected with espionage was of some concern, because of the high rank of her male companions".

 

The following day Robert Kennedy sent La Verne Duffy to meet Ellen Rometsch. His mission was to silence Rometsch before the press got to her. It was reported a few days later "men flashing U.S. security badges saw Mrs Rometsch and got her to sign a statement formally denying intimacies with important people." In a letter to Duffy she thanked him for providing her with money and assured him, "Of course I will keep quiet."

 

This is where the story usually ends. However, in 2009-2010 Bobby Baker was interviewed by Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office. "His recollections - of an age when senators drank all day, indulged in sexual dalliances with secretaries and constituents, accepted thousands of dollars in bribes and still managed to pass the most important legislation of the 20th century - were collected by the Senate Historical Office... The resulting 230-page manuscript was so ribald and riveting, so salacious and sensational, that the Historical Office refrained from its usual practice of posting such interviews online."

 

The interviews were not released until 2013. It seems that the American media ignored this material. However, the German newspaper, Die Welt, took a lot of interest in this. It seems that they had managed to get hold of Rometsch’s 478-page heavily redacted FBI file (code number 105-122316). The most interesting thing about this file is that the FBI investigators were in contact with Rometsch from July 1963 to 1987. The newspaper has also investigated her links with East German intelligence: "In the archives of the Stasi documentation authority, there is not a single record in the intelligence files about the members of the family of Ellen Rometsch, who once lived in Saxony. Together with the findings of the Western intelligence services, therefore, everything speaks for the fact that the former East German citizen has never spied for the East."

 

The newspaper has been trying to interview the elderly Ellen Rometsch who lives near Bonn. She is protected by her husband, Rolf Rometsch, who came over with his wife in 1961, to work at the German embassy in Washington. (They did officially divorce when the Kennedy story broke in 1963, but they remarried soon afterwards.)

 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Bobby Baker interview with Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office concerns Ellen Rometsch. Baker claims Rometsch returned to the United States in 1964 and had an affair with Gerald Ford during his time on the Warren Commission. The affair was used against him by Hoover who was frustrated that the Warren Commission was not sharing their findings, "So, (Hoover) had this tape where Jerry Ford was having oral sex with Ellen Rometsch. You know, his wife had a serious drug problem back then… Hoover blackmailed… Ford to tell him what they (the Warren Commission) were doing."

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKrometsch.htm

[Tom Little]

One link on the Bobby Baker version of events on Rometsch:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2511225/Kennedy-Ford-affairs-East-German-spy-loved-oral-sex.html

 

 

[Mathias Baumann]

On ‎19‎.‎12‎.‎2004 at 9:44 AM, John Simkin said:

[...]

Rometsch was not the only Soviet spy that JFK slept with. He also had sex with Maria Novotny and Suzy Chang. This was a problem because they had both initially came from communist countries and had been named as part of the spy ring that had trapped John Profumo, the British War Minister, a few months earlier. Understandably, JFK told J. Edgar Hoover that he "personally interested in having this story killed".

[...]

Interesting. The mysterious phone call to the Cambridge newspaper 25 minutes before the assassination was also supposedly linked to the Profumo affair - and possibly made by Albert Osborne, who sat next to Oswald in the bus to Mexico.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5022789/UK-reporter-got-tip-25-minutes-JFK-assassination.html

Was Osborne a Soviet spy after all? Is it possible the KGB learned about the plans to kill Kennedy in Dallas?

[Paul Brancato]

5 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Interesting. The mysterious phone call to the Cambridge newspaper 25 minutes before the assassination was also supposedly linked to the Profumo affair - and possibly made by Albert Osborne, who sat next to Oswald in the bus to Mexico.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5022789/UK-reporter-got-tip-25-minutes-JFK-assassination.html

Was Osborne a Soviet spy after all? Is it possible the KGB learned about the plans to kill Kennedy in Dallas?

But - Oswald wasn't on the bus.

[Mathias Baumann]

7 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

But - Oswald wasn't on the bus.

Two Australian girls said that Osborne had been sitting next to Oswald. Osborne himself denied this. Who are we to believe? I don't know much about the two girls - but Osborne IS a suspicious character, especially in view of the fact that later he would confide to a friend that he had indeed been with Oswald.

 On the other hand I know there's reason to believe Oswald went to Mexico by car - or not at all. The whole story remains an enigma to me. So what's your opinion?

[Michael Clark]

13 minutes ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Two Australian girls said that Osborne had been sitting next to Oswald. Osborne himself denied this. Who are we to believe? I don't know much about the two girls - but Osborne IS a suspicious character, especially in view of the fact that later he would confide to a friend that he had indeed been with Oswald.

 On the other hand I know there's reason to believe Oswald went to Mexico by car - or not at all. The whole story remains an enigma to me. So what's your opinion?

It’s all minutiae. LHO didn’t kill JFK. There are plenty of wrongly convicted people who deserve exoneration, LHO included. LHO, bullets and pictures are are a waste of time and effort. This case is not about LHO; it is about the assassins an conspirators who were on the clock @ 12:30 AM, on 11-22-63.

[Tom Little]

As Douglass and other writers on the conspiracy have suggested Oswald's double could have been used in a number of operations.  But Oswald himself was being handled and controlled by CIA agents so I don't doubt that he could have done that as well.  

As for Kennedy and his mistresses he must have had a hell of a guilt complex with all that Jackie had gone through.  He had plenty of warnings he was in imminent danger but was indifferent and oblivious to the threats.  

[Tom Little]

https://www.cwporter.com/jfksex.htm

[David Josephs]

On 11/24/2017 at 4:36 PM, Mathias Baumann said:

Two Australian girls said that Osborne had been sitting next to Oswald. Osborne himself denied this. Who are we to believe? I don't know much about the two girls - but Osborne IS a suspicious character, especially in view of the fact that later he would confide to a friend that he had indeed been with Oswald.

 On the other hand I know there's reason to believe Oswald went to Mexico by car - or not at all. The whole story remains an enigma to me. So what's your opinion?

Paul is correct...  Oswald was not on the bus offered up as evidence... changed 2 and 3 and 4 times to finally match the timetable.

The Australian girls repeated tell us they are on Del Norte buses...   The Flecha Rojas bus manifest from Monterrey to Mexico City only lists those passengers who got on in Monterrey.

Below left is from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey...  2pm depart...  it's almost 4 hours to Monterrey yet the Flecha Rojas bus leaving Monterrey departs at 3:30pm... only 90 mins later

Flecha Rojas = Continental Busline   del Norte = Greyhound....   one rarely bounces back and forth between buslines on a simple trip like this...

del Norte leaves Monterrey at 7:30pm

This report... dated May 11, 1964, is well after the changes to the evidence had occurred yet still sticks with Flecha Rojas for Oswald... 
The AUSSIE girls stick to their claim of del Norte travel...

and the FBI simply LOVES the testimony of RUIZ... who willingly places Oswald wherever his superiors tell him... cause y'know it would be "inimical" to his best interests (of not disappearing into a DFS prison maybe?)

 

 

Miss MUMFORD. Well, we traveled by bus on a scheme which allowed us to travel on Trailways buses for a period of 3 months for a certain amount. We just got on and off at various places we wanted to see: For instance, Washington, D.C.; Miami, where we stayed a week; then we went across to New Orleans, down through Texas to Laredo, and from Laredo we crossed the border also by bus and went to Monterrey.

We spent one day in Monterrey and left by bus at 7:30 p.m. at Monterrey, and it was on that bus that we met Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Miss MUMFORD. Well, the ticket we had on this deal enabled us only to travel in the States, not in Mexico.  So, we bought the ticket on the bus at Laredo and that enabled us to stop off in Monterrey. But the ticket was from Laredo to Mexico City.
Mr. BALL. And from what company did you buy the ticket?
Miss MUMFORD. As far as I can remember, it was a bus company called Transporter del Norte.

Mr. BALL. Now, you got on the bus at Monterrey on the evening of September 26 at 7:30 p.m., you just told me?
Miss MUMFORD. Yes.
Mr. BALL. And what was the company that operated that bus, do you know?
Miss MUMFORD. That was also Transporter del Norte.

  

Edited March 19, 2018 by David Josephs