Jim Hargrove

18 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Hope this isn't too Cold War-centric, but you might check the records of Leo Cherne's International Rescue Committee (IRC), whom Oswald wrote in 1962.  That's a coincidence.  They did a lot of Hungarian refugee work beginning in 1948.  

Probably worth keeping in mind, but there is pretty good evidence that the Russian-speaking LHO was living in Benbrook, Texas in 1947, the earliest reasonably solid biographical data we have for him.

Thank you for trying to limit the scope of your posts a bit.  It is appreciated. 

20 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

Even though we do not know his birth name I would add refugee societies to the list. These would include Hungarian immigrants providing assistance to refugees from Hungary, the American Red Cross and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration which provided relief and resettlement camps for war victims. Their headquarters was in NYC. They are no longer in existence but their documents are at the United Nations archives. 

Let me contact the NYPL before looking for a researcher. Have a list of items from the Weinstock papers that I want to   review, and will add the New York telephone directory for 1945-1949 to the list. Will also inquire about Yorkville community newspapers and alternatives to the city directory.

As you probably know, John A. is particularly suspicious of Frank Wisner and his group.  Here’s what John wrote on The Early Years page of our website:

----------------------

"Frank Wisner was a Wall Street lawyer and during WW II worked for the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). After World War II ended thousands of Eastern European refugees were brought to the United States under his supervision. National Security Council (NSC) records show that Wisner, the CIA's director of clandestine operations, oversaw the re-location of thousands of anti-Communist exiles to the United States as a means of rewarding them for conducting secret operations against the Soviets. Wisner became the CIA and State Department’s expert on European war refugees, and secretly subsidized the refugee relief organizations that brought these Eastern Bloc refugees to the United States throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

"Wisner and his group recognized they could use these Eastern European immigrant's knowledge, customs, and familiarity with their respective homelands. Wisner asked the National Security Council (NSC) to sanction the “systematic” use of such refugees, and they (the NSC) agreed. The NSC soon issued a top-secret intelligence directive (NSCID No. 14), which even today remains "classified," that authorized both the FBI and the CIA to find and jointly exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of well over 200,000 Eastern European refugees resettled in the USA. The CIA soon contacted the Displaced Person's Commission (DPC), which worked closely with the leaders of refugee organizations in the USA...."

-------------------

I’ll hold off on contacting NYPL until I hear from you.  Note that the 1945 Manhattan phone book is available online, but I haven’t been able to find online directories for 1946 to 1949.

On 3/15/2024 at 6:43 AM, Sandy Larsen said:

I don't know about the rest of you, but I prefer that the mole theory be  studied in its own thread.

Thank you, Sandy.  Here, I'd like to talk about the Russian-speaking young man who was eventually killed by Jack Ruby.

Bill,

Is it your honest opinion that all the FBI/CIA  disinfo about “Lee Harvey/Henry Oswald” on Oct. 10, 1963 was about a “mole hunt?” Or ….

Wasn’t it more likely about turning off the federal spotlights on LHO and setting him up a patsy for the JFK assassination?

Would you agree that, if you're going to assassinate the President of the United States, you absolutely must HAVE A PATSY!

Otherwise, the search for you will be relentless, and you will be captured!

EDIT: The patsification of LHO started before 10/10/63, but those documents were an important part of it.   
 

On 3/15/2024 at 6:20 PM, Matt Cloud said:

For the third time, p. 136, second-to-last paragraph.

Matt,

With all due respect, you post too much!  Even though the Ed Forum admins recently transferred a hundred or so of your messages OUT of this thread, you’re about to become this topic’s leading poster yet again, and just from your efforts of the last few days! 

Just look at the totals!

Despite your around-the-clock screeds, you mock people for not reading—and remembering—every word you post.

I am the originator of this topic and, once again, I’ve stopped reading some of what you write, which is unfortunate, because you have some reasonably valuable things to say, although you inevitably overestimate their originality.

Please STOP SPAMMING THIS THREAD!  
 

On 3/15/2024 at 12:13 PM, John Kowalski said:

As you can tell by the posts on this thread, what we are trying to achieve here is to determine the identity of the man who was accused of assassinating JFK. Our main lead is the Bentley call. We do not have to understand the Cold War to find his identity, what we must do is search for documents that will lead to his identification.

John,

In our search to discover the original identity of the Russian-speaking man who eventually assumed the name Lee Harvey Oswald, these issues strike me as the most significant: 

Finding the original notes of Christina Tippit (still awaiting to hear from Ms. Uccellini).

Discovering if Ramaz School has any relevant information.

Shedding more light on Ekdahl’s apparently bigamous marriage to Marguerite in 1945 and discovering if his relationship with Rasmina continued at any point after that marriage.  

More research on George and Margaret Peacost.

Finding if there was any follow-up to NYC City Directory, apparently discontinued in 1934.

Discovering if the following people were listed in the Manhattan phone book for the years 1946-1949:

Fred Blair (aka Carroll Blair?)
Louis Weinstock
Edwin Ekdahl, and
Emil and/or Grace Gardos (Grace Gardos was in the 1945 directory at 217 E 86th)

If the only way to answer the issue immediately above involves printed Manhattan telephone directories, can we find an inexpensive NYC researcher willing to go to the NYPL and search for us?  I’ll try to contact the library next week about this.

Can you think of any other relevant issues I’ve neglected to list above?  I’d like to keep a running list of these issues.

13 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

You are obviously very interested in the Cold War but this thread is not about that. It is about John A's book Harvey and Lee in which he proves that a man took on Lee Harvey Oswald's identity and then defected to the Soviet Union. In this thread, the significance of the call to me is about what it can tell us about young Harvey, the boy Bentley told Tippit about. This is why Jim, Paul and I have been doing research on the Tippit family in Connecticut and the Gardos in NYC. 

12 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Not sure how even to approach this.  You completely ignored all of the salient points in my response to your question, all of which tie directly to the persons identified in the call.  I'll just say if you want to solve the mystery of who Lee Harvey Oswald was, you need to understand the Cold War.  I mean really understand it.  You don't need to have a RAND-level think tank analysis here, but you're going to need to have some familiarity with the concepts.  More than has been on display.  The Kennedy assassination is not a murder; it's a political/intelligence operation operating on a 70+ year scale.  

All of us surely agree that “The Kennedy assassination is not [just] a murder; it's a political/intelligence operation operating on a 70+ year scale,” but, again, this thread simply is trying to ascertain if the “Lee Harvey Oswald” named by the anonymous caller was actually the Russian-speaking youth who was given the identity of the American-born Lee Harvey Oswald. Toward that end, all I am trying to do right now is find out if the following people were listed in the Manhattan phone book for the years 1945-1949:

• Fred Blair (aka Carroll Blair?)
• Louis Weinstock
• Edwin Ekdahl, and
• Emil and/or Grace Gardos (Grace Gardos was in the 1945 directory at 217 E 86th)

Simple.

13 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

What we need is the NYC City Directory. This directory will provide the names of each person living at an address listed in the directory. NYPL has city directories online up to the year 1934. Contacted them today regarding obtaining copies of the directory for 77nd avenue and 2nd avenue for the years 1945-1949.

John,

When you refer to the NYC City Directory, is that different than the Manhattan telephone directory  (or phone books for the other boroughs)? Also, did the NYPL provide an answer about the years 1945-1949?  If memory serves, the 1945 directory I found Grace Gardos listed in was online from the NYPL.

13 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

Hoover disciplined Supervisor Marvin Gheesling, Lambert Anderson at the Nationalities desk, and sixteen other agents. Hoover's main frustration was that right before the twin 10/10/63 memos were sent by the CIA to the upper-echelon and lower-echelon monitors of Oswald at FBI, ONI and State, Anderson and Gheesling had removed the security flash on Oswald that Anderson had placed on LHO when he arrived in Moscow in October 1959 -- and that the other agents who had handled the Oswald file should have put the man on the security index. This sequence of events resulted in Oswald being “out of the spotlight” of the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Secret Service. If these FBI agents had not been playing fast and loose with the Oswald file, Hoover would not have been in such a tight spot.

This needs even more emphasis, because at worst it suggests the possibility of a conspiracy among several members of the Bureau and the Agency.  To reiterate... 

The FBI took Oswald off the watch list, managed by its “WANTED NOTICE” cards, at the same time a CIA cable gave him a more-or-less clean bill of political health, just a couple of months after Oswald’s New Orleans arrest for alleged violence in support of Communist Cuba and less than two months before the assassination.  These two actions effectively took the federal spotlight off “Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The WC didn’t even bother to depose Gheesling, who ordered the FBI's flash cancellation. “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been on that list for nearly four years, since the “defection.” Now that he was taken off it, he’d no longer be under FBI and SS surveillance on 11/22.

At the very same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was publishing several confusing things about him. Responding to a query from the Mexico City station, four CIA officers signed a cable giving lots of accurate biographical data on our boy but calling him “Lee Henry Oswald.” The three page cable expressed no security concerns whatsoever about Oswald and, in fact, indicated the Moscow embassy felt “life in the Soviet Union had clearly had maturing effect on Oswald.” Nothing to worry about here!

This cable was signed by Jane Roman (Angleton’s assistant), William Hood (also close to Angleton), Thomas Karamessines (assistant to Helms) and John Whitten who, according to Jefferson Morley, was the only CIA officer of the four signers who suffered any adverse consequences for this troubling cable. John Armstrong believes that Angleton ran the Oswald Project.

Again, at the same time the FBI was taking “Lee Harvey Oswald” off the watch list, the CIA was giving “Lee Henry Oswald” (biographical data mostly matching LHO’s official biography) a clean bill of political health in the infamous cable of 10/10/63 (see above). 

It was now no longer officially necessary for the FBI to monitor “Oswald’s” activities in Dallas. And the Secret Service would no longer be expected to investigate him prior to a presidential visit to Dallas.

Although “Lee Harvey Oswald” had been arrested for a supposedly violent confrontation in support of Fidel Castro in New Orleans just two months earlier, the entire National Security apparatus of our Federal government now seemed to just stop worrying about him.  What stunning timing!

4 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Fine.  If you indicate who it is your searching for I may be able to help point you in needed directions.  

 

I also happened to live at 81st between 1st and 2nd Avenues in NYC -- Yorkville, the home of much of the Brown Scare then the Red Scare, FWIW. 

Awesome!  I spent the first 10 years of my life living at 440 Riverside Dr. in Manhattan (near Grant’s Tomb and Columbia University).

John K., Paul J. and I are mostly interested in the years 1945 -1949 and would like to know if any of these people had Manhattan addresses during those years:

Fred Blair (aka Carroll Blair?)
Louis Weinstock
Edwin Ekdahl, and
Emil & Grace Gardos (Grace Gardos was in the 1945 directory at 217 E 86th)

Any help would be appreciated.

25 minutes ago, Matt Cloud said:

If only I had known that what I received my LLM -- that's Master of Laws -- in copyright law.  Would love to see any of the "case law" you claim supports this otherwise irrelevant issue of yours.  The phonebooks are not copyright protected.  

The phonebooks themselves are not copyrighted, but we are not dealing only with them.  We are working with digitized, indexed, web-oriented repackagings that MAY have copyrightable elements. 

I’ve worked as an editor, publisher, and book author in the print and electronic publishing business for roughly 50 years,  and I know a thing or two about copyright laws also.  But let’s stop arguing about this and keep to the subject at hand.

Bill,

Without considering which chapter is under discussion, may I ask if you would consider abandoning your statement that LHO “was a spy in his own mind” and at least discuss the possibility that this Russian-speaking young man who allegedly sat in a U-2 radar bubble before "defecting" to the USSR was an actual U.S. spy?

23 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Was it normal back then to register for the draft when in your forties?

I was too young for the draft, but assume that only young men were required to register.

Sandy,

My take is that WWII was special.  My father landed on Normandy Beach on D-Day plus 4 (four days after D-Day) and he was nearly 40 yrs old.  He was a U.S. Army lieutenant in charge of a small group of African-American troops.

Matt,

Copyright laws are often complex.  A collection of public domain elements, if original and comprehensive new material is added, can sometimes be copyrighted again, which may be the case in an analog to digital transformation.  There is plenty of case law behind this.

8 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

How did you access 1946? Have you tried Ancestry for the 1948 one?

A search for "1946 Manhattan phone book" or something similar produced multiple working sources, including the NYC Public Library and several others.  Looking virtually inside the 1946 phone book worked beautifully on several sites, but when I tried for 1948, there was just a brick wall.  Lots of references, lots of libraries to visit in person, but no ability to look inside the 1948 book online.  My bet is it is either a copyright exclusion or a limit to how many people are willing scan and publish that many pages.  

8 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Do not have anything else on her except her will that is been sent to me by mail.

Hopefully, I'll have something to send your way from Connecticut soon.

20 hours ago, Paul Jolliffe said:

John,

Since not even the Warren Commission and the FBI could produce a divorce record for Rasmina and Edwin Ekdahl, I suspect it is highly likely that they never officially divorced. 

Your research here indicates that as of the spring of 1942 (at least), they were not yet divorced. 

Apparently he started with EBASCO in 1943 and somehow met Marguerite thereafter. 

I've been hinting that their "courtship" was not necessarily romantic - that (maybe) he was enlisted in some kind assignment, based on the physical similarity between Marguerite's youngest son and a mysterious little refugee boy in NYC.

In any event, I think it is highly likely that the "other woman" with whom Ekdahl was living in 1947 (according to statements dug up by Armstrong) was in fact his "former" wife, Rasmina.

If so, then the bizarre wording on both of their obituaries becomes much more understandable - they really were husband and wife all along.

 

Paul,

As we probably indicated before, at the time of her marriage to Edwin Ekdahl, Marguerite was working for the U.S. Navy and Edwin for EBASCO, suggesting a clear path to an intelligence hookup.

Note the pictures below that John A. referred to near the beginning of his book.

The first one shows Marguerite on the day of her marriage to Ekdahl on May 7, 1945:

The second is a close-up of Marguerite from the Paul’s Shoe group photograph taken in 1957.  The pictures directly above and below show the Marguerite who married Edwin in 1945.  Note her level eyebrows in both photos. 

The last photo (below) is from 1954 and shows the “Marguerite” who testified to the Warren Commission. Note her slanting eyebrows, which, in most photos of this woman, were partially obscured by glasses. Here is the detail:

And here is the full shot:

Matt -- Thanks!  I forgot to put two and two together.

John -- That's quite a file, but it seems to end in the 1950s, at least from what I've browsed through so far.  Do you know of anything else on Bentley that goes to or approaches 1963?  Or do you think much more was unlikely after she changed teams? 

19 hours ago, Matt Cloud said:

Fred Blair is going to be pretty much Wisconsin centered, the state perhaps not incidentally of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Sure, but some of us are trying to figure out if Blair stayed in NYC for any period of time in the late 1940s.  If he did, he may have stayed with the Gardos family  (his sister Grace and her husband Emil).   This could help give us some clue how the anonymous caller knew of Emil’s commie brother-in-law.  That information probably didn’t come from news reports, at least from the East Coast.

Surprisingly, for me at least, the New York Times Archives has only a single article about Emil Gardos, and that was a March 3, 1934 AP story describing the hearing in Milwaukee in which Federal Judge F.A. Geiger revoked “the citizenship of Emil Gardos of Cleveland, Communist organizer, chemical engineer and editor.”
 

John K and Paul J--

Do either of you know how to access the Manhattan phone book after 1946 or 1947?  It was simple to gain access to the 1946 book, but I spent an hour trying to look through the 1948 edition without success.

16 hours ago, Paul Jolliffe said:

Jim,

Edwin Ekdahl, his (then?) wife Rosmina and their son Dewey lived at 207 North Broadway, in Orangetown  in Rockland County, New York, just northwest of New York City according to the 1940 census.

https://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/New-York/Edwin-A-Ekdahl_639qv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangetown,_New_York

Close enough, I'd say. 

Note that his 1953 obituary claims that he "leaves his wife and son."

(I cannot find a divorce record from Rosmina. Nor could the FBI, apparently. Rosmina seemingly vanished.)

"Wife".

Hmm. Gotta wonder with whom Ekdahl was fooling around when Marguerite found him with another woman in 1947 . . . 

Paul,

Can we find out if there was any relation between Ruth A. Ekdahl of Manhattan and Edwin? Interesting that only a single Ekdahl was listed in the 1946 directory for a place the size of Manhattan.  Researcher Brian Doyle,  who lived in the area most of his life, just wrote to me and said, “The reference to 207 N Broadway Orangetown is actually 207 N Broadway, Nyack, NY...Orangetown is the township but the name of the town for that residence is "Nyack, NY."

According to Google Maps, the distance from 207 N Broadway in Nyack to 125 Wadsworth Ave., New York, NY is  19.9 miles.  

1 hour ago, Paul Jolliffe said:

Jim,

FWIW, you may recall that John Butler discovered four years ago that Blair's use of "Fred" was a nickname - his birth name was "Carroll", which caused John some confusion until he realized the mistake. I have no idea if Blair ever legally changed his first name to "Fred" or just used it as a suitable alternative to the ambiguous "Carroll". 

Anyway, I doubt that Blair was ever listed in a phone book. If he did spend time in NYC in the mid-1940's, he probably temporarily stayed/visited his sister Grace and her communist husband Emil Gardos, their son John (and maybe . . . our little "Oswald"?) at 217 E. 86th Street in Yorkville. 

Also, can you check these directories for Louis Weinstock?

(Slight variation: can you check NYC directories to see if Edwin Ekdahl had any NYC addresses at any time in the 1940's?)

Thanks.

From the 1946 Manhattan phone book:

A single entry for Ekdahl, which was,

Edkahl, Ruth A  125 WdswrthAv

Quite a few listings for Blair.  Here they are starting with Blair C and going through Blair F.  I too think its a long shot that Fred Blair or Carroll Blair or whatever his name was ever had his own residence in NYC.  It was expensive even back then.

There is an entry for Louis Weinstock, but he appears to be an MD.

I’ll take a look at another directory this evening or tomorrow, perhaps skipping to 1948.

On 3/6/2024 at 11:10 AM, John Kowalski said:

Has anyone checked the NYC city directory?

Successfully searching for Emil or Grace Gardos in Manhattan 1945 telephone directory:

Unsuccessfully searching for Fred B. Blair in Manhattan 1945 telephone directory:

Will check 1946 through 1949 asap.

1 hour ago, Geo Kozma said:

Sorry Jim, I do think it is okay to alert me at my too many typos. And, sorry all this will remain confusing. 

No worries, Geo.  The whole case is confusing!

Several of us keep telling you that the “Lee Harvey Oswald” referred to by the anonymous caller was in all likelihood not the same boy whose early years in Louisiana and Texas were described in the Warren Report.  We think he is a different person who went by the same name.

But since you seem interested in finding Hungarian associations of the surname Oswald (and close variants), if you have the time and inclination perhaps you could check your genealogical sources to see if there is any reference to identical twin boys with this name being born sometime in the 1930s in Hungary?  Bear in mind this is a VERY long shot.

Finally, if you aren’t sick of us yet, could you look into the name Istvan Gardos, named in the 1963 U.S. legal petition posted above by Matt Cloud?  Date of birth in Hungary is unstated, but he apparently became a Canadian citizen in 1955 and was deported from the U.S. in 1963.

9 hours ago, Geo Kozma said:

SAndy - there is no name like "Hidel en Heidel in Hungarian....In Germany, Heidelberg is a famous city and heidel exist as a name but has no concrete meaning. (Heide means Meadow).

Thanks for checking the Hidell name in Hungary, Geo.  Nothing in this case is easy, eh?  I’ll read your post above again to see if I can make more sense of it.  In the meantime….

Going back to Sandy’s theory….

Before the paywall crashes down, Ancestry.com reports for Hidell there are

124 birth records
231 marriage and divorce records
406 death records
246 census records
and, notably
49 immigration records

The site has a 14 day free trial, but I used up mine a couple of years ago to get access to its newspaper database.

John Armstrong believes the Hidell alias may have been used by both Oswalds, Harvey starting in the USSR, Lee in the U.S., but, perhaps to keep their identities differentiated for select intel personnel, LEE used AleX Hidell and Harvey used AleK Hidell.  Both variants appear to have been in evidence. 

If memory serves, David Josephs felt the “X” vs. “K” was an optical illusion due to a lack of resolution but, in my opinion at least, John makes a good case.

For more on this, see:

https://harveyandlee.net/Alex/Alek.html

10 hours ago, Jim Hargrove said:

Marina referred to her husband as Alek in a few conversations with researchers

Yesterday, I asked John Armstrong if, in his many conversations with Marina Oswald Porter, she ever referred to Oswald as “Alek.”  John answered, “Never.”

Geo – If you’re willing to help us, please search for two surnames:  Hidell and Heidel 

John K – Will do.  Thanks for the tips.

Thanks, Robert!

Just wanted to add my name to the list of people thanking you for this database of probable Kennedy assassination conspirators.

In my thirty years of research on this subject, I’ve come up with only a much shorter list of names that I’m convinced were involved in the killing, but every one of them appears on your list in a prominent way!  Thanks so much!
 

4 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

The gist of the case is that Domingo Benavides clearly identified Tippt's killer as someone other than Oswald.  He subsequently received multiple threats about his witness testimony, and he changed his story after his brother was shot in the head.

    Belzer's conclusion was that the murder of Eddy Benavides could not be definitively linked to the JFK assassination, but that Domingo Benavides had, obviously been a victim of repeated witness intimidation.

Amen.  As David Walsh’s piece in the November 1996 Ramparts article stated:   

Domingo [and his father-in-law J.W. Jackson] are both convinced that Eddy's murder was a case of mistaken identity and that Domingo, the Tippit witness, was the intended victim.

It is important for all of us to understand that, although witnesses to the Tippit killing have substantially different accounts, many of these witnesses were actually quite far away.  Domingo Benavides was the closest, just a few feet away.