Jim Hargrove

Exactly, but as releases over the last few decades have disclosed, the Agency appears to have been involved in all sorts of illegal domestic activities. Here’s a page from the so-called “Family Jewels.” More than seven hundred other pages from the “Family Jewels” can be downloaded directly from a CIA website at this address: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/family-jewels

I'm anxious to see it too. John A. is planning to return to the U.S. around the end of the month, but then he has to be quarantined for two weeks, and so I hope this can be done via email. Good luck with the docs.

Thanks for the Daily Beast excerpts. According to John Simkin in this Spartacus-Education post, “In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles and Wisner (and add Washington Post’s Bill Graham) would rather famously go on to direct Operation Mockingbird for the Agency starting around 1950. According to a Wikipedia article, referring to reporter Deborah Davis (author of a 1979 biography of the Post’s Katherine Graham): Davis claimed that Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (a covert operations unit created in 1948 by the United States National Security Council) had created Operation Mockingbird in response to the International Organization of Journalists, recruiting Phil Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry. According to Davis, "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."[6] Davis claimed that after Cord Meyer joined the CIA in 1951, he became Operation Mockingbird's "principal operative."[7] One of my earliest memories involves looking at the tiny, black and white screen of an early television set and seeing the images of WWII war orphans on newsreel footage. These sad images hardly prove Harvey Oswald was a war orphan, but his fluency in the Russian language strongly suggests early exposure to it.

Correction: I talked to John A. earlier today, and he said that Otto Otepka was NOT the source for the HUAC file information. He said that it was actually a document from the U.S. Office of Security and that Malcom Blunt had the document and would send it to him. If no one else does it first, I’ll put it up here as soon as I see it.

John - John A. decided this was a great time to travel in Asia (gotta love his contrariness) but I tracked him down and asked about this. From memory, he said the information came from Otto Otepka, but without his files he couldn't be much more specific. More, hopefully, later. Thanks, again, Jim. When he gets home, I'll ask what evidence John A. has that Oswald drove himself to East Louisiana State Hospital. John wrote that he believed that LEE was consciously posing as HARVEY in the Clinton/Jackson appearances.

Thanks, John. You can never tell when something like this might come in handy. I've made a little text file of your post for my H&L collection of files.

I don't know what evidence he had for this, John, and I've been checking all the usual sources to find it. No luck so far. I'll ask John A. ASAP.

Thanks, Jim, but my bet is that it was American-born LEE Oswald who made the appearances in Clinton and Jackson while it was Russian-speaking HARVEY Oswald who worked that whole charade around the Trade Mart and Banister’s office. John A. makes the case for this starting on page 578 of H&L. Although witnesses say Shaw did some of the driving for the Clinton appearances, John wrote, “Around noon LEE Oswald drove to the East Louisiana State Hospital and spoke with Bobbie Dedon, a nurse's aid who worked in the hospital.” HARVEY Oswald didn’t drive. Soon after this, LEE Oswald would be driving Ruth Paine’s car in Texas while HARVEY was still in New Orleans.

I mostly wanted to get the information above on this new page, but I'd also ask, Have you also tried the Mary Ferrell JFK database for the HUAC material? I spent a few minutes yesterday looking there, without success.

John K, Thanks for this additional information. When possible, I'll ask John A. if he recalls his source for the statements he made about the HUAC file and Judge Tunheim. In the meantime, I wanted to add one more thing about CMC/Permindex. At John Armstrong’s public speeches in the late 1990s, he would almost always set up large projection screens on both sides of the podium. As he gave his lengthy talks, he projected images of documents, scores of documents, illustrating the factual basis of his claims. The first time I saw one of these speeches I was immediately struck by what I never saw in the whole CMC/Permindex saga: DIRECT EVIDENCE. Specific, relatively simple pieces of EVIDENCE. It’s been a long time since I studied the whole Permindex business, but what I recall from way back then was how little real evidence there was linking CMC/Permindex to the Kennedy assassination. All kinds of loose associations, this financier knowing that banker, rich people behaving selfishly, but nothing, just nothing, specifically pointing to the JFKA. Perhaps that is the sort of thing that should be expected in upper level financial circles, but if we have found no direct EVIDENCE in all this time for the Permindex/CMC involvement, I sincerely doubt we ever will.

Hi, Jim Di.... I agree wholeheartedly that Clay Shaw was on the board of Permindex, and that he CLEARLY manipulated Harvey Oswald in New Orleans. Besides that.... I always assumed that the Shaw handoff of LHO to Banister in NOLA was ordained by US Intel. Just my opinion, but I don't think Permindex / CMC had ANYTHING to do with it.

Bill, But on the very same day that JFK was assassinated, J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to all his top aides indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald “went to Cuba on several occasions but would not tell us what he went to Cuba for.” Can you imagine a Dallas cop in 1963 considering an American's multiple trips to communist Cuba a “defection”? I sure can. By then, Cuba was clearly a communist island. This all gets a whole lot easier to understand if you consider that maybe, just maybe, there were multiple “Lee Harvey Oswalds” taking part in multiple spy games. My theory is that Don Stringfellow got the usual treatment for inconvenient witnesses.

Do you know if they are fully indexed for Boolean-type searches, i.e, have you tried the Advanced Search tool and found an ARRB doc in the NARA JFK collection? Thank you, John. If someone put a gun to my head and demanded the truth about Permindex, CMC and the Kennedy assassination, I'd have probably said something like, "it's all smoke and no fire." Sometimes it's almost as good to be lucky as it is to be smart. Unless something else comes up, this pretty much settles it for me. I'm going to spend some time searching NARA docs for anything on that 1953 HUAC file referencing "Mrs. M. Oswald" in a CIA Office of Security file also referencing "1941," "Nazis," and "New Jersey."

John K, Thank you for making a real effort to analyze information and disinformation about the whole Permindex/CMC business. I always thought the issue had all sorts of fascinating leads and potential connections to JFKA, but that there was not much proof of anything related directly to the assassination. Could you give us a short version of your opinion of it? In regard to a potential traveling companion for John Bowen, you’re probably already aware of the doc below, but it does name a couple of people allegedly on the Mexican bus not mentioned in the docs DJ posted, including two spouses (spice?):

As far as I know, the Agency has NOT released the file. Here’s what John A. wrote on our website: In January, 1953 the House Un-American Activites Committee (HUAC) file in New York City made reference to a "Mrs. M. Oswald" in a CIA Office of Security file. This file contained references to 1941, Nazi's and New Jersey. Judge John Tunheim, of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) wrote to Henry Hyde and requested the HUAC file on "Mrs. M Oswald," but his request was denied. If he followed his usual methods, John would have made a copy of at least one page of the 1953 HUAC document, but I haven’t been able to find it. Of interest, though, might be this follow-up comment added to an online article entitled BREAKING NEWS: LIST OF WITHHELD JFK ASSASSINATION DOCUMENTS from Russ Baker’s WhoWhatWhy.org site (emphasis added by me): Robert Miller says: July 20, 2017 at 12:15 pm Here’s the document I want to see, as described in John Armstrong’s HARVEY AND LEE: “In January 1953 the HUAC in New York made reference to a “Mrs. M. Oswald” in a CIA Office of Security file. The file contained references to 1941, Nazi’s, and NewJersey. Judge John Tunheim, of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB ), wrote to Henry Hyde in an attempt to get the HUAC files on Lee and Marguerite Oswald released, but his request was refused.” In 1953 Lee and Marguerite Oswald went to New York City for “testing”. According to the official story Marguerite and Lee had never been to New Jersey before then. So what does “1941, Nazis and New Jersey” have to do with people who’d lived in either New Orleans or Texas? In 1941 before the US’s entry into WWII there was a raid on American Bund property in northern New Jersey by the FBI. How does that relate to Lee Oswald? Armstrong’s book strongly puts forth the theory that there were two Oswalds, starting in 1953, the kid from Texas and a boy in New York City who was born into a home that spoke Russian. By that theory, of merging two Oswalds identities while still children would have required two mothers. We know nothing about the faux Marguerite. Perhaps earlier she had worked as an asset for the FBI under another name. Or perhaps in 1941 she was a member of the Bund but was flipped. In any case, it would open up new vistas in the story.

Ah, I see what you’re getting at. (Sometimes I'm a little slow). Looking for the origins of the Oswald Project in the 1940s makes perfect sense. John A’s evidence for two LHOs and two Marguerites starting in the summer of 1947 strikes me as pretty strong. Real Marguerite and the American-born LHO were at 1505 8th Ave. in Fort Worth; after the end of the spring semester at Chamberlain Hunt, Robert and John Pic jointed them at the Fort Worth apartment. During this same summer of 1947, the false Oswalds were on San Saba in Benbrook, where Georgia Bell was able to judge the time frame so well because her house next door was finished at nearly the same time the “Oswalds” moved in. Mrs. Bell recalled that at one time a neighbor drove phony Marguerite to a house directly across from Stripling School, where “Margeurite” kept clothes and furniture. This was most likely 2220 Thomas Place, directly across the street from Stripling School, and where phony Marguerite probably lived on several occasions, including at the time JFK was assassinated. And so concentrating on a time frame between 1941 and 1947 makes perfect sense!

John, Yeah, I’m inclined to believe the photo is a plant also, along with a number of others ostensibly published late in his life by Robert Oswald. Your material on Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, etc. is interesting and very much of a focus by researchers such as Jim DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, and John Armstrong. There is an important set of two articles by Lisa Pease published in 2000 in Jim D’s old PROBE magazine entitled “James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination.” I’m not sure if Jim has these stories archived on his current website, but John A. copied Part II in its entirety and it is included in the John Armstrong Collection at Baylor University here: James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part II Lisa article begins on page 8 of the file.

John B, The explanations of your methodology are most appreciated. You’re better with photos than I am, and so I would only suggest that you try and create or even re-create any info you gather about each photo’s provenance. I’ve been routinely disappointed by online image searches and believe they cannot be relied upon at all unless they help establish at least some recorded documentation. All the best on this research you are doing. Hope you can make some provable discoveries! And I agree with you completely about the potential genetic makeup and earliest history of the the Russian-speaking Oswald.

John, I appreciate what you’re doing here and hope you make some provable discoveries, but I want to share with you just part of the reason I’m deeply skeptical that early photos of Harvey Oswald exist. If John A’s. speculation is right, that Russian-speaking Oswald was a WWII orphan, then it is quite likely that there is simply no surviving photo of him as a young child. John suspects the war orphan status primarily because of Harvey’s Russian language facility. How did he become so fluent so early in such a difficult language for Westerners? Recall that Yale University Russian language professor Vladimir Petrov speculated that Oswald might have been a native-speaking Russian “with an imperfect knowledge of English.” Before ever setting foot in Russia, Oswald spoke in Russian for two hours with Rosaleen Quinn, who had been studying Russian with a Berlitz tutor for over a year. Ms. Quinn told Edward Epstein that Oswald “had far more confident command of the language than she did.” John A. interviewed a number of Harvey Oswald’s marine associates who said that Oswald simply wasn’t absent enough to have studied Russian at someplace like the military’s Monterey School of Languages. In Minsk, the Soviets hired a Russian engineer to formally tutor Oswald in Russian, but the would-be instructor indicated Oswald had no interest in studying the language. Marina claimed that when she met him in 1961, she thought LHO’s Russian was so fluent that he was simply from another Russian-speaking region of the USSR. (In fairness, though, it should be pointed out that when saying this, Marina may have been trying to hide her command of English at the time.) George de Mohrenschildt, like Marina, said LHO preferred to read novels in Russian by difficult Russian writers. George de M. also said that Oswald “preferred to speak Russian than English any time. He always would switch from English to Russian.” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. IX, 226.) Just my opinion, but to me the most likely explanation of this is that Harvey Oswald learned to read, write, and speak Russian as a child. For much more on Harvey’s Russian language skills, see Prof. James Norwood’s article: Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language.

John, Not in general, but one thing that occurs to me in addition to what DJ wrote involves the events of early October, 1963, when a possibly sandy-haired “Oswald” was seen by all those potential employers and others in and around Alice, TX and towns leading back to Dallas at the same time another Oswald was demonstrably in Dallas. And the FBI/WC sort of wanted us to believe “Oswald” was still on his return trip from Mexico, and this is just days after the Odio affair. Two Oswalds (one accompanied by a traveling hair-dresser) might account for all this, but they would have been busy young men. I would say, though, that John A’s analysis of Harvey and Lee Oswald dating from 1947 through most of November 1963, and especially the last few weeks of Harvey Oswald’s life, makes the ASSUMPTION that the phony Oswald (the man killed by Ruby) was always the same person. Since having more than two Oswalds would have created more loose ends that could potentially unravel, I kind of suspect there were only two, but it is admittedly an assumption. I think John always believed that phony Marguerite was shorter, heavier, and less attractive than the real Marguerite Claverie.

I’m unaware of anything that Mr. McBride revised about his original statements, but the only public interview he ever gave, at least that I’m aware of, was in Dallas in 1997 when John A. brought him to the old JFK Lancer conference. Mr. McBride answers a few questions in the following YouTube video at around the 2:34:35 mark: https://youtu.be/GZZTNAIoR70

John, I’ve seen the photo on the right before described as an image of “Lee Harvey Oswald,” but know nothing about it. Do you know about the source and anything at all about the chain of possession of either of these images? The kids look at least similar to me, but I wouldn’t bet on anything with what I know so far.

Jim - I can't answer the first question, but as for the second.... According to John A., Mr. McBride contacted USAF security officers on the day of the assassination and the Air Force contacted the FBI.

My bet is that in the early to mid 1950s Harvey Oswald was reflecting communist propaganda that he had been exposed to in New York. This is despite the fact that he allegedly told Aline Mosby, who interviewed him in Moscow “Then we moved to North Dakota and I discovered one book in the library, 'Das Kapital.' .... l read the 'Manifesto' .... .! started to study Marxist economic theories .... .! continued to indoctrinate myself for five years ....” I think it started (or continued) in NYC, although in the summer of 1953 (when Harvey Oswald and his caretaker “Mom” fled NYC to escape the city court system) he arrived in remote Stanley, North Dakota, where, according to Henry Timmer, he talked about communism and carried around a commie pamphlet. Like Palmer McBride, Timmer said Oswald expressed interest in killing the president. Harvey Oswald also, of course, showed numerous Marines his communist literature. My thinking about the interest in killing a president is that it may have been overstated by both McBride and Timmer, who both may have made too much after the assassination about adolescent boy braggadocio. My bet is that Harvey Oswald half-believed some of the communist slogans he was told as a youngster and was eventually turned to right-wingers like Guy Banister by his handlers. Palmer McBride was completely ignored by the WC and all the other so-called investigations.

Mr. Caddy, I used Google Translate on a 5-year-old Nexus 6P cell phone during brief visits to three or four Baltic-area nations last year, including Saint Petersburg in Russia. The instantaneous translations often provoked laughter at both ends of the conversation, but in every case I got enough demonstrably true information to continue enjoying my visits. I thought it was amazing, but I was looking for basic directions, not answers to philosophical dilemmas.