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

19 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

Looking forward to seeing this document.

Found a reference to military intelligence investigations of Nazis and Communists in NYC in the 1940s. Am looking into getting copies of these documents but it may take a while because of the pandemic. Will upload these documents if and when I get them.

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.

20 hours ago, John Butler said:

Jim,

Something to add to your files:

Daily Beast:  CIA and FBI Spied on Americans and Immigrant Refugees as Early as the Late 50s

Frank Wisner and refugees

Soon after World War II ended, the Department of State recognized that there was a huge, untapped pool of Eastern European refugees. Harnessing them to fight the communists they hated was the brainchild of Frank Wisner, a former Wall Street lawyer turned Office of Strategic Services spy and the State Department’s expert on European war refugees. In a secret February 1948 policy paper, Wisner and his study group recommended that the National Security Council sanction the “systematic” use of such refugees. The NSC took Wisner’s advice.

This secretive use of refugees was probably done in secret during the war years and after the war prior to obtaining a legal status.  The legal status for this was more than likely prompted by the red scare and President Truman’s March, 1947 order concerning communists, his so-called Loyalty Program.  The authority to use refugees came from the Executive Order NSCID No. 14.

Frank Wisner worked under Allen Dulles in WWII and after the war.

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.

21 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

How did John A. find the reference to M.Oswald in 1941, was it a 1953 CIA document? If he still has the document can you upload 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.

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

There was only one car in Clinton Jackson and it was driven by Shaw.

In fact, there was a photo of all three men in the car.

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.

5 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

How did John A. find the reference to M.Oswald in 1941, was it a 1953 CIA document? If he still has the document can you upload it.

 

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.

55 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

And Jim you refer to some kind of handoff of Oswald to Banister.  That is not really true.  Because the last activity Oswald did in Louisiana that was patently suspicious was the journey to Clinton/Jackson. And that was not with Banister.  It was clearly with Shaw and Ferrie.  And that evidence has grown stronger and stronger over the years. Today I would regard it as a fact.

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.

1 hour ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

Have been working on this as well.  Below is the response I received from NARA that may be helpful in your research.

This is in response to your September 2, 2019, request for information about the records of the JFK Assassination Records Collection. Specifically, you are seeking information about Judge John Tunheim's donation of his personal correspondence relating to his time as Chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). We received your request on September 6, 2019.

 

We were unable to locate any correspondence to or from Judge Tunheim outside of the ARRB records. We did find the Papers of Jack Tunheim in the Collection. This is one box containing transcripts of three Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) investigative reports broadcasts given to J. Tunheim by a CBS producer on 9/25/1998.

 

Otherwise it appears that all other records of his time with the ARRB would in Record Group (RG) 541,Records of the Assassination Records Review Board that are part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection. You can also find a finding aid for ARRB records off of the Collection's main page. Series 1: Administrative Records is currently closed for pending privacy screening for Personally Identifiable Information (PII)."

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.

22 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

* Don Stringfellow advised that Oswald had confessed to the shooting of President Kennedy and Police Officer Tippit.  He also provided additional false information ---portraying Oswald as a card-carrying Communist who had defected to Cuba---used in a message to the US Strike Command in Florida.

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.

6 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

This is so true, finding this document may provide information about the fake Marguerite.

AARB documents are now at NARA, so it may be buried somewhere in this collection.

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?  

6 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

CMC and Permindex had nothing to do with the assassination. Bloomfield had no connection to it as well.

People connected to these 2 companies are suspicious, and as individuals may have liked to see Kennedy assassinated but I see no proof that they acted as a group to have him killed.

The many leads that are found in these companies is due to the fact that they are many right-wing neo-fascists who probably have connections to right-wing activities and therefore may overlap with those who actually planned and carried out JFK's assassination.

I have uploaded Bloomfield's papers that pertain to Permindex, CMC, President Bush and other things to Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/louismbloomfield_201907

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?):

15 hours ago, John Butler said:

I call the other Marguerite "Mysterious Marge" since not much is know about her early origins.  Supposedly, there is a letter in about 1941 that mentions Mysterious Marge in New York or New Jersey.  I thought I had a copy, but....

If you have a copy of the whole letter could you post it?  I think the one you posted had an envelope covering part of the letter.

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): 
 

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.

1 hour ago, John Butler said:

At this time, I am not so much interested in the 1960s, but the current interest is 1940s and the OSS in WW2.  Who, when, and where was the Oswald Project started?  The idea may have originated with the OSS leadership in Washington or it just might have started with Allen Dulles in Switzerland in about 1942-43.  If the notion was thought of in Washington then the effort quickly shifted to Dulles in Switzerland who had contacts in the refugee communities in Switzerland, France, and many East European countries.  Frank Wisner in Romania and Noah Field in France were connected to this effort and also after the war ended in the surviving branches of the OSS.  This continued on into the CIA.  People like James Angleton, Richard Helms, Frank Wisner were added after 1945 in the surviving branches of the OSS.

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!
 

12 hours ago, John Butler said:

Jim,

Often time the photos on the net are better than the government ones (WC, HSCA, and other files).  That's why I use them.  The provenance is important.  Very important. 

But, I often lack the knowledge to know where to vet these photos.  I haven't been a JFK researcher that long.  That's a big weakness.  I've come to rely on David Josephs vast knowledge.  A good example is the Dulles clue.  Go over the notes I have been assembling and a framework or picture will begin to form on what may have happened ending in Harvey Oswald. 

John K. has given a good example of a vetted photo.  Can you trust this information on the Harvey photo.  I think it is phony.  There is no way the Oswald family could have had that photo of Harvey except through a government agency, the CIA's Oswald Project.

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.

19 hours ago, John Butler said:

I picked up these photos on the net at one time or another.  They have been in my files for ages.  Well, about 3 or 4 years.  I have written about the Harvey photo, the photo on the left (screen right), before and have identified it as Harvey based on the Dallas Mugshot characteristics.  I noticed this morning the photo on the right (screen left) which I labeled Lee Oswald.  And, for the first time noticed it is different from the Harvey photo and therefore made the comparison.  I also wrote but didn't post what I thought were the differences.  This is that:

Lee and Harvey differences noticeable even in this young age....

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.

5 hours ago, John Kowalski said:

Jim:

Did John A. ever find evidence that there were more than one Marguerite and Harvey? When the Oswald project began they knew that this would a long-term project. They would have to wait years before Harvey was old enough to be used in a clandestine operation. In the intervening years they could have left the project, became incapacitated or passed away. Perhaps the CIA created a number of mother and son duos who could be used in future operations.

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. 

On 3/16/2020 at 9:17 PM, David Andrews said:

I appreciate your speculation on Oswald's juvenile motives for wanting to kill Eisenhower, but it would really interest me to know if Palmer McBride ever walked back that story, claimed it was forced on him by the FBI, or flat out denied making the statement.  I understand if you are not able to answer this. 

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.

12 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Two questions:

Why did Weberman think this affidavit did not exist?

How  did the FBI find McBride that fast?

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.

6 hours ago, David Andrews said:

One question might be: is the Harvey Oswald left behind in New Orleans in 1957-1958 already doing low-level intelligence work?  Admittedly, the NOAAA sounds like a small-time, hobbyist organization - but is this Oswald already dangling himself as a Red sympathizer to see if there are any inordinate Sputnik lovers among space program aficionados?  Any dangerous bilateralists in the emerging space race crowd? 

Was there an early COINTEL-type program infiltrating these most peripheral of social and political orgs?  Would that be the FBI putting the scion of Hungarian Communists to work?  Is that how they descended so quickly on the likes of McBride and Gehrke - because no real investigation was necessary if they already had a file on NOAAA?

Was Palmer McBride ever questioned on his 1963 statement that the Oswald he knew wanted to kill President Eisenhower?  Did he stick to that assertion?

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.

1 hour ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Don't always trust hand-held machines to translate English into a foreign language when visiting a foreign country. One guy asked "out of sight, out of mind"  be translated into Russian. Then he asked what came up in Russian be translated back into English. What came back was "Invisible' and "Insane."

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.