The Ultimate USAEC secrets per the JFK hit.

[Thomas Graves]

My memory of The Man Who Knew Too Much is that Nagell told Dick Russell that he warned Oswald, at Jackson Square in New Orleans, that he was in with an element that was going to set him up for a fall - presumably Hall and Howard. I don't recall that Nagell told Oswald that he was under compulsion to kill Oswald, which would be a counterintuitive thing for a KGB counterespionage agent to reveal. ("These guys are setting you up, so if you don't quit them I'm gonna have to take you out." That's a confidence-inspiring line.) Nagell allegedly paid a tourist street photographer in Jackson Square to commemorate the meeting with Oswald, which photo was presumably in Nagell's self-preservation cache, and was lost with other evidence after Nagell died.

My feeling is that Oswald's express mission was to present himself as a perpetual dangle to interests left and right, and to report on anyone who took the bait. This put him into incriminating situations: the Walker shooting; the Mexico City trip (or into going elsewhere under orders while the Mexico City fraud was perpetrated in his name); and, finally - through the Paines' agency - into the TSBD on 11/22. To incriminate him, Oswald may have been ordered to encourage DeMohrenschildt's assumption that he shot at Walker, which DeMohrenschildt was instructed to ask him about: What is the sound of two dupes talking? Was Oswald ordered to "report" on George deMohrenschildt's overtures and influence, as if DeMohrenschildt was one of those who bit at the dangle?

Nagell may have never known if Oswald was actually going to Mexico City or not - Oswald may not have spilled all his involvements and movements to Nagell. Perhaps Hall and Howard babysat him while the imposture was perpetrated, and instead drove him to incriminating rendezvous like the one at Sylvia Odio's - other meetings that we've never heard of. But Nagell was warning him of bad company, regardless of whether he had full knowledge of Oswald's movements.

David,

You're right of course. According to Dick Russell, Nagell didn't threaten Oswald but simply tried to get him to extricate himself from the plot to assassinate JFK. Maybe Oswald took his "the hint" and tried to get to Cuba by either getting an "instant visa" or by hijacking a small plane. In so doing, maybe Oswald was just trying to "get out of Dodge," metaphorically speaking. This might explain why Oswald, when refused an instant visa by the Russians, yelled out, "This is not my case! For me, it's all going to end in tragedy!"

This is what Russell says in an article he wrote:

Oswald was brought into the conspiracy in July 1963, deceived into thinking he was working for Castro. Soviet intelligence ordered Nagell either to convince Oswald he was being set up to take the rap--or to kill him in Mexico City before the assassination could transpire. While both U S and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the conspiracy, it was the KGB--not the CIA or FBI--that attempted to prevent it. The Soviets, who had reached a growing accommodation with Kennedy after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, were also afraid that the assassination would falsely be blamed upon them or the Cubans.

http://www.assassinationweb.com/russell2.htm

Note that Russell says nothing about Nagell's actually treatening Oswald, but I think we can assume that Oswald was clever enough to "read between the lines."

--Tommy

Edited September 8, 2014 by Thomas Graves

[Paul Trejo]

My memory of The Man Who Knew Too Much is that Nagell told Dick Russell that he warned Oswald, at Jackson Square in New Orleans, that he was in with an element that was going to set him up for a fall - presumably Hall and Howard. I don't recall that Nagell told Oswald that he was under compulsion to kill Oswald, which would be a counterintuitive thing for a KGB counterespionage agent to reveal. ("These guys are setting you up, so if you don't quit them I'm gonna have to take you out." That's a confidence-inspiring line.) Nagell allegedly paid a tourist street photographer in Jackson Square to commemorate the meeting with Oswald, which photo was presumably in Nagell's self-preservation cache, and was lost with other evidence after Nagell died.

My feeling is that Oswald's express mission was to present himself as a perpetual dangle to interests left and right, and to report on anyone who took the bait. This put him into incriminating situations: the Walker shooting; the Mexico City trip (or into going elsewhere under orders while the Mexico City fraud was perpetrated in his name); and, finally - through the Paines' agency - into the TSBD on 11/22. To incriminate him, Oswald may have been ordered to encourage DeMohrenschildt's assumption that he shot at Walker, which DeMohrenschildt was instructed to ask him about: What is the sound of two dupes talking? Was Oswald ordered to "report" on George deMohrenschildt's overtures and influence, as if DeMohrenschildt was one of those who bit at the dangle?

Nagell may have never known if Oswald was actually going to Mexico City or not - Oswald may not have spilled all his involvements and movements to Nagell. Perhaps Hall and Howard babysat him while the imposture was perpetrated, and instead drove him to incriminating rendezvous like the one at Sylvia Odio's - other meetings that we've never heard of. But Nagell was warning him of bad company, regardless of whether he had full knowledge of Oswald's movements.

As I see it, David, the question about the identity of the two Latinos who accompanied Lee Oswald in New Orleans while Nagell was investigating a planned JFK murder in Washington DC, is still wide open.

Silvia Odio testified that two Latinos (probably Loran Hall and Larry Howard) were with Lee Oswald at her apartment around 25 September 1963 -- but I'm not confident that these were the same two Latinos that Richard Case Nagell investigated.

They might be -- there are signs that suggest it. For example, the plot motives were the same -- set up Lee Harvey Oswald as a patsy so that the American People would believe that the Communists killed JFK.

That's too close to ignore.

But there are also differences. Nagell first met these two Latinos in Mexico City, while Hall and Howard were running guns between California and Florida on an almost full-time basis in 1963.

There were probably MANY such plots to kill JFK circulating among the USA right-wing. (Many plots involved Latino-Americans, e.g. David Morales, Guy Gabaldon, Loran Hall and Larry Howard, though this is not often emphasized.)

The two Latinos that Nagell investigated seemed to him to be Cuban Exiles who resided in Mexico City.

Loran Hall and Larry Howard, however, were Americans. Loran was a Cuban-American born in Kansas. Larry was a Mexican-American born in Southern California. They were both US Army veterans and they both liked combat. They both served with Gerry Patrick Hemming, first in supporting Fidel Castro (for the CIA) and then in opposing Fidel Castro (for the CIA). They both later served with Guy Gabaldon's DACA run out of Mexico City.

It's vaguely possible that Nagell met Hall and Howard in Mexico City's DACA offices -- and confused the Dallas plot with a Washington DC plot -- but I doubt it. That's too wide to miss. Also, I think Nagell would have mentioned that he was following specifically American Latinos, instead of specifically Cuban Latinos. I doubt that he would have missed that.

I think there were SEVERAL plots to kill JFK. It sounds to me that Nagell was following a specifically Washington DC plot, as he said. Yet Jim Garrison basically PROVED that Lee Harvey Oswald signed up for the plot instigated by Guy Banister and David Ferrie, to occur (unknown to Oswald) in Dallas.

It remains possible that other Cuban Exiles at a paramilitary training camp overheard that Lee Harvey Oswald was the perfect PATSY, and then tried to recruit Oswald into their own plot. Maybe Oswald accepted some of their money, but he'd already signed up with Guy Banister, and he wouldn't go to Washington DC after all. But he thought about it, as the evidence shows.

This is how it sounds to me today.

As for threatening to kill Oswald -- that report came from Nagel himself. Nagell knew Oswald since 1959 -- they were practically pals. But Nagell had to protect his own cover story -- and Nagell warned Oswald that pretending to be a real Communist was Nagell's bread-and-butter, and he had to keep up appearances. (That's what I read somewhere -- I'm still searching for the quote.)

Oswald seems to have ignored Nagell -- probably because Nagell showed that he knew NOTHING about what Guy Banister was having him do, i.e. working for Operation Mongoose.

Your theory, David, that Oswald was hired (by the ONI?) to dangle himself to everybody, left and right, and to report on anyone who took the bait -- is interesting. But do we know of anybody else who was a combo left-right dangle? Sure, dangles were common -- but they were typically dangled to ONE SIDE ONLY -- usually to the left-wing ONLY, or to the right-wing ONLY.

A combo left-right dangle would quickly be spotted, it seems to me. If you can show more evidence of a combo left-right dangle, I could follow your argument more closely, because a combination left-right dangle could explain much.

Anyway, David, I fully agree with you when you say, "Nagell was warning him of bad company, regardless of whether he had full knowledge of Oswald's movements."

The most interesting fact about Nagell, IMHO, is that he seems to know about ANOTHER plot to murder JFK which involved a PATSY as a way to blame the Communists for the murder -- and that plot also selected Lee Harvey Oswald as its PATSY.

It's small wonder that both plots (Washington and Dallas) center around New Orleans, where Guy Banister and David Ferrie were operating.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

<edit typos>

Edited September 9, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Paul Trejo]

...This is what Russell says in an article he wrote:

Oswald was brought into the conspiracy in July 1963, deceived into thinking he was working for Castro. Soviet intelligence ordered Nagell either to convince Oswald he was being set up to take the rap--or to kill him in Mexico City before the assassination could transpire. While both U S and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the conspiracy, it was the KGB--not the CIA or FBI--that attempted to prevent it. The Soviets, who had reached a growing accommodation with Kennedy after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, were also afraid that the assassination would falsely be blamed upon them or the Cubans...

--Tommy

Thanks, Tommy, for that quote by Dick Russell.

I think there are multiple ways to interpret the data in question. For example:

(1) Dick Russell wrote that "Oswald was brought into the conspiracy in July 1963." I question that, because we have evidence that Lee Oswald was making odd moves in May and June 1963 as well.

For example, on 26 May 1963 Oswald wrote to the FPCC and requested a charter. Yet Guy Banister had been tracking the FPCC for years at this point. So, I think that Guy Banister persuaded Oswald to write to the FPCC to set up a FAKE CHARTER in New Orleans, as early as May.

Also, on 29 May 1963, Oswald ordered a thousand handbills to advertise his Fake FPCC chapter. I think he did this on orders from Guy Banister, with money from Clay Shaw. Remember that Guy Banister's address was stamped on some of these handbills.

On 3 June 1963 Oswald rented a new PO Box under his alias of Alek Hidell -- the one and only member of this Fake FPCC chapter. Again, by orders of Guy Banister, IMHO.

As early as 16 June 1963, Oswald was seen distributing FPCC handbills at the dock near the U.S.S. Wasp. Insofar as his FPCC handbills were marked with the address of Guy Banister, it should be clear that Oswald was already working for Guy Banister long before July, 1963.

On 24 June 1963 Oswald applied for a new passport -- he was already thinking of a journey abroad -- even before July 1963.

(2) Dick Russell wrote that Oswald was "deceived into thinking he was working for Castro." That is Russell's guess, but I think the opposite; Lee Oswald knew very well that his FPCC chapter was a fake, and he knew very well the politics of Guy Banister, whose address was stamped on those FPCC handbills.

Lee Oswald was far from any notion of working for Castro -- he was FAKING his love for Fidel Castro on orders from Guy Banister. Guy Banister (and David Ferrie and Clay Shaw) deceived Oswald on other grounds -- they probably told him they were grooming him for a permanent CIA position, something he desperately wanted. They were laughing behind his back.

(3) Dick Russell wrote that "Soviet intelligence ordered Nagell either to convince Oswald he was being set up to take the rap -- or to kill him in Mexico City before the assassination could transpire." This suggests that Nagell knew something about a Mexico City trip with regard to a Washington DC plot to murder JFK. But the details are vague.

What details did Nagell know about the Mexico City trip? Russell doesn't say.

(4) Dick Russell wrote that "while both U S and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the conspiracy, it was the KGB -- not the CIA or FBI -- that attempted to prevent it." However, Bill Simpich PROVED, I say, that the CIA knew NOTHING about a plot to kill JFK and frame Oswald -- because when some rightist mole in the CIA *impersonated* Lee Oswald over the wire-tapped line from the Cuban consulate to the USSR consulate in Mexico City, the CIA high-command started a mole-hunt! They had NO IDEA who was trying to frame Oswald!

(5) Dick Russell wrote that "The Soviets, who had reached a growing accommodation with Kennedy after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, were also afraid that the assassination would falsely be blamed upon them or the Cubans." This, as I read it, was precisely the point of Nagell's entire case. This was almost word for word what the Soviet representatives said about the JFK assassination after it occurred, so we can be assured that Nagell was telling the truth as he knew it, at least as far as this statement goes.

In conclusion, I say the main errors of Dick Russell in that paragraph were:

(i) a failure to see that Lee Harvey Oswald was playing along with Guy Banister with his eyes wide open. There wasn't the slightest bit of Communist belief in Lee Oswald -- he was playing a game that he thought would make him a super-spy with a big salary from the CIA;

(ii) a failure to recognize that Lee Oswald was working with Guy Banister as early as May, 1963, and probably he moved to New Orleans in April in the first place, precisely to work for Guy Banister through David Ferrie.

Instead, Guy Banister was deceiving Oswald into believing he was part of (something like) Operation Mongoose, when in actual fact Guy Banister and his men (in cooperation with Ex-General Edwin Walker and his men) were FRAMING Lee Harvey Oswald to appear to be a Communist officer of the FPCC in the newspapers, on radio and on TV. That TV film of Oswald handing out FPCC handbills is now famous.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited September 9, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[David Andrews]

Your theory, David, that Oswald was hired (by the ONI?) to dangle himself to everybody, left and right, and to report on anyone who took the bait -- is interesting. But do we know of anybody else who was a combo left-right dangle? Sure, dangles were common -- but they tended to be exclusively dangled toONE SIDE ONLY -- usually for the left-wing ONLY, or for the right-wing ONLY.

Right - but Oswald's defection set him apart, made him interesting to, and exploitable within, both camps. And the ambidextrous dangle seems to fit Oz's multifarious involvements. Why else would he find it plausible that he - a defector - should be in the TSBD on game day? Answer: he believed he was there to report.

Consider an Oswald instructed to report back on the activities of Banister, Ferrie, DeMohrenschildt. Instructed to report back on everyone who bit at his dangle.

Edited September 8, 2014 by David Andrews

[Steven Gaal]

Oswald and the CIA, by John Newman Reviewed by James DiEugenio

John Newman (CTKA file photo)

Oswald and the CIA is not an easy book to read. And I think this is one of the reasons that it was underappreciated when it was first published in 1995. One would expect this result in the mainstream press. But even the research community was not up to the task of understanding the true value of this important work when it was originally published.

Jerry Rose's The Fourth Decade discussed the book twice: once directly and once indirectly. That journal specifically reviewed the book in late 1995 (Vol. 3 No. 1). The reviewer was a man named Hugh Murray. His review was completely inadequate. He gave the book less than two pages of discussion. Murray never even addressed the volume's two crucial chapters on Mexico City, which are the key to the book. (This would be like criticizing the Warren Report and never addressing the single bullet theory.) In the summer of the following year (Vol. 3 No. 3), Peter Dale Scott did something that may have been even worse. He wrote a long article for Rose's publication entitled "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole". This piece seriously distorted and misinterpreted both the book itself and some of the important information Newman had unearthed. This sorry performance partly explains why the book's achievement was never really comprehended even within the critical community.

But to be honest, Newman made some mistakes that contributed to the book's disappointing reception. The author felt it was important to get the book out quickly. He thought he should do so while the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)) was still operating in order to draw attention to its work. I thought this was an error at the time. I still do. For there were some documents, not fully processed at the time, which would have been useful to the endeavor. For instance, The House Select Committee's Mexico City Report, aka the Lopez Report, had not yet been fully declassified. And to his credit, Newman updated his work on Mexico City with a 1999 article for Probe (Vol. 6 No. 6 ). This is included in The Assassinations.

Secondly, because of this haste, the book is--to put it gently--not adroitly composed. Newman's previous book, JFK and Vietnam, also deals with a complex topic: President Kennedy's intent to withdraw from the Vietnam conflict. Yet that book is skillfully arranged and written. When I asked the author about the comparison between the two, he said, "But Jim, that book was ten years in the making." I should also add that he had an editor on the first book. Something he did not have, at least to my knowledge, on the second.

Third, Major John Newman was an intelligence analyst for twenty years. And he approached Oswald and the CIA in that vein. In other words, he played to his strengths. Therefore the book is a study of Oswald as he is viewed through the intelligence apparatus of the United States government. Or, as the author notes, it's about "Oswald the file". The author rarely tries to fill out the story or the personage. For instance, the alleged attempted suicide of Oswald in Russia is not mentioned here. Ruth Paine is mentioned once; Michael Paine not at all. Only a highly disciplined, almost obsessed mind, could hew to that line almost continuously. Or the mind of a former intelligence analyst. Consequently, because of its inherent longeurs, the book makes some demands on the reader. Which some, like Scott and Murray, were not up to.

II

Now, with caveats out of the way, lets get to the rewards in this valuable, and undervalued, book. No person, or body, not even the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), has ever dug more deeply into what the American intelligence community knew about Oswald prior to the assassination. What Newman reveals here literally makes the Warren Commission look like a Model T Ford. All the denials issued to that body by the likes of John McCone and J. Edgar Hoover are exposed as subterfuges. Contrary to their canards, there was a lot of interest in Oswald from the time he defected to Russia until the assassination.

Newman first discovered this when he was hired by PBS to work on their ill-fated Frontline special about Oswald in 1993. And it was this discovery that inspired him to write the book. The CIA Director at the time of the debate in Congress over the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board had testified there were something like 39 documents at CIA about Oswald. Most of them were supposed to be clippings. Newman discovered there was many, many times that amount. Further, he discovered the Agency held multiple files on Oswald. And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there were some puzzling irregularities within the record. (When the author expressed his continuing bewilderment about this to the archivist, the archivist replied, "Haven't you ever heard of Murphy's Law?" To which Newman shot back, "Every time I turn around I'm walking into Mr. Murphy.")

Mr. Murphy makes his appearance right at the start. Once Oswald defected to Russia in 1959 the FBI opened up a file on him for security purposes. But at the CIA there is a curious, and suspicious, vacuum. Richard Snyder of the American Embassy in Moscow sent a cable to Washington about Oswald's defection. But the exact date the CIA got it cannot be confirmed (p. 24). Further, the person who received it cannot be determined either. Since Oswald was a former Marine, the Navy also sent a cable on November 4th. This cable included the information that Oswald had threatened to give up radar secrets to the Soviets. But again, no one knows exactly when this cable arrived at CIA. And almost as interesting, where it was placed upon its immediate arrival. (p. 25) This is quite odd because, as Newman points out (Chapter 3), Oswald's close association with the U-2 plane while at Atsugi, Japan should have placed alerts all over this cable. It did not. To show a comparison, the FBI recommended "a stop be placed against the fingerprints to prevent subject's entering the US under any name." (Ibid) So, on November 4, 1959, the FBI issued a FLASH warning on Oswald. This same Navy memo arrived at CIA and, after a Warren Report type "delayed reaction", eventually went to James Angleton's CI/SIG unit on December 6th. Angleton was chief of counter-intelligence. SIG was a kind of safeguard unit that protected the Agency from penetration agents. It was closely linked to the Office of Security in that regard. But as Newman queries: where was it for the previous 31 days? Newman notes that the Snyder cable and this Navy memo fell into a "black hole " somewhere. In fact, the very first file Newman could find on Oswald was not even at CI/SIG. It was at the Office of Security. This is all quite puzzling because, as the author notes, neither should have been the proper resting place for an initial file on Oswald. This black hole "kept the Oswald files away from the spot we would expect them to go-the Soviet Russia division." (p. 27)

Another thing the author finds puzzling about this early file is that he could find no trace of a security investigation about the danger of Oswald's defection. This is really odd because while talking to some of his friends the author found out that Oswald knew something that very few people did: the U-2 was also flying over China. If Snyder's original memo said that Oswald had threatened to give up secrets on radar operation to the Russians, and Oswald had been stationed at the U-2 base in Japan, there should have been a thorough security investigation as to what Oswald could have given the Russians. For the obvious reason that the program could be adjusted to avoid any counterattack based upon that relayed information. Newman could find no evidence of such an inquiry. (pgs 28,33-34) Further, the author found out that Oswald was actually part of a unit called Detachment C, which seemed to almost follow the U-2 around to crisis spots in the Far East, like Indonesia. (p. 42)

Needless to say, after Oswald defected, the second U-2 flight over Russia--with Gary Powers on board--was shot down. Powers felt that, "Oswald's work with the new MPS 16 height-finding radar looms large" in that event. (p. 43) The author segues here to this question: Whatever the CIA did or did not do in regard to this important question, it should have been a routine part of the Warren Commission inquiry. It was not. As the author notes, "When called to testify at the Warren Commission hearings, Oswald's marine colleagues were not questioned about the U-2." (p. 43) Oswald's commander in the Far East, John Donovan, was ready to discuss the issue in depth. The Commission was not. In fact, Donovan was briefed in advance not to fall off topic. (p. 45) When it was over, Donovan had to ask, "Don't you want to know anything about the U-2." He even asked a friend of his who had testified: "Did they ask you about the U-2?" And he said, "No, not a thing." (Ibid) Donovan revealed that the CIA did not question him about the U-2 until December of 1963. But this was probably a counter-intelligence strategy, to see whom he had talked to and what he had revealed. Why is that a distinct probability? Because right after Powers was shot down, the CIA closed its U-2 operations at Atsugi. Yet, Powers did not fly out of Atsugi. As Newman notes, the only link between Powers and Atsugi was Oswald. (p. 46)

Right after this U-2 episode, Newman notes another oddity. The CIA did not open a 201 file on Oswald for over a year after his defection, on 12/8/60. (p. 47) This gap seriously puzzled the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Investigator Dan Hardway called CI officer Ann Egerter about it. It was a short conversation. She didn't want to discuss it. (p. 48) The HSCA tried to neuter the issue by studying other defector cases. But as Newman notes: defection is legal but espionage, like giving up the secrets to the U-2, is not. (pgs 49-50) So the comparison was faulty. In fact, when Egerter finally opened Oswald's 201 file, the defection was noted, but his knowledge of the U-2 wasn't. This delay in opening the 201 file was so unusual that the HSCA asked former CIA Director Richard Helms about it. His reply was vintage Helms: "I am amazed. Are you sure there wasn't? ... .I can't explain that." (p. 51) When the HSCA asked where the documents were prior to the opening of the 201 file, the CIA replied they were never classified higher than confidential and therefore were no longer in existence. Newman notes that this is a lie. Many were classified as "Secret" and he found most of them, so they were not destroyed. Further, the ones that were classified as confidential are still around also. (p. 52)

And this is where one of the most fascinating discoveries in the book is revealed. Although no 201 file was opened on Oswald until December of 1960, he was put on the Watch List in November of 1959. This list was part of the CIA's illegal HT/LINGUAL mail intercept program-only about 300 people were on it. Recall, this is at a time when Oswald's file is in the so-called Black Hole. It was not possible to find a paper trail on him until the next month. How could he, at the same time, be so inconsequential as to have no file opened, yet so important as to be on the quite exclusive Watch List? This defies comprehension. In fact, Newman is forced to conclude, "The absence of a 201 file was a deliberate act, not an oversight." (p. 54) Clearly, someone at the CIA knew who Oswald was and thought it was important enough to intercept his mail. Long ago, when I asked Newman to explain this paradox in light of the fact that his first file would be opened at CI/SIG, he replied that one possibility was Oswald was being run as an off the books agent by Angleton. In light of the other factors mentioned in this section, i.e. concerning the U-2 secrets, the "black hole" delay, plus what we will discover later, I know of no better way to explain this dichotomy.

III

In his analysis of the Russian scene with Oswald on the ground, Newman made clear two important points. First, whereas most of the attention prior to this book was on embassy official Richard Snyder's interaction with Oswald, Newman revealed a man behind the scenes, peering through the curtains: John McVickar. It was this other embassy official who asked Priscilla Johnson to interview Oswald without Snyder's OK. (p. 72) What makes this interesting is the timing. Oswald had actually refused an interview with American reporter Bob Korengold. He had not been very forthcoming with Aline Mosby, the first journalist to talk to him. Then two things happened. First, the Russians communicated to Oswald that he would be allowed to stay in Russia (p. 73). Second, after McVickar gave Johnson the tip about Oswald, the defector agreed to meet her at her room. He arrived at nine at night. He stayed until well past midnight. (p. 72) What makes this interesting is that Newman reveals that Oswald's room at the Metropole Hotel was equipped with an infra-red camera for the observation of its occupants-and the CIA knew this. (p. 9) Second, Oswald found out he would be allowed to stay through a Russian official who actually visited his room.

After the long interview with Priscilla Johnson, McVickar had dinner with the reporter. Johnson, of course, worked for the conservative, and intelligence affiliated, North American News Alliance. At this dinner, somehow, some way, McVickar revealed that Oswald was going to be trained in electronics. (p. 84) Which he was.

Besides the discoveries about McVickar, Newman actually found documents that revealed that Johnson had applied to work for the CIA as early as 1952. She then worked with Cord Meyer, who helped fund the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed later as a CIA conduit. At the time Newman wrote the book, it was not yet revealed that the CIA did not hire her because they later deduced she could be used to do what they wanted anyway and they classified her as a "witting collaborator." (The Assassinations p. 435) The story based on this interview received little play in the media at the time, although it did announce that Oswald was a defector. But after the assassination, Johnson revised this original story-to Oswald's disadvantage-- and it received circulation through the wire services, including the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Thanks to Newman we now know that McVickar was ultimately responsible for it.

Another hidden action that was first revealed in this book was that in 1961, the CIA launched a counterintelligence program against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which had been formed the year before. According to the author, that effort was launched by the CIA's Office of Security, under the orders of James McCord. (p. 95) Further, this operation was done within the United States, which made it illegal for the Agency, and without the permission of the FBI. Making it even more interesting is that, as Newman first revealed, David Phillips was also part of this program. (p. 241) This program used neighbors hired as spies, and double agents posing as sympathizers, both reporting back to the CIA. (p. 241)

When Oswald decided he wanted to return from Russia, Newman notes another appearance by Mr. Murphy. Actually two. No "lookout" card was inserted on Oswald by the State Department. Although it appears that one was prepared, it was never active. (p. 138) This would have alerted State and other agencies that a security risk had applied to reenter the country. Second, many FBI files that contained the security risk information on Oswald from 1959 are now missing. (p. 153) Finally, the FBI very selectively issued documents from these files to the Warren Commission. The HSCA got more of the picture. But in 1994, when the author went looking for the information hinted at to the HSCA, he couldn't find them. (p. 154)

When Oswald tries to return, he negotiates to have potential legal proceedings against him dropped. (p. 218) Interestingly, he was taken off the Watch List in 1960, then placed back on it in August of 1961. (But yet, his mail was opened even when he was off the list! p. 284) And at this time, there is the first documentary evidence that the CIA had an operational interest in Oswald. At the end of a memo about Oswald's probable return, the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote, "It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald's wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald's own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald ] story." (p. 227)

Marina got her exit visa surprisingly fast. Oswald explained his behavior there as, "It was necessary to make this propaganda because at the time he had wanted to live in Russia." (p. 235) Oswald thought his passport would be confiscated when he returned. But, surprisingly-or not-Oswald was actually able to sign papers for a government loan at the American Embassy. A man named Spas Raikin of the Travelers Aid Society was contacted by the State Department to meet Oswald and his new wife in New York in June of 1962. The Oswalds made it through customs and immigration without incident. And without any evidence of an attempt at a debriefing.

When Oswald arrived back in Texas, FBI agent John Fain did do an interview with him. Oswald then got a job at Leslie Welding, and started to subscribe to communist newspapers. At this point, Mr. Murphy pops up again. Even though the FBI had informants in many post offices looking out for just this sort of thing-a former defector subscribing to communist periodicals- and Oswald has signed a post office form instructing the post office to deliver him foreign propaganda, the Bureau did an inexplicable thing. In October, they closed their Oswald file. (p. 271)

What makes the timing of this fascinating are two events. First, the CIA campaign against the FPCC begins to heat up, and the FBI opens up a similar front against the FPCC led by Cartha De Loach. (p. 243) Second, George DeMohrenschildt, the Baron, enters Oswald's life. In his interview with the Warren Commission, the Baron tried to conceal his knowledge of who J. Walton Moore was. Moore was the head of the CIA office in Dallas who, it was later revealed, approached the Baron about going out to meet the returned defector. But DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Moore was "some sort of an FBI man in Dallas. Many people consider him the head of the FBI in Dallas." (p. 277)

Newman closes this section of the book with a beautiful Mr. Murphy episode. He notes that FBI agent James Hosty was now, rather belatedly, looking for Oswald and his wife. This was in March of 1963. Hosty also recommended that Oswald's case be reopened. The grounds for this reopening? Oswald had a newly opened subscription to the Communist newspaper, The Worker. (p. 273) But, as the author notes, when the Dallas FBI office had previously learned of an earlier such subscription-to the exact same publication-it had closed his file! This recommendation had a caveat. Hosty left a note in Oswald's file "to come back in forty-five to sixty days." (Ibid) But by then, of course, Oswald would be in New Orleans. Newman poses the question: Was the reason Oswald's case was closed for these six months because DeMohrenschildt was now making his approach to Oswald? (p. 277) Was another reason because Oswald was now about to enter the fray, along with the CIA and FBI, against the FPCC in New Orleans? (p. 289)

IV

The two finest parts of this distinguished work are the sections on New Orleans and, especially, Mexico City. Newman notes that the official story is that the FBI lost track of Oswald while he was organizing his FPCC group in New Orleans under the name of Hidell. This is when many credible witnesses place him in league with Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith at 544 Camp Street. But even though FBI agents Regis Kennedy and Warren DeBrueys were specialists on the anti-Castro beat in New Orleans, the FBI holds that Hosty did not know that Oswald moved to New Orleans until June 26th. In this book, the author demonstrates with a chart why this is so hard to believe. On page 300 he lists seven different events between May 14th and June 5th that should have caused the Bureau to realize that Oswald had moved. If you believe the Bureau, it wasn't enough.

The author suspects this methodical obtuseness was due to the fact that Oswald was in, what Newman calls, his "undercover" phase in New Orleans. That is, he has visited Jones Printing to order flyers with two different stamps applied, neither of them in his name. The first is under the name Hidell, and the second is addressed 544 Camp St. Newman believes that Banister was using Oswald to smoke out leftwing students and liberal professors at Tulane, like Prof. Leonard Reissman. Newman also brings out the fact that in a memo to the Bureau from New Orleans, the information that several FPCC pamphlets contained the 544 Camp St. address was scratched out. (p. 310)

The next discovery made by the author is also arresting. The FBI says they discovered Oswald was in New Orleans at the end of June. (p. 317) Yet they did not verify where he lived until August 5th. As Newman notes, the latter is the same day that Oswald broke out of his undercover mode and contacted some Cuban exiles, using his real name. Or as the author puts it: " ... the FBI's alleged blind period covers-to the day-the precise period of Oswald's undercover activity in New Orleans." (Ibid)

On August 5th, Oswald begins to play an overt role as an agent provocateur with Carlos Bringuier of the anti-Castro exile group, the DRE. The Warren Commission never knew that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMSPELL. When Oswald is arrested on Canal Street after his famous altercation with Bringuier, he actually had the Corliss Lamont booklet, "The Crime Against Cuba" with him. This had the "FPCC 544 Camp Street" stamp on it. (As I showed in my first book, this particular pamphlet was very likely provided to Banister through the CIA itself. See Destiny Betrayed, p. 219) Newman then details Oswald's arrest, his court date, his activities in front of the International Trade Mart-with flyers in his own name with his own address, and how Oswald now goes to the papers to get ads published for his cause. Oswald was attracting so much attention that J. Edgar Hoover requested a memorandum on him in late August with a detailed summary of his activities. This went to the CIA. When Oswald debated Bringuier on a radio program, the moderator Bill Stuckey offered the tape to the FBI. And the DRE reported the incident to the CIA. As Newman builds to his climax, all of this is important in light of what will happen next.

After creating a lot of bad publicity for the FPCC in New Orleans, Oswald now lowers his profile again. At the Mexican consulate in New Orleans, he and CIA operative Bill Gaudet get visas to go to Mexico on September 17th .Why is the date important? Because on the day before, the 16th, the CIA told the FBI they were considering countering FPCC activities in foreign countries. A week later, Oswald leaves New Orleans on a bus to Mexico.

What Newman does with the legendary Oswald trip to Mexico is, in some respects, revolutionary. Greatly helped by the release of the finally declassified Lopez Report, he actually goes beyond that magnificent document. According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was in Mexico City from Friday September 27th to Wednesday October 3rd. The ostensible reason was to acquire an in-transit visa from the Cuban consulate so he could travel from Cuba back to the Soviet Union. But as Newman notes, this story makes little sense and is likely a ruse. (p. 615) Oswald already had a passport to Russia, but the stamp warned that a person traveling to Cuba would be liable for prosecution. If he really wanted to go to Russia, Oswald could have gone the same roundabout route he had in 1959. The route he was choosing this time actually made it much harder, if not impossible, to get to Russia in any kind of current time frame.

When Oswald first shows up at the Cuban consulate it allegedly is at 11:00 AM on Friday. (p. 356) Yet as the author notes on his chronological chart, he is supposed to have already called the Soviet Consulate twice that morning. (Ibid) The problem with those two calls is that they were both in Spanish which, as the Lopez Report notes, the weight of the evidence says Oswald did not speak. He tells receptionist Silvia Duran he wants an in-transit visa for travel via Cuba to Russia. But he has no passport photos. He leaves to get the pictures taken. When he returned with the photos, Duran told him that he now had to get his Soviet visa before she could issue his Cuban visa. (p. 357)

Oswald now went to the Soviet Consulate. But here we find another problem with what is supposed to be his third call there. The time frames for the call and the visit overlap. He cannot be outside calling inside when he is already inside. (Ibid) Further, this call is also in Spanish, which creates a double problem with the call. Once inside, Oswald learns he cannot get a visa to give to Duran unless he requested it from Washington first. And the process would take weeks. Oswald now makes a scene and is escorted out. He goes back to the Cuban consulate. Oswald tells Duran there was no problem with the Soviet visa. She does not buy his story and calls the Soviet consulate. They tell her they will call her back. Embassy official and KGB secret agent Valery Kostikov calls back. Oswald's attempt falls apart since Oswald knows no one in Cuba and the routing to the Russian Embassy in Washington will take too long. (p. 359) This call seems genuine. But as the author notes, and as we shall see, there was one problem with it: neither Duran nor Kostikov mentioned Oswald by name.

Oswald creates another scene and quarrels with Cuban counsel Eusebio Azcue. Now, and this is important, Duran insists that this is the last time she saw or spoke to Oswald. This created a serious problem because the Warren Commission reported that she did talk to him again.(p, 408) The apparent source for this is an FBI memo of Dec. 3, 1963. The HSCA realized this was a problem. So they grilled Duran on this point. They tried three different ways to get her to admit she could be wrong. She stuck by her story. (pgs 409-410)

Why is this so problematic? Because on the next day, Saturday September 28th, the Lopez Report says there was a call from a man and a woman to the Soviet Consulate. Further, in his interviews, Newman discovered that the Russians maintain that the switchboard was closed on Saturday. (p. 368) From this and other evidence, Newman concludes that the man in this call is not Oswald. Duran says the woman is not her. Further evidence of this impersonation is that Oswald had visited the Russian Consulate earlier that day. And this phone conversation has little, if any, connection to what he discussed there. From information in the Lopez Report, from CIA Station Chief's Winston Scott's manuscript, and interviews with the transcribers, there was also a call made on Monday, the 30th, from Oswald to the Soviet Consulate. This call is apparently lost today.

Finally, on Tuesday, October 1st, there are two calls from Oswald to the Soviet Consulate. Right off the bat, these are suspicious because they are in poor Russian. Yet Oswald was supposed to have spoken fluent Russian. So again, these two calls appear to have been made by an imposter.

But why? In the new Epilogue written for this edition, Newman writes it is because when Duran originally called the Soviet Consulate, Oswald's name was not specifically mentioned. When Oswald then went to the Soviets on Saturday, and created another scene, this was the last of the actual encounters. The specific problem was this: There was no direct record made between Oswald and Kostikov. As we shall see, this could not be allowed. So the two calls on Tuesday had to be made. And the necessity was such that the risk was run of exposing the charade by not having Oswald's voice on the tapes. Why was this so important?

V

Prior to Oswald's Mexican odyssey, the FBI reports on his FPCC forays in New Orleans went into a new operational file at CIA, which did not merge with his 201 file. (p. 393) According to the author, this file eventually contained almost a thousand documents. Newman dates the bifurcation from September 23rd: shortly after Oswald goes to the Mexican consulate, and right about when he leaves New Orleans. The FBI report goes to Oswald's CI/SIG soft file and his Office of Security file. (p. 394) But after the assassination, all the FBI reports suddenly revert back to Oswald's 201 file. Only two compartments in the Agency had all of Oswald's file-CI/SIG and Office of Security. As we shall see, there is a method to all this meandering.

At CIA HQ, after the information about Oswald in Mexico City arrives, a first cable is sent on October 10. This cable is meant for the FBI, State Department and the Navy. This cable describes a man who does not resemble Oswald. He is 35 years old, has an athletic build, and stands six feet tall. (p. 398)

At almost the same time this cable was sent, a second cable from CIA HQ goes to Mexico City. This one has the right description of Oswald. So therefore, in a normal situation, the officers in Mexico City could match the description to their surveillance take. But it was missing something crucial. It said that the latest information that CIA had on Oswald was a State Department Memorandum dated from May of 1962. This was not true. For just one example, the Agency had more than one FBI report about Oswald's FPCC activities in New Orleans. Yet, for some reason, the file used to draft this cable was missing the FBI New Orleans reports. What makes these two varyingly false cables even more interesting is that Angleton's trusted assistant Ann Egerter signed off on both of them for accuracy. (p. 401) Apparently, she didn't know what she was signing, or if they contradicted each other. Further, Egerter sent Oswald's 201 file, which was restricted, to the HQ Mexico City desk until November 22nd. (Ibid)

For the first cable, Jane Roman was the releasing officer. She also participated in the drafting of the second cable. What makes her participation in all this so interesting is that she had read the latest information about Oswald in New Orleans on October 4th, less than a week before she signed off on the first cable. When Newman confronted her with these contradictory documents, she said: "I'm signing off on something that I know isn't true." (p. 405) She went on and tried to explain it with this: "I wasn't in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far as the Cuban situation ... to me it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis." (p. 405) Note her reference to the "Cuban situation". For it was Oswald's activities with the Cubans in New Orleans that was left out of the second cable to Mexico City. Therefore Mexico City chief Win Scott could not coordinate Oswald's New Orleans activities with what Oswald had done on his home turf.

For the second cable, the releasing officer was Tom Karemessines who was deputy to Richard Helms. It has never been explained why this cable had to go so high up into officialdom for permission to release it.

There is one last piece to this mosaic that is necessary for its deadly denouement to be fully comprehended. Ann Egerter testified that their counter-intelligence group knew Kostikov was a KGB agent. But the story is that they did not know he was part of Department 13, which participated in assassinations, until after Kennedy's assassination. (p. 419)

All of this is absolutely central to the events that occur on November 22, 1963. Consider: Here you have a defector who was in the Soviet Union for almost three years. He returns and then gets involved confronting anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He then goes to Mexico City, and visits both the Cuban and Soviet embassies trying to get to Russia from Cuba. He creates dramatic scenes at both places, and here is the capper: He talks to the KGB's officer in charge of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. By the time Oswald returned to Dallas, the alarm bell should have been sounding on him throughout the intelligence community. Especially in view of Kennedy's announced visit to Texas. He should never have been allowed to be on the motorcade route. The Secret Service should have had the necessary information about him and he should have been on their Security Index.

This did not happen. In fact, at the time his profile should have been rising, these false cables within the CIA and to the FBI, State, and Navy were actually lowering it. The final masterstroke, which made sure the information would be concealed until November 22nd, was not discovered until after the book's initial publication. As stated above, the FBI had issued a FLASH warning on Oswald back in 1959. After four years, this was removed on October 9, 1963! This was just hours before the first CIA cable mentioned above was sent. (The Assassinations p. 222)

As Newman notes, "the CIA was spawning a web of deception". (p. 430) When JFK is killed, and Hoover tells President Johnson about Oswald's trip to Mexico City and his visits to both the Cuban and Russian embassies, the threat of nuclear war quickly enters the conversation. But when the FBI discovers that the voice on the tapes are not really Oswald's it does two things: 1.) It points to something even more sinister, therefore throwing the intelligence community into a CYA mode, and 2.) It forces the Agency to hatch a cover story: the tapes were routinely destroyed days after they were made. The result of all this was an investigation that was never allowed to investigate. A presidential commission whose leader was told beforehand that millions of lives were at risk because the Cubans and Russians might be involved. And it exposed an intelligence community that was asleep at the switch, therefore allowing the alleged assassin to be moved into place by the KGB. The result was therefore preordained: a whitewash would follow. And Newman presents written evidence from both J. Edgar Hoover and Nicolas Katzenbach demonstrating that the subsequent inquiry was curtailed at its inception. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach wrote that speculation about Oswald had to be "cut off" and the idea that the assassination was a communist conspiracy had to be rebutted. (p. 632) Newman later discovered that Hoover realized he had been duped by the CIA about Oswald in Mexico City. (The Assassinations, p. 224)

In his new Epilogue for this 2008 edition, Newman explains why only someone who a.) Understood the inner workings of the national security state, and b.) Understood and controlled Oswald's files, could have masterminded something as superhumanly complex as this scheme. One in which the conspiracy itself actually contained the seeds that would sprout the cover-up.

In this new chapter, Newman names James Angleton as the designer of the plot. (p. 637) He also names Anne Goodpasture, David Phillips' assistant in Mexico City, as the person who hatched the internal CIA cover up by saying the ersatz tapes had been destroyed in October. This is evidenced in a cable she sent on 11/23 (pgs 633-634). Yet she probably knew this was false. Because she later testified to the ARRB that a voice dub of a tape had been carried to the Texas border on 11/22/63, the night before she sent the cable (p. 654). Further, Win Scott had made his own voice comparison after the assassination. He could not have if the tapes had been destroyed. (p. 635) Angleton made sure Scott's voice comparison never became public by swooping into Mexico City and confronting, nearly threatening, Win Scott's widow after he died. Once he was inside the house, he removed four suitcases of materials from Scott's office. This included the contents of his safe where the Mexico City/Oswald materials had been stored. (p. 637)

This remarkable book could never have been composed or even contemplated without the existence of the Assassination Records Review Board. No book takes us more into Oswald's workings with the intelligence community than this one. And his section on Mexico City is clearly one of the 5 or 6 greatest discoveries made in the wake of the ARRB. The incredible thing about the case he makes for conspiracy and cover up is this: The overwhelming majority of his evidence is made up of the government's own records. Its not anecdotal, its not second hand. In other words, its not from the likes of Frank Ragano, Billy Sol Estes, or Ed Partin. It is material that could be used in a court of law. And it would be very hard to explain away to a jury. Imagine the kind of witness Jane Roman would make.

Which is why it all had to be concealed for over thirty years. So much for there being nothing new or important in those newly declassified files. Angleton knew differently. Just ask Win Scott's widow. Or read this book.

[Paul Brancato]

The Nagell article mentions files, Swiss accounts, smoking guns. Can one of you experts fill me in on anything that was discovered after his timely death?

[Larry Hancock]

Paul, Dick Russell did look into it after his death and tracked down the location which contained some trunks of Nagell's stuff - supposedly he had told a family member that a particular trunk should be protected but when Dick got there that particular trunk was not present. In some of his follow on editions Dick recounted how various bits and pieces of the material Nagell reputedly had left with family and friends had all disappeared, some of it in thefts where only his stuff was taken - after very specific visits from the FBI.

Given Nagell's visibility to both the FBI and CIA for so long its hard to imagine anything remaining ....he had his chance to use it when he was negotiating with the Agency for help in getting custody of his children - when he did - and separately in his argument for disability, which he won. Nagell told Russell outright that he had been forced to make compromises and having gotten fed up with trying to go through official channel - primarily Congressmen - he decided to act strictly in his own best interest and the devil take the rest.

[Steven Gaal]

The Nagell article mentions files, Swiss accounts, smoking guns. Can one of you experts fill me in on anything that was discovered after his timely death?

This may be interesting to you.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17772&page=2

=

Swiss accounts http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/194.html

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

James DiEugenio

On August 5th, Oswald begins to play an overt role as an agent provocateur with Carlos Bringuier of the anti-Castro exile group, the DRE. The Warren Commission never knew that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMSPELL. When Oswald is arrested on Canal Street after his famous altercation with Bringuier, he actually had the Corliss Lamont booklet, "The Crime Against Cuba" with him. This had the "FPCC 544 Camp Street" stamp on it. (As I showed in my first book, this particular pamphlet was very likely provided to Banister through the CIA itself. See Destiny Betrayed, p. 219)

++++++++++++

Paul The Booklet came from the CIA and Bannisters partner Gatlin said (before he was pushed out of a window) he was working to kill Charles De Gaulle ,for the CIA.......how is Bannister independent from the CIA ???

Edited September 8, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Paul Trejo]

Your theory, David, that Oswald was hired (by the ONI?) to dangle himself to everybody, left and right, and to report on anyone who took the bait -- is interesting. But do we know of anybody else who was a combo left-right dangle? Sure, dangles were common -- but they tended to be exclusively dangled toONE SIDE ONLY -- usually for the left-wing ONLY, or for the right-wing ONLY.

Right - but Oswald's defection set him apart, made him interesting to, and exploitable within, both camps. And the ambidextrous dangle seems to fit Oz's multifarious involvements. Why else would he find it plausible that he - a defector - should be in the TSBD on game day? Answer: he believed he was there to report.

Consider an Oswald instructed to report back on the activities of Banister, Ferrie, DeMohrenschildt. Instructed to report back on everyone who bit at his dangle.

David, there is much to contemplate here. The defection of Oswald to the USSR could make him interesting to both sides -- to the leftists if they thought he was one of them, or to the rightists, if they thought he was a double-agent.

Lee Harvey Oswald knew Richard Case Nagell fairly well -- and one gets the impression that Oswald knew that Nagell was a double (or triple) Agent.

Could Oswald have been reaching for this super-spy status? Could this be what embroiled Oswald in a plot over his head, where he wound up as the Patsy, rathern than as a super-spy?

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited September 9, 2014 by Paul Trejo

[Steven Gaal]

Mohammad Fayed (FA'ID below in memo) is sleeping with George de Mohrenschildt's daughter.

JAMES ANGLETON is giving and controlling George de Mohrenschildt information to the FBI.

Richard Helms is giving and controlling information to the WC. George de Mohrenschildt is a singleton for ANGLETON.

RICHARD HELMS , DD FOR PLANS,
STEPHEN C. MILLETT, JR. CHIEF, CI/S and C/CI. JAMES ANGLETON all monitor CIA asset de Mohrenschildt
######################################

AGENCY INFORMATION

AGENCY : CIA
RECORD NUMBER : 104-10166-10232
RECORDS SERIES : JFK
AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA
FROM : STEPHEN C. MILLETT, JR. CHIEF, CI/S
TO : WITHHELD
TITLE : FA'ID IS CURRENTLY NEGOTIATING AND ARMS DEAL WITH
PRESIDENT DUVALIER OF HAITI
DATE : 12/01/1964
PAGES : 1
DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT
SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT; JFK ASSASSINATION
CLASSIFICATION :
RESTRICTIONS : 1B
CURRENT STATUS : RELEASED WITH DELETIONS
DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 06/30/2004
COMMENTS : JFK64-5 : F17 : 20040301-1051962 :

****************************************************************************

AGENCY : CIA
RECORD NUMBER : 104-10431-10039
RECORDS SERIES : JFK
AGENCY FILE NUMBER : RUSS HOLMES WORK FILE

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA
FROM : ANGLETON JAMES
TO : DIRECTOR FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIG
TITLE : MEMO: ACTIVITIES OF GEORGE AND JEANNE DE MOHRENSCHILDT
IN HAITI
DATE : 04/05/1965
PAGES : 30
DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT
SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT
CLASSIFICATION : SECRET
RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL
CURRENT STATUS : OPEN
DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 09/16/1998
COMMENTS : JFK-RH18 : F1 : 1998.09.16.08:52:04:966128 :

*********************************************************************************

AGENCY : CIA
RECORD NUMBER : 104-10057-10413
RECORDS SERIES : JFK
AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A

DOCUMENT INFORMATION
ORIGINATOR : CIA

FROM : HELMS, RICHARD, DD FOR PLANS
TO : RANKIN, J. LEE, WC
TITLE : STATEMENTS REPORTEDLY MADE BY GEORGE AND JEANNE DE
MOHRENSCHILDT CONCERNING LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY.
DATE : 07/06/1964
PAGES : 2
DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT
SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT; FINANCIAL AID; HAITI
CLASSIFICATION : UNCLASSIFIED
RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL
CURRENT STATUS : OPEN
DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 07/01/1993
COMMENTS : JFK1 : F30 : 1993.07.01.18:04:49:280250 : PREVIOUSLY

=============================================

Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 5: The Mysterious Mr. de Mohrenschildt

By Russ Baker on Oct 14, 2013

George de Mohrenschildt

What possible connection could there have been between George H.W. Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A. and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people, apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one live wire touch another. Here, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in November, is the fifth part of a ten-part series of excerpts from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker’s bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. The story is a real-life thriller.

Note: Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (The excerpts in Part 5 come from Chapter 5 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication.)

For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here.

“Must have angered a lot of people”

In 1976, more than a decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a letter arrived at the CIA, addressed to its director, the Hon. George Bush. The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged Poppy for help:

Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by this situation . . . tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people . . . Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you anymore.

The writer signed himself “G. de Mohrenschildt.”

The CIA staff assumed the letter writer to be a crank. Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss: Did he by any chance know a man named de Mohrenschildt?Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed:

I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first men [sic] him in the early 40’3 [sic]. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50’s maybe) . . . Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. I don’t recall his role in all this.

Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters. George de Mohrenschildt was not just the uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not recall – or more precisely, claimed not to recall – the nature of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the thirty-fifth president.

This would have been an unusual lapse on anyone’s part. But for the head of an American spy agency to exhibit such a blasé attitude, in such an important matter, was over the edge. At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses – including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigations were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry into a closer one?

Writing back to his old friend, Poppy assured the Mohrenschildt that his fears were entirely unfounded. Yet half a year later, de Mohrenschildt was dead. The cause was officially determined to be suicide with a shotgun. Investigators combing through de Mohrenschildt’s effects came upon his tattered address book, largely full of entries made in the 1950’s. Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:

BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM MIDLAND.

De Mohrenschildt and the Oswalds

When Poppy told his staff that his old friend de Mohrenschildt “knew Oswald,” that was an understatement. From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.

De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald has tantalized and perplexed investigators and researchers for decades. In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness – possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina. The Commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more. The de Mohrenschildts, the Commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.

Even the Warren Commission counsel who questioned George de Mohrenschildt appeared to acknowledge that the Russian émigré was what might euphemistically be called an “international businessman.” For most of his adult life, de Mohrenschildt had traveled the world ostensibly seeking business opportunities involving a variety of natural resources – some, such as oil and uranium, of great strategic value. The timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable. Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding – an invasion, a coup, that sort of thing. For example, in 1961, as exiled Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends was a month-long walking tour of the Central American isthmus. On another occasion, the de Mohrenschildts appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a similar mission – and even happened to meet the Communist official. In a third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly before an unsuccessful coup against its president that had U.S. fingerprints on it.

A Russian-born society figure was a friend both of the family of President Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. A series of strange coincidences providing the only known link between the two families before Oswald fired the shot killing Mr. Kennedy in Dallas a year ago was described in testimony before The Warren Commission by George S. de Mohrenschildt.

He was actually much more intriguing – and mystifying. As Norman Mailer noted in his book Oswald’s Tale, de Mohrenschildt possessed “an eclecticism that made him delight in presenting himself as right-wing, left-wing, a moralist, an aristocrat, a nihilist, a snob, an atheist, a Republican, a Kennedy lover, a desegregationist, an intimate of oil tycoons, a bohemian, and a socialite, plus a quondam Nazi apologist, once a year.”

A Name Never Dropped

During all these examinations, and notwithstanding de Mohrenschildt’s offhand recitation of scores of friends and colleagues, obscure and recognizable, he scrupulously never mentioned that he knew Poppy Bush. Nor did investigators uncover the fact that in the spring of 1963, immediately after his final communication with Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had traveled to New York and Washington for meetings with CIA and military intelligence officials. He even had met with a top aide to Vice President Johnson. And the commission certainly did not learn that one meeting in New York included Thomas Devine, then Bush’s business colleague in Zapata Offshore, who was doing double duty for the CIA.

Had the Warren Commission’s investigators comprehensively explored the matter, they would have found a phenomenal and baroque backstory that contextualizes de Mohrenschildt within the extended petroleum-intelligence orbit in which the Bushes operated.

Getting America Into World War I

The de Mohrenschildts were major players in the global oil business since the beginning of the twentieth century, and their paths crossed with the Rockefellers and other key pillars of the petroleum establishment. George de Mohrenschildt’s uncle and father ran the Swedish Nobel Brothers Oil Company’s operations in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea. This was no small matter. In the early days of the twentieth century, the region held roughly half of the world’s known oil supply. By the start of World War I, every major oil interest in the world, including the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, was scrambling for a piece of Baku’s treasure or intriguing to suppress its competitive potential. (Today, ninety years later, they are at it again.)

In 1915, the czar’s government dispatched a second uncle of George de Mohrenschildt, the handsome young diplomat Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt, to Washington to plead for American intervention in the war – an intervention that might rescue the czarist forces then being crushed by the invading German army. President Woodrow Wilson had been reelected partly on the basis of having kept America out of the war. But as with all leaders, he was surrounded by men with their own agendas. A relatively close-knit group embodying the nexus of private capital and intelligence-gathering inhabited the highest levels of the Wilson administration. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was the uncle of a diplomat-spy by the name of Allen Dulles. Wilson’s closest adviser, “Colonel” Edward House, was a Texan and an ally of the ancestors of James A. Baker III, who would become Poppy Bush’s top lieutenant. Czarist Russia then owed fifty million dollars to a Rockefeller-headed syndicate. Keeping an eye on such matters was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, a close friend of George Herbert Walker’s from St. Louis.

Once the United States did enter the war, Prescott Bush’s father, Samuel Bush, was put in charge of small arms production. The Percy Rockefeller-headed Remington Arms Company got the lion’s share of the U.S. contracts. It sold millions of dollars worth of rifles to czarist forces, while it also profited handsomely from deals with the Germans.

In 1917, Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt’s mission to bring America into the world war was successful on a number of levels. Newspaper clippings of the time show him to be an instant hit on the Newport, Rhode Island, millionaires’ circuit. He was often in the company of Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, of the family then befriending Prescott Bush and about to hire Prescott’s future father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. Not long after that, Ferdinand married the step-granddaughter of President Woodrow Wilson.

In quick succession, the United States entered World War I, and the newlywed Ferdinand unexpectedly died. The von Mohrenschildt family fled Russia along with the rest of the aristocracy. Emanuel Nobel sold half of the Baku holdings to Standard Oil of New Jersey, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally authorizing the payment of $11.5 million. Over the next couple of decades, members of the defeated White Russian movement, which opposed the Bolsheviks and fought the Red Army from the 1917 October Revolution until 1923, would find shelter in the United States, a country that shared the anti-Communist movement’s ideological sentiments.

Bush and de Mohrenschildt Families: Deeply Intertwined

In 1920, Ferdinand’s nephew Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, the older brother of George, arrived in the United States and entered Yale University. His admission was likely smoothed by the connections of the Harriman family, which soon persuaded the Bolshevik Russian government to allow them to reactivate the Baku oilfields. At that point, the Harriman operation was being directed by the brilliant international moneyman George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of Poppy Bush.

The Soviets had expropriated the assets of the Russian ruling class, not least the oil fields. Though ultimately willing to cooperate with some Western companies, the Communists had created an army of angry White Russian opponents, who vowed to exact revenge and regain their holdings. This group, trading on an American fascination with titles, was soon ensconced in (and often intermarried with) the East Coast establishment. The New York newspapers of the day were full of reports of dinners and teas hosted by Prince This and Count That at the top of Manhattan hotels.

Dimitri von Mohrenschildt plunged into this milieu. After graduating from Yale, he was offered a position teaching the young scions of the new oil aristocracy at the exclusive Loomis School near Hartford, Connecticut, where John D. Rockefeller III was a student (and his brother Winthrop soon would be). There, Dimitri became friendly with Roland and Winifred “Betty” Cartwright Holhan Hooker, who were prominent local citizens. Roland Hooker was enormously well connected; his father had been the mayor of Hartford, his family members were close friends of the Bouviers (Jackie Kennedy’s father’s family), and his sister was married to Prince Melikov, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army.

While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour, in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resumé would include serving in the Office of Strategic Services wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1941, Dimitri also founded a magazine, the Russian Review, and later became a professor at Dartmouth.

When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker. In the summer of 1936, immigration records show that Dimitri traveled to Europe, followed a week later by Betty Hooker with her young daughter and adolescent son.

Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. There, he shared a small cottage with George H. W. “Poppy” Bush. Bush and Hooker became inseparable. They worked together on Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, whose photos show a handsome young Poppy Bush and an even more handsome Hooker. The friendship would continue in 1942, when both Bush and Hooker, barely eighteen, enlisted in the Navy and served as pilots in the Pacific. Afterward, they would be together at Yale. When Hooker married, Poppy Bush served as an usher. The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted for three decades, until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three. Six years after Hooker’s death, Poppy Bush would serve as surrogate father, giving away Hooker’s daughter at her wedding to Ames Braga, scion of a Castro-expropriated Cuban sugar dynasty.

Another Careful Disconnect

The relationship couldn’t have been much closer. Yet Bush never mentions Hooker in his memoirs or published recollections, even though he finds room for scores of more marginal figures. Certainly his family was aware of Hooker.

Poppy’s prep school living arrangements would have mattered to Prescott Bush. The Bush clan is famously gregarious, and like many wealthy families, it puts great stock in the establishment of social networks that translate into influence and advantage. Prescott took a strong interest in meeting his children’s friends and the friends’ parents, as expressed in family correspondence and memoirs. Moreover, as a prominent Connecticut family with deep colonial roots, the Hookers would have had great appeal for Prescott Bush, an up-and-coming Connecticut resident with political aspirations and a great interest in the genealogy of America’s upper classes.

In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine. Prescott would likely have been keen to know his son’s roommate’s stepfather – this intriguing Russian anti-Communist aristocrat, with a background in the oil business and a degree from Yale, working for Prescott’s Skull and Bones friend Luce.

Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother, George, had been living with their family in exile in Poland, where he finished high school and then joined a military academy and the cavalry. In May 1938, George arrived from Europe and moved in with his brother and new sister-in-law in their Park Avenue apartment. Young George de Mohrenschildt came to America armed with the doctoral dissertation that reflected the future trajectory of his life: “The Economic Influence of the United States on Latin America.” The oil south of the border was certainly of interest to Wall Street figures such as Prescott Bush and his colleagues, who were deeply involved in financing petroleum exploration in new areas.

From Émigré to Spy

The White Russian émigrés in the United States were motivated by both ideology and economics to serve as shock troops in the growing cold war conflict being managed by Prescott’s friends and associates. No one understood this better than Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer, diplomat, and spy-master-in ascension. Even in the period between the two world wars, Dulles was already molding Russian émigrés into intelligence operatives. He moved back and forth between government service and Wall Street lawyering with the firm Sullivan and Cromwell, whose clients included United Fruit and Brown Brothers Harriman. The latter was at that time led by Averell and Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush.

Whether in government or out, Dulles’s interests and associates were largely the same. He seemed to enjoy the clandestine work more than the legal work. As Peter Grose notes in Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, he worked during the 1940 presidential campaign to bring Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovak émigrés into the Republican camp. “Allen’s double life those first months after Pearl Harbor [in 1941] had specific purpose, of course,” Grose observes. “The mysterious émigrés he was cultivating in New York were potential assets for an intelligence network to penetrate Nazi Germany.”

Dimitri von Mohrenschildt was a star player in this game on a somewhat exalted level. He found sponsorship for a role as an academic and publisher specializing in anti-Bolshevik materials, and later became involved in more ambitious propaganda work with Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Younger brother George was more willing to get his hands dirty. He took a job in the New York office of a French perfume company called Chevalier Garde, named for the Czar’s most elite troops, the Imperial Horse Guards. His bosses were powerful czarist Russian émigrés, well connected at the highest levels of Manhattan society, who worked during World War II in army intelligence and the OSS. One of them, Prince Serge Obolensky, had escaped Soviet Russia after a year of hiding and became a much-married New York society figure whose wives included Alice Astor. His brother-in-law Vincent Astor was secretly asked by FDR in 1940 to set up civilian espionage offices in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center. Astor was soon joined in this effort by Allen Dulles.

The next stop for George de Mohrenschildt was a home furnishings company. His boss there was a high-ranking French intelligence official, and together they monitored and blocked attempts by the Axis war machine to procure badly needed petroleum supplies in the Americas. Young de Mohrenschildt then traveled to the southwest, where he exhibited still more impressive connections. Ostensibly there to work on oil derricks, he landed a meeting with the chairman of the board of Humble Oil, the Texas subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, predecessor to Exxon.

Prince Serge Obolensky, circa 1943

The jobs kept becoming more interesting. By the midforties, de Mohrenschildt was working in Venezuela for Pantepec Oil, the firm of William F. Buckley’s family. Pantepec later had abundant connections with the newly created CIA and was deeply involved in foreign intrigue for decades. The Buckley boys, like the Bushes, had been in Skull and Bones, and Bill Buckley, whose conservative intellectual magazine National Review was often politically helpful to Poppy Bush, would in later years admit to a stint working for the CIA himself.

George de Mohrenschildt’s foreign trips – and some of his domestic wanderings as well – drew the interest of various American law enforcement agencies. These incidents appear to have been deliberate provocations, such as his working on “sketches” outside a U.S. Coast Guard station. In many of these cases de Mohrenschildt would be briefly questioned or investigated, the result of which was a dossier not unlike that of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. These files were full of declared doubts about his loyalties and speculation at various times that he might be a Russian, Japanese, French, or German spy. A classic opportunist, he might have been any or all of these. But he also could have simply been an American spy who was creating a cover story

Edited September 8, 2014 by Steven Gaal

[Thomas Graves]

Mohammad Fayed (FA'ID below in memo) is sleeping with George de Mohrenschildt's daughter.

JAMES ANGLETON is giving and controlling George de Mohrenschildt information to the FBI.

Richard Helms is giving and controlling information to the WC. George de Mohrenschildt is a singleton for ANGLETON.

RICHARD HELMS , DD FOR PLANS,

STEPHEN C. MILLETT, JR. CHIEF, CI/S and C/CI. JAMES ANGLETON all monitor CIA asset de Mohrenschildt

######################################

AGENCY INFORMATION

AGENCY : CIA

RECORD NUMBER : 104-10166-10232

RECORDS SERIES : JFK

AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA

FROM : STEPHEN C. MILLETT, JR. CHIEF, CI/S

TO : WITHHELD

TITLE : FA'ID IS CURRENTLY NEGOTIATING AND ARMS DEAL WITH

PRESIDENT DUVALIER OF HAITI

DATE : 12/01/1964

PAGES : 1

DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT; JFK ASSASSINATION

CLASSIFICATION :

RESTRICTIONS : 1B

CURRENT STATUS : RELEASED WITH DELETIONS

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 06/30/2004

COMMENTS : JFK64-5 : F17 : 20040301-1051962 :

****************************************************************************

AGENCY : CIA

RECORD NUMBER : 104-10431-10039

RECORDS SERIES : JFK

AGENCY FILE NUMBER : RUSS HOLMES WORK FILE

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA

FROM : ANGLETON JAMES

TO : DIRECTOR FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIG

TITLE : MEMO: ACTIVITIES OF GEORGE AND JEANNE DE MOHRENSCHILDT

IN HAITI

DATE : 04/05/1965

PAGES : 30

DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT

CLASSIFICATION : SECRET

RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL

CURRENT STATUS : OPEN

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 09/16/1998

COMMENTS : JFK-RH18 : F1 : 1998.09.16.08:52:04:966128 :

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AGENCY : CIA

RECORD NUMBER : 104-10057-10413

RECORDS SERIES : JFK

AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA

FROM : HELMS, RICHARD, DD FOR PLANS

TO : RANKIN, J. LEE, WC

TITLE : STATEMENTS REPORTEDLY MADE BY GEORGE AND JEANNE DE

MOHRENSCHILDT CONCERNING LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE

ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY.

DATE : 07/06/1964

PAGES : 2

DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

SUBJECTS : DEMOHRENSCHILDT; FINANCIAL AID; HAITI

CLASSIFICATION : UNCLASSIFIED

RESTRICTIONS : OPEN IN FULL

CURRENT STATUS : OPEN

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 07/01/1993

COMMENTS : JFK1 : F30 : 1993.07.01.18:04:49:280250 : PREVIOUSLY

=============================================

Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 5: The Mysterious Mr. de Mohrenschildt

By Russ Baker on Oct 14, 2013

George de Mohrenschildt

What possible connection could there have been between George H.W. Bush and the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or between the C.I.A. and the assassination? Or between Bush and the C.I.A.? For some people, apparently, making such connections was as dangerous as letting one live wire touch another. Here, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination in November, is the fifth part of a ten-part series of excerpts from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker’s bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. The story is a real-life thriller.

Note: Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (The excerpts in Part 5 come from Chapter 5 of the book, and the titles and subtitles have been changed for this publication.)

For Part 1, please go here; Part 2, here; Part 3, here; Part 4, here.

“Must have angered a lot of people”

In 1976, more than a decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a letter arrived at the CIA, addressed to its director, the Hon. George Bush. The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged Poppy for help:

Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by this situation . . . tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people . . . Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you anymore.

The writer signed himself “G. de Mohrenschildt.”

The CIA staff assumed the letter writer to be a crank. Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss: Did he by any chance know a man named de Mohrenschildt?Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed:

I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first men [sic] him in the early 40’3 [sic]. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50’s maybe) . . . Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. I don’t recall his role in all this.

Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters. George de Mohrenschildt was not just the uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not recall – or more precisely, claimed not to recall – the nature of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the thirty-fifth president.

This would have been an unusual lapse on anyone’s part. But for the head of an American spy agency to exhibit such a blasé attitude, in such an important matter, was over the edge. At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses – including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigations were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry into a closer one?

Writing back to his old friend, Poppy assured the Mohrenschildt that his fears were entirely unfounded. Yet half a year later, de Mohrenschildt was dead. The cause was officially determined to be suicide with a shotgun. Investigators combing through de Mohrenschildt’s effects came upon his tattered address book, largely full of entries made in the 1950’s. Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:

BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM MIDLAND.

De Mohrenschildt and the Oswalds

When Poppy told his staff that his old friend de Mohrenschildt “knew Oswald,” that was an understatement. From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.

De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald has tantalized and perplexed investigators and researchers for decades. In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness – possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina. The Commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more. The de Mohrenschildts, the Commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.

Even the Warren Commission counsel who questioned George de Mohrenschildt appeared to acknowledge that the Russian émigré was what might euphemistically be called an “international businessman.” For most of his adult life, de Mohrenschildt had traveled the world ostensibly seeking business opportunities involving a variety of natural resources – some, such as oil and uranium, of great strategic value. The timing of his overseas ventures was remarkable. Invariably, when he was passing through town, a covert or even overt operation appeared to be unfolding – an invasion, a coup, that sort of thing. For example, in 1961, as exiled Cubans and their CIA support team prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Guatemala, George de Mohrenschildt and his wife passed through Guatemala City on what they told friends was a month-long walking tour of the Central American isthmus. On another occasion, the de Mohrenschildts appeared in Mexico on oil business just as a Soviet leader arrived on a similar mission – and even happened to meet the Communist official. In a third instance, they landed in Haiti shortly before an unsuccessful coup against its president that had U.S. fingerprints on it.

A Russian-born society figure was a friend both of the family of President Kennedy and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. A series of strange coincidences providing the only known link between the two families before Oswald fired the shot killing Mr. Kennedy in Dallas a year ago was described in testimony before The Warren Commission by George S. de Mohrenschildt.

He was actually much more intriguing – and mystifying. As Norman Mailer noted in his book Oswald’s Tale, de Mohrenschildt possessed “an eclecticism that made him delight in presenting himself as right-wing, left-wing, a moralist, an aristocrat, a nihilist, a snob, an atheist, a Republican, a Kennedy lover, a desegregationist, an intimate of oil tycoons, a bohemian, and a socialite, plus a quondam Nazi apologist, once a year.”

A Name Never Dropped

During all these examinations, and notwithstanding de Mohrenschildt’s offhand recitation of scores of friends and colleagues, obscure and recognizable, he scrupulously never mentioned that he knew Poppy Bush. Nor did investigators uncover the fact that in the spring of 1963, immediately after his final communication with Oswald, de Mohrenschildt had traveled to New York and Washington for meetings with CIA and military intelligence officials. He even had met with a top aide to Vice President Johnson. And the commission certainly did not learn that one meeting in New York included Thomas Devine, then Bush’s business colleague in Zapata Offshore, who was doing double duty for the CIA.

Had the Warren Commission’s investigators comprehensively explored the matter, they would have found a phenomenal and baroque backstory that contextualizes de Mohrenschildt within the extended petroleum-intelligence orbit in which the Bushes operated.

Getting America Into World War I

The de Mohrenschildts were major players in the global oil business since the beginning of the twentieth century, and their paths crossed with the Rockefellers and other key pillars of the petroleum establishment. George de Mohrenschildt’s uncle and father ran the Swedish Nobel Brothers Oil Company’s operations in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea. This was no small matter. In the early days of the twentieth century, the region held roughly half of the world’s known oil supply. By the start of World War I, every major oil interest in the world, including the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, was scrambling for a piece of Baku’s treasure or intriguing to suppress its competitive potential. (Today, ninety years later, they are at it again.)

In 1915, the czar’s government dispatched a second uncle of George de Mohrenschildt, the handsome young diplomat Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt, to Washington to plead for American intervention in the war – an intervention that might rescue the czarist forces then being crushed by the invading German army. President Woodrow Wilson had been reelected partly on the basis of having kept America out of the war. But as with all leaders, he was surrounded by men with their own agendas. A relatively close-knit group embodying the nexus of private capital and intelligence-gathering inhabited the highest levels of the Wilson administration. Secretary of State Robert Lansing was the uncle of a diplomat-spy by the name of Allen Dulles. Wilson’s closest adviser, “Colonel” Edward House, was a Texan and an ally of the ancestors of James A. Baker III, who would become Poppy Bush’s top lieutenant. Czarist Russia then owed fifty million dollars to a Rockefeller-headed syndicate. Keeping an eye on such matters was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, a close friend of George Herbert Walker’s from St. Louis.

Once the United States did enter the war, Prescott Bush’s father, Samuel Bush, was put in charge of small arms production. The Percy Rockefeller-headed Remington Arms Company got the lion’s share of the U.S. contracts. It sold millions of dollars worth of rifles to czarist forces, while it also profited handsomely from deals with the Germans.

In 1917, Ferdinand von Mohrenschildt’s mission to bring America into the world war was successful on a number of levels. Newspaper clippings of the time show him to be an instant hit on the Newport, Rhode Island, millionaires’ circuit. He was often in the company of Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, of the family then befriending Prescott Bush and about to hire Prescott’s future father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. Not long after that, Ferdinand married the step-granddaughter of President Woodrow Wilson.

In quick succession, the United States entered World War I, and the newlywed Ferdinand unexpectedly died. The von Mohrenschildt family fled Russia along with the rest of the aristocracy. Emanuel Nobel sold half of the Baku holdings to Standard Oil of New Jersey, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally authorizing the payment of $11.5 million. Over the next couple of decades, members of the defeated White Russian movement, which opposed the Bolsheviks and fought the Red Army from the 1917 October Revolution until 1923, would find shelter in the United States, a country that shared the anti-Communist movement’s ideological sentiments.

Bush and de Mohrenschildt Families: Deeply Intertwined

In 1920, Ferdinand’s nephew Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, the older brother of George, arrived in the United States and entered Yale University. His admission was likely smoothed by the connections of the Harriman family, which soon persuaded the Bolshevik Russian government to allow them to reactivate the Baku oilfields. At that point, the Harriman operation was being directed by the brilliant international moneyman George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of Poppy Bush.

The Soviets had expropriated the assets of the Russian ruling class, not least the oil fields. Though ultimately willing to cooperate with some Western companies, the Communists had created an army of angry White Russian opponents, who vowed to exact revenge and regain their holdings. This group, trading on an American fascination with titles, was soon ensconced in (and often intermarried with) the East Coast establishment. The New York newspapers of the day were full of reports of dinners and teas hosted by Prince This and Count That at the top of Manhattan hotels.

Dimitri von Mohrenschildt plunged into this milieu. After graduating from Yale, he was offered a position teaching the young scions of the new oil aristocracy at the exclusive Loomis School near Hartford, Connecticut, where John D. Rockefeller III was a student (and his brother Winthrop soon would be). There, Dimitri became friendly with Roland and Winifred “Betty” Cartwright Holhan Hooker, who were prominent local citizens. Roland Hooker was enormously well connected; his father had been the mayor of Hartford, his family members were close friends of the Bouviers (Jackie Kennedy’s father’s family), and his sister was married to Prince Melikov, a former officer in the Imperial Russian Army.

While Dimitri von Mohrenschildt clearly enjoyed the high-society glamour, in reality his life was heading underground. Dimitri’s lengthy covert resumé would include serving in the Office of Strategic Services wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In 1941, Dimitri also founded a magazine, the Russian Review, and later became a professor at Dartmouth.

When the Hooker marriage unraveled, Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker. In the summer of 1936, immigration records show that Dimitri traveled to Europe, followed a week later by Betty Hooker with her young daughter and adolescent son.

Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. There, he shared a small cottage with George H. W. “Poppy” Bush. Bush and Hooker became inseparable. They worked together on Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, whose photos show a handsome young Poppy Bush and an even more handsome Hooker. The friendship would continue in 1942, when both Bush and Hooker, barely eighteen, enlisted in the Navy and served as pilots in the Pacific. Afterward, they would be together at Yale. When Hooker married, Poppy Bush served as an usher. The relationship between Bush and Hooker lasted for three decades, until 1967, when Hooker died of an apparent heart attack. He was just forty-three. Six years after Hooker’s death, Poppy Bush would serve as surrogate father, giving away Hooker’s daughter at her wedding to Ames Braga, scion of a Castro-expropriated Cuban sugar dynasty.

Another Careful Disconnect

The relationship couldn’t have been much closer. Yet Bush never mentions Hooker in his memoirs or published recollections, even though he finds room for scores of more marginal figures. Certainly his family was aware of Hooker.

Poppy’s prep school living arrangements would have mattered to Prescott Bush. The Bush clan is famously gregarious, and like many wealthy families, it puts great stock in the establishment of social networks that translate into influence and advantage. Prescott took a strong interest in meeting his children’s friends and the friends’ parents, as expressed in family correspondence and memoirs. Moreover, as a prominent Connecticut family with deep colonial roots, the Hookers would have had great appeal for Prescott Bush, an up-and-coming Connecticut resident with political aspirations and a great interest in the genealogy of America’s upper classes.

In 1937, Betty Hooker and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt married. By then, Dimitri had been hired by Henry Luce as a stringer for Time magazine. Prescott would likely have been keen to know his son’s roommate’s stepfather – this intriguing Russian anti-Communist aristocrat, with a background in the oil business and a degree from Yale, working for Prescott’s Skull and Bones friend Luce.

Meanwhile, Dimitri’s younger brother, George, had been living with their family in exile in Poland, where he finished high school and then joined a military academy and the cavalry. In May 1938, George arrived from Europe and moved in with his brother and new sister-in-law in their Park Avenue apartment. Young George de Mohrenschildt came to America armed with the doctoral dissertation that reflected the future trajectory of his life: “The Economic Influence of the United States on Latin America.” The oil south of the border was certainly of interest to Wall Street figures such as Prescott Bush and his colleagues, who were deeply involved in financing petroleum exploration in new areas.

From Émigré to Spy

The White Russian émigrés in the United States were motivated by both ideology and economics to serve as shock troops in the growing cold war conflict being managed by Prescott’s friends and associates. No one understood this better than Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer, diplomat, and spy-master-in ascension. Even in the period between the two world wars, Dulles was already molding Russian émigrés into intelligence operatives. He moved back and forth between government service and Wall Street lawyering with the firm Sullivan and Cromwell, whose clients included United Fruit and Brown Brothers Harriman. The latter was at that time led by Averell and Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush.

Whether in government or out, Dulles’s interests and associates were largely the same. He seemed to enjoy the clandestine work more than the legal work. As Peter Grose notes in Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, he worked during the 1940 presidential campaign to bring Russian, Polish, and Czechoslovak émigrés into the Republican camp. “Allen’s double life those first months after Pearl Harbor [in 1941] had specific purpose, of course,” Grose observes. “The mysterious émigrés he was cultivating in New York were potential assets for an intelligence network to penetrate Nazi Germany.”

Dimitri von Mohrenschildt was a star player in this game on a somewhat exalted level. He found sponsorship for a role as an academic and publisher specializing in anti-Bolshevik materials, and later became involved in more ambitious propaganda work with Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Younger brother George was more willing to get his hands dirty. He took a job in the New York office of a French perfume company called Chevalier Garde, named for the Czar’s most elite troops, the Imperial Horse Guards. His bosses were powerful czarist Russian émigrés, well connected at the highest levels of Manhattan society, who worked during World War II in army intelligence and the OSS. One of them, Prince Serge Obolensky, had escaped Soviet Russia after a year of hiding and became a much-married New York society figure whose wives included Alice Astor. His brother-in-law Vincent Astor was secretly asked by FDR in 1940 to set up civilian espionage offices in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center. Astor was soon joined in this effort by Allen Dulles.

The next stop for George de Mohrenschildt was a home furnishings company. His boss there was a high-ranking French intelligence official, and together they monitored and blocked attempts by the Axis war machine to procure badly needed petroleum supplies in the Americas. Young de Mohrenschildt then traveled to the southwest, where he exhibited still more impressive connections. Ostensibly there to work on oil derricks, he landed a meeting with the chairman of the board of Humble Oil, the Texas subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, predecessor to Exxon.

Prince Serge Obolensky, circa 1943

The jobs kept becoming more interesting. By the midforties, de Mohrenschildt was working in Venezuela for Pantepec Oil, the firm of William F. Buckley’s family. Pantepec later had abundant connections with the newly created CIA and was deeply involved in foreign intrigue for decades. The Buckley boys, like the Bushes, had been in Skull and Bones, and Bill Buckley, whose conservative intellectual magazine National Review was often politically helpful to Poppy Bush, would in later years admit to a stint working for the CIA himself.

George de Mohrenschildt’s foreign trips – and some of his domestic wanderings as well – drew the interest of various American law enforcement agencies. These incidents appear to have been deliberate provocations, such as his working on “sketches” outside a U.S. Coast Guard station. In many of these cases de Mohrenschildt would be briefly questioned or investigated, the result of which was a dossier not unlike that of Lee Harvey Oswald’s. These files were full of declared doubts about his loyalties and speculation at various times that he might be a Russian, Japanese, French, or German spy. A classic opportunist, he might have been any or all of these. But he also could have simply been an American spy who was creating a cover story

It's just all interconnected, isn't it Steven?

--Tommy

Edited September 9, 2014 by Thomas Graves

[Paul Brancato]

Yes it is Tommy.

[Paul Brancato]

With all die respect to Dick Russell, I think Nagell's stories don't hold up. Paul T - you said that Nagell and Oswald were well acquainted. What is the evidence for that?

[Steven Gaal]

It's just all interconnected, isn't it Steven?

--Tommy

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http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13941&p=173751

http://books.google....the cia&f=false
Oswald and the CIA: the documented truth about the unknown ... - Page 278
John Newman - 2008 - 669 pages - Preview
In a recent interview, Mr. Anikeeff acknowledged not only his close and continuous friendship with George deMohrenschildt... Who was Nicholas Anikeeff? During the early 1950s, when the CIA dispatched two groups of Lithuanian infiltrators into Poland, ...

Nicholas Anikeeff ?......yes Tommy it is !!!!!

[Paul Trejo]

With all die respect to Dick Russell, I think Nagell's stories don't hold up. Paul T - you said that Nagell and Oswald were well acquainted. What is the evidence for that?

Nagell is the source of that story, according to Dick Russell (TMWKTM, 1997). Oswald and Nagell met at the Atsugi Airforce Base in Japan in 1959. It appears that Nagell was observing the young Oswald, and they had talks in Japanese bars.

Nagell knew a lot about Oswald, and claimed that Oswald "had CIA connections" in Japan, although Oswald was never a CIA employee, but instead "got paid by indirect means." This can be found in Dick Russell's book on pages 145 and 361.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited September 9, 2014 by Paul Trejo