Will the real Lee Harvey Oswald please come forward

[Gene Kelly]

1 hour ago, Steve Thomas said:

Gene,

I wonder if it had anything to do with the missing two weeks from October 19 - November 3, 1962 when nobody knew where Oswald was living.

Not his friends, not his co-workers, not his bosses, not his wife.

Those two weeks were also when he was working at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall.

Steve Thomas

Steve

It was on April 6th, that Oswald is dropped by Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall because, in his supervisor's opinion, he allegedly did not get along with his fellow employees. On April 6th, Oswald is dropped by Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall because, in his supervisor's opinion, he allegedly did not get along with his fellow employees. Ruth Paine then invites the Oswald’s to dinner and took them on a picnic on April 20th. When Lee was not present, the two women discuss their respective marital problems, and Marina discloses to Ruth that she is pregnant.  Oswald decides to move to New Orleans and on April 24, Ruth drives him to the bus station; he arrives and moves in with his aunt Lillian Murret.

It wasn't until October that Oswald returned to Dallas. On October 4th (after an alleged failed attempt to go to Cuba), he has no job, no money and Marina is eight months pregnant living in suburban Irving at the home of Ruth Paine, who only allows Lee to visit them with her and Marina’s approval.  On the morning of October 14th, Ruth and Marina were allegedly having coffee at a neighbor’s house, which leads to Lee's finding work at the Book Depository (incredibly). Just a week before, Oswald almost got a job as a typesetter trainee at a printing company ... far from what would be the motorcade route.  On October 15th, Oswald takes a job at the Texas School Book Depository as a clerk.

I agree that where he was living then is a mystery.  At least that's the timeline as I understand it. 

Gene

[Gene Kelly]

Sorry Steve ... I was confusing 1962 and 1963. 

In Tipping Point, Larry writes that - during the period of October 1962 up to March 1963 - Oswald and his wife Marina had been covertly checked out by the CIA's Domestic Contacts section, via a contact by Dallas CIA officer J. Walton Moore with George de Mohrenschildt.  Purportedly, the job at Jaggers was arranged by someone within the White Russian group in Dallas.  Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) was a graphic arts company that did newspaper advertising layouts and catalogues. But they also performed more sophisticated photographic work (i.e., processed and analyzed U-2 photos).  Oswald held that job for a relatively long time (6 months) as far as his employment record is concerned.  In a 2007 EF thread, Bill Kelly wrote:

JCS did map work for the Army Security Agency, placing captions, arrows and notations on U2 photos - including October 1962, when U2 photos positively demonstrated the presence of USSR nuke missiles in Cuba. It was while working at JCS when Oswald wrote the word "Microdot" in his notebook, and JCS had technical facilities, which Oswald is said to have used to manufacture various identifications and documents. Oswald ... discussed what he learned of Soviet military deployments while living in USSR, and another JCS employee, John Caesar Grassi (aka Jack Leslie Bowen), who is listed as a reference on Oswald's New Orleans library card. Grassi/Bowen is one of the most interesting and least investigated characters in the whole JFK assassination drama.

Further, Harold Weisberg wrote the following:

As we would wearily expect, Oswald's Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall tenure is an enigma. Sometimes he would literally disappear at the end of each workday until he showed up at work the next morning. No official investigation has discovered what he was up to, or even where he was living, for most of the period between October 8 and November 3.' While at Jaggars he became acquainted with sophisticated camera techniques and equipment.'" He asked the firm if he could use their facilities to do his own photo developing." Oswald probably used Jaggar's equipment to forge the "Hider draft card found in his wallet when he was arrested on the afternoon of the assassination. 

Gene

[Paul Brancato]

10 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Sorry Steve ... I was confusing 1962 and 1963. 

In Tipping Point, Larry writes that - during the period of October 1962 up to March 1963 - Oswald and his wife Marina had been covertly checked out by the CIA's Domestic Contacts section, via a contact by Dallas CIA officer J. Walton Moore with George de Mohrenschildt.  Purportedly, the job at Jaggers was arranged by someone within the White Russian group in Dallas.  Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) was a graphic arts company that did newspaper advertising layouts and catalogues. But they also performed more sophisticated photographic work (i.e., processed and analyzed U-2 photos).  Oswald held that job for a relatively long time (6 months) as far as his employment record is concerned.  In a 2007 EF thread, Bill Kelly wrote:

JCS did map work for the Army Security Agency, placing captions, arrows and notations on U2 photos - including October 1962, when U2 photos positively demonstrated the presence of USSR nuke missiles in Cuba. It was while working at JCS when Oswald wrote the word "Microdot" in his notebook, and JCS had technical facilities, which Oswald is said to have used to manufacture various identifications and documents. Oswald ... discussed what he learned of Soviet military deployments while living in USSR, and another JCS employee, John Caesar Grassi (aka Jack Leslie Bowen), who is listed as a reference on Oswald's New Orleans library card. Grassi/Bowen is one of the most interesting and least investigated characters in the whole JFK assassination drama.

Further, Harold Weisberg wrote the following:

As we would wearily expect, Oswald's Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall tenure is an enigma. Sometimes he would literally disappear at the end of each workday until he showed up at work the next morning. No official investigation has discovered what he was up to, or even where he was living, for most of the period between October 8 and November 3.' While at Jaggars he became acquainted with sophisticated camera techniques and equipment.'" He asked the firm if he could use their facilities to do his own photo developing." Oswald probably used Jaggar's equipment to forge the "Hider draft card found in his wallet when he was arrested on the afternoon of the assassination. 

Gene

This connection with John Caesar Grossi, or Jack Leslie Bowen, or whatever his name was, is very interesting. I noticed in looking through the 2007 thread that the name Harold (K) Van Buren comes up twice. Grossi is mentioned as a fellow employee that Oswald used as a reference on his library card. According to an auto salesman named Reddell, who the FBI interviewed on Dec 13, 1963, the last document mentioned in Thomas Graves’ post on that thread, Grossi/Bowen lent him his library card, which listed Harold Van Buren as a reference. James Richards, on this same thread, mentions many other aliases that Grossi/Bowen used, and then identifies Van Buren as a friend of Grossi/Bowen from the 1950’s who at the tIme was spokesperson for the Dallas County supporters for General Douglas MacArthur’s presidential aspirations. Indeed, Grossi, with his long criminal record, his many aliases, his association with Oswald during a period when there are mysteries as to just what Oswald was doing with his time, is an under researched figure. The name that pops to my mind at this point is Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence. Useful to remember that Truman fired MacArthur. Generals don’t enjoy being fired by Presidents. The possible connection of Grossi to this milieu is interesting.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Paul Brancato

[Steve Thomas]

2 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Further, Harold Weisberg wrote the following:

As we would wearily expect, Oswald's Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall tenure is an enigma. Sometimes he would literally disappear at the end of each workday until he showed up at work the next morning. No official investigation has discovered what he was up to, or even where he was living, for most of the period between October 8 and November 3.' While at Jaggars he became acquainted with sophisticated camera techniques and equipment.'" He asked the firm if he could use their facilities to do his own photo developing." Oswald probably used Jaggar's equipment to forge the "Hider draft card found in his wallet when he was arrested on the afternoon of the assassination. 

Gene

Gene,

CD 735 FBI Gemberling Report of 10 Mar 1964 pp. 329-337.

page 329: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=11133#relPageId=338&tab=page

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=57768&search=YMCA#relPageId=57&tab=page

Letter from J.Edgar Hoover to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security, Department of State dated February 12, 1964:

“We are endeavoring to identify Lee Harvey Oswald's place of residence during the period from October 19, 1962 when he moved out of the YMCA in Dallas to November 2-3, 1962, when, with his wife, he moved into a furnished apartment at 604 Elsbeth Street, Dallas, Texas.”

The letter is asking that George de Mohrenschildt be re-interviewed concerning what he might know.

 

Reading through Mary Ferrell’s Chronologies for the month of October, beginning from around October 8 – October 14^th. she asks “where does Oswald spend the night?”

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=40390#relPageId=77&tab=page

pp. 77-80.
 

I personally believe that Oswald was being briefed for an intelligence mission, but that's just my suspicious mind.

Steve Thomas

[Steve Thomas]

3 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Further, Harold Weisberg wrote the following:

As we would wearily expect, Oswald's Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall tenure is an enigma. Sometimes he would literally disappear at the end of each workday until he showed up at work the next morning. No official investigation has discovered what he was up to, or even where he was living, for most of the period between October 8 and November 3.' While at Jaggars he became acquainted with sophisticated camera techniques and equipment.'" He asked the firm if he could use their facilities to do his own photo developing." Oswald probably used Jaggar's equipment to forge the "Hider draft card found in his wallet when he was arrested on the afternoon of the assassination. 

Gene

Gene,

I forgot to mention...

When Oswald was arrested, he either denied, or refused to admit that the signature on the Hidell Selective Service card was his. He also refused to say why he had the card, or the the purpose for which it was used.

The card itself was so fake that it couldn't possibly be used for identification, and I have never found any time when he showed to anyone for the purpose of identification.

To my dying day, I will believe that the clue lies in the signature on the card, rather than the card itself.

If, as I believe, Oswald was undergoing some kind of intelligence briefing in the October 19 - November 3, 1962 time period, at the same time he was manufacturing the fake Hidell card, I wonder if they are connected.

Steve Thomas

 

[Paul Brancato]

7 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Gene,

I forgot to mention...

When Oswald was arrested, he either denied, or refused to admit that the signature on the Hidell Selective Service card was his. He also refused to say why he had the card, or the the purpose for which it was used.

The card itself was so fake that it couldn't possibly be used for identification, and I have never found any time when he showed to anyone for the purpose of identification.

To my dying day, I will believe that the clue lies in the signature on the card, rather than the card itself.

If, as I believe, Oswald was undergoing some kind of intelligence briefing in the October 19 - November 3, 1962 time period, at the same time he was manufacturing the fake Hidell card, I wonder if they are connected.

Steve Thomas

 

Steve - will you use your considerable sleuthing skills and see what you can dig up on Grossi/Bowen?

[Tom Gram]

9 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Gene,

I forgot to mention...

When Oswald was arrested, he either denied, or refused to admit that the signature on the Hidell Selective Service card was his. He also refused to say why he had the card, or the the purpose for which it was used.

The card itself was so fake that it couldn't possibly be used for identification, and I have never found any time when he showed to anyone for the purpose of identification.

To my dying day, I will believe that the clue lies in the signature on the card, rather than the card itself.

If, as I believe, Oswald was undergoing some kind of intelligence briefing in the October 19 - November 3, 1962 time period, at the same time he was manufacturing the fake Hidell card, I wonder if they are connected.

Steve Thomas

 

Not sure if there’s any connection here, but the P.O. Box was opened on Oct. 9th, just a week and a half before Oswald disappeared. Did he anticipate needing somewhere neutral to receive mail? 

Oswald’s letter/subscription to the Worker in late Sept. ‘62 was picked up by a prolific FBI informant embedded in CPUSA HQ in New York. After the box was opened, allegedly not one subversive letter, subscription, etc. was intercepted by the FBI until the box was closed, with the exception of the Soviet Embassy letters from Lee and Marina. However, those letters were sequestered by the WFO and never shared with Dallas, so they never made it into Lee’s Internal Security file. The only other exception is the April 19th FPCC letter, but that can of worms was not shared with Dallas for 67 days, long after the box was closed. 

As soon as Oswald gets to New Orleans, his subversive mail almost immediately starts getting scooped up again by the FBI, with interceptions from the FPCC and CPUSA within a couple weeks of each other. 

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I just think it’s odd that there was a complete blackout on Oswald’s mail intercepts that coincided perfectly with the rental period of that P.O. Box. The mail blackout on Oswald’s IS file was effectively the sole reason for Hosty’s alleged failure to track Oswald to New Orleans, and is the only way the mysterious Postal Inspector Dorothea Myers got away with (allegedly) telling Hosty that the Oswalds had changed their address with the Post Office to Neely St., which according to the official story never happened. Hosty visited the Post Office at least twice, but he supposedly didn’t know the box even existed until New York mentioned the April FPCC letter on June 25th, which is just ridiculous, IMO. 

Hosty’s infamous “check with the Postmaster” in May where they supposedly told him that the Oswalds left no forwarding address, despite having three different change of address forms on file at that time is another ridiculously convenient coincidence. Two of those forms listed Ruth Paine’s house, and had Hosty known about them Paine would have been interviewed immediately. Both forms listing 2515 W. Fifth St. also conveniently vanished after the assassination and were never entered into evidence… /rant

Edited June 21, 2023 by Tom Gram

[Gene Kelly]

The Oswalds move to Fort Worth in June 1962.  Lee got a job at the local Leslie Welding Company but quit that job (without explanation) on October 8th.  On the following day, Lee began renting a post-office box under two names … Lee Harvey Oswald and A. J. Hidell. Three days later, on October 12, 1962, Oswald was hired by a local company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stoval in Dallas.  At the same time, the Oswalds weretaken under the wing of George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt, whose recollection (in WC testimony) is vague regarding how/when he first heard of or met the couple:

Mr. De Mohrenschildt. My best recollection—I even cannot recall who gave me their address in Fort Worth. I don't recall that. Either George Bouhe or the Clarks, because the Clarks knew them already, Max and Gail Clark, because they were from Fort Worth, you see. And I think a few days later somebody told me that they live in dire poverty. Somewhere in the slums of Fort Worth. I had to go on business to Fort Worth with my very close friend, Colonel Orlov.  

Meanwhile, George's daughter and son-in-law (the Taylors) helped move the Oswalds to Dallas about two weeks after George claimed he first met them (sometime in September).  George puts a lot of this on the shoulders of George Bouhe and is also vague about how this all played out during his WC testimony, and defers to his wife:

I think in the meantime Lee found a job at Jaggars, and was looking for a place to live, and found a place to live himself in Oak Cliff, this address which I don't remember now—the first address in Oak Cliff. He had two addresses. I forget the exact address. My wife will remember that.

A lot is going on in October 1962. Jim D. has previously pointed out the parallel between what the Baron is doing and what Ruth Paine will later do...

Gene

[Steve Thomas]

1 hour ago, Gene Kelly said:

 George puts a lot of this on the shoulders of George Bouhe and is also vague about how this all played out during his WC testimony, and defers to his wife:

Gene,

I loved the response of Jeanne deMohrenschildt:

WC testimony of Jeanne de Mohrenschildt taken at 4:45 PM on April 23, 1964.

(9H285)

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=43#relPageId=293&tab=page

http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/demohr_j.htm

I said, "For God sakes, if we are to help them, I cannot race to Oak Cliff to help them with this or that"--if she had to go to the doctor. Why wouldn't they take a little place near us, it will be much easier for me to help her.

He had some reasons to live far away.
I don't know if anybody else mentioned that to you. That was everybody's impression. For some particular reason, he moved all the way out.

Steve Thomas

[Gene Kelly]

This thread made me revisit the WC testimony of that entire White Russian group ... reading it (in retrospect) always adds new insight and creates more suspicion.  It is almost as if the WC was investigating George D. (not Oswald) and painting him with suspicion.  

[Ron Bulman]

On 6/22/2023 at 3:08 PM, Gene Kelly said:

This thread made me revisit the WC testimony of that entire White Russian group ... reading it (in retrospect) always adds new insight and creates more suspicion.  It is almost as if the WC was investigating George D. (not Oswald) and painting him with suspicion.  

Almost like he was possibly kind of a limited hangout?

Dulles knew George D's background well the whole time he was being questioned.  From meeting his father and likely him in the (?) Russian oil field near the end of WWI on behalf of the Rockefeller interests.  To the Vichy France oil deal with the Germans at the start of WWII to his discovery of the lucrative oil field in Indonesia, still kept secret at the time of his questioning by the WC I think.   It would have been something to have been a fly on the wall and observed the eye contact between them during his questioning.

[Gene Kelly]

Ron

I don't think Allen Dulles was present. George S. De Mohrenschildt's testimony was taken on April 22, 1964, in Washington, D.C., by Albert Jenner, Jr., assistant counsel with Dr. Alfred Goldberg, historian, present.  Several of the other White Russians (Paul M. Raigorodsky, Natalie and Thomas Ray Samuel B. Ballen, Lydia Dymitruk  Gary E. Taylor, Ilya A. Mamantov, Dorothy Gravitis, Paul Roderick Gregory, Helen Leslie, and George and Jeanne) are found in Volume IX testimony, but Jenner did the interviews. 

In March 1979, the HSCA issued a special staff report in Volume XI on George and Jeanne:

The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, that he was not tied to any intelligence agency, and that none of his associates were tied to the assassination. Nevertheless, speculation continued to center about one of Oswald's associations: George de Mohrenschildt and de Mohrenschildt's background. The Warren Commission developed no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildt's. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any other witness contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the, de Mohrenschildt's to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy. Despite this disclaimer of any subversive or disloyal activity on the part of de Mohrenschildt by the Warren Commission, de Dfohrenschildt was rumored to have had ties with the intelligence communities of several countries. 

It appears that Dulles stayed clear of any direct contact with or observation of George D.  But reading some of the testimony of these individuals, it does seem that George is being hung out to dry. 

Gene

[Larry Hancock]

Bottom line, George as he himself admitted, had been a source for government and intelligence agencies (note: this was not viewed as evil back then, it was viewed as patriotic and by many as a duty) - it bought him connections and contacts and he was a consultant and a promoter.  He admitted all that.  Worse yet for the CIA he was admitting his contact with CIA domestic op, although he likely  thought of him as just another government guy to befriend, do favors for and maintain a good relationship with for whatever might come up.  Pretty typical relationship for domestic ops.

But it it had been fully explored and called out, that would have been something that would have made huge press headlines - CIA Monitored Oswald before President Killed, and certainly George had to be "diminished", have his credibility undermined and also shown that he and his reputation were very much at risk - all of which comes out in how he was handled by the WC.

[Greg Doudna]

I believe it is in the book, Walking the Razor's Edge: the Dutchman and the Baron (2019), by Tommy and Hilde Wilkens, drawing on papers of Willem Oltmans, that a story is told of De Mohrenschildt, in the context of his mental deterioration toward the end but when he was still at Bishop College, of De Mohrenschildt claiming, and Oltmams confirming (if I remember that right) strange things such as De Mohrenschildt claiming he would go out to his car at Bishop College and find it parked in a different place in the parking lot than where he had parked it. Supposedly Oltmans (who was not mentally out of his mind) confirmed a relocation of De Mohrenschildt's parked car at Bishop College.

A first reaction is that De Mohrenschildt was hallucinating or his paranoia was getting the better of him because that can't be true. However there is another possibility, "noisy" surveillance, in which a private investigator is hired to have the surveillance known to the target victim, as a means of harassment. The victim is not personally attacked or harmed, just messed with, including messing with their mind which in this case could be (if someone had a key or hotwired the vehicle) moving the car to a different parked location just to mess with De Mohrenschildt's state of mind.

Then there was that letter of De Mohrenschildt to his old acquaintance George Bush Sr., when Bush Sr. was head of the CIA in 1976, appealing to Bush to get the harassing surveillance on him stopped. Bush wrote back, acknowledged that he knew De Mohrenschildt, but said he had checked and no one knew anything about any surveillance so there was nothing he could do.

Whether or not the specific parked-car movement details were or were not true, that de Mohrenschildt was being harassed in surveillance seems to be true based on his letter to Bush appealing to get it stopped. The unanswered question is who was doing it and why.

Would whoever was doing that, if identified, have been possibly liable of charges of contributing to De Mohrenschildt's suicide?

Some government agency perhaps through a cutout (for deniability) seems the obvious suspect, and De Mohrenschildt's role and possible testimony in the JFK assassination case/ CIA contacts (referring to his contacts with Oswald, not that de M had any role in the assassination) would be the obvious suspicion. De Mohrenschildt himself interpreted his surveillance troubles (or so he said in his letter to CIA chief Bush) as caused by his writing his manuscript on Oswald ("I'm a Patsy!"). In his final interview of his life, the morning of the day he killed himself, he told Epstein (according to Epstein) that his (de Mohrenschildt's) reporting of Oswald taking the shot at Walker--both before (!) and after it happened, according to de Mohrenschildt--to the local Dallas Domestic Contacts office of the CIA, was what had been the ruin of him.  

That is the reported final interpretation of de Mohrenschildt on what had gone sour in his life and why, as HSCA wanted to get him to testify under oath, and he went back to his daughter's home and shot himself. 

He knew Oswald about as well as anyone in the Dallas-Forth Worth area other than Marina and Lee's family members, and he wrote sympathetically of Oswald in "I'm a Patsy". De Mohrenschildt is a tragic figure in this whole historical story. 

De Mohrenschildt's letter to George Bush, director of the CIA:

You will excuse this hand-written letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to 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 the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadya died from [cystic fibrosis] over three years ago. I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H Oswald and must have angered a lot of people — I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more. Good luck in your important job. Thank you so much.

Bush Sr.'s reply:

Let me say first that I know it must have been difficult for you to seek my help in the situation outlined in your letter. I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter's tragic death a few years ago, and the current poor state of your wife's health. I was extremely sorry to hear of these circumstances. In your situation I can well imagine how the attentions you described in your letter affect both you and your wife. However, my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of Federal authorities in recent years. The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long subsided. I can only speculate that you may have become "newsworthy" again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination, and thus may be attracting the attention of people in the media. I hope this letter has been of some comfort to you, George, although I realize I am unable to answer your question completely.

— George Bush, Director of Central Intelligence.

If De Mohrenschildt had not killed himself, it may have come out in testimony to the HSCA and been reported to the world that CIA had been knowledgeable of and informed about Oswald and the shot fired at Walker, via de Mohrenschildt, early in 1963, when officially CIA was saying they had no knowledge or interest in Oswald, and officially no one had any idea Oswald had shot at Walker until after Nov 22. (Even though one of the White Russian women later claimed as quoted in a Dick Russell book that she had told the FBI a few days after the fact, in April 1963, that de Mohrenschildt had told her that Oswald had taken a shot at Walker.) Of course de Mohrenschildt's claims of that nature would be denied, and de Mohrenschildt's claims would lack corroboration nor be capable of confirmation. 

But de Mohrenschildt killed himself just before his testimony could happen in the first place, in a context of a number of other high-profile potential witnesses in the 1976-1978 period dying suspiciously as HSCA was getting underway, so his testimony, as that of those others, was not a problem (the suicide itself probably de Mohrenschildt's own doing following the mental deterioration). 

[Gene Kelly]

Greg

I'm not sure that I would trust much of what the papers of Willem Oltmans reveal ... he seems like a shady character (at best).

And the testimony of the Dallas/Ft. Worth White Russian milieu (Raigorodsky, Natalie and Thomas Ray, Ballen, Lydia Dymitruk  Gary Taylor, Ilya Mamantov, Dorothy Gravitis, Paul Roderick Gregory, Helen Leslie) painted a rather negative picture of Oswald for the WC 

Gene