Excerpt from
by George Michael Evica
© 2010 Trine Day Publishers
Portion of Essay Eight, pp. 282-288
Oswald and the Paines
 |
A Certain Arrogance |
When Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald settled in Dallas, Michael Paine and his wife Ruth Hyde Paine (“the kindly Quaker woman”) were already residents of the area. No other household in the United States supplied the Dallas Police, FBI, and Warren Commission with more “evidence” of Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged guilt than the Paines: the Paine garage in Irving, Texas, was an incriminatory storehouse. According to Gaeton Fonzi, a Congressional investigator, “One glaring example of the quality of the [House Select] Committee’s investigation was … Ruth Paine was never called as a witness.”
Who, then, were Ruth and Michael Paine?1
Ruth Paine’s father and mother, William Avery Hyde and Carol Hyde, were prominent Unitarians in Ohio.
[p. 283]
The Unitarian Service
The Oil-Intelligence-Unitarian Universe of Lee Harvey Oswald Committee, a significant supporter of Schweitzer College, had collaborated with the OSS in World War II and, later, with the CIA- penetrated US Agency for International Development (USAID). During World War II, Hyde was an agent of the OSS. Later, he worked for USAID as it cooperated closely with the CIA. In addition, Ruth’s brother-in-law John Hoke worked for the Communications Resource Division of USAID.
According to John Gilligan, President Jimmy Carter’s USAID director, many offices of the USAID were populated “from top to bottom” by CIA agents or assets. According to Gilligan, “The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas -- government, volunteer, religious, every kind.” Ruth Hyde Paine’s familial Intelligence connections were close. Ruth’s sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, worked either for the Air Force, the CIA, or both. In 1957, William Avery Hyde (Ruth’s father) was evaluated for a CIA assignment in Vietnam but (at least officially) was not used by the Agency.
Hyde toured Latin America from October 1964 to August 1967, covering Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama, afterward composing a report sent to both the State Department and the CIA. William Avery Hyde and George De Mohrenschildt had both worked for the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA).
A post-assassination intelligence report on Ruth Paine and her father recorded that William Avery Hyde and his wife Carol had closely associated with known CIA operatives, but the report contained an additional and important notation: “Sam Papich” had been given the information. Papich was the partner of William Sullivan in the FBI’s counter-intelligence operations, cooperating with James Jesus Angleton of the CIA’s corresponding unit; Papich was the Bureau’s CIA counter-intelligence contact reporting directly to Angleton; and both he and Sullivan were longtime Bureau investigators
of False Identity and Illegals espionage cases. One such case concerned Lee Harvey Oswald.
William Avery Hyde
Baron George De Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s closest friend in the Russian community of Dallas/Fort Worth and a world traveler with close links to at least four spy agencies, had a working relationship with J. Walton Moore, the chief of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas. Joseph Dryer, an asset of the CIA, friend of
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De Mohrenschildt and witness for the House Select Committee on Assassinations was supplied with a list for possible identification “of names of a number of people who may have had some connection
or association with George De Mohrenschildt.” Dryer recognized two names: one was “Dorothe Matlack.” Ms. Matlack was the US Army’s Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence and the
Office’s contact with the CIA. In effect, Dorothe Matlack was the Pentagon’s liaison to the Agency. In turn, Director Matlack and DeMohrenschildt met on May 7, 1963, just prior to the Baron and his wife leaving for Haiti on an intelligence-related mission.
The meeting between Army intelligence and Oswald’s reputed “sitter” was, in fact, a densely populated thicket. Present were: Clemard Charles, a Haitian banker who dealt in arms sales, acted
as a CIA funding conduit, and functioned as a top advisor to the president of Haiti; Army intelligence officer Sam Kail, close associate of anti-Castro Cubans at the Miami JM/WAVE station and responsible for key elements of the Army/Agency plots against Fidel; CIA officer Tony Czaikowski, an Agency staff officer representing the CIA’s interest in Haiti as a launching platform for another invasion of Cuba.
Clemard Charles pleaded for the overthrow of President Duvalier (at least one plot reportedly including De Mohrenschildt) as the Haitian banker who apparently toted large sums of money around Washington for investment and gifts to D.C. politicos just short of bribery. There were at least two cover stories for the Baron: a Haitian-approved “geological survey” and a contemplated exploration of sisal and hemp plantation purchases or leases.
The second name Joseph Dryer recognized was “William Avery Hyde.” Everything about Hyde and De Mohrenschildt suggests their foreign travels would have been valuable to the CIA’S Domestic
Contacts Division both in Washington and in Dallas. Certainly William Avery Hyde’s OSS/CIA links, given Hyde’s closeness to his daughter Ruth Paine, ought to have troubled any government investigator of the JFK assassination.
Ruth Hyde Paine’s family was apparently dysfunctional. William Avery Hyde consigned his wife of over thirty years to an Ohio mental institution before divorcing in her in 1961. Carol Hyde was “treated for paranoia and delusions,” but her daughter Ruth was apparently doubtful about the grounds for her mother’s commitment.
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The Oil-Intelligence-Unitarian Universe of Lee Harvey Oswald She herself felt partly responsible for her mother’s behavior. After the divorce, Carol Hyde was released from the Ohio sanitarium, entered Oberlin College and pursued ministerial studies to become a hospital chaplain. She was ordained a Unitarian minister.
Michael & George Lyman Paine
Michael Paine’s father was George Lyman Paine, called Lyman Paine by his son and those who knew him well. Lyman Paine was a Harvard graduate, a New York architect, and, after the Great Depression, a serious explorer of Marxist alternatives. Moving to Los Angeles, Lyman Paine married Freddie Drake and joined a “socialist splinter group,” becoming a key figure in the anti-Stalinist Trotskyite movement in the United States. The Socialist Workers Party, chief organ of the Trotskyites in the United States, was closely monitored and even infiltrated by US Intelligence, becoming a path for American counter-intelligence to run operations against the Communist Party and keep a close watch on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, heavily supported by Trotskyites.
Lyman Paine was suspected (by some) of being a double agent tasked to penetrate and permanently cripple Trotskyism as an independent Socialist entity. Oddly enough, Michael Paine, apparently knowledgeable about nuances of Marxist/Leninist anti-Stalinism, once characterized his friend Lee Harvey Oswald as a Trotskyite, and FBI Agent Hosty testified to the Warren Commission that on November 5, less than two weeks before the murder in Dealey Plaza, Ruth Paine told Hosty that Oswald “admitted to her being a Trotskyite Communist.”
According to a Dallas FBI agent, “George Lyman Paine, Jr., had telephoned [his son Michael] … the night of the assassination. A long-distance operator … illegally listened in on the conversation [why?] and later reported what she had heard to the FBI.” The Paines’ telephone lines were obviously being monitored by US Intelligence. According to that same Bureau agent, “George Paine was a well-known Trotskyite, and during his telephone call to his son … said, ‘We all know who did this.…” The FBI had, in fact, been monitoring George Lyman Paine for some time as a Bureau “security-index subject.” From no later than 1953 through as late as October 2, 1963, the FBI submitted regular reports on Lyman Paine: one in 1953, another in 1955, three in 1956, two in 1957, one in 1958, three in 1959, three in 1960, and the last in 1963,
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just before the assassination. All the Bureau’s reports are preserved in the Warren Commission’s documents (CD 600-615).
Apparently the FBI found the coincidence not at all remarkable: that the Paines, with their liberal/ anti-Communist orientation and with a major anti-Communist/Trotskyite link in their family, should befriend the family of an admitted Trotskyite (who had redefected from the Soviet Union), at least according to Michael and Ruth Paine. Despite the clear contradictions in Oswald’s left-wing
resume´, including his closeness to the son of a major anti-Stalinist socialist being tracked by the FBI, the Bureau apparently took no further notice after November 22, 1963.
The Warren Commission did pay some attention to the odd confluence, closely questioning Michael Paine about his father, about Lyman Paine’s political interests, and whether Michael was aware that his father had used at least two pseudonyms: “Thomas L. Brown” and “Lyman Pierce,” the latter probably a pun on that which caused pain, a pierce; or the surname of Charles Pierce, a philosopher Lyman Paine admired; or both.
Ruth Forbes Paine Young
Michael Paine’s mother was Ruth Forbes, who had an important intelligence connection: she and Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles’ OSS lover and fellow agent, were lifelong friends. In Mary Bancroft’s careful rendition of her life as an OSS agent, she identified George Lyman Paine and Ruth Forbes Paine as her close friends both in Boston and New York; but they disappeared from Bancroft’s narrative after 1933, though Ruth Forbes Paine remained a part of
Bancroft’s life. After her divorce Ruth and her second husband, Arthur Young, were intimates of Mary Bancroft for years.
Ruth Young, or Ruth Forbes Young, or Ruth Forbes Paine Young became a World Federalist, founded the International Peace Academy, and, together with her husband Arthur, created the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Berkeley, California.
Arthur Young, Michael Paine’s stepfather, was an inventor, and deeply interested in what would later be called general systems theory, including its para-psychological and spiritual dimensions. He “had a serious interest in both extrasensory perception and astrology,” an oversimplified tag for Young’s belief in a pervading cosmic synergy. Young was one of the creators of the Bell Helicopter and was responsible for obtaining
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The Oil-Intelligence-Unitarian Universe of Lee Harvey Oswald a high-tech/high security clearance job for his stepson Michael Paine at Bell’s operation near Dallas. Michael had earlier worked for the Franklin Institute, a CIA “conduit.”
Michael’s wife Ruth apparently considered Arthur and Ruth Young important elder mentors. She periodically consulted the Philadelphia-area Youngs about undisclosed topics, especially in the summer of 1963. Michael and Ruth were originally from the Philadelphia area, where they were reportedly active Quakers. How had it all begun?
Ruth Avery Hyde
Ruth Avery Hyde established her earliest liberal, philosophical and political credentials at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. By 1951, she had become a member of the Quakers, the Society of Friends. Ruth instructed senior Russian Jews at the YMCA in Philadelphia and taught physical education to schoolchildren in a Friends program; her post-graduation years were lived in “Quakerism’s great American stronghold, southeastern Pennsylvania.…” Ruth met Michael Paine in 1955 at a Quaker service, and they sang together in the madrigal group. They were married in December, 1957.
For a short time Ruth and Michael lived in a barn on the estate of Arthur Young, Michael’s stepfather. It was here, reportedly working with Arthur Young on “aeronautical designs,” that Michael picked up sufficient expertise to land an engineering job at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. It may have helped that Arthur’s patent, sold to Larry Bell in 1941, made the Bell Helicopter possible.
The Paines moved to Irving, Texas, and by 1958, sparked by Ruth’s Russophilia, became active in the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s expatriate Russian community. This was a highly conservative, anti-Soviet and Orthodox Christian community whose hierarchy was compromised by both the CIA and the KGB. Prominent among the White Russians was Paul M. Raigorodsky, at one time employed by the
NATO Special Representative to Europe, probably an intelligence related office. In 1963, Raigorodsky was a member of the Board of Directors of the CIA-funded Tolstoy Foundation. The relationship between the ostensibly liberal Philadelphia Quaker couple and the reactionary Russian expatriates was a curious fit.
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The Oswalds Meet Ruth Paine
In February 1963 Lee and Marina Oswald were brought by George
De Mohrenschildt and his wife to a social gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There the Oswalds met Ruth Paine, and an intimate relationship between Ruth and Marina began. Though the Paines had recently separated, the couple remained close. Marina and her first child lived with Ruth while Michael and Lee visited periodically.
The circumstances surrounding the initial meeting of Ruth Paine and Oswald resonate with special intelligence dimensions, suggesting he was already being evaluated (or even prepared) as a possible patsy.2
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Essay Eight Notes:
[1] p. 282 What has been called the “Paine Project,” led by researchers and writers Carol Hewett, Steven Jones, Barbara LaMonica, and William Kelly has meticulously documented the extraordinary participation of Ruth and Michael Paine in the lives of Lee and Marina Oswald.
The Paine/Hyde/Hoke familial network to which Michael and Ruth Paine belonged exhibited a complexity of U.S. intelligence connections either withheld from or ignored by the Warren Commission.
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William Avery Hyde, Ruth Paine’s father, was the subject of several CIA file documents that referred to his family’s support of Norman Thomas’ anti-communist Socialist Party, which was being funded by the Agency. Hyde and his wife Carol were associated with Talbot Bielfeldt, an agent of the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA; yet Carol Hyde (Ruth Paine’s mother) was characterized as a “radical” by U.S. double-agent Herbert Philbrick, who cited her activity in the Woman’s International League for Peace and Justice: according to Philbrick, a communist “front.”
Sylvia Ludlow Hyde, Ruth (Hyde) Paine’s sister, also called both Sylvia Hyde Hoke and Sylvia Hoke (after marrying John Hoke), was employed by the U.S. Labor Department from 1949 through 1953. During World War II and the Cold War, the OSS and the CIA recruited anti-Nazi and then anti-Communist labor activists and union leaders. The U.S. Labor Department was, therefore, a long-time center of U.S. intelligence/anti-Communist activity and the site of U.S. covert penetration of both the domestic and foreign labor movements.
Sylvia Hyde was employed by the CIA as early as 1954; her “cover” was as a Personnel Research Technician, Placement and Employee Relations Division, Director of Civilian Personnel, HQ, Department of the Air Force, Washington, D.C. The Air Force had, in fact, provided sanctuary for both intelligence “black” budget items and covert intelligence personnel in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Sylvia Hoke’s Security File 348 201 was inside the CIA’s Office of Security, Security Analysis Group. Sylvia’s contacts included her mother-in-law, Mrs. Helen Hoke, who had a close relationship with Dorothy Wilson, allegedly a member of the North Beach, California branch of the Communist Party, in the early 1940s. Sylvia Hoke also worked at Time magazine when she gave Gerritt E. Fielstra as a reference, reputedly a communist sympathizer and labor organizer. But Fielstra may have himself been a U.S. double agent. On April 17, 1956, Sylvia Hoke was granted a Top Secret security clearance by the Agency for International Development (USAID), a long-time collaborator with the CIA. Because of her labor and left-wing associations (and those of her mother-in-law), Sylvia Hoke’s
clearance was questioned by the FBI. Yet her clearance with USAID was revalidated on January 17, 1962.
As late as November 11, 1963, the CIA’s Office of Security was queried internally about Sylvia Hoke. The 1961 Falls Church, Virginia Directory listed Sylvia Hoke as an “emp CIA”: that is, employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Evidence also indicated that Sylvia Hoke either worked for Naval intelligence at the same time or had an active file there because of her husband’s intelligence-related activity.
Sylvia Hoke’s husband was John Lindsey Hoke (Ruth Paine’s brother-in-law). On February 4, 1956, John Hoke was appointed an audio-visual consultant with the International Cooperation Administration (predecessor of USAID, U.S. Operations Mission in Panama City. John Hoke admitted to the Deputy Director of Communications, ICA, that he did “intelligence type work for the American Embassy.” In Surinam and later in Washington, D.C., John Hoke worked for ICA and then USAID, but ran into trouble with the House Subcommittee on Government Operations when it was
discovered his solar-powered boat project in Surinam was also intended to generate “personal profit.” On June 30, 1963, John Hoke left USAID, yet on August 22, 1963, the CIA granted a second and indefinite “Approval for Liaison” with John Hoke. Hoke remained in the good graces of both the U.S. Military and U.S. Intelligence through at least 1965, employed by the military-industrial partner Atlantic Research where he was the subject of a positive U.S. Naval intelligence check. The Hyde/Paine/Hoke network of intelligence and intelligence-related activities strongly suggests a liberal familial complex whose members were willing double-agents in support of anti-Communist
goals. Ruth Hyde Paine was at the center of that Hyde/Paine/ Hoke counterintelligence complexity.
337 - End Notes
[2] p. 288 Edward Epstein, the confidante of both the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton and FBI’s William Sullivan and their counterintelligence associates interviewed six (or more) people present at the Oswald/Ruth Paine party meeting (see Epstein 317, end note for Chapter XII: the party is covered on 203-206). Epstein apparently considered the party’s ambiance a necessary factor in Oswald’s motives for allegedly shooting at General Edwin Walker and, subsequently, John F. Kennedy. The reader must therefore keep Epstein’s major anti-Oswald intelligence connections in mind when evaluating statements ostensibly made by the party’s participants and subsequently ‘reported’ by Epstein.
Also see:
1. By Bill Simpich: THE JFK CASE: THE TWELVE WHO BUILT THE OSWALD LEGEND (Part 7: The hand-off from De Mohrenschildt to the Paines)
2. The Paines by LaMonica, Hewett and Jones
3. Security File on Sylvia Hyde Hoke
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