Monday, January 19, 2015

The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part I)



DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS:
A Texan Born and Bred
by Linda Minor

Part One

David Atlee Phillips, born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1922 to Edwin T. and Mary Young Phillips, hardly had a chance to know his father. Edwin's father, George Wilson Phillips, a Pennsylvanian, had married Blanche Murphy in 1874 in Iowa. Prior to 1898, the family had moved moved to Fort Worth from Marshall, Texas, where George was an engineer for Benjamin F. Yoakum's Frisco Railroad until his death in 1906. Blanche Phillips and her children, Henry Smith, James Olcott and Mattie Phillips were thereafter listed among communicants of St. Andrews Episcopal Parish in the heart of the Fort Worth business and courts district.

The Phillipses were Episcopalian.
Edwin, the youngest of four boys and one girl, was 16 when his father died. His older brothers were all employed as railroad clerks, and the family rented out rooms to boarders in their large house, located at 501 Louisiana Ave. in downtown Fort Worth, for extra income. Though still standing when George Phillips' funeral procession began  from that location in 1906, the house was demolished when the highway (now IH-35W) was built.

With help from his older siblings, Edwin managed to attend the University of Texas and obtain a legal education. It was in Austin that he met fellow student, Mary Louise Young; he graduated in 1908, and Mary in 1909.They married in 1912 and moved to Fort Worth. By 1920 Mary had already given birth to three sons, ranging in age from two to six years old. David would come along like an afterthought, two years later. Edwin had by then become a "corporation attorney," and was a partner at Phillips, Trammell and Chizum. The law firm specialized in oil and gas cases, taking some of them on appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. The firm also worked closely with Fort Worth's oldest and most respected law firm--Capps, Cantey & Hanger. 

The marriage would last only sixteen years, cut short by Edwin's untimely death in 1928. Edwin's law practice, in which he represented wealth oil interests, however, would give his widow, Mary Young Phillips, the springboard of contacts she needed, when added to those from her own background, to find a career that helped support her family.

Charles Glidden Young

1870 Census of Young family in Rusk
Mary's father, James Mills Young, had been born in 1873 in Chappell Hill, Texas, during the midst of the civil war, though his own father was not a native Texan. Charles Glidden Young began life in New Hampshire in 1816, then gravitated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met and married Henrietta M. Chamberlain in 1842. The 1870 census shows Charles G. Young living in Rusk, Cherokee County, Texas, giving his occupation as "minister of the gospel."

We know that Charles had arrived in Texas by way of Mississippi and Louisiana, just as the civil war was beginning. The Vicksburg, Shreveport and Texas Railroad (VS&T), which he was constructing, reached the Texas state line in 1861.

Six years earlier (1855) Charles G. Young had been elected by the board of directors of the VS&T as its president, working with the railroad's engineer, William G. Bonner. The two had been instructed by the Board to approach the Texas Legislature to ask for a route through Texas, with a long-range plan of ultimately linking up with the Southern Pacific line. Ultimately, if achieved, it would have given The VS&T a connection to the Pacific Coast. 

Charles may have moved his family at that time to Chappell Hill, Texas. Located in Washington County, near the site where Texas independence had been born in 1836, the Washington County Railroad before long negotiated a merger with the railroad being built out of Houston by William Marsh Rice--the Houston & Texas Central. 

Before the VS&T's dream of linking to the Southern Pacific could materialize, however, its roadbed and rails were seized in December 1861 by the Confederacy, which took them over for its supply line. Thereafter, as reported on January 21, 1863, by the Dallas Herald, Union forces had not only destroyed the road, but had also:
captured and destroyed or carried away a large quantity of Confederate property. They also burnt three of the most important bridges on the route, viz: at bayou Macon, Tensas, and lake One. They also burnt the depot at Delhi and materially injured the railroad track. The bridges, we are informed, cannot be rebuilt under years of hard labor. We presume we are once more cut off from all communication with the country east of the Mississippi river, save that which may be carried on by the "runners of the blockade."
Despite all the disruption of his railroad-building plans by both sides in the War Between the States, Charles G. Young did not give up. When in November 1861, Young was "relieved" by the superintendent of the VS&T railroad, and he took the opportunity to relocate his family to Texas--first settling it appears in Washington County, where James Mills Young, his youngest son was born. He  built a smelter and operated a sawmill, brickyard, and store at Rusk in Cherokee County, selling goods brought by a wagon train with supplies from Galveston and Matamoros, Mexico. The smelter and sawmill were a necessary part of the Houston & Great Northern Railroad, which he chartered in 1866 in the hope that, with the war now concluded, there would be no further violence. The maternal grandfather of David Atlee Phillips, James M. Young, was listed as a lad of seven in the Young residence at Rusk in the 1870 census. However, he had been born in Washington County, Texas, not far from today's Brenham, where older siblings married and remained when their father took the younger brood to Rusk.

For example, Daniel Marshall Young, born in Mississippi in 1840, married a girl named Marie from Virginia, and their first child was born only a year after his young brother James. Daniel worked as a farm laborer in Chappell Hill to support his young family. The eldest daughter, Catherine (called Callie), had studied music and married a lawyer named I. M. Onins who became a judge in what was at that time the 28th Judicial District of Texas. They had a daughter named Posey. The Texas Legislature granted Onions a three-month leave in April 1873 to leave Texas until July 1873.

We will resume at this point with Part Two.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Big Lie Told by David Atlee Phillips

It has been said by at least one or two Kennedy assassination researchers that Judyth Vary Baker tells a heartrending love story, but that, even if what she says is true that it does not "add anything" to our knowledge about the assassination itself. In my own opinion, that belief is utterly false. What Judyth's story supplies is the answer to the question of what Lee Oswald was really doing in Mexico City in late September . . . and why he went there. It also gives a strong hint about who was responsible for planning the plot. I have arrived at a conclusion that Alton Ochsner was working with someone who was not technically part of the Central Intelligence Agency, although I began my research thinking that Lee believed he was working under Robert Kennedy's design.

Judyth's book also relates that David Atlee Phillips told Lee Oswald before the two met in Dallas on September 6th that he would be introduced to a contact who would supply a method for the cancer weapon to be taken into Cuba. As we learn below, that was part of a much bigger lie in which Phillips was involved. Phillips must have had an Oswald impostor planted to appear at the Consulate twice after Oswald attempted to gain his visa. The tape of the real Lee Oswald's appearance was said to have been destroyed or recycled before it normally would have been. However, tapes of the impostor's appearance at the Consulate were preserved, ready to present to the new President Lyndon Johnson the day after Kennedy's murder as a pretext for silencing all investigations other than his "blue-ribbon panel" that would frame the patsy as the lone-nut assassin. It was a very intricate plan which clearly involved Lyndon Johnson, working with David Atlee Phillips and someone else who knew ahead of time when Oswald would appear at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City.

John Newman related in a PBS Frontline story, that J. Edgar Hoover said he could not "forget CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip in Mexico City only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.” In the text and in footnote 17, following this quote from Hoover, Newman added:
CIA headquarters made the decision soon after the assassination to deny that anyone within the CIA — including the Mexico station — knew of Oswald’s visits to the Cuban consulate until after JFK’s murder. But the Mexico City station’s chief, the head of Cuban operations, and the others involved with Cuban operations all maintain that they knew about the visits and informed headquarters at the time. They also maintain that there was an additional Oswald phone call not accounted for in the extant records.
We know about a 30 September tape because of the recollection of the CIA translator who transcribed it, Mrs. Tarasoff. She remembers not only transcribing it but also the fact that the Oswald voice was the same as the 28 September voice—in other words the same Oswald impostor. Mrs. Tarasoff remembers the Oswald character asked the Soviets for money to help him defect, once again, to the Soviet Union. In addition, the CIA officer at the Mexico City in charge of Cuban operations, David Atlee Phillips, in sworn testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), backed up Mrs. Tarasoff’s claim about the tape and the request for money to assist in another defection to the Soviet Union. But the Phillips story has a twist. The day before his sworn testimony, Phillips told a different, more provocative version to Ron Kessler of the Washington Post. He told Kessler that on this tape Oswald asked for money in exchange for information. Why was this crucial transcript destroyed? We can only wonder at what motivated Phillips to tell two different stories about this piece in less than 24 hours.
...The operational reason for this deception has yet to fully come to light. 
It seems likely, however, that the impostor was sent to the embassy to make it appear as though "Oswald" was acting with the Soviets, and thus to convince one or more persons that "the patsy" had to be killed after the eventual assassination and to supply a reason for what was to become the Warren Commission, as Newman further details. The motive for this impersonation is revealed by Rex Bradford of History Matters:
An otherwise inexplicable impersonation episode takes on an entirely new meaning in this light. The calls from the Oswald impersonator made it appear that Oswald was a hired killer, hired by the Soviet Union no less. This was a prescription for World War III.
John Newman brought up in his 1999 presentation at the JFK-Lancer Conference, what he had discovered about the impostor in Mexico City, stating:
So, I tried to erect a hypothesis in my mind where it could be benign and it really didn't work. And where I have been for the last four years, as the Review Board has been releasing more and more stuff on this, is you really can't explain the impersonation outside of the plot to murder the president.
An additional appendix to the HSCA Report on the JFK assassination, entitled "Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City," actually called the "Lopez Report," was first partially released in 1996, but with fewer redactions again in 2003. Since 2003, other separate files have been come to light which furnish new information not dealt with by the HSCA staff in its report, according to History Matters:
The LBJ taped phone conversations for instance, include startling corroboration for the claim that audio intercepts of an Oswald impersonator were listened to by FBI agents in Dallas while Oswald was in custody. Declassified testimony of David Phillips, the Tarasoff couple who translated the tapes for the CIA, and others illuminate some areas and deepen the mystery in others. [The Tarasoffs' 1976 interview with review date indicated as 11/14/96 appears in the Mary Ferrell website.]
What Lee Oswald Told Judyth Baker

Once the cancer weapon had been proven to work, Judyth left New Orleans, while Lee returned to Dallas to prepare for his trip to Mexico City, where he had the tough assignment of getting a visa into Cuba in order to deliver the weapon to someone who could use it to inject Fidel with cancer. Under the September  6, 1963 entry in the chapter of Me and Lee, entitled "Separation," Judyth wrote:
He [Lee Oswald] arrived in Dallas around lunchtime and proceeded to a large prestigious building downtown, where he met two men. One was his handler, "Mr. B" who had accidentally told him his name was "Benton" when previously he'd said his name was "Benson." Disturbingly, how Lee heard this man addressed as "Bishop" by the anti-Castro Cuban who joined them. He now realized that only the letter "B" had been consistent in "Mr. B's" name. Lee had previously been informed that he'd meet not only his handler, but also the contact who would make sure the bioweapon got into Cuba, so he assumed the Latino was that man. No names were exchanged: it was an eyes-only encounter, and the meeting then abruptly ended.
The above passage, relating what Lee told Judyth, must be compared with what Antonio Veciana has said about his meeting with his handler, known to him only as Maurice Bishop, first revealed to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1976, but he never identified Bishop as David Atlee Phillips until the AARC Conference in October 2014. Researchers have pondered for several decades about the real reason for Oswald's trip, including the contacts he made with diplomatic officials in Cuba's Communist government, as well as with the Soviet Embassy. The first face-to-face attempts between researchers and Cuban officials occurred in 1995 after some of the insiders had retired.

What Antonio Veciana Told Other Researchers

A. Veciana in 2014
Former Cuban security agent, Arturo Rodriguez, had spoken to Antonio Veciana about his meeting with "Bishop" (David Atlee Phillips) in Dallas, when he saw his handler with the young North American man later identified as Lee Oswald, and later related to researchers his own curiosity about the reason for it. Rodriguez delivered a paper in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in August 1995 in which he set out his conclusions about why Phillips may have departed from customary tradecraft by scheduling two agents, unknown to each other, to appear together. Rodriguez concluded that Phillips' motive in arranging the early September meeting with Oswald, which Veciana walked in on, had initially been to frame Oswald as a member of an assassination plot with Cuba to kill Kennedy; then, after Oswald's arrest and murder, he surmised, Phillips' intent changed, and he attempted to show Oswald was a "lone nut," not acting on behalf of Cuba.

The Rio conference at which Rodriguez and others spoke was eventually expanded into a one-on-one encounter between researchers and retired Cuban agents, held in Nassau, The Bahamas, in December 1995. The papers and transcripts of the taped discussions are all now part of the Cuban Information Archives. The discussions were taped and a transcript made. What follows is an excerpt from those archives, with punctuation corrected and emphasis added:
[Dick Russell?]: Veciana told me when I interviewed him in 1976 about, and I'll just read you the quote, of exactly what he said. It is about, ah, his cousin, who is Luis [Ruiz?]. "Yes," it says, "I had a cousin, Guillermo Ruiz who worked with the Cuban intelligence service in Mexico City. After the assassination, sometime early in 1964, Bishop said to me that, I think by getting my cousin a considerable amount of money, would he say he talked to Oswald to make it appear Oswald was working for Castro? Because of this, I asked Bishop if it was true Oswald had been talking to Castro agents. Bishop said it did not matter if it was true; what was important was to get my cousin to make that statement."  So my question is: did you ever speak to, is this, do you know anything more about this? Did you ever speak to Guillermo Ruiz about this?

Escalante: Yes, of course we have. We knew about this interview from this book about the investigation of the select committee [Gaeton Fonzi's The Investigation] and we had an interview with Guillermo Ruiz. In 1963, Guillermo Ruiz, in August 1963, he was appointed to commercial [attaché?] of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City....
We must interrupt at this point to relate what Bill Simpich says happened the day Oswald appeared in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. Simpich writes: "On September 27, an alleged phone tap revealed that Cuban consulate receptionist Silvia Duran had contacted Guillermo Ruiz at 10:54 am, complaining in Spanish that "he wants to speak to the consul"."
He told me that when he arrived in Mexico a group of Cubans were waiting for him at the airport to welcome him, an act of repudiation, yes that's it. Guillermo Ruiz never worked for the Cuban intelligence. He was not an official of Cuba. He was not really a cousin to Veciana. Veciana's cousin was his wife. Guillermo Ruiz's wife. Guillermo Ruiz. So also is one of the persons who saw Oswald at the embassy, he will explain that when he gets to Oswald.
[Dick Russell?]: Ruiz saw Oswald at the embassy?

Escalante: Yes. There is one moment when he gets there and then you see Eusebio Azcue having a big discussion with Oswald in the last interview they have. He had an office on the top of the consulate and when Guillermo is about to pass through-- Guillermo spoke better English than Azcue--Azcue said please explain to this gentleman that I cannot give him a visa to go to Cuba if he doesn't have a visa from Moscow. So Guillermo looked at him, and he is one of the persons that confirmed that he saw Oswald in our Cuban consulate. This is what we know.

When we read this story told by Veciana, it looks very strange to us. We, in our book, have a chapter, it is dedicated to the press campaign that was started before and after the Kennedy assassination to blame Cuba. However, there is a moment in December in 1963 after the Warren commission was appointed and this company started to go lower, and lower still because they were just not interviewed, I think. On the other hand, some other events which had happened in Cuba, didn't happen to us. It has always had very few meaning in 1964. Maurice Bishop gives this task to Veciana because this was out of the context of the moment, (?) the most important moment. We have some other theory about it. And we believe that the meeting Veciana speaks of in September of 1963 was for that ... was to try to recruit Guillermo Ruiz.

[Dick Russell?]: He tried to recruit Ruiz?

Escalante: (?) the meeting between Oswald, Veciana and Phillips in 63, September 63, was really to try to recruit Guillermo Ruiz

[Dick Russell?]: How so? I don't really understand.

Escalante: Let me explain. A few days before Kennedy's assassination, Guillermo Ruiz's wife walks from her house to the Cuban embassy. She was about 200 feet in from the entrance of the embassy, she looks at the...a big bunch of dollars on the sidewalk.

[Dick Russell?]: A big bunch of what?

Nunez: Dollars

[Dick Russell?]: Dollars?

Nunez: Dollars on the sidewalk.

Escalante: And a Mexican person. She recalls that it was a Mexican person from the accent and tells her, "Lady, this money is yours." She gets scared because there are the two people coming to approach her, so she starts running for the embassy asking for help. When people from our embassy went to the same place, no money nor the people were there anymore. Obviously, this is not something normal. Imagine finding a big bunch of money in the middle of Mexico City. For us this had never had an explanation and I think that the only explanation that we can give is a form to try to recruit her.

Lechuga: She was a cousin of Veciana. ...

Smith: I don't understand how Phillips having Veciana in Dallas see him with Oswald has to do with the recruitment effort against Ruiz.

Escalante: I'm going to say once more. Veciana told to Fonzi and Russell, that in January of 1964 his case officer, Maurice Bishop made a promise to recruit Guillermo Ruiz for him, to say that Oswald was a Cuban agent. That was out of context, out of moment, because in January 1964 the campaign against Cuba has lowered down, diminished. So we think that the true reason of the interview enter [between?] Veciana, Oswald and Maurice Bishop in Dallas, in September 1963 could have been that, or probably would have been that, and simply Veciana was given the information out of context, out of date to mix up everybody and to give only part of the truth, not the whole truth, not the same that happened in September, but in January 64. That is what we assumed even more logical that this (?) was in September and there was a plot to try to include Guillermo Ruiz. He doesn't have any sense would have wanted to put him in after murdering, but before...
 
Fonzi: I would like to... we have a slight disagreement on you know why... Why Phillips ... General Escalante believes ... deliberately had Veciana see him with Oswald and I still tend to believe, as a result, the manner in which the information came up originally in the interview, that it was a mistake on Phillips' part. Now Phillips was not a man who did not make mistakes in his history. Joseph B. Smith, of the CIA, who wrote the book told me, I think he told Tony Summers also, that he recalled Phillips making two very bad mistakes in the course of his career. One was in Havana when he was caught in the house of prostitutes and called the American Embassy even though he was supposedly not connected to the agency. And another story that Smith tells is that at one point Phillips was supposed to have a meeting with a Russian in a restaurant and Phillips was asked to bring some bonapita, and he did, and then on leaving he left his briefcase on a chair. So the point is that Phillips, despite being a sophisticated spy, did make mistakes.

The other factor I find difficult to find an answer to involves the basis of Veciana's talking to me in the first place. I did not tell Veciana when I first approached him that I was interested in the Kennedy assassination. At the time I was working for Senator Schweiker who was on the Senate Intelligence Committee and my approach to all the Cubans I interviewed at the time was that I was interested in the relationship between the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban groups. And it was on that basis that Veciana began talking with me. When I had originally gone to see Veciana and discovered Veciana, as a result of a suggestion by Paul Hoch out in California, who had written an article for the Saturday Evening Post I think, suggesting that it may have been Veciana who had visited (?)_____________, Hoch sent an advance copy, actually sent a manuscript of the article, and I was unaware that it had been published in the Post already. So, when I was trying to work the interview around to the Kennedy assassination, without being very blatant about it, I asked Veciana whether Alpha 66 had branches in other cities and then whether or not they happened to have one in Dallas and Veciana said... I said, then I asked him had he ever been to Dallas at that house and Veciana said "Yes, I have been there and now you are going to ask me whether I saw Oswald there." And I said, "Why would I ask you that?" He said "because I just read it in the Saturday Evening Post." I have it here in the bedroom. And he went to the bedroom and took it out. So the subject of Oswald came up in that manner, not by any direct question, and so I have trouble trying to figure out why Veciana would even bring up Oswald, why if he was involved in the assassination, why he would even link himself to the Kennedy assassination with me at all even though he told me everything about Bishop. He didn't have to tell me about the meeting with Oswald at all.

Escalante: But let's take the facts. I said he was a hypocrite. Let's go back to the facts. The CIA--we are not going to identify any names--thought that Guillermo Ruiz was an official from the Cuban intelligence service. That is something that has been proved. Guillermo Ruiz was in the city of Mexico from August 1963. His wife is Veciana's cousin. They both are (?)__________. That is the second part. The third part. The information that Veciana gives you that he had had an interview with his case official in September 1963 in Dallas and that he saw there a man that looked like Oswald, that he later identified as Oswald. The fourth fact, is that Guillermo Ruiz's wife was a provocation to her [had been provoked?], a few days before Kennedy's assassination. The fifth point, Veciana tells that in January 1964 his case official in Mexico makes him a proposition to try to recruit Guillermo Ruiz for him to confirm that Oswald is a Cuban agent. These five facts obviously happened. All the information that we have available, is that these five things happened. The only thing I give you is that the order in which this timing in these facts, is not the one that Veciana says it was... No the way he said it was.

?[Dick Russell]: Possibly the way it was. I may be mistaken, because I haven't reviewed my notes on this but my recollection is that Veciana told me, that Bishop, shortly after the assassination made the proposal to him to contact Ruiz. Later he said there was a CIA agent who came to him and asked him to try and recruit Ruiz, and Veciana said he made an attempt to reach Ruiz in Spain. Was he in Spain at some point?...

Escalante: And he made another proposition. He made a proposition to trade the hands of _________ for the liberation of one person in prison. It's a different operation and there's one sixth fact--when I talk about five that David Phillips--when he heard of the operation against Cuba in Mexico in 1962. There are a group of coincidences that make me think that the order of these facts, in this case, they do make a different final result and has been changed.

?[Dick Russell]: I have to change the emphasis slightly and I do so despite my great respect for the work done today _____, but what you just said is to me is the most important thing. That we know that Phillips was in charge of operations against Cuba in Mexico City, in the period when so much happened down there in respect to Oswald. There is the second thing we know about Phillips that is even bigger, more obvious, and that is that Phillips had been in charge of this information about the assassination since it happened and if there is a single key to this disinformation it is to blame the assassination on Cuba. And it seems to me that we should talk primarily about this, and only in this context, come back to the Veciana story. I would like to make two observations. One is that at the time that the Maurice Bishop story began, Phillips had caught the public eye and therefore Phillips in a sense had a reason to start creating disinformation about himself and his own role. Another point which I think is relevant, is that at a certain point and I (?) to know better than me, is that Veciana was shot through the head. It is important what year that was. It was in 1973. July 1973. I spoke to him myself by telephone, not long after this. And he said to me, I know who you are. I would be... it would be interesting to talk to you but consider this, I have just been shot through the head....
Veciana told Dick Russell, author of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1992 publication), that Maurice Bishop (David Atlee Phillips) asked him, a month or so after the Kennedy assassination (or, late December 1963 or January 1964) to bribe a cousin working at the Mexico City Cuban Embassy, Guillermo Ruiz, to testify that Oswald was an agent working for Cuba. Then some time later, while Ruiz was assigned to Spain, Bishop/Phillips made contact with Veciana in order to reach Ruiz for a purpose unknown. We have to look at all these contacts within the context of history. What better context can be established, other than James Douglass' unparalleled book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters? Another good source is David Talbot's Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.


"Operation Mongoose ... Death Bed" -- November 5, 1962

"The Project," on which Judyth Baker worked with Lee Oswald, David Ferrie and Dr. Mary Sherman, could not have been under Robert Kennedy's supervision, through his role in the Special Group Augmented's oversight of Operation Mongoose, since that operation, which began in November 1961, had died within weeks of October 16, 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved. The new Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms' special assistant, George B. McManus signed a Memorandum on November 5, 1962 stating that Mongoose had ended and that  Task Force W would begin dismantling. [Source: David E Kaiser, THE ROAD TO DALLAS, (2009, p. 145.)]

Paragraph 9 of the McManus memo dealt with what to do about Edward Lansdale, who had first been in charge of Mongoose, clearly stating that Robert Kennedy, the "A.G.," "will drop Lansdale like a hot brick." The rest of the members of the former operation were advised to close ranks and deny access to Lansdale, except through the DCI to prevent his doing damage to the CIA; but they were advised not to attempt to "unseat" Lansdale. Thus, once Operation Mongoose officially ended in November 1962, Robert Kennedy would have ceased to have any interest in killing Castro.

Who, then, was directing the spies and doctors at the Ochsner Clinic with whom Judyth was working?

We will go back to unpublished research which I did several years ago about Dr. Ochsner in attempting to answer that question.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Hyde Family in the CIA and USAID

In attempting to determine what role, if any, Ruth Paine's Hyde family may have had in steering her toward developing a relationship with wife of the returning former defector, Lee Harvey Oswald, a month before his departure from Texas to New Orleans in the spring of 1963, I reviewed research performed several years ago which had been posted on the internet.

Martin Shackelford once posted the following at an internet group, alt.conspiracy.jfk:
More from Evica's book, [A Certain Arrogance, republished by TrineDay]:
  •  Evica noticed that the HSCA never called Ruth Paine as a witness.
  • Ruth Paine's parents: Unitarians; associated with a CIA agent. (Though Quakers, and though Dallas had a significant Quaker community, Ruth and Michael Paine became involved with the Unitarians there, claiming there was no Quaker community in Dallas)
  •  Ruth Paine's mother: denounced by Oswald's hero Herbert Philbrick; became a Unitarian minister.
  • Ruth Paine's sister: CIA employee, also involved with Naval Intelligence; her husband was also involved with the CIA and Naval Intelligence, and worked under a USAID cover.
  • Ruth Paine arranged with William Lacy, a colleague of Edward Lansdale, to create a U.S.-Soviet student exchange program. [This is not exactly what Evica said. Ruth was on a Young Friends Committee trying to get contacts between East and West for exchange program, for which Ambassador Lacy was in charge. He had previously been close to Lansdale in the Philippines.]
  • Ruth and Michael Paine both described Oswald as a Trotskyite Communist. Michael Paine's father: Long-time Trotskyite, suspected of being a government plant in the Socialist Worker's Party, parent group of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On the phone with Michael after the assassination, he said "we both know who was responsible" for the assassination. Michael Paine's mother: a close friend of Mary Bancroft, OSS spy and the lover of Allen Dulles. Dulles told a friend that conspiracy theorists would have a field day if they knew he had been in Dallas three weeks before the assassination, as well as being linked to the Paines.
  • Michael Paine had worked for the Franklin Institute [in Philadelphia], a conduit for CIA funds. He then worked for defense contractor, Bell Helicopter.
  • George De Mohrenschildt  was the subject of a seven-year FBI investigation, opened in April 1963, shortly before he went to Haiti. He was close to J.Walton Moore, the Dallas chief of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division, and provided him with copies of material loaned to him by Oswald. He was also close to CIA asset Joseph Dryer. In May 1963, he met with Dorothe Matlock, an Army Intelligence employee who acted as a liaison with the CIA.
  • After the assassination, an Army Intelligence agent selected Ilya Mamantov as the first translator for Marina Oswald.
  • In Mexico City, Oswald was reported seen riding on the back of a motorcycle with a young American Quaker. The young man was a CIA double agent. There was an initial attempt to identify the motorcyclist as another young man, but that fellow hadn't arrived in Mexico City until after Oswald had left--he mentioned that the Quakers there were talking about Oswald, and after the assassination were very worried that he had been there.
  • In Dallas, Oswald attended a meeting [of the American Civil Liberties Union] at a Unitarian church, and had a long talk with the minister, who later mentioned his impressions to a reporter. When the FBI contacted the minister, he denied knowing anything about Oswald. After the assassination, the FBI conducted an extensive investigation nationwide among Unitarians, but no records resulting from it have been released. [See  John Kelin, "Pictures of the Paines;" Letter from Greg Olds.]
[What follows was possibly taken from excerpts of A.J. Weberman's research posted online. See NODULEX16.]

QUAKER

When Ruth Paine was 15 years old, she preached [sic] with a traveling Bible school. Ruth Paine told the Warren Commission: "I was asked to be a leader, a teacher with a traveling Bible school. We went to three different small towns in Indiana and Ohio, and taught young children. I led songs and games and read stories." Ruth Paine became a Quaker while attending Antioch College in 1951 and was a delegate to two conferences of the Friends World Committee in England in 1952. She graduated from Antioch College in 1955. In 1993 Ruth Paine described herself as a financial contributor to the Friends World Committee.

RUSSIA/UNITED STATES EXCHANGE PROGRAMS

According to the Warren Report:
"In 1955 Mrs. Paine was active in the work of the North American Young Friends Committee, which, with State Department cooperation, was making an effort to lessen the tensions between Soviet Russia and the United States by means of ...exchanges of young Russians and Americans. It was during this period that Mrs. Paine became interested in the Russian language. Mrs. Paine participated in [and arranged] a Russian-American student exchange program...Ruth Paine was the "convener or clerk" of the East-West Contacts Group of the North American Young Friends Committee which was established in 1955. She has corresponded, until recently, with a Russian schoolteacher." [WR p285]

Ruth Paine told the Warren Commission:
Paine: It was at this conference, toward the later part, arising out of a discussion of the need for communication and more of it between the United States and the Soviet Union, by no means the bulk of business of this conference, but a small committee of interested people, was working on this matter.

Jenner: Are these interested young people?

Paine: These are all young Friends.

Jenner: And you were then of what age, 1955. Twenty-three?

Paine: Yes...This was at the time that plans first began for encouraging an exchange of young people between the Soviet Union and the United States, and I became active with the committee planning
that, and from the planning there was an exchange, three Soviet young people came to this country and four young Quakers went to the Soviet Union... The Committee worked on: "Organization of pen pal correspondence between American and Soviet young people." In 1958 Ruth Paine was involved in a Russian/American exchange program on a leadership level. [Friends Journal 4.26.58]

ANALYSIS

Another Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, sent a delegation to the Soviet Union in 1955. The American Friends Service Committee was very much on the Left. The Friends World Committee soon sent a delegation to the Soviet Union. The CIA had an interest in "cultural exchange programs."

CIA DD/P Richard Bissell stated:
"Exchange of person programs...are more effective if carried out by private auspices than if officially supported by the United States Government." [Marchetti Cult of Intell. p52]
The SSCIA reported that from 1964 to 1974
"the FBI identified over 100 intelligence officers among the approximately 400 Soviet students who attended universities as part of an East-West student exchange program. Also, in this program's 14-year history, more than 100 American students were the target of Soviet recruitment approaches in the USSR." [SSCIA For. & Mil. Intell. V1 p164]
What was the story behind the Friends World Committee?

Ruth Paine answered negatively when she was asked if she had been aware of any intelligence community interest in student exchange programs. She stated:
"The Soviets that came over were real party-line types, very doctrinaire."
Ruth Paine was asked to name the State Department official who was involved with her program. She responded, "I haven't a clue, but you know they were working on cultural exchange at that point. Trying to make a crack in the Iron Curtain." Michael Paine stated, "I remember reading about that kind of thing in The Times and finding it so frustrating that a genuine effort to try to get person-to-person contact was being subverted by the government there."

MANY DOCUMENTS STILL WITHHELD

Neither CIA Headquarters, nor the CIA's Office of Security traces on Ruth Paine have been released as of 1996, and she was mentioned only tangentially in the HSCA Report -
"They never even called me. Someone called - to be sure where I was - if they wanted to call me."
Despite much correspondence with the USSR, Ruth Paine did not show up on [James J. Angleton's secret CIA project to intercept mail destined for the Soviet Union and China begun in 1952HT LINGUAL indices before 1966. (That year an American sent a letter to her from Moscow.) Withheld documents on the Paines included USSS 179-10001-10034, 10036; FBI NARA 179-10001-10091, 10094, 10101, FBI 179-10002-10084, 10244, 10251; HSCA 180-10116-10150; HSCA 180-10112-10450.

WILLIAM AVERY HYDE AND ANGLETON

The father of Ruth Paine, William Hyde, had contact with the CIA, and the CIA's Office of Security [presumably Sheffield Edwards (OS)?] had traces on him:
"Files of the Office of Security reflect that Ruth Paine is the daughter of William Avery Hyde, OS C-157,435, (deleted)."
William Avery Hyde [CIA SSD-157,435] was an anti-Communist who supported Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas. Norman Thomas received millions of dollars in CIA subsidies because of his anti-Communist views. [NOTE by this Blogger: Apparently Ruth's parents took her to a rally for Norman Thomas in 1940. Could W.A. Hyde have been infiltrating the Socialists in 1940, much as Oswald was apparently doing in 1962-63? Was that the reason Ruth Hyde Paine was really attempting to learn to speak Russian?]

William Avery Hyde related :
"Our introduction [to the Communists] came at the 1929 annual meeting of the Eastern Cooperative League. There were a number of Communist delegates to the convention. When they found out they did not have enough votes to control the meeting, they set out to obstruct it, and succeeding in preventing it from doing any business worth mentioning. [See a Bureau of Labor Statistics study which mentions political discord in the Cooperative Movement in 1930. The Bureau had been doing such studies on co-ops for a number of years by this date and seemed to indicate their increase was a positive step.]
"Mother and I entered the meeting knowing very little about Communists, and left as their enemies, which we have been ever since 1948."
Voorhis
[NOTE by this Blogger: It is unknown to whom Hyde made the above statement. There is a strong possibility the quote was taken from a 1957 letter written by Hyde to former Congressman Jerry Voorhis (referred to in footnote 6 of the Barbara LaMonica paper published in The Fourth Decade). Following his defeat by Richard Nixon in the 1946 Congressional election, Voorhis became executive director of the Cooperative League of the USA (CLUSA). Perhaps the letter cited in LaMonica's paper can be found amongst Jerry Voorhis' Papers at Claremont College.
Hyde's job in 1932 - CLUSA
[NOTE continued: After Voorhis gave up his Congressional seat to Richard Nixon in January 1947, he was immediately hired by CLUSA. William Avery Hyde had by then been selling CLUSA Service, Inc. insurance and fidelity bonds for years, at least as early as 1932, according to clipping to the left. In October 932 Hyde spoke to the Sunnyside Consumers' Co-operative League, a neighborhood in the western part of Queens, NY. When Voorhis was hired by CLUSA, he moved to Winnetka, Ill. to be near the headquarters at 343 S. Dearborn Street in Chicago. The organization had been founded in the U.S. in 1916 by a medical doctor named James Peter Warbasse, who was president of CLUSA until 1941, when Murray Lincoln replaced him. The name would be changed to National Cooperative Business Association in 1986. Warbasse died in 1957 at his summer home in Woods Hole, MA, located not far from Naushon Island (owned in trust by lineal descendants of the late J.M. Forbes). Warbasse's winter home was in Queens, where he created the community known as Rochdale Village, about 15 miles southeast of Sunnyside, where Hyde spoke in 1932.]
[Second NOTE: If William and Carol Hyde left the annual meeting of the Eastern Coop League in 1929 as enemies of the Communists, why did he then say they had been enemies only since 1948? What exactly happened in 1948? Why was he even aware of the Eastern Coop League in 1929? Recall that the census of 1930 shows William Hyde was working at Bell Labs in New York City, which is not part of the Eastern Cooperative district based in Boston, and the Hydes did not move to New Jersey until after Ruth was born in New York in 1932.]
"From 1930 to 1942 I worked for, and with, various New York metropolitan area consumer cooperatives. [NOTE: Why did he change jobs in 1930, after the census was taken?]
"They [coops] were subject to attempts at communist infiltration almost continuously. Both Mrs. Hyde and I took our part in trying to block this. From 1939 to 1941 I was the District Sales Manager of Greater New York for the Farm Bureau Insurance Companies of Ohio (now Nationwide). No one could get an agent's contract from the companies in my district except through me. Apparently the Comrades were anxious to infiltrate the outfit because a continuous stream applied for contracts. The fact that we had no specifically Communist type trouble from any agent I appointed leads me to think that my screening was successful. In our first few years in Columbus we met a few people we suspected of Communist leanings, but we have not been aware of such since the end to the Wallace campaign." [No source given for this quotation; see above note relative to Jerry Voorhis.]
A report by Bruce Solie of the CIA generated on December 5, 1963, stated:

To:         Files
From:    Chief, Research Branch/OS/SRS
Subject: PAINE, RUTH
              nee: HYDE
              aka: Mrs. Ruth Paine
  1. FBI S.A. Cregar on December 4, 1963, confirmed that the Subject is the daughter of William Avery Hyde, SSD-157435. Cregar was furnished a copy of two 1957 investigative reports on William Avery Hyde, for lead purposes only, and was informed that Hyde was under consideration for a covert use by this Agency in Vietnam in 1957, but was not used. This information had previously been obtained from (deleted) CI/SIG.
  2. Subject is the individual who is taking care of the widow of LEE HARVEY OSWALD and has apparently been quite well known to the widow of LEE HARVEY OSWALD for an undetermined period of time. The possibility that William Avery Hyde was the father of Ruth Paine was previously brought to the attention of Mr. Papich through Mr. O'Neal, CI/SIG. The Security File of William Hyde contains a copy of a 1956 FBI investigative report (Security of Government Employees) on Sylvia Ludlow Hyde aka Mrs. John Hoke who is the sister of Ruth Paine. The file of William Hyde also contains a 1956 OSI report on Sylvia Hoke.
  3. In addition to the above, it was previously known that William Avery Hyde and wife Carol Hyde were associates in the late 1920's and later of Talbot Bielefeldt, #29931, who is currently employed by this agency in FDD. A certain amount of information concerning William Hyde, Carol Hyde, and other associates of Hyde and Bielefeldt during the latter 1920's was furnished by Talbot Bielefeldt during interviews several years ago. At that time the Bielefeldt case was under extensive investigation. 
                                                                   Bruce Solie
On April 30, 1964, Birch O'Neal generated the following document:
MEMORANDUM FOR FILE (CI/OA File 59751)
SUBJECT: Mrs. Ruth Paine nee Hyde

Shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy the press carried information concerning a Mrs. Ruth Paine who had befriended the OSWALD family. Mr. Bruce Solie, of the Office of Security, called to my attention that the Office of Security has information of possible interest concerning William A. Hyde, who had three children; namely Ruth Hyde, Sylvia Hyde Hoke and Carl Hyde. Mrs. Ruth Paine was known to have had the name Hyde prior to her marriage. On November 29, 1963, I advised Sam Papich to contact Mr. Solie of the Office of Security for information of possible interest in connection with Mrs. Ruth Paine. I indicated to Mr. Papich that the Office of Security information was of possible security significance and consideration and I was subsequently informed that the Bureau had been in touch with Mr. Solie for its information. Birch D. O'Neal Chief, CI/SIG.
[NARA CIA 1993.07.08.09.:07:31:900520]
On March 1, 1964, FBI S.A. Charles M. Beall, Jr., ascertained at CIA that its security and foreign indices did not contain any references identifiable with Michael Ralph Paine. CIA advised its only reference to Ruth Avery Hyde, nee Hyde, was set out in CIA Report prepared in 1957 on William Avery Hyde, father of Ruth. This CIA material was furnished the Bureau via Liaison on December 4, 1963, with request the CIA material not be inserted in the Bureau reports. Dallas is cognizant. [FBI 105-1717-225 -- Hosty's name on the "Searched, Indexed, Serialized and Filed April 19, 1964, FBI - Dallas" stamp on this document.]
NOTE: Birch D. O'Neal was referred to by John Newman in a 1999 presentation at JFK Lancer Conference as "the head of the mole hunting unit, CI/SIG." Searching the Mary Ferrell website for "bureau liaison" turns up one interesting connection with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960. In a memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Allen Dulles, dated April 14, 1960, Hoover referenced a previous memorandum from Dulles with an attachment signed by William K. Harvey. Hoover stated that the FBI had opened an investigation in March 1960, prior to Dulles' correspondence, on the "Committee of Friends of Cuba," which the FBI thought might be identical to Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He then mentioned the New York Times advertisement, headed "What's Really Happening in Cuba?," which listed the names of numerous people in support of Cuba's revolution, requesting "derogatory information" the CIA had on the individuals named in the ad.

Hoover's letter, which was addressed to the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans (Richard Bissell was in this post until he was fired by JFK and replaced by Richard Helms after the Bay of Pigs fiasco), contains a note that it "is being sent by Liaison at request of Bureau Liaison representative." The FBI's liaison representative to the CIA was Sam Papich.

John Newman's book, Oswald and the CIA, also mentioned this advertisement. According to H.P. Albarelli, Jr. in A Secret Order: Investigating the High Strangeness and Synchronicity in the JFK Assassination (Trine Day, 2013), the ad had been placed in the Times by Robert Bruce Taber and Richard Gibson, both former CBS news journalists. Some researchers believe that Taber's admission that he met with Oswald in Cuba in 1961 discounts Oswald's being in the USSR the entire time he claims to have been there, while others, such as Jim Hargrove, believe Taber's statement furnishes evidence that there were two Oswalds--Harvey and Lee.

Bill Simpich makes the case, however, that shortly after the Bag of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba, the FBI began a
"campaign of disruption against the FPCC.... During June, 1960, a few months after Oswald’s defection to the USSR in late 1959, J. Edgar Hoover himself sent a memo to the State Department alerting it to the possibility that an imposter was using Oswald’s identity. Hoover was tipped to the problem by a telegram from Harold F. Good at the New York field office. Former Cuban Prime Minister Tony Varona testified to a House committee that he believed Oswald was in Cuba during 1961." In his Counterpunch article, Simpich cited Athan G. Theoharis for the statement that the FBI engaged in eight separate break-ins of FPCC offices to gain evidence to use against Taber and/or his CBS colleague, Richard Thomas Gibson, a black journalist from San Francisco, who refused to furnish to the FBI the membership list of the FPCC. Therefore, operatives broke into the office to photograph a list made available by a confidential political informant whom Simpich identifies as Victor Thomas Vicente. In his 2009 book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, David Kaiser states that in July 1963 the FBI had "infiltrated an informer from the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a Puerto Rican named Victor Thomas Vicente, into Cuba, probably through Mexico City."
This ongoing campaign would have been reaching its culmination then within two months after Oswald arrival in New Orleans to work (possibly on instructions from Bobby Kennedy) with David Ferrie and Judyth Vary Baker on the bioweapon intended to give cancer to Castro, according to Baker's book, Me and Lee.

Kaiser says, however, that although Vicente met both Fidel and Che Guevara, he returned from Cuba and was debriefed by the CIA upon his return. He then set about planning a speech to be given in New York City on September 23, 1963, working with Vincent Theodore Lee, to whom Oswald had sent two letters. The first letter dated May 26, 1963, was designated Commission Exhibit #2, and the second written in reply to V.T. Lee's response, was labeled Commission Exhibit #4. This correspondence occurred only a month after Judyth met Lee in line at the New Orleans Post Office. She relates in Me and Lee (page 316) that she paid for the money order for Lee to rent the office for FPCC on May 27, and Lee explained his motives for joining FPCC and setting up a branch of the pro-Castro organization.

What is not clear is by whom Lee was being directed in this activity. It seems possible his work for the FBI could easily have been of great use by former FBI agent, Louis J. Russell, HUAC's chief investigator after 1949, to undermine the group by proving it to be a front for Communists.

Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood

From HSCA file
Though Russell's name appeared frequently in newspapers throughout the McCarthy era, he is best recognized by Watergate researchers because of the fact he was mentioned in Jim Hougan's books, Spooks and Secret Agenda, as well as in the Anthony Summers book, The Arrogance of Power. According to Summers, in fact, Richard Nixon had worked so closely with Russell prior to the 1948 HUAC hearings in exposing Alger Hiss as a Communist, that the investigator was hired by the Nixon White House during the first term and then moved in 1972 onto the payroll of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP).




Thursday, November 13, 2014

From Pacifist to Assassination Planner in One Easy Step

If we can believe what lifelong spy E. Howard Hunt told his son a short time before his death, he and his friend and colleague Frank Sturgis aka Frank Fiorini had been in contact with a covert operative (contract killer)  named David Morales in Miami in 1963. The story Morales told was that Chief of Western Hemisphere for the CIA, Bill Harvey, had chosen him for a team tasked with the murder of the President. Harvey had told Morales he had been selected by Cord Meyer, Jr., Chief of Covert Action for the CIA, and that Meyer was also working with a Texan named David Atlee Phillips and a Cuban named Antonio Veciano. Following is an excerpt from Saint John Hunt's book, Bond of Secrecy, as well as miscellaneous research relating to the names he mentioned.

Excerpt from 
BOND OF SECRECY 
by SAINT JOHN HUNT
© 2008 Saint John Hunt,
All Rights Reserved
 pages 52- 54

"Now let's understand that what I tell you must be kept in secrecy and you'll never reveal any of this without my approval. Understood?"

I nodded in agreement and then I wheeled him back to his bedroom. After making him as comfortable as I could, this is what he told me.

In 1963 my father and Frank Sturgis met with David Morales, a contract killer for the CIA at a safe house in Miami. Morales explained that he had been picked by Bill Harvey, a rogue and unstable CIA agent with a long history of black ops for a secret "off the board" assignment.

The Chain of Command, according to E. Howard Hunt 

It was Morales' understanding that this project was coming down through a chain of command which started with LBJ, [who was] then the vice President. Intrigued, my father listened on.



Harvey told Morales that he'd been brought in by Cord Meyer, a CIA agent with international connections, who in turn was working with David Phillips and Antonio Veciana. Phillips was CIA station chief in Mexico City and deeply involved in the dangerous world of the Cuban underground. Veciana was the Cuban founder of the violent anti-Castro Alpha 66 group; bent on overthrowing Castro by any means necessary. All these men shared a common ground; a hatred for Kennedy who they felt was dangerous for this country's politicalfuture, and had abandoned them in their time of need.

Cord Meyer had his own reason to hate Kennedy; his wife Mary was one of Kennedy's many mistresses and the gossip surrounding them infuriated Cord who swore revenge. (Later Mary Meyer would be mysteriously murdered and her personal diary stolen. It's interesting to note that James Angleton, chief spook of  counter intelligence was known to have broken in to her apartment and stolen the diary. The rumor was that Mary Meyer had kept detailed notes about Kennedy and perhaps had information about his death. We'll never know.)

Of the men mentioned thus far, my father knew Cord Meyer, David Phillips, Frank Sturgis and Bill Harvey. He'd never met nor heard of Morales until that night and claims he's never heard of Antonio Veciana. This seems unlikely because Alpha 66 was the leading anti-Castro faction in the Cuban underground.

David Atlee Phillips worked with my father closely and was actually recruited into the CIA by him when Phillips worked as a journalist in Santiago, Chile. When Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Russian Consulate in Mexico City in the summer of '63, it was Phillips who was station chief there. Although Phillips denied ever meeting Oswald, Antonio Veciana gave evidence that he had met with Oswald and his case officer, a man known to him only as Maurice Bishop, in Mexico City. Although unwilling to identify Phillips as Bishop, Veciana did provide a detailed description of Bishop to a sketch artist and the resulting drawing looked very much like Phillips.

I sat by my father's bedside and asked "what happened then?"

"Well, I asked them what this assignment was." Sturgis looked at Morales and then at my father and calmly said "killing that son of a bitch Kennedy!" My father said he was stunned but I don't think he would have been that surprised; getting rid of Kennedy was a common topic of conversation among the Cuban exiles. The truth of the matter is that Kennedy was hated by much of the military-industrial complex. He was viewed as soft on communism and many factions of the government, the exiles, the Mafia, and just about everyone else was looking to get Kennedy out. My father then simply asked "You guys seem to have enough people, what is it that you need me for?"

"Well," Frank said, "you're somebody we all look up to…we know how you feel about the man (Kennedy), are you with us?" My father looked around the room for a minute and said "Look, if Bill Harvey has anything to do with this, you can count me out. The man is an alcoholic and a psycho."

"You're right Eduardo", laughed Frank, "but that SOB has the balls to do it." The meeting ended; my father thought it nothing more than the usual 'death to Kennedy' ranting.

The next day when my father and I were alone in the house, we discussed ways that we could divulge certain information to Giamarco and Costner without giving anything away. My father came up with a good solution: put it in code. With that plan in mind, my father provided me with a hand written diagram outlining the chain of command, a list of people who were involved, and a descriptive time line of the events that led to the 'big event'. This was the name we used to refer to JFK's murder. He provided a code for each name such as 'Nu' for LBJ, 'Beta' for Cord Meyer and so forth.

He also wrote a few pages of background material on Sturgis, Phillips, and Cord Meyer. The reason for this was that he wanted me to type out a descriptive outline in code form and fax it to Giamarco. Hopefully it would be enough to initiate a formal agreement and a good faith payment. My father wanted $150,000. to be deposited in an account. In view of the fact that Costner and Giamarco had been dangling a multi-million dollar figure for a documentary, a book, and DVD sales and rentals, I didn't think that $150,000 was too much. I had to wait until Laura was out of the house to type it up and fax it off.

Shooter fired from grassy knoll.
Before I returned to California I had one more conversation about JFK with my father. He related to me that Oswald had in fact fired on the President that day but there was also another man, a French assassin, firing from the famous grassy knoll. The man's' name sounded something like Sarte or Satre and he had probably been recruited for the job by Cord Meyer who had connections to the Corsican underworld. In his own diagram, my father outlined 'French con. Man…grassy knoll'.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why was Cord Meyer, Jr. interested in stopping publication of Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper and Row, 1972) before it came out in 1972?

See footnote 4 to chapter 13, Henrik Kruger's Great Heroin Coup:
Prior to the publication of this book [Politics of Heroin by McCoy] on 20 August 1972, Cord Meyer, Jr., a CIA covert operations division leader, visited Harper and Row to demand the galleys. The publisher refused, subject to receipt of an official CIA request. When that came, the proofs were delivered over McCoy's objections. The agency returned them with corrections, but the publisher rejected them, and the book was published unaltered.
~~~~~
Brief history Cord Meyer
 
From a summary made  from snips taken from John Simkin's Spartacus website:
Allen W. Dulles made contact with Cord Meyer in 1951. He accepted the invitation to join the CIA. Cord was a graduate of Yale, and a darling of the East Coast elite in power at the time. Dulles told Meyer he wanted him to work on a project that was so secret that he could not be told about it until he officially joined the organization. Meyer was to work under Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA.
Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
click to enlarge
But by August, 1953, Joseph McCarthy had accused Cord Meyer of being a communist!
By 1954, Cord Meyer became disillusioned with life in the CIA. It would not be the last time. In November, 1954, Meyer replaced Thomas Braden as head of International Organizations Division. Meyer began spending a lot of time in Europe. One of Meyer's tasks was to supervise Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the United States government broadcasts to Eastern Europe.
According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) Meyer was "overseeing a vast 'black' budget of millions of dollars channeled through phony foundations to a global network of associations and labor groups that on their surface appeared to be progressive".
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Young Man on a Crusade in 1948

Time Magazine - OPINION:
"In a Drawing Room," Feb. 16, 1948 

Cord Meyer, 1948
Cord Meyer Jr., 27, is a pale young man with a preoccupied smile and wavy brown hair. His paleness and his preoccupation are the marks of war: he was very nearly killed on Guam. He lost an eye and had his face shattered when a Jap grenade exploded in his foxhole.* Since his discharge from the Marines, Cord Meyer has been a young man on a crusade. He is the president of United World Federalists, which seeks to save the world through a limited federation before an atomic war destroys it.

He has been talking night & day, at colleges, over the radio, to public audiences, to anyone and everyone who will listen. He has written a book (Peace or Anarchy) which, while not exactly a bestseller, has gone into five printings of 13,000 copies.

Last week he spoke in the graceful drawing room of Manhattan's English Speaking Union.
The middle-aged audience listened to him attentively, then engaged him in spirited debate. Cord Meyer is quick on his feet, sure of his position, talks fast, and is convinced that there is no time to lose.

The Plan. 

Cord Meyer is the son of a wealthy New York real estate man and onetime diplomat. Before World War II, he was a top honor student at Yale and editor of the Yale Lit. After he was wounded and sent home from the Pacific, he married Mary Pinchot, the comely niece of Pennsylvania's late Governor Gifford Pinchot. He had got started on his crusade when he served as "veteran aide" to Delegate Harold Stassen at the San Francisco Conference. There he saw the United Nations born. He deplored the veto, which left U.N. virtually powerless to prevent aggression.

The Hope. 

He sees no hope in U.N. as it is now, calling it "a weak league of sovereign, armed states preparing for war." As his ideas took shape, he framed a program. He wants: 1) an agreement among all nations to surrender their arms to U.N., retaining only a force big enough to keep internal order; 2) a U.N. police force to defend all nations from aggression; and 3) an Assembly acting as the world's chief legislative body, with a Security Council acting as a Cabinet.

He is not proposing a One-World government and world constitution; that would take too much time — more time, he thinks, than the world has. He is young enough to feel that his elders are timid, and mature enough to know that the present uneasy peace cannot last. And he is being heard. He disregards cynics. He thinks of himself as a practical realist and considers optimism foolish but hope necessary. "If this hope is naive," he says, "then it is naive to hope."

* His twin brother was killed on Okinawa.

~~~
CREATING A NEW WORLD ORDER IN 1950

Time Magazine - THE CONGRESS:
"World Architects," Monday, Feb. 27, 1950 

Will Clayton of Houston, TX
For a fortnight the members of the special Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee had sat with furrowed brows, listening intently to eight different proposals for taking apart and reassembling the world. By last week their files were stacked with thick mimeographed statements and their heads whirled from the barrage of testimony.

"Stalin is winning the cold war," warned white-thatched Will Clayton, onetime Under Secretary of State. "Even if we should be so fortunate as to
escape another shooting war there will hardly be any occasion for great rejoicing if we find ourselves . . . isolated politically and eco nomically, our friends picked off one by one and added to Russia's satellites . . ."


Sincerity & Good Will.

Clayton was speaking for the Atlantic Union Committee, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. Atlantic Union was a lineal descendant of Union Now, founded and expounded by Clarence Streit, longtime crusader for a union of free peoples. Its blueprint envisioned a political, military and economic federation of the original seven North Atlantic Treaty [NATO] nations (U.S., Canada, Britain, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg).

Others were working towards much the same goal by somewhat different paths:
  • ex-marine Cord Meyer Jr., whose United World Federalists was designed to transform the U.N. itself into a world government; 
  • Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, who urged the "faithful members" of U.N. to bypass the Soviet veto and go on about their pressing business; 
  • Ely Culbertson, high priest of contract bridge, who wanted an international land, sea and air force (drawn principally from small nations) to prevent aggression.
No one doubted the sincerity or good will of any of the planners. All were bold and imaginative. They had in common a mingled sense of urgency and high ideals. But their congressional audience listened with increasing skepticism.

Pertinent Questions. 

The skepticism was reinforced by Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson, who brought up some painfully realistic facts. He raised a pertinent question: "Just how far are we willing to go in compromising our way of life and our institutions?" Was the U.S. willing to agree to common citizenship, a common currency and taxes, a common standard of living within any federation? Who, he asked, could be sure that other nations would agree that the laws and institutions of the U.S. should be the basis for world government? Said Hickerson: "How far would the American people be prepared to go in altering our form of government? Are they prepared to have the representatives of the American people a minority in the parliament of such a union?"

The U.S., added Hickerson, was already moving as rapidly as practicable toward closer world relations through the Atlantic pact, ECA and the U.N. "The establishment at this time of such a federation," said Hickerson, "far from providing additional strength, could be a source of weakness and greater internal divisions."

The Senators seemed to agree. By week's end they were beginning to feel like bewildered home builders who had listened to too many architects. They limited witnesses sternly to five minutes and indicated that they would settle for a resolution pledging renewed U.S. support to the aims and ideals of U.N.—which, after all, was only five years old.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 The White Russian--A Powerful Cocktail

From: THE JFK CASE: The Twelve Who Built The Oswald Legend
(Part 6: White Russians Keep An Eye On Oswald In Dallas) By Bill Simpich

The Dallas-Fort Worth community of Soviet and Eastern European emigres - referred to as "White Russians" - took Oswald and his family under their wing upon their arrival from the USSR in May 1962. Consider the importance of White Russian defectors as spies. A re-defector like Lee Harvey Oswald was even more exotic. The ability of a defector to report what is happening behind enemy lines is the ultimate counterintelligence prize.

The White Russian community settled on using George de Mohrenschildt as Oswald's mentor, one of the few liberals in the community who enjoyed spending time with the man. This chapter will focus on de Mohrenschildt's intelligence connections with Radio Free Europe, key RFE officials Allen Dulles and Cord Meyer, and CI chief James Angleton....

Solidarists were being used by CIA in early 1963.
The Dallas White Russian community was tightly aligned with an anti-Soviet movement known by its Russian initials of "NTS" (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists). NTS was founded in 1930 by "second generation" White Russian emigres. At that time, most of them were living in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Yugoslavia is where Mr. and Mrs. Igor Voshinin met and married in early 1940 - they moved to Dallas, were active in NTS, and knew Oswald. During this era, "Solidarism" was a quasi-fascist ideology that saw corporations as an ideal and Benito Mussolini as a model of leadership.

In the 1940s, NTS was thoroughly enmeshed with Hitler's war effort. After Germany attacked the USSR during World War II, NTS was allowed to set up a Berlin headquarters and encouraged to proselytize in Soviet territories under German control among both POWs and civilians. When the tides of war shifted, NTS swung back into alliance with the Americans.

After World War II, the CIA included NTS within the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty organization. Radio Free Europe focused on the East European Soviet satellites, while Radio Liberty focused on the USSR itself. A House report described Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty as "the best known CIA proprietaries". These were pet projects of International Organizations chief Cord Meyer, who headed these radios from 1954 to 1971. Meyer consulted directly and frequently to CIA director Allen Dulles before making any controversial decisions. As described earlier in this series, CI chief Jim Angleton and Cord Meyer were the best of friends. Meyer described Angleton as his hero. They were also Legend Makers #1 and #2 for Lee Harvey Oswald, as they had very special relationships with the people who either befriended or studied Oswald.

After meeting with Meyer, Radio Liberty decreed that anyone adhering to NTS' "organizational discipline" would not be allowed to work at RL. NTS infiltrated and dominated groups that challenged its supremacy. NTS members tried to sabotage the installations and intimidate the exile staffs. Meyer saw it as part of his responsibility to "try to provide the radio with the counter-intelligence protection against this continuing intimidation...it was a never ending task".

...De Mohrenschildt had an extremely deep background with the intelligence community, going back for more than twenty years. His handler appears to have been Thomas Schreyer, identified as "the acting chief" of the Cord Meyer's International Organizations Division [IOD] back in 1956. This means that Schreyer worked very closely with Cord Meyer. [IOD merged in October 1962 with covert action staff.] In April 1963, the Domestic Operations Division asked for traces on de Mohrenschildt, with Schreyer's name provided as the source for any follow-up....

The CIA admitted before the assassination that de Mohrenschildt was "of interest" to them. CIA Dallas resident agent J. Walton Moore stayed in touch with de Mohrenschildt, which will be discussed later in this series. Covert action chief Richard Helms acknowledged that de Mohrenschildt and his wife provided useful foreign intelligence in 1957. His brother Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, described by the CIA as being "employed in a confidential capacity by the U.S. government," is said to have been one of the founders of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. A lengthy CIA-created list entitled "Companies and People Known to be Associated with de Mohrenschildt" includes only one political group: "Dallas Committee Radio Free Europe." De Mohenschildt's wife in Philadelphia, Phyllis Washington, also worked for Radio Free Europe in the early fifties.


The Radio Free Europe connection is an important link between Cord Meyer and George de Mohrenschildt. George couldn't get OSS credentials during World War II because of security disapproval. He was subjected to five separate investigations by intelligence during the 1940s and 50s. Officers like Meyer and Schreyer, however, understood the nature of his relationship with people such as the Jacqueline Bouvier family and the White Russian community. A CIA memo notes that George knew the families of the Kennedys and the Oswalds better than anyone else.

One of George's contacts exposes his hidden CIA connections. In 1954, a young oil lawyer named Herbert Itkin wrangled a meeting in Philadelphia with Allen Dulles, the first chief of Radio Free Europe and future CIA chief. Dulles set him up with a meeting with de Mohrenschildt, who told Itkin he was "from that man in Philadelphia" and that his name was Philip Harbin. William Gaudet verified at an HSCA deposition that he knew George under his alias as Philip Harbin. De Mohrenschildt's beloved and soon-to-be new wife, Jeanne, was from Harbin, China. Angleton testified that Dulles was a very close friend of his own family. Angleton had both an Itkin file and a "Mike/Portio/Haiti" file (Itkin's code name was Portio). Itkin claimed he met "Harbin" in 1954, while CIA general counsel Larry Houston claimed that he could not find any Itkin files prior to 1964 after thousands of hours of search. This was probably because Angleton's personal Itkin and Portio files were kept apart from the CIA records system, and were only discovered after Angleton was fired in 1974. All indications are that de Mohrenschildt was provided to Dulles by Angleton.

Working under the Harbin alias, de Mohrenschildt worked with Itkin in oil matters as a nonpaid, voluntary agent between 1954 to 1960, before Itkin moved on to work with another agent. Itkin's skills enabled US Attorney Bob Morgenthau to win convictions against New York political boss Carmine DeSapio and city commissioner James Marcus. Morgenthau's office described Itkin as "probably the most important informer the FBI ever had outside the espionage field. He never lied to us. His information was always accurate."

By May 1963, Itkin became the attorney for the Haitian government-in-exile. CIA documents show that Itkin's handler in 1963 was Mario Brod, who was recruited in Italy by James Angleton during World War II and had operational involvements in Haiti. Before his brother was killed, Bobby Kennedy himself was relying on mob tips from Itkin. In 1966, Itkin was reportedly researching under his code name "Portio," while Angleton held onto his private "Mike/Portio/Haiti" file. In 1968, CIRA (CI research and analysis chief) Ray Rocca swore that the "CI Staff definitely never was in contact" with Itkin. By 1971, CIRA's bird-dog investigator Paul Hartman was asking to review Itkin's CIA file, no doubt to educate himself on some fine points....

A report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations described Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Liberty as "the best known CIA proprietaries": Narration by G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel, HSCA Appendix Volumes/ HSCA Report, Volume IV, p. 3.
Cord Meyer was the division chief in charge of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty from 1954 until 1971: Puddington, p. 24.

After meeting with Meyer, Radio Liberty decreed that anyone adhering to NTS' "organizational discipline" would not be allowed to work at RL, because of NTS' history of infiltrating organizations and dominating them: Puddington, p. 162.

NTS had its headquarters near Berlin in Frankfurt: Memorandum by Thomas A. Parrott to the Special Group, 4/26/63, p. 3, Miscellaneous CIA Series / NARA Record Number: 104-10306-10024.

Meyer saw it as part of his responsibility to "try to provide the radio with the counter-intelligence protection against this continuing intimidation"...: Cord Meyer, Facing Reality, pp. 120-121.

Coffin looked back on the experience: "It was a fundamentally bad idea...we were quite naive about the use of American power.": Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York, Doubleday: 2007), p. 47.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The pattern of using secret fund-raising organizations, ostensibly set up for charitable purposes, as cover for CIA activity is so prolific that we venture to say that this pattern has in effect replaced the U.S. Constitution with the model for how the American government works today. It was what Congressman Wright Patman from Texas warned us about before his death, a cry taken up by Congressman Henry B. Gonzales--both men elected from different districts in Texas. (See Final Report of Select Committee to Study Government Operations (1976), p. 185. under the heading "Cover is Blown: The Patman and Ramparts 'Flaps'."

While helping Catherine Austin Fitts, a friend who worked in the first George Bush presidency, discover how a business she created had been destroyed by some unknown force,  another part of the pattern was disclosed. As explained in the March 30, 2012 post at Cold Case Conspiracy Update Catherine Austin Fitts was fighting the same "financial model" of government action used in killing JFK:
The NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] was set up in 1965 after President Lyndon Johnson apparently realized that his assassinated predecessor John Kennedy had appointed a close friend, William Walton, Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, to assume a covert role in making a back channel contact with Nikita Kruschev of the Soviet Union. Citing David Talbot's book, Brothers, Peter Janney reveals in his own book, Mary's Mosaic, that within days of the assassination of JFK,

Bobby and Jackie [Kennedy] asked their close friend [Walton] to quickly reschedule his artistic mission to Russia. They wanted him to deliver a special, secret message to Georgi Bolshakov, formerly a KGB agent under journalistic cover in Washington, who [sic] the Kennedys had come to rely upon when they needed to communicate with Khrushchev directly during critical moments. Indeed, Bolshakov had once been referred to by Newsweek as the "Russian New Frontiersman" because he had become so close to Bobby.... Bobby and Jackie knew that through Bolshakov their message to the Soviets would be directly communicated to Nikita Khrushchev. They wanted "the Russian who [sic] they felt best understood John Kennedy to know their personal opinions of the changes in the U.S. government since the assassination."
After passage of a federal statute setting up the NEH in 1965, President Johnson named former president of Brown University, Barnaby C. Keeney, to be its first chairman. We learn from Martha Mitchell’s Encyclopedia Brunoniana:
In 1978 it was revealed that Keeney had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was president of Brown. He admitted that he had advised the CIA in matters such as “setting up covert funding operations,” adding in explanation, “I suppose nowadays it is improper to attempt to serve your country ... but then I felt I was doing what I should.” In 1962 Keeney set up the Human Ecology Fund, which Alex Constantine describes in Virtual Government as "the financial hub of MK-ULTRA."

The Human Ecology Fund had been originally created as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology by Harold Wolff. As explained by the author of this last linked essay:
Though largely unexamined, the extent of covert CIA funding of American-funded social science research during the 1950s and 1960s was extraordinary. This unexamined state of affairs is all the more problematic considering that over three decades ago, the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities [the "Church Committee"] found that
[t]he CIA’s intrusion into the foundation field in the 1960s can only be described as massive. Excluding grants from the ‘Big Three’ – Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie – of the 700 grants over $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants the non-‘Big Three’ foundations made during this period in the field of international activities. In the same period more than one-third of the grants awarded by non-‘Big Three’ in the physical, life and social sciences also involved CIA funds.

Bona fide foundations, rather than those controlled by the CIA, were considered the best and most plausible kind of funding cover for certain kinds of operations. A 1966 CIA study explained the use of legitimate foundations was the most effective way of concealing the CIA’s hand as well as [falsely] reassuring members of funding organizations that the organization was in fact supported by private funds. The Agency study contended that this technique was ‘particularly effective for democratically run membership organizations, which need to assure their own unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.’ (US Senate 1976: 182-183) [All emphasis added by QJ]
The Chief of the Covert Action Staff at the time President Kennedy was murdered was none other than Cord Meyer, Jr. We find in top secret sanitized documents released in 1998 that Meyer was reporting to the President's PFIAB, chaired by Dr. James Rhyne Killian, former president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Killian was appointed in 1956  by President Eisenhower and served until April 1963. That same month Clark Clifford moved up from being a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to replace Killian as chairman. When President Kennedy took office in January 1961, Clark Clifford had been appointed his special counsel--the same position, incidentally, which John Dean was given in Richard Nixon's White House.

James R. Killian
 Killian only two months before his resignation had become a director at AT&T, formerly known as Bell Labs before its merger with Western Electric. It will be remembered that Ruth Paine's father, William Avery Hyde, educated as a chemical engineer, had worked in New York City at Bell Labs before the company moved many of its operations to Murray Hill, New Jersey.

After Ruth was born in 1932, at some point prior to 1935, the Hyde family had moved to Malboro Township in Monmouth County, New Jersey, approximately 40 miles from AT&T/Bell Lab's new office in Murray Hill. Bell Labs acquired the site, called the Deal Test Site, which is bounded by three major township roads, Deal Road, Whalepond Road, and Dow Avenue, in New Jersey from Western Electric in 1927. Western Electric had used part of the land since 1919. In 1979 this land, which by then totaled 208 acres, was proposed to be converted to a municipal park in the center of Ocean Township, New Jersey. The city had purchased the land five years earlier, according to Robin Goldstein's article at page 14 of the pdf. Bell Labs had sold it in 1953 to two Jersey city businessmen--George Fangmann and Walter Scott--who then leased the site to the federal government during the Korean War and during USSR's space race. The lease was not renewed after July 1, 1972.

Yet, the chemical engineer reported his occupation as insurance salesman in 1940.


James R. Killian was "so very important in setting up the national security system during the Eisenhower administration. Key player in setting up the Institute for Defense Analyses, the President's Science Advisory Committee, DARPA, a Princeton-located think tank for the NSA, MITRE and the NRO. He was a MITRE trustee and a board member of the Office of Defense Mobilization. He could also be found at MIT and Tulane and was a close associate of Vannevar Bush."

Killian's replacement as chairman of PFIAB was Clark Clifford (1906-1998). Special Counsel to the President, 1946-1950; Senior Partner, Clifford & Miller, 1950-1968; President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board member, 1961-1968, Chairman, 1963-1968; Secretary of Defense, March 1968-January 1969; Senior Partner, Clifford & Warnke, 1969-1991. 

"Clifford recalled that for him the two most valuable members of PFIAB were scientists Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land camera, and Dr. William Baker, who brought to the PFIAB the most recent scientific knowledge and discoveries bearing on the technical acquisition of intelligence information. (Counsel to the President: A Memoir, New York: Random House, 1991, pages 350 ff.)"