Communists and Anti-Communists Meet Under Ground

In our last post, we moved from Palo Alto, California, where Ruth Hyde Paine's father grew up, and where her mother's family settled shortly before the two young people met and received baccalaureate degrees from Stanford in the mid-1920s. The reason for the abrupt departure of chronology was the need to discuss a memorandum dated 21 Dec.1955 that referred to acquaintances of  Ruth's father, William A. Hyde during the days he had been at Stanford:

Re: Orr, Paul & Violet
William A. Hyde was in Washington this last week-end, visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and John Hoke, 763 Kennedy, N.E. The latter invited [REDACTED] and me over to meet him on Saturday night, 17 December, since we three were friends at Stanford. 

This 1955 memorandum from Stanford graduate and CIA Foreign Document specialist Talbot Bielefeldt to the the man in charge of researching the background of CIA employees and their contacts remained classified until, "sanitized" in 1998, it was deemed safe for public consumption. We wanted to explore the various divisions within the CIA and the background of the personnel before revealing what our own research shows about the persons being discussed.

(Read Part I, Part II, PART III, Part IV, Part V)
 
Part VI
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture

By Linda Minor

Preparing to Enter "the Real World"

Stanford as it was in 1923

The Stanford campus had been new and polished in 1923-26, when these young students graduated and set out to change the world. By 1955, while Senator Joseph McCarthy was cranking up his Red Scare tactics, Talbot was reporting to Bruce Solie, of the CIA's Security staff, about a recent meeting involving some of his closest friends from those college days.

As a major in political science, Talbot joined Alpha Pi Zeta, a fraternity for history, economics, and political science majors, and he was involved in a debating society, one of whose sponsors was Dr. Yamato Ichihashi, a Japanese-American professor who, though he lived almost all his life in the United States, would be interned for three years in "relocation centers" during WWII. The Japanese camps were set up at about the same time Talbot was a student at the Japanese Language School at Berkeley, before it was moved to Boulder. It was Dr. Ichihashi who had sponsored Talbot's summer in Japan in 1924; the tour was made available every year for Dr. Ichihashi's students. Buddy Tseuneo Iwata, for example, made the tour in 1938. He would be released from internment in 1942 in order to teach Japanese at the Japanese Language School in Boulder taught by Florence Walne until her untimely death in 1946.

Talbot's return from Yokoham in 1924 (click to enlarge).

Little did Talbot know when he graduated in 1925 that Stanford's most illustrious alumnus would be elected U.S. President three years later, though he must have known that Hoover, whose family owned a home just south of the campus, that he had been serving as Secretary of Commerce since 1921. In fact, Talbot graduated from Stanford the same year as Hoover's eldest son. In their sophomore year, both had been nominated to serve on behalf of their class for different offices.

The Cosmopolitan Club, which brought in noted speakers with an international point of view, had been created by Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, with the help of Dr. Ichihashi. The club was also sponsored and promoted on campus by Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, who was the university's president during the years Talbot and his friends were students. Wilbur had taken a leave of absence in 1917 to serve as Herbert Hoover’s second in command in the Wartime Food Administration, and would also depart for Washington in 1929 to serve as the newly elected President Hoover’s Secretary of the Interior. These connections undoubtedly led to the promise of important, if perhaps secret, government work for Talbot Bielefeldt and his colleagues.

Ruth's mom, 1924

Talbot may not have known W.A. Hyde, who was two years ahead of him in Stanford's chemistry department, but he knew Carol Hyde (class of 1924) from the Cosmopolitan Club. Carol, like her husband, was Phi Beta Kappa, the national honorary scholarship fraternity, but her primary interests were music-related. She joined the Schubert Club and the Music Club. Thus, it would have been Carol's motivating influence on daughter Ruth which involved her in folk singing and dancing, an activity in which she was engaged when she met Michael Paine in 1957.

The other two students mentioned in the subject line of Bielefeldt's 1955 memo may indicate whom Talbot  meant by "we three were at Stanford together," although, if that is the case, it is unclear why a name was redacted from the body of the memo (at top of this post). The redacted name of the person invited by John Hoke to his home could not have been either Paul Wright Orr or his wife, Violet May Balcomb Orr, who lived in California. To whom was he referring, and why was the subject of the memo seemingly so unrelated?

Paul Orr, as we observe from the bio clipped from the Stanford yearbook, served in the Cosmopolitan Club's cabinet with Talbot during their sophomore and junior years. Violet was treasurer of the club during their senior year when Talbot was also a cabinet member. Therefore, these three students were likely somewhat close throughout their last three years at the university. In addition, both Paul and Talbot were in the Sequoia Club together, the Sequoia being Stanford's quarterly literary magazine. The Orrs, like the Hydes, married in 1926, though Talbot remained single for ten years, later marrying a woman he met in New York.

The year was 1926 when all five students departed California. It was the jazz age, and all America was tuned into radio and Victrola recordings of Bye Bye Blackbird, a fitting melody for young men and women poised to enter the "real world."

William A. and Carol Hyde in New York

William Avery Hyde (W.A.), the oldest of the five, had not been a member of any clubs. In fact, W.A.'s  photo did not appear in the Quad yearbook at any time while he was a student, although his name was shown in the 1923 and 1924 yearbooks as a member of Phi Lambda Upsilon, the honorary chemistry fraternity, and also in 1924 as a Phi Beta Kappa honoree. I have not been able to find any photograph of either him or his father, who was a municipal leader in Palo Alto for many years, an admirer of the Progressive movement of Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

It is likely through W.A.'s excellence in chemistry that he secured employment in New York City at the AT&T's Bell Laboratories shortly after his 1923 graduation, coupled with influence possibly from his well-known father or uncle, James McDonald Hyde, who had known Herbert Hoover's brother Tad Hoover for many years. W.A. and Carol Hyde set up housekeeping together in 1926 in New York as W.A. used his chemistry degree to get a job in the telephone industry in which A.T. & T. had a legal monopoly.

First public demonstration of "television" at Bell Labs

We can only wonder whether W.A. was present on-site when then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's live image was broadcast to Bell Labs in New York from Washington, D.C., the first public demonstration of how television would work. It was one of many promises of what the future of technology held in store for the world.

Hoover held the Commerce position in the Cabinets of both Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge throughout the 1920's until his own election to the Presidency in 1928. From Hoover's Quaker upbringing, his education at Stanford and his mining career, he had acquired world view which today seems alien from our knowledge of what Republicans have become over the last 80 years or so. His philosophy was one of optimism and cooperation, believing:

...that the American economy would be healthier if business leaders worked together, and with government officials and experts from the social sciences, in a form of private-sector economic planning. This stance led him to support trade associations—industry-wide cooperative groups wherein information on prices, markets, and products could be exchanged among competitors—which Hoover saw as a middle way between competition and monopoly. He insisted, though, that participation in these associations remain voluntary and that the government merely promote and encourage, rather than require, their establishment.

40 Morningside at 118th, NY

The Hydes remained in New York through at least the birth of their youngest child, a second girl, whom they name Ruth Avery Hyde, who entered the world in 1932. Their home at that time was an apartment at 40 Morningside Avenue, adjacent to the Church of Notre Dame near the campus of Columbia Teachers College. The building faced out on a beautiful park, perfect for Carol to take the children for a stroll while William made a short commute to Bell Labs in downtown, but still on the West Side.

The 1930 census record, which shows their address, also indicates that the Hydes had a boarder living with them that year--none other than future CIA foreign document expert Talbot Bielefeldt, whom we met earlier!

Talbot Bielefeldt lived with William A. and Carol Hyde in New York, 1930 (click to enlarge).

How did they meet ... and where?

Talbot, who by then had a degree in political science and possibly a master's degree from Columbia, listed his occupation in 1930 as a bill clerk at a collection agency. He was also enumerated that year at his parents' home in Placentia, California, where they, too, listed him as a "collector at a collection agency (code 6792)". He continued to have a separate listing at his parents' citrus ranch address in the Placentia directory, though no occupation was shown until he was appointed the town's Postmaster by President Roosevelt in 1936. Where was Talbot during these years from 1930 to 1936 which led up to his appointment?

See Mike Wallace's 1957 interview of Browder.

Could he have been working under cover even then for counter intelligence, possibly in the guise of a clerk at the Retail Credit agency which reported back to FBI, as we shall later observe. Equally intriguing is the fact that he met his wife, Eugenie Pfeil, news editor for the weekly Bronxville Review, during the time that Earl W. Browder, general secretary of the Community Party USA, lived in Yonkers with his Russian-born wife, Raissa, about five miles from the Pfeils' home. Was Talbot part of a secret agency within the Hoover administration, years even before the Office of Strategic Services was created? Could he have had Communists like Browder under surveillance in Yonkers, and in the process met his future wife?

Paul W. Orr and Violet Balcomb Orr

Formerly classified files not released until the 1980's inform us that, as early as 1935 the FBI was aware that Violet Orr was working at San Francisco's 1026 Market Street office of he American League Against War and Fascism, a Communist group in which Elizabeth Turrill Bentley, "the Red Spy Queen," was a member as early as 1932. She was studied by Mary Ferrell, who added her to her timeline of Communist activities leading up to the assassination in 1963. Ferrell compared Bentley to Hede Massing, formerly the wife of Gerhart Eisler and the controller of Russian underground in Washington, D.C., which included Alger Hiss. Ferrell also added to her timeline a contact in San Francisco called Volkov, who may well have been the first husband of Elena Volkov aka Helen Silvermaster. We mention the fact that Elizabeth Bentley, in fact, died of a fast-growing cancer just ten days after President Kennedy was shot.

Ferrell also recounted in her chronology the fact that Alger Hiss, who had been Hede Massing in 1935, was married in 1929 to a woman named Priscilla Fansler, born in Evanston, Illinois in 1903. In 1930 this young couple was living and working in Washington, D.C. where he was licensed to practice law, and she obtained a job as a researcher for the government; they lived at 1251 30th Street, N.W., an upscale Georgetown address. A decade later they were in the same neighborhood at 3415 Volta Place. Ferrell's comments relative to Ruth Paine after Fansler's name are unclear.

The next mention of Bentley in Ferrell's timeline is in 1938, when she joined the Jacob Golos network he controlled under his corporation called World Tourists, Inc. in New York City. Not until 1941 did Bentley identify Irving Kaplan, by then working in Washington, D.C. for the War Production Board, as a member of her Communist cell within the Silvermaster group. Shortly after that label was placed on him, the FBI was conducting both "technical" and physical surveillance of Irving Kaplan and his wife, Dorothy Friedland Kapan, and, as a result, the FBI report mentioned the Kaplans' connection to Violet Orr, whom the FBI counter-intelligence branch considered "a prominent Communist." This information was part of the FBI's BUFILE 65-56402, tucked away in a report prepared by J. Edgar Hoover's assistant D. Milton "Mickie" Ladd, the son of deceased Senator Edwin Ladd of North Dakota. But the report was not compiled until 1946, when it was sent to officials in Truman's administration.

We can only speculate about who it was who opened an investigation of the office where Violet Orr worked ...in 1935, when she opened the letter addressed to Dorothy Friedland Kaplan. This branch of the League was also connected to Russian-born Helen (Vera Witte) Silvermaster, daughter of Sergei Yulyevitch Witte. Helen came to America in 1923 by way of China with her first husband. She lived in San Francisco and gave birth to a son, Anatole Boris Volkov, shortly before she began living with the notorious Soviet spy, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster.

The FBI investigation of Chambers' allegations may have been requested by FDR's Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle after he was introduced to Whittaker Chambers by Isaac Don Levine in September 1939, but that was four years after Violet was in San Francisco. According to the testimony Levine gave to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, Chambers had left the Communist Party in 1937 and lived in hiding within the United States until the news of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 scared him to the point of taking action. Only then did he seek out Levine, a journalist, to whom he told his confidential story in the hope he could reveal what he knew to President Roosevelt about the infiltration of Communists within the U.S. Government. A few months later, Levine took him to the home of Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle at a home he rented from Secretary of War Henry Stimson, but after listening for several hours to Whittaker Chambers, Berle never contacted either of the two men again. Levine assumed the matter had died.

However, in Adolph Berle's testimony before HUAC, he related what he had done in response to the information he had been furnished by Chambers. He "caused the Department [of State] to establish very close relations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation," and he apparently instigation the organization of a division called the "Foreign Activities Correlation Division," which following the National Security Act of 1947 merged into another division within the State Department. He also helped to enact the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Berle left the State Department after a "showdown" with Dean Acheson in 1944.

Acheson, however, had resigned from FDR's Treasury department in protest when the administration remained the gold backing on the dollar. However, in 1940 Acheson was brought back into the administration within the State Department. It was in that role that haggling took place between him and Berle, who until that point was in charge of intelligence matters within the State Department. Berle claimed to have been ousted from his role in the State Department after telling FDR what he had been told by Whittaker Chambers, and said that the substitution by Acheson  "worried" him, telling HUAC he was also quite concerned about leaks of secret information from the State Department that he had noticed appearing in news columns, especially with regard to the Yalta Conference.

Admiral William D. Leahy with Joint Chiefs from military

The FBI Report was transmitted to Admiral William D. Leahy and Secretary of State James Byrnes, and Attorney General Tom Clark in 1946. That was, coincidentally, the same year Richard Nixon was elected to Congress ... in the same district where Talbot Bielefeldt had been Postmaster during the late 1930's. It may be recalled that Admiral Leahy (equivalent to what is now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was related to Tennent H. "Pete" Bagley on his mother's side, that Pete's father, in addition to being brother-in-law to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, rose to the rank of vice admiral before his retirement in 1947.

Violet at American League Against War and Fascism, 1935

Based on what Berle called the "very close relationship" he had promoted with the FBI after meeting Chambers in 1939, Special Agent R.C. Taylor in the San Francisco FBI office had Dorothy Friedland Kaplan (inset to the right), under surveillance when he made a report on June 29, 1941. However, I have been unable to discover why the Bureau would have opened the captioned case file, "Paul Wright Orr, with aliases, et al., Internal Security - C."

Taylor's report, no copy of which has surfaced, ostensibly contained documentation for the stated conclusions that:

• Violet Balcomb Orr was an associate of Dorothy Friedland in March 1935 (both referred to as "professional grafters"); 
• that Violet succeeded Dorothy as secretary of the American League Against War and Fascism (1026 Market Street in San Francisco) in April; and
• in that capacity, Violet was in receipt of a letter sent by the head of the CPUSA Earl Browder from New York to Friedland at that San Francisco address. 

What is not clear from the report is who requested such surveillance in 1935. Could surveillance have been opened much earlier by someone on the staff of President Herbert Hoover, whose Labor Secretary William Doak had charged that protests against the President's policies were not only politically motivated but inspired by Communists, specifically by an organization called "Friends of the Soviet Union"? Hoover's Secretary of Labor Doak attempted to connect John J. Ballam, the organizer of that group to Earl Browder, chairman of the CPUSA as early as December 1931 (see news clipping at left). If so, it appears that J. Edgar Hoover continued to have his agents following up on these cases, even after FDR took office in 1933.

Background on the Orrs

Violet's father, Jean Bart Balcomb, according to the 1920 census, was a civil engineer and designer of a hydroelectric and irrigation project in Oregon before moving to Palo Alto, where he died in 1927. According to Violet's Oral History (digitized on 24 separate MP3 recordings), conducted under a 1976 oral history project by California Historical Society documenting lives of female labor activist/  radicals in California, Violet and Paul Orr moved to New York City in 1926 to work on their master's degrees at Columbia Teachers College, where Violet taught during 1927-28 term in the department of education-psychology.

At the conclusion of the spring of 1928 term, she mentions on the oral history tape discussions they had with some Columbia professors who had recently returned from the Soviet Union, who  encouraged the Orrs to go there. Violet discusses the time spent in Leningrad and Moscow, but unfortunately, there is no transcript.

Public Immigration records reveal that, upon their return from the Soviet Union via Naples, in 1930, they gave their destination address in the U.S. as 40 Morningside Avenue in New York City--the address of the same apartment building in which W.A. and Carol Hyde shared a unit with Talbot Bielefeldt during that same year (see census record above). It was at approximately the same time that Elizabeth Bentley returned from her first trip to Italy, boarding a ship in Southampton.

Could Bentley Have Connected with Our Stanford Grads?

The next year Bentley returned from Naples, and in 1934 from Trieste--on the last occasion giving her U.S. address in care of  "Dr. Turrill" in Kent, Connecticut. In 1946 she flew by Colonial Airlines from Montreal, giving her address as the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn. In 1947, Bentley made numerous trips to the Caribbean, returning from Puerto Rico in March, and again in August and November 1947 from Bermuda--all three times flying Pan Am into LaGuardia and giving the same hotel as her address.

It was during these years also that Sir William Stephenson, head of the British Security Coordinator (BSC) office was helping FDR's intelligence man, William J. Donovan, appointed Coordinator of Information in the summer of 1941, to construct America's first intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. Could Bentley have, in fact, been working undercover for the government? Camp X was located near Montreal, and Stephenson also had his hideouts in Jamaica and Bermuda, as we have previously researched at this blog (search 'Stephenson' in search block at right, orange frame).

When we look at Miss Bentley's Vassar yearbooks, her name appeared in the class of 1930 with that of Jane Acheson, daughter of Secretary of State Dean Acheson. We can only wonder at this point whether the two young women were well acquainted, if at all.


Although several documents have leaked out, someone in the government is still hiding information about the following persons:

1. William and Carol Hyde--parents of Ruth Avery Hyde Paine;
2. Talbot Bielefeldt--a known foreign documents expert trained in 1941 by a Naval Reserve Intelligence unit absorbed into the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947;
3. Paul and Violet Orr--their mutual friends who were considered to be prominent members of the Communist Party.

You may recall that Talbot's 1936 wedding announcement stated he, too, had taught in American schools in "the Orient, in China and Japan." We know about his short visit to Japan in 1924 before graduation. Yet we have found nothing to confirm independently any travel in China. Talbot Bielefeldt would have met his wife, Eugenie Pfeil while the former Stanford students were all in New York City. She was at Barnard, located next to Columbia (in the Morningside Heights neighborhood) at the same time the Californians were all there. Is it possible those missing years in the early 1930's he too was abroad? Had he possibly met Elizabeth Bentley while she was a graduate student at Columbia, living also in Morningside Heights?

The archives of the California Historical Society relates:

As a Communist Party activist, Violet Orr filled many positions in Northern and Southern California: as an organizational secretary in Oakland in the early 1930s; a candidate for the California State Assembly from Richmond (1934); a laundry worker and labor organizer in San Francisco (1935-1937); and an advertising and circulation manager of the People's World in San Francisco and Los Angeles (1937-1946). Throughout this period, she played an energetic role in California's radical print culture, not only as a manager of the People's World, but also as a founder of the San Francisco laundry workers' newspaper, the Shake Out; a contributor to the Western Worker; and a leafleteer among Richmond refinery workers. During the 1934 General Strike, the Orrs' Point Richmond home was ransacked by vigilantes. After World War II, Violet and Paul Orr worked as school teachers in Oregon, returning to California in 1951 after losing several jobs in the early years of the post-war Red Scare. They continued to feel the strain of rising anti-communist anxiety in Pasadena, where Paul was fired from his job at the California Institute of Technology for refusing to disavow his Communist Party membership. In Pasadena, Violet was active in the Methodist Church and in various peace movements. She and Paul co-authored a utopian novel, 1993, the World of Tomorrow, which was published by Pacific Progress Publishers in 1968.

At the time the People's World was launched, Time Magazine reported (1/17/1938, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p34):

Last week Harrison George, who spent 1918-23 in Leavenworth Prison for too violent pacifism, launched the San Francisco daily People's World on $33.000 raised by California Communists. After Chicago's Midwest Daily Record gets under way February 12, People's World will be the western link in a cross-country chain of Communist papers anchored to New York's Daily Worker. Almost bare of advertising, the first week's issues of People's World gave 20,000 readers a generous three cents' worth of bellicose headlines about "SHIPOWNERS PLOT LOCKOUT" and "Portrait of a Fink." Two of its six pages were crammed with fighting Left editorials. Said one: "If you want a reason for a new daily newspaper, all you have to do is to look at the ones you have. . . . The economic royalists have your daily information sewed up."

The following excerpt appeared science fiction writers' catalog after publication of the Orrs' 
1968 book.

The Orrs wrote and self-published this book, whose complete title was 1993: the world of tomorrow; timely look into the future. Printed in Altadena, Ca. in 1968--thirteen years after Paul Orr was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer any questions, it reflects how the Orrs saw what America would be like in thirty years.

Paul Orr takes the Fifth.

After refusing to testify in HUAC hearings in 1955, Paul Orr was fired from the job he held as supervisor in charge of the biology department stock room at Cal Tech. Violet was also  fired from her teaching job in McMinnville, Ore., in the early 1950s. Directories show that Paul and Violet continued to live in the Pasadena area, where he worked as a salesman for J.R. Watkins natural household products. Quite a step down, or up, depending on one's angle of perspective.

Why did he refuse to talk? Was he trying to protect the Hydes and Bielefeldt? Or, had the Orrs been working undercover for the Herbert Hoover administration against the Communist Party during and after their two-year sojourn to Soviet Russia in the late 1920's? Did they take oaths of secrecy that forbade them from talking about what they did? Were they still in touch with the Hydes and with Talbot and his wife up to and including the year 1955?

Research by A.J. Weberman 

Other researchers have written about the Hyde family connections to intelligence, but none of them have yet discovered the full story. For example, A.J. Weberman wrote:

The father of Ruth Paine, William Hyde, had contact with the CIA and the CIA's Office of Security 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.

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. Mother and I entered the meeting knowing very little about Communists, and left as their enemies, which we have been ever since 1948. From 1930 to 1942 I worked for, and with, various New York metropolitan area consumer cooperatives. They 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." [QJ: No footnote for source of this quote!]

 … 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….

From FBI McAvoy Report on Sylvia Hyde Hoke

According to Herbert Philbrick, the mother of Ruth Hyde Paine, a Unitarian Minister, Mrs. Carol E. Hyde, was a radical: "Ruth Paine's mother, Mrs. Carol E. Hyde, was active in the Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom, one of the very first fronts I came to know through the Cambridge Youth Council." (If this was correct, why did the CIA consider her husband for employment)? The FBI stated that Carol E. Hyde was insane, and had been institutionalized for mental illness. J. Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission was informed that these reports were Secret. The FBI also discovered that Carol E. Hyde had allegedly admitted to neighbors that she was a communist….

The sister of Ruth Paine, Sylvia Ludlow Hyde Hoke (born October 2, 1929), worked at the Labor Department from 1949 to 1953. She started working at the CIA in 1954. Her cover was Personnel Research Technician, Placement and Employee Relations Division, Director of Civilian Personnel, Headquarters, Department of the Air Force, Washington, D.C. Marina Oswald told this researcher in 1994: "Ruth Paine never mentioned her sister was in the CIA." The Sylvia Hyde Security File 348 201 was held by the Office of Security, Security Analysis Group. On June 15, 1955, this CIA Official Routing Slip from Bruce Solie was sent to (Deleted) whose initials were "wmw"- "Remarks: Please have file set up on Sylvia Hyde Hoke nee Hyde MS 8201."

 … On March 21, 1956, the Department of the Air Force issued Sylvia Hoke a Final Secret Clearance which remained in effect until May 31, 1957, six months after the investigation by OSI, at which time Sylvia Hyde resigned her cover employment with the U.S. Air Force to accompany her husband overseas to Germany. As of 1965 the above clearance was still in effect. Sylvia Hyde Hoke was granted a Top Secret Clearance from the Agency for International Development on April 17, 1956. On September 20, 1956, and on September 21, 1956, the CIA noted that Sylvia Hyde Hoke's name appeared in FBI Reports about her father, William A. Hyde….

"Hoke's mother-in-law is Helen Hoke Watts, who is a partner in a New York publishing firm with Dorothy Wilson, aka Dorothy Wilson Seligson, aka Mrs. Lou Seligson, who has been identified as a member of the Communist Party. Wilson is known to have been in contact with Isadore Gibby Needleman concerning financial payments received by her from Bernard Geis (1962 to 1963)." Gibby Needleman was an attorney who represented the Amtorg Trading Corporation, the registered Russian Trade Agency in the United States….

Ruth Paine's brother-in-law, John Lindsey Hoke, (born June 26, 1925, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), worked for the American Automobile Association from 1951 to 1957. He accepted an appointment with the International Cooperation Administration (the predecessor of the Agency for International Development) on February 4, 1956, as a "audio visual consultant (regional) to be assigned to the U.S. Operations Mission (USOM), Panama City, Panama." John Lindsey Hoke told the Deputy Director of Communications of the International Cooperation Administration, Gale Griswold, that, "while assigned in Latin America he had been requested, and did, intelligence type work for the American Embassy." Gale Griswold did not know for whom John Lindsey Hoke worked, or what his job was. On June 24, 1957, John Lindsey Hoke was transferred to Paremaribo, Surinam, where he worked with the International Cooperation Administration's Office of Program Support, Communications Research Division. One of his family members could not adapt to the field and Hoke returned to Washington, D.C. where he worked with the Agency for International Development in the Office of Program Support, Communications Research Division. Ruth Paine stated, "You want to know why he left - his wife couldn't stand Surinam." A notation in Hoke's Naval Intelligence File was "Mrs. Van Sast, CIA, on September 25, 1962, called and wanted to know Hoke's TS clearance and basis." On June 30, 1963, Hoke terminated his employment with AID, no reason given….

Agency For International Development personnel and security records reflected that Congressman Porter Hardy, Chairman, Subcommittee on Government Operations, held hearings on John Lindsey Hoke on August 13, 1962, that produced evidence that Hoke seemed to be serving two masters, in connection with a solar-powered boat project between AID and Hoffman Electronics Corporation of California under circumstances which Congressman Hardy described as "collusion." Hoffman's president denied company profit on the contract. Hoffman "denied banality and explained false limousine fares covered purchases." A newspaper clipping, undated, Washington Daily News, stamped September 25, 1962, reflects results of a committee hearing, that caption read "Aid Official Has Wings Clipped." This article charged that Hoke was the promoter of a project to finance a solar powered boat for use in Surinam while at the same time he was planning to "make personal profit from the venture." On November 9, 1962, Assistant United States Attorney, Fredrick G. Smith declined prosecution in the case on the grounds that violation of Federal laws by Hoke were merely a technical nature. Hoke was embittered over the way this Congressional investigation was handled….

Ruth Paine visited the Hokes in August 1963. In August 1963 Ruth Paine was in Washington D.C. to attend a mass civil rights march. [WCE 1983 page 7] Ruth Paine described her trip in a letter to Marina: "Tomorrow we and the children will go to Baltimore, Maryland, where Michael's brother and wife live. We will spend one day there and then we will go back further to Washington, where we will stay with sister until Thursday. Then back to Paoli again, where we will wait for my father. He will be here with us for two days. I expect to be in Paoli until September 10, 1963, and then to go to Ohio and Indiana, where our relatives and friends live, and to arrive in New Orleans on the 20th..." [WCE 78 p253] When Hoke's Request for Liaison Approval was renewed on August 13, 1964, it was identical to the others except for a block stamp that read "On August 20, 1964, Subject's Security Officer advised that Subject was cleared for access to classified information up to and including Top Secret TERMINATED June 30, 1963. Return, no action."

… Ruth Paine claimed her first meeting with OSWALD happened purely by chance. Michael Paine said he met Everette Glover at the Unitarian Church. Everette Glover asked him if I wanted to meet a Marine who had defected, then redefected, from the Soviet Union. Michael Paine: "I thought, 'Oh boy, that sounds interesting.' It never struck me too odd that he should be allowed to come home. To be allowed back would be a feather in the cap of the United States. So I didn't have trouble. Without asking him, I assumed that was why he was so readily allowed back. I expected to find him politically interesting. And I didn't find him that way. He was very different from the kinds of people who had come to talk to my father. He didn't like complexities."

Michael Paine did not attend Everette Glover's party, but Ruth Paine did. In July 1993 Ruth Paine stated: "This whole thing is still very painful. Kennedy was the first President I ever voted for who won. I had no association with the Dallas White Russian community. I did not know DeMohrenschildt. The party was put on by Everette Glover. I sang English Madrigals with Everette. That was the only time I met DeMohrenschildt. A colorful fellow, though."

It was pointed out to Ruth Paine that the HSCA linked her father to George DeMohrenschildt. Ruth Paine: "Well it might be, you know, things happen."

Barbara LaMonica, Steve Jones and Carol Hewett

Article "The Paines," in the Fourth Decade, May 1996.


Violet's name was listed as a teacher in the San Francisco Workers' School, according to HUAC hearings in 1954. In testimony, one witness said she was a Communist.

Miscellaneous Notes

Below are a few tidbits of information which do not fit into the above narrative. They are included here only as unrelated footnotes which may be found of interest to some readers.

1. Only two weeks after the Kennedy assassination, December 5, 1963, Bruce Solie (of the Security Analysis Group, SAG) felt it necessary to inform the Chief in the Office of Security, Security Research Staff (OS/SRS) of Ruth Hyde Paine's travel during the preceding summer:



What was the "Bielefeldt case" investigated by CIA?

2. When I searched the term "Chief, Security Research Staff" in the Mary Ferrell database, it returned an interesting file from the same era in which the Orrs were traveling in the Soviet Union, one pertaining to an Austrian actress named Hedwig "Hede" Manning, the wife of Rutgers professor, Dr. Paul Wilhelm Massing, which was flagged with a cautionary note dated 12 February 1965, apparently by Morse Allen. Ms. Manning defected from the Soviet underground in East Germany to testify on behalf of the FBI in the Alger Hiss trial in 1949. She first came to the United States in 1926, but acted as a Soviet spy while here from 1929-1938, when she defected. She wrote a book published in 1951 entitled This Deception.

During the years Hede Manning was under surveillance, prior to creation of the CIA, reports were signed by Special Agent C. Donald Dudley of the FBI, who by 1960 was officially working for the CIA and living in Silver Spring, MD.




3.  In 1959, according to John Newman, Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK, Robert L. Bannerman was Deputy Director of Security, and Bruce Solie and Paul Gaynor worked on his staff (p. 57).

4.  The university’s first president, David Starr Jordan, a graduate of Cornell, had been recruited from Indiana University. He was a member of the American Peace Society and a supporter of the League of Nations, and he spoke often at Stanford’s Cosmopolitan Club. This organization first began in 1903 and spread to other campuses to bring together “in one brotherhood men from different countries, to learn the customs, viewpoints, and characteristics of other nationalities, to remove racial prejudices, and to establish international friendships.” It was akin to Andrew Carnegie’s endowment for international peace movement.

5.  Silvermaster was living in Oakland at the time of the 1930 census, giving his occupation as professor at a private school, after having taking his oath of citizenship in San Francisco in 1927. In 1946 "Dr. N. Gregory Silvermaster" was shown as an employee of the War Assets Administration (statistics and progress reports division) in Washington, D.C., whose head was Quartermaster General Edmund B. Gregory. The War Assets Administration itself fell under the umbrella in 1946 of the Office of  War Mobilization and Reconstruction, whose director of Contract Settlement was H. Chapman Rose. By 1962, Rose was Richard Nixon's tax attorney.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Several years ago while working on a totally separate project, I came across the War Assets Administration and wrote the following:

Bob Prescott of Flying Tigers

In November, 1944 Robert Prescott had met with a group of Los Angeles businessmen in Acapulco, Mexico, including one of Edwin Pauley's fellow UC Berkeley regents, Samuel B. Mosher, who wanted to establish an air freight line along the U.S. and Mexican west coast, to be called Aero-Azteca. The investors included Signal Oil Company. They agreed to form a syndicate, with Mosher's group matching whatever Prescott could raise. Prescott found 14 Navy surplus cargo aircraft from the War Assets Administration and collected cash from friends from the American Volunteer Pilots unit (AVP, popularly known as the "Flying Tigers") who had flown with him in China. This group of American civilians who fought with Chiang Kai-Shek in China before the U.S. entered the war... had an important role in the setting up what William Casey would later call an "off-the-shelf" method of financing covert operations for the CIA and other black operations not disclosed to Congress.

What is not mentioned at the Flying Tiger history website linked above is that pilots were known to fly opium for the Kuomintang to put money in the coffers of the Nationalist Chinese Army. Documentation for this fact was given in my 2002 essay at footnote 11.

The Research That Broke Ground on the Hydes

The first experts on the subject of Ruth Hyde were recognized by respected researcher, the late George Michael Evica in his groundbreaking book published by Trine Day.

Excerpt from

A CERTAIN ARROGANCE

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

284 - A Certain Arrogance

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.

285

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,

286 - A Certain Arrogance

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

287

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.

288 - A Certain Arrogance

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


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

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.

336 - A Certain Arrogance

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

A Generation's Buried Secrets Uncovered

Bagley's testimony at HSCA

Every generation has its own secrets it would like to keep buried. What do those secrets reveal about our forefathers? Were they complicit in high crimes or only misdemeanors? Did they have good intentions that, only in retrospect, appear to be unforgivable? There were many secrets buried in the backyards of Tennent "Pete" Bagley's family members. Not even he knew what they were, because his many uncles had undoubtedly taken oaths of confidentiality not to discuss their business with family members without clearances. Pete must have wondered about such secrets before he would come face-to-face with the biggest test of his career. 

On June 8, 1962, Yuri Nosenko, a security officer in Geneva with the Soviet delegation attending a disarmament conference, passed a note to an American diplomat, who immediately contacted the second secretary at the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. That diplomat was actually Pete Bagley, then 36-years-old, a C.I.A. agent clandestinely assigned to the  Soviet division. 

(Read Part I and Part II, PART III, Part IV)
 
Part V
LEE H. OSWALD AND RUTH HYDE PAINE:
The Big Picture

By Linda Minor

One Memorandum Dredges Up Much History

Memo to Mr. Bielefeldt, C/FDD at CIA

Approximately six weeks after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas, Lee H. Wigren of C/SR/CI/ Research section the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) typed a memo addressed to the attention of "Mr. Bielefeldt," in the CIA section called C/FDD -- the Foreign Documents Division.
Wigren's research department for counterintelligence (CI) was ultimately headed by Tennent "Pete" Bagley:

Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia [SR] division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time [March 1959] that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.

Pete Bagley's Baggage: Uncle Josephus

Pete Bagley, CIA

In 1950, when he joined the CIA, Pete Bagley was a youthful 26 years old. He undoubtedly had been groomed from birth for the role he was to play in international spy games. His given names came from his mother's father, Tennent Harrington, cashier of the Colusa County Bank in California. As a teen, his mother, Marie Louise Harrington, traveled frequently with with her maternal aunt and uncle, Commander William D. Leahy, to Washington, D.C., and was introduced to an array of naval officers there.

Although she may have met Lieutenant Commander David Worth Bagley, whom she married in 1918, in Washington, one wedding  announcement indicates they had in fact met in Newport, R.I., the upper crust resort to which Marie Louise had traveled with a paternal aunt and uncle, Admiral Albert Parker Niblack.

In Pete's parents' wedding announcement in the Washington Post (right) toward the end of WWI, the groom, David Worth Bagley, was revealed as a brother of Adelaide Bagley Daniels, wife of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

As a matter of fact, Daniels (editor of a Democrat-financed newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.) had published in 1898 a biography of his wife's older brother, Ensign Worth Bagley, the first Navy officer killed in action during the Spanish-American War, and Adelaide would name David's brother Worth Bagley Daniels after the war hero.

Secretary Daniels first entered appointive political office in 1893 when another southerner, M. Hoke Smith, a railroad reformer and champion of  farmers, selected him to work in Grover Cleveland's Interior Department, a position he would hold for only a year. After purchasing controlling interest in the Raleigh News and Observer and in 1905, however, he perfected his political writing skill and was chosen in 1912 to head the "publicity bureau" of the Wilson campaign. Since Wilson's campaign was controlled by Edward M. House of Texas, Daniels no doubt had acquired the attention of the "Colonel" himself. After the campaign he was rewarded with the job as Secretary of the Navy, probably because of his wife's close ties to Naval officers.

Although Daniels left office in 1921, his propaganda efforts continued. His wife worked with Mrs. Robert Lansing, wife of the Secretary of State, in sponsoring the first National Conference of Church Women in Washington, D.C. in 1920. The Interchurch World Movement's division for "Women's Activities," organized by Adelaide Worth Daniels and Eleanor Foster Lansing and other wives in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, also had help from Mesdames John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Henry P. Davison. This "women's work" allowed their husbands to gather unofficial intelligence through the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American and International Red Cross Societies, and Protestant church-related foreign missionary groups, which allied themselves with Friends' organizations, the YMCA, and "war work councils". There was no official civilian intelligence agency in those days.

This blog discussed the Dulles family's role in world missions a year ago, under the caption "John Birch Society Warning to JFK in 1958." It should be recalled that the wife of Wilson's Secretary of State, Mrs. Robert "Eleanor Foster" Lansing, was a sister of Edith Foster Dulles, whose sons John Foster and Allen Dulles were being trained to exert the same missionary zeal in the 1940's and 50's over world affairs and intelligence as these sisters' father, John Watson Foster, had done in the 1870's, 80's and 90's. Protestant fundamentalists were the original settlers of American colonies. Through their control of institutions such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, they also controlled the purse strings of charitable and missionary efforts abroad. It was simple enough to set up front groups through which to spy on suspected dissidents.


Josephus Daniels returned to "public service" in 1933 to become President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Mexico, a post he held in Mexico City at the time Leon Trotsky was living in asylum at nearby Coyoacan. Did Daniels have a role in having Trotsky murdered in August 1940 by an "ice-ax-wielding assassin"?

 Had young Pete Bagley ever heard stories told by his uncle about those days in Mexico? Daniels died in 1948. Pete was then 24 years old, but he would have been a teenager in 1940 when he read about Trotsky's death.The convicted assassin Jacques Mornard van den Dresch finished serving his prison sentence in 1960 and went to Cuba with a Czech passport. Mexican officials by then claimed he was a Spaniard, though he had earlier claimed to be Persian-born of Belgian parents. Pete Bagley must have wondered what his uncle had known. But we can no longer ask him. He died in March 2014.

Talbot Bielefeldt's Own Skeletons  

By 1963, however, Pete Bagley was not looking back to Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940. He had a more current assassination to solve. Having been in charge of Soviet counterintelligence since 1959, it was his office which tasked Lee Wigren to obtain an "analysis of the Soviet press reaction" to the assassination of President Kennedy. Was there a reason Wigren addressed his questions to Talbot Bielefeldt, whose expertise was not Russian, but Japanese?

J. Bagnall

Exactly who was Talbot Bielefeldt? We do know from the above memo that he worked in the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA, and therefore his boss would have been John J. Bagnall. who also seems to have something to do with "Project USJPRS".

In February 1962 E. Howard Hunt, who had been attempting to find work for his wife Dorothy, was advised to check with Bagnall to see if he could find work for her in JUSPB [sic]; the writer must have been referring to, USJPRS, the U.S. Joint Publications Research Service:

JPRS was established in March 1957 as part of the United States Department of Commerce’s Office of Technical Services, about six months before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. Acting as a unit within the Central Intelligence Agency, JPRS staffers prepared translations for the use of U.S. Government officials, various agencies, and the research and industrial communities. During the Cold War, the reports were primarily translations rather than analysis or commentary, with an emphasis on scientific and technical topics. Over time, however, that scope expanded to cover environmental concerns, world health issues, nuclear proliferation, and more.

Writer, Leo Sarkisian, who worked with Voice of America, was once photographed at a party with the Bielefeldts and other CIA officials who worked with foreign translations.

Nixons at Fullerton Union

Talbot's family in 1920 was living in Placentia, California, a Quaker community, the same small town where Richard Nixon’s family lived at that time. Though Talbot was ten years older than Richard, he did have siblings the same age as the Nixon boys. Talbot and his younger siblings attended Fullerton Union High School, where Richard Nixon was a student in 1927-28, though the Nixons had moved to Whittier after 1920. Did they cross paths before Nixon came to prominence during the Red Scare wave?

Though Talbot’s parents were born in Iowa, both sets of his grandparents immigrated to Iowa from Hanover, Germany. His father and grandfather tried their hands at mining near Silverton, Colorado for a time, but moved to Maryland after a scarlet fever plague killed several family members. Talbot and his two closest siblings were born while the Bielefeldts lived in a large house on the Miles River in the Chesapeake region, and his name likely came from Talbot County, where it was located.

When Talbot was five years old, his family had moved from the east coast to the west, settling in North Orange County, where three more children were born. Talbot's father turned to farming and by 1930 owned a prosperous citrus ranch in Placentia. It is likely Talbot's exposure to the German language stuck with him. Then, at Stanford in the early 1920's, he gravitated toward internationalism. The summer before his senior year, he spent a month in Japan with a group of young men his age. Although there is no independent evidence of the fact, his wedding announcement in 1936 revealed:

Mr. Bielefeldt, who is postmaster at Placentia, is a graduate of Stanford University. He was a faculty member of American schools in the Orient, in China and Japan.

Fernanda Eliscu in Winterset, 1936

His new wife, Eugenie Pfeil, was the daughter of two stage actors, who used the names Carl Anthony and Fernanda Eliscu (born in Romania). After Carl's death in 1930, Fernanda began making movies, her first being the "photoplay," Winterset, written and produced by Maxwell Anderson in 1936. Talbot took his new wife back home to Placentia, where he had been assigned a commission by the President as Postmaster of his hometown.

A week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Talbot enlisted in the Navy and served six years, first being assigned to the Japanese Language School on the campus of University of California at Berkeley. By September 1944 he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and there are indications he was involved in cryptology. From there it was only natural that he would join the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947.

Excerpt from Roger Dignman in Deciphering the Rising Sun: Navy and Marine Corps Codebreakers, Translators and Interpreters in the Pacific War.

As shown in the excerpt above, W. A. Talbot Bielefeldt was among the first men chosen for the Japanese Language School held in California, along with someone called "Gerald J. Bagnall".  Could  Gerald have been a disguised "John"? This first class preceded the selection of Roger Pineau, who attended the same school after it was moved to Colorado because of internment of Japanese taking place at the original location.

According to the CIA's website:

With the creation of the Central Intelligence Group there commenced a process of accretion of functions taken from the wartime agencies and from departments which were anticipating reductions in budget under peacetime conditions. The Strategic Services Unit was transferred from the Department of the Army and became the Office of Special Operations - charged with espionage and counterespionage functions. The Washington Document Center was taken over from the Navy and shortly after that the Army's German Military Documents Center at Fort Holabird joined this unit and together became the Foreign Documents Division. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an organization with worldwide bases for monitoring all non-coded radio traffic, which had originally been under the Federal Communications Commission, was transferred from the Army and became the Foreign Broadcast Information Division. During World War II the Army and Navy and OSS and occasionally other agencies had all approached US businesses and institutions in search of foreign intelligence information. An early agreement was reached that this domestic collection should be performed as a service of common concern by Central Intelligence with other agencies participating as they desired, and this became the Contact Division. Another illustration of the type of functions taken on is the division of responsibilities with the Department of State on biographic intelligence. The list would be much too long if we attempted to enumerate all of the functions acquired in this method.

In December 1953 Talbot was rated at the salary level GS-14 in the C.I.A., and his name appeared on a list of 96 CIA employees cleared for Top Security, who were "certified to meet the standards required" to attend lectures at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. On that list were also the names Thomas W. Braden, C. Tracy Barnes, E. Howard Hunt, and Cord Meyer, Jr., but many more names were redacted, even upon the list's release in 1998.

Two years after receiving clearance to attend the Industrial College, Talbot wrote the following memorandum to Bruce Solie of the CIA's Security Analysis Group (SAG):

click to enlarge

Re: Orr, Paul & Violet
William A. Hyde was in Washington this last week-end, visiting his daughter and son-in-law, Sylvia and John Hoke, 763 Kennedy, N.E. The latter invited [REDACTED] and me over to meet him on Saturday night, 17 December, since we three were friends at Stanford.

Why would Solie's security group have been curious about William Hyde and his eldest daughter, Sylvia Hyde Hoke? And who, pray tell, were Paul and Violet Hyde?