The Story of DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS (Part II)

Continued from Part I
See also Part III

DAVID ATLEE PHILLIPS:

A Texan Born and Bred

by Linda Minor

Part Two

E.M. House residence in Austin, Texas

The mother of David Atlee Phillips was born as Mary Louise Young, the eldest of James and Gussie Young's three daughters living in 1910 in Austin near the corner of Rio Grande and West 13th Street, a few steps west of the Texas Capitol Building site. James listed his occupation as "commercial traveler, oil company," while his father-in-law, Tandy Ayres, who lived with them, was in hardware sales. We will reserve the Ayres ancestry for a subsequent post.

Thirteenth Street terminated only a few blocks to the west into what is now Austin Community College. If one were facing that school, looking behind it to the right, situated on a slight rise near Shoal Creek, the Victorian mansion of Edward Mandell House would have loomed into view. House had created four Texas governors, beginning with James S. Hogg in 1892, followed by Culberson, Sayers and Lanham. After Lanham's election in 1892, House had begun to look beyond Texas--to the federal government in Washington, D.C. By 1912, using his advanced knowledge of political strategy, he had "created" President Woodrow Wilson.

David's father, Edwin Phillips was fated to die only 16 years into his marriage to Mary, and his death came in 1928, when young David was just a boy of five. At first they were far from being poor, however, as the spy, David Atlee Phillips joked in The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, (page 4):

"My father died when I was five, leaving my mother, three older brothers, and a portfolio of oil stocks which turned to ashes in the market crash of 1929. We were the poorest rich people in Fort Worth. A founder of a local country club, my father left us a life membership and the deed to a house on the fourth green."

We will return later to explore Edwin's legal contacts and social ones in that country club in Fort Worth. First, however, we will explore the ancestry of Mary's parents--both sides of which were steeped in Texas history. Some of their associates were men and women who built the Republic of Texas prior to statehood within the Union, and who also observed Texas during the years of Confederacy and Reconstruction.

The Career of Mary Young Phillips

David's mom on FDR's Committee.

Edwin Phillips' widow felt the need to work, and the career she chose is set out in her obituary in the March 12, 1948, Denton Record-Chronicle:

Funeral services for Mrs. Edwin T. Phillips, secretary of the Texas State College for Women Board of Regents, who died at her home in Fort Worth Wednesday after a long illness, will be held Friday at 3 p.m. St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fort Worth. The Rev. Louis F. Martin will conduct the services and burial will be in Greenwood Cemetery in Fort Worth. Mrs. Phillips, 57, was appointed to the Board of Regents in 1941 by Gov. W. Lee O'Daniel and was reappointed in 1947 by Gov. Coke Stevenson [the man Lyndon Johnson defeated in the special election to the U.S. Senate in 1948 by only 87 stolen votes].

Mrs. Phillips Aids Needy for FDR

Manager of the civic affairs department of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and prominent in business, civic, education and social circles in Fort Worth for 20 years. Mrs. Phillips left her active duties more than a year ago when she became ill. She had been in New York most of the year receiving medical treatment, but was brought home ten days ago when it became evident that she could not live.

David's grandmother, Gussie

Mrs. Phillips was the widow of Edwin T. Phillips, Fort Worth attorney. Survivors are four sons, Edwin T. Phillips, Jr., Jim Phillips, J. Olcott Phillips and David Phillips; her mother, Mrs. Augusta Ayers Young, and three grandsons, all of Fort Worth; and one sister, Mrs. Robert Taylor of Norfolk, Va.

Mrs. Phillips, the former Mary Louise Young from San Antonio, was a daughter of Augusta Ayres (Ayers) Young, widowed at a young age when her own husband, James Mills Young, died. James, as mentioned in Part I, was the youngest son of Charles Glidden Young, but little is known of him. Nevertheless, four years before her husband's death, Mrs. (James M.) Gussie Young, was making society page headlines in San Antonio's newspapers as chairman of the Christmas Cheer campaign, working with other socialites involved in the local charity. We will examine her own background that prepared her for this role in a future blog entry.

 How much about her father-in-law's career Mary knew is impossible to say. Although she grew up in San Antonio, her parents, James and Gussie Young, were living in Austin, the state capital, when Mary was a student at the University of Texas. There she met her future husband, Edwin Phillips, and, after he finished law school there, they married in 1912 and moved back to his hometown, Fort Worth, where he began the practice of law. Mary's father, James Mills Young, died in 1917, and her grandfather, Nathan Tandy Ayres passed two years later. Her daughter , leaving Mary's mother little else to do except move to Fort Worth.

Back to Mary's Grandfather

Dr. C.G. Young and wife, H.M.L. Young, in 1850

Continuing with where we left off in Part I, we find that in 1850 Charles G. Young was a 33-year-old practicing physician in Caddo Parish, Louisiana--living in the town of Greenwood between Shreveport and the Texas state line. His wife was only 22 but had already given birth to three children, ages six, four and two months. We are not quite sure when he gave up the practice of medicine to start building a railroad or how he avoided military service when the South seceded. Medical doctors would have been in great demand as the casualties of war piled up.

A short biography of him is recorded in the Handbook of Texas Online:

YOUNG, CHARLES G. (1816-1871). Charles G. Young, businessman and railroad promoter, was born in New Hampshire on April 7, 1816. He graduated from Philadelphia College and in 1838 moved to Louisiana, where in the 1850s he was president of the Vicksburg and Shreveport Railroad Company. About 1861 he moved his family and slaves to Texas. In 1863 he organized a smelter in Cherokee County, employing seventy-five white men and several hundred blacks. In addition to the foundry, Young operated a sawmill, brickyard, and store, which he supplied by wagon-train from Galveston and Matamoros. The business failed some time after the end of the Civil War, following a boiler accident and a jayhawker raid on the store. Young's Cherokee Furnace Company was taken over in 1867 by stockholder T. L. Philleo.

Besieged by Jayhawkers

Young helped charter the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company in 1866 and on June 1, 1867, became president of the company. He was killed in an accident near Houston on August 9, 1871. Young's reminiscences of early railroad history were published by W. S. Adair in the Dallas Morning News on December 7, 1924. [Sources: Vera Lea Dugas, "Texas Industry, 1860-1880," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59 (October 1955). Houston Daily Telegraph, August 24, 1871. S. G. Reed, A History of the Texas Railroads (Houston: St. Clair, 1941; rpt., New York: Arno, 1981)]

A website about Confederate railroads reveals that the Vicksburg road, which was chartered in 1853, by 1861 was operating 75 miles from Vicksburg to Monroe, Louisiana and had soon built another five miles toward Marshall, Texas (in the same county where, a few years later, Lady Bird (Taylor) Johnson's father would be a merchant). The csa-railroads website indicates that the "Confederate army seized the road because of the Union sympathies of its directors," and that the line was "heavily used in their supply until Union operations caused serviceable rolling stock and other machinery to be dismantled and hauled to Shreveport in August 1863. Eventually, the entire line east of Monroe was destroyed, with usable iron rails being removed to support other Union railroads."

Young's boss in the VS&T seems to have been another man from New Hampshire, Colonel William Morrill Wadley, president of the Georgia Central railroad and general manager of the VS&T. Possibly he was a friend of Young's father, who also lived in Georgia at the time he died in 1867. (See Robert C. Black III, The Railroads of the Confederacy, page 108, for more on Wadley.) Only a few months after his railroad was seized by the Confederacy, Young was fired, while Wadley received a commission as a colonel in the Confederate army.

Chappell Hill Manufacturing Company incorporated 1863.

Young moved on to Texas, but seemingly never fought for either side. Instead, he seems to have hovered between the Texas counties of Washington and Cherokee.

James Mills Young was born in Washington County 24 MAY 1864 in Chappell Hill, Texas, according to one genealogist. The previous year the Texas Legislature (in Special Law XXXVII) had approved the incorporation of  a manufacturing business in that location, in which Charles Young was a principal with several others, and its stated purpose was the manufacture of woolen and cotton cloth, cotton seed oil, and iron. Young's associates in Chappell Hill Manufacturing included:

• Col. William W. Browning, a farmer, who had lived in Chappell Hill at least ten years by that time; 
• Bryant L. Peel, son-in-law of Dr. Martin Ruter, also a Methodist minister and agent for Chappell Hill Female College;
• James F. Dumble was a cotton factor and broker in Galveston in business with Peel's family. Research indicates that Dumble was associated with T. W. House in a real estate company in 1904. He was also involved with the Methodist mission board, as was Nathan Tandy Ayres, Gussie Young's father, who was named as head of the Shearn Church Sunday School in 1884. We find the Methodist Church in Houston, which was named for Charles Shearn, mentioned many times in Macum Phelan's book about early Texas Methodism. Another member of the Shearn church was a daughter of Martin Ruter, Mrs. Winn, who would have been Dr. Charles Young's first cousin. Gussie Ayres Young, who was married to Dr. Young's son.
• Gabriel Felder owned a cotton plantation in Washington County, acquired after he relocated from South Carolina in about 1852; he was a trustee of Soule University, the predecessor of Chappell Hill Female College, named for Methodist Bishop Soule. 
• Alexander McGowen, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, had settled in Washington County, where the Texas declaration of independence had been signed in 1836, then called Washington-on-the-Brazos, the first capital of Texas. He was a trustee affiliated with the Methodist circuit of ministers that included Chappell Hill, as well as Houston and LaGrange and as such was an associate of Charles Shearn and  Thomas W. House.

It seems likely, given the fact that many of these men were church members in the Shearn Church in Houston, named for E.M. House's mother's father, and the fact that the House and Shearn men were involved with the Masonic Lodge, that most of them were probably lodge brothers, intimate friends of the House family. Undoubtedly, Young came in contact with them in furtherance of his desire to finance the future railroad enterprise. One forum comprised of civil war buffs posted a list of companies contracting with the Texas Confederacy during the war, compiled in a book called Texas in the Confederacy, with the implication that the Chappell Hill Manufacturing company was organized in order to contract with the Confederate government.

C.G. Young's High Powered Associates

Daniel Young, father of C.G.

We can glean something of the personality and character of Charles Young from the circumstances he faced and the way he carried on in spite of them. Much of his life, however, is like a jigsaw puzzle that must be put together, piece by piece. Although he was born in New Hampshire in 1816, his father, Daniel Young, moved to Scioto County, Ohio in 1820, where Charles grew up. Daniel, with his father-in-law (Glidden) and others, manufactured iron in a company called Franklin Furnace. [Source: Frank H. Rowe, History of the iron and steel industry in Scioto County, Ohio (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1938).] 

According to this history, Daniel Young was an associate of

Dr. Martin Ruter

Methodist minister Martin Ruter, who was head of the Texas Mission to the Republic of Texas in 1836. Ruter collected supplies in Indiana for his mission, and then traveled to Texas with an associate, David Ayres. According to Macum Phelan, in  A History of Early Methodism in Texas, Ayers/Ayres took Ruter to Houston, the early capital of Texas, to meet with members of its Congress shortly before Christmas of 1837 to request an educational charter, before Ruter set out on his arduous tour through Texas that led to his death in the spring of 1838. Ayres had written to Dr. Bangs as early as 1835, requesting a missionary to Texas. One of the last letters he wrote was to Dr. Nathan Bangs, a Methodist in the Missionary Society of New York, informing him of his illness. Coincidentally, we note that Dr. Bangs was an uncle of one of George Bush's ancestors, Mary Ann Bangs Beakey, profiled previously. Another intriguing fact is that Dr. Edwin Augustus Atlee had been a Methodist minister in Philadelphia before converting to Swedenborgianism in 1826. [See page 62 of article on Swedenborgian Challenge.]

Martin Ruter's second wife, with whom he had nine children, was Daniel Young's sister, Ruth, who likely kept her brother Daniel, an ordained minister himself, informed about events in Texas during the years leading up to the civil war. Daniel Young died in Georgia in 1867, while working on a railroad that would constitute the eastern end of the railroads his sons were building through the South both before and after the civil war.

Ruter had met Sam Houston and M.B. Lamar, both presidents in Houston, Texas' capitol city during the Republic years, and that he had been successful in getting the Republic to charter a college in Chappell Hill in Washington County, where Martin Ruter died in 1838. His associate minister, Rev. Littleton Fowler wrote in his journal that spring about his own visit to Houston, where he was made Grand Chaplain of the Grand Lodge of  Masons. Fowler would finish building the church in Washington  on the Brazos that Ruter had started--"the first Methodist, and the first church of any Protestant faith in Texas." In 1842, as calls for statehood, and ultimately war with Mexico, loomed, the Texas Capitol was moved to the community where this church was built. Congress then met in the second floor of a saloon.

Another minister, licensed by Ruter shortly before his death, was Robert Crawford, who had fought in the Battle of San Jacinto, as did many to whom the Methodist circuit riders ministered in those days. The lobbying of the Texas Congress had resulted in a land grant being bestowed on which to build Texas' first university, Rutersville College, which opened in 1840, located near what is today the town of LaGrange. The Rutersville district would then be in charge of Rev. Robert Alexander, who also organized the first Methodist church in Robertson Colony, the same church where the maternal grandfather of George and Herman Brown--Rufus Y. King, father of Lucy Wilson King Brown--was ordained. Born in Alabama in 1828, King was recorded living with his Tennessee-born wife, Virginia, in the District of Burleson and Brazos by the 1850 U.S. Census, and he died in 1911 in Bell County, Texas. During this time Rev. Alexander sent his reports to the Methodist Secretary in New York, Dr. Bangs.

Starting out near Shreveport, La. as a doctor, Charles Young began raising a family with his much younger Ohio-born wife, Henrietta Maria Louisa Chamberlaine, daughter of James Lloyd Chamberlaine, who had moved to Cincinnati from Talbot County, Maryland as early as 1784. After many years as a medical doctor, Charles Young may have been lured away from his medical career by the promise of more lucrative business profits. It would be through his second career, as a railroad builder, that he established a name for himself. Then the civil war intervened. 

At that point, he may have learned that Rutersville College in Fayette County, Texas, named for his uncle--had been succeeded in 1856 by Soule University, which in 1865 decided to open a medical school. Dr. Charles Young, possibly upon the suggestion of his aunt, Ruth Young Ruter and cousins who had been associated with the Female College located in Chappell Hill, Texas, near Brenham, applied to teach at Soule. As mentioned earlier, Dr. Young's aunt's husband, Dr. Martin Ruter, had been an associate of Ruth's brother, Daniel Young in Scioto County, Ohio, at a company called Franklin Furnace, which in the late 1820s manufactured pig iron. While in Ohio he heard of Texas' declaration of independence from Mexico in 1836. Ruter then volunteered and was appointed to be the first Methodist missionary to Texas, and, after a busy tour through the wild new nation, he succumbed to a fever in June 1838 at age 52. At Chappell Hill a new college had already been started, eventually to merge with the Chappell Hill Female College; by 1872 absorbed into Southwestern University as a result of a raging yellow fever epidemic. In the 1850s, however, several members of the Ruter family remained associated with Chappell Hill college. Ruter family members include:

• Augustus W. Ruter (1812-69)
• Professor Philander S. Ruter (1815-57)
• Eliza (Mrs. Hiram) Gilmore (1816-91)
• Marcellus A. Ruter (1819-96) 
• Anna Bell (Mrs. Rev. Bryant L.) Peel (1826-81). Charles' aunt, Ruth Ruter, survived her husband by more than 30 years, ultimately moving to Los Angeles with the Peels. 
• Maria Ruter (1828-1908) married J. W. Cuthbertson from Pennsylvania. A son, Martin Ruter Cuthbertson died in Houston, Texas in 1935.
• Charlotte Ruter (1832-1913) in 1857 married James Winchester Wynne, whose family had lived in Gallatin, Tennessee. He was a veteran of the Mexican War and died in 1868. Both are buried in Marshall, Harrison County, Texas.

 [Partial source: Macum Phelan, A history of Early Methodism in Texas, 1817-1866; Ancestry.com]

The president of the Houston and Great Northern Railroad died on August 10, 1871 when his train overturned as a result of a "malicious act" which obstructed the track, according to newspaper accounts. Only eight months earlier, however, Young was announced as president of a newly financed railroad, whose associates included some of Houston's wealthiest businessmen in association with others from New York and New Jersey. According to Earle B. Young in his book, Tracks to the Sea: Galveston and Western Railroad Development, 1866-1900, Dr. Young was "president of the Chappell Hill Manufacturing Company and general superintendent of the company's ironworks near Rusk."

The 1870 directors of the reorganized H&GR, each of whom represented a bloc of shareholders, were:

• Moses W. Taylor - builder of the Morris and Essex Railroad at the same time, whose president was Samuel Sloan, and vice president was Percy R. Pyne, Taylor's son-in-law. Taylor had been a dealer in pickles in Tarrytown, New York, when he met Charles Stillman, recently arrived from Brownsville, Texas, where he had acquired a veritable fortune in running ammunition to both sides of two wars from an outpost in Matamoros (working there alongside the likes of Richard King, Mifflin Kenedy, and William Marsh Rice), Mexico. Stillman's son James then learned about private banking from Taylor and ultimately succeeded Percy Pyne as head of the National City Bank in New York City. Taylor, through his railroads in and around Central New Jersey, helped to build the town of Dunellen, where William Marsh Rice acquired a large estate before his murder in 1900.
• Wm. E. Dodge - head of Phelps, Dodge & Company.
• John S. Barnes - He acted as agent for Robert Lenox Kennedy, president of the National Bank of Commerce of New York, whose father-in-law was a large stockholder in the Central New Jersey Railroad in the 1870s. Barnes also partnered with Scotsman, James Stewart Kennedy who arrived in America in 1856. J.S. Kennedy created the Scottish American Investment Trust (SAIT) and his partners included "...John S. Barnes, and finally John Kennedy Tod, [who] served successively as secretaries of the [SAIT] Board, which two further 'Kennedy men' joined in 1875. One, James Alfred Roosevelt [uncle of Teddy], a senior partner in the private banking firm of Roosevelt & Son, symbolized New York's wealthy old Dutch elite. The other, Robert Lenox Kennedy, was of Scots ancestry though unrelated to John S. Kennedy, and was a private banker and president of the city's National Bank of Commerce; this institution succeeded the failed Duncan, Sherman firm as Scottish American's bank in the United States. J. Kennedy Tod & Co., the successor to J. S. Kennedy & Co. in 1883, continued as Scottish American's agent until 1902." (Quoted in The Man Who Found the Money).
  
• Wm. Walter Phelps - He became interested in Texas railroads in 1870, shortly after he came into an inheritance on the death of his father. The railroad was eventually to become the International & Great Northern, which was alleged to have fraudulently enticed the Texas Legislature to pass laws aiding the railroad in violation of the Texas Constitution. Placed into receivership, the I&GN would eventually become part of Jay Gould's system between St. Louis and Mexico City. Exchanging his debtor bonds in the various components of the railroad, Phelps thus became a huge owner of real estate in Texas through the New York and Texas Land Company set up in 1880.
• Wm. Marsh Rice - Massachusetts man who settled in Houston, Texas, and founded the Houston & Central Texas Railroad, which merged with Charles Phillips' Houston & Great Northern in 1870. Rice lived partly in Houston and partly in New York City, but before his death moved to Dunellen, N.J. His 1900 murder was pinned on a man named Albert Patrick, who, coincidentally, lived in the same Austin, Texas neighborhood at about the same time the James Mills Young family lived there.
• W. J. Hutchins - president of the H&TC Railroad in 1867 before the merger with Young's H&GN three years later.
• C. G. Young - maternal great grandfather of David Atlee Phillips.
• Cornelius Ennis - along with the father of Col. E.M. House, Ennis was a director of the H&TC in 1867.
• T. F. White - a businessman from Galveston.

Vice President of the railroad was Congressman W. Walter Phelps, an 1860 graduate of Yale, where he had been chosen as a member of Skull and Bones. Phelps' father had founded and served as the first president of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. His father-in-law, Joseph Earl Sheffield, came from a seafaring family in Connecticut, but worked as a cotton broker and railroad financier, and donated the funds to found Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. William Earl Dodge's son, Rev. David Stuart Dodge, married the sister of W. W. Phelps. After William Dodge married Melissa Phelps, daughter of Anson Green Phelps, the two men created Phelps, Dodge & Co., a metal works and mining company in 1834. W.E. Dodge was a director of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, set up by William M. Marsh of Houston, since at least 1868. 

As mentioned previously, Young had been relieved of his duties at the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Texas Railroad in 1861 as a result of its destruction by Union forces following its seizure and use by the Confederacy. Relocating to Texas, Young most likely sought out men of political and financial influence who could finance a new project of rail-building between Harrison County, where he had ended the VS&T, through Rusk in Cherokee County, thence in a southerly or southwestern direction to link up with rails reaching up to his area by merchants seeking a national market for goods grown or produced around Houston and Galveston. On that route was Chappell Hill, where its citizens had been clamoring for rail service since 1852. It was a good place to start preparations for a project that would have to await war's end. 

By merging with the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, he achieved his goal of acquiring financing. This railroad, although building along a route that is now the location of U.S. Highway 290 between Houston and Austin, the shareholders were also amenable to combining with other businessmen in Washington County at Chappell Hill and Brenham, who wanted to connect to a point farther to the east at Rusk, a route which somewhat paralleled another railroad then being planned.

 Continued in Part III.





















[Side Note: Much of the money that would go into the railroad came from a Texas family about whom much has already been written at a sister blog, WHERE THE GOLD IS. James Stillman, who had run blockades during the Mexican and Civil Wars, accumulating enough capital to form the National City Bank in New York City, while being mentored by banker Moses Taylor. Jacob S. Wetmore hailed from Englewood, New Jersey. Teaneck, N. J., where William Walter Phelps lived, was less than 40 miles northeast of Dunellen, N.J., where W. M. Rice made his home for many years after leaving Houston.]
Dr. Charles G. met his death on August 9, 1871, fifteen miles north of Houston. He had two flat cars placed behind the steam locomotive, which was chugging up the track toward its terminus when it crashed into an obstruction. Newspapers declared whatever the obstruction was, it had been placed by "malicious persons." Before the following month was out, not only had the perpetrator been arrested, but tried and convicted as well. That's quick justice, even though Flake's Bulletin indicated some reluctance to accept that it was totally accurate. But then, that's Texas justice for you!

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.

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.

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 father: Knew George de Mohrenschildt, and both worked the the ICA. The CIA considered him for an assignment in Viet Nam.

•  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 1952]  HT 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).