“In my opinion,” de Mohrenschildt wrote, “Lee was a very bright person, but not a genius. He never mastered the English language, yet he learned such a difficult language! I taught Russian at all levels in a large university, and I never saw such a proficiency in the best senior students, who constantly listened to Russian tapes and spoke to Russian friends. As a matter of fact, American-born instructors never mastered the Russian spoken language as well as Lee did.”17
Also greatly altered in de Mohrenschildt’s statements was Oswald’s motive for the assassination. The reasoning given to the Warren Commission was one of social status. “In my opinion,” de Mohrenschildt stated, “if Lee Oswald did kill the president, this might be the reason for it: that he was insanely jealous of an extraordinarily successful man, who was young, attractive, had a beautiful wife, had all the money in the world, and was a world figure. And poor Oswald was just the opposite. He had nothing. He had a bitchy wife, had no money, was a miserable failure in everything he did.”18
Later, de Mohrenschildt again re-characterized Oswald as a man of political idealism not at all envious of material possession. “Lee, an ex-Marine, trained for organized murder, was capable of killing, but for a very strong ideological motive or in self-defense.”
This could not be a possible motive for Oswald in the assassination of President Kennedy. De Mohrenschildt, as well as Oswald’s wife Marina, knew that Oswald had a great appreciation for Kennedy, especially the president’s efforts in mending the politically divisive relationship with Russia. Once in conversation, the topic between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald turned to Kennedy’s work to end the Cold War.
“Great, great!” exclaimed Lee. “If he succeeds, he will be the greatest president in the history of this country.”19
Why the changing feelings on Oswald? De Mohrenschildt said he was initially pressured by Albert Jenner, assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, into answering in a particular way, but also felt he had given an unfair evaluation of Oswald. “It would not have made him a hero to have shot a liberal and beloved president, especially beloved by the minorities,” wrote de Mohrenschildt, “and Marina was not such a bitch, while Jacqueline was not so beautiful.”
What is likely is that de Mohrenschildt, shortly before his death, felt guilty about the initial portrait that he had painted of the man whom he had been assigned to oversee. Evidence suggests that de Mohrenschildt was procured to develop Oswald for his role in the assassination.
In April 1963, following his grooming of Oswald, de Mohrenschildt traveled to Washington, where he convened with CIA officials and sought a meeting with Vice President Johnson.
A letter written to de Mohrenschildt on April 18 from Lyndon Johnson’s office adds details to his trip to Washington:
Dear Mr. Mohrenschildt:
Your letter has come in the vice president’s absence from the office … I would like to suggest that you see Colonel Howard Burris, Air Force aide to the vice president, when you come to Washington. Should Mr. Johnson happen to have any office hours here during your stay, we will be happy to see if a mutually convenient time can be found for you to meet …
With warm wishes,
Sincerely, Walter Jenkins, Administrative Assistant to the Vice President.20
Why was de Mohrenschildt seeking council with Vice President Johnson? Besides de Mohrenschildt’s connections to the CIA and Texas Oil, he also had connections to other Johnson associates. Following his mysterious death, the unlisted phone number of Colonel Burris was found in de Mohrenschildt’s address book.21 As Johnson’s military advisor, Burris accompanied Johnson to Vietnam in 1961, where the two convinced Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem to petition JFK for the training of sixteen thousand more US troops, a request that the president denied.22
The decision to request more troops was not made in a vacuum—it was a result of Johnson’s evolved relations with the intelligence community that had shunned Kennedy. According to Burris himself, “Johnson had back-channel sources at the CIA, which kept him apprised of such matters.”23 Burris was an integral link in this “back channel”.
For Burris to be interacting personally with de Mohrenschildt adds another integral connection between oil, intelligence, and LBJ.
For a man depicted as a lone nut, Oswald had made a very interesting friend in the older de Mohrenschildt. Indeed, de Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission of a business trip that he had taken to Mexico City in 1959 “on behalf of Texas Eastern Corp.”24 for the purpose of entertaining members of the Mexican Government in relation to a natural gas contract.
Texas Eastern Corporation was the Texas Eastern Transmission Company, the major oil-pipeline firm owned by Johnson’s main contributors, Brown and Root. De Mohrenschildt had many similar business and political associations in Texas. He was also close friends with D. H. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building. In 1950, de Mohrenschildt started an oil investment firm with Eddie Hooker, George H. W. Bush’s roommate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. This odd connection between Bush and de Mohrenschildt did not stop there: Years after the assassination of President Kennedy, in 1976, a desperate de Mohrenschildt wrote a plea for help to Bush, who at that time was the director of the CIA.
The letter was an obvious attempt to call the dogs off in a time when, with the HSCA hearings, new inquiries into the assassination were being opened and people who had been involved were dying. Bush, though, in an important government position, took the time to answer back, perhaps as a precaution, deflecting the accusations of surveillance intrusions on de Mohrenschildt and his wife as paranoia.
“My staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of federal authorities in recent years,” wrote Bush. “The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long since subsided. I can only suspect that you have become ‘newsworthy’ again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination and, thus, may be attracting the attention of people in the media.”25
Despite the assurance of Bush, de Mohrenschildt’s situation worsened. In conversation with Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans in 1977, de Mohrenschildt’s long held secrets began to leak.
“I feel responsible for the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald … because I guided him,” de Mohrenschildt said. “I instructed him to set it up.”26
De Mohrenschildt was unraveling, filled with guilt over his past associations and no doubt filled with fear. He pleaded with Oltmans to get him out of the country. The journalist complied and took him to Holland. It was during that trip that de Mohrenschildt revealed more of his sensitive assassination knowledge.
“On the trip, via Houston and New York, de Mohrenschildt purportedly began dropping small pieces of information,” wrote Russ Baker in Family of Secrets, an investigative indictment of the Bush dynasty. “He claimed to know Jack Ruby. And he began providing fragments of a scenario in which Texas oilmen in league with intelligence operatives plotted to kill the president.”27
De Mohrenschildt then reportedly provided names of those implicated in the plot to the Dutch media. Knowing his time was short, he was talking. A month later, back in the United States, the HSCA continued the investigation of de Mohrenschildt, but it wouldn’t last long. During the second day of interviews, de Mohrenschildt was found in the room where he was staying dead of a gunshot through the head. The death was later deemed to be a suicide.28
De Mohrenschilt’s death came only hours after he intimated to investigators that the CIA had approved his contact with Oswald.29 At the time of his death, a tape recorder was running nearby, the audio of which was studied and described later by assassination researcher Mark Lane:
They claimed he committed suicide. But if you listen to the tape, you hear this: You hear a little noise, then you hear silence and you hear ‘Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep,’ a little more noise, and then you hear the shot. The ‘Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep’ was a security system on medium mode. One mode is, if
it’s on fully armed and someone opens a door or a window, a siren goes off, and the police are notified. On another mode, it’s off entirely. But on the medium mode, it goes ‘Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep’ to show that someone has opened the door and come into the house. Just before de Mohrenschildt was shot, that’s what happened.30
In I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy! his unpublished memoir written shortly before he died, de Mohrenschildt wrote that he believed Oswald was “probably innocent of the Kennedy assassination.”31
The use that the CIA had made of Oswald would almost replicate the use they would attempt to make out of another ex-Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee. Parallels between the two men are striking. As Oswald, Vallee, while in the Marines, was assigned to a U-2 base in Japan, where CIA operations were being held. Following their time in the Marines, both Oswald and Vallee trained Cuban exiles at CIA camps: Oswald at Lake Pontchartrain and Vallee in New York.32 Vallee subsequently moved from New York to Chicago in August of 1963, where he was employed as a printer in a warehouse at 625 West Jackson Boulevard. The warehouse was on President Kennedy’s motorcade route on November 2.
“Vallee’s location at IPP Litho-Plate actually gave him a nearer, clearer view of the November 2 Chicago motorcade than Oswald’s so-called ‘sniper’s nest’ did of the November 22 Dallas motorcade,” wrote James W. Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable. “Oswald’s job was on the sixth floor, whereas Vallee’s work site, three floors lower than Oswald’s, put him in the culpable position of having an unimpeded shot at the president passing directly below him. At the same time, the unidentified snipers in the Chicago plot could have shot Kennedy from hidden vantage points and then escaped, leaving Vallee to take the blame.”33
Kennedy was traveling to Chicago to attend the Army–Navy football game, but at the last minute, the trip was cancelled. Almost immediately thereafter, Vallee was arrested by intelligence officers of the Chicago police.34
Word of the plot had come from an FBI informant named “Lee” on October 30. The next day, a landlady called the Chicago police with information that four men were renting rooms from her, and, in one of these rooms, she had discovered four rifles with telescopic sights.35 The men were questioned but never arrested. Chicago too had its patsy, in what looked to be a dry run of the actual assassination in Dallas.
Dallas, though, was given attention on all levels by the conspirators. Even Oswald’s Russian bride, Marina, was made presentable for the lone gunman theory. Marina Oswald, who spoke no English, was not pleased with the interpretation assistance of Ilya Mamantov, the interpreter assigned to her by Dallas Police Department. Many years later, she would say that she despised the man. Interestingly, Mamantov, a geologist with Sun Oil, received a call to interpret for her five hours after the assassination from spy-cum-oil baron, George H. W. Bush crony, John Crichton.
Oswald was certainly groomed to be the fall guy. Following the kill shot on President Kennedy, the initial location and temperament of Oswald described by witnesses does not match up with that of a man who has just killed the president. Only a minute after the assassination, he was encountered by the Book Depository superintendent Roy Truly and Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker. Oswald, in the second floor lunchroom, four floors down from where the shooting had taken place, was calmly sipping on a Coke. The incident was recounted in subsequent Warren Commission testimony with commission member Hale Boggs of Louisiana:
TRULY: [Immediately after the shooting] I saw a young motorcycle policeman run up to the building, up the steps to the entrance of our building. He ran right by me. And he was pushing people out of the way… . I ran up and … caught up with him inside the lobby of the building… . I ran in front of him … I went up on a run up the stairway. By the time I reached the second floor, the officer was a little further behind me than he was on the first floor … a few feet… . I ran right on around to my left, started to continue on up the stairway to the third floor, and on up … I suppose I was two or three steps before I realized the officer wasn’t following me… . I came back to the second-floor landing… . I heard … a voice coming from the area of the lunchroom … I ran over and looked in this door … I saw the officer almost directly in the doorway of the lunchroom facing Lee Harvey Oswald… . He was just inside the … door … two or three feet possibly… . The officer had his gun pointed at Oswald.
BAKER: As I came out to the second floor there … I caught a glimpse of this man walking away from this—I happened to see him through this window in the door… . He was walking away from me about twenty feet away … in the lunchroom [ … drinking a Coke]. I hollered at him at that time and said, ‘Come here.’ He turned and walked straight back to me …
REP. BOGGS: Were you suspicious of this man?
BAKER: No, sir, I wasn’t.
REP. BOGGS: Was he out of breath? Did he appear to be running or what?
BAKER: It didn’t appear that to me. He appeared normal, you know.
REP. BOGGS: Was he calm and collected?
BAKER: Yes, sir. He never did say a word or nothing. In fact, he didn’t change his expression one bit.
TRULY: The officer turned this way and said, ‘This man work here?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ … [Oswald] didn’t seem to be excited or overly afraid or anything. He might have been startled, like I might have been if somebody confronted me. But I cannot recall any change in expression of any kind on his face… . Then we left … Oswald immediately and continued to run up the stairways … 36
Oswald was next seen by Book Depository clerical supervisor Mrs. Robert Reid. She saw Oswald walking through her second-floor office. Oswald, still nursing the Coke, was in Reid’s estimation “just calm… . He was moving at a very slow pace. I never did see him moving fast at any time.”37
Oswald left the Book Depository shortly after the confrontation with Reid at approximately 12:33 p.m. and headed to his rooming house.
“Because of all the confusion, I figured there would be no work performed that afternoon, so I decided to go home,” Oswald told investigators while in custody.
The housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, was watching reports of the assassination on television when she saw Oswald enter the house at approximately 1 p.m. While Oswald was in his room, Roberts saw a police car stop in front of the boarding house and lay on the horn. Mrs. Roberts, who knew several policemen, did not recognize the officer.
“And who was in the car?” asked Commission lawyer Joseph Ball.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Roberts replied. “I didn’t pay any attention to it after I noticed it wasn’t them, I didn’t.”38
The police car left, and Oswald emerged from his room and exited the house after three or four minutes. He then, allegedly, walked nine-tenths of a mile to Tenth Street and Patton, where he shot and killed Officer J. D. Tippit. After allegedly killing Tippit, Oswald was diverted from his path, which was a direct route to Jack Ruby’s apartment, and proceeded to the Texas Theatre, where he was quickly arrested by Dallas police.
“I can’t, in my mind, firmly make myself believe that he might not have been trying to get to Ruby’s apartment,” said Jesse Curry in an interview following his years as Dallas police chief. “You know he was in close proximity to it, and I know he didn’t leave his house with the idea of going to the Texas Theatre. There again, after he shot Tippit, I think in his fright he just thought the movie house was the place to hide.”39
Curry never earnestly pondered the Oswald–Ruby connection, at least not publicly “because I never really seriously admitted that there was a conspiracy. But there’s been coincidental things that have happened here to lead one to believe that there could have been a conspiracy after all… . There might have been a connection between the two that we never established. And if there was, it was more than a local thing, I believe. I think it there was a collusion between those two, it involved probably an international conspiracy.”40
Curry’s leap from a “local thing” to an “international conspiracy” might have been his way of
distancing his police force and his country from the assassination when, in truth, members of both would be needed to carry out an operation of this caliber. Had Curry known Ruby, he would have seen a gateway between his world and the underworld.
NOTES
1. De Mohrenschildt, George, “I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy.”
2. North, Act of Treason, pg. 62–63.
3. Ibid, pg. 313.
4. Ibid, pg. 354.
5. Beschloss, Taking Charge, pg. 23.
6. Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pg. 19.
7. Ibid, pg. 144.
8. Morleyd, “What Jane Roman Said,” www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/WhatJaneRomanSaid/WhatJaneRomanSaid_2.html.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 99.
16. Warren Commission Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt.
17. De Mohrenschildt, George, “I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy.”
18. Warren Commission Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt.
19. Ibid.
20. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 107.
21. Nelson, LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, pg. 506.
22. Gilbride, Matrix for Assassination, pg. 166.
23. Nelson, pg. 506.
24. Warren Commission Testimony of George de Mohrenschildt.
25. Ibid, pg. 270.
26. Ibid, pg. 273.
27. Ibid, pg. 273.
28. Ibid, pg. 277.
29. Nelson, LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, pg. 341.
30. Belzer, Hit List, pgs. 236–237.
31. De Mohrenschildt, George, “I am a Patsy! I am a Patsy!
32. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pg. 205.
33. Ibid, pg. 206.
34. Ibid. pg. 213.
35. Black; Chicago Independent; November, 1975, “The Plot to Kill JFK in Chicago.”
36. North, Act of Treason, pgs. 388–389.
37. Ibid, pg. 390.
38. Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation, pg. 86.
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