Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Because Ruth was still interested in the Russian language, the Paines became part of the local Russian expatriate community. Which was quite conservative, anti-Soviet, and with a parish church, which, as noted, was reportedly CIA affiliated. As George Michael Evica notes, this was a curious fit. For Quakers are usually liberal and have their own special church customs, which are not at all like Russian Orthodox. As many have noted, one of the greatest failures of the American media was its showing in the Kennedy assassination: Its acceptance of Jack Ruby as a bar owner who felt homicidal pity for Jackie Kennedy, its failure to look into the mystery of 544 Camp Street, its lack of curiosity about Oswald, and also its acceptance of Ruth and Michael Paine at face value. The “Good Samaritan” Quakers were in fact extensions of the Eastern Establishment in Dallas.

  Michael Paine’s ancestors are Boston Brahmins of the Forbes and Cabot first families of America. Michael’s grand uncle, Cameron Forbes, was both governor and later ambassador, to the Philippines.99 Prior to his death in 1959 he joined his Cabot relatives on the board of United Fruit.100 One of these relatives, Thomas Dudley Cabot, was Michael’s cousin. Thomas was actually a former president of the United Fruit Company. In 1951 he was working in the State Department Office of International Security Affairs. Thomas’ brother, John M. Cabot, was also in the State Department around this time, and was exchanging information with Maurice Gatlin about the preparations of the CIA-United Fruit overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz. In the early sixties, Thomas was president of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, which leased uninhabited land ninety miles off the coast of Honduras named Swan Island. Gibraltar was a CIA front. It owned no ships. But it was on that island, through the Gibraltar front, that David Phillips established Radio Swan, the CIA radio station broadcasting into Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, Radio Swan broadcast secret messages to certain people in the know about that operation.101

  Ruth Paine’s family originated from New York before moving to Ohio. Her father, William Avery Hyde, was a high executive for Nationwide Insurance. He had worked for the OSS in World War II.102 He ended up becoming the Agency for International Development’s (AID) regional director for all of Latin America. John Gilligan, a former AID director later said that AID was infiltrated from top to bottom by CIA agents. So that the CIA could plant operatives in all types of operations abroad.103 And, in fact, as Steve Jones discovered, one of Hyde’s reports went from the State Department to the CIA.104 Ruth told Jim Garrison during her grand jury appearance that her father “was on leave to an agency called the International Cooperative Alliance.” This may be one reason why Ruth tried to say she only met George DeMohrenschildt once. Because George told the Warren Commission that he also traveled abroad for the ICA.105 Interestingly, William Avery Hyde got this contract with AID in 1964, the year after the Kennedy assassination.

  It is important to establish this familial background for the Paines and to always keep it in mind. Because this intermingling of wealth, diplomacy, and intelligence work helps explain the remarkable occurrence of espionage employment in the family. In that summer of 1963, Ruth made a cross country trip visiting certain friends and relatives. Before Ruth came down to pick up Marina—and finally achieve her goal of separating Marina from her husband—she had been visiting her sister in Falls Church, Virginia. Falls Church adjoins Langley, which then housed the new headquarters of the CIA. When Ruth appeared before the New Orleans grand jury, Jim Garrison observed that her sister’s occupation was being withheld by the government. The DA asked why that was so. Ruth replied she was not even aware it was classified. So Garrison asked her what agency of government her sister worked for. Ruth replied she did not know.106

  This is the fourth sworn statement by the couple which begs credibility. But there is a reason for the evasiveness. Ruth Paine was the younger sister of Sylvia Hyde Hoke. In 1993, a CIA security file was declassified which revealed that Sylvia had been employed by the Agency for a number of years prior to 1963 as a psychologist. Ruth, who had just spent a couple of weeks with Sylvia, somehow never knew where her sister went to work in the morning and was not even curious enough to ask, even though Sylvia’s association with the CIA had been printed in the City Directory.107 And to top it off, Sylvia’s husband John Hoke, like Ruth’s father, worked for AID. Ruth did mention this fact in her appearance before the New Orleans grand jury, but this was just before the exposure of AID made it into the press. Odd that Ruth would know who her sister’s husband worked for, but not her sister.

  As noted previously, by his association with Chamberlin, Allen Dulles was aware of how compromising all these associations were to him and his service on the Warren Commission. In fact, according to one of his biographers, he actually joked about it:

  Dulles joked in private that the [JFK] conspiracy buffs would have had a field day if they had known … he had actually been in Dallas three weeks before the murder … that one of Mary Bancroft’s childhood friends had turned out to be a landlady for Marina Oswald … and that the landlady was a well-known leftist with distant ties to the family of Alger Hiss.108

  This tantalizing quote does not just reveal that Dulles understood how dangerous the exposure of all these associations was to his veneer as an impartial investigator. But that last clause suggests that he understood how important Ruth Paine’s veneer as a “leftist” was in her association with the Oswalds. Yet Dulles died in 1969. This extensive work on the Paines by researchers like Jones, Barbara LaMonica, and Carol Hewett was not published until the nineties. It is quite interesting that Dulles knew about it back then.

  And let us make no mistake about it. As this background material on the Paines indicates, a veneer is now what it appears to be. As Steve Jones and Carol Hewett have pointed out, the ARRB declassified an interesting FBI report about a man talking to certain college students at Luby’s Restaurant near SMU in Dallas. The man would accost certain students, and then praise the Castro revolution to them, while protesting America’s policies toward Cuba. The man claimed to know a communist, an ex-Marine who had recently returned to the USA with a Russian wife, clearly a reference to Oswald. This event occurred in April of 1963. Someone thought this a little unusual for Dallas at that time. So an FBI agent came down and started interviewing some of the students the man had talked to. After one student physically described the man, the agent pulled out a picture of Michael Paine. The student said Paine was the man.109 So the question with Michael Paine is this: What would a man living off of trust funds from the Cabot and Forbes families—which he was at the time—and with a security clearance from Bell Helicopter, why would such a man be promoting Castro in Dallas with college students?

  The answer appears to be that he was doing the same thing Oswald was about to do. For in Brush With History, Eric Tagg’s book about sheriff’s deputy Buddy Walthers, he reports that Walthers was one of the officers at the Paine household on the twenty-second. He was there to do a search and seizure since the authorities learned that Marina Oswald was living there and her husband’s possessions were likely located there. Walthers later talked about finding several “metal filing cabinets full of letters, maps, records, and index cards, with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” Sheriff Decker mentioned the metal boxes in his official report provided to the Warren Commission. This created quite a stir, and therefore the Warren Commission made it go away in the Speculation and Rumors part of its report.110 One can safely guess that some of the SMU students who agreed with Paine about Castro had their names inserted in those file boxes.

  Why is it a “safe guess?” Because the collecting of the names of leftist sympathizers continued with Ruth during the days of American involvement in the Contra War in Nicaragua. Sue Wheaton was a volunteer for a religious group who journeyed to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas consolidate their leftist revolution. There she met Ruth as part of another group. But Ruth’s group ran a sawmill project on the east coast of Nicaragua, a Contra holdout and nexus of CIA based activi
ties. Further, Ruth was associated with a man names Jon Roise who was trying to recruit former Contra members to speak at Casa Ben Linder in Nicaragua. Whenever Wheaton would encounter Ruth, she said Ruth would be taking copious notes and be accompanied by others who would take snapshots and also tape record proceedings. Wheaton concluded that Ruth was taking down information about Americans in Nicaragua who opposed U.S. policy there and that she was probably then giving it to members of the American Embassy who she said she knew.111

  This posturing as a liberal Quaker, but then acting as a surveillance agent, was not just vaguely suggested by Allen Dulles. It was clearly suspected by other intelligence agencies about the Paines. And again, it surfaced through Garrison’s grand jury proceedings. When a member of the grand jury asked Marina Oswald if she still associated with Ruth Paine, Marina replied that she did not. When she was asked why she did not, Marina said that it was upon the advice of the Secret Service. She then elaborated on this by explaining that they had told her it would not look good if the pubic found out that, “she [Ruth] had friends over there and it would be bad for me if people find out connection between me and Ruth and CIA.” An assistant DA then asked, “In other words, you were left with the distinct impression that she was in some way connected with the CIA?” To which Marina replied in the affirmative.112

  In Nicaragua, because the situation was so confrontational and since there was no powerful mainstream media to protect her, the suspicion of Ruth being an asset of the Agency was widespread. Steve Jones followed up on Sue Wheaton’s information with another female worker who knew Ruth in Nicaragua and befriended her. When Ruth’s surveillance activities finally became too suspicious in Nicaragua, the two women drove to Costa Rica for some R&R. When they arrived near the Costa Rican camp, some people approached the car to help them out. When they saw it was Ruth, they walked away moaning, “Oh no, its Ruth Paine. Keep her away from us. She’s CIA.” It got so bad, the pair had to leave.113

  When they got back to the USA they remained friends. The woman actually won Ruth’s confidence. For Ruth admitted to her that her father, William Hyde, had worked for the CIA. She even told her that she had an estranged daughter who would not talk to her until she came to grips with the evil she had done in her life. When the woman asked Ruth, “What evil?” she clammed up. But the friend is certain that she was talking about the Kennedy assassination since the assassination was the previous context of the discussion.114

  If that is so, then what “evil” could Ruth be talking about? One instance could be her dubious testimony about the call from Robert Adams, which could have placed Oswald outside of Dealey Plaza on November 22. But Ruth also figured prominently in producing questionable evidence to help the FBI and Warren Commission finger Oswald for a previously unsolved rifle assault. This was an unsuccessful shooting attempt at General Edwin Walker back on the evening of April 10, 1963. It is important to note that in the entire nearly eight month span the Dallas Police had this case under inquiry, Oswald’s name never surfaced in any part of their investigation. Let us now observe how a German newspaper and Ruth Paine combined to give the Commission and the Bureau pretexts to convict Oswald in the public mind in the Walker case.

  On November 29, a reporter named Helmet Hubert Muench published an article for a conservative West German newspaper published out of Munich. There were actually two articles, one a straight story and one a transcript of an alleged conversation with Walker on the twenty-third—and perhaps a follow up on the next day—by what appears to be another German reporter named Hasso Thorsten.115 Thorsten had called Walker when he was in Shreveport on a speaking engagement right after Kennedy’s murder. The point of both articles was that Walker had told the paper that it was Oswald who had fired at him in April, that this was known earlier—that is, before the assassination—and yet nothing was done about it. But if something had been done then Oswald would not have shot Kennedy. The problem with this story is that Walker denied under oath saying this to Thorsten, and in no uncertain terms.116 In fact, Walker said that the accusation against Oswald in his case was not made until after the interview, so he could not have said such a thing.

  But then, a day later, on November 30, a piece of evidence emerged from Ruth Paine’s home. The Dallas authorities had spent a large part of two days looking through Ruth’s home for evidence against Oswald. Their inventory list was forty-nine pages long. Somehow they missed a note which was inside a book. It was a note allegedly written by Oswald in Russian which ominously tells Marina what to do if he was in jail, and how to find him there.117 Why did Ruth produce this book at the time? She said Marina had to have two books with her. One was entitled Our Child and the other was Book of Helpful Instructions. She had to have them since Marina used them each day. (This while Marina was being detained at a hotel and under twenty-four-hour watch by the FBI and Secret Service.) The note was then found in the latter book by the Secret Service. The note was not dated and did not have Oswald’s latent fingerprints on it.118 This, even though the note took up almost one side of a sheet of paper. But also interesting is this: the FBI did happen to take seven latent fingerprints off the note; yet none of them matched Lee or Marina. Prior to this, the police had retrieved photos of the exterior of Walker’s house from Ruth Paine’s garage. It was the confluence of these three elements—the news article, the photo, and the note—that provoked the FBI to take a new look at the Walker case. Yet even Wesley Liebeler of the Warren Commission asked an obvious question: Why would Oswald keep the incriminating note and photos around for well over seven months?119

  The problem with this odd evidence is that it does not at all fit the parameters of the crime. First, the shooting of Walker vitiates the marksmanship in the Kennedy case. In the latter, one has to believe that Oswald fired three shots from a manual bolt action rifle in six seconds and got two of three direct hits at a moving target from as far away as 270 feet. Something that the best Army snipers could not do.120 In the Walker case, Walker was sitting at his desk in his study, a stationary target. The sniper had time to line up the still target. The distance was approximately 30 yards. And he missed. True, it was night, but Walker’s house was illuminated by the lights from a church parking lot next door. In a discussion with the officers after a reconstruction, the police were stupefied as to how the gunman could have missed. Walker himself reportedly said that whoever it was had to have been a lousy shot.121 There were two principal witnesses. The first was Robert Surrey, an aide to Walker. Surrey had told the police that four nights prior to the shooting he had seen two men sitting in a brown Ford behind Walker’s house. They got out of the car and walked around Walker’s home. When the car pulled out, he followed it. He could detect no license on the car. He lost the car near downtown Dallas.122 The other witness was young Kirk Coleman. Coleman’s testimony corroborated Surrey. He said that he saw two men drive off in separate cars from Walker’s home after the shooting attempt. One of the men threw something down on the floor of his car before pulling away. Concurring with Surrey, Coleman said that neither man resembled Oswald.123 Oswald, according to the Commission, did not drive, and did not own a car. Further, who could be his accomplice? The FBI agents in Dallas were particularly impressed with Coleman as a witness. But Coleman never testified to the Commision.124 In fact, Walker complained to the Commission that he had been blocked from getting any info on the case since the FBI took it over. Also, that he could not talk to Coleman since the witness had been told to keep his mouth shut.125 This makes perfect sense in light of Hoover’s upcoming agenda on the Walker case. For by June 10, Hoover—after leaking to the press that Oswald had shot at Walker—was shutting down the inquiry. Even though his agents in the field came to no conclusion in the case.126 In fact, the chief suspect prior to the FBI taking over the case was a man named William Duff, a former employee of Walker. Walker’s lawyer said that Duff had actually admitted to firing on Walker to a former girlfriend.127

  Also, why would a communist be shooting at both
a rightwing ideologue like Walker and the most liberal president since Franklin Roosevelt? Further, it was Kennedy who pushed Walker out of his command after a thirty year career in the service. This was for distributing rightwing, John Birch Society literature to his troops. No one from the Commission posed these obvious questions. The Commission was enthralled by Ruth Paine now producing questionable evidence to implicate Oswald in the shooting.

  And the exhibits produced by Ruth, almost by necessity, had to be dubious. As mentioned above, the FBI cut off Walker from all communications about their investigation. In fact, it appears that they also deliberately misinformed him. During his testimony, Wesley Liebeler showed Walker many photo exhibits. Near the end of his testimony Walker said that he had heard the FBI had matched up the bullet fired at him with the alleged Oswald rifle.128 This last statement explains why, among all the photos shown to him, Walker was never shown the most important one of all: The bullet the FBI said they had matched up to Oswald’s rifle. For they were now saying that it was a 6.5 caliber, copper-jacketed bullet. One compatible with the alleged rifle in evidence. Yet, this was not the bullet the police retrieved from Walker’s house that night and Walker had held in his hand. That bullet was a 30.06, steel jacketed bullet.129 As the reader can see, the combination of Ruth Paine with the FBI allowed the Warren Commission to manufacture a case that likely did not exist. As we will see, this will recur.