by Russ Baker
Around this time, Willem Oltmans was passing through Dallas from the West Coast and called de Mohrenschildt’s apartment. He was surprised when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt answered the phone, as the couple had been divorced for three years and lived separately. Jeanne clearly was not sober. She told him that her ex-husband was in the hospital, in bad shape. In a subsequent call to George’s lawyer, Oltmans learned that de Mohrenschildt was in a mental hospital receiving electric shock therapy for a persecution complex.40
On November 9, 1976, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt had signed papers authorizing that George be committed to a mental institution for three months. In a notarized affidavit, she claimed that George had made four suicide attempts in the past, that he suffered from depression, heard voices, saw visions, and believed that the FBI and the Jewish Mafia were persecuting him—that is, his tormentors were everybody but the CIA, though it was CIA director Bush he had contacted to “remove the net.”
George was brought to Parkland Hospital, the same facility where JFK had been rushed thirteen years earlier. His doctor of record administered intravenous drugs and a second doctor ordered electroshock therapy.
Two things might shed light on the de Mohrenschildt divorce and Jeanne’s acquiescence in her ex-husband’s commitment to a mental hospital. One is her own familial intelligence connections, as discussed in chapter 5. The second is what appears to have been her own independent history with intelligence work. According to interviews conducted by Michael Kurtz, the dean of the graduate school at Southeastern Louisiana University and author of several books on the Kennedy assassination, Jeanne had been a friend of—and apparently at some point a coworker with—Richard Helms, who later would become the CIA director.41 She was, according to Kurtz, also acquainted with James McCord, the ex-CIA man and future Watergate burglar; and David Atlee Phillips, the head of the CIA’s western hemisphere operations, whose area of responsibility included Cuba and who is believed by many to have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
A year after George de Mohrenschildt’s death, Jeanne would tell a journalist a completely different story about what precipitated George’s hospitalization. She claimed that a doctor had appeared in Dallas for a brief period and administered injections to him. Following those injections, she said, George suffered a nervous breakdown, at which point she decided to have him hospitalized. The doctor, she claimed, vanished into thin air.42
Cut Loose
Most people remember George H. W. Bush’s tenure as CIA chief, but few recall how short it was. He had been at the helm of the spy agency less than a year when his boss, President Gerald Ford, was defeated by the Democrat Jimmy Carter. Poppy, who obviously saw some urgency in staying at the agency’s helm irrespective of the party in power, actually flew to Plains, Georgia, to urge Carter to keep him on, but the new president was not persuaded.
This was, of course, a source of enormous frustration. Bush felt that he was just starting to reshape the agency. The head of French intelligence at the time agreed: “Even Mr. Bush, during his stay, was unable to change the methods of the CIA. He tried, certainly, and described to me at times the lengths to which he went to move this enormous bureaucracy in a direction that would have created a more effective intelligence apparatus. He had many valuable ideas. But it would have taken years, rather than the time he was given, to put them into effect.”43
From his exile, Poppy began plotting his comeback—and his operation to rescue his colleagues from the idealistic Carter and his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner. But first, he needed a new command post. Within two months of his departure from Washington, he was hired as a seventy-five-thousand-dollar-a-year (about three hundred thousand in 2009 dollars) consultant to First International Bancshares of Dallas, which was Texas’s largest bank holding company. According to an SEC filing, he was to perform “such duties as may be prescribed or assigned by the board of directors.” What were those duties? When Poppy was asked that question some years later, he trotted out the same old answer: he could not recall.
In 1988, while Poppy was waging his successful presidential campaign, the Washington Post asked the man who hired him, company chairman Robert H. Stewart III, for a description of his job. Stewart declined to answer any questions.
The Cuckoo’s Nest
Meanwhile, in February 1977, just after Poppy left the CIA, the Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans was back in Dallas again. He had a conversation with de Mohrenschildt’s lawyer, who told him de Mohrenschildt was now out of the mental hospital. Oltmans then met for lunch with de Mohrenschildt and his lawyer.
Oltmans was shocked by the transformation of de Mohrenschildt.“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in three hours of closed-session testimony shortly after de Mohrenschildt’s death. “The man had changed drastically . . . he was nervous, trembling. It was a scared, a very, very scared person I saw. I was absolutely shocked, because I knew de Mohrenschildt as a man who wins tennis matches, who is always suntanned, who jogs every morning, who is as healthy as a bull.”44
At the lunch, according to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt spoke to him in hushed French, so that their dining companion would not understand. The Russian confessed that he had something troubling to share. Later, sitting in the library of the historically black Bishop College, where de Mohrenschildt now taught French classes, he began to unburden himself. “He said, ‘Willem, I have to tell the story as it really was. But don’t betray me . . . you are the only journalist I will trust. Don’t incriminate me in the Kennedy assassination. I don’t want to go to jail. How could we do it in such a way that I don’t go to jail?’”
Oltmans said that he then asked de Mohrenschildt, “Well, first tell me, did you do it or didn’t you do it?” He said de Mohrenschildt replied: “Yes, I am responsible. I feel responsible for the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald . . . because I guided him. I instructed him to set it up.” At this point, it is certainly possible that George de Mohrenschildt was changing as a person, feeling guilt, perhaps alternating between candor and the instinct to embellish or lie. He could have been saying that his was a somewhat compartmentalized role, never knowing who some of the other players were.
At that point, “He begged me to take him out of the country,” Oltmans told the House panel, “ ‘because they are after me.’ ” With the approval of the head of Dutch national television, Oltmans and de Mohrenschildt flew to Amsterdam. As before, it becomes difficult to ascertain Oltmans’s motives in this process, as well as what larger interests he might have been serving.
On the trip, via Houston and New York, de Mohrenschildt purportedly began dropping small pieces of information. 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.
In Holland, where they arrived February 13, 1977, according to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt provided names of CIA and FBI people to a Dutch publisher and the head of Dutch national television, with other witnesses present. De Mohrenschildt, awaiting an offer of a deal from the publisher, did not go into greater detail. What happened next may have represented the moment when de Mohrenschildt could read the writing on the wall and knew his ultimate fate.
De Mohrenschildt spent a few days at Oltmans’s Amsterdam home, continuing to edit aloud his memoirs of his time with Oswald. Then Oltmans suggested it might do them good to get out of the house. He proposed a day trip to Brussels. When they arrived, Oltmans mentioned that an old friend of his, a Soviet diplomat, would be joining them a bit later for lunch. A few minutes later, they came unexpectedly on the Soviet man. De Mohrenschildt quickly excused himself and said he wished to take a short walk before lunch.
He never came back. Instead, he fled to a friend’s house, and after a few days, headed back to the United States. Later, among his effects would be an affidavit he had purportedly prepared, in which he accused Oltmans of betraying him. Perhaps, and this would be strictly conjecture, de Moh
renschildt saw what it meant that he, like Oswald, was being placed in the company of Soviets. He was being made out to be a Soviet agent himself. And once that happened, his ultimate fate was clear.
De Mohrenschildt’s affidavit—if he truly wrote it—registered distrust of Oltmans and others, and a fear that people were doing things to him, altering his address book, forging his signature on traveler’s checks. He also wrote: “I have a meeting with Reader’s Digest people on March 15th in New York City . . . The meeting is with Edward Jay Epstein, editorial writer, and the time was agreed upon with the Editor in Chief, Mr. Fulton Oursler, Jr.” It was almost as if he knew that he needed to produce a record.
De Mohrenschildt then flew back to New York and later boarded a Greyhound bus for Palm Beach. There, he joined his daughter Alexandra, then thirty-three, who was staying at the beachfront mansion of a relative, Nancy Pierson Clark-Tilton.45 De Mohrenschildt was installed in the guest room.
A Key to the Mystery
Within days, the Palm Beach County police would be poring over George de Mohrenschildt’s blood-spattered corpse. And the FBI would receive a lead about a man named Jim Savage. They did not pursue it very far, but if they had, they would have discovered Savage’s connections—right back to the FBI, and to a whole new subterranean level of the story that leads to Poppy Bush.
At de Mohrenschildt’s request, Savage, an executive with the Transcontinental Drilling Company in Houston, had been given the keys to the Russian’s car with the understanding he would drive it to Palm Beach. The friend of Oltmans’s who had delivered the car to Savage told the FBI that Savage had behaved strangely; among other things, he had seemed intent on avoiding a face-to-face meeting. Oltmans’s friend was instructed to leave the car in a parking lot and slip the keys under an apartment door.
The entry of W. C. “Jim” Savage into the story at this juncture is significant.
Savage was one of a small cluster of people who had known both de Mohrenschildt and Poppy Bush for many years. In the late 1940s, he and de Mohrenschildt had worked together on an oil field consortium project in Colorado.46 Then Savage went on to work as an engineer for Kerr-McGee, the oil company of Prescott Bush’s friend and fellow senator Robert Kerr.
In 1952, one year before the neophyte Poppy Bush entered the terrestrial oil business and two years before he started his sea-based company, Zapata Offshore, Kerr had been a big help, volunteering Savage to give Poppy a tour of the Kerr-McGee offshore oil rigs and show him the ropes. “I said, ‘Sure boss,’ ” Savage recalled.47 “I invited [Poppy] out, took a helicopter, flew him around our operations out there (in the Gulf of Mexico), had heliports on all the rigs, wined and dined him.” Savage said Bush was “very curious” about the operations and “sort of hooked on to me.” But according to Savage, Bush did not mention that he was thinking of forming his own company. When he did take that step, Bush offered top dollar to two Kerr-McGee engineers who left to join Zapata Offshore.48 Because Poppy Bush knew next to nothing about the oil business, these men ran the operational side of the venture. Yet neither of them merited even a single mention in Bush’s autobiography, Looking Forward.
The former Kerr-McGee men working for Poppy continued to associate with Savage, and also with de Mohrenschildt, whom they would see at oil-related functions in Houston when de Mohrenschildt traveled there from Dallas. This was in the early 1960s, about the time de Mohrenschildt was squiring Oswald.
De Mohrenschildt was also a close friend of Savage’s supervisor at Kerr-McGee, George B. Kitchel, who was a prominent figure in what was then the close-knit offshore drilling industry. Like the others, Kitchel had gotten to know de Mohrenschildt not long after the latter immigrated to the United States. They had met at Humble Oil, where Kitchel managed oil drilling operations for most of the 1930s and 1940s; de Mohrenschildt had worked for the company briefly as a “roughneck” in 1938. Kitchel, whose name appears in de Mohrenschildt’s address book, said he knew the Russian “very well,” and considered himself a “great admirer.”49
IN THE EARLY 1960s, George Kitchel was also close with Poppy Bush and played a role in launching Poppy’s political career in Houston. Among other things, it was Kitchel who introduced candidate Bush, in a ten-to fifteen-minute peroration, to a gathering of several hundred Houston oilmen.
Years after the JFK assassination, Kitchel would confirm that he had been friends with both Poppy Bush and George de Mohrenschildt.50 He denied, however, that he had been aware of any friendship between the two—which seems highly unlikely given the tight web of relationships of which they were part. The denial did, however, suggest that Kitchel understood the ramifications.
There turns out to be a reason for Kitchel’s improbable denial: his own brother was none other than Graham Kitchel—the FBI agent to whom Poppy Bush called in his Kennedy threat from Tyler, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Thus, the man who helped start Poppy Bush’s political career shortly before the Kennedy assassination was at the same time a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler, while his own brother was the FBI agent who created an alibi paper trail for Poppy Bush.
After the assassination, FBI agents interviewed George Kitchel about his friend de Mohrenschildt. Kitchel told them that the Russian was close with the powerful right-wing oilmen Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, and John W. Mecom Sr. The FBI report did not mention Poppy Bush, or that Kitchel’s brother was an FBI agent, with his own curious walk-on part in the assassination story.
BOTH JIM SAVAGE and George Kitchel were more than casual friends of the de Mohrenschildts. Their activities raise the question of whether they might have been serving as contacts and handlers. In late 1961, when the de Mohrenschildts returned by boat following their “walking tour” through Central America (the one where they happened upon Bay of Pigs invasion preparations), Savage and Kitchel were waiting at quayside. Savage took them to his home in Houston, where they remained for a few days, before returning to Dallas.51 In early 1962, when the de Mohrenschildts returned from a short trip to Haiti, arriving by ship, Savage and Kitchel picked them up again and drove them back to Houston and then on to Dallas. That two oil executives had the time and inclination to perform such errands is at least curious.
Prior to the Kennedy assassination, Savage was working for Sun Oil, the firm owned by the Pew family of Philadelphia, which was rabidly and outspokenly anti-Kennedy. Sun Oil also employed the far-right Russian émigré Ilya Mamantov, who frequently gave political speeches and was active in the Texas GOP when Poppy and Jack Crichton were its nominees. It was Mamantov who, as noted in chapter 7, would “translate” Marina Oswald’s remarks on November 22 in a manner that underlined Oswald’s guilt.
Blast from the Past
In March 1977, when George de Mohrenschildt fled Belgium for Florida, the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned of his return and quickly sent its investigator Gaeton Fonzi after him. But Reader’s Digest was a step ahead.
On March 27, de Mohrenschildt arrived at the famed Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach and spent the day being interviewed by the Digest’s Epstein. It was to be the first of four days of interviews, for which Epstein had agreed to pay the Russian a thousand dollars a day. That day, de Mohrenschildt talked about his life and career up until the time he met Oswald. The next morning, they began again, continuing until lunch.
De Mohrenschildt returned to the seafront mansion where he was staying, had a light lunch, and then learned from his daughter that the House investigator Fonzi had stopped by to see him. He apparently took in this information with no visible upset. A little later that afternoon, a maid found George de Mohrenschildt slumped over in his chair, surrounded by a pool of blood. The cause of death: a 20-gauge shotgun blast through his mouth.52 After an investigation, the authorities proclaimed it suicide.
The weapon had been left by de Mohrenschildt’s hostess, Nancy Pierson Clark-Tilton, loaded and leaning against a wall near his guest room. Tilton told police she left the gun out because she had hea
rd noises in the house in recent days.
When police searched the room, they found in de Mohrenschildt’s briefcase the two-page personal affidavit that he had prepared on March 11, 1977. That was the day he had learned about Oltmans’s plans for them to lunch with the Soviet diplomat and had bolted. In his left front pants pocket, they found a newspaper clipping that Epstein had given him. It was a front-page article from the Dallas Morning News, dated Sunday, March 20, 1977, with the headline MENTAL ILLS OF OSWALD CONFIDANT TOLD.
De Mohrenschildt’s stay in the mental hospital had remained a secret until the Dallas paper persuaded a judge that it was in the public interest for the patient’s private medical records, which were part of a court record, to be released. Thus, when de Mohrenschildt died, the Dallas public already had reason to believe him a candidate for suicide. The disclosure of his purported mental state also served to discredit any of his recent claims.
Epstein told police that he had brought the clipping to de Mohrenschildt. Presumably, that action could be seen as an innocent act that unintentionally led de Mohrenschildt to take his life. That is, if de Mohrenschildt took his own life, and did it entirely unassisted.
One person who challenged the idea that George de Mohrenschildt died by his own hand was his ex-wife. In a May 11, 1978, interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt said that she did not accept that her husband had committed suicide. She also said that she believed Lee Harvey Oswald was an agent of the United States, possibly of the CIA, and that she was convinced he did not kill Kennedy. As to whoever she believed did do it, she said: “They may get me too, but I’m not afraid . . . It’s about time somebody looked into this thing.”53