by Jim Marrs
Speaking of his tax reform act of 1963, President Kennedy pointed the finger at the oil companies, saying, “No one industry should be permitted to obtain an undue tax advantage over all others.”
Included in Kennedy’s tax package were provisions for closing a number of corporate tax loopholes, including the depletion allowance. Needless to say, oilmen both in Texas and elsewhere felt threatened by Kennedy and his policies. Kennedy’s use of his personal power against the steel manufacturers had shown them that the young president meant to enforce his will in these matters.
John W. Curington, who for twelve years was special assistant to Dallas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, reported in 1977, “Hunt was often heard by top aides and followers to say that America would be much better off without Kennedy.” Curington, whose statements were assessed as truthful by Psychological Stress Evaluator analysis, also said the oilman sent him to check on Oswald’s police security while in custody and was “elated” to find it was lax. Curington also is convinced that he saw Marina Oswald coming from Hunt’s private offices several weeks after the assassination.
Hunt’s former assistant said he believes that the wealthy oilman unwittingly influenced right-wing followers to participate in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. He added that in later years, Hunt admitted that he knew an assassination conspiracy existed.
Angry talk in the corporate boardrooms may have grown into deadly plots on golf courses and at private parties. But despite their unparalleled wealth and power, oilmen could not have moved against Kennedy on their own. They needed allies within government and within the intelligence community and the military. Such allies were there—among the anti-Castro Cubans, in the CIA, in organized crime, in the Pentagon and even within the federal government—and all were most receptive to the idea of a change of leadership. Lyndon Johnson was especially sympathetic to oilmen, many of whom were fellow Texans and financial contributors.
One man with connections to government, intelligence, and the oil industry was Dallas oil geologist George DeMohrenschildt, identified by the Warren Commission as the last-known close friend to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald’s Friends
DeMohrenschildt—a man who was friends with both Jackie Kennedy’s family and her husband’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald—is perhaps the most intriguing person in the entire cast of characters connected with the Kennedy assassination.
Despite this fascinating link, little was said about DeMohrenschildt at the time of the assassination as both he and his wife, Jeanne, were in Haiti during the events in Dallas.
A close study of DeMohrenschildt’s life shows a string of intelligence connections, raising the possibility that DeMohrenschildt may have played a role—perhaps unwittingly—in furthering plans for the assassination. This possibility may have come to haunt DeMohrenschildt in the days just prior to his suspicious death in 1977.
DeMohrenschildt—his family, originally named Mohrenskuld, was of Swedish extraction—was born April 17, 1911, in Mozyr, a small Baltic town in czarist Russia near the Polish border.
An educated, sophisticated young man, DeMohrenschildt was introduced to many wealthy and influential Americans. He later told the Warren Commission:
[I met] lots of people, but especially Mrs. [Janet] Bouvier. . . . Mrs. Bouvier is Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, also [I met] her father and her whole family. [Mrs. Bouvier] was in the process of getting a divorce from her husband [Jackie’s father, John V. “Jack” Bouvier], I met him, also. We were very close friends. We saw each other every day. I met Jackie then, when she was a little girl. [And] her sister, who was still in the cradle practically.
After failing in attempts to sell insurance and perfume, DeMohrenschildt traveled by bus to Texas, where, thanks to family connections, he got a job with Humble Oil Company in Houston. Despite being friends with the chairman of the board of Humble, young DeMohrenschildt was confined to working as a “roughneck” in the Louisiana oil fields. He quit after being injured and contracting amoebic dysentery.
For years he claimed to have worked for French intelligence during the early years of World War II—he said he was never an official agent but had helped a good friend, Pierre Freyss, the head of French counterintelligence. In 1941, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with being a Nazi spy for sketching and photographing military installations near Aransas Pass, Texas. In later years he confessed to his wife that he had briefly worked for the Germans.
DeMohrenschildt also became closely connected with many exiled Russians who joined with the General Vlassov movement, anticommunist Russians who fought with the Nazis in hope of recovering their homeland. Springing up in cities with large Russian exile communities, these people referred to themselves as “solidarists,” indicating the solidarity of their purpose. One of these groups existed in Dallas during the early 1960s, although DeMohrenschildt disclaimed being a member.
The Vlassov organization was eventually absorbed by the Nazi spy system under General Reinhard Gehlen; at the end of the war the system became a part of US intelligence. Many members of this apparatus ended up working for the CIA.
DeMohrenschildt’s oil-related travels took him to France, Nigeria, Ghana, and Togoland.
In 1957, despite an unflattering background check by the CIA, he journeyed to Yugoslavia for the International Cooperation Administration, a branch of the US government’s Agency for International Development. By this time, DeMohrenschildt apparently had some association with the agency, according to documents that became public in the late 1970s.
Researcher Michael Levy obtained one CIA memo from former agency deputy director Richard Helms that states that DeMohrenschildt’s trip to Yugoslavia provided “foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in 10 separate reports.” Another CIA memo indicated that DeMohrenschildt also furnished lengthy reports on his later travels through Mexico and Central America.
Shortly before leaving for Yugoslavia, DeMohrenschildt met another Russian exile who lived in the same Dallas hotel with him. Jeanne Fromenke LeGon had already established a career as a dancer and clothing designer. Her family, too, had strong political and defense-related connections. Her Russian father had built the first railroads in China and was connected with Nationalist politics there while her brother, Sergio, had worked on the super-secret Manhattan atomic bomb project. Her former husband, Robert LeGon, was connected to security work for Douglas Aircraft and their daughter, Christiana, was married to a vice president of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
Jeanne and the outgoing DeMohrenschildt hit it off right away and she joined him in Yugoslavia. In a curious incident there, the couple was boating when they were shot at by communist guards who became anxious when they came too close to Marshal Tito’s summer home. DeMohrenschildt claimed to have been simply sketching the shoreline.
Returning to the United States, George and Jeanne were soon married and shortly set off on an incredible odyssey through Central America.
Back in Dallas in late 1961, the DeMohrenschildts were at the center of prominent Dallasites. His business and social contacts read like a who’s who of the Texas oil community. DeMohrenschildt knew Dallas oil millionaires H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson, John Mecom of Houston, Robert Kerr of Kerr-McGee, and Jean De Menil, head of the worldwide oil firm Schlumberger Corporation. According to former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, arms and explosives the CIA supplied to the anti-Castro Cuban exiles were hidden away in a Schlumberger facility near New Orleans in the summer of 1963.
But most intriguing was DeMohrenschildt’s friendship with J. Walton Moore, a member of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service.
Moore, whom DeMohrenschildt described to the Warren Commission as “a government man—either FBI or Central Intelligence,” debriefed the geologist upon his return from Yugoslavia and thereafter met with the DeMohrenschildts socially on many occasions. The Warren Commission, perhaps in an effort to deflect any attention from the CIA, listed Moore as “G
. Walter Moore.”
After DeMohrenschildt first met Lee Harvey Oswald, he checked on the ex-Marine with Moore. Less than two months after the assassination, DeMohrenschildt wrote to friends expressing shock and disbelief over Kennedy’s death: “Before we began to help Marina and the child, we asked the FBI [he meant Moore but used the term FBI at that time, as the CIA was supposed to be secret] man in Dallas . . . about Lee and he told us that he was ‘completely harmless.’”
These letters are part of DeMohrenschildt’s FBI file, indicating the bureau was monitoring him during this time. Following the assassination, his statements that he had checked on Oswald with the bureau apparently caused great consternation. Dallas FBI chief J. Gordon Shanklin even ordered agent James Woods to go to Haiti and obtained a lengthy statement from DeMohrenschildt denying that he had ever spoken about Oswald to the bureau.
DeMohrenschildt himself may have been the object of a secret investigation in the months preceding Kennedy’s death. Once DeMohrenschildt noticed small pencil marks on some of his papers and, convinced his home had been secretly entered, questioned Moore about it. Moore denied that government people had broken into DeMohrenschildt’s home.
Another close friend of DeMohrenschildt’s was Fort Worth attorney Max Clark, who at that time was connected with security at General Dynamics.
In later years, neither George nor Jeanne DeMohrenschildt could recall exactly who first mentioned the Oswalds to them. But in the summer of 1962, DeMohrenschildt made a business trip to nearby Fort Worth and decided to visit the Oswalds. He had learned through the Russian community in Dallas that the Oswalds had recently arrived in this country from Minsk and he was eager for news about the city of his youth.
DeMohrenschildt was appalled at the poorly furnished “shack” in which the Oswalds lived, but was impressed by Oswald’s command of Russian. He told the Warren Commission, “He spoke fluent Russian, but with a foreign accent, and made mistakes, grammatical mistakes but had remarkable fluency in Russian. . . . Remarkable—for a fellow of his background and education . . . he preferred to speak Russian than English any time. He always would switch from English to Russian.”
He said both his first impression of Oswald and his last were the same:
I could never get mad at this fellow. . . . Sometimes he was obnoxious. I don’t know. I had a liking for him. I always had a liking for him. There was something charming about him, there was some—I don’t know. I just liked the guy—that is all. . . . With me he was very humble. If somebody expressed an interest in him, he blossomed, absolutely blossomed. If you asked him some questions about him, he was just out of this world. That was more or less the reason that I think he liked me very much.
In 1976, his opinion of Oswald had not wavered. He told one researcher:
No matter what they say, Lee Harvey Oswald was a delightful guy. They make a moron out of him, but he was smart as hell. Ahead of his time really, a kind of hippie of those days. In fact, he was the most honest man I knew. And I will tell you this—I am sure he did not shoot the president.
In 1963, the DeMohrenschildts embraced the Oswalds and visited them with an idea of helping the struggling couple.
It is interesting to note how the Dallas Russian community split in reacting to the Oswalds. Most of them—being staunch anticommunists—wanted nothing to do with a man who had tried to defect to Russia. But some of the émigré members—especially those with intelligence connections, such as DeMohrenschildt—seemed quite at ease with the young would-be defector. Perhaps they, too, had been assured that Oswald was “harmless.”
In October 1962, DeMohrenschildt managed to move Oswald to Dallas, where he dropped out of sight for nearly a month. Marina was left with DeMohrenschildt’s daughter and son-in-law, the Gary Taylors. Oddly, Oswald did not even inform his mother of the move and he told friends he had been fired from his job at Leslie Welding in Fort Worth when actually he had quit.
Furthermore, during this time DeMohrenschildt was making regular trips to Houston, according to his friends Igor Voshinin and Paul Raigorodsky. Raigorodsky, a wealthy oilman and a director of the Tolstoy Foundation—an anticommunist organization of Russian exiles that was funded by the US government—told the Warren Commission he asked DeMohrenschildt about his frequent Houston trips. Raigorodsky stated, “He told me he was going to see Herman and George Brown. They are brothers.” The Brown brothers were owners of Brown and Root Construction and close friends and financial contributors to Lyndon Johnson. Jeanne DeMohrenschildt said the only reason they didn’t relocate to Houston during this time was her successful clothing business in Dallas.
At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oswald went to work for Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a Dallas printing and photographic firm that had contracts with the US Army Map Service. Although clearances were required to work in some areas of the plant, testimony before the Warren Commission showed security was sloppy and apparently Oswald had access to sensitive material. It was here, it was believed, that Oswald manufactured false identification papers both for himself and in the name A. J. Hidell, using company photographic equipment.
He once asked fellow employee Dennis Ofstein if he knew what the term “microdot” meant. The word “microdot” was found written in Oswald’s address book next to the entry for Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. When Ofstein replied no, Oswald proceeded to explain that it was a special photographic process whereby a great mass of documents could be reduced to the size of a dot. He said this technique was used frequently in espionage work. Ofstein wondered why Oswald would discuss such a subject.
Through the Christmas holidays of 1962–1963, DeMohrenschildt continued to try with only marginal success to get the Dallas Russian émigré community involved with the Oswalds.
He apparently tried to separate the Oswalds and, on at least two occasions, tried to find living quarters for Marina and her children. But Marina decided to reunite with Oswald, much to the disgust of her friends in the Russian community. On February 22, 1963, the DeMohrenschildts brought the Oswalds to the home of Everett Glover, where Marina was introduced to Ruth Paine. Mrs. Paine was separated from her husband, Michael, an employee of Bell Helicopter, and expressed an interest in seeing Marina again to learn the Russian language. Marina agreed and several visits between the women followed.
According to the Warren Commission, Oswald ordered the Carcano rifle from a mail-order firm under the name “A. Hidell” on March 12, 1963, and it arrived in Dallas on March 25. Just sixteen days later, Oswald reportedly fired a shot at General Walker.
The Walker incident occurred on a Wednesday night. Oswald arrived back home that evening and, according to Marina’s Warren Commission testimony, told her he fired at Walker and had then buried his rifle. The rifle discovered in the Texas School Book Depository showed no sign of being buried. It was clean and well-oiled, yet no gun-cleaning material was ever found among Oswald’s possessions.
And the following weekend, the rifle was observed in his home by Jeanne DeMohrenschildt during a visit. She and her husband brought a pink bunny toy to Oswald’s young daughter and Marina was showing her around their new apartment when she saw a rifle in a closet. As Jeanne later recalled the incident, she asked Marina, “What on earth is that?” Marina replied, “A rifle. Lee bought it. I don’t know why when we need money for food and things.” Asked what Oswald did with the weapon, Jeanne said Marina answered, “He goes to the public park with little June [Oswald’s daughter] and shoots leaves with it.”
Jeanne DeMohrenschildt later told this author:
Today that sounds very strange, but at the time, I was thinking of the times I had fired guns at small targets in amusement parks and I really didn’t think too much of her answer. When I told George about the rifle I had seen in the closet, he immediately boomed out, “Did you take that pot shot at General Walker, Lee?” George then laughed loudly. Looking back on this incident today, Lee and Marina did not appear to be shocked or upset. They merely stood there in silence while
George laughed.
DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission his question about shooting at Walker was “frankly a stupid joke on my part.” Marina told the Warren Commission that on another occasion, DeMohrenschildt asked Oswald, “Lee, how is it possible that you missed?” However, both DeMohrenschildts denied such a question was ever asked. It seems this may have been yet another example of Marina’s being coached or misquoted by federal authorities.
This visit was to be the last meeting between the DeMohrenschildts and the Oswalds. On April 23, Marina moved in with the attentive Ruth Paine, and the next day Oswald left Dallas by bus for New Orleans.
About a week later, the DeMohrenschildts left for a new business venture in Haiti. As the DeMohrenschildts were preparing to leave for Haiti in May 1963, they stopped in Washington, where, according to CIA records, DeMohrenschildt met with a CIA representative and the assistant director of Army intelligence. What specifically was discussed at this meeting is not known, but at this same time, another CIA document shows that an agency officer “requested an expedite check on George DeMohrenschildt.” At this meeting was DeMohrenschildt’s Haitian business associate, Clemard Charles. Researchers have noted that Charles later was implicated in the sale of arms and military equipment involving a gunrunner named Edward Browder.
According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Browder leased a B-25 bomber under the name of a fictitious company and flew it to Haiti a year after the Kennedy assassination and later cashed a $24,000 check signed by Charles. Browder, a former Lockheed test pilot who served a twenty-five-year prison sentence for “security violations,” told the committee he had been working for the CIA. According to information gathered by author David E. Scheim, Browder also was an associate of Jack Ruby in the 1950s when both men were arranging the sale of arms to Fidel Castro.