The Vehicle on the Grassy Knoll

[Dawn Meredith]

Part two was missing the first paragraph, so I will try this again. Hope enough time has passed to let me post it- this will be my third attempt

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evening with M.B., C.W. had his secretary phone his office every ten minutes until news came across the wire that Harding had a stomach ache from eating crab. C.W. then exclaimed, "That's it! Get me the Vice President!" Vice President Coolidge was spending that evening visiting his father. With them that evening was a good friend of C.W.'s.150

Depending on which history book is consulted, the cause of Harding's death was either from a heart attack that was misdiagnosed as ptomaine poisoning by the so-called "incompetent crony whom he had made surgeon general," or to an apoplectic stroke (a blood clot in the brain), or is left entirely to the reader's imagination. Barron's anticipation of and reaction to Harding's stomach ache would seem to corroborate poisoning as the cause of death.151

Now almost lost to history is the fact that poisoning was indeed suspected by the American people for many years after Harding's death, much in the same way that suspicions linger in President Kennedy's death. Like Kennedy's, Harding's was one of the few presidential deaths deeply mourned by the American people. Shortly before he died, Harding had been asking Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover's advice on publicly exposing "a great scandal in our administration." Hoover advised disclosure, but Harding died before taking his advice. Mrs. Harding permitted no autopsy and destroyed her late husband's private papers.152 Scandals surfaced which tended to be more damaging to Harding's reputation than to what he called his "goddamn friends" who kept him "walking the floors nights." Even in the worst of these scandals, known as Teapot Dome, the culprits escaped conviction on the charge of conspiring to defraud the government. Barron also knew, before any other journalist, the exact moment of the Supreme Court's Teapot Dome decision (not expected for several months). M.B. called this "a nose for news."153

Upon Harding's death in August 1923, Vice President Coolidge became president and was himself succeeded by Hoover in 1928. Coolidge had "cryptically" removed his name from consideration allowing Hoover, whom he detested, to easily win the Republican nomination.154 It is interesting to note, as will continue to be evident in this paper, the similarities in this to Johnson's succession, subsequent surprise withdrawal in 1968, and Nixon's succession to the presidency. To paraphrase Napoleon: It is not necessary to bury the truth. It is sufficient merely to delay it until nobody cares.

M.B.'s first husband, Sherwin Badger, had a job lined up at United Fruit prior to his June 1923 graduation from Harvard. Sherwin's job was in the head office. The manager of the company's sugar mill town of Banes, Cuba, where M.B. and Sherwin requested to be transferred, was David Armstrong a man who had devoted his life to United Fruit. Sherwin did not share his devotion.155

After a year at United Fruit, Sherwin quit and went to work for the Boston News Bureau. He later transferred to The Wall Street Journal and eventually became editor of Barron's.156 Their son, Sherwin Badger, Jr. was born on July, 26, 1928.157

Mary's and Sherwin's Boston friends, the Paines, moved to New York and were there when Mary and Sherwin moved back to the city after living in the suburbs of Scarsdale for most of 1929. [George] Lyman Paine was an architect and Ruth [Forbes] Paine was a painter. M.B. had her first love affair with a friend of the Paines. He was Leopold Mannes, a pianist/composer who helped perfect Kodachrome color processing. The affair began at the end of the summer of 1930 while M.B. was visiting Ruth Paine at her family summer home on Naushon Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Because of anti-Semitism in M.B.'s family and the disapproval of Leopold's mother, the affair ended. Still, M.B. and Sherwin decided to divorce in the summer of 1933. M.B. then took a trip to France with Ruth Paine by ship. On this trip M.B. met her next husband, Jean Rufenacht.158 She and Leopold were still in love, however.159

At this point in the chronology, around the time of the birth of the Paines' son Michael, it is important to look at an overview of the Paine family for insight into M.B.'s past history with them as well as an understanding of their impact on her future. It is equally important here not to ignore the dominating dynamics in the U.S. of the so called "Old Boy Network."


Michael Paine...was sixth in descent from Robert Treat Paine the signer of the Declaration of Independence. His mother Ruth Forbes was a great-granddaughter of Emerson and a granddaughter of William Hathaway Forbes, founder and first president of the American Bell Telephone Company. Her father, Ralph Emerson Forbes, left an estate of $2.5 million when he died in 1937. Her uncle, W. Cameron Forbes, a former Ambassador to Japan, had been until his recent demise a director of United Fruit....Michael's great-great-great-uncle, Robert Bennet Forbes, is said by the Dictionary of American Biography to have played "a prominent role in the outbreak of the Chinese Opium War." Robert's mother was a Perkins, of a family who were partners in the "most powerful American house in China." ...Michael Paine was descended from the Cabots on both his father's and his mother's side; he was thus a second cousin once removed of Thomas Dudley Cabot, the former President of United Fruit who offered another of his companies, Gibralter Steamship, as a "cover" for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs adventure. He was also a cousin of Cabot's partner, Alexander Cochrane Forbes, a director of United Fruit and trustee of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes. Paul F. Hellmuth vice-president of Cabot, Cabot and Forbes, was a trustee of the J. Frederick Brown Foundation, a CIA "conduit", along with G.C. Cabot. Thus the Paine family [had] links with the blue-blood intelligence circles of the "Oh So Social" OSS and CIA, though one would not guess this from their description in the Warren Report....In the summer of 1963 it was Ruth [Michael's wife], rather than Michael, who maintained close relations with the patrician Paine and Forbes families, traveling east in July to stay with her mother-in-law at the traditional Forbes clan retreat of Naushon Island near Wood's Hole, Massachusetts (CE 416, 17 H 119).160
..Michael Paine...had an uncle, Eric Schroeder, who was a friend and investment associate of [Dallas oil man Everette Lee] deGolyer;161 his cousin Alexander "Sandy" Forbes, a former director of United fruit, belonged to the elite Tryall Golf Club retreat in Jamaica with former deGolyer associate Paul Raigorodsky, a financial patron of the St. Nicholas Parish.162


With that history in mind, it must be noted that Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster had, and profited from, extensive conflicts of interest between their government positions and the United Fruit Company.163

Between the fall of 1933 and the end of June 1934, M.B. moved to Zurich; married Jean, returned to the U.S. to get custody of her daughter, Mary Jane (born May 15, 1930), and returned to Zurich on a steamship of the Italian Line called Rex.164 She and Mary Jane lived for a while in the village of Les Geneveys-sur-Coffrane in the Val de Ruz above the city of Neuchâtel in the Swiss canton of the same name; visited on weekends by Jean. He had inherited the Villa Joliette from his father. Eventually, feeling like a hermit, M.B. moved back to Zurich. Mary Jane had started school at this time. M.B. joined the "American Women's Club, a flourishing organization in those days. There were a surprising number of American women married to Swiss in Zurich, as well as American Businessmen and their wives and a large consular corps."165 Did Elspeth or Walt Rostow participate in the American Women's Club while in Switzerland? If so they probably met Mary Bancroft by 1937 and were among her mutual friends with Allen Dulles, whom she met in 1942.

Some weeks after "The Night of Long Knives," June 30, 1934, M.B. and Jean went to Germany on a business trip. On the eve of their departure King Alexander of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou, the French foreign Minister, were assassinated in Marseilles [by a Croatian gunman named Petrus Kalemen on Oct. 9, 1934]. Mary discovered in Germany that this assassination was blacked-out in the German press and that it was known about but never discussed by the Germans with whom she and Jean socialized. The Germans felt that discussing politics would lead to speculation about the true meaning of events -- something they did not want to know.166 It was a lesson in mass psychology that was valuable in the world of assassination plotting and cover-up.

She had also prepared herself psychologically for her future work with Allen Dulles: "For if there was one thing my work during the war convinced me of, it was essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what you were doing and why....In short, I personally would be incapable of engaging in intelligence work in the service of an idea. But when war broke out and my own country was under attack, that solved the problem for me."167 Did Bancroft consider Kennedy a threat to her country after the Bay of Pigs? If so, she probably shared that opinion with mutual United Fruit friends of Allen Dulles and the Paines.

She shared another interest with Dulles as well: "I also developed an interest in Yugoslavia, which was to continue all during the war, until my file on Yugoslavia actually became second in size only to my file on Germany. I noted with interest that the grandmother of the new, eleven-year-old King Peter of Yugoslavia was Grandpa Barron's friend, Queen Marie, now the Dowager Queen of Rumania...."168

Bancroft spent the next four years getting to know the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and developing a lifelong interest in his work.169 She also made friends at this time with two American Women: Mary Briner and Carly Goetze.170

Mary and Jean went to Venice, Italy in early summer 1938, staying until early August 1938. During their absence the Queen of Rumania had died. "I would eventually become much more familiar with her country and her people because of Jean's many trips to Rumania during the war, as well as by meeting his Rumanian friends who came to visit us on their way to Paris or other European capitals."171

After Pearl Harbor, Bancroft, through her friend Don Bigelow, the First Secretary at the American Legation, met and began writing articles on Switzerland and Germany for Gerald Mayer, a representative of the Office of Coordinator of Information172 [predecessor to the OSS].173 Through Mayer, after working for him for several months, M.B. met Allen Dulles, who was posing as assistant to the American Minister, in early December, 1942. Mayer was actually an OSS recruiter and Dulles was head of U.S. intelligence in Switzerland. A few days later over dinner at Dulles' apartment in Bern, they "...discovered [they] had many mutual friends and talked about them for a while." Prior to this meeting M.B. had learned that Dulles had held various positions in the State Department and that his uncle, Robert Lansing, had been Wilson's Secretary of State.174

Wilson also had several powerful University of Texas personalities in his cabinet: Colonel Edward M. House, David Franklyn Houston, Albert Sidney Burleson, and Thomas Watt Gregory. House, then a kingmaker in Texas politics was the man principally responsible for Wilson being nominated for and elected President.175

Dulles asked M.B. to continue to analyze the speeches of Hitler, Goering, and Goebels and send them to him rather than Gerald Mayer. "He'd also like me to see some people coming from adjacent countries who had to be careful where they went and whom they saw because they would be returning to occupied territories. Switzerland was riddled with enemy agents. Officially, mine was a Swiss household where such people could visit with a minimum of risk. Or, if I had to meet them in public, I was a journalist and that was an excellent cover.... Useful was a word that was constantly on his [Dulles'] lips. He judged everyone and everything by the yardstick of its usefulness in the war effort....176 It is speculated that such techniques and personality traits would also have been useful if Bancroft had to relay information from Dulles to Ruth and Michael Paine in 1963.

Dulles said of Howard Burris' close friend, Richard Helms, that he was "useful," and he "knew how to keep his mouth shut." According to Helms biographer Thomas Powers, "When Dulles undertook the delicate job of getting a Postmaster General's okay for an illegal mail-opening program, it was Helms he picked to go with him."177

Considering that Helms "had a certain slippery ability to avoid crisis situations in which failure might wreck a career..." and considering "...his skepticism of covert action," the reason he worked on this delicate job might have been due to another trait of Allen Dulles. As Bancroft describes it: "One of his greatest strengths was the devotion he was able to evoke in those who worked for him and this kind of devotion on my part began on that very first evening in Bern."178

Mary Bancroft and Allen Dulles fell in love. For M.B. it was much deeper than her feeling for Leopold had been. M.B. did not like Allen's attitude toward John Foster, however. When their father was dying he told all his children to regard Foster as the head of the family. M.B. thought the American people should have made more of a fuss "over the constellation of power resulting from Foster at State and Allen at the CIA."179 She probably knew about their conflicts of interest with the United Fruit Company.

M.B. noticed that Dulles was annoyed with the wrongness of facts in Hitler's speeches and found herself having to explain the Nazi theory of propaganda, "how it had nothing to do with presenting facts accurately but solely with an appeal to the emotions of the German people."180 To do this she translated passages on the subject from Mein Kampf for Dulles. M.B.'s work included comparing articles in the most respected German newspaper with the contents of Goebbel's weekly and issues of the Nazi party paper. She summarized significant articles in each "and also reported on the obituaries -- how many deaths were of the military or seemed significant in connection with specific bombings."181

While she never mentions the term "editorial intelligence" in her book, Bancroft, nevertheless, gives a good definition of it: "But intelligence is a mosaic. General material about background and people's interrelationships can be both illuminating and important. Quite often missing pieces of the mosaic emerge that make a previously incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear."182 Indeed.

Toward the end of May, 1943, M.B. was asked by Dulles to translate a book on the Third Reich by Hans Bernd Gisevius, a member of the Canaris organization -- the Abwehr -- stationed under the diplomatic cover of vice-consul at the German consulate in Zurich. His book was about the July 20 plot against Hitler, being coordinated by Admiral Canaris' subordinate, Colonel Hans Oster. M.B. reported: "I told Allen it all made sense to me. Difficult as it might be to believe, the conspirators actually hoped that if they got rid of Hitler they would be able to take over the whole country and to negotiate peace with the Anglo-Americans. Their hopes went even further: They envisaged the western Allies joining them in a crusade against Russia -- and communism. Gisevius had been sent to Switzerland to get in touch with the western Allies. Other emissaries were making similar contacts in Sweden and elsewhere."183

Bancroft reveals more about Dulles' background: "In addition to Rumanians, I was also meeting with a considerable number of Yugoslavs....Allen was already thoroughly familiar with both the history and present conditions in Yugoslavia, having at one point in his State Department career been in charge of the desk that dealt with the affairs of that part of the world. He apparently knew the names of every city, town, river, bridge, railway line, and personality in the entire country."184

Gisevius told M.B. that the Rumanians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians were watching how the U.S. treated Italy after the fall of Mussolini in the summer of 1943. He said we should have made peace with them and followed it with peace offers to the Balkan countries, who would have jumped at the chance. This, he said would have destroyed German morale enough that Germany would have collapsed "within seventy-two hours."185

Gisevius claimed that the Allies behavior in Italy was proof they were not interested in fighting fascism. He also felt that Allied bombing strategy and the demand for an unconditional surrender would drive the German's toward "an eastern solution" being offered by the Russians and their Freies Deutschland ("Free Germany") committee established in Moscow after Stalingrad and headed by Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus and General von Seydlitz. "This was causing difficulties for the conspiracy of civilians and officers who wanted to get rid of Hitler -- particularly the older men who, like Gisevius himself, favored `a western solution.'" Gisevius felt that if we "disappointed" the Germans "they might well fling themselves in the arms of the Russians, and the resultant terror would mean `the end of Western Civilization.'" M.B. felt this phrase was overused to promote ones menace of choice -- in this case the menace of Russian communism. The July 20 plotters were both anti-Nazi and anti-communist, but not necessarily anti-fascist.186

Concerning intelligence which would have been of certain interest to Rostow, Mary tells us, "Allen had been beside himself with eagerness for Jean's return. On August 1, Allied planes had raided the Rumanian oil fields at Ploesti, and Allen, realizing that the railroad ran by these fields, knew Jean would be able to give him a firsthand report of the damage caused by the raid....The Rumanians were greatly upset by the bombing of Sofia. They couldn't understand why Sofia had been bombed and not Bucharest. Their pride had been hurt!" Although the Rumanians loved the Americans and hated the Germans, they preferred German over Russian occupation.187

In early July, 1944, Gisevius left for Germany to prepare for the coup. M.B. and Mary Jane left for Ascona for six weeks. Gisevius' friend and Abwehr colleague, Eddie Waetjen, also attached to the German consulate in Zurich, also spent the summer in Ascona with his family. On July 20, the coup failed. M.B. and Mary Jane returned to Zurich on September 1, 1944. Jean spent the summer traveling.188

In late January, 1945, Gisevius returned to Zurich and eventually moved to a rented house on Lake Geneva. In the weeks preceding July 20, Gisevius had been constantly on the move between Basel, Bern, Geneva, the Grisons, and Zurich.189

On July 13, Gisevius met with General Beck who wanted to put the whole plan down on paper. "Men of Beck's generation had no conception of how, under a terror, everyone, including one's own children, must be regarded as potentially dangerous spies. Nor did it occur to such old school gentlemen that any slip of paper, even if only written for ones own private information, might find its way into the hands of the Gestapo with devastating results for all concerned. Gisevius was only too aware of this problem." One detail of the putsch was that "Immediately after the bomb exploded, the headquarters' communications center would be put out of commission. This would insure that headquarters would be cut off from the outside world for several hours and prevent the issuance of counter-orders should there be any survivor with the authority to issue them." This never happened and allowed not only counter-orders but verification of Hitler's survival.190

It is recalled here that Kennedy's entire cabinet was out of the country at the time he was killed. Also, for an hour after the JFK assassination, phone service in Washington was sporadic at best.191 Whether or not this was due to deliberate tampering can be researched by checking the memories of people in other cities with large populations about whether their phone system was having problems during that hour.

By July 23 Gisevius had managed to find a hiding place where he waited for Dulles to smuggle false papers to him. On January 20, 1945 the papers mysteriously appeared at the house where he was staying. "The papers included a special pass and a letter from Gestapo headquarters signed by Himmler (a perfect forgery), instructing all government officials to assist said Hoffman [his new identity] on an important secret mission to Switzerland." Still, he was lucky to make it back.192

After analyzing Gisevius, Carl Jung told M.B., "`Of course, he still has rather grandiose ideas, and if he goes to the United States, he might attach himself to some current of power there that would permit him to realize at least some of them.'"193 Prior to this comment, the only contact Bancroft had established between Gisevius and the United States was with Dulles through Bancroft herself. Did Gisevius wish to continue his work in anti-communist assassination plots? As we shall see, Gisevius did go to the U.S. He "spent some time in Texas, then returned to Germany...."

In another statement that overlaps with the interests of Ransom and Rostow M.B. writes that among Dulles' achievements cited in his Medal for Merit is "...his reports on damage inflicted by the Allied Air Forces as a result of raids on Berlin and other German, Italian, and Balkan cities, which were forwarded within two or three days of the operations."194

On her relationship with Dulles, M.B. says, "He knew that there was nothing he could say or do that would affect in the slightest my deep affection for him. He was also aware that I knew his dark side and that it didn't bother me in the least." Again we see personality traits that were and would remain useful in the business of assassination plotting.

Dulles went to Germany in the spring of 1945 to head the OSS mission there.195 When the Russians learned of the secret negotiations for the first great German surrender, from which they were excluded, they protested to Washington. "So Allen withdrew personally from the negotiations, but indicated, without saying so in so many words, that it would be quite all right for others to proceed as long as he didn't know anything about what they were doing. This was an old trick, similar to the one practiced by Admiral Canaris in connection with the July 20 conspiracy."196 And again we see techniques that were and would remain useful in the business of assassination plotting.

According to Robert Morrow, it was Tracy Barnes, second in command of the Bay of Pigs operation under Rostow's friend Richard Bissell, who was the recipient of Lee Harvey Oswald's information from Minsk. Barnes went on to head the CIA's super secret Domestic Operations Division (DOD); and was therefore the boss for whom J. Walton Moore was working in Dallas in 1962 when he initiated de Mohrenschildt's relationship with Oswald. Though fired from the CIA by Kennedy, Dulles was still considered "the Director" by some who had worked under him.197 One of them was very likely Tracy Barnes. Barnes was disliked at CIA but got top jobs because Dulles liked him. E. Howard Hunt, a mutual friend of Barnes and Dulles, was Barnes' covert action chief at DOD.198

In early summer 1952, M.B. and Mary Jane "again returned to the States, and she and Horace Taft announced their engagement at the Republican Convention in Chicago, where Horace's father, Senator Robert A. Taft, was contending with General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the presidential nomination. Mary Jane and Horace were married that September in Washington, where we made our headquarters with Clover [Allen's wife] and Allen. Sherwin [Jr.] could not make the wedding because by then he was a lieutenant in the United States Navy serving off Korea. Clover and Allen's son was also in Korea serving as an officer in the US marines." In the fall of 1953, M.B. moved back to the States permanently and Sherwin, Jr. started working for Time magazine. Of particular interest, Bancroft reveals that "Gisevius married his Fräulein Braut, spent some time in Texas, then returned to Germany where he published several more books; he finally settled on the Lake of Geneva near Vevey. We kept in touch until his death in 1974."199

When Allen Dulles retired in 1961 he took M.B.'s wartime reports home with him. Despite his urging, M.B. procrastinated on writing her war memoirs (Allen wanted to "go over them" with her). After his death, in 1969, she asked Clover for the reports. Richard Helms had them by then and took two years to return them to her.200

With all of her references to Kennedy assassination-related persons and subjects, Bancroft could scarcely have overlooked another detail of her life that was not in her book. Perhaps Bancroft is purposely making it conspicuous by its absence -- a possible coding technique.201 It is in Leonard Mosley's 1978 book, Dulles. Mosley says that in 1948, a year after her divorce from Jean Rufenacht, "Mary Bancroft was still a friend of Allen Dulles, as she would continue to be until his death, but the intimacy they had achieved in wartime Switzerland had now gone out of their relationship. Mrs. Bancroft had turned her strong personality in other directions and lighted upon Henry M. Luce, president and editor-in-chief of Time magazine, whom she set out to "convert" from his right-wing ways to her more liberal philosophy."202

Also in a description, that researchers of the JFK assassination will find intriguing, Mosley says about Allen Dulles: "He had periods when he was out on the tennis courts owned by his rich friends, the Belins, challenging and beating Bill Bundy, Jim Angleton, and Bob Amory, or other members of the Agency's top echelon bold enough to take him on." Whether or not this is the family of Warren Commission attorney David Belin, or the family of Gaspard d'Andelot Belin, acting Secretary of the Treasury at the time of the assassination (making him the ultimate head of the Secret Service because Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon was out of the country) and husband of Harriet Lowell Bundy, niece of Kennedy's National Security Advisor, Frederick McGeorge Bundy, this reference has probably been overlooked all these years because the name Belin is not in Mosley's index.203

Clover Dulles and M.B. continued to be close friends until her death in 1974. Mary Bancroft continued to keep in touch with her daughter, Joan. Her book ends with a quote from C.W. Barron, which M.B. used in other parts of her book: "But remember that facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie."204

This comment, along with Bancroft's statement about knowledge of "interrelationships" which "make a previously incomprehensible picture unexpectedly clear"; her experience with codes (she used a different verbal and written code with each of her contacts and informants); the importance of the Paines in her life: the mutual ties to United Fruit, their involvement with her meeting her first love and her second husband, and their possible mutual friendship with Dulles -- who also had close ties to United Fruit; her knowledge and understanding of "the Nazi theory of propaganda"; the fact that she was Dulles' secret contact with a group planning to take over a government by assassination, using techniques of forgery and plausible deniability, so they could wage "a crusade against Russia -- and communism"; all of these facts leave no doubt that she would have followed the events following, if not leading up to, the Kennedy assassination and would realize the importance of revealing these "interrelationships" in 1983.

Can there be any doubt that Bancroft asked, if she did not know first hand, how her close friend's son and daughter-in-law, Ruth and Michael Paine, came to know Lee Harvey Oswald? If she did, she would have learned that George de Mohrenschildt, who in 1940 worked briefly for his distant cousin, Baron Constantine Maydell, then the top German Abwehr agent in the U.S., had introduced Oswald to Volkmar Schmidt, who had lived and studied with one of the July 20 plotters.205

She would have learned that after talking to Oswald, Schmidt particularly wanted him to meet Michael Paine. Schmidt arranged the party where, allegedly, Oswald and Ruth Paine met. And Paine eventually got him the job in the School Book Depository.206 Oswald also met, at that party, a man whose father had worked for C.D. Jackson's Radio Free Europe. Jackson, along with being the man who bought the Zapruder film for Bancroft's lover Henry Luce's Life magazine, was the CIA's propaganda mastermind.207

What did Mary Bancroft think of all this? Did she know Michael's friend, Volkmar? Did she know Volkmar's former professor and housemate, Dr. Wilhelm Kuetemeyer?208 Did she know de Mohrenschildt?

While in Yugoslavia in 1957 de Mohrenschildt was accused by the authorities of making drawings of military fortifications. At this time de Mohrenschildt was working for a subsidiary of the CIA funded Agency for International Development.209 Upon returning to the U.S. he met with a CIA representative who "obtained foreign intelligence which was promptly disseminated to other federal agencies in ten separate reports" according to a CIA report.210 Whether or not Bancroft knew Oswald's CIA friend, Dulles surely must have known him, being one of the CIA's top experts on Germany and Yugoslavia.211 De Mohrenschildt had applied to the OSS in late 1942 (about the time Bancroft and Dulles met) and was rejected because of FBI reports that he had done undercover work in the U.S. for Nazi Germany.212

And just what is the rest of the story of Gisevius' grandios ideas that required currents of power in the United States? Was this his motivation for a trip to Texas?213 Researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson discovered that, by 1953, Hans Gisevius was working for Dresser Industries, a Dallas-based oil equipment company. Adamson's research, for a book he is writing about George de Mohrenschildt, revealed that Dresser's long-time chairman of the board, Henry Neil Mallon and newly appointed CIA Director Allen Dulles were mutual friends of Gisevius. He was "handling" one of Mallon's prized projects -- a worldwide economic development program called the "Institute on Technical Cooperation."214

The "current of power" to which Gisevius had attached himself in the United States did not stop there. Prescott Bush, the father of former U.S. President George Bush, had just ended a record setting twenty-two year stint on Dresser's board to take his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1952. The senior Bush, who had been inducted into Yale's secret Order of the Skull and Bones with Mallon in 1917, used his financial expertise to reorganize his friend's company in 1928 and 1929.215

As Adamson points out, "It was at a Dresser subsidiary, International Derrick and Equipment Company (IDECO), where young George [Bush] would get his first start in 1948." And "For clear evidence of George Bush's admiration for Mr. Mallon, one need look no further than the birth certificate of Bush's third son. Neil Mallon Bush was born on January 22, 1955, in Midland, Texas. In fact it was Mallon who personally offered George Bush the IDECO job." Like his father, the future president would form a close personal friendship with Mallon, "the man who used his company, friends and business contacts as cover for CIA-sponsored projects."216

Adamson's research also indicates that Mallon and Dulles also formed a close friendship. They visited each other in Washington and Dallas, exchanged gifts, and noted significant family anniversaries. Bruce Adamson notes that, "it was Neil Mallon who helped introduce Allen Dulles to the wealthy and influential in Dallas society." He further notes that when George Bush was founding Zapata Oil (which later explored for oil near a Carribean base used for CIA raids against Cuba), Prescott Bush and Neil Mallon were meeting in Washington, D.C. with CIA Director Dulles to discuss a "Pilot Project" in the Carribean.217

Adamson also discovered that George Bush offered more pay to Wayne H. Dean, a top engineer at Kerr & McGee Oil, to come work for him as one of Zapata's first drilling superintendents. Adamson learned from another engineer who worked at Kerr & McGee in 1952, that "Wayne Dean and de Mohrenschildt were very good friends." Dean went on to become a top executive at Zapata.218

According to Zapata's 1960 annual report, "In September, Mr. Wayne Dean resigned his position as executive vice president and director in order to go into the drilling business in Mexico. Mr. G.H. Walker, managing partner of G.H.Walker and Co., New York City, has been elected to fill the vacancy on the board." As we will see, in 1934, a shipping line established at the end of World War I in a deal arranged for Brown Brothers, Harriman by Prescott Bush's partner and father-in-law, G.H. Walker, was found by Congress to be subsidizing "a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States."219

In other Bush-de Mohrenschildt links, Adamson notes that wealthy oilman Edwin Wendell Pauley, with whom Bush and others at Zapata formed the Permargo drilling company in Mexico, is listed in de Mohrenschildt's phone book four times. An employee at Mexico's Pemex Oil Company, Antonio J. Bermudez, is also in de Mohrenschildt's phone book. Bermudez was "a very close friend to Everette DeGolyer, owner of DeGolyer & MacNaughton and father-in-law of one of LBJ's right-hand men, George Crew McGhee."220

Of all of the possible implications of Mary Bancroft's cryptic reference to a post-war trip to Texas by Hans Gisevius, it turns out that Dulles' and Bancroft's fellow expert on political assassination continued to stay in close proximity to the places and people whose names would one day be linked to the Kennedy assassination. Considering Gisevius' "rather grandios ideas" that this current of power in the U.S. "would permit him to realize," two questions are raised: what were these ideas, and did he realize them? Given the truth behind Mary Bancroft's seemingly mild statement that Gisevius "spent some time in Texas," this more severe but equally cryptic statement takes on greater importance.

All of this makes crucial the need for research into the possible relationship between George Lyman Paine and CIA covert action pioneer, James Burnham. Both had been leaders in the Trotskyist movement in the U.S. Burnham is responsible for introducing William F. Buckley, Jr. to E. Howard Hunt in June 1950.221 Hunt then hired Buckley to work with him at the infamous Mexico City station. Paine and Burnham would certainly have shared a common interest in one of Stalin's most successful covert operations -- the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City.222

After a failed attempt in May 1940, Stalin and his secret police, the GPU, succeeded three months later, in assassinating the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico. It was accomplished by Spanish Communist Ramon Mercader, a trained agent of the secret police, who cunningly, over a period of several weeks, used unwitting Trotsky loyalists to penetrate Trotsky's guarded and fortified house in Mexico City. Mercader struck the fatal blow with an alpenstock (an iron staff used in mountain climbing) into Trotsky's head during a private, unguarded meeting in the exiled leader's workroom.223

The Burnham-Paine link is one of at least nine Trotskyite connections to Oswald:


Harry L. Power, an Army veteran and "Trotskyist or Maoist type" from San Antonio was an associate of Oswald, according to undercover intelligence operative Richard Case Nagell. On Nov. 23, 1963, a 7.65 German Mauser rifle (the type of rifle Roger Craig and others identified as the murder weapon on the sixth floor of the TSBD) was found in his Indiana hotel room. Another San Antonio man who professed knowledge of Power, John Robert Glenn, an Air Force intelligence operative whose life story was strikingly similar to Oswald's, also professed to be a Trotskyist.224

Oswald is holding the Trotskyite newspaper The Militant in the backyard photos;225

Michael Paine's father (a friend of Mary Bancroft) was a leader of the movement;226 as was

James Burnham, the CIA covert-action chief who introduced William F. Buckley, Jr. to E. Howard Hunt.227
This connects to Oswald not only because Burnham may have known Paine but because Hunt had just become chief of the Mexico City station when he and Tracy Barnes became involved with David Atlee Phillips (Maurice Bishop?) in the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala for United Fruit228 -- the Paine-Dulles connected business.

Also, Hunt hired Buckley to work at his Mexico City station. De Mohrenschildt had worked at Buckley's parent's oil company, Pantipec, with his future business partner, Pantipec's president, Warren Smith;229


On New Year's Day 1963, Oswald ordered several political pamphlets from the Trotskyite Pioneer Press and soon began checking out books about Marxism, Trotskyism, and American imperialism in Latin America, especially Cuba;230

Vaughn Marlowe, the executive officer of the Los Angeles chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) whom Leopoldo and Angel almost recruited to be the shooter in the June 1963 plot against JFK, had been associated with "Trotskyists";231

Harold R. Isaacs (Rostow's co-worker at CENIS) is referred to as a "Trotskyist" in two books about the Far East;232

FBI agent John William Miller reported that CIA agent William George Gaudet told him of a purchase of paintings by Jack Ruby from Lorenzo Borenstein, a close relative of Leon Trotsky.233 Gaudet is the CIA agent who got the Mexican tourist card next to Oswald's in New Orleans in September 1963.234 He also told attorney Bernard Fensterwald in 1975: "She [Dorothea Murret, Oswald's cousin linked to Rostow's associate Harold Isaacs] may have worked for the agency in New Orleans."235

Felipe Alvahuete, a secretary and aide of the late Leon Trotsky and a leader of the Fourth Internationale, accused the Communist Party of complicity in the Kennedy assassination a few days after the murder.236
There are at least three possible explanations for this Trotsky business. First, Burnham and Paine may have been plants in the movement (Richard Gibson, one of FPCC's founders was suspected of being CIA),237 or they may have been rightists who sought to use Trotsky as the best hope for overthrowing Stalin; a sort of "Trotsky-right." Since Burnham and Paine had close ties to Oswald by the time of the assassination, Trotskyism may have been part of his intelligence cover as well -- a link that made him a prime candidate as a patsy for those wishing to blame the assassination on the Communists.

Second, Leopoldo and Angel, the two unknown, shadowy figures who were reportedly posing as pro-Castro agents around Oswald in 1963, were apparently thinking of recruiting Marlowe, a real leftist with a Trotskyite background, to shoot Kennedy in Los Angeles in June 1963. They may have been working in league with Burnham and Paine in efforts to set up several Trotskyists as patsies.

And third, since Oswald was either becoming a Trotskyite, or it was part of his sheepdipping as a leftist, and since he told Volkmar Schmidt that he thought the U.S. was becoming fascist,238 he may have suspected that a Trotsky-right, foiled by the GPU in its attempt to overthrow Stalin, was now conspiring to assassinate JFK and blame it on the KGB for revenge (among other motives).

Recall that Oswald was reading Trotskyite literature, books on U.S. imperialism in Cuba and Latin America, and checking out library books on Kennedy simultaneously with books on the assassination of Huey Long. Oswald may have been the original assassination researcher, studying aspects of the conspiracy in advance that other researchers would be examining thirty years hence. The GPU's assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City, while not as sophisticated, had its similarities to the conspiracy involving Oswald. Maybe Paine and certainly Burnham were inspired by the KGB's institutionalized assassination program; especially given the infamous William Pawley- and Allen Dulles-assisted Doolittle Report of 1954 which urged the CIA to think more like the KGB.239

It has been said that neither Rostow nor his father had ever been leftists but actually avowed Mensheviks (anti-communists).240 This fact may shed light on Isaacs' Trotskyite past and on Rostow; especially since Oswald's cousin and Isaacs' associate Marilyn Dorothea Murret may have worked for the Agency in New Orleans with William George Gaudet.

Many researchers still think of Rostow as a reformed leftist and still others think he continued to be a leftist and a victim of the extreme right. This type of confusion has served the cover-up well. Dick Russell himself seems to be confused by all of these Trotsky goings-on when he says of Michael Paine that "...interestingly enough, his father, George Lyman Paine, was one of the leaders of the American Trotskyite movement."241 While having obviously read Scott's manuscripts, Russell overlooked the Paines' extensive ties to the national security establishment.

Also needed is a close look at how and when Foster Dulles' son, John W.F."Jack" Dulles, expert on Brazil, came to be employed at George de Mohrenschildt's alma mater, The University of Texas at Austin. Foster's and Allen's uncle, Robert Lansing, after all, had several powerful friends there, some of whom were fellow cabinet members in the administration of Woodrow Wilson, Harding's predecessor.242

Perhaps the more fitting question is how de Mohrenschildt came to attend the academic halls of Lansing's fellow cabinet members. Keeping in mind the earlier discussion of Harding's death which ultimately resulted in the presidency of his "detested" commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, it is worth noting that Harding's secretary of state was Charles Evans Hughs, who narrowly missed becoming president in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was elected. Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919 while on a countrywide speaking tour to gain support for ratification of the League of Nations. He was trying to overcome the protests of the Republican controlled Congress.243 Harding, who won the nomination in 1920 because his "...lack of strong convictions made him attractive to many of the politicos after eight years of the headstrong Wilson,"244 also became "determined that America should join the League of Nations' World Court despite Congressional disapproval...." Like Wilson, he went on a cross-country tour to take the issue to the people -- the tour on which he, again like Wilson, suffered his so called stroke.245 As will be seen in this paper, the fact that President Wilson had several powerful University of Texas personalities in his cabinet, as well as Allen Dulles' uncle, Robert Lansing, has potentially major implications concerning links between the UT Rambler and the JFK assassination. For now, however, we will take a closer look at these Texan cabinet members.

Colonel Edward M. House, a kingmaker in Texas politics and an advisor to four Texas governors, was the man principally responsible for Wilson being nominated for and elected President. He was not elected or appointed to any office. "He was, simply, President Wilson's friend and adviser."246

David Franklyn Houston, UT's president in 1905, had as three of his closest friends in Austin, Colonel House, Albert Sidney Burleson, and Thomas Watt Gregory. He served Wilson as agriculture secretary and later as treasury secretary. His first jobs after leaving Washington, were as vice president of AT&T and then president of Bell Telephone Securities of New York; linking him to associates of Michael Paine's maternal great grandfather, William Hathaway Forbes, founder and first President of the American Bell Telephone Company. Houston died in 1940 after directing Mutual of New York through the Depression; earning twice the salary of the President of the United States.247

Albert Sidney Burleson, descendant of soldiers in the Texas Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War and American Revolution, was one of UT's first students. Later as a Texas congressman he was generous in matters where his alma mater was concerned. He served Wilson as postmaster general for eight years establishing the first air mail service; which no doubt led to associations with aviation pioneers. In 1918 Burleson became chairman of the U.S. Telegraph and Telephone Administration, a capacity in which he could have also known members and associates of the Paine family.248

Wilson's attorney general, Thomas Watt Gregory, was admitted to the bar in 1885 after earning his law degree at UT in only one year. After eight years on the Board of Regents, he worked with Colonel House to secure Wilson's nomination in 1912. As attorney general he concentrated on anti-trust violations, creating the War Emergency Division, and enlarging the FBI.249

These were the men who were fellow cabinet members of Allen Dulles' uncle, Robert Lansing. It appears Wilson fared no better with his Texans and Dulles family member than did Kennedy with his. And like Kennedy, Wilson was well aware of the dangers. "`Remember,' Woodrow Wilson warned his daughter when his first administration was sailing smoothly, `the pack is always waiting to tear one to pieces.'"250 According to Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link:


Wilson's greatest problem was Robert Lansing, Secretary of State from 1915 to 1920. Lansing, who looked every inch the statesman, was brilliant while executing routine business and often bungling while conducting important negotiations. A very bad blunder by Lansing in a controversy over armed ships in January 1916 first revealed the Secretary of State's ineptitude to Wilson and was one reason why Wilson increasingly refused to permit him to make any important decisions on his own. Worse still, the discussions over policy toward German submarine warfare in the spring of 1916 first made it apparent to Wilson that Lansing was trying to lead him into war. Lansing revealed this purpose even more clearly in the following autumn and winter. Since Wilson did not want to go to war, his distrust of Lansing naturally increased. Finally, Wilson lost all confidence in his Secretary of State when he tried to sabotage Wilson's efforts to end the war through mediations in December 1916 and January 1917. Unable to find a good replacement or dismiss Lansing in the midst of various crises, Wilson thought that he had no recourse but to conduct all important negotiations himself. This isolation only increased Lansing's bitterness and tendency toward disloyalty, particularly during the peace conference and afterward. There is some evidence that Lansing contemplated a coup that would put him in the White House after Wilson's breakdown in October 1919. There is good evidence that Lansing tried to provoke a war with Mexico about this same time.251
Wilson's critics have suggested a final reason for his techniques as a diplomatist -- his personal egotism, jealousy of others, and inability ever to delegate authority. A search of the record does not yield much evidence to support these charges. A fairer conclusion would be that Wilson was generous in dealing with subordinates, welcomed and took advise, and often changed his mind. Indeed, Wilson's chief weakness as a diplomatist was his soft heart and unwillingness to dismiss incompetent and even disloyal subordinates. He could not do anything to embarrass or hurt another person. He finally dismissed Lansing in January 1920, but Lansing had done irreparable damage by then. Even though Wilson had good proof of House's disloyalty at Paris during the early stages of the peace negotiations, Wilson appointed the Colonel as his chief spokesman when he, Wilson, left the conference for a visit to the United States. House gave away most of Wilson's positions during the President's absence.252

Thus Wilson's cabinet members were anti-Wilson and Wilson's successor, Warren G. Harding, had anti-Wilson cabinet members. Both presidents were stricken with a "stroke" when they pushed for participation in the League of Nations. Harding died of his stroke/heart attack/poisoning and was replaced by Coolidge who was immediately (if not sooner) informed of Harding's anticipated stomach ache by Bancroft's step-grandfather. Coolidge, with his "genius for inactivity,"253 withdrew from the election in 1928 allowing Herbert Hoover to win. Hoover had been the member of the anti-Wilson cabinet in whom Harding (just prior to his death) confided about publicizing a "great scandal" in his administration which was rumored never to have surfaced.

In light of Bancroft's revelations about "old-boy" Dulles-UT connections, it might be worthwhile for researchers of the JFK assassinating to take a closer look, in the future, at two other past and present members of UT's power structure, Harry Huntt Ransom and Walt Whitman Rostow. As discussed earlier, Rostow, who selected bombing targets as a major in the OSS, went on to a dubious career guiding Vietnam policy with the advice of his close friends Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, and Edward G. Lansdale. Ransom, as we have seen, was head of Air Force editorial intelligence during World War II, and went on to become Chancellor of the University of Texas System from 1962 until his death in 1976. He had been instrumental in the recruitment of professors Walt Rostow and Jack Dulles.

In Mary Bancroft's book about facts, truth, interrelationships, the Paines, and the Warren Commission's most active member, Allen Dulles,254 it is apparent that Bancroft is deliberately telling the true story of one assassination conspiracy while telling us "where the truth may lie" in others. And perhaps most disturbing of all, as we shall see next, are the implications of a Navy Department document which reports that Ruth Paine was requesting information about the family of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1957. Schmidt's party was in late February 1963.255



Strange Magnolias

George de Mohrenschildt, born in 1911, served in the Polish military and government throughout the 1930s and worked for French counterintelligence in the U.S. after 1938. In this latter capacity he recruited agents to gather intelligence about oil exports to Europe.256
This activity certainly brought him into contact with the OSS considering the fact that the British and American commanders planning the European invasion did not trust the French resistance. Even when Churchill decided to aid the French in 1944, the U.S. Army Air Force refused to cooperate. Through the persistence of the OSS' William "Wild Bill" Donovan, however, most of the war material dropped into France in 1944 came from the United States.257

By 1941 de Mohrenschildt was involved with German and Japanese intelligence, the OSS, and Nelson Rockefeller, who was then coordinator of information for Latin America. After the war de Mohrenschildt got a degree in petroleum engineering at UT and entered the joint worlds of oil exploration and the CIA; working for William F. Buckley, Sr. along the way, while E. Howard Hunt was getting to know William F. Buckley, Jr.258

By 1962 Allen Dulles' friend, Tracy Barnes was head of the CIA's mysterious Domestic Operations Division (DOD). That same year J. Walton Moore was head of the DOD's Domestic Contact Service in Dallas when he encouraged de Mohrenschildt to pursue a relationship with Oswald. E. Howard Hunt, a mutual friend of Barnes and Dulles, was Barnes' covert action man at DOD.259

During 1962 Lee and Marina were "befriended" by de Mohrenschildt's associates in the small, wealthy, heavily petroleum-connected and U.S. intelligence-connected Russian exile community in Dallas. According to Peter Dale Scott, "One of the chief Russian guardians, George Bouhe, was a sixty-year old personal accountant for Lewis MacNaughton of the famous oil exploration consulting service DeGolyer and MacNaughton, a man with numerous CIA contacts. Bouhe was said actually to have been `rather mad at Marina for taking an apartment at Oak Cliff because it was rather too far for him to drive and help her when she needed help with the baby.'"260

In April 1963, despite that kind of intimacy among the Oswalds and their Russian "babysitters" there was an apparent change in the people with whom the Oswalds associated. Marina moved in with Michael's wife, Ruth Hyde Paine, and Lee left for New Orleans. Although they would never see or hear from de Morhrenschildt again, neither Lee nor Marina had "escaped from the United Fruit-CIA sphere of influence." With regard to Marina, we have already explored the Paines' CIA connections. Most of Lee's known political connections "after April 1963 in New Orleans and Dallas were with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans and their contacts, many of whom (possibly including an Army Intelligence Officer) were also bitterly hostile to John F. Kennedy."261

As mentioned earlier, the Oswalds, according to the Warren Commission, first made contact with the Paines at a party in Dallas. Considering the Navy Department report mentioned earlier, however, indicating that Ruth Paine was aware of Lee Oswald in 1957, it must at least be said that this introduction was anticipated. This "initial meeting" between the Paines and the Oswalds was also strange in other ways.

It seems that almost everyone at the party was connected to an oil company in Dallas called Magnolia. While that alone is not unusual, these particular party guests, as we will see, had other associations that were.

Not only were these Magnolia employees now in contact with Oswald, but another man with older and just as dubious links to the company happened to be connected to Jack Ruby and David Ferrie.262 And like Oswald, this man ended up in Dealey Plaza.

This strange party came about because in February 1963 de Mohrenschildt introduced Oswald to Volkmar Schmidt. In Germany several years earlier Schmidt lived with and studied under a professor at the University of Heidelberg who had been involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. After meeting Oswald, Schmidt "particularly wanted him to meet Michael Paine...."263

Volkmar Schmidt had come to Dallas from Germany in the fall of 1961 to do geological research for the Magnolia Laboratories in Duncanville, Texas. Schmidt's teacher and housemate in Germany had been Dr. Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, professor of psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. His work involved conducting experiments on a group of schizophrenics until Kuetemeyer became involved in the "20th of July" plot against Hitler and had to go into hiding -- like Gisevius. When Schmidt first met Oswald he brought up the subject of General Walker and Hitler. As Schmidt told Edward J. Epstein, "Oswald instantly seized on the analogy...to argue that America was moving toward fascism. As he spoke, he seemed to grow more and more excited about the subject."264

Schmidt's two housemates, geologist Richard Pierce and chemist Everett Glover, who owned the house, also worked at Magnolia.265 Glover arranged the February 22 party at which the Oswalds met Ruth Paine and Pierce also attended. Michael wasn't able to come. This would be the first of an apparent pattern of incidents whereby Ruth would have closer contact with the Oswalds than Michael. However, as we have seen, it was Ruth, not Michael, who was in contact with Michael's CIA-United Fruit relatives during the same period as her contacts with the Oswalds. Two other guests at the party, Pierce's girlfriend Betty MacDonald and geologist Norman Fredricksen were also Magnolia employees.266

Fredricksen, was invited because he had been studying Russian with Schmidt and Pierce. Fredricksen's father, it turns out, had been director of Radio Free Europe. RFE was the main project begun by Life magazine's purchaser of the Zapruder film, C.D. Jackson, when he was president of the CIA's National Committee for a Free Europe.267

Schmidt, Fredricksen and Paine represent many overlapping connections between this party and Allen Dulles. Schmidt had been closely associated in Heidelberg with a man who was involved in one of Allen Dulles' and Mary Bancroft's most important wartime exploits. Frederickson's father had directed the CIA project created by C.D. Jackson, friend and co-worker of Walt Rostow and of Bancroft's two lovers, Allen Dulles and Henry Luce. Furthermore, "Fredricksen had been hired by [Magnolia]268 to come to Dallas after studying Russian with the U.S. Army in Heidelberg."269 And Ruth Hyde Paine probably knew Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles' former lover and Henry Luce's current lover, and may have visited with her in July 1963 when she was at Ruth Forbes Paine's home on Naushon Island, Massachusetts.

In 1975 Dick Russell got an anonymous letter telling him that the mastermind of the JFK assassination was one Tscheppe Weidenbach, a famous American general who was born in Heidelberg Germany in 1892. Years later Russell discovered in a history of General MacArthur's era, "that Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach of Heidelberg, Germany, had changed his name, upon arrival in the United States shortly before World War I, to Charles Willoughby." Willoughby was MacArthur's radical right-wing chief of intelligence.270

Schmidt, Pierce and Fredricksen were taking scientific Russian classes at Magnolia from Ilya Mamantov who, after the assassination, would become Marina's interpreter by arrangement of Jack Alston Crichton. According to Peter Dale Scott, "Crichton of Army Reserve Intelligence Service, was the apparent outsider who arranged for Marina Oswald to have the "excessive rightist" Ilya Mamantov as her interpreter."271

Scott adds, "There is an Army Intelligence Reserve Office under the Army's Director of Combat Intelligence (along with the Special Warfare Branch)."272 As discussed earlier in this paper, Vice President Johnson's military aid, Colonel Howard Burris, was the end point of a treasonous secret back-channel of information to Johnson concerning combat intelligence; Edward G. Lansdale was visiting special forces bases in the spring and summer of 1963; Lansdale, "Intellfirst" and Burris were friends with Rostow's long-time friend, General Charles P. Cabell (Lansdale and Cabell were very close); and Rostow was Lansdale's sponsor and "big patron" in the White House.

A fellow director of Crichton's firm, Dorchester Gas Producing, was D.H. Byrd, close friend of Barbara J. Burris' father, and owner of the Texas School Book Depository building in which Ruth Paine helped arrange a job for Oswald.273 Paine herself was tutoring a "boy astronomer" at Dallas' St. Marks School in scientific Russian.274 As Peter Dale Scott points out, "The task of keeping abreast of Soviet science and technology is of course an intelligence responsibility, albeit a perfectly legitimate one without "black" overtones, for which an overall coordinating responsibility is assumed by the CIA."275

If that is not strange enough, Eugene Hale Brading, who was arrested and released in Dealey Plaza because his new alias, "Jim Braden" was not yet known to local authorities, had a connection to Magnolia Oil. Brading had travelled to Dallas the day before the assassination and stayed at the infamous Cabana Motel with his friend Victor Periera and other traveling companions. The Cabana is where Jack Ruby met with friends from Chicago in the Bon Vivant Club on the evening of November 21.276

Brading and Periera had a long history of marrying rich widows and embezzling from them. In a much publicized vagrancy arrest by Sheriff Bill Decker in Dallas in 1952, Brading's fifty-dollar fine was paid by Periera. "The vagrancy rap stemmed from Brading's lingering presence, without any apparent effort to earn his take, at the Dallas area mansion of D.A. Little, president of Magnolia Oil Co. Little had died and Mrs. Little had become Periera's sixth wife after a whirlwind courtship."277

In Texas, a "community property" state, married couples equally own each other's assets. Therefore, Periera could have owned an interest in Magnolia Oil at the time of Schmidt's party.

Brading told the sheriff's department, after his arrest in Dealey Plaza, that he was in Dallas on "oil business." Only four years out of prison, Brading had checked with the U.S. Probation Office in Dallas when he arrived, as was required for his out of state travels. Had the deputy sheriffs checked his name with that office they would have gotten negative results because Brading had given chief probation officer Roger Carroll only his real name. In the early 1970s Brading was investigated by federal authorities for an alleged role as courier for laundering the mob's illegitimate money in Amsterdam and Zurich.278

Brading and Periera may have visited the offices of Lamar Hunt the day before the assassination on "oil business." The Dallas probation office's report of his visit to Dallas states Brading "advised that he planned to see Lamar Hunt and other oil speculators while here." Years later Brading reportedly told an official of the Los Angeles Police Department that he did not go to the Hunt offices on November 21 because of his criminal record. He said one of his traveling companions, Morgan H. Brown of Los Angeles, did go however. Brown, who had signed the Cabana register for the travellers' third floor suite, has since served time in a California prison. According to Earl Golz, "An old friend of the Hunt brothers who first met Brading almost 20 years ago said Brown, Brading's traveling partner, `knew the Hunts very well -- knew Lamar and Bunker and all of them.' Brown and his wife and other couples played `mixed poker' in Dallas with the Hunts about 25 years ago,' he said." Jack Ruby also admitted being at the Hunt office building that day but claimed he was just dropping someone off there.279

H.L. Hunt's security chief, Paul Rothermel, told researcher Peter Noyes that he is sure Brading visited the Hunt offices (of Lamar and Nelson Bunker) on Nov. 21, 1963.280 If so, this is very likely a right-wing/Orlando Bosch/Paine/CIA link given Brading's fellow Hunt visitor and Magnolia Oil friend Periera, and the Magnolia sponsored party where the Oswalds met Ruth Paine.

Bosch comes into the linkage because Hinkle and Turner raised the question of where Orlando Bosch got the massive funding he needed to continue his raids on Cuba after splitting from the CIA. Bosch rebelled against U.S. government backing in 1963 after an FBI informant foiled his Violynn III raid (involving Frank Sturgis, Alex Rorke, and the Minutemen) and brought twin FBI raids against his Florida airfield and Lake Pontchartrain training camp. The answer to the funding question came when "During a 1968 trial of Bosch's group in Miami, a telephone tape transcript was introduced in which Bosch indicated that a Mr. Hunt -- `the one with the wells' -- was providing backing."281 These raids were in July 1963, the same month Ruth Hyde Paine was visiting her mother-in-law, Ruth Fo rbes Paine (Mary Bancroft's long-time friend).

During 1963 in New Orleans, Brading frequented an office in the Pere Marquette building down the hall from an office frequented by David Ferrie. In a building across the street were the New Orleans offices of (H.L.) Hunt Foods and Zapata Off-Shore; as well as both of Oswald's employment agencies, and many other intriguing companies and individuals.282

Zapata Off-Shore was the oil company owned by former President George Bush after he split it off from Zapata Oil partner Hugh Liedtke in 1954.283 Beginning in 1957...