The White Russians Linked to JFK ‘s Assassination
I started getting into the White Russian links to JFK assassination after reading Russ Bakers “Family of Secrets” awhile back. Then my research on the Galician Diaspora started me on this post.
I just found this link which comes up with a few things Russ Baker didn’t cover and confirms some of what he wrote , which I will get to later. This is a good start though.
https://stigostgaard.com/86-2/
Upon arriving at Fort Worth on June 14, 1962, after the end of Lee Harvey Oswald’s long sojourn in Russia, Lee and Marina’s earliest contacts included 1) individuals associated with General Dynamics’ Security Division, and 2) members of the White Russian community.
According to the official narrative, these connections were facilitated through the Texas Employment Commission. It was at the Commission’s office that LHO received the phone number of Max Clark, a lawyer and former supervisor for General Dynamics’ security office, whose wife, Gali, being a Russian speaker, might be interested in meeting and conversing with Marina. Also, it was Virginia Hale, employee of the Commission, and wife of I B Hale, also of General Dynamics’ security division, who got LHO his job at Leslie Welding Company.
From these beginnings, the Oswalds’ White Russian connections blossomed, leading eventually to their relationship with George de Mohrenschildt.
At least that is the official story. But it is certainly possible to conceive an alternate scenario.
Assuming that LHO was an intelligence operative at some level – and there is much evidence that he was – his first duty upon returning to the United States would have been to report to his superiors, his intelligence handlers. Surely he would have talked to them before going to the Texas Employment Commission. The arrow of time, then, starts with the intelligence connection, and flows to the Employment Commission.
And what better candidates for intelligence handlers than Oswald’s General Dynamics contacts? First, consider Max Clark with his “covert security approval” by the CIA for “Project ROCK/IDIO/SGAPEX”. Then I B Hale with his FBI background.
Also, although he doesn’t enter the official narrative until much later, there was Mason Lankford, an ONI operative and General Dynamics security division employee who was certainly connected with Clark and Hale — and why not Oswald?
Finally, to round things out on the General Dynamics side, consider Cyrus Doering, with his record of subscribing to Communist newspapers using false names. There’s no evidence he knew LHO, but who knows?
The other component of the Oswalds’ contact nexus in 1962, the White Russian/Solidarist community, has always been somewhat of a mystery. But its members’ contacts with the Oswalds were continuing, real, and at least to some extent, documented. Many of these White Russians were, in fact, called to testify before the Warren Commission.
The term “White Russians” refers, of course, to those Russians who opposed the “Red” Russians, or Communists, during the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and continuing long afterwards. Mostly members of the aristocratic, capitalist, military and professional classes, these White Russians were forced to flee the country at the conclusion of the Civil War in 1920 in a diaspora that included enclaves in Europe, China, Australia, South America, and the United States.
One political arm of the community was called the “Solidarists”, an organization whose aims were to oust the Bolshevik government by more sophisticated, clandestine means than outright warfare.
Now in a sense, it should be noted that Marina Oswald was a White Russian, too. According to the testimony of George Bouhe, she spoke a very grammatically correct Russian, probably learned from her grandmother who was a graduate of the Smolny Institute, a school for noble girls. In other words, Marina may well have had aristocratic roots. So one interpretation of Marina might be that she was a member of some noble family “smuggled” out of Russia by the White Russian community, assisted by Lee Harvey Oswald.
At any rate, it should not be forgotten that in 1963, for many White Russians the Russian Revolution was still a vivid memory, and a restoration of the Old Regime, or at least portions of it, an overriding goal. Certainly the Solidarists would not have been pleased with JFKs apparent rapprochement with Khrushchev, or his lack of aggression toward Castro. From the White Russian point of view, the assassination of JFK may well have been viewed as a late action of the Russian Civil War.
But now let us come to the place where the influences and contacts on Lee Harvey Oswald – intelligence, the military-industrial complex, and Russian Solidarists – all come together: with the husband and wife team of Max and Gali Clark.
In fact, Gali Clark is an interesting person. The Warren Commission certainly knew this, which is why they did not call her to testify, nor was she interviewed, nor did she provide affidavits, or anything. The only information we are provided about her is second-hand: either the testimony of others, or information incidental to Max Clark.
So who was Gali Scherbatoff Clark? George de Mohrenschildt gives us a clue in his Warren Commission testimony. She was a Russian princess, “Princess Sherbatov” – thus a member of the highest of the three orders of Russian nobility.
Indeed, there is nothing so rare as a Russian princess. One wonders how a common Fort Worth boy could have landed such a prize. Ilya Mamantov tells us that Max and Gali married “during the American occupation of Europe”, presumably just after WWII.
Mary Ferrell also shows some interest in the Scherbatoff family during WWII. It seems that members of the family were not far removed from the espionage activities of the “Red Orchestra”. It is not known whether the “Princess Sherbatov” of the narrative is Gali; but “Olga Sherbatov”, as we shall see, was the mother of someone with definite intelligence connections in the United States.
Further information about Gali comes from some of Max Clark’s files. Here we learn the names of Gali’s parents: Michael and Gali Hughes Scherbatoff.
A more complete genealogy can be found at the “heirs of Europe” site (see footnote). Note that Gali Clark is the sister of #2 in this genealogy, Mikhail Mikhailovitch, so her ancestors are the same as his.
Going further, it turns out, Gali Clark has some very interesting relatives indeed – on both her father’s and mother’s sides. Let us examine the Scherbatoff side first.
Paul Raigorodsky, in his WC testimony, gives us a good place to start. Speaking of Gali, he says: “While she is a Russian, in fact she is a first cousin of a very close friend of mine, Prince Sherbatoff, who lives in New York and lives in Jamaica. That’s where I see him occasionally.”
A little internet research reveals that this “Prince Sherbatoff” must have been Kyril Scherbatoff (or Scherbatow, as that branch of the family spelled the name). Kyril’s father, Paul (or Pavel) Borisovich Scherbatoff was a brother of Michael (or Michel or Mikhail) Borisovich Scherbatoff. Thus, Kyril and Gali were first cousins, just as Paul Raigorodsky said.
The mention of Jamaica suggests a connection to the “Tryall Compound” at Montego Bay, well-known to assassination researchers. In fact, a look through some genealogical and newspaper websites shows several references to Scherbatoffs or Scherbatows at Montego Bay. Also, Kyril’s stepson, John Munroe Jr. (son of Adelaide Scherbatow) is known to have been in the real estate business there.
Not far from Tryall is John Pringle’s Round Hill resort, a site where many notable guests, including John F Kennedy, are known to have spent some time. John Pringle was one of the initial investors at Tryall, along with Raigorodsky, John Connally, and others.
The Scherbatow home, from 1956 on, however, was not at Tryall, but not far away, at Wyndways (former home of the composer and actor Ivor Novello). Here they maintained a guest home “for society and celebrity visitors,” as they also did at High Time at Southampton, Bermuda. Thus, the Scherbatows seem not to have been directly involved with Tryall, but they certainly moved in the same elite circle as the founders of that establishment, and, having been long-time (at least seasonal) residents of Jamaica’s north shore, perhaps served as progenitors for Tryall’s model.
Another cousin of Gali Clark’s was Alexis Scherbatow, brother of Kyril. Alexis was an academic who taught history and politics at Farleigh Dickinson University, was a Russian translator for the U. S. Army during WW II, worked for the Tolstoy Foundation, was vice president of the Association of Russian-American Scholars, and was a long-time president of the Russian Nobility Association. In short, he was a leading figure in the White Russian community in America.
Given this background, particularly Alexis’s experience as a writer, one wonders if he was not an editor or writer for the White Russian newspaper to which LHO subscribed, as reported by Nelson Delgado, while he was stationed at Santa Ana, California in 1959.
Moving on, we come to another Scherbatoff cousin who had a most interesting career as a tennis player, socialite, art collector, translator, military intelligence operative, and perhaps more. This was George Scherbatoff, or Stroganoff-Scherbatoff as he sometimes called himself in recognition of his descent on his mother’s side from one of the richest – probably the richest — and most powerful families in pre-Revolutionary Russia.
According to Kyril Scherbatoff’s 1939 wedding announcement George was a cousin of Kyril and Alexis – and thus would have been Gali Clark’s cousin, too. With his father’s patronymic being Grigorievich, however, George appears not to have been a pure first cousin, but maybe a second cousin (?) Nevertheless, he was a solid member of the family.
Born in 1897, the son of Alexander Scherbatoff and Olga Stroganoff, George served in the Russian Imperial Navy in his youth. In 1919 he escaped from Soviet Russia and lived in England and France for 8 years before coming to the United States in 1927. A lifelong bachelor, during the 1930s he was a well-known tennis player and member of the Palm Beach social scene.
George seems to have had friends in high places. In 1942, when he needed to accelerate his application for U. S. citizenship in order to enter the Navy, he was able to enlist the aid of Winthrop Aldridge, chairman of Chase Bank, who paved the way for him. Once in the military, given his proficiency in several languages, especially Russian, he served as a translator, a job that brought him to important WW II conferences such as Yalta. He was also the leader of a “top secret” Combined Communications team composed of Russian speakers and radio communications experts.
After WW II, George continued his career in the Navy, attending the Paris Peace Conference and the Meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York in 1947, along with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes.
Starting in 1951, George’s career took an interesting turn. He became the Navy’s member on the State Department’s Psychological Operations Board. Possibly related to this role was George’s involvement with the People-to-People program, designed to bring ordinary U. S. and Russian citizens together in various exchanges. George was particularly instrumental in bringing American and Russian veterans of WW II together. At least one such group is known to have been touring Russia in the summer of 1960.
The possible associations of these activities with the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, while not exact, are suggestive. Was there a connection between George Scherbatoff and Max and Gali Clark, and thence to LHO?
Beyond this, there is little information publicly available about George Scherbatoff’s career. However, he did participate in the House Committee on Un-American Activities
Symposium on Anti-Stalinism and the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, which basically concluded that although Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism policy was altering the political structure of Communism somewhat, it was not changing its ultimate nature.
Interestingly, George Scherbatoff’s home was in Sharon, Connecticut, the same place as William F. Buckley’s estate, Great Elm. There is no record that Scherbatoff and Buckley knew each other, but given the length of each’s residence in Sharon, it seems likely.
Next, let us look at Gali Clark’s family on her mother, Gali Hughes’ side.
As the genealogy in note 13 shows, Gali Hughes’s grandfather was John Hughes, Welsh inventor, industrialist, founder of the New Russia Company for Coal, Iron, and Rail Production, and founder of the town and steelworks of Hughesovka, or Yusovka, (later called Stalino, now Donetsk) in the Ukraine.
John Hughes might well be considered the Andrew Carnegie of Russia. (One wonders if there may not have been a relationship between the Hughes and de Mohrenschildt families at this time, given that members of both families were in charge of massive pre-Revolutionary Russian industrial and energy interests.
Gali Hughes, at any rate, was one of the heirs of an industrial empire, an empire of coal mines, steel mills, metal workshops, railroad yards and more, an empire that was lost when the Bolsheviks nationalized it in 1919 and the founders and their families were forced to return to England and Wales.
Looking at the record, John Hughes appears to have had a paternalistic relationship to his employees. He provided a hospital, schools, fire protection, churches and other amenities for the town he had built as an adjunct to his industrial works. Workers were paid compensation for industrial accidents and widows and injured workers were given jobs with light workloads to help them through their plight.
Other writers, however, give a different picture of life at Hughesovka: long working hours, deplorable conditions, filth and disease. One such writer was Nikita Khrushchev, who, as a young man, had been employed as a metalworker and miner in Hughesovka and at the surrounding mines.
In fact, the youthful Khrushchev seems to have been quite busy at Hughesovka – organizing workers, distributing socialist newspapers and organizing strikes and demonstrations. These activities were noticed by the police and by his employers, causing him to be fired more than once.
Indeed, members of the Hughes family would likely have been well aware of this irksome but affable young man, popular with the workers due to his oratorical and leadership skills, a young man who was elected unanimously by his co-workers as the chairman of the Rutchenkovo soviet, just outside of Hughesovka.
But these events were positively benign compared to what was to come. The Russian Revolution and Civil War unleashed a terror such has rarely been matched in human history. The area around Hughesovka – the Donbas – lay along one of the most viciously fought fronts of the Russian Civil War, with at least 20 changes of power recorded during that conflict. Atrocities were committed on both sides.
Nikita Khrushchev was, of course very much a part of the military action around Hughesovka, first as a member of the Red Guard, and later as an officer in the Red Army. Although his primary function was political commissar, he is said (particularly by himself) to have been involved in several battles. Some of these battles were particularly barbaric. In fact, the Ninth Army, with which Khrushchev served, is said to have tortured captured White officers in a hideous manner.
Although in 1919 the White Army was ascendant, the tide of affairs, for various reasons, quickly changed. It was in this year that the industrial works of Hughesovka were nationalized, and the Hughes family fled. By the end of 1920, General Wrangel’s troops were evacuated from the Crimea, and the Civil War was over.
Or at least its military portion was. As General Wrangel stated: “The battle for Russia has not ceased, it has merely taken on new forms.”
Much of what follows is taken from “Family of Secrets by Russ Baker
George de Mohrenschildt’s father and uncle ran the Swedish Nobel Brothers Oil Company’s operations in Baku, in Russian Azerbaijan on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea.
The von Mohrenschildt family fled Russia along with the rest of the aristocracy after the Revolution.Emanuel Nobel sold half of the Baku holdings to Standard Oil of New Jersey, with John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally authorizing the payment of $11.5 million.
Dimitri’s lengthy covert résumé would include serving in the Office of Strategic Services wartime spy agency and later cofounding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
George de Mohrenschildtwas born in what is today called Belarus close to the Ukraine border , an area also known as White Russia
In May 1938, George arrived from Europe and moved in with his brother Dmitri and new sister-in-law in their Park Avenue apartment.
Young George de Mohrenschildt came to America armed with the doctoral dissertation that reflected the future trajectory of his life: “The Economic Influence of the United States on Latin America.”
In the summer of 1936, immigration records show that Dimitri traveled to Europe, followed a week later by Betty Hooker with her young daughter and adolescent son.
Betty’s son, Edward Gordon Hooker, entered prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. There, he shared a small cottage with George H. W. “Poppy” Bush. Bush and Hooker became inseparable.
They worked together on Pot Pourri, the student yearbook, whose photos show a handsome young Poppy Bush and an even more handsome Hooker. The friendship would continue in 1942, when both Bush and Hooker, barely eighteen, enlisted in the Navy and served as pilots in the Pacific.
Afterward, they would be together at Yale. When Hooker married, Poppy Bush served as an usher.
Upon his arrival in US British intelligence reportedly told the US government that they suspected George was working for German intelligence.
Although de Mohrenschildt denied any Nazi sympathies, his application to join the OSS during World War II was rejected because, according to a memo by former CIA director Richard Helms, he “was alleged to be a Nazi espionage agent.”
De Mohrenschildt was acquainted with the Bouvier family, including young Jacqueline Bouvier, future wife of John F. Kennedy. Jacqueline grew up calling him “Uncle George” and would sit on his knee.
1948, Jim Savage and de Mohrenschildt worked together on an oil field consortium project in Colorado. 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.
1949 Crusade for Freedom founded . Senator Herbert Lehman of New York, son of a founder of Lehman Brothers, together with a group of associates established the National Committee for a Free Europe Inc. Backed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Yale ’43, Scroll and Key), this group spawned a subsidiary, the Crusade for Freedom, with General Lucius Clay, which proceeded to launch a series of gigantic annual fund-raising campaigns.
Members of the Texas Crusade for Freedom would become a who’s who of Texans connected to the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In addition to Neil Mallon, future members would include Raigorodsky, MacNaughton, Everette DeGolyer,and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Charles Cabell, who was Allen Dulles’s deputy CIA director.
Another member was D. Harold Byrd, who owned the building in downtown Dallas that would become known as the Texas School Book Depository. Still another was E. M. “Ted” Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, who was a harsh critic of Kennedy.
1950-George de Mohrenschildt bounced frenetically around every corner of the burgeoning energy landscape. In 1950, together with Poppy Bush’s old friend and former roommate Eddie Hooker, he launched a modest oil investment firm, Hooker and de Mohrenschildt, with “offices in New York, Denver, and Abilene.”
De Mohrenschildt had numerous ties to the CIA and would often make international trips after which he would be debriefed by J. Walton Moore, an agent of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas.
1950 George de Mohrenschildt was working with his former boss, Pantepec president Warren Smith, on the latter’s new firm called the Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust Company (CVOVT).
In passing, de Mohrenschildt mentioned to the commission that the CVOVT had managed to obtain leases covering nearly half of Cuba.
Like all foreign businesses operating in Cuba, it had to work through the dictator’s American intermediaries, notably the mobster Meyer Lansky, who was de facto representative of American “interests” on the island.
By the early fifties, Dallas contained a small and close-knit community of Russian émigrés, perhaps thirty in all. George de Mohrenschildt developed ties with the most important of them.
The man who would be considered the “godfather” of the émigré community was Paul Raigorodsky, a former czarist Russian cavalry officer who had fought against the Red Army. After the Bolshevik victory, Raigorodsky came to the United States with the help of the Red Cross and the YMCA.
Paul Raigorodsky, a friend and mentor of de Mohrenschildt, and was was one of the directors of Permindex..
Like many of the other émigrés, he married into American society at a high level: his new father-in-law had set up the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Before long, he was on the oil and military track, with important assignments in war and peace, including some from powerful figures in the Bush-Dresser orbit.
Some accounts have him serving in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. He also became an acknowledged friend of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
1951-Neil Mallon set up a new local chapter of the nonprofit Council on World Affairs in Dallas, in whose Cleveland branch he had been active.
Under this umbrella, Mallon brought together many of Dallas’s most powerful citizens, from oilmen and titans of the burgeoning military-contracting industry to German scientists who had fled the wreckage of Hitler’s Germany to help fashion weapons against the Communist threat.
Mallons Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives. Dresser’s global sales and acquisition efforts provided excuses for travel and technical inquiries virtually anywhere.
1952- George de Mohrenschildt moved to Dallas , established himself as a consulting geologist, and was quickly accepted into the city’s ruling elite. He joined the powerful Dallas Petroleum Club and became a regular at Council on World Affairs meetings.
1952, Former OSS Jack Crichton was part of a syndicate—including Murchison, DeGolyer, and the Du Ponts—that used connections in the fascist Franco regime to acquire rare drilling rights in Spain. The operation was handled by Delta Drilling, which was owned by Joe Zeppa of Tyler, Texas—the man who transported Poppy Bush from Tyler to Dallas on November 22, 1963.
1952, Senator Kerr was a friend of Prescott Bush and owned an oil company. He volunteered Savage to give Poppy a tour of Kerr-McGee offshore oil rigs and show him the ropes.
Bush would later offer top dollar to two Kerr-McGee engineers who left to join his own company. Because Poppy Bush knew next to nothing about the oil business, these men ran the operational side of the venture.
The former Kerr-McGee men working for Poppy would continue to associate with Savage, and also with de Mohrenschildt,
1953-The Empire Trust Company was a New York-based bastion of power and wealth. Empire Trust’s John Loeb had a network of associates that amounted to “something very like a private CIA,” wrote Stephen Birmingham in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York. Empire worked hard to protect its foreign investments and especially its stake in the defense contractor General Dynamics.
Empire entrusted its affairs in Texas to Baker Botts, the law firm of James Baker’s family. Besides Rice, another Empire Trust director was Lewis MacNaughton, a Dresser Industries board member from 1959 to 1967.
MacNaughton was the employer of George Bouhe, the Russian émigré who would later introduce George de Mohrenschildt to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Perhaps the most curious of the Empire Trust figures was Jack Crichton, a longtime company vice president who joined Empire in August 1953 and remained through 1962.
Crichton, who had been hired soon after leaving the military in 1946 by oil industry wunderkind Everett DeGolyer, quickly became a go-to guy for numerous powerful interests seeking a foothold in the energy arena. He started and ran a baffling array of companies, which tended to change names frequently. These operated largely below the radar, and fronted for some of North America’s biggest names, including the Bronfmans (Seagram’s liquor), the Du Ponts, and the Kuhn-Loeb family of financiers.
According to his former lawyer, Crichton traveled to the Middle East on oil-related intelligence business. On behalf of prominent interests, he was involved with George de Mohrenschildt in his oil exploration venture in pre-Castro Cuba.
1960 George de Mohrenschildt happened to take a business trip to Mexico City, where the CIA station was deeply involved in the coming attractions.
One longtime buddy of his and of Poppy Bush’s, offshore drilling expert George Kitchel, would tell the FBI in 1964 that de Mohrenschildt counted among his good friends the oil tycoons Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, John Mecom, and Sid Richardson.
Clint W. Murchison and Sid Richardson were known to have been major national political operatives and had close ties to Eisenhower and his vice president Nixon, as well as J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon B. Johnson.Murchison bank-rolled General Douglas MacArthur after he was fired by President Truman.
According to Anthony Summers, author of The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Clint Murchison was also a primary source of money for the American Nazi Party, and its leader, Lincoln Rockwell, who considered Hoover “our kind of people.”
Murchison’s financial empire overlapped closely with that of Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters. Hoffa would be put in prison by Robert Kennedy, but was later pardoned by Nixon.
In 1955 a Senate committee discovered that 20 percent of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was owned by Vito Genovese and his family.
Sid Richardson was an original founding member of the ASC, which in the early 1960s was the leading public group advocating the use of military force against Castro.
John Fisher, the president of the ASC, formed the Free Cuba Committee in 1963, along with fellow ASC members and retired chief of naval operations Raleigh Burke, and Clare Boothe Luce.
Other commission testimony revealed that in the couple of years prior to the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt had traveled frequently from Dallas to Houston, where he visited with figures such as George Brown of Brown and Root, the construction and military contracting giant that helped launch LBJ’s career,and Jean de Menil of Schlumberger, the huge oil services firm.
LBJ had numerous connections with the Bushes. One came through Poppy’s business partners Hugh and William Liedtke, who probably knew LBJ even before they knew Bush.
While in law school in Austin, the Liedtkes had rented the servants’ quarters of Johnson’s home.
Another connection came through Senator Prescott Bush, whose conservative Republican values often dovetailed with those of Johnson during the years when LBJ served as the Democrats’ majority leader.
1961 (late) which would have been about a half year before Oswald returned to the United States. CIA agent Moore told De Mohrenschildt about an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year and in whom there was “interest,” since he was returning to the Dallas area.
In the summer of 1962, De Mohrenschildt heard more about this defector. One of Moore’s associates handed him the address of Lee Harvey Oswald in nearby Fort Worth and then suggested that De Mohrenschildt might like to meet him. He added, as if it was an inducement, that this ex-Marine had returned from Minsk with a pretty Soviet wife.
De Mohrenschildt and Moore had met a number of times prior to that, first in 1957 following a lengthy stay by de Mohrenschildt in Yugoslavia, and again after other de Mohrenschildt trips.
1962 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 around the time de Mohrenschildt was squiring Oswald.
De Mohrenschildt was also a close friend of Savage’s supervisor at Kerr-McGee, George B. Kitchel
Kitchel, whose name appears in de Mohrenschildt’s address book, said he knew the Russian “very well,” and considered himself a “great admirer.”
1962-From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby.
1963-Mohrenschildt left US to live in Haiti
1963 The Defense Intelligence Agency was started up in 1961 and headed by Lt. General Joseph F. Carroll, a former assistant Director of the FBI. Carroll worked closely with Sullivan, Hoover and L.M. Bloomfield in directing activities of the munition-makers' police agency, the Defense Industrial Security Command.
J. Edgar Hooverwas named first Director of the FBI in 1924, and he immediately organized the anti-communist Division Fivefor espionage and counter-espionage work which President Roosevelt made official in 1936
Division Fiveof the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a relatively small department within the FBI whose usual duties are espionage and counter-espionage activities.
Division Five acted dually with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which was acting on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Directly under the two-pronged leadership of Division Five and the DIA was the Defense Industrial Security Command.
L.M. Bloomfield was the direct supervisor of all contractual agents with J. Edgar Hoover's Division Five,
A Swiss corporation, Permindex, was used to head five front organizations responsible for furnishing personnel and supervisors to carry out assigned duties.
The five groups under Permindex and their supervisors were:
1. The Czarist Russian, Eastern European and Middle East exile organization called Solidarists
2. A section of the American Council of Christian Churchesheaded by H.L. Huntof Dallas, Texas.
3. A Cuban exile group called Free Cuba Committeeheaded by Carlos Prio Socarras, ex-Cuban president.
4. An organization of United States, Caribbean and Havana, Cuba gamblers called the Syndicate.This group worked closely with a Mafiafamily headed by Joe Bonanno.
5. The Security Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)headed by Wernher Von Braun, head of the German Nazirocket program from 1932 through 1945. Headquarters for this group was the Defense Industrial Security Command
George De Mohrenschildt, testified that J. Edgar Hoover, using Division Five of the FBI, was the planner of the assassination of President Kennedy. Through DeMohrenschildt's testimony before the Commission and his documentation, the connection of the espionage section of the FBI and the assassination has been established.
Dallas oil tycoons H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were allegedly the principal financiers of Permindex—a trade organization headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and a front organization for the CIA
H.L. Hunt was also a member of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, and was a major financial contributor toward the establishment of the conservative Christian evangelical Criswell College in Dallas, Texas, named after Criswell, its founder. At the time of his death, H.L. Hunt was reputed to have the highest net worth of any individual in the world.
The president of Permindex was Prince Gutierez de Spadafora, whose daughter-in-law was related to the Nazi Banker Hjalmar Schacht.
Clay Shaw, who was indicted by Jim Garrison, represented the United States on the board of directors of Permindex, which also allegedly included Trumps mentor Roy Cohn. Clay Shaw operated a division of PERMINDEX in New Orleans at the International Trade Mart.
Halliburton was one of the financiers of PERMINDEX. George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root were also financiers. Halliburton acquired Brown and Root after 1963.
Other financiers of Permindex were a number of U. S. oil companies, John DeMenil, Solidarist director of Houston, John Connally as executor of the Sid Richardson estate, Haliburton Oil Co., Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Troy Post of Dallas, Lloyd Cobb of New Orleans, Dr. Oschner of New Orleans, George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root,Houston, Attorney Roy M. Cohn, Chairman of the Board for Lionel Corporation, New York City, Schenley Industries of New York City, Paul Raigorodsky of Dallas through his company, Claiborne Oil of New Orleans, Credit Suisse of Canada
PERMINDEX allegedly was the operator of death squads in Europe, Mexico, Central American, the Caribbean and the United States.
http://www.armoftheageddon.com/the_Torbitt_File.html
1963-D. Harold Byrd had employed de Mohrenschildt at his Three States Oil and Gas Co. during the 1950s. In September 1962, just weeks before he began to squire Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt incorporated a charity ostensibly devoted to the study of cystic fibrosis—and put D. Harold Byrd’s wife on the board.
Mrs. Byrd’s role on the charity board would have created a convenient excuse for de Mohrenschildt to have been interacting with her husband during this period. Other board members included Paul Raigorodsky, J. Edgar Hoover’s good friend and the White Russian community’s godfather.
It is worth noting that D. Harold Byrd, a big-game hunter, decided to take his first-ever foreign safari—to Africa—during this period. That removed him from Dallas precisely when the assassination took place.
1963-IN THE EARLY 1960s, George Kitchel was 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.
1963- FBI memo from December 22, 1963, reported a call had come in on the day of the assassination to Special Agent Graham W. Kitchel of the Houston FBI bureau, contained some important new identifying information and other details: At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.
BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown.
He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the president when he comes to Houston.
BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt MRS FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.
BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63.His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.
From Barbaras Memoirs she had lunch with Doris Ulmer on 11/22/63
Doris Ulmer husband Al Ulmer is sometimes described as having filled the positions of “at-taché” and “first secretary” at the U.S. embassy in Athens from the late forties through the midfifties. Yet a memorial tribute to him in the alumni publication of his alma mater, Princeton, scores higher on the candor meter, describing his life in the war time OSS and the CIA. Ulmer was a good friend and confidant of CIA director Allen Dulles.
Ulmer had another connection to Bush—via Robert Maheu. The Zapata Offshore drilling rig that Poppy Bush had positioned near Cuba in 1958 was located off Cay Sal island, which was leased by Howard Hughes. At the time, Hughes employed Maheu as his private spook. A former FBI man whose private security firm sometimes fronted for the CIA on unauthorized operations, Maheu was, in turn, an old friend of Ulmer’s.
Maheu was later involved in a series of failed plots, commencing in 1960, that involved recruiting the Mafia for a hit on Fidel Castro.
Besides Doris Ulmer, the other person Barbara mentioned in her letter is Joe Zeppa , the man who had lent them his plane on November 22. Joe Zeppa founded the Tyler-based Delta Drilling Company, which became one of the world’s largest contract oil drillers, with operations around the globe.
On the evening of November 21, 1963, Poppy Bush spoke to a gathering of the American Association of Oil Drilling Contractors (AAODC) at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas. Since Zeppa himself was a former president of AAODC, it is likely that he attended that gathering.
It is also likely that both Zeppa and the Bushes actually spent the night in Dallas—and that they were in Dallas the next morning: the day that Kennedy was assassinated.
When Poppy called the FBI at 1:45 P.M. on November 22, to identify James Parrott as a possible suspect in the president’s murder, and to mention that he, George H. W. Bush, happened to be in Tyler, Texas. He told the FBI that he expected to spend the night of November 22 at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas—but instead, after flying to Dallas on Zeppa’s plane, he left again almost immediately on a commercial flight to Houston.
Why state that he expected to spend the night at the Dallas Sheraton if he was not planning to stay?
Graham Kitchel own brother was none other than George Kitchel.
George Kitchel is the man who helped start Poppy Bush’s political career shortly before the Kennedy assassination and 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.
1963-Zapruder was a former colleague of Mrs. de Mohrenschildt, who worked with her at Nardis when she first moved to Dallas. Zapruder also sat on the board of Neil Mallon’s Dallas Council on World Affairs.
The film he would make on November 22 would soon be purchased by Henry Luce, a Skull and Bones colleague of Prescott Bush and a devotee of intelligence—whose wife, Clare Booth Luce, had personally funded efforts to overthrow Castro.
Henry Luce had warned that JFK would be punished if he went soft on Communism. After quickly purchasing the original Zapruder film, Luce’s Life magazine kept it in lockdown until New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison successfully subpoenaed it in 1969.
1963-Poppy’s eventual Texas running mate in the 1964 election, Jack Crichton, was connected to the military intelligence figures who led Kennedy’s motorcade.
Crichton and D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building, were both connected to de Mohrenschildt—and directly to each other through oil-business dealings.
Jack Crichton was a key figure in a web of military intelligence figures with deep connections to the Dallas Police Department
Associates of Crichton’s who were involved with the Army Reserves had managed to get into the pilot car of Kennedy’s procession, with one as the driver.
Crichton was closely connected to Poppy in their mutual efforts to advance the then-small Texas Republican Party, culminating in their acceptance of the two top positions on the state’s Republican ticket in 1964.
During World War II, Crichton had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. Postwar, he began working for the company of petroleum czar Everette DeGolyer and was soon connected in petromilitary circles at the highest levels.
When Crichton left DeGolyer’s firm in the early fifties he became involved in an almost incomprehensible web of companies with overlapping boards and ties to DeGolyer.
Many of them were backed by some of North America’s most powerful families, including the Du Ponts of Delaware and the Bronfmans, owners of the liquor giant Seagram.
One of Crichton company directors was Clint Murchison Sr., king of the oil depletion allowance, and another was D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building.
On November 22, Crichton suggested Mamantov to the police department as the ideal person to interpret for Marina. His basis for knowing this was that in his role in military intelligence he maintained surveillance of Russians in Dallas, working closely in this regard with the police department.
In the hours following Kennedy’s assassination, the Dallas Police Department passed along information purportedly gleaned from Marina Oswald that suggested possible ties between her husband and the government of Cuba.
Though the information would turn out to be wrong, it was quickly passed to Army Intelligence, which then passed it along to the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the unit that would have directed an attack on the island had someone ordered it in those chaotic first hours after Kennedy’s death
1963-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.
1977-On a trip to Amsterdam with Willem Oltmans, a freelance Dutch television reporter, via Houston and New York, 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, 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 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.
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.
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.
In de Mohrenschildt’s battered address book was an entry for “Bush, George H. W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.”
There is no evidence that anyone interviewed the recently departed CIA director.
THE SAME MONTH that de Mohrenschildt died, so did Paul Raigorodsky, his onetime White Russian mentor.On November 22, 1976, while Poppy Bush was still CIA director, author Michael Canfield paid a visit to Raigorodsky.
The oilman told the researcher, “I told everything I knew to the Warren Commission. What is your interest in all of this?” When Canfield answered, “Oh, I’m just curious, that’s all.” Raigorodsky retorted, “But don’t you know that curiosity killed the cat?”
Yet it was Raigorodsky, not Canfield, who was soon dead, on March 16, 1977, less than two weeks before his friend de Mohrenschildt’s death, at a time when HSCA investigators were seeking to interview both men about the assassination.
TESTIMONY OF GEORGE A. BOUHE to Warren Commission in 1964
Mr. LIEBELER : I think Mr. Rankin sent you a letter last week telling you that we would be in touch with you for the purpose of taking your testimony in connection with your knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald and his background, and anything you might know about the assassination or anything shedding light on Oswald's motive.
I am a member of the legal staff of the Commission, and the Commission authorized me to take your deposition pursuant to the power granted to it by Executive Order 11130 dated November 29, 1963, and Joint Resolution of Congress No. 137.
Mr. BOUHE - For 9 1/2 years I was employed as a personal accountant of a very prominent Dallas geologist, and probably capitalist if you want to say it, Lewis W, MacNaughton, senior chairman of the board of the well-known geological and engineering firm of DeGolyer & MacNaughton, but I was MacNaughton's personal employee.
I was born in what was then St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, Russia, on February 11 or 24, 1904, and the difference in dates is because we had the Julian and Gregorian calendar, and I have a baptismal certificate showing, February 11
During the years 1920 through 1923 back in Petrograd, Russia, while I was finishing my high school there, which was called the Gymnasium, although it had nothing to do with athletics, I was working for the American Relief Commission as an office boy.
It was an association to which the American Congress allocated, I think, $100 million for the relief of the starving population of Russia.
The Hon. Herbert Hoover was Chairman of that Commission.He sent
American executives to Russia to set up branch offices in several cities, including what was then already Petrograd, and I, speaking English, was an office boy.
When we finished that thing, I got a little letter of thanks which is now here framed, which is my great pride and joy, in which it says to George Alexandrovich Bouhe, in gratitude and recognition of his faithful efforts to assist the American Relief Commission in its efforts to relieve the suffering of the hungry population in Russia.
Mr. LIEBELER - After you worked for the American Relief Commission, did that lead to your coming to the United States?
Mr. BOUHE - That is correct. My association with some of the supervisors which were American executives led to numerous discussions with them, including, the now deceased Prof. Frank Colder of Stanford University, Gen. William Haskell, who later commanded the National Guard; one of my supervisors said, "Why don't you come to America?" So after the office closed sometime in August 1923, more or less, I applied for a passport to leave Russia but was refused. Then I went across the little river separating Soviet Russia from Finland in the middle of September at night, and it was cold, and got out.
Mr. LIEBELER - You went into Finland and came to the United States?
Mr. BOUHE - Through Germany and then to the United States in April 1924.
Mr. LIEBELER - Did you eventually become an American citizen?
Mr. BOUHE - I became an American citizen on or about June 1939.
Mr. LIEBELER - It's been indicated to me, Mr. Bouhe, that you are regarded as the leader of a so-called Russian group here in Dallas and the Fort Worth area,and I would like to have you tell us briefly the nature of that group and how you came to be the, shall we say, so-called leader or its actual leader? Let's leave it that way. And particularly, Mr. Bouhe, did there come a time when you formed a congregation of a Russian church here in Dallas? Would you tell us about that?
Mr. BOUHE - Yes; you have just mentioned some flattering remarks which I appreciate if it is true from the sources which you obtained it, but I would say that if I am so called, it means simply because of a process of elimination, because when I came in 1939, there were absolutely only three Russian-speaking people in Dallas and they were all married people, married to Americans, and so on.
So I did not, so-to-speak, associate with any Russians that might have come or gone through Dallas from 1939 to about 1950.
In 1950, approximately, a great avalanche of displaced persons came to Dallas from Europe. Among these were probably 30, 40, 50 people, native of what I would say of various parts of the former Russian Empire.
By that I mean to say that they were not all Russian. They might have been Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles, Caucasians, Georgians, Armenians, and such, but we did have one thing in common and not much more, and that was the language.
It was a sort of constant amazement to me that these people, prayed God, for years before coming here while still sitting in various camps in Germany--they wanted to get to America, and if 1 out of 50 made a 10-cent effort to learn the English language, I did not find him.
So the problem was to help those people to be self-sufficient, self-sustaining, and as I earnestly hoped, faithful citizens of their new homeland.
Mr. LIEBELER - You gathered these people together and you formed a church congregation, is that correct?
Mr. BOUHE - That's correct. Perhaps not all of the people, because I could not bring a Mohammedan into the Greek Orthodox Church, but anybody who wanted to come and worship in the Russian or Slovenian language was welcome.
And as you said, I organized--well, I did the organization work, really.
The godfather of it all to help us with finances was a very prominent well-known man who still lives here, Paul M. Raigorodsky.
Mr. LIEBELER - At the time did you meet a man by the name of George De Mohrenschildt?
Mr. BOUHE - Yes; I did, who was then married to his wife number two, if my information is correct.
Mr. LIEBELER - That lady's maiden name was Sharples?
Mr. BOUHE - That's right; from the main line in Philadelphia, and a daughter of a prominent industrialist and oilman.
Mr. LIEBELER - Did you also meet a gentleman by the name of Ilya A. Mamantov?
Mr. BOUHE - I did meet him. I cannot promise the year, but somewhere around that time.
Mr. LIEBELER - Did there come a time when you met Lee Harvey Oswald?
Mr. BOUHE - Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER - But you say you know De Mohrenschildt did go on and attempt to help the Oswalds in the manner that you have described?
Mr. BOUHE - Yes.