Was JFK Bushwacked?
Having reread Family of Secrets as we are in the 60th year of the of the last elected American President of the USA taking office (not to be confused with the 10 elected AmeriKan presidents since the coup), I thought some excerpts and additions in a timeline might be useful to me. Sharing it for those who can still read anything longer than a tweet.
No smoking gun obviously. We will never know anything for sure beyond that the Official Story is false. Bidens refusals to release the rest of JFK documents proves the truth would expose the criminals who rule us today
I do think there is way more to Poppys involvement in this and many other events than we are supposed to believe.
If George Washington was the Founding Father of the United States of America, Poppy Bush may be the Founding Father of the Divided States of AMERIKA
1918, the World Affairs Councils of America were a localized equivalent of the Rockefeller-backed Council on Foreign Relations
1926-W. A. Harriman and Company brought Prescott Bush aboard
1928-W. A. Harriman and Company purchased Dresser in 1928. Prescott Bush and his partners then installed an old friend, H. Neil Mallon, at the helm.
Mallon was Skull and Bones, so he could be trusted. Poppy would name his third son Neil Mallon Bush, after this “favorite uncle.”
As World War II approached, Dresser began expanding, gobbling up one militarily strategic manufacturer after another.
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. 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.
George’s older brother 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.
In May 1938, George arrived from Europe and moved in with his brother 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.”
Dimitri began seeing Betty Hooker. 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 he 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.
1945 at the end of WWII, the treasury of the Japanese Empire was discovered in the Philippines by a staff member of General Charles Willoughby, [Edward Lansdale], who was General MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence.
Then known as the Golden Lily Treasure, this mass of wealth had been accumulated by the Japanese through over fifty years of pillaging by its army in Southeast Asia and China . Reports vary, butdocuments in the public domain suggest the recovered treasure was in excess of 280,000 metric tonnes of gold, not including jewels and diamonds.
Lansdale briefed Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy about the findings, and a U.S. Cabinet level decision was made to confiscate the gold and cover-up its discovery. The gold would be added to the Black Eagle Trust fund. It was McCloy, along with Secretary of the Navy Robert B. Anderson and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson who created the Black Eagle Trust.
John McCloy, went on to become President of the World Bank. Robert Andersonwould go on to operate the Commercial Exchange Bank in the British West Indies, be convicted of running illegal banking operations and tax evasion, and be sentenced to prison.
A fourth member of that group – William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan– would go on to found the CIA and distribute the gold to key banks represented by his staffers.
The Yamashita gold would become the cornerstone of the Black Eagle Fund, from which many covert operations of the U.S. intelligence would be funded.
1945-Poppy Bush participated in numerous bombing runs over the Philippine islands when they were in Japanese hands—including Manila Harbor as part of MacArthur’s effort to retake the territory.
Bush became part of a joint intelligence effort coordinated with MacArthur’s command. The association with the Bush circle would date back to the days when Douglas MacArthur was a young man and his mother contacted E. H. Harriman, father of Prescott’s future business partners, to ask the railroad tycoon to give her son a job.
At the end of the war, MacArthur appointed William Quasha as alien property administrator. “Alien property” would have included anything of value captured from the Japanese. If in fact the Japanese possessed gold, this would have been by far the top priority.
Authors Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave contend that former CIA deputy director Ray Cline told them that the United States did locate the Japanese gold and used it to fund anti-Communist operations the world over.
McCloy, Lovett and Stimson, [intelligence officer] Captain [Edward] Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila where they set out for a tour of the vaults [that] already had [been] opened. Probably the key figure in all this was Edward Lansdale
Lansdale was also the titular head of Operation Mongoose, the part-CIA, part-Pentagon project to assassinate Cuban leaders, as well as a top figure in counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.
William Quasha son would one day invest in Poppy’s sons oil business
1946-Bill Casey was a former member of the OSS and was closely involved with the Black Eagle Fund conspirators.
Casey’s financial skills made him one of the key players, along with Paul Helliwell and Edwin Pauley, in implementing the Black Eagle Trust under the guidance of Robert B. Anderson and John J. McCloy.”
Casey also was a close friend of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, worked with Ray Cline, and became involved with Edward Lansdale in the hunt for the Golden Lily treasure.
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-At this time West Texas was the center of a new boom. Poppy Bush was working there in his role as a trainee for Neil Mallon’s Dresser Industries. Meanwhile, a vastly more ambitious enterprise was afoot in Dallas, where Mallon relocated Dresser Industries in 1950.
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-Following Ike’s decisive victory, the Dulles brothers obtained effective control of foreign policy: John Foster became Ike’s secretary of state, and Allen the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The rest of the administration was filled with Bush allies, including national security adviser Gordon Gray, a close friend of Prescott’s, and Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, a sometime member of the Dresser Industries board.
During the early days of Dresser in Dallas—and of Zapata Petroleum—Allen Dulles began to experiment with “off the books” operations
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.
1953, as Dulles was building his global machine, Poppy Bush launched his own enterprise, with help from Dulles, Mallon, and Poppy’s maternal uncle Herbert Walker.
Mallonwas an early investor in Zapata Corporation, a CIA front founded by Bush. Operation Zapata would be the code name for the Bay of Pigs Invasion Cuban exile training program.
Bush founded Zapata with John Overbey, brothers Hugh and Bill Lietdke and former CIA agent Thomas J. Devine.
Bush hired fellow Bonesman Robert H. Gow who eventually became president of Zapata, and persuaded several Bonesmen to invest in the company.
The Liedtkes’ contacts were nearly as interesting as the Bushes’, with strands leading to, among others, the millionaire former bootlegger Joseph P. Kennedy and Ray Kravis, the father of the famed corporate raider Henry Kravis.
Based on a “hunch” of Hugh Liedtke’s, the company drilled 127 consecutive “wet” holes, and the firm’s stock exploded from seven cents a share to twenty-three dollars a share.
The Liedtkes would later involve themselves in political operations with Poppy Bush that would contribute to the demise of Richard M. Nixon.
1953 On April 10 , exactly two weeks after Zapata Offshore’s land-based sister, Zapata Petroleum was launched, Neil Mallon wrote to CIA director Dulles about an upcoming meeting at D.C.’s Carlton Hotel.
“In addition to Bob Johnson, I have invited a close personal friend, Prescott Bush. We want to talk to them about our Pilot Project in the Caribbean and have you listen in.”
That project was Zapata Offshore, launched by Poppy, just as the U.S. government, under an administration dominated by the Dulles-Bush circles, began auctioning offshore mineral rights.
1956 the bayou-bred Crichton started up his own spy unit, the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment. He would serve as the intelligence unit’s only commander in Dallas through November 22, 1963, continuing until he retired from the 488th in 1967, at which time he was awarded the Legion of Merit and cited for “exceptionally outstanding service.”
1958, Zapata Offshore’s drilling rig Scorpion was moved from the Gulf of Mexico to Cay Sal Bank, the most remote group of islands in the Bahamas and just fifty-four miles north of Isabela, Cuba. The island had been recently leased to oilman Howard Hughes, who had his own long-standing CIA ties, as well as his own “private CIA.”
Zapata leased the Scorpion to Standard Oil of California and to Gulf Oil. CIA director Dulles had previously served as Gulf’s counsel for Latin America. The same year that Gulf leased Bush’s platform, CIA veteran Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt joined Gulf’s board.
This was the same Kermit Roosevelt who had overseen the CIA’s successful 1953 coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh,
The offshore platforms had a specific purpose. “George Bush would be given a list of names of Cuban oil workers we would want placed in jobs,” said one official connected to Operation Mongoose, the program to overthrow Castro. “The oil platforms he dealt in were perfect for training the Cubans in raids on their homeland.”
1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover discovered by reporter Joseph McBride. The memo, which mentioned a briefing about Cuban activity in the wake of the JFK assassination, had been given to “George Bush of the CIA.”
Bush also set up operations for Zapata Offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, Borneo, and Medellín, Colombia. Clients included the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company, which began his close association with the Kuwaiti elite.
1959, immediately after Fidel Castro drove the dictator Batista out of Cuba, then Vice-President Richard Nixon established and chaired a Special Committee within the National Security Council for the purpose of carrying out a non-Congressionally authorized operation to mount a covert war against the new socialist government of Cuba, using expatriate right-wing Cubans who had been loyal to Batista.This secret operation was then code-named “Operation 40.”
In late 1959, Nixon, with the direct participation and cooperation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, undertook the supervision of the recruiting of expatriate, right-wing Cubans who had fled from Cuba to Miami, Florida.
Nixon secretly reached out to one Robert Maheu, the Chief of Staff and de facto Director of billionaire Howard Hughes’s financial empire to attend a secret meeting in Florida with two men representing Santo Trafficante, John Roselli and Sam Giancana.
Giancana was “the chieftain of Cosa Nostra and the successor to Al Capone.”Trafficante’s Havana casino, hotel and prostitution operation, which was run by Resorts International, a Meyer Lansky company, had been driven out of Cuba, along with Trafficante’s business associate Batista in 1959.
Trafficante was a close associate of Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Mafia, who was responsible for managing the finances of Lucky Luciano’s heroin smuggling empire.
Organized crime thrived in prerevolutionary Cuba, and Havana was probably the most important transit point for Luciano’s European heroin shipments.
1960-Richard Nixon recruited George H.W. Bush to gather the necessary funds for the Bay of Pigs operation, and according to Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo the man assigned to assist him was Felix Rodriguez.
1960-Poppy severed his ties to the Liedtkes by buying out their stake in Zapata Offshore, and then moved its operations to Houston—which, unlike the remote Midland-Odessa area, had access to the Caribbean through the Houston Ship Channel.
1960-Bay of Pigs project began with Eisenhower’s approval on March 17,
1960-Beyond providing a staging area for Cuban rebels, Zapata Offshore appears to have served as a paymaster. “We had to pay off politicians in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and elsewhere,” said John Sherwood, chief of CIA anti-Castro operations in the early 1960s. “Bush’s company was used as a conduit for these funds under the guise of oil business contracts . . .
1960-Hunt and Phillips attended the first meeting of the Cuban Task Force, held January 18, 1960, in Barnes’s office. Barnes spoke at length on the objectives. He explained that Air Force General Charles Cabell, a Texan (and brother of Dallas’s mayor), would be in charge of air cover for an invasion, and that Vice President Richard Nixon, whose brief included some national security areas, was the administration’s Cuba “case officer.”
In his memoirs, former Cuban intelligence official Fabian Escalante asserted that Nixon had met with an important group of Texas businessmen to arrange outside funding for the operation. Escalante, whose service was vaunted for its U.S. spy network, claimed that the Texas group was headed by George H. W. Bush and Jack Crichton.
Escalante’s assertion cannot be easily dismissed: Crichton’s role in covert operations was little understood at the time Escalante published his memoirs. In March 1960, the Eisenhower administration signed off on a plan to equip and train Cuban exiles, and drills soon began in Florida and Guatemala.
One of Dulles’s top three aides, the covert operations chief Richard M. Bissell (Yale ’32), was made director
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, President Kennedy called for an end to the abuse of “foreign tax havens” and, asked Congress for legislation to “drive them out of existence.” The CIA and Mafia were reliant on the tax havens and were displeased
In June 1961, Robert Kennedy had re-grouped Operation 40 as Operation Mongoose, with the mission of overthrowing Castro’s government,he also decided that Edward Lansdale, Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance, should be placed in charge of the operation.
As head of Operation Mongoose, one of Lansdale’s first decisions was to appoint William King Harvey to organize a broad range of activities that would help to bring down Castro’s government.
Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans (DDP), the man overseeing plans for the Bay of Pigs Invasion, had assembled a number of other agents who had worked on the Guatemalan coup, and appointed Hunt with forging Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would form a provisional government to take over Cuba after the invasion.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Hunt was reassigned as Executive Assistant to Allen Dulles.
After President John F. Kennedy fired Dulles for the Bay of Pigs failure, Hunt served as the first Chief of Covert Action for the Domestic Operations Division (DODS) from 1962 to 1964.
1961-Lansdale would hire American Mafia family heads Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano in the U.S. war against Fidel Castro in 1961.
It would be Lansdale’s team that would propose and justify sacrificing innocent U.S. civilians in order to rally the American citizenry to support an invasion of foreign soil. This was done under a program run by Brigadier General William H. Craig, who reported to Lansdale for the Cuba project.
This project was called Operation Northwoods. Documents for this project would be accidentally released from the files of Robert McNamara into the public domain some 40 years later, exposing the degree to which Lansdale’s operatives would go to wage war.
These declassified documentsrevealed secret plans of the U.S. military to wage a fabricated “terror” campaign against US citizens as a pretext to justify a second invasion of Cuba.
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-Le Cercle has been described as “an international right-wing propaganda group, which brings together serving or retired intelligence officers and politicians with links to right-wing intelligence factions from most of the countries in Europe.”
Le Cercle was founded at some point in the 1950s, by synarchists Jean Violet French intelligence agent, and Antoine Pinay, former French prime minister and original founding member of the Bilderberg Group.
Pinay was a vice-president of the Comité International pour la Défense de la Civilisation Chrétienne (CIDCC), a largely French body created in 1948, and whose first President was Belgian Paul Van Zeeland.
A further CIDCC Presidium meeting was held in Paris in December 1962, for the first time including an American representative, ASC member and Shickshinny Knight of Malta, Major-General Charles Willoughby.
Earlier in 1962, Willoughby had founded an American section of the CIDCC, that was funded by his close associate, H.L. Hunt.
Le Cercle was funded, amongst others, by the CIAfor its “militant anti-leftism as it wars against it enemies more than jaws about them.”Leaked documents suggest that Le Cercle’s activities included political subversion, false-flag Gladio-style terrorism, assassination and arms dealing.
1962, Harvey had been appointed by Richard Bissell with a project to organize “Executive Action” for the assassination of foreign political leaders, under the codename ZR/RIFLE.
William King Harvey was one of three people involved in a covert program to send false defectors to the Soviet Union, and was undoubtedly aware of Oswald’s defection.
In his personal notes for Executive Action, Harvey developed a profile of the ideal assassin: a person with Communist credentials that can be used if the cover is blown.
Harvey also hated the Kennedys. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Harvey infuriated Robert Kennedy when he ordered an unauthorized mission to send ten intelligence operatives into Cuba, and was exiled to Italy as Rome Station Chief.
Bissell was in charge of the Directorate for Plans responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. His deputy was Richard Helms.
Executive Action was responsible for the coup d’état that overthrew the elected Marxist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company.
Other political leaders deposed by Executive Action included Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, General Abd al-Karim Kassem of Iraq and Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam.
Harvey’s main target was Fidel Castro who had established a socialist government in Cuba in 1959.
To get to Castro, Harvey had decided he needed Mafia links, and drew on the connections of CIA agent Robert Maheu, who had links with Mafia bosses like Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jr., Johnny Roselli and others.
In 1960 Roselli and Giancana, had taken part in talks with CIA director Allen W. Dulles, about the possibility of murdering Fidel Castro.
In early 1962 Harvey had brought Ted Shackley into the project as deputy chief of JM/WAVE, which was responsible for Mongoose.
In April, 1962, Shackley was involved in delivering supplies to Roselli as part of the plan to assassinate Castro.
1962 Later that year, Shackley became Station Chief in Miami, and he gained control over Operation 40 or what some now called Shackley’s Secret Team.
Operation 40 included Shackley’s fellow long-term colleagues at the CIA, agents Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson, and David Sanchez Morales.
Operation 40 also recruited former Batista-regime intelligence officers, mob henchmen, and mercenaries like Frank Sturgis, CIA case officer E. Howard Hunt, and Felix Rodriguezwho was later involved in the execution of Che Guevara and Watergate
Agents of Operation 40 were also commanded by Otto Skorzeny for operations in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina.
1962-Kennedy fired both CIA Director Allen Dulles and his chief Bay of Pigs planner, Richard Bissell, and threatened to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
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 included 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.
1963-Dallas was a national epicenter for the John Birch Society in early 1961,with an estimated 35 chapters. In 1961, Jim Lehrer a rising reporter for the Dallas Morning News observed that approximately seven hundred members of the group lived in Dallas, making it “one of the most flourishing, enthusiastic John Birch movements in the country.”
Walker was a major general in the US Army who had given up his appointment when he was accused of indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society materials.
Walker's indoctrination program was endorsed by ASC member General Lemnitzer.Walker moved to Dallas and became an ultraconservative icon, though his latent homosexuality likely contributed to his downfall.
Walker also decided to run for governor of Texas and enjoyed the support of H.L. Hunt.
Shortly after his resignation from the military, Edwin Walker began forging a friendship with fellow John Birch Society member Billy James Hargis. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Hargis’ Christian Crusade ministry was broadcast on more than 500 radio stations and 250 television stations.
It was Walker who said of the President, “He is worse than a traitor. Kennedy has essentially exiled Americans to doom.” More chillingly, General Walker’s troops had distributed thousands of handbills along the streets of Dallas, picturing Kennedy on a “wanted” poster with the message: “WANTED FOR TREASON.”
Oswald was posthumously accused of having shot at Walker in April 1963, largely on the basis of a claim by his widow that he had admitted to the shooting. Against this, the only witness failed to identify Oswald, and the bullet was the wrong type.
1963-Madeleine Brown, who claimed to have been Lyndon B. Johnson’s mistress and the mother of his child,stated in an interview on the television show, A Current Affair that on November 21, 1963, that she was at Murchison’s Dallas home on the evening prior to the assassination of JFK, which was attended by Johnson as well as other famous, wealthy and powerful individuals, including John J. McCloy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, H.L. Hunt and Sid Richardson.
CIA agent Robert D. Morrow who wrote in the book, First Hand Knowledge: How I participated in the CIA-Murder of President Kennedy,
“On the eve of the assassination, Hoover and Nixon attended a meeting together at the Dallas home of oil baron Clint Murchison.
Murchison, along with Richardson and H.L. Hunt, became major supporters of Lyndon B. Johnson in order to maintain the oil depletion allowance, a generous tax credit.
However, in January 1963, Kennedy had presented his proposals for tax reform, which included relieving the tax burdens of low-income and elderly citizens. Kennedy also said he wanted to do away with the oil depletion allowance. It has been estimated that the proposed removal of the oil depletion allowance would have resulted in a loss of around $300 million a year to Texas oil tycoons.
After the assassination of Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped the government plans to remove the oil depletion allowance.
1963-The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographed three transients under police escort near the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination of Kennedy.
The men later became known as the “three tramps.” According to Vincent Bugliosi, allegations that these men were involved in a conspiracy originated from theorist Richard E. Sprague who compiled the photographs in 1966 and 1967, and subsequently turned them over to Jim Garrison.
Later, in 1974, assassination researchers Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield compared photographs of the men to people they believed to be suspects involved in a conspiracy and claimed that two of the men were E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis..
1963-In 1977, Marita Lorenz told Paul Meskil of the New York Daily News that she met Oswald in the fall of 1963 at an Operation 40 safe house in the Little Havana section of Miami.
According to Lorenz, she met him again in 1963 before the Kennedy assassination in the house of Orlando Bosch, with Sturgis, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, and two other Cubans present. She said the men studied Dallas street maps and that she suspected that they were planning on raiding an arsenal.
Lorenz stated that she joined the men who were traveling to Dallas in two cars and carrying “rifles and scopes,” but flew back to Miami the day after they arrived.
1963-Researchers Gaeton Fonzi, Larry Hancock, Noel Twyman, and John Simkin believe that Operation 40 member David Morales was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
Morales is alleged to have expressed deep anger toward the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Morales’ friend, Ruben Carbajal, claimed that Morales said, “Well, we took care of that SOB, didn’t we?”
Morales is alleged to have once told friends, “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard,” the latter presumably referring to the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, California on June 5, 1968.
1963-Kennedy decided to monitor the Dimona nuclear plant. He insisted on doing so, in order to determine whether or not it produced nuclear weapons. The Israelis refused, but he insisted.
This crisis was resolved with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. He resigned so he would not have to agree to the monitoring of the Dimona plant.
On November 19, 1963, after signing the first Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, Kennedy declared that “he intended to be the first President of the United States to visit the Kremlin as soon as he and Khrushchev reached another arms control agreement.”
.1963-One of Crichton’s company directors was D. Harold Byrd, a wealthy oilman whose family accumulated a large portion of downtown Dallas property in the early 1900s, and who were heavily involved in Dallas politics. Byrd’s cousin was Admiral Byrd who headed Operation Highjump, that H. Keith Thompson also participated in, and named Antarctica’s Harold Byrd Mountains after him.
Byrd was vehemently opposed to racial desegregation of the public schools, and was leader of “massive resistance,” a campaign of opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that led to closure of some public schools in Virginia in the 1950s.
D. Harold Byrd, was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald was to have shot Kennedy, and also founded the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Oswald was recruited by CIA agent David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp in Louisiana in 1957.
Byrd was a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson, was closely associated with John Connally, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson and H.L. Hunt.
Byrd was also a member of the right-wing Texas Crusade for Freedom (TCF),whose members included Earle Cabell, Everette DeGolyer, Ted Dealey and de Mohrenschildt.
The TCF was spawned from the National Committee for a Free Europe, established by Senator Herbert Lehman, son of a founder of Lehman Brothers.The TCF supported Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, centers of American propaganda riddled with former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.
The TCF would become a “who’s who of Texans connected to events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”
They included H. Neil Mallon, Paul Raigorodsky,Lewis W. MacNaughton, Everette DeGolyer, Earl Cabell and Ted Deally. Charles Cabell, Allen Dulles’ CIA deputy director, and a key Bay of Pigs figure, was brother of Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, also a good friend of Byrd’s.
In his book JFK: The Second Plot, Matthew Smith argued that the John Birch Society may have joined forces with the Texas oil millionaires to assassinate Kennedy.
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-Dulles appears to have made no book-related appearances outside the Washington–New York corridor except for Dallas, to which he traveled at the invitation of Neil Mallon to speak at the Council on World Affairs.
The Dallas Council would certainly be a receptive audience. After all, it had been conceived, in Mallon’s own words, along “the guidelines of central intelligence.”
So Dulles was in Dallas, a scant weeks before the assassination; Al Ulmer, the foreign-based CIA coup expert, in Texas and visiting with Poppy Bush; E. Howard Hunt, top Dulles operative and covert operations specialist, said by his own son to have been in Dallas; and Poppy Bush in Dallas— until he leaves town either the night before or on the very day of the assassination
Nixon also was-in Dallas on the day of JFK assassination (leaving right before like Bush) . In early edition of the November 22 Dallas Morning News, under the headline “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”
And LBJ himself was in motor pool procession
But Oswald’s all-too-public “friend” George de Mohrenschildt is safely off on important business in Haiti, and D. Harold Byrd is off on a safari.
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-In the middle of his move out of the oil business into politics, Poppy Bush embarked on a busy itinerary of foreign business travel for Zapata Offshore.
Upon his return, Poppy’s new lust for political power hit warp speed: now he had decided to seek a U.S. Senate seat.
As a businessman engaged in offshore drilling, Poppy Bush had little reason to be traveling extensively throughout Texas. But as a Senate candidate, he had every reason to be seen all over the Lone Star State.
In theory, a candidate like Poppy Bush, with his family connections to Wall Street, could be a strong fund- raiser and perhaps contribute to a substantially increased Republican turnout in 1964, even if Bush himself was not elected. To head off this larger threat, it was clear to Kennedy’s political advisers that Jack would have to campaign in Texas, along with Florida.
Kennedy was interested in revoking the oil depletion allowance, a decision that would have meant steep losses for Texas oilmen, and he continued voicing his support for civil rights, always a contentious issue in the South.
As a candidate for statewide office, Poppy Bush was on the go in the fall of 1963, moving around Texas and spending time in Dallas, where he opened a headquarters.
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
Her 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. In
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.
1965-Bush’s reward for all his troubles came when one of the company’s rigs was ostensibly lost in Hurricane Betsy. For the first time in its history, the insurance giant Lloyds of London paid out an oil-platform disaster claim without physical evidence. Zapata received eight million dollars for a rig that had cost only three million.
The fate of the rig remains a mystery. “The platform was stable at the time,” recalled Vincent “Buddy” Bounds, the last man evacuated from it. “I remember we were taken off just before dark . . . I was surprised to hear it disappeared without a trace; it was awfully big.”
1965- On February 15, 1965, just six days before he was shot at the same location, Malcolm X revealed the Nation of Islam was funded by Hunt and confessed with regret that he had personally led negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan based on their mutual dedication to segregation.
Referring to Hunt’s involvement in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X remarked, “And never have I seen a man in my life more afraid, more frightened than Elijah Muhammad (head of Nation of Islam) was when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”
1976-CIA Director Bush composed an internal memo asking for a copy of a report concerning a visit by Jack Ruby (killer of Lee Harvey Oswald— Kennedy’s alleged assassin) to the reputed Mafia leader Santo Trafficante Jr.; two years after Bush left the CIA directorship, Trafficante would admit to a House panel that he participated in a CIA-directed 1960 operation to assassinate Castro.
Trafficante was also believed by some to have had a role in the Kennedy assassination. (Another mob figure of interest to Kennedy assassination investigators, Sam Giancana, was killed in 1975 by an unknown gunman shortly before he was scheduled to testify about the plots against Castro.)
Trafficante would say that he had been recruited for the Castro project by fellow mobster John Rosselli, who had testified in 1975 before the Church Committee about efforts to kill Castro.
In April 1976, while Poppy was CIA director, Rosselli was again called before the Church Committee, this time to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Three months later, the committee decided to recall Rosselli for additional testimony. But by the time he was called, he had already been missing for several days. His decomposing body was found later.
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.